Holacracy is a social technology that was designed to help organizations facilitate emergent order, collective learning, and collective decision making. Can the STEEM Community make use of this concept?

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Introduction

[Source: Pixabay.com, License: CC0 - Public Domain]

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• Are downvotes necessary, or should we eliminate them?
• Should bots be allowed or not?
• Should we eliminate curation rewards or increase them?

These questions (and others) have all been discussed ad nauseam on steemit with little (in my opinion) real progress towards consensus. The questions, however, that are not being asked are: (i) "Who decides?" and (ii) "How are the decisions made?" Maybe the absence of agreement on those higher order questions is why we're making so little progress on the others? So, I'm going to ask them. How should we, as a community, achieve consensus on questions that affect everyone?

Perhaps a temporary "truce" is needed on all of the tensions that have arisen over particular aspects of the platform, in order to refocus our attention towards governance and decision processes (note: that's "governance," not "government.") Once we have a model for decision flow, perhaps we can make more progress on the particular tensions that have been so contentious. To that end, here is a #weekly7 post to brainstorm about a possible direction.

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Holacracy

This is not my area of expertise, but recently I was reminded of a post I made a few months ago: Order in Business Without Top-Down Control, discussing the concept of holacracy. From what little I know about it, this organizational model seems like it might be a good fit for the steemit ecosystem. It is a decentralized decision making model that has recently been adopted by a number of businesses.

Holacracy was created as an improvement over hierarchical decision making in many business organizations, but as a so-called "social technology," it might be useful anywhere that you find large groups of people. As the creator, Brian Robertson, describes it, the holacratic organization is structured as collections of roles, sub-circles, and circles. Any particular person might perform several roles and belong to several circles. According to Robertson, the model is patterned after human physiology, where autonomous cells belong to autonomous organs, which belong to an autonomous whole. Another analogy that he made is that it's like the "yellow line" in the middle of the highway. It is a form of emergent order where you have "the right framework of rules and individuals with the freedom to act within that framework of rules."

Off the top of my head, I can imagine the following roles and circles for steem, steemit, and the surrounding ecosystem:
Roles:

• Author
• Voter
• Bot operator
• Miner
• Witness
• Developer
• Evangelist
• Trader / Speculator
• Buyer & seller of merchandise and services

Circles

• Steemit.Inc
• Busy.Org
• Steering
• Tools developers
• Steemit users
• Busy.Org users

Of course there are others or things could be organized differently, and several of those circles might have more traditional roles like payroll, accounting, purchasing, and sales.

So this is just one idea, and I am admittedly uninformed on the concept, but whether it's holacracy or some other structure, I think that we would all benefit by finding a way to refocus the considerable effort that's currently being directed towards resolving tensions into a more productive decision flow.

So here are 7 Videos on the topic to help acquaint you with the idea

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Videos

7. "Holacracy" by Brian Robertson - BOOK SUMMARY

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6. A very personal journey with holacracy at Zappos - Kristy Meade

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5. Holacracy: How to Decentralize Your Company for Higher Performance with Brian Robertson

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4. Holacracy: A Radical New Approach to Management | Brian Robertson | TEDxGrandRapids

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3. A new management hype? Holacracy: its benefits and challenges - Ruben Timmerman

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2. Introduction to Holacracy (by Diederick Janse)

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1. Brian J. Robertson: "Holacracy" with Bonus Q&A | Talks at Google

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And here is a single playlist with all 7 videos.

So what do you think? Does the steemit ecosystem need an agreed group decision making process? Can we experiment with the holacracy concept to create one, or is there a better model?

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For further reading

• Web - Holacracy Constitution on GitHub
• Web - Holacracy.Org: How It Works
• Book - Holacracy: The New Management System for a Rapidly Changing World, Brian J. Robertson, 2015
• PDF - Organization at the Leading Edge: Introducing Holacracy™, Brian J. Robertson, 2007 (Whitepaper)

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@remlaps is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has also been awarded 3 US patents.

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