41–50 of 135 posts
This is not a bad idea but this person basically reinvented LDAP. Everything he wanted to do is already in LDAP, much already in Active Directory.
Right down to the low code interface for changes.
I recommend book Accelerado by Charlie Stross: Um.” Manfred finds it, floating three tiers down an elaborate object hierarchy. It’s flashing for attention. There’s a priority interrupt, an incoming lawsuit that hasn’t propagated up the inheritance tree yet. He prods at the object with a property browser. “I’m afraid I’m not a director of that company, Mr. Glashwiecz. I appear to be retained by it as a technical contr…
This article reminds me of another book [1] called Holacracy where how a business is run is systematized according to other pre-defined principles. David Allen, a productivity trainer, used it at his own company for several years before eventually moving away from it because the ongoing overhead to keep its system up was too much.
I wonder if this system will end up like that as well. I love the idea, but I think humans operate at a squishier level than our computers do, there's a risk of 'massive bureaucratic dehumanization and inflexible processes' and the Iron Law of Organizations that make such efforts as that book and this article fraught with peril. Taylorism has its limits.
But hey, if this works, I'll be excited to see more businesses adopting better practices and less painful fumbling around trying to do practices in an organic or unplanned way.
[1] https://www.holacracy.org/blog/dac-ceo-reflects-on-holacracy...
I feel like this is kind of missing the point that companies are mainly a group of humans and their roles and responsibilities matter to them emotionally. Managing those expectations and feelings can only be done by other humans that feel empathy (good managers) and abstracting such relationships onto something that can be "versioned, queried, tested, and automatically verified" might create a shitty soulless place t…
We came at it from the perspective of DAOs, which was helpful at first but ultimately limiting. I think a non-blockchain version of this will take off. Tailscale is in a good position to do it.
Our earned insight is that you need to build the right primitive for delegation that works up and down the org. Our latest thinking on that is what we call a “Trust Zone” - more details here: https://blog.hatsprotocol.xyz/making-daos-work
You can ignore the “DAO” parts. Happy to answer any questions, I’m still very inspired by this line of inquiry.
I feel like this is kind of missing the point that companies are mainly a group of humans and their roles and responsibilities matter to them emotionally. Managing those expectations and feelings can only be done by other humans that feel empathy (good managers) and abstracting such relationships onto something that can be "versioned, queried, tested, and automatically verified" might create a shitty soulless place t…
Yes - the author's observations are not wrong. Companies, on paper, are logical. However, as one professor told us in college "All companies are perfect until you introduce the humans". Humans are messy. Humans work outside of whatever system you create. You can codify all your things all you want, it simply will not capture the operational complexity of a business run by humans. The problem needs to be flipped on it…
It's a model. And it will inevitably be incomplete and out of data, because the map is not the territory[1]
Of course, the same is true about the unstructured documents he laments, and whatever is done with those documents could probably sped up a lot this way, probably enough to justify the cost of building and maintaining it.
But the more advanced use cases he imagines run a big risk of making very costly decisions based on an incomplete or outdated model.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation
We tried this at Hats Protocol, I think you’ll find our approach very aligned! https://blog.hatsprotocol.xyz/organizational-graphs We came at it from the perspective of DAOs, which was helpful at first but ultimately limiting. I think a non-blockchain version of this will take off. Tailscale is in a good position to do it. Our earned insight is that you need to build the right primitive for delegation that works up a…
I do this, more or less, for my small law firm. Employee and client information are stored in Recfiles and accessed with GNU Recutils. Adding or changing is a pull request, and all sorts of GitHub actions run. Works pretty well!