101–110 of 166 posts
I'm sure the author is well intentioned and filled with integrity, however trashing a thing you created because you feel dejected is inherently self-interested and unworthy of attention.
I am not inclined to read this longwinded post. Anyone who writes a headline like this is not worthy of it's subject, and the popular comments would tend to agree. I'm sure the author is well intentioned and filled with integrity, however trashing a thing you created because you feel dejected is inherently self-interested and unworthy of attention.
Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here, but I never read an essay where I more thought "wow this guy really needs to read some basic business books." Even though it was a non-profit, there is so much wisdom in them about management and leadership that was clearly lacking throughout his experience. It's too late now. But maybe if he understood some of the reasons back when they were starting the app why organi…
Do you have any recommendations for business books about effective management / leadership?
Business books sometimes get a bad rap on here, but I never read an essay where I more thought "wow this guy really needs to read some basic business books." Even though it was a non-profit, there is so much wisdom in them about management and leadership that was clearly lacking throughout his experience. It's too late now. But maybe if he understood some of the reasons back when they were starting the app why organi…
> When the two mix it doesn't always go well (see Mozilla). you've written more than 20 paragraphs of comments but I stopped here, because if you think this way about Mozilla, a very successful company and philanthropy, you probably are not making generalizable judgements about others
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That's one view of how to structure organizations but hardly the only one. Much of SV was built using non-hierarchical organizations, often bragging that nobody had a title. The greater corporate world embraced flat organizational structures for 1-2 decades and did very well. Toyota famously gave (gives?) everyone on the assembly line the power to stop production, and they were (are?) considered the pinnicle of autom…
Am sure you're already aware, but for others in the thread: Absence of titles does not mean absence of hierarchy. Absence of formal hierarchy doesn't mean absence of social power. At their best, flat hierarchies do as described. At their worst, they take on all the worst aspects of cults together with all the worst aspects of high school. Endless manoeuvring for influence, currying favour, autocratic fiefdoms emergin…
Interestingly enough, this is exactly how ex-Valve employees describe their workplace.
While I love that anarchists and sociocrats exist, I would say from personal experience (admittedly, over 30 years ago when I was a student) that every single "anarchist collective shared living space" will get to a point where someone (even me, even if I'm attempting to be chill about everything) will grab someone by the shirt front, haul them to their feet, and threaten to knock seven shades of shit out of them if they don't take their turn of washing the dishes.
Any successful business has a lot of dishes to wash.
Makes perfect sense to me, and I would like to point you to the technology and ecosystem of "nanopublications": https://nanopub.net/
In a nutshell, nanopublications provide a decentralized infrastructure like Mastodon, but with focus on redundantly storing open data rather than on user ownership of personal data. Moreover nanopublications are basically snippets of knowledge graphs, so they resemble database entries and can be queried as such.
Happy to elaborate if this is of interest.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
With full respect to your right to criticize, I don't understand what differentiates an organization trying to build a social networking app around biodiversity data from an organization feeding the poor, and those organizations' ability to experiment with their governance system. Can you expand that thought or is it rhetorical?
I mean I think there's a pretty stark difference between a charity feeding the poor and an app startup (even a non-profit one). So stark that it feels almost weird writing this comment, but I'll take your question at face value. Okay, here's a few: - Decisions at a charity feeding the poor are likely less controversial and binary in nature than decisions for a product focused app organization. If people are making a…
I don’t understand the distinction you’re drawing between “charity” and “nonprofit”. iNaturalist is a 501c3, so it’s a charity [1]. One of my partner’s previous 501c3 employers produced an app to aid with their mission.
Let me reframe your first bullet to reflect my lived experience (both in the nonprofit world and building software at a for-profit):
> Decisions at a charity feeding the poor are high-stakes and often controversial compared with decisions for a product focused app organization. If people are making a lot of decisions bottom-up at the charity, the scarce budget won’t stretch to cover the needs of the mission. In a product-focused organization, decisions are much lower stakes. Through the magic of version control, A/B testing, and vendor app stores, you rarely need to commit deeply to decisions, so the individual developer can make the initial call: will we use this app icon design or that one? Will we have one app for professionals and one for laypeople or a unified app? Will we use SVM or a neural network? Ship, learn, iterate.
My for-profit employer explicitly hires for (or at least used to) “passion” and intrinsic motivation. And there are several corporations I’m not willing to work for despite their reputation for high compensation. I think it’s pretty tenuous to connect org structure with motivation so directly and concretely.
The third bullet is uninformed. 501c3s answer to the people they derive funding from, their customers/clients/served population, their board, and the government (tax authority) whether they’re putting spaghetti on plates or pixels on screens. The IRS has a pretty readable intro to the requirements [2].
This kind of first-principles reasoning from vibes about what it must be like is seductive but often misleading. I encourage everyone I can to serve on a nonprofit board. The organizations can usually benefit from the perspective and different type of thinking that computer people bring, and it’ll open your eyes to new perspectives about your own work and life!
[1] https://www.charitynavigator.org/ein/921296468
[2] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting to contrast with Wikipedia. I'm not deeply involved with either, so I'm talking out of my ass and would be curious to hear other people's thoughts here. But Wikipedia has gone to great lengths to make the data side, Wikidata, and the app/website, decoupled. I'm guessing iNaturalist hasn't? The OpenStreetMaps model is also interesting. Where they basically only provide the data and expect others to ma…
Wikidata is a separate project, specifically for structured data in the form of semantic triples [0]. It's essentially the open-source version of Google's KnowledgeGraph; both sourced a lot of their initial data from Metaweb's Freebase [1], which Google acquired in 2010. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_triple [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freebase_(database)