joel spolsky is merging the spirit of the cluetrain and opensource with his open blueprint companies proposal:
“I’ve begun to notice a variation on Open Source, where people share code, which I’m going to call Open Blueprint, where people share plans and ideas for creating companies.”
“It’s just like the open source process, but it’s not code I’m creating: it’s a company blueprint. I get patches from all over. I get a few wrong, dumb patches from people who suggest that I should pay everybody what they demand, which I don’t add to my blueprint. I get a lot of bug fixes, like the person who gracefully pointed out that I misspelled both Torvalds and Stroustrup. I get a lot of smart discussion about the hard questions, like equality within levels. I apply the patches that are good and ignore the ones that aren’t with a polite “thanks for sharing”.
Not a lot of companies have their compensation policies on the web. (ArsDigita does). In fact most companies seem to make it a secret; telling other people what your salary is can be a firing offense. That’s outrageous. Fog Creek is an Open Blueprint company: the “code” for running our company is up there for anyone to see, copy, enhance, and tweak.”
interesting that his first ‘app’ is the company’s compensation policy.