James Baker

• A [[person]].
• [[twitter]] twitter.com/jambarree
• [[go]] bakejam.com
• Used to work at [[tableau]], left [[Jun 2020]]: https://twitter.com/jambarree/status/1277446443884638208 pull.
• [[interest]]s
  • [[intentional society]]
  • [[complex system]]s
  • [[cultural shift]]s
  • [[kegan]]
  • [[activism]]
• Topics I’d like to bring up:
  • Agora
  • Agora at the workplace
  • Distributed activism
  • Privilege
  • Companies as a mirror of society

Collaboration opportunities

• Group building + stoas
• Shared index of potentially related projects and interested people
  • [[michael ocean]] [[ask]]
  • [[richdecibels]]
    • [[loomio]]
    • [[enspiral]]
  • [[democracy-earth]]
  • [[social coop]] (I’m a member)
  • [[reasonable movement]]s

[[2020-11-27]]

• Flancia is evocative of an Italian place :)
• [[software developer]] in his first career.
  • Hello from the future!
  • Financial independence.
• [[awakening]] came through [[career]] in a while. Joined a startup ([[tableau]]).
  • 5-6y of hard coding.
  • Some management.
  • Company kept growing: from 50 people to several thousands.
  • The most fascinating topic in time became scaling itself. Organizational complexities.
    • Organizations as systems.
    • How do systems grow, scale or break?
    • This pulled him out of conventional thinking and into more abstract/outside perspectives.
    • Complex systems.
  • Ended up doing [[branch management]], [[release cycle]]s.
  • With time took on more problems having to do with human scaling more than software systems.
    • [[psychological safety]]
    • [[leadership]]
    • [[cultural shift]] towards quality
      • a break from startup culture
  • [[interference]] with executives and company
    • ran into trouble with the cultural shift
    • ran into the limit of personal skills too
• pushed through [[existential crisis]]
  • [[secular buddhism]]
  • [[post-conventional self-identity]], [[kegan stage]]s, [[deconstruction]]
  • tried [[employee]] [[activism]], intending to have it be self-organizing, not leading it.
    • extended his time at the company
    • cared for the people
    • inspired by [[google walkout]]
    • main objective: raising [[awareness]], helps others become aware
  • movement wounded by [[pandemic]]
• On our respective approaches:
  • Difference in orientation: [[place]] vs [[people]].
  • Key levers/key to unlock futures:
    • [[james baker]] people, dynamics of small teams and small groups, low level social systems.
      • Examples: church groups, social organizations, clubs. Organizations where people find belonging.
      • This is the [[kernel]] of what James is trying to engineer.
      • Practice oriented.
    • [[flancian]] place oriented. People in a different system with different rules, but starting from a place or system or tooling or structure.

Q&A

• What’s your opinion w.r.t. [[union]]s?
  • Complicated. Logical counterbalancing force: collective power vs corporate power. But it seems, as far as structures go, to be trapped in a local minimum.
  • Global optimum lies elsewhere; rather than counterbalancing, how could we dissolve the need for poles?
    • Perhaps we should have user, data unions. More cooperatives.
• What is your current focus?
  • Opening up to allies and contributors within the next month or so.
  • Interest group, might meet every N weeks.
  • Co-creation, shared ownership. Looking for diverse perspectives.
  • Meta and object level: let’s design it and live it.
  • Goal: an independent organization working on building pieces/rings of structure within 1y.
  • "Who wants to join"
    • There’s an evolving community interested in the meta
    • Sort of like [[game b]], but feels a bit different
      • [[game b]] has the concept of parasitism (of [[game a]])
    • [[flancian]] also [[rationalism]], [[effective altruism]]
• Note taking?
  • A bit, not too much
  • About the current [[Agora]]
• Funding/revenue models
  • Companies on the side
    • What’s the "edge"?
      • Could be agility/nimbleness
• [[social network]]s as venues for intentional society
  • [[james baker]] started in this direction some years ago, then moved interests to below-[[dunbar limit]] to bootstrap.