on organisation and the unanswered question of openness

it is pretty easy at first sight to give a general definition of "what is an organisation" in a few lines, but it becomes puzzling when starting on a meaningful explanation of openness and its specific values for organisations. on top of that the traps are manyfold. one is certainly to exaggerate in useless - read non-operational - never-ending over-formalisms (also called the shopping list problem). so it is better to restrict ourselves to two small topics here, first of all to see what organisational forms were a response to creative and collaborative needs in the past and secondly to try to describe what a different view on creative organisations could yield for a hypothetical 'baku 2022 foundation', nick named "an organisation without a center" as time unconditionally progresses. 

now, an organisation comes into existence when two or more people work to a common goal. so it is a very meaningful activity that shapes a certain structure. and of course through the changes in the activities the structure will get reshaped, maintained or abandoned. maybe a goal or a number of targets are met (but sometimes things are not that clear) and the purpose for an organisation disappears.  so within that very simple definition we already meet a lot of characteristics like communication, evaluation, interaction, hierarchy, and the list will continue as we think about more details and actual organisations we know better. on top of that we tend to believe that the role of the technology and tools involved is a crucial one because it directly corresponds to the generative/activity related and communicative outcomes of an organisation, as a legal entity or a temporary common agreement. 

we are used to meet different types of organisations and basically we have been involved in 3 different setups, either for working, creating, curating, writing, and even shopping if you would ask further. each type exists as both formal-legal and informal common agreement setups in society. in fact we seem to regard this as a variable, and leave this now out of the picture for simplicity of presentation, but we are aware that this is an important factor. 
we sum up the three types here without getting too much going into details about it, and described from the position of the actor: 
	- as a small shrimp executing pre-defined tasks (hierarchical)
	- taking part in the decision process what and how to do things (consensus)
	- automomous and free to perceive, react, create, enter/leave (open)

like we said, this is applying totally to all the situations we were involved in for making or losing money, artistic collaborative setups, family or household conditions, as an independent worker or as an employee. even in several projects there were different profiles for identical activities interacting and sometimes intervening at the same time, and that always makes talking about it difficult due to the complexity of the process. that also tunes completely into two important issues: the history of the level of formalisation of the organisation, and the essential presence of a communicative apparatus, both at the core of operationability. 

here we could add examples from work, organizing, creative organisations we have been involved in before. but maybe it is better to clarify two different approaches... one could be an over-formalized model like most of the administrations in culture expect us to comply with. it is a typical top-down and hierarchical model in which responsibilities to resources are quantified and treated in a well defined plan in advance of any activity. the other example may be the coming together of a group of artists that have to choose a name and then will create artefacts together as they go along, try to puzzle things together for display or exhibit, without a any previously agreed on plan or list of tasks each has to follow, and using available means. this organisation of the proceedings of the baku 2022 foundation wants to function like this: same day we see what we have and we work with that towards creating a consistent setup. 

also in a wider area of culture and society, in reality it only boils down to two situations reflecting creativity and both work out somehow, the examples are drawn from music: 
- playing in a fixed setup like in a garageband with rehearsed songs
- playing in a group of variable improvisors
in both situations you have the freedom to join or leave, there is the will to join the organisation, based on the fulfillment and interest in what is happening. and finally there is the hope for happiness and fun while being in it. that makes you change your own involvement and participation and in the best case you come out better than you went in. 

but this is already a too complex start for us, since we wanted to tackle the problem of openness and we got stuck into the ongoing discussions about definitions. openness of an organisation, whatever its (hybrid) nature can be, we always considered a variable parameter, indicating that a participation within the given context, or even interaction with the system from outside itself is possible. so it is definitely an environmental characteristic that is changing through time. on purpose here we named it a possibility because open systems can in many cases and for certain reasons be closed. think of the wiki environments that suddenly got completely destroyed by spambots, and had to be protected somehow. so when we mentioned the relativity to time, we meant the changes that occur to environmental circumstances and indirectly relate to formalisations in economy, culture, arts, power, habits, innovations, ...

the importance of openness for an organisation has alll and everything to do with the will to work within a collaborative or cooperative context. we are using both terms as synonyms in this text, the latter being coined by karl marx. a cooperative system is an organisation between human and technological artefacts in order to undertake an activity together. most of the themes related to this have been explored a lot since the cyberneticians, cognitivists, connectionists, constructivists from the 60s-70s. teh infamous cyberneticist ludwig von bertalanffy within systems theory, worked a lot on open systems theory, which he developed parallel to the russian-belgian scientist ilya prigogine. for them open systems are systems that are in a  dynamically irreversible steady state. he also called it in german 'eigengeschwindigkeit': the system will achieve a dissipative state that configures a structure since it maintains itself in a state far from equilibrium. you could call open systems simply chaotic systems. 

especifically on cooperation for instance robert axelrod [The Evolution of Cooperation (1984)] elaborated on the so called prisoner's dilemma, and tit-for-tat puzzling games, in order to apply it to political, social and economical science. and so it has found its way to the game industry as well [http://people.bath.ac.uk/mk213/ipd/], even tested on actual prisoners [http://webfiles.uci.edu/mkaminsk/www/book.html] and big brother [http://www.paulspages.co.uk/hmd/]. 

related to this is the notion of evaluation. evaluation has two important significations. it can either mean studying a system in use to make it better, but also studying a system in use to determine whether it fulfills certain criteria, and there it turns into an interventionist activity. obviously we are more likely to adhere the first meaning. but whatever you think of it, evaluation needs to have a dynamical definition in which it fosters in both meanings a learning process. 

from that era we would like to look at two cases in which insights in organisations/systems have lead to a theoretical insight as well as a artistic/creative outcome. first of all the experiments conducted in the early 70s by stafford beer, humberto maturana, francisco varela and fernando flores. secondly the ground breaking work of gordon pask and his artistic outcomes in the 60s. (see the material)

we also plan later in the forthcoming sessions regular updates on the use of databases, management systems, in the arts: do they cover the needs for organisation and collaboration? 

and finally we hope to come to a description about B22F: really, what is an organisation without a centre? Is it possible in long-term sense to maintain this? what are the positive and negative features? what is the end? 

for a quick analyses of organisations, in ethnographical sense we can use the following list: 

1. Type of organisation 
   (scope, goal, size, map)
2. Organisational structure 
   (who is expected to do what and who is doing what + plan)
3. Management Structure 
   (hierarchical/flat, participation, consensus)
4. Funding and Accounting Systems (from personal, gifts to official subsidies)
5. Human Resources (number of people and the functional names given to them)
6. Communication systems 
   (technology for decision making, producing, oral/written)
7. Power and key figures
   (position, controlled resources, gender, ethnicity, personality/charisma)
8. Processes 
   (describe a typical activity within the organisation 
    and add the above findings to the process from begin-end)
9. Inter-organisational politics 
   (what is the position of the organisation within similar/diff organisations)
10. specific issues and remarks