Subject: Re: Organis design submission

From: Gerry Gleason <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 17:04:45 -0600

Carl Vilbrandt wrote:

>Dear members of the ggpl discussion group.  I am submitting to the Osaka
>design competition the "Orgains Design".  Your help or collaboration
>with the submission of an  "Orgains" design to the Osaka design
>competition would be warmly accepted.  :-) Carl    The Osaka design
>competition is about designs for environmental sustainablity and that
>includes business plans...
>
Cool!  Based on the information I just skimmed from www.jdf.or.jp, we 
have until Mar 31 to complete the initial design for screening.  I will 
get right to feedback on the substance and worry about typos and grammar 
at a later stage.  Just for grins, I searched google for "organis" and 
George's paper is the first thing listed.  Is there any more background 
on the use and origin of this term?  I'm just curious.  Did you or 
George coin it for talking about this, or did you borrow it from another 
source?

>
>
>The Orgains design
>
>Orgains  is a basic design for a digital based operating system for the
>space craft called earth. The Orgains design is hyper function micro
>kernel business organisational system derived from a set of simple
>cellular automata rules governing the interactions of individual
>geographical located networked computational farms nodes of Micro
>Cooperatives.  The Organis design supports Virtual Networked
>Organisations (VNO's) which are dynamic decentralized adaptive complex
>digital social structures that are self regulating capable of producing
>very complex and reliable digital services.  The goals of  VNO's
>cellular automata rules of  the Orgains design is create a large number
>of  decentralized small sustainable cellular for more than only profit
>business structures that incorporate the ethics of digital freedom,
>human rights and  environmental sustainability with personal
>remuneration.
>
I know what you are saying here, but more because of a history of 
conversation.  It gets a bit thick ...  I hope you don't mind if I take 
the liberty of restating this paragraph:

Organis is a set of design rules and organizing principles that will 
begin to realize a digital operating system for Spaceship Earth. 
 Physically, Organis is a network of individual geographically dispersed 
Micro Cooperative nodes and a (hyper functional) micro kernel business 
organizational system.  Each node encompasses both physical 
computational farms which are linked together with the global internet 
to form a resilient and powerful grid computer, as well as a social 
organizational cell.  These organizational cells provide the physical 
support to enable individual members to contribute human capital to 
building Virtual Networked Organizations (VNOs) which are the organs of 
Gaia's emerging personification.  VNOs are dynamic decentralized 
adaptive digital social structures that are self-regulating and capable 
of producing very complex and reliable digital products and services. 
 In contrast to typical business structures, VNOs are organized to 
support communities of users and to sustain communities of authors 
rather than to just provide profits to owners and investors.  As such, 
monitary profits are managed to sustain the organization's mission and 
provide fair renumeration for contributing authors and other workers, 
but just as important are the community based ethics of digital freedom, 
human rights and environmental sustainability.

I think I got all the important concepts from the original, and also 
added one or two.  I dropped out the "cellular automata" concept, but I 
don't think that is critical here (can be introduced later if needed), 
and I really like the progression from Micro Coop -> VNOs -> The Earth 
Personified which parallels the progression cell -> organs -> organism. 
 I trust most are familiar with the idea of Gaia as the organic spirit 
of the earth as a whole, living system, but the Gaia concept is more 
spirit than personality.  Fully realized, Organis can be thought of as 
Gaia with a human face, and although I'm not completely happy with how 
this came out in the middle of the paragraph, I'm not sure it would be 
good to be much more direct with this concept as it would seem 
presumptuous and grandiose.

>
>The Virtual Networked Organisations (VNO's) are orgamistic trans-human
>digitally networked cellular business structures who's sustainable is
>based on the creation of charters for novel non profit Micro
>Cooperatives (MicroCo-Ops) business entities geographically grouped in
>computational farm grids.   Virtual Network(ed) Organisation (VNO)
>allows any number of geographically dispersed MicroCo-Ops of knowledge
>workers to virtually collaborate on a project under no central planning
>and were for many various central areas of focus, the roles of
>co-ordination and management arise from any of the project knowledge
>workers based on level of knowledge and  interest.  The definition and
>recognition of the operations of  VNOs structures are base on the case
>studies of the Linux Project done by George Dafermos.
>
I like this pretty much as is with e a little cleanup.  The only thing I 
don't like is the negative idea of "no central planning", but how to 
restate this positively?  What we really have is "distributed planning 
based on transparent sharing of goals, ideas, code, etc."

