"There is no organizational structure keeping you from being in close proximity to the people who you’d help or be helped by most."

"Since Valve is flat, people don’t join projects because they’re told to. Instead, you’ll decide what to work on after asking yourself the right questions."

"What’s interesting? What’s rewarding? What leverages my individual strengths the most?"

"…our lack of a traditional structure comes with an important responsibility. It’s up to all of us to spend effort focusing on what we think the long-term goals of the company should be."

"Nobody expects you to devote time to every opportunity that comes your way. Instead, we want you to learn how to choose the most important work to do."

"We should hire people more capable than ourselves, not less."

"We value “T-shaped” people…who are both generalists (…the top of the T) and also experts (…the vertical leg of the T). This recipe is important for success at Valve."

"“Wellman is finding that Twitter isn’t flat,” Vidantam says—as if Tom Friedman’s chimerical “flatness” (the analytic value of which has proven to be nil) is the only possible quality of transformative political agency.

In last year’s revolutions, it wasn’t flatness that gave social media its power. It was its hyperlocality, its novel blending of intimate communities and witness at a distance.

Other work in which Wellman is involved argues for the richness of real-world community life that gets instantiated in Twitter. In a paper called “Imagining Twitter as an Imagined Community,” Wellman & his coauthors find that Twitter networks are “the basis for a real community, even though Twitter was not designed to support the development of online communities. There they conclude that “studying Twitter is useful for understanding how people use new communication technologies to form new social connections and maintain existing ones.”

Here’s the thing: Twitter is part of the “real world.”"

“Tokyo, a city of parts where the individual defines the large scale shows the elimination of the hierarchical city, quietly dismissing accumulated forms of power in favour of a situation in which everyone is free to realize their possibilities. Tokyo makes it possible for slim segments of the population to generate their own environments in scattered oases of a vast metroscape. What emerges here is the idea of the city of unimposed order, consisting of communal self-determination on one hand and individual freedom on the other. Here authority is practical, rather than absolute or permanent, and based in communication, negotiation.

Small places of anarchy are zones of human-scale action, attachment and care. They can:

1) Replace state control with regards to an aspect of city life.

2) Take away that aspect from the requirement of majority rule.

3) Promote unimposed order as the style working…"

"research group dedicated to exploring new approaches to arts admin & funding…act as curators, researchers & co-producers of artists projects…interested in what kinds of organizational strategies could provide more direct support to critical & socially-engaged art & culture…core organizational principle…treat art admin as creative practice…hope to generate & share new vocab of practical solutions to everyday problems of producing under-the-radar culture…[no] physical location…"<br />
<br />
"…worth noting how various models such as labor unions, community centers, block-clubs, religious institutions seem to resolve some of key problems facing our concept of slow build. Consider how these…provide space & resources, exert political influence, & allow for participation of wider demographics. Our task for future is to produce these effects w/out instituting rigid hierarchy or overtly moralizing & dogmatic system in order to affect a more equitable, participatory, & democratic future."

"when I play in Sunday-morning soccer games, I can literally spot the people who’d probably be good managers and good people to hire ... if you give people really big jobs to the point that they’re scared, they have way more fun and they improve their game much faster. ... I like to bet on people, especially those who have taken risks and failed in some way, because they have more real-world experience. And they’re humble. I also like to hire people into one position below where they ought to be, because only a certain kind of person will do that — somebody who is pretty humble and somebody who’s very confident. This is another thing I really, really value: being a true meritocracy. The only way people will have the trust to give their all to their job is if they feel like their contribution is recognized and valued. And if they see somebody else higher above them just because of a good résumé, or they see somebody else promoted who they don’t think deserves it, you’re done."

"new governing principle (often called network dynamics) is growing in impact. It is based on increasingly horizontal communications and interaction between people, whether friends, colleagues, citizens, customers, constituents, employees or management"

"Prisoners call their prison guards Boss bank employees call their leaders Boss; wirearchy = increasingly horizontal communications and interaction between people...friends, colleagues, citizens...employees or management"