Fellow B12er Daniela Retelny's final chapter of her thesis is on Flash Organizations. We read her and her collaborators' CHI paper on the topic.
- How much structure comes from the initial scaffold laid down by the person forming the organization, and how much comes from forks/teams? a lot changed---566 branches, lots of help from hired team leads
- How much fluidity in membership does this model see vs. traditional organizations and vs. Flash Teams? way more churn than traditional organizations---not necessarily a benefit for a company, but good for a project. Would be cool to see hybrid organization or restructured organization from internal company team members.
- How does promotion work? Is there a notion of demotion? What does it look like when the task you are working on gets "refactored?" no instances of tasks getting deleted---only added. the only organizational refactor was a promotion from eng to manager, so less confict there.
- What does a branch/merge conflict look like in a running organization? didn't see as much organizational conflict---usually around the details/order of executing tasks.
- How does leadership/expertise come into play? A Tech Lead leads a team of engineers, but does Foundry help in determining who the Tech Lead should be?
- How much did each of the Flash Organizations cost in terms of human labor? How would this compare to hiring a small agency to solve the problem? EMS = $46,191, True Story = $6,650, Enterprise=$36,604
- Current crowd workflows can't handle complex and open-ended goals, like creating a game or web application
- Take inspiration from modern organizations because they have to create large groups to pursue complex open ended goals
- The paper describes two challenges to structuring crowds like organizations:
- Asset specificity. To address this challenge, the paper structures
workers in a de-individualized role hierarchy
- Workers coordinate based on clear understanding of what each person's role is and what that role entails.
- Organizational structures need to be continuously reconfigured so that the organization can adapt as work progresses. To address this challenge, the paper introduces a model for handling reconfigurations to the organizational structure.
- Asset specificity. To address this challenge, the paper structures
workers in a de-individualized role hierarchy
- Computational organizational structures
- Role structures
- Specifies what skills are required
- Arranges roles into hierarchy - encodes authority and decision rights
- Roles can be assigned tasks.
- Reconfigurable organizational structures
- Organizations must be able to adapt to changing circumstances, but in a coordinated way to avoid conflicting adaptations.
- This paper borrows from software version control to handle changes to organizational structure: changes are submitted as pull requests similar to that used in git.
- The version-controlled data are the roles, teams and task details, stored as hierarchical objects
- On-demand hiring
- Create panels of workers pre-approved for certain skills.
- When an opening appears, fill the opening with a worker from the appropriate panel.
- Evaluated system with three cases:
- EMS Trauma Report - used the crowd to create a prototype mobile and web application for EMTs to report trauma injuries from an ambulance en route to the hospital.
- True Story - used the crowd to design, manufacture and playtest a storytelling card game and an accompanying mobile app
- Enterprise Workshop Planning Portal - used the crowd to create an enterprise web portal to administer client workshops
- There was a lot of PRs submitted for adaptations to the organizational structure (566 over 6 weeks).
- Hired 75 workers on-demand across the three organizations. Median time of 13.7 minutes to fill a role.
- Organizations used rehiring functionality to rehire members for new tasks - reduces amount of onboarding
- Challenge: skill fit of workers were unreliable - quality hiring was an issue
- Qualitative feedback from workers: 1) liked structure---worked with contractor work habits, 2) disliked time limits, 3) wanted to know when work was coming down the pipeline, when to be available, etc.
- Flash Organizations are role-based (e.g., movie crews) rather than asset-specific (i.e., requiring Jane on a particular team) to facilitate fast hiring based on skills/roles.
- Organizational change (hierarchical structure, roles, new tasks, task changes) can be proposed by anyone like a Pull Request on GitHub, and are reviewed by the leader of the team that the submitter is on. Reviewed changes/branches can be merged into the master organization, which results in new hiring, etc.
- In three applications (an EMS Android app, an actually manufactured/crowdfunded card game, an enterprise workshop web application), a leader used Flash Organizations to accomplish their goal satisfactorily in six weeks!
- How are these real world deployments more complex than building a mobile app (flash teams)?
- Did personality / working style of individuals affect the quality / speed of work? It does play a factor, but isn't explored as much in this paper. Future work is looking at creating more effective teams with time
- How did workers react to the strict hierarchy? One interesting thing that happened is a bunch of (re)organization happened in Slack, and researchers would have to remind workers to go update structure in Foundry. We see this in Orchestra as well.
- What did we learn from our experience with experts in Orchestra that aligns with the learnings from this paper? What doesn't align? volume of work, knowing when it's coming. frustrations around tasks going away too quickly.
- What techniques from Foundry can we adapt and use in Orchestra? our workflows should be more adaptive to customer input (e.g., single-page vs. multi-page website). Foundry has better support for finer-granularity tasks. Ran into issues with task scope being all over the place, but erring toward being more specific.
- Do we have (will we have) tasks that require Flash Organizations? What might they be?
- The fast hiring, despite needing more improvements for hiring quality,