Many of us work on multiple projects in different capacities; supporter, evangelist, cohort, contributor, core team member, and founders. We are always searching for the work that is most aligned with our deepest values and dreams. We may find organizational boundaries to be a hinderance to the deep collaboration required for building a better world.

How have open-source projects like Firefox, Linux and Wikipedia organized their work? How can we learn from these and other governance models to create the adaptable, open organizations capable of responding to change as it emerges?

The folks at BetterMeans seem to have been working on these questions for some time. They are developing a platform that supports collective intelligence through crowd-sourced, democratic decision-making. People submit ideas for a given situation, and the group votes and gives feedback, and the winning idea moves forward into action. The value of work tasks can be budgeted democratically, so everyone can feel confident about the energy being invested in different parts of the organization. Contributors are paid the amount of equity credits that have been democratically determined for that task. Credits can either be cashed out or reinvested into the project.

There’s alot more to the idea; these guys have outlined an incredibly detailed governance model for a distributed, democratic enterprise. Not only have they outlined a great model, they are building the enterprise software to make adoption of the model super easy!

I’m really interested in how this model and tool can be used in concert with the Global Online Oasis Game as well as for the development of the MetaCurrency Platform. As well as Hubs, social enterprise education/incubation and everything else I’m working on!

If you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole, check them out at: http://bettermeans.com/front/

Thanks to Poki for linking to these guys on the OpenKollab list.