The Charter lays out the vision the founders of the wiki shared when the wiki was created. The charter serves two functions:
- Help people decide if they resonate with the wiki’s purpose and want to participate
- Help settle disagreements when two people have different perspectives for an article or the wiki as a whole
The Charter’s 8 guidelines
The wiki focuses on the next stage of organizations…
… but is not linked to any one school of thought
The wiki seeks to be useful for people trying to establish next generation organizations
We do the hard work of synthesizing case examples
No article inflation
No advertisement
The wiki’s governance seeks inspiration from the very structures and practices it describes
The wiki’s content falls under creative commons
The Wiki focuses on the next stage of organizations…
The wiki is founded on the idea that there are distinct evolutionary steps in the way people conceive of and run organizations.
This wiki is not a general management wiki, but focuses specifically on the organizational structures and practices congruent with a new form of consciousness, currently emerging in the world, often called Yellow, Teal, Integral, Holistic, Authentic, or Networked… depending on who you ask!
For this reason, the Wiki does not seek a “Neutral Point of View” as Wikipedia does. Such a Neutral Point of View would bring us to describe the most commonly held view of management (i.e. the status quo, the mechanistic, industrial perspective on management taught in most business schools today).
… but is not linked to any one school of thought
The wiki does not advocate for a particular school of thought and tries to stay clear from (or ideally tries to transcend) the tussles between such schools of thought.
What matters most from the wiki’s perspective is identifying the overlap between various schools of thought. For instance, within an evolutionary framework, the Wiki is agnostic to the way successive stages of consciousness are named. However, it is still useful for those attending to specific schools to be able to use the wiki to support their work. To support this, the wiki features built-in support for on-the-fly renaming and branding as the wiki is loaded in a browser. Those hosting the wiki on their page can make it their own, quickly and easily!
The wiki seeks to be useful for people trying to establish next generation organizations.
The ultimate yardstick to help make decisions on editing the wiki is “what will be most useful for people who desire to create a next generation organization?”
We interpret useful as the right combination of the minimum necessary amount of theory with concise descriptions of the most powerful examples of practices, either already implemented in existing organizations, or conceived by wiki contributors and yet to be tested in reality.
Other considerations are: keeping articles short vs. having practical, detailed descriptions; seeking to be comprehensive in terms of topics covered vs. keeping to a reasonable number of entries.
We do the hard work of synthesizing case examples
There is real value in having detailed case examples, and having many of them. But only if there is also a synthesis!
If we only reference, say, 20 different performance evaluation practices from 20 different companies, it won’t be very useful for readers of the wiki. They then still need to do the hard work of comparing the 20 practices and distilling the commonalities and differences. Before bringing the 20 examples, the wiki must propose a synthesis: is one practice more powerful, more advanced than the others? If yes, why? Or are there perhaps three archetypes of practice, with one archetype more powerful in one kind of context (say a small organization), and another more powerful in another kind of context (say a large organization)? Much better that the wiki authors do the hard work of synthesis once, than force every single reader to do it for herself or himself.
In practice, this means that an article comes with two levels of depth. A synthesis in the main part of the article (“oh, this was helpful, I have a good way to think about it now”), and lots of case examples that people can go through for real detailed inspiration (“oh, that specific practice would really work for us, if we combine it perhaps with this other one”)
No article inflation
There is value in the wiki having a curated, limited set of entries that readers can get their head around. Therefore, article inflation is to be avoided, and the threshold of usefulness before creating a new article should be placed very high. For instance, while we could create one separate entry for every single type of large group process (Open Space, World Café, Appreciative Inquiry…), it will be more helpful to users if these processes are included in one single article referencing all, and beyond this, doing the work of synthesis, elevating certain practices as more robust than others in key contexts.
Practices that are well defined in Wikipedia (or other such sources), are best referenced to rather than duplicated (For instance: World Café), as they are more likely to be kept up to date there. We want to avoid redundant entries and focus specifically on innovative, Teal-facing practices.
No advertisement
The wiki is not meant to advertise any one technique (say a specific group facilitation technique) nor any consulting offer.
The wiki’s governance seeks inspiration from the very structures and practices it describes
The yardstick for decisions is the wiki’s purpose and guidelines, as described by this founding charter. The wiki’s governance will eschew power hierarchies for natural hierarchies of skills, contribution and reputation.
The wiki’s governance is not set in stone, but should operate like a living organism, changing and morphing in response to the needs and constraints it encounters as it tries to serve its purpose as much as possible.
The wiki’s content falls under Creative Commons
All the wiki’s content falls under the Creative Commons license “Attribution” (the most accommodating license, allowing to copy, modify and making commercial use)
Contributors who feel their perspective diverges from this Charter, or from how this Charter is implemented, can copy the entire wiki and create an alternate version that better matches their perspective. Rather than spending time in conflict, let’s spend time developing separate wikis that will appeal to different types of people. In the end, to more people!