4h (edited) • Governance
I wrote a community constitution draft on how you (and we) can take part of the upside.
I wrote out this constitution for governing communities. It will give the community and business more likely to survive and thrive, and to get past internal and external problems more quickly.
The first deliverable with every client is the legalese, and draft a partnership agreement. In the past, I used a more complex version where members were ONLY people who owned the company, and paid based on their contribution, and in this draft, to stick to the spirit of the community approach I open this up to every member of the community, professionals and customers to allow anyone to opt in to the path to taking part of the upside, leading teams, and so on.
This covers how people get paid -- how I get paid. How we work and what to work on. Who gets kicked out and who stays an why. How we handle disputes and problems. And so on.
This moves from a "I tell you what to do" to "Lets get (both) everyone + the experts to agree on the solution, and commit to it.
This is giga, based, and something you've never experienced because you've always been on the other end of a factory -- owned by the owner, isntead of taking part of the upside.
When people say "workers own the means of production" this is literally that. This creates an upside for people to come in. More people that care about the growth, all using the same tools, allows for more sustainable growth, more transparency, and it leads to more accountability. The shame mechanic kicks in when people feel like they are letting their peers down, and it builds this social glue. Good for scaling, and building positive traditions that scale.
As a company grows, decision making needs to be pulled from the owner to the team. This can be done at the literal beginning with a charter or constitution making it an employee-owned or ran startup.
This also enables the customer (paid members who are not on the team) to be able to voice concerns, ideas, and help guide discussion as they're the other stakeholder of the company.
In practice this is just people posting big direction-changing things on skool, and making sure everyone who owns the company uses the same central platform to discuss these things openly. And if a idea or problem gets big enough, we can have a dedicated meet or discussion to make the case.
In the past, this was "we should do 1 skool or 2 skools" -- a huge discussion warrenting multiple conversations. Or a "we should go all into this bottleneck" or "we should make this product or this other one". The GRAFTS tree (assumption tree) does help with conflict, but factionalism KILLS companies without a proper release valve like open discussion and voting. People feel like they can't (or won't have support) to fix their problems and so they leave, damage the company, or just ghost.
Team members (myself included) earn at the same rate as everyone else. And earns a % of the profit share in proportion to value created. And this lets us appoint "seats" of people who can confirm votes.
This also makes ideas and projects stick, we focus down and keep things as is, and this counters the natural entrepreneurial habit of "try 1000 things and iterate" when we only need to commit to the bottlenecks and make one good judgement call to find the right one to fix and move on.
This way, the governance of the community and business will thrive faster, and can last without me, with the ability to hand the torch, but until then there are still veto privileges for (me) + absolute powers to safeguard in crises legal or otherwise. I used Roman governance and language for memery, but as a draft I'm happy with this.
Why?
- Companies are more likely to succeed as a team/worker co-op, not a single founder lead business.
- There are 3 tiers (member, team, me) of how BIG ideas get decided upon
- When membership is paid, the individual gets one vote. Customers can voice ideas.
- This allows everyone joining to put in dues, to cover costs of things, for the intention of growing.
- Any member can suggest projects, ideas / decisions and vote on how funds are used to grow the community, guide research, build products, etc -- as a marketing research tool
- Team members (partners) earn profit share as voting share over time
- Team members (or partners) get to confirm big changes or veto
- Profit is shared to partners in proportion to their contribution
Read it here.
Comment mode is on, discuss here.
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I wrote a community constitution draft on how you (and we) can take part of the upside.
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