Difference between revisions of "Self Organize"

Organize Thyself!

By it's very nature, wiki encourages people with divergent ideas and processes to collaborate and work through conflicts in a constructive way. Self Organize is a philosophy in the wiki culture to promote ways of dealing with these conflicts, encourage Collaboration and help build something more than the sum of it's parts.

In the wiki world, part of the BeABuilder philosophy is: there are always opportunities for us, such as pages to build, to extend, to streamline, to re-factor, to interlink or to improve in other ways.

At it's core, Self Organizing is a process for doing this work in a spirit of AssumeGoodFaith, Collaboration and full Transparency. The general idea starts from a single seed: Self organizing is about the get it done mentality, just getting together and when something needs to be done, getting it done rather than waiting around for someone else to do it.

Wikis are about:

• Seeing something that causes you to want to take action.
• In wiki, that action is clicking on the edit button.
• You have clicked the edit button because you want to share information. As it happens, there are other people out there who also have information and we want to share it with each other.
• As the occurance of other people doing these things goes up as time goes by, then you have to determine if you want to work together or not when conflicts arise. (And it is ok to choose not work together -- LawOfTwoFeet).

At some point in the BeABuilder process, conflicts will arise from other community members who are also trying to build something for the collective good. Self Organizing is really about learning to work together to overcome those conflicts.

The Self Organize philosophy believes it is in working and struggling together that true Collaboration and beautiful things can arise.

The role of self and working together

Self organizing is about taking responsibility for the things that you care about. Because the community is full of others who are taking responsibility for the pieces that they care about, occasionally these interests and projects will bump or collide. This is where self organizing can come into play.

This goes back to the idea that who ever shows up gets to BeABuilder and that self is the person who showed up. Because you showed up:

• Your ideas are the ones that are going to be heard
• Your ideas are the ones that are going to be taken

And the next person who shows up, their ideas are going to be taken/heard. When a conflict arises, you have a couple choices:

• Try to work together. More often, this is done over the WikiWiki, using "talk" pages, but it could also happen via email, phone, Skype or in person.
• Don't work together and keep conflicting with each other (never reaching resolution)
• Decide to create equal but divergent works in the same area (which could really separate AboutUs from say Wikipedia, there could be a world in which there are various AboutUs pages organized from a central point, each with a different viewpoint or idea expressed. Imagine a "George W. Bush" page from a Republican viewpoint, one from a Democrat's viewpoint, even from a Wiccan or Freemason view -- we can.)
• One person decides to work on something else and leaves that project (LawOfTwoFeet)

In any case, all are ways of self organization and create unique outcomes that wouldn't have been created by a person working alone.

Some external references

MeatBall:TheCollective

MeatBall:WikiWeblog

Wiki:WhyWikiWorks