[notphilatall]

Who determines product direction? Aside from the challenge of estimating developer contributions ("I wrote the core services" vs. "I wrote the money making feature of the day" vs. "I wrote the analysis / AB test tools that let us optimize"...), how would you split revenue among non-coding contributors (including artists, for example)

[bobds]

>Who determines product direction?

Everyone submits ideas, some voting and discussion takes place, then people work on what they want to work on.

Splitting equity and revenue is a much more complicated issue. In my experience it's easy to figure this out for small teams, provided the members are reasonable and can appreciate each other's work.

There was a software startup that was trying to do exactly this but I can't remember what it's called. Quirky is also doing this, albeit for tangible products, and they have an interesting approach.

[buzzzlight]

That's cool. Ya I was thinking that it would have to work similar to real employee-owned companies. There would be votes to determine tiers of pay, or equal pay for everyone (which I personally don't think is fair, after pulling about twice the weight fixing computers at my last job). The more perceived "fairness" for all parties involved, the better the talent that will be attracted. This kind of flies in the face of for-profit decision making, where the owners and shareholders are given more priority than the workers.

[arghnoname]

On issues of product direction and a whole host of other decisions which aren't practically decidable by "let's vote everyday," it seems reasonable that the collective would elect from within a chairman who would hold office for some previously agreed upon period of time before the next election, say two years. Etc.

The logistics problems aren't the big difficulty to me. To me the activation energy, so to speak, is where it gets tough. Who starts the thing? How does it get rolling and profitable such that you could get people to do such a thing.

[jules]

A stackoverflow like "proposals and voting" might work. Perhaps you'd want to make the proposing anonymous to get a vote based on the content of the proposal rather than on the person who proposed it.