(2022-01-05) Mann Networked Orgs And Tooling

Boris Mann: Networked Orgs and tooling. I am hugely inspired by Protocol Labs and their “versioning” approach to company and organizational evolution. This current version sees the birth of the Protocol Labs Network, or #pln, to which Fission is lucky enough to have been invited to become a member of.

Fission is a remote first organization that spans 4 time zones

Our software, apps, protocols, and dev tools are published under a variety of open licenses, and the team has a history of participation in open source.

The company uses the same tools for internal collaboration as it does for community collaboration, which makes for a very fluid boundary between external and internal. The three core collaboration tools we use are Discord chat, this Discourse forum we call “Talk”, and Github.

Chat

Chat is a huge part of day to day life, both socially as the primary native mobile interface, and in business with the rise of Slack.com beginning ~2013.

This is “flow” and it is great for even large groups of people to jam together

The downside is that it is synchronous, which doesn’t work great for differing time zones. And it isn’t very discoverable or browseable.

This story of Stripe deleting chats to encourage people to treat them as ephemeral is amazing:

Slack

The jump from free to paid can be incredibly large. E.g. a community with 100 members might go up to $500 / month from free!

Discord

Discord has a novel business model. Individuals buy boosts, and then they can give boosts to servers, and the servers get more features. Technically this is a form of freemium.

While Discord has rich APIs, the whole stack is centralized and proprietary. What’s my justification for recommending it? Chat is ephemeral, therefore low risk (and/or you should also mirror “important” stuff elsewhere).

Element / Matrix.org

I’m personally super bullish on it as a building block. The Beacon system for app <> wallet communications on Tezos uses Matrix in browser, and it’s a pretty great experience that I hope to implement as part of FIL Accounts 3.

Other Chat Systems and Protocols

Signal app

Gitter: It is transitioning to use Matrix, and is highly focused on developer chat. Very interesting!

Wiki

Github Wikis are trapped on Github namespace and don’t really have permissions. Confluence is part of the greater Atlassian sphere and couldn’t be farther away from open source and community work.

HackMD is OK, you’ll need the enterprise version to really use it. HedgeDoc and various other open source versions that forked off of HackMD are pretty janky.

I loved Quip, but then the Salesforce acquisition. I loved Dropbox Paper, but…so many Dropbox thoughts.

Long Form Community Writing

Discourse

easy to install! A $10/monthly VPS will let you comfortably run a Discourse forum.

It can be your wiki, your discussion forum, your meeting notes, your company vacation calendar, your public events calendar, your project management tool, and even power the comments on one or more blogs. The team at Discourse has integrated Github in such a way that they do code reviews in Discourse that round trips to Github

Are there any issues with Discourse? Well, it’s a very unique system that takes a lot to customize and extend. The core team has strong opinions, which means your usage has to somewhat align with those opinions.

I think Discourse is peak long form community, built in a classic Web2 Rails with a database style. I’d say it doesn’t scale down well to smaller groups (albeit Fission has been using it since we were 5 people).

Better Futures for Networked Knowledge Sharing

The Orbit Model — and Orbit the SaaS tool for community analytics 1 — acknowledges that communities can’t be modeled as sales funnels, and so developed a model and “orbits” of engagement

There is a lot of #tools-for-thought folks that hang out with Fission who are all interested in IPFS with content addresses uniquely identifying versioned documents and other assets.

Led by Roam Research (not open source), there has been a wave of TFTs, and in fact certain base concepts like wikilinks that generate backlinks have become another textual interface that I think is getting up to the common interface patterns like @-mentions and #-tags.

Discourse itself supports backlinks (and @ and #) but without the brackets — if you link to some other article, that article will show a “backlink” to the things that link to it.

We haven’t seen “backlinks at scale” in an open way, quite yet. What if across #pln, meeting notes or project proposals or events or many other kinds of common written material included backlinks?

What does it mean to build a search engine that indexes the websites and blogs of all the people, companies, and projects in the #pln?

My thinking about organizational and community conversations and evolutions is much influenced by Simon Wardley #swardley. He has correctly predicted (actually, mapped, using #wardley-maps) the growth of the cloud industry since 2007.