New Organisational forms

A discussion that Framework core members have engaged in over the years is about new organisational forms.

A recent interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has some interesting thoughts about the future of political and social analysis. His context is journalism – investigative journalism, to be precise. His view is that journalism’s future will not be within traditional media organisations but rather will take place and be published from within movements and networks.

“Movements and networks” accurately describes the forms which are enabling much of the social change that is happening today, whether they are on-line or in person.

Assange also comments that the barriers between what is inside an organisation and outside are being “smoothed out”. That is Framework’s experience too. Examples I’ve encountered include:

• volunteers and supporters who want to be kept informed and active but without being required to join;
• increasing emphasis on service-user consultation
• globally responsible practice which takes account of the organisation’s contribution, consumption and values measured on a global scale not just economics or more traditional impact assessment.

If you have other examples of new organisational forms, or other examples of the “smoothing out” of what is inside and outside an organisation, I’d be very interested to hear about them – feel free to contribute them below.

Here are the two paragraphs I picked out from the interview with Julian Assange:

“WikiLeaks has just five full-time staff and about 40 others who, [Julian] says, “very frequently do things”, backed by 800 occasional helpers and 10,000 supporters and donors – an amorphous, decentralised structure, which might become the model for many media organisations in the future, as what might be called “journalism factories” become both outmoded and unfinanceable.

…

Is WikiLeaks the journalistic model for the future? He gives a characteristically lateral answer. “All over the world the barriers between what is inside an organisation and outside an organisation are being smoothed out. In the military, the use of contractors means that what is the military and what is not the military is smoothed out. Newswise, you see the same trend – what is the newspaper and what is not the newspaper? Comments on websites from the general public and supporters . . . ” His point trails away, so I press him to make a prediction about the shape of the media in a decade or so from now. “For the financial and specialist press, it’ll still look mostly the same – your daily briefing about what you need to know to run your business. But for political and social analysis, that’s going to be movements and networks. You can already see this happening.”

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