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Recommend Decentralization : Collaboration, Resilience, and NO PROFIT? (Email)

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I spent about an hour at last week's Open Source conference here in Portland with Rod Beckstrom, co-author of The Starfish and the Spider. I won't give a book review here (see the Amazon.com link for some excellent user book reviews), but will focus on a few observations. In a nutshell, the starfish is a biological example of a completely decentralized organism -- cut it in half and you'll eventually get two starfish because it has no central nervous system. On the other hand, the spider, although it may look superficially like a starfish, is extremely centralized -- cut off its head and it is dead! The book gives several examples of decentralized organizations which exhibit resilience similar to that of the starfish: the Apache Nation, Alcoholics Anonymous, and even al Qaeda. There are many reasons why such organizations prevail and thrive while their centralized counterparts fail. I'll focus on two: circles, and ideology:


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