Building Capacity for Exit to Community

I've worked in a lot of "non-hierarchical" organizations, and management or leadership do not go away. You don't succeed in that space by removing them and leaving a vacuum. You succeed by reinterpreting things like management and leadership into distributed processes, transparent roles that can rotate and are accountable back to the community at l... See more

If a commons is being managed successfully, individuals feel like they're getting back more than they're putting in, that the thing is more than the sum of its parts, that running it together means we have something more powerful than any of us could on our own.

When a Collective joins a Fiscal Host, they get a clear service: we'll hold your money, you don't have to go get a bank account and form your own legal entity, we're going to take care of some really annoying paperwork stuff for you, and we'll give you this nice online tool that lets you share your budget transparently and pay your expenses. On the... See more

it's important we don't rush.

There's what I mentioned about the mission failing to translate across time. For six years, Open Collective has had people in the center holding very strongly to a certain set of values. If those people are no longer there, where's that strength going to come from? That's difficult to design. You can see lots of examples out there of large, diverse... See more

Exit to Community was a very natural fit. It's giving us a north star to orient ourselves around strategically, and helping us figure out what capacities we need to build, internally and with our community, to be set up for a successful post-E2C future. It has really helped us get aligned as a team. Exit to Community is values-aligned, structurally... See more

Exit to Community is values-aligned, structurally-aligned, and financially-aligned. For us, it makes a lot of sense.

One of the really challenging things about an E2C is how to set things in stone enough that the mission and the values persist, post ownership transition, without setting it too much in stone so cannot evolve with the times. We want to genuinely put the future participant-stakeholders in charge. It shouldn't be the ghosts of founders past setting t... See more

Ultimately, the non-transactional thing works on the basis of trust. You have to have trust first, before you can get that virtuous cycle going, because you have to start by giving and not knowing what you'll get back. It's something like an abundance mindset, trust in the community. But at the same time, if you give and you don't get meaningful va... See more

Design-by-committee is a real risk for a software company. It's so hard to build software, because you can literally build anything, there are infinite possibilities, so you have to have a really coherent design and product vision. I really don't think you can distribute that to thousands of people, so we have to figure out where in the system that... See more