The Community Is The Organization

Communities exist because the individuals that participate get more out then they put in, scaling from very little value to significant value. In addition the value into and out of communities can be quite varied, some individuals contribute time, some money, some awareness and the value they get back out is often a mix of emotional satisfaction, money, recognition, wisdom, assistance, and relationships.

Hierarchies, because of their structure, always disproportionately reward those at the top levels of the hierarchy and disproportionately take from those at the bottom levels. It turns out that this does not result in producing good incentives for either those at the top (who will get rewarded because of their position alone) or those at the bottom (who will loose regardless of their effort).

My hypothesis is that those organization that can operate as communities will not only be more productive, achieving higher revenue with lower costs, but that they will also produce more of what Umair Haque calls thick value - that which accounts for externalities like pollution, employee burnout, etc.

More by Rachel Happe here.