There are some organizational functions that could/should be more 
centrally controlled.  I'm not sure about exactly where this fits, but I 
am primarily thinking about financial controls and governance issues. 
 Without this, corruption can destroy the entire enterprise. 
 Ultimately, a VNO would be controlled by democratic input from its 
communities, and the Micro Co-ops would be similarly controlled (by a 
smaller constituency). Common standards and operating principles would 
be developed and shared between VNOs, and it might be useful to 
establish one of more VNOs whose mission is to develope and maintain 
these standards and principles, and provide services to raise and 
maintain a high standard for organizational governance for all the VNOs. 
 Of course, this wouldn't be dictated from headquarters, but rather 
emerges from the self-organizing principles and a large network of VNOs 
all trying to solve these problems in parallel and sharing results and 
tools.

>
>CompuFarms (CF) the physical equavelence of the VNO type structure is
>being envisioned and developed in Japan by Carl Sunburg.  CF  is the
>large geo political grouping of  MicroCo-Ops that  form a peer to peer
>computational farming grid nodes  for various types of active data
>repositories, disaster recovery resources, and for government, finical
>and scientific simulations.  The data storage and computational
>resources provide one source of income for the MicroCo-Ops.  MicroCo-Ops
>would also provide digital services for local government and educational
>services.
>
This is very cool.  Is there more from Carl S. about this plan?  I've 
also been working on ideas to build an Open Source based consulting 
business using geraldgleason.com (GG.com).  My thinking is that the main 
obsticle for small to mid-sized businesses (and probably local 
governments and schools too) adopting Linux and Free Source systems is 
the lack of hands-on local support.  Typically, they need a high level 
expert to help navigate potential pitfalls, choose mature tools, train 
systems people and such, but they don't want or need that sort of person 
on staff.  They end up with Microsoft products because it seems like the 
most effective way to go and their software is easy on the surface. 
 What they don't know is that the compromises that MS has made to make 
it look easy also make it insecure and unstable without equal systems 
expertise to help install, configure and maintain these systems.

The reason I digressed here is for background to the idea that the best 
way for most small to mid-sized enterprises to deploy systems is with 
local workstations, plus print/file services, and offsite resources for 
almost everything else.  This is essentially the Application Service 
Provider (ASP) model for information services, and these CompuFarms 
would probably be perfect for deploying ASP services for a wide variety 
of enterprises.  

I realize that this also opens up a can of worms relating to non-profit 
status, particularly in the US.  To maintain your charitable non-profit 
status, you can't really engage in a lot of activities that would 
compete with services offered by commercial entities.  It's the 
"charitable" part that is the problem as there are many trade 
association type non-profits that have no such restrictions, but then 
you can't accept tax deductable donations.  On the other hand, you can 
structure the organization to partition charitable and more commercial 
activities, and keep them separate financially and in terms of governance.

As long as I have digressed this far, I might as well bring up my 
concern about limiting VNO and Organis design activities strictly to 
non-profits (whether charitable or trade association like).  My concern 
is that some of these ideas have a great deal of commercial viability in 
addition to being attractive in terms of holistic ethics and such.  My 
point is that it might be easier to secure commercial funding for some 
ideas, and as it develops and gets profitable, you can expand more 
quickly with equity financing, and if you don't plan to expand quickly, 
you might be overshadowed by a commercial entity that take the idea and 
runs with it.  The point is to maintain flexibility to be able to use 
the financial model most appropriate to each project. Besides, you can 
always use the profits to fund non-profit activities, but you can't use 
retained earning from a non-profit to invest in expanding your network.

>
>The novelty of the proposed VNO MicroCo-Ops based on Greater Good Public
>License agreement is that the VNO/CF  MicroCo-Ops create the necessary
>local micro business structures providing each each person that is an
>active member of the Geo. positioned MicroCo-Ops cells with the
>communications, computational and finical resources needed.  The   The
>VNO type Linux Projects, would still be base on voluntary participation
>in a matrix type of management were the local resources and employees
>pay is removed from the VNO projects and they would continue to operate
>as they currently do, but achieve a level of sustainablity that is not
>available because of there current voluntary nature.
>
I'm getting confused with this.  Would CF be basically a network of 
MicroCo-Ops which actually own and operate the physical farms?  I'm 
trying to think about how this would evolve from the current situation 
where the bigger projects are basically non-profit VNOs, managing all 
their own resources, and large numbers of small projects are hosted by 
the likes of SourceForge or FreshMeat, etc.  It seems like CompuFarms 
would compete with these, or would it try to join the smaller 
competitors of these into a cooperative network?

Thinking about this from the standpoint of my "GG.com" planning, I could 
operate a facility in my locality, but I wouldn't want to commit all the 
financial resources needed to build and pay for this facility and its 
ongoing expenses.  On the other hand, if CF was able to make the 
financial commitment to start it and keep it going, I would be in a very 
good position to sell the computational services along with my own 
service offerings to commercial and non-profit entities in my region. 
 Also, I wouldn't need a local facility to start the process forward. 
 Location is essentially irrelevant to providing computational resources 
for ASP services, so I could build the business up based on remote 
facilities, and deploy our own facility when the need develops.

