The Minciu Sodas laboratory

Proposal: Creating an economy for working openly

A Rant on Economy

I'm realizing that we should fight this tendency: "What can we do to 
meet their needs?"  The first need of a company is to have participants 
who know themselves, know their own passions, motivations.  This is put 
bluntly by CollabNet, http://www.collabnet.com :

"We're looking to hire solid business and technical professionals in all 
departments. If you have the skills and the know-how for one of our open 
positions--great! More importantly, though, we're looking for bright, 
intelligent, creative, hard-working, and thoughtful employees. We're not 
looking for robots, not even robots that precisely fit the job 
description." (copyrighted)

In Lithuania, (and in the US, too), programmers regularly tell me: "Just 
tell me what you need me to do, I can do it."  I explain to them: "It's 
not worth the effort to deal with you unless you can show me that you're 
self-managing, self-motivating, self-educating.  You show me that you're 
able to create something that you yourself genuinely care about."

It takes a long time for people to "get it", but it's a good way to 
separate out the people.  And people do tell me, "now I understand". 
And we had a great success last year that Peter Kaminski chose to work 
with us because we can attract such people, help them develop and apply 
themselves.  We've a whole group, quite active now, at 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/minciu_sodas_LT/

The reason that our laboratory's economy will work is that it's 
even-sided.  I'm realizing that in the normal economy, the person with 
the money is the one who gets to decide what they want, and the worker 
has to accept that.  But that's one-sided in ways that are unhelpful for 
both parties.

In our economy, everyone makes clear what their own interests are, what 
their own projects are, what they work for free on.  For example, Alex 
Shapiro is interested in his invention http://www.touchgraph.com  Or 
Natalie is interested in her investigation on Love.  We're offering 
Hewlett-Packard the opportunity to work with Alex or Natalie or 
Raimundas.  But they need to consider what Alex, Natalie, Raimundas, and 
others want to work on, and then show them why they should be interested 
in adapting their projects, applying their passions for what 
Hewlett-Packard is interested in.

For Hewlett-Packard, it's about resources and opportunities, not about 
needs.  There are many ways to try to increase the market for 
large-sized printers.  There are many ways to proceed.  A smart way to 
proceed is to simply consider the passions of your people.  And a good 
way to back them up is to hook them up with other passionate people.

In other words, we're selling people and passions, not products or 
services.  Natalie's "Love" investigation is worth, say, half a million 
dollars, because it expresses so much of her passion.  She's doing it 
for free, and for the public.  But it makes a lot more sense for 
Hewlett-Packard to tap into her passions and apply them practically, 
rather then to try to get her passionate about selling their printers, 
or other needs they may have.  So maybe they would pay her fifty 
thousand dollars for publicly applying these large-sized printers in her 
investigation, simply to figure out what they're best for, and have 
public evidence for it.

We live in an economy that has no jobs for geniuses.  The economy 
reduces all activity to solving economic problems.  The economy states 
these problems in terms of the lowest common denominator solution.  So 
the economy is unaware that there are so many beautiful people who know 
best what to do with themselves.  It doesn't care what they have to 
offer, all it has are the sets of low-level problems it needs solved. 
That would be all right, except that the people of the world have, for 
the most part, come to think that a person's "work" is defined by these 
low-level problems.  So this system of low-level problems grows way out 
of proportion, taking up all the resources of our society, and fueling 
itself.  We end up with people who are "overqualified".  And we have a 
system where people are hired to do work that they've already 
demonstrated competence in! rather than work that would help them and 
others grow.

 From a very practical point of view, when I think of the many different 
kinds of useful things I've done in life for other people, and for 
myself, they were unpaid.  And when I think of the jobs I earned money 
from, they were truly a waste of time for all concerned, myself included.

