# James Baker

- A [[person]].
- [[twitter]] twitter.com/jambarree
- [[go]] bakejam.com
- Used to work at [[tableau]], left [[Jun 2020]]: https://twitter.com/jambarree/status/1277446443884638208.
- [[interest]]s
  - [[intentional society]]
  - [[complex system]]s
  - [[cultural shift]]s
  - [[kegan]]
  - [[activism]]
- Topics I'd like to bring up:
  - Agora
  - Agora at the workplace
  - Distributed activism
  - Privilege
  - Companies as a mirror of society
## Collaboration opportunities

- Group building + stoas
- Shared index of potentially related projects and interested people
  - [[michael ocean]] [[ask]]
  - [[richdecibels]]
    - [[loomio]]
    - [[enspiral]]
  - [[democracy-earth]]
  - [[social coop]] (I'm a member)
  - [[reasonable movement]]s
## [[2020-11-27]]

- Flancia is evocative of an Italian place :)
- [[software developer]] in his first career.
  - Hello from the future!
  - Financial independence.
- [[awakening]] came through [[career]] in a while. Joined a startup ([[tableau]]).
  - 5-6y of hard coding.
  - Some management.
  - Company kept growing: from 50 people to several thousands.
  - The most fascinating topic in time became scaling itself. Organizational complexities. 
    - Organizations as systems.
    - How do systems grow, scale or break?
    - This pulled him out of conventional thinking and into more abstract/outside perspectives.
    - Complex systems.
  - Ended up doing [[branch management]], [[release cycle]]s.
  - With time took on more problems having to do with human scaling more than software systems.
    - [[psychological safety]]
    - [[leadership]]
    - [[cultural shift]] towards quality
      - a break from startup culture
  - [[interference]] with executives and company 
    - ran into trouble with the cultural shift
    - ran into the limit of personal skills too
- pushed through [[existential crisis]]
  - [[secular buddhism]]
  - [[post-conventional self-identity]], [[kegan stage]]s, [[deconstruction]]
  - tried [[employee]] [[activism]], intending to have it be self-organizing, not leading it.
    - extended his time at the company
    - cared for the people
    - inspired by [[google walkout]]
    - main objective: raising [[awareness]], helps others become aware
  - movement wounded by [[pandemic]] 
- On our respective approaches:
  - Difference in orientation: [[place]] vs [[people]].
  - Key levers/key to unlock futures:
    - [[james baker]] people, dynamics of small teams and small groups, low level social systems.
      - Examples: church groups, social organizations, clubs. Organizations where people find belonging.
      - This is the [[kernel]] of what James is trying to engineer.
      - Practice oriented.
    - [[flancian]] place oriented. People in a different system with different rules, but starting from a place or system or tooling or structure. 

## Q&A

- What's your opinion w.r.t. [[union]]s?
  - Complicated. Logical counterbalancing force: collective power vs corporate power. But it seems, as far as structures go, to be trapped in a local minimum.
  - Global optimum lies elsewhere; rather than counterbalancing, how could we dissolve the need for poles?
    - Perhaps we should have user, data unions. More cooperatives.
- What is your current focus?
  - Opening up to allies and contributors within the next month or so.
  - Interest group, might meet every N weeks.
  - Co-creation, shared ownership. Looking for diverse perspectives.
  - Meta and object level: let's design it and live it.
  - Goal: an independent organization working on building pieces/rings of structure within 1y.
  - "Who wants to join"
    - There's an evolving community interested in the meta
    - Sort of like [[game b]], but feels a bit different
      - [[game b]] has the concept of parasitism (of [[game a]])
    - [[flancian]] also [[rationalism]], [[effective altruism]]
- Note taking?
  - A bit, not too much
  - About the current [[Agora]]
- Funding/revenue models
  - Companies on the side
    - What's the "edge"?
      - Could be agility/nimbleness
- [[social network]]s as venues for intentional society
  - [[james baker]] started in this direction some years ago, then moved interests to below-[[dunbar limit]] to bootstrap.