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Tell HN: I'm launching in 30 days. No matter what. Hold me to it

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Re: Tell HN: I'm launching in 30 days. No matter what. Hold me to it

#92
post #82
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate? what disadvantages do you see in running this way?

No major ones. Until something goes wrong and every deliberation and discussion about how to respond is dissected and quoted without context in public. I mean are you going to do everything in public? Hiring and firing decisions? Whether to sue someone who screws you over somehow? Whether to change hosting suppliers? As I write this I'm arguing with myself about the power and value of genuine transparency, it's somet…

Also, there are no hiring or firing decisions. Anybody can contribute, contributors have non-binding votes.

Members can nominate contributors to become members (this voting happens in private) and then they can have binding votes. It's a mod of the apache foundation governance and it's baked into the platform.

Re: Tell HN: I'm launching in 30 days. No matter what. Hold me to it

#93
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Not anti free-market. Just pro transparency, and meritocracy.

Great, merit based compensation could be a powerful way to run a company. I sincerely agree with your belief that purpose-driven enterprises are more successful, especially when that purpose is to produce a fantastic product. I read a bit of your "open enterprise manifesto" (which is way too long to read in my opinion, but that may not be your goal), and found conflict with this statement: "We made our government dem…

I agree with what you're saying. The system of government is definitely far from perfect.

The reference to it in our manifesto is that we at least see the value of democracy in our attempt to govern ourselves politically, but have made very few strides in that in our attempts to govern our businesses.

I would trust our government much more if it ran all its work transparently on bettermeans, and allowed me to vote, discuss, and comment freely.

Also, "greed" and "corruption" are IMHO not a function of human nature, but a function of poor governance systems that we find ourselves in.

Our entire model is based on an inherit trust in our nature. That given the right circumstances, and a fair, transparent, accountable system we can rise above "greed" and "corruption"

We wrote a post about it here: http://bettermeans.org/front/?p=565

Re: Tell HN: I'm launching in 30 days. No matter what. Hold me to it

#96
post #71
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow. I'm not sure whether that's brilliant or insane but I wish you the best and will watch with interest.

Can you elaborate? what disadvantages do you see in running this way?

There's a reason the "command and control" model has evolved. The history of mankind has shown an increasing tendency toward specialization of expertise in our daily jobs. One of the risks of doing things this way is that people that aren't specialists in a field and have no context about how a proposed decision came about will start dragging down the group like lead weights. Think about the kinds of comments you see in newspaper articles. It's lowest common denominator for a reason. Everybody there is commenting on stories that are, at best, second-hand information (not to mention whether the information is even accurate to begin with).

I wish you the best of luck, but I have to admit I don't think I would find your tool to be very useful. If people working for me are that unhappy that they feel the need to resort to anarchism, then maybe they should question whether working for the company is something that they should even be doing. Put another way, if I were working for somebody and felt like a pawn, I'd choose to work elsewhere if trying to engage the leadership and persuade them on issues failed.

Re: Tell HN: I'm launching in 30 days. No matter what. Hold me to it

#97
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stop coding and spend 1-3 days on your launch plan, brainstorm some marketing and PR ideas, cook up some inspiring screenshots, etc. Not having a landing page now is REALLY FREAKIN' SCARY.

Ok, here's what we cobbled up in the last hour http://rm.bettermeans.com/home/show?page=index

This is what I get: http://imgur.com/dbLty.png

Opera on Ubuntu

Re: Tell HN: I'm launching in 30 days. No matter what. Hold me to it

#98
The video “Better Means, Changing the World of Work” on the home page of your website has an incorrect aspect ratio. Everything is slightly horizontally stretched, so the text is wider than normal, all of the people look slightly fat, the proportions of people’s heads change when they tilt them, the Wikipedia logo isn’t circular as it should be, etc. You should fix that; it looks unprofessional.

Re: Tell HN: I'm launching in 30 days. No matter what. Hold me to it

#99
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, merit based compensation could be a powerful way to run a company. I sincerely agree with your belief that purpose-driven enterprises are more successful, especially when that purpose is to produce a fantastic product. I read a bit of your "open enterprise manifesto" (which is way too long to read in my opinion, but that may not be your goal), and found conflict with this statement: "We made our government dem…

I agree with what you're saying. The system of government is definitely far from perfect. The reference to it in our manifesto is that we at least see the value of democracy in our attempt to govern ourselves politically, but have made very few strides in that in our attempts to govern our businesses. I would trust our government much more if it ran all its work transparently on bettermeans, and allowed me to vote, d…

You may well be right about the idea that greed and corruption are not natural to humans, you've obviously done a lot more thinking about that side of it than I have and your logic is reasonable.

I really like the application you built. I need some more convincing on the model and how it would work, without reading the entire manifesto, do you have a document that explains it in much shorter form?

Great job on the design, it LOOKS like you spent about a year on it :)

Re: Tell HN: I'm launching in 30 days. No matter what. Hold me to it

#100
Don't forget to tell your loved ones, your friends, family, etc that you are working on the launch in 30 days. This way they know that you are not to be bothered, etc. I picked this up from this link here http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2009/how-to-get-your-side-proj...
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