Participatory organization

Participatory organization is an organization which is built based on people participation rather than their contract obligations.

Most current organizations are contract-based. Contracts define a functional structure that holds such an organization together by imposing mutual obligations on people. For example, an employee of a typical organization is obliged to perform a certain function in exchange for some previously agreed compensation. Once established the contract relationship is quite rigid and inflexible. A breach of contract implies severe penalties in most cases. Contracts facilitate organizational planning and often shifts risks from one party to another. Contracts are necessary for existence of fixed and rigid organizational structures primarily because these structures cannot easily accommodate changes: a failure of one element can easily become a cause of the failure of the whole organization. On the other hand, the rigidity of contracts creates a major stress for the people involved, primarily, employees.

Participatory organization is an alternative to the contract model. In the absence of obligations, any participant is free to contribute or not to contribute, free from deadlines to met. This requires flexibility and robustness from the organizational structure. It should easily accommodate new participants and their contributions, without failing if some participants leave or fail to participate. This way it gives much flexibility to all people involved, while the organization still performs its function reliably. Some participatory organizations emerge spontaneously and are better described by the word self-organization, others are initially designed and organized by entrepreneurs. Human-based genetic algorithm is one possible model to design such an organization. The largest example of participatory organization so far is Wikipedia.

A nice property of participatory model is its ability to scale well with the number of participants.

Examples

References

Kosorukoff, A. & Goldberg, D. E. (2002) Genetic algorithm as a form of organization, Proceedings of Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, GECCO-2002, pp 965-972

Interview with Jimmy Wales at Open business link

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Examples

References

See also