>
>MicroCo-Ops growth will be based on transformation of services from
>analog to digital
>
At best this analog to digital concept is unclear, and at worst it is 
wrong and/or misleading.  To a large extent, the analog to digital 
transition is complete, at least in communications and information 
storage and management.  I claim the transition we are approaching, and 
this proposal seeks to address is fundamentally about the way the 
Internet enables and facilitates group formation (ala the Group Forming 
Networks (GFN) ideas I sent around a while back).  The technology is in 
place for the most part now, but the social and organizational 
innovations are just starting to emerge.

>  and by cellular replication.  MicroCo-Ops upon
>reaching a certain size of I/0 and resources  will temporally swell its
>number of personal and then divide or reproduces it self in various and
>complex ways base on a set of simple rules governing its behavior and
>particularly MicroCo-Ops  interaction with each other.
>
>NanoCorp or MicroCo-Ops rule base / founding charter.
>
>1. They are base on phyical and Geo. location.
>
Yes, promotes face-to-face interactions and connectons to community.

>
>2. The limiting size factor for personal is 1 to 26
>
Is there some research to base this size factor on?  My experience with 
small organizations suggests that there is often a serious breakdown in 
communications that becomes critical somewhere between 50 and 100 
employees, so I agree completely with the idea, but I'm not sure 
where/how to draw this line.

>
>3.  The limiting I/O factor is based localy
>
I/O factor?  Are you refering to the scale of the local operation? 
 Something else?

>
>4.  payment of personal is based on local wages
>
Yes, basically.  I would want to also create opportunities for expanded 
rewards for the most important contributions.  Profit can be a good 
motivator for certain types of activities, and we shouldn't write it out 
of the equations.  You do have to be careful that it doesn't interfere 
with more important goals.

>
>5.  They subdivide in to separate organization
>
I would base this on divergence of missions as much or more than pure 
size considerations.  The way I see it, the VNOs are more the visible, 
marketable face of this, and the MicroCo-ops are where the work actually 
gets done, and customer/clients interact with workers.  Wouldn't this 
work sort of like a franchise?

>
>6.   They have inheritance base on  ?? and need for diversification.?
>
The "daughter cells" should have a balanced set of physical resources 
from the parent cell, and all of the infomation (genetics). 
 Diversification is based on enabling different genes in different 
cells, which is probably based in a large part on the differential 
skills and specialization of the individuals in each cell (interests 
too, of course).  Programs to promote people moving between cells would 
have value as well.

>
>7. As a non profit they must achieve their goals by not growing larger
>in size, but by their reproduction. However at the same time they are in
>competition with each other to provide services under GGPL at
>continually
>
I don't really see this as based on being non-profit.  Non-profits can 
grow by building up membership as well, and at the VNO level, I expect 
some of the organizations will be quite large indeed, based on how 
universal the need they address is.  Splits are mandated by 
inefficiencies of scale.  Most of the efficiencies of scale that are the 
basis of increasing size of commercial entities are based on limiting 
the free exchange of ideas, which ends up being a net cost to the 
society as a whole.  Name recognition via mass marketing is another big 
one, but that will be a function of the VNOs, and not the MicroCo-Ops, 
right?

Competition can be good in some contexts, but if you look at the farm 
analogy, there are problems.  I don't doubt that market competition has 
made food productions very efficient, but often at the expense of the 
very things we are interested in protecting.  Of course, competition 
under the GGPL would factor in some of the externalities, but there are 
still problems.  In the growth phase, things are ok because price 
signals are both promoting more production and prividing a good margin 
for existing producers, but eventually the demand is met and prices 
start to fall.  In the steady state, demand doesn't change that much 
either way, but prices are based on current supply, so if there is a 
good year there is over supply and if there is a bad year, at least some 
farmers are hurting from low yields.  Your body does not place your 
cells in competition with one another (in general), but there are a lot 
of regulatory processes that keep things in balance.  Regulatory 
processes use signals that are processed by an information system and 
fed back as control signals to slow down or speed up other body systems. 
 The point of all this is that you have to be careful about when to use 
pure market competition, and when you need to tweak the market signals 
or introduce another system of signals altogether.

>
>The proposed rules  attempt to develop computer orgnisational growth
>models, that exhibit both continuous sustainable growth through
>transformation and replication and complex unpredictable random
>behaviors necessary to realize the hyper functional organizational
>qualities including decentralize control, self organising, dynamic
>response, and efficiency as witnessed in the Linux project and appears
>to be occurring with other Libre Source projects.
>
When you talk about "continuous sustainable growth", I think you must 
look at the stuff from Paul Romer. The core of his proposals is that 
continuous growth in wages and GNP is only possible by being smarter and 
sharing more knowledge or information, and this is good because it is 
consistent with the Organis conception.  In one paper he talks about why 
stimulating the demand side of technology is often conterproductive 
because adding funding for R&D (demand side) might be good for the 
salaries of scientists and engineers, but this price signal doesn't 
translate well to an increase in the supply of skilled workers.

