alt Hacker NewsWith full respect to your right to criticize, I don't understand what differentiates an organization trying to build a social networking app around biodiversity data from an organization feeding the poor, and those organizations' ability to experiment with their governance system. Can you expand that thought or is it rhetorical?
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I mean I think there's a pretty stark difference between a charity feeding the poor and an app startup (even a non-profit one). So stark that it feels almost weird writing this comment, but I'll take your question at face value. Okay, here's a few:
- Decisions at a charity feeding the poor are likely less controversial and binary in nature than decisions for a product focused app organization. If people are making a lot of decisions bottom-up at the charity, as long as more people are getting fed, it's probably fine as long as it's not chaos. In a product-focused organization you need to make binary decisions: will we use this app icon design or that one? Will we have one app for professionals and one for laypeople or a unified app? Will we use SVM or a neural network? Somebody ultimately has to be the decider on these binary decisions. They cannot all be bottom-up decisions if you want to have a cohesive vision for the product.
- If you're feeding the poor you're probably a charity or a government. People who work for a charity or a government are more likely to be motivated by the common good. So they don't need as much extrinsic motivation from leadership. An app startup, even a non-profit one (which I guess can be technically a charity), is going to have workers who are also motivated by money (yes even if it's a non-profit, they have other high paying options), technical decisions, and sure the mission too. I have a couple friends who have hopped around between non-profit software organizations due to these non-mission reasons. Corralling those motivations often requires a different management mindset than working with people who are just happy to be there.
- If you're feeding the poor you're probably a charity or a government and you therefore probably need to answer to your donors or voters. You need full transparency. This was an app startup, albeit a non-profit one. It doesn't really answer to anyone except who it gets grants from and even then is not fully transparent/open (has a proprietary machine learning model).
These are just a few but do you really think any governance structure can just be applied to any organization? They're not all compatible.
One thing that comes to my mind is the question about what you actually want to achieve, expressed by what outcome you want to measure. In the case of „feeding the poor“, that’s relatively easy: people fed, calories distributed, maybe also health indicators and sociographic factors of the people you reach. For any app, that might be much harder: total installations? Total usage? New downloads? Additional funding raised? Feature X vs. feature Y? You can absolutely bring the „feeding the poor“ to the same level of complexity by involving politics and trying to scale to multiple locations and cities. So maybe the difference is in scale, not in technology vs. non-technology.