Personal Vision With Agaric

I would love for Agaric's goals to include helping move the world toward liberty and justice— the most power possible for all people over our own lives. Taking the values of freedom and openness as moral and practical imperatives, we operate a business proudly for the purposes of our own financial security and bettering everyone's lot in life.

Rather than take the approach of only working for people, organizations, companies, or governments theoretically doing good, we instead do great work for anyone not doing evil and get paid well. We then use our skills, connections, and resources to do the most powerful good we can think of and pull off to short-circuit inequality and be a catalyst for people's visions and power. We do these self-funded and self-directed projects not merely as individuals but also collectively, and as part of our public identity.

I would like to see us constantly develop, improve, and share with everyone our skills and processes of coordination— information sharing, communication, decision-making, and task management. These translate directly to people working together for any cause, not just business purposes.

I'd like to take my personal and foreign policy to business: unilaterally do the right thing. Share information without looking for reciprocity first. Treat contractors and partners nearly the same way we treat ourselves (all the same treatment except having a say in consensus decisionmaking and the distribution of profits to ourselves or to projects we want to support). I'd like everything about income and money to be public, in near real time. Want to hire us, or be a contractor? Know exactly what the profits are what is being done with the money. This also fits nicely with a focus on education and sharing knowledge- a valuable resource it is a crime not to share. Even when we are not directly trying to educate, we are sharing a detailed example.

I would like to see Agaric take the lead in building a network of freelancers and small and large shops that can more assuredly take on all manner of projects. A process like we're going through now, finding alignment, mutualism, and overlap in goals, potential projects, skills, and needs could be systematized to scale to a whole community in a shallow way, and peer mentorships encouraged to do the same in a deep way. Plus we will have shared every aspect of the collective model we build, so people can clone and fork and build their own.

Clear decision-making is very important. I'd like to bring another political and economic philosophy into play here: decisions should be made on the lowest (most direct) level possible, based on who is impacted. Your choice of tools and exactly how you use your time is ultimately your choice alone, though you can take other's needs into account, not up to a committee. How work is divided up is a matter for the team members on a particular project. What projects are brought on and how significant resources are spent are a matter of the collective as a whole. For moderate expenses, i like the idea of a 50% collective match, automatically. We can decide to raise or lower the shared cost based on what everyone thinks the value of the purchase or subscription or subcontracting is to us as a whole, but this helps each Agaric start out trying things without waiting for a collective meeting. Two cooperatives Romy and i have learned from (Community Builders Cooperative and Quilted) discuss projects and task assignments weekly but make any decisions about money and larger issues only quarterly, and broad strategy and direction annually. This seems like a great way to prevent inefficient revisiting of matters not necessary to daily getting things done. I've gone way off track but my personal vision is that we be creative and flexible in our structure and processes but not waste time refining them to death.

As part of decision-making and processes i would want to be a part of, i think every initiative needs one person to take primary responsibility, whether it is an ongoing internal need, an Agaric-directed project, or a client project. The Bluestockings collective calls this individual acceptance of ownership for certain areas bottom-lining.

What i want while working to build and be a part of Agaric:

1. to help build a network for everyone which makes possible equal access to communication, to organizing, and so to gaining equal power— a prerequsite for liberty and justice.
2. to be able to travel to Guatemala, India, and elsewhere around the world and in the US.

That's it on the broadest level. And i don't need #2.

Where i need help:

• planning
• using time available to achieve goals
• clearing the decks of the less consequential and not taking on too much
• structure, process, and most basic life skills

I'm not expecting to receive help in everything, but just so everyone knows.

Skills i bring:

• willingness and ability to work relentlessly
• an unaccountable knack for networking (1,000+ Drupal contacts in address book we need to share)
• willingness and some capability to get code to do most of what it needs to do, eventually
• inability to be offended
• vegan cooking

(Ideally, i would not be the first-line anything in most cases. I should be sweeper— the position in soccer (fútbol) that is to take care of anything that gets by the defenders. Which makes Stefan goalie, because he's the ultimate emergency weapon.)

I'm very happy being distracted by helping others, but i will likely need help both making time for this and making sure it doesn't take up too much time.

Preferred modes of collaboration, that's a tough question, but mainly i think working on the same project with at least one other person, actively, if not on the exact same part of the project then on parts where each person has direct awareness of the others' portions. A good ticketing system, version control, and a ferocious commitment to documenting everything are also key.

Also in collaboration, i'd love to see Agaric shared resources:

• contacts
• bank account in real time
• directory of domain names [to know who has what]
• books
• money: monthly minimum stipend and other loans (absolutely no credit card debt allowed for Agarics).

My minimum financial requirements to live, on a monthly basis, are zero, and likely to remain about at that level until a significant other and i find one another.

I want to work with people who share a commitment to working hard. I want us to try to pass as much of the value for work done to the person doing it, but to realize that in a company, as in society, it's not possible to do this precisely. The remainder of income earned (and not put toward projects for good) is shared equally or equally per effort put in by the people in as core Agarics.

I want us to be able to say: We live and work to connect ideas, resources, and people. Our collective goal (which extends beyond the work we do for clients) is the most power possible for all people over their own lives.