Building Communities

RADs could also be a way to implement ways of easing into co-ownership by building communities.

Software Community

A young friend is working on a very different approach to programming that will make it easier to build sophisticated programs (i.e., and, no, it is not the typical approach of tying together specialized modules). He already has seeded other projects that have been embraced by developers, so this is bound to make a similar impact. Adrian Perez, a co-author of the RADICAL COMPANIES: Without Bosses or Employees is using chatGPT to help to help him program. But this kind of work is pretty lonely even though other people are doing adjacent work. That is where RADs can make a difference: they can help create a community.

My friend could seed a community with people who understand and believe in what he is doing, and also with people who are working on technology that may turn out to be relevant to his work (i.e., not immediately adjacent, but close enough). He could invite these people to his RAD community and they could help each other with feedback, critique, code, financial support, and whatever else comes up. This software community could end up transforming prototypes into products.

In the software space, there are,

• People who like ideas and like writing about them,
• Others who like transforming ideas into prototypes, and
• Still others who like to transform prototypes into products

Transforming prototypes into products is where it gets messy. At this point you have to form a company to raise capital, then you get a Board of investors-as-owners, and your prototype-into-product intentions fall by the wayside and you end up with a crappy-prototype-for-paying customers business. A lot of people find that… not right. Nobody minds the money that comes along with all that, but they may not be comfortable with the Fiat mindset and behavior that it requires.

RADs bypass the whole business/money/hierarchy stuff. My friend’s community could deliver products if it grows to include people with different interests, in particular people who like doing the prototype-to-product part of it. As revenue from those products starts to come in, it can be distributed to the people who contributed to making it all happen based on how many RADs each has been given by their community.

Research Community

Another good example is the Bichler-Nitzan research team that Adrian Perez, a RADICAL COMPANIES co-author, pointed me to Growing through Sabotage,^∇ a fantastic, mind-blowing work (i.e. long read but worth it). In it, they cite Blair Fix’s work several times. And, as it so happens, Blair Fix has his own Patreon page.^∇

Bichler and Nitzan, for example, could form a community by inviting Fix and any other adjacent researcher into it. This community could then have a Patreon page. The Patreon funds would then be distributed to community members based on the number of RADs each researcher receives for their community peers. I, for one, would prefer to sign up to support that community rather than single researchers. The benefit to me-as-sponsor is that 1) I could post questions to the whole community and 2) have access to all their work. The researchers themselves could help each other by reviewing each other’s papers, providing their perspectives, co-authoring,^∇ etc. This makes a community of collaborating researchers more trustworthy than a more traditional group of competing researchers.

Not only is the community more trustworthy, but individual researchers who embody it would be too. The number of RADs each researcher has been given is an indicator of the level of trust with their peers. The more RADs a researcher has, the more he can be trusted. For example, there are researchers who don’t publish a lot of papers, but contribute in other ways to the community. In the traditional Fiat organizations of competing researchers they don't get much recognition and are relegated to second banana roles. In a community of collaborating researchers they would end up with a lot of RADs.

ENDNOTES

• Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan. Growing Through Sabotage: Energizing Hierarchical Power. <https://capitalaspower.com/2020/09/growing-through-sabotage/> (alt. <https://diigo.com/0prmqb>)

• Blair Fix’ Patreon page. <https://www.patreon.com/blairfix>

• Matt M Perez. rMake. 2021. <https://radicalcompanies.com/2022/05/20/rmake.html>