Chris Grams

Authored Comments

cgrams
Why the open source way trumps the crowdsourcing way

Hi Amgine-- You are right, Wikipedia is a great example of crowdsourcing where there are many contributors and many beneficiaries. It can also be a great example of doing things the open source way, as I've written about before.

At some point, language quits being our friend, there is so much nuance to the way every project is designed that the terms open source and crowdsourcing probably oversimplify things in most cases. My hope is that the matrix starts to allow us to map things rather than put them in buckets, and in that sense, my article title is probably not helping things:)

I like your thoughts about how to think about efficiency in multiple ways.... As I was thinking through the 2x2 matrix concept, one of the things that occurred to me is that the best type of efficient work project might not be the "many contributors, many beneficiaries" one. It might actually be the "few contributors, many beneficiaries" one... another measure to consider might be impact... for instance if there are few users, but the project has incredible impact for each of them, how do we account for that?

thanks!

cgrams
How much transparency is too much?

I've often heard Whole Foods given as an example of salary transparency-- they make all individual salary information accessible to all other employees. According to this Fast Company from a few years back on the subject http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/charles-fishman/how-much-money-do-you-make ) they are one of the few companies to do this (there may be more now).

Interestingly enough, this kind of transparency is very core to the philosophy of John Mackey, Whole Foods CEO. Here's a blog post he wrote a few weeks ago about how to create a high-trust organization, and one of the key themes is transparency.

http://www2.wholefoodsmarket.com/blogs/jmackey/2010/03/09/creating-the-high-trust-organization/

But I've also heard from people who have worked at Whole Foods that it is not an entirely positive experiment for a number of reasons.

I was pretty impressed with John Mackey's blog post a few years back when the Bord of Directors transparently increased executive comp from 14x to 19x the average pay:

http://www2.wholefoodsmarket.com/blogs/jmackey/2006/11/02/compensation-at-whole-foods-market/#more-16

nice example of transparent communication.