**DRAFT VERSION*** (some minor updates -- August 3, 2005)
Draft Summary"The word 'radical' derives from the Latin word for root. Therefore, if you want to get to the root of anything you must be radical… and no one in politics dares even to use the word favourably, much less track any problem to its root.”-- G. Irvin.
This book gyrates around bazaar management and bazaar organisation, shortly termed the bazaarmodel.
Bazaar management could be applied within a (bazaar)organization. The three base rules are openness, honesty and freedom and all are bound together in trust. Trust is gained by thy deeds and a higher level of trust is accompanied with more influence, instead of power, and a better reputation among others. This is a different kind of reputation system than normally practiced today where titles signify someone power level but not their true being in practice.
The prime resource of the bazaarmodel is knowledge. A basic infrastructure for transporting knowledge could be a LAN, Internet or the successor to the internet; the Grid. An intelligent Grid which is able to tutor, helping and reasoning intelligently, thereby being able to support humans or businesses, is called an Enterprise Nervous System (ENS).
The begin period of the bazaarmodel emerged under the Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s (FDR) administration. His wife, Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, was a forceful person who made sure that FDR would know what was going on in the mind and hearts of the people. The bureaucrats had the tendency of filtering out data which wasn’t in line with established opinion or thought. To circumvent this filtering FDR asked Eleanor to be his ears and eyes of what was going on in the country, especially amongst the common men. Instead of an utopian report from a bureaucrat he was in touch with reality via Eleanor.
Eleanor was forceful in here approach of bypassing all the data filters between the president and the people. One example is that she oftentimes ignored standard White House protocols and invited numerous people which would normally never have been invited, to the White House, to tell FDR about their situation or the situation of the people they represented. This very much annoyed the bureaucrats who wanted to be the gatekeepers; wishing to be the eyes and ears of FDR. The tactics of FDR and Eleanor made the organization flat.
The opposite of the bazaarmodel is the cathedralmodel with the characteristics of being closed, utopian and controlling, where fear bounds these characteristics and (scarce) matter is the prime resource instead of knowledge. Almost all worldly affairs are managed within the cathedral model, let it be small companies, or governments, intelligence agencies or the United Nations. It is safe to say that the past thousands of years where a cathedral model world, starting with the agricultural revolution. The cathedralmodel is an rigid, mechanical hierarchical model where there is one supreme leader. The 18th century became the apex of the cathedralmodel. The mechanic thinking was epitomized by John Locke who declared that; ‘…everything in nature is idle waste, unproductive, those trees are out there, unenclosed, they are not doing anything valuable for us.” This type of thinking makes everything an material kind of asset, even knowledge.
The bazaarmodel is organic in nature and based upon complexity theory which states that units based upon very simple rules are able to form a complex system within a moment of time. Example are economies, political parties or businesses. A bazaarmodel which is self-organising is within reach with the right set of simple rules for units, i.e. agents.
In practice the Linux project is an example of a bazaarmodel. Red Hat is an example of a bazaarmodel company although it’s management is cathedralmodel tainted because it has to compete for scarce resources like money [1] and labor. This is not a constraint for the Linux project where money isn’t necessary for the development of Linux and labor is in abundance, many contribute freely and others are compensated when they work within a company for the Linux project.
A bazaar management could consists of one or many individuals. A bazaar organisation could harbor many participants and is organised via modules instead of departments. The base infrastructure would be an Enterprise Nervous System (ENS). The bazaar organization is in the hands of the bazaar-management and is the instrument to reach a goal.
Bazaar management is a way stimulate creating ideas and to weave them into a product or service that is attainable for everyone and heralds that freedom of the individual is the core for self development.
Thy deeds define who you are.
Post Edited (08-03-05 21:48)