[NetBehaviour] The Open Organization Project

[marc]

*The Open Organization Project*

The idea of Open Organizations was born from the work on the network of 
independent (of corporate and state capital) media, Indymedia. It was 
not created as explicitly politically outward, but as a result of desire 
for more efficient and more radical internal political group work, 
desire for improvement, criticism and supplementation of methodologies, 
which made it possible for Indymedia to become a network with over one 
hundred branches within less then three years. At the same time, our aim 
is to establish an organizational platform which will enable consistent 
political engagement, without simultaneously destroying the potentials 
we are witnessing: dynamic and network operations, a high level of 
autonomy, solidarity through global use of resources, and above all, 
reproduction of cultural capital1 which constantly strengthens group and 
individual network participants.

Of course, every definition of politics contains power, i.e. social 
relations established by it. Since the theory and practice of models of 
organized work, including those related to Open organizations, deal also 
with methods controlling the distribution of power within organizations 
themselves, the question of the relation between internal and outward 
policies of organizations, at least according to our experience, is the 
very question of motives and wishes of those developing such theories. 
How else can we expect a consistent establishment of processes on global 
and regional level (maybe the state level, as a transitional one) , if 
we are not able to establish them on the group, organizational and 
network level? This is precisely the organizational issue presently 
being forced upon us, as a problem, from several directions of 
alter-globalisation2 movement: unions (which would, due to their 
shortsighted pragmatism, make a deal with the devil for their share) and 
the remnants of the left are pushing their closed and mostly strictly 
hierarchical model (whose flaws would fill in the rest of this text), 
while activists groups rooted in direct action offer an anarchist and 
politically disfunctional utopia (problems with invisible hierarchies, 
lack of responsibility lines, inability to act strategically, see the 
Joe Freeman text) which sometimes renders even the remnants of the 
classical leftists in Britain useful, which is a real achievement; 
credit for last years largest protest in the British history (two 
million people against the war in Iraq) is mostly given to the efficient 
organizing of classical parties and their activists included in the 
process on the occasion. Certainly, such organizational differences 
constantly produce conflicts, the last of which is currently growing3 
here in Britain, on the issue of the European Social Forum - ESF which 
is to be held in London in the autumn. While the left still holds to 
their unchanged ideological principles, ignoring social changes, 
anarchy-based collectives practice a suicidal idea – suicidal, since it 
blocks their development – that there is a non-ideological position – 
their position.

more...

http://www.open-organizations.org/view/Main/EssayOoIntroEng

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