in zeitin we are working in a pretty free environment, it's more close to an anarchy rather than a democracy. our priority list is the only point where anarchy ends. when we were in parkyeri, we had weekly coordination meetings that department heads and co-founders attend to put jobs in order for every department in that week.
we are a small team in zeitin now, so we began to do weekly meetings which everyone attends, and we were trying to solve prioritization problems. but our anarchic system didn't allow us to continue these meetings. so as a solution we preferred to leave this job to one volunteer, giray, probably it was the best solution for a small team.
this week,
alper got crazy because of a job i'd done that was not in our priority list. this is a side effect of anarchy, it's not so easy to estimate when and who will react when you do something. afterwards i learned that alper had wanted to do the job i'd done before me, but he had come across with the priority list obstacle when he tried to talk with giray and other guys.
it's more easy to estimate results of your moves in a more hierarchical structure or in a place with some rules, at least you'll know the guys who you're supposed to satisfy. but in an anarchic community you're supposed to satisfy everyone, and this is too ideal, not much possible practically. so there becomes no time without arguments, there is always someone complains about someone or something. we don't manage these complaints in our company, so even if you have nothing to do with a subject, you're finding yourself inside it. in fact, in zeitin there can't be a subject that you're not related with, because if you're working in zeitin, it means you've already accepted that you're ready to take responsibility of any thing related with the company.
i think the freedom we have in zeitin is not offered to any other company employee in the world, including google. people think that
parkyeri and
zeitin is inspired from google. if it's necessary to compare us with a company, i would prefer to be compared with SUN rather than google. what i can understand from outside, SUN is designed more like a school and employee initiative is really important. google seems like pretending to be some other thing rather than it really is. it says "don't do evil" but it forces android users to have a google account to activate their phones. it uses it's distribution power for monopolization. it makes propoganda by saying that "every employee is free to do what ever s/he wants at %20 of her/his work time", but it doesn't share the small detail that every employee need to take approval of their managers at first. the terms like "manager" is a sign of hierarchy inside. it opens two distinct projects with names chrome and chromium and tries to use community power one sidedly. this kind of things make me suspicious about company's sincerity.
in zeitin we prefer debian because it's the only distribution which could keep freedom as a reason to exist. generally other distributions try to use community power, they have other purposes but their way intersect with free software, so they are pretending to be some other thing than they really are like google does.
i know founders of zeitin, i was there when zeitin was started-up, i can assure you that zeitin is a company where freedom and happiness of employees has the highest priority, i hope it can go on like that.
but i can also assure you that freedom does not mean happiness, it's also not true to show the freedom as a cause of success, but i believe it's possible to be free and successful at the same time.
limitless freedom of everyone means anarchy, in anarchies it's normal to have disagreements that can ruin peace, democracy can be a solution to these problems. but it's not possible to adapt democracy to zeitin, because democracy brings rules with itself, laws means restrictions. in this system, by time, you're becoming subject to some rules you've never heard of.
instead of writing rules, keeping them as community morals in minds can be a solution to this problem, in practice you can allow public sanction to keep rules alive. in this case, there can't be any rule that you didn't hear. "knowing the rule" becomes precondition of a rule's existence.
in last example i experienced, i violated our moral of obeying the priority list, and the first obstacle i came across with was alper. nobody supported me so i was also defeated with public sanction. but i kept going on my way despite every thing, i said "let me do this job or just fire me", and i'd exceeded all the obstacles. most probably i'll get one more punishment with my low performance mark at the end of month, to prevent me doing something like this again. (for today performance evaluation job also is giray's responsibility, he gives marks to every one that affects their salary, so it's his choice to give this punishment or not. performance evaluation is the second point where anarchy breaks.)
the job i wanted to do was changing our releasing methodology, at parkyeri times we were using tarballs for our releases and i was despirately defending the idea that we should use deb packages instead, and we should have a private deb repository to keep our releases in and their dependencies that does not exist in official debian repositories. that's why it was a high-priority job for me but apparently giray was not in the same idea with me. if i'd obeyed giray's priorities we would probably not have a deb repository for the next 6 six years (if we think that parkyeri was a six-year old company which doesn't have a deb repository yet)
it was a critical job, because in an anarchic community, doing something in right time and right place will change too much thing for company's feature, it would trigger birth of a new moral and affect community culture. at first sight it seems like forcing others to your methods, but it's not. because if you force people to something unreasonable, they won't accept it and will resist. of course you must have smart and questioning people around to make it work. it's not enough to determine a methodology also you must stand with it to make it a cultural thing. i'm planning to take responsibility of all release jobs for a while, i'll tell my methodologies to people, i'll get feedback, i'll try to make new procedures mature enough. if i'm on the right way, people will accept them and begin to use them. otherwise i'll stay alone and my new procedures will not live long.
zeitin is a new company, people doesn't have some old habits, so my job will be relatively easy. if i let time pass, it wouldn't be enough to offer a reasonable method, i would also have to fight with old routines.
another way was trying to convince people before starting job. but this way is pretty expensive, it requires doing some meetings. for meetings you'll need to want people to stop what they're doing currently and you'll expect them to be focused on the subject as much as you are. and in this method, generally it becomes different people who offers the idea and who does the job actually. i see this a little risky, because ideas can be so unmature when it's offered, procedures should be kept improved during their life cycle not before.
if you'll do a job in an anarchic community, you should belive what you're doing, you should determine your motivations good, because you shouldn't allow what people says to break your motivation, you should make it a principle to finish what you're started.
as well as not letting people break your motivation, you should also not break other people's motivations. you should be careful about what you're saying, you should keep yourself away from purposeless sentences. but if you have a purpose, you should not avoid saying your word, because if you keep your silence, compony can go to a wrong way that you don't want. if you want some morals to be settled up, you should support them. (though i couldn't obey this rule, i was supporting existence of priority list normally, but i thought breaking rules for this time will have more incomes than the damage it'll create). you should also not avoid your word if you think someone doing something wrong, you should let people fix their mistakes, but always keep the possibility in your mind that you can also be wrong. it's not easy to care your words every time, i'm not so good at it as well, i can't control my patience if i feel someone attacks me, and i can break people's motivation when i become reactive.
actually there becomes many times i lost my peace in zeitin, i prefer peace rather than freedom. but when i look behind, in 3 month time we developed
vidi which was definetly would last near 1 year if you try to make it done by a classical firm in same scale with us. and also we are inthe half way of gokada project that we did not officially announced yet, we are currently using thinclient solution of gokada in our company now.
apparently, in anarchy, with some moral rules, it's possible to get progress. as a developer, feel of success, feel of "doing something" is very important. i hope we can succeed to make some sales of our products and keep our company alive.