And I now have experience investing money in people, especially in 
Lithuania.  "I will pay you, just show me what you can do with yourself, 
what you can learn, and how you can apply it."  The results have been 
astounding, 2 months x $125 of support from me was enough for a villager 
in Lithuania, Saulius Sakalas, to invest $375 for Internet access, get a 
computer from his cousin, learn how to use Windows and write HTML, 
practice installing Linux, create a webpage for advertising his cottage 
to eco-tourists http://marcinkonys.infoseka.lt/ , get to know the rest 
of our team at three get-togethers.  Moreover, his beautiful letters on 
the environment, village life, rural politics, etc. stimulated very 
moving dialogue at our Lithuanian group 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Minciu_sodas_LT/ Our Lithuanians found a 
concrete cause, how to help this young villager and his wife, what to do 
so they can he make a living? Rytis Umbrasas, a network administrator 
from a neighboring small city, took him under his wing, helped him so 
much for free, and at the same time became a very active and devoted 
member of our laboratory.  In our lab, Rytis is studying Python 
independently, is working on a file uploader for Natalie, and would be a 
fantastic manager when work becomes available.  This is money that I got 
originally because of Peter, and although that funding has paused, the 
assets are still there and growing, and it is quite likely that in a 
month or two Rytis may be assisting for free on public projects that 
Pete is working on.  So for such a small amount of money I was able to 
develop enormous resources because they were spent publicly on people 
who've demonstrated themselves to be independently thinking, 
self-managing, self-educating, self-motivating, understanding-of-others, 
able-to-work-publicly.

Likewise we've gotten enormous momentum helping George Christian 
Jeyaraj, a Tamil refugee who has been a Minciu Sodas member for three 
years and has been in and out of detention camps.  Our people in 
Lithuania have rallied around him, that has been a great way for us to 
learn how to work together, a positive side to his misfortunes.  And he 
became fantastically expert at reinstalling Linux, he was doing it every 
day for many weeks, in a Zen sort of way.  Which can be very handy.

I think an economy is important to address the chores of life, more or 
less fairly.  And I think that we can simultaneously participate in the 
obligations of our economy, and rise above it.  And I also think that we 
can show to others, such as Hewlett-Packard, that their economic 
obligations and interests are better met by rising above that level, and 
working with great people like us.  But to do this it is crucial that we 
ourselves rise above the low-level thinking, so that we can all snap out 
of it.

One way to think of this is to realize that our economy (for working 
openly) takes place in parallel to the normal economy, but is 10 times 
bigger.  So the cool thing about our economy is that small amounts of 
money have disproportionate effects.  Peter Kaminski, or Alex Shapiro, 
or Natalie or Raimundas or Andrius are willing to do some work for you 
for $500.  But for that money you'll get the equivalent of $5,000 worth 
of relationship.  I mean, how many people get to work with these guys? 
What is the entry fee?

I need all of our help.  What are the passions that we truly wish to 
work on, that truly benefit others?  What do we truly have to offer? 
Enterprises will get a lot more if they relate their needs to our 
passions, then if they try to get us passionate about their needs. 
That's the point of our economy.

Once we know our passions (and we have already accumulated fantastic, 
tangible evidence!) then we can be creative about who might benefit from 
having us adapt our passions, our projects to their needs.  And you can 
bet that people will be happy to find us, that we exist!

Please write, what would you like to work on.  I'll be able to dream up 
some hypothetical scenarios.  Then we'll have truly great examples that 
we can wish to come true, and that might actually come true. 

> Andrius,
> 
> I agree with Natalie; I don't really get it.  In addition to Natalies
> 'working publicly' or 'working intimately' question, I have some others:
>      Could you clarify how you are defining assets and profits?  You seem to
> be using the latter in a traditional way, but I'm really not sure of the
> meaning when you use the former; it doesn't seem to mean what assets mean in
> an ordinary business sense.  Specific examples would help.  For example,
> what specific assets are you referring to when you write, "a business grows
> in assets when those roads become more attractive, regardless of who owns
> them"?
>      What are the specific benefits to a company for working openly?  I
> don't really get this.  For example, what does a information (programs,
> movies, music, books, etc.) company gain by working openly?  Their primary
> asset is the information itself; if the have given it all away for free, it
> seems that they are decreasing rather than increasing the value of their
> asset.
> 
> Thanks in advance for the clarification.
> --Jenson

> Andrius,
> 
> I don't think I'm thick but I still don't understand what you mean by
> .
> 
> I've read all your posts on this but while they abound in generalities, I
> couldn't find a single concrete example, something that says: for
> instance..........
> 
> Could you give just a couple of concrete 'for instances'?
> 
> Such as: 
> Corporation X decides to 'work publicly' (as opposed to working privately).
> What exactly do they do now that they didn't do before?
> 
> Company Y decides to 'work intimately' (as opposed to NOT intimately?). What
> exactly do they do now that they didn't do before?
> 
> 
> Please, absolutely no generalities!
> Only very specific examples, as if you're talking to a 7-year old child.
> 
> Thanks.
> Natalie