For effective promotion of Open/Free Source development and deployment, 
there is both the supply of skilled workers as well as the supply of 
paying jobs.  The issue here is that many people want to do this sort of 
development, but also need a paycheck to support themselves and their 
families, so the question is more one of establishing revenue streams 
that grow in response to usage of OS software, and feeding some of this 
back to the development side.  Clearly some organizations like RedHat 
and IBM are extracting revenues from the sales and services end, and 
they are feeding back some of it to development, but the scale of this 
is still very small compared to the demand.  Others like Dell and Sun 
seem to just be taking away and not giving anything back of note.

So, let's go back to my GG.com concept as an example.  If something like 
it already existed, I wouldn't bother (I'd just apply there for a job), 
and if generating good leads (i.e. ones leading to sales) was as easy as 
contacting all the Linux distribution vendors, the concept would be a 
slam dunk.  So, instead, the only viable path is the painful process of 
generating leads myself and following up, etc., etc. etc.  So, one way 
to go is to build something like CompuFarms as a VNO, and provide all 
sorts of community services under a "Virtual Roof" and market the whole 
thing as a much larger concept, then GG.com is just a MicroCo-Op member 
of the CompuFarms VNO.  Actually, this could be a viable model, but only 
if together CF and GG.com generate enough business (in GG.com's geo 
region) to keep GG.com viable, and the collective revenues from all the 
MicroCo-Ops under CF generate enough excess revenue to support CF's 
operations as well as feeding some of this back to development. 
 Microsoft has extracted billions of dollars from its customers over the 
years, so it shouldn't be that hard to provide free software for the 
masses with top notch support for a fair price for far less than the 
going rate.

>
>"the state of nature" The Garden of Eden "that  a set of simple "natural
>rules" genitic  code (like programing ) that repsent combintory
>solutions worked out over centures stemming from the laws of physics of
>matter that express themselves in  complex biological systems with no
>centeral control system.  The "natural rules" and resulting self
>governing and self replcation of biological structures of gentic code
>really have no most no parallel to any other human social strutcture
>other than the Linux project.
>
>The type of  noncentralized control evolution and development of
>biological growth base on gentic blueprints and physical law as  that
>respectively can not be broken or can not be easly changed because of
>the many levels of interactive complex behaviour does not seem to have
>any thing in common with anarchy nor libertarianism.  The "natural
>rules" are simple, but exibit high level both localy and global of very
>controled highly organised codes boundaries and interactions,  that
>repesent sets of various solutions for a given set of physical
>boundaries and indeed rules that cannot be broken and leave very little
>choice for a given life form.
>
These two paragraphs need a bit of work.  I'll wait for another draft 
before taking a stab at it.  Maybe a few more ideas from my little 
anarchy screed (at http://www.geraldgleason.com/projects/anarchy.html) 
would connect the ideas better.  Another helpful concept that this 
suggests to me is the idea of "autopoesis" from Maturana and Varella, 
_The_Tree_of_Knowledge_.  At first glance, it seems you are saying that 
organisms "cannot be easily changed", but I think you are trying to make 
a different point in reality.  I would say that these systems are both 
relilient and adaptable, so that they tend to resist change in most 
situations and actively try to restore the original state, but finding 
themselves in a very different state, the "law" is change or die, so 
change they do.

>
>
>We envision the Organis to be a business model by which payment for
>development and services can be introduce to the Liber / free source
>Projects with out disturbing the above mentioned organisational
>qualities.  It is our hope, that a digital based type of "hyper
>fictional micro kernel structured" :-) earth operating system can be
>created that will have the capabilities to compete with and dissolve the
>large inefficient global corporate structures.  NanoCorp or MicroCo-Ops
>entities who rather that merely express  a "code of ethics
>duty/obligation" for the greater good of the public, actually provide
>legal binding agreements as a non-proift entity to provide a real
>services locally promoting digital freedom, human rights and a
>sustainable future for all.
>
I think it is important to remember that there are organic aspects to 
how these "large inefficient global corporate structures" came to be 
what they are and they will both resist and adapt to the changing 
landscape, and do so in ways that are as surprising and hard to predict 
as anything that will emerge from the structures proposed here. 
 Ultimately we need to use both the power of "organis growth" in 
addition to the power of the markets and other existing systems to put 
things on the right track.

Anyway, hope this helps, and I look forward to the next revision of this.

Gerry