garden/james-baker.md

James Baker

• A [person].
• [twitter] twitter.com/jambarree
• [go] bakejam.com
• Used to work at tableau, left Jun 2020: https://twitter.com/jambarree/status/1277446443884638208.
• interests
  • intentional society
  • complex systems
  • cultural shifts
  • kegan
  • activism
• Topics I'd like to bring up:
  • Agora
  • Agora at the workplace
  • Distributed activism
  • Privilege
  • Companies as a mirror of society

Collaboration opportunities

• Group building + stoas
• Shared index of potentially related projects and interested people
  • michael ocean [ask]
  • [richdecibels]
    • [loomio]
    • enspiral
  • [democracy-earth]
  • social coop (I'm a member)
  • reasonable movements

[2020-11-27]

• Flancia is evocative of an Italian place :)
• software developer in his first career.
  • Hello from the future!
  • Financial independence.
• awakening came through career in a while. Joined a startup (tableau).
  • 5-6y of hard coding.
  • Some management.
  • Company kept growing: from 50 people to several thousands.
  • The most fascinating topic in time became scaling itself. Organizational complexities.
    • Organizations as systems.
    • How do systems grow, scale or break?
    • This pulled him out of conventional thinking and into more abstract/outside perspectives.
    • Complex systems.
  • Ended up doing branch management, release cycles.
  • With time took on more problems having to do with human scaling more than software systems.
    • psychological safety
    • leadership
    • cultural shift towards quality
      • a break from startup culture
  • interference with executives and company
    • ran into trouble with the cultural shift
    • ran into the limit of personal skills too
• pushed through existential crisis
  • secular buddhism
  • post-conventional self-identity, kegan stages, deconstruction
  • tried employee activism, intending to have it be self-organizing, not leading it.
    • extended his time at the company
    • cared for the people
    • inspired by google walkout
    • main objective: raising awareness, helps others become aware
  • movement wounded by pandemic
• On our respective approaches:
  • Difference in orientation: [place] vs people.
  • Key levers/key to unlock futures:
    • james baker people, dynamics of small teams and small groups, low level social systems.
      • Examples: church groups, social organizations, clubs. Organizations where people find belonging.
      • This is the kernel of what James is trying to engineer.
      • Practice oriented.
    • [flancian] place oriented. People in a different system with different rules, but starting from a place or system or tooling or structure.

Q&A

• What's your opinion w.r.t. unions?
  • Complicated. Logical counterbalancing force: collective power vs corporate power. But it seems, as far as structures go, to be trapped in a local minimum.
  • Global optimum lies elsewhere; rather than counterbalancing, how could we dissolve the need for poles?
    • Perhaps we should have user, data unions. More cooperatives.
• What is your current focus?
  • Opening up to allies and contributors within the next month or so.
  • Interest group, might meet every N weeks.
  • Co-creation, shared ownership. Looking for diverse perspectives.
  • Meta and object level: let's design it and live it.
  • Goal: an independent organization working on building pieces/rings of structure within 1y.
  • "Who wants to join"
    • There's an evolving community interested in the meta
    • Sort of like game b, but feels a bit different
      • game b has the concept of parasitism (of game a)
    • [flancian] also rationalism, effective altruism
• Note taking?
  • A bit, not too much
  • About the current [Agora]
• Funding/revenue models
  • Companies on the side
    • What's the "edge"?
      • Could be agility/nimbleness
• social networks as venues for intentional society
  • james baker started in this direction some years ago, then moved interests to below-dunbar limit to bootstrap.