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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.
  • [[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.