Work is always useful
I never implied your work (or anyone’s) is not useful. On the contrary, it is because I appreciate it so much that I insist we stay well away from the Dilbert-ish nightmare in which everyone is a supervisor of someone else, and people focus on overseeing others instead of building stuff. Oversight is important – that’s why we recruit nonexecs – but work is the real scarce resource. Hence the structure we have now, where no one is holding anyone back, and the only sanctioned brake people are the two non-execs. Have you thought of trying a different structure in the newly minted unMonastery LBG? Then, in a year or two, we could compare notes.
The company’s relationship to the projects on the platform is explained here (2013) and here (2014). It boils down to the usual “who does the work calls the shots”, with the additional provision “no veto power”. Your work, your project, your decision. In more detail:
- If you don't need the Edgeryders LBG corporate shell to realize your project, you have no need to engage the company. You can still tell the world (if that helps you) that you are involved in the Edgeryders (not LBG) community, and use the ER red logo. It is licensed under a creative commons license, so you don't need anyone's permission.
- If you do need the Edgeryders LBG corporate shell (like, originally, Economy App, Viral Academy, and unMonastery in Matera) then you do need to talk to the company, because any contract or other legal document needs to be signed by someone in the ER LBG board to be valid. But even in that case, we would request that you lead your own project (like Matt did for the Economy App and David for VA. In the unMonastery Matera case there was a larger investment from myself and other directors, because no one person or group could or would do the fundraising part. So we did that instead, but Ben still was asked to commit to being on site).
- If after having been "incubated" by ER LBG your project grows so that it needs its own organization, that's good news! You are welcome to set one up, with our congratulations, and again you don't need anyone's permission. This was the case for the Economy App when it became the Makerfox, and now for unMonastery LBG. Hopefully, you will want to contribute back to the community, so that more projects can become as successful as yours. A good way to contribute to the community is by offering opportunities to do meaningful, paid work, and do so in an open way (like public calls). The more community projects become successful and generate opportunities for the community, the better! There can and should be more than one company operating in symbiosis with the community and serving it; the community should be unique for maximum diversity and critical mass.
- No, the fact that you have a project group on Edgeryders does not mean you are working for Edgeryders LBG. The GitHub example serves again: I have my own GitHub user, and Edgeryders as an organization is also present on GitHub. You guessed it: we still don't work for GitHub.
Edgeryders LBG is not much of a political player. You are now in our admin group, and you see that we talk about client relationships, finding cheaper banking, getting proposals in, preparing reports: necessary work, but hardly exciting. We are doing market activism, i.e. trying to generate opportunities to operate the change we want to see and get paid for it. Money changing hands (“market”) means the force driving change is sustainable over time. These opportunities are not appropriated by the people who generated it, but reshared with the community: the unMonastery residency opportunity are the perfect example. I don’t see how you can have any conflict with the company, as it has no agenda other than that of generating revenue based on what community members want to do anyway.
There is, probably, a conflict between some people associated with the unMonastery and the Edgeryders community, specifically community members who feel they have contributed the unMonastery development and are now suspicious that others might pull a Huffington Post/Couchsurfing on them. I suggested a possible solution in a post called “Together, in relative peace, over a long time”: a proposal for this context, that you will find in the semi-closed Confessional group, originally invented by Ben as a safe space for dialogue and reconciliation. He seems to have lost interest, so I am not sure that proposal is in the right place anymore. Maybe I should move it out?