What is an open organisation?

What is an open organisation? The ‘open’ in The Open Co-op is all about ‘openness’ and can refer to a lot of different things, most of which have have significant overlap and / or very similar values and principles. Here we define the various different versions of ‘open’…

What is an open Organisation?

As defined by United Diversity:

“open organisation; an organisation open to anyone who agrees to abide by its purpose and principles, with complete transparency and clearly defined desicion making structures, ownership patterns, and exchange mechanisms; designed, defined, and refined, by all members as part of a continual transformative process.”

Or as as detailed by The Open Organizations Project:

Open Enterprise

As described in the Open Enterprise Manifesto and Open Enterprise Governance Model from the Bettermeans project (see also lots of great videos about them here).

Open Value Network

Open Value Networks are very similar to Bettermeans’ Open Enterprise ideas and variously described as “people creating value together, by contributing work, money and goods, and sharing the income”  a “framework for many-to-many innovation” and a “model for commons-based peer production”.  The idea is probably most clearly outlined by  Sensorica‘s  Tiberus Brastaviceanu in his TEDxMontreal talk:

Open Company

As outlined by Indy Johar and/ or those companies who are “maximizing trust through genuine corporate transparency and openness” by pledging “to maximize operational transparency and openness as a defining element in how we create value” as part of the  The Open Company Initiative

Open Source

e.g. a commitment to use and/ or support Free Software as defined by the Free Software Foundation, Open Source software as defined by the Open Source Initiative, and/ or to release/ share knowledge using a Creative Commons licences or similar.

Open Data

Open data is “data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone – subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and sharealike.”

The Open Knowledge Foundation have a great intro to Open Data.