Experi.org - Experiments in the future of Organizations

From major events like the Enron scandal to low level inefficiency in government, corruption has a massive effect on our day to day lives. Most people aren't inherently evil, so it is the type of organisations that we create that are at fault, either for allowing evil people to gain power on requiring good people to do evil to gain or remain in power.

Different organisation types encourage people to act in different ways. The way people need to act to get influence within an organisation might not be for the benefit of that organisation. For example during voting, a person running for the post needs to convince you that they will do better than the other people that can be voted for. So it encourages them to be convincing and denigrate the other people, rather than necessarily being any better than the other people running for the post.

The way people act given an organisational framework is not always obvious before hand. We need to test them out and experiment with them, so we can get them right on the small scale before we use them in the real world.

There are four goals.

Explore

There are a number a fields that are worth knowing while designing organizations. These include such things as political theory, cybernetics, economics, psychology and game theory. This site will have a introductions to relevant research in the library and will also post interesting new pieces in the blog.

Create

Different organizations require different infrastructure. For example a democracy needs a way of tallying votes for different people, other organisations need more complex ways of interacting with each other. We will create electronic versions of that infrastructure, so that spread out groups can use them.

Experiment

Our organizations are important, they keep the world working. It makes sense to trial new organization types on a small scale to see how they work. These experiments will vary in character, from a strict academic setting to testing it in a university club.

Teach

There is no point in having a well tested organizational method if no one knows of its existance or how it works. So participation in experiments is important! For real world tests we will also make videos of what it is like to be inside that type of organisation.

Another goal is to have an academic community devoted to this subject, to get more bright minds working on it.

With your help! We are just getting off the ground. See our todo list for more information.

One of the first things we are planning on doing is make a game so that different organisational systems can be trialed against each other. It would allow our theories to be tried on the small scale and refined before real world test. Infrastructure for each type of organisation would be built in such a way it could be used outside the game. People would get a feel for each type of system and how human friendly they were.