Video from hackday 25 July 2009
Posted by Charles Armstrong | Filed under Hackdays, Video
Last Saturday’s hackday was super-productive. All the remaining constitutional amendments were completed and work was done to make the platform easier to install. In this video, recorded towards the end of the day, Chris Mear demonstrates the constitutional modification process.
One Click Orgs hackday 25 July 2009 from CIRCUS foundation on Vimeo.
Lunchtime seminar on Emergent Democracy, Young Foundation, Wednesday 22th July 2009
Posted by Jonathan Gray | Filed under Events, Presentations
Charles Armstrong will be hosting a lunchtime seminar on emergent democracy at the Young Foundation in London this Wednesday.
The event is free and open to guests, so feel free to come along if you are around in London!
Following is the blurb for the event:
For two millennia democratic systems have been designed to accommodate a set of limiting factors which the internet has rendered obsolete. This opens the door to substantially new models of democracy which are more fluid, more responsive to changing circumstances and more efficient at harnessing a society’s collective intelligence. The seminar draws on ideas explored by Charles in his chapter on emergent democracy which forms part of O’Reilly’s forthcoming book “Open Government”.
Charles is CEO of the social analytic software business Trampoline Systems, recently recognised by Red Herring as one of the world’s top 100 technology firms. He is founder of think tank CIRCUS foundation and Director of the One Click Orgs project, providing automating legal structures and governance tools for non-profits. Charles is a Fellow of the School for Social Entrepreneurs, a board member of Fondacja Techsoup and was the final person to be mentored by Michael Young.
Session at Reboot Britain
Posted by Charles Armstrong | Filed under Uncategorized
I’m doing a session on One Click Orgs at Reboot Britain tomorrow in London. It kicks off at 12:30 in the Mountbatten Room at the Savoy Hotel. Come and say hi if you’re there.
Video from Alpha demo at OpenTech
Posted by Charles Armstrong | Filed under Presentations
James and I had a marvelous time at OpenTech yesterday. The Alpha platform performed flawlessly in its first public demonstration and we had a huge amount of positive feedback. Here’s a video of the second half of our session covering the demo itself. Apologies for the low image quality, the auto-exposure was confused by the bright projection.
One Click Orgs demo at OpenTech 2009 from CIRCUS foundation on Vimeo.
Presenting at OpenTech
Posted by Charles Armstrong | Filed under Presentations
This Saturday I’m giving a presentation about One Click Orgs at OpenTech in London. My session is due to kick off around 12:40. This will be a particularly exciting day for the project as we’re hoping to give the very first public demo of the alpha release. There will be several of us at the event so if you’re there do come and say hallo.
Mentioned in O’Reilly Radar
Posted by Charles Armstrong | Filed under Press
Since we launched the new website last week we’ve had a deluge of encouraging messages and people saying their groups need the service as soon as possible. On Thursday Nat Torkington posted a link to us on the O’Reilly Radar blog with the marvelous comment that:
We’re one step closer to Charlie Stross’s vision from Accelerando of a twisty maze of cross-shareholding organisations whose bylaws are Python scripts.
See the post here. Thanks Nat!
Rewired State becomes second alpha customer
Posted by Charles Armstrong | Filed under Customers
Rewired State, the influential initiative connecting government with technology innovation, has signed up as One Click Orgs’ second alpha customer. Following their hugely successful “hack the government” event on 7th March 2009 Rewired State has been besieged with interest from government and developers alike. Now they’ve decided to form an organisation to build on this momentum and One Click Orgs was the natural choice. Find out more at http://rewiredstate.org/buzz.
Partnership with Open Knowledge Foundation
Posted by Charles Armstrong | Filed under Partners
I’m delighted to announce that One Click Orgs has formed a partnership with the Open Knowledge Foundation, the respected think tank campaigning for sharing and reuse of information. OKF is kindly providing the servers and collaboration infrastructure we need to build a larger open-source developer community, provide this public website and host our initial customer platforms. Many thanks to Rufus and the other board members at OKF for supporting One Click in this vital way.
BarCampLondon becomes first alpha customer
Posted by Charles Armstrong | Filed under Customers, Presentations
Yesterday evening the BarCampLondon Planning Association (the organisation putting on BarCampLondon) became One Click Orgs’ first alpha customer. The association held its founding meeting at the Trampery and adopted a Themis constitution running on the prototype server. This is an important step forward for OCO, the first time an independent group has used the platform to help it manage a complex project. We’ll get a lot of valuable feedback from this that’ll help us refine the platform to meet users’ needs.
Meanwhile our presence at the BIL Conference was a great success. I was the second keynote in the main auditorium talking about the relationship between technology and organisational structure, the principles of emergent democracy and the One Click Organisations project. Then Emma had a main-auditorium session on the Sunday afternoon discussing the democratic open source development approach we’ve pioneered with OCO. Both sessions were well received and we met a lot of people who are interested in the project and/or have groups wanting to use it. The conference as a whole was overflowing ideas and projects. I’ll link to videos of our sessions as soon as they’re published.
One Click Orgs becomes a legal entity
Posted by Charles Armstrong | Filed under Project team
The founding meeting for One Click Organisations was held on Monday 29 December at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, attended by Jef, Emma, Martin, Jan and myself. We went through the draft constitution clause by clause making sure everyone understood how it worked and considering any revisions. The founding vote was passed unanimously at 8:26pm, at which point One Click Organisations came into being as a legal entity (specifically an unincorporated association).
We were careful to observe established practice in convening and running the founding meeting, conscious that beyond this point we’d have few conventions on which to grasp. One of the nice things about unincorporated associations is that they are governed by the law of contract which means the members can collectively agree to adopt whatever rules they wish. So long as there is a clear paper trail leading up to the founding vote the courts will adjudicate that the constitution adopted at that point (with any subsequent modifications) is the legitimate basis on which the members have agreed to come together.
One of the most important characteristics of the Themis Constitutions is the complete absence of machinery for convening and running meetings. Therefore it was distinctly ironic to find ourselves going to such lengths in connection with the founding meeting. As the platform matures we’ll be able to streamline even this part of the process (though this first meeting will still be necessary) by providing a “wizard” which automates the production and circulation of the agenda, guides the convenor step by step through the workflow then circulates minutes at the end of the process.
From the moment of the founding vote One Click Organisations was irreversibly locked to the decision-making tools hosted on the system. Every decision registered there is binding on the organisation. As far as we can tell this is the first time anyone’s done anything like this. Whilst the system remains at such an early stage of development it’s slightly nerve-wracking. Day by day we’re thinking of more edge cases. What’s the legal situation if the server fails? Or if a bug leads to spurious decisions? Gradually we’ll add cover for cases like this in the constitution, but this definitely feels like terra incognita.
We’ve had a lot of offers of help and advice which have been gratefully received. 2009 promises to be an exciting year for One Click!
