Throughout my political career, I've believed in the concept of home rule. Some call it local control. Whichever phrase you use, the concept is the same - the best decisions are those made closest to those who will be impacted by the decisions.
The culture at Valve is pretty much crowdsourced. The handbook is a wiki. One of the first things we say to new hires is, 'You have to change something in the handbook.'
There are other forms of community-based decision-making, not unlike, you know, our elected bodies, except that the intention here is to exclude pay-to-play players from determining how these decisions are made.
I hope that we increasingly shift power to local governments.
Find ways to decentralize. Move decision making authority down and out. Encourage a more entrepreneurial approach.
Managing bottom-up change is its own art.
You need a Democratic Party which is a grassroots party, which makes decisions from the bottom on up, not just from the top on down.
Organizations that empower folks further down the chain or try to get rid of the big hierarchal chains and allow decision making to happen on a more local level end up being more adaptive and resilient because there are more minds involved in the problem.
Reduce the layers of management. They put distance between the top of an organization and the customers.
In this world which is losing faith in so called representative democracy, there are new developments in participatory democracy. These are very interesting developments, reflecting the revitalization of community power with a more and more active presence of minorities in political life, including the presence of women who are of course by no means a minority.
