On Fri, 2005-03-11 at 06:01, Jacqueline McNally wrote: > > Hopefully we can learn to live together both of you, and all volunteers > > can be useful and helpful to OOo. If you don't like something, fix it. > > OOo is a doocracy. > > My initial post to the MP list was with the subject "do-ocracy", see: > http://marketing.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=16702
The classic organisational cultures in management theory are role culture, club culture, task culture, cooperative culture, coersive culture. Large organisations are role cultures usually with power in the organisation conveyed by a title and role. These are not necessarily meritocracies as the holder of the role might or might not be more competent than someone else. Role cultures are well known to have difficulties with management of change - hence IBM losing 40 billion dollars. The civile service is a classic role culture. In task cultures status is gained by expertise and doing things. Small start ups particularly in high tech are classic task cultures. Seems to me that the term doocracy is really just describing a task culture. A cooperative culture is where people have cooperative psychological contracts with one another, respect each others work and get on. So probably the most productive set of cultures are cooperative task cultures. A coersive role culture would be typified by say a prison or conscripted army. Role cultures are associated with large organisations. Its very difficult to manage any organisational unit bigger than 150 people because of things hardwired into our genetics. This is one reason why large companies try and organise themselves into autonomous small business units. They are trying to mimic the startup task culture because they know its more productive. The difficulty for OpenOffice.org is that its a big project with roles that bestow power and influence on the incumbents. It is in fact a role culture and we need to recognise that. There are elements of task culture about it too, and it is more democratic than a corporate would be and certainly less coersive. But its a bit of a strange mixture so perhaps understanding the nature of the organisation is important. I don't think just declaring ourselves a do-ocracy or anythng else means that we are one. Establishing cooperative psychological contracts is the only way to manage a project like OOo. Coersion won't work because the coersed will just go elsewhere or do something else. -- Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ZMS Ltd
