🌿The Spore

Brought to you by the team at Organizational Mycology

🔨 Some things we’ve been working on

We do a lot of work with “open” organizations, such as open source software projects and open science groups. Fluidity of membership is a unifying characteristic of these organizations: The people who work for the organization come and go, change what they’re working on, take on additional tasks or step back from responsibilities, and generally shift their work in ways that traditional organizations do not experience. What’s more, the people who work in open organizations live their daily lives as members of multiple organizations. They may work for a large corporation, a nonprofit, an educational institution, a lab, or a government agency alongside their work with open orgs. 

In other words, the folks we work with often do a particular set of things in their “primary” work world but they still find themselves drawn to doing work with open groups, either as a part of their formal employment or as a hobby they like to do on the side. Their motivations to join open organizations are varied:

• Sometimes it is to build what they can’t build inside their own institutional structures. 
• Sometimes it is to talk to people who are focused on openness and drive cultural change in a particular domain. 
• Sometimes it is to bring together people from across different organizations to do something collectively meaningful. 
• Sometimes it is because the open organization can focus on problems that aren’t relevant to their primary work. 

While their motivations are varied, their problems are often very similar. As we work to support organizations and people who work like this, we’ve found that these orgs hit various milestones that prompt certain challenges. Starting up a new open organization, for example, requires a first round of funding, and raising that funding can be a full-time job on its own. After getting funded and developing a governance structure, leaders are often plagued by indecision and action is challenging to catalyze–a problem that we have been thinking about a lot lately.

Indecision can persist in part because people are so focused on wanting to do the work that made them interested in starting or joining an organization in the first place: Those who enjoy developing software might not get excited by the idea of finding a fiscal sponsor, and those who enjoy building new data sharing platforms for scientists might not be thrilled by the task of setting up a hiring and onboarding process for new employees. Even when they find themselves in a position to begin allocating funding to workstreams that are important to them, leaders can feel overwhelmed about making sure they do it “the right way,” whether that be technically (e.g., funding the right software development priorities) or structurally (e.g., making decisions democratically and with community input).

As a firm that focuses on organizational research and development, we are fascinated by many of the challenges that open organization leaders seemingly do not always enjoy. We love to help them answer questions like:  

• How do you stand up an organization in a way that aligns with our specific goals and values? 
• What leadership style do you want for your organization? 
• How distributed or concentrated do you want leadership to be?
• How do you sustain and direct your organization’s trajectory based on input from your community? 
• What are the appropriate feedback mechanisms between leadership and the broader community?
• What should be the first grant to get your not-for-profit going? Should you take anything that you can get, or be more intentional about whose money you accept and for what purpose?
  • How do you even get the first check and distribute it?! 
  • Um, I have to do MORE taxes?!
• Should you have a board of directors? If so, what are they supposed to do? What is their role within the broader community? 

What we’re beginning to learn from our work across these open organizations is that the answers to the above questions can only be found through experimentation. Whether the challenge is starting a new organization or dealing with major socio-cultural-political shifts, leaders should focus on defining and creating opportunities for different kinds of small experiments that their community can do. This could be a small internal grant program where groups of individuals with aligned interests take the lead on things like fundraising, community-building, or technical innovation. It could be short events where there is a common goal but flexibility and spontaneity in how to reach it (e.g., hackathons or unconferences). Or it could just be facilitated conversations about particular topics, such as co-developing a strategic plan or figuring out a board structure that is sensitive to the needs of various members.

Framing these efforts as experimentation lowers the cognitive and social barriers we place on ourselves and our coworkers to “get it right.” In other words, instead of demanding that we do it perfectly right off the bat, we can ask: What might be “good enough” to get us started and building momentum? What are the things that are safe enough to try out without catastrophically breaking something? What does an experimental first step look like, and how can we learn from it no matter how

What are some ways your organization has tackled this kind of thing?

⚡Short updates 

• 🌐Join our April CZI Open Science Community Call: The next call in our CZI Open Science series will be a Collider call, and is scheduled for Thursday April 24th from 1 to 2 pm Eastern US / 10 to 11 am Pacific US. In this 60-minute call, you'll have the chance to meet at least three other people from the open science world in 15-minute, 1:1 sessions. It's a great opportunity to expand your network, spark new friendships, and share inspiring ideas—all in a relaxed atmosphere. Join us to "collide" with like-minded individuals and create meaningful connections with peers working on open source projects. Share your challenges, successes, and/or just get to know each other. Sign up for the call (and future calls), and learn more about Open Science Community Calls.
• 👥 Our latest resources from the CZI Open Science Community Calls are now live. We developed tips and examples for Implementing Software Peer Review and curated a List of Awesome Resources for Sustaining Open Source Projects. We hope these resources help to get groups thinking about and talking through topics that could benefit their projects. As always, feel free to share, adapt, and contribute however you see fit!
• 🌿 Beth is continuing her Everyday Flourishing workshops and newsletter, where she applies principles from permaculture as a frame on work and personal life. The next workshop on Self Regulation and Feedback will be on Monday, April 14th at noon Pacific. All are invited!