adhocracy, n. An organization with little or no structure; the opposite of a bureaucracy.

Background

From the conversations recorded and archived at: http://www.personaltelco.net/static/meetings/200304/index.html

[The idea is] doing some sort of package where people who want to build nodes but don't know the first thing about wireless can drop their name off and say, hey look I'm curious about setting up a node, I don't know the first thing about it, but there are all of these guys here who do know a whole bunch about it. You drop your name in the hat and a message goes out to all of these guys who know things about wireless. Each of them can then choose to send a message back to the interested party - saying, hey, I'm interested, I want to help you out; we can take it from here. As the number of nodes grows, managing them all grows increasingly complex. So, we get to push out the management of the nodes out to these smaller groups, and it becomes very heirarchial.

The process of selecting groups of people to work together can be aided by a trust metric system; people can go in and say, I trust this person (or not), and they'll receive a rating that says as much.

We can build on this system further by allowing the system itself to handle a significant portion of the necessary management overhead; it should be able to keep track of all types of information, plot the layout of the network, generate configuration files and entire system images.

Implementation

Although all of this historical information has not yet been transferred over, the Trac Wiki is the authoritative place to look for information on Adhocracy:

http://svn.personaltelco.net/trac/wiki/Adhocracy

This project has been started many times. Initially, in 2003, there were Python and Java implementations by DarrinEden and AdamShand (respectively, I think). In 2004 and early 2005, KeeganQuinn did the majority of the backend work for an XML-RPC-oriented Python version, then in mid-2005 discarded the code to begin work on a Ruby on Rails version.

The current Ruby on Rails stuff is still under development at the moment; the majority of the system is stable now and is expected to be deployed soon. The latest code can be found in Subversion at: http://svn.personaltelco.net/svn/ptp/code/trunk/adhocracy This codebase has been under development more-or-less actively since May of 2004; even the change to Rails was done in a somewhat evolutionary manner.

Useful links:

• [http://svn.personaltelco.net/trac Trac instance]

• [http://cia.navi.cx/stats/project/personaltelco CIA]

The original working Python XML-RPC interface is still housed in same Subversion repository at: http://svn.personaltelco.net/svn/ptp/code/tags/adhocracy-py-final

Adhocracy is a poor name for this piece of software. Any suggestions for a new name would be appreciated.

Authors

KeeganQuinn created this page. Most of the concepts and ideas presented here can be attributed to DarrinEden and AdamShand.

Bits and pieces of various things are based on an early database implementation by AaronBaer and a roster project UI by DonPark.

[CategorySoftware]