🌿 The Spore

Brought to you by the team at Organizational Mycology

Welcome to The Spore, the Organizational Mycology newsletter. Expect to hear from us about every two weeks. We're going to do pop-up Oblique Thinking Hours as ideas come up. So if you're interested in those, drop us a line at [email protected] and we'll add you to that special announcement list for those interested in the Oblique Thinking Hour.

🔨 Some things we’ve been working on

Landscape of Open Source

We're increasingly looking at organizations in the open source and open science space. We are inspired by the Map of GitHub, which visually maps open source projects and how they are interconnected. We had a chuckle in our work with Astropy and recent work with molecular scientists when their Slack communities were interested by how close together the astronomy and molecular science software stacks are on the Map. One person pointed out that the physics of stars created the heavier elements, and this is logical consequence of how stars grow (via gravity), explode, and spew out heavier elements. In other words, the available chemical elements are a result of astrophysics at work. Or is it the other way around 🤔? In any case, studying these closely-related "materials" or "matter" means that the resulting software tools are proximate to one another. We love these kinds of connections where software tools and systems are so closely related in sometimes unexpected ways.

Jonah has created an early view of some of the Scientific OSS landscape. We would love to hear what organizations you see missing, or other ways you have tried to understand different spaces you work in. This started as a diagram to help us understand work we were doing for the Astropy project (they were at the middle originally), but we realized it is a broadly useful landscape to help understand scientific software, organizations, reach and impacts. If you're interested in this work, you can get involved on Github by submitting issues (suggestions, ideas, tweaks are all welcome), or drop us a note at [email protected].

Our Mycological Metaphor

One of our favorite questions to be asked is: Why on earth did we name ourselves Organizational Mycology? Are you mycologists? Are you into mushrooms? Are you working on psychedelics?

The humorous response to these kinds of questions is that we named it OrgMycology because we didn't feel comfortable going public with "Slime Mold Consulting", though we still kinda like the ring of it.

We are not mycologists, though we do find fungi of all kinds inspiring (and often quite tasty). We specifically find it inspiring to observe and learn from the way that mycelium move in the world. They expand and emerge and create networks in ways that we think is a compelling newer way to think about how organizations can (and could) function. Connections in the mycological world are not always immediately visible, but they exist, much like the latent connections within organizations.

🤔 Something we found interesting

New Emoji!

There is a new emoji afoot. Some group at the Unicode Consortium has blessed us with a new brown mushroom emoji to enhance our mycological communications. It is apparently a variant of the 🍄 where you pair it with the original mushroom and a brown square like: 🍄 🟫. Look out, 'cause we're likely to use any and all emojis related to mycelium that are created.

Oblique Thinking Hour

We've put the oblique thinking hour on hold as our consulting work has ramped up, but we're always open to holding sessions for individual teams. We'll be sure to let you know when we hold another free and open OTH! Find out more about OTH and our other offerings on our Services page.