Decision-making is at the core of our culture. We want to groom our members to be capable of making decisions with collective consensus, based on merits, and remain open-minded to respond and adapt to contextual changes to grow a healthy culture and sustain the long-term prosperity of our organization.
To this end, we have established a set of principles that guide our decision-making process, primarily based on the learned lessons from the open-source community.
Meritocratic Decision System
All members should be able to opt-in to participate in the decision-making process in a round-table manner and have the decision derived based on merits and collective consensus.
- Established status, positions, on-paper seniority, and other non-merit-relevant criteria should be excluded from the decision-making process.
- Everyone has the equal opportunity to participate, propose, and defend the merits of their ideas and suggestions.
- Participation should be voluntary but encouraged based on sufficient transparency of references to the current problems, proposals, and discussions.
- Participation should be inclusive. Naturally, members who are interested but unable to participate during a given time can still participate asynchronously without being excluded or marginalized. Consequently, the decision-making process should also become more scalable and adaptive to the elastic nature of participation sizes and inter-person dynamics.
- Members should feel safe expressing their ideas and suggestions and developing and presenting supporting merits without being excluded or marginalized.
- For sensitive but non-private topics, we can leverage anonymous discussion threads, polls, and surveys.
Objective-oriented
The decisions, especially about processes and practices, should be objective-oriented and eliminate personal interpretations or opinions without proving the merits to accomplish the objectives.
By being objective-oriented, we can avoid the tendency to entrap ourselves in the technical details of the process and instead focus on the core problem and the solution, allowing merits-based decision-making to derive natural and logical conclusions.
Responsive and Open Mindset
All decisions should reserve sufficient room for future merit-based changes, which would allow us, as an organization, to be more responsive and adaptable to the changing needs of our members and other internal and external factors. We tap into the collective knowledge and experiences of our team to make better short-term pivots to mitigate risks while pursuing the long-term organizational strategy.
