Continuance

Editors note (2020-02-05): Our ideas for audio versions, regular articles, and a few other things were too ambiitious and have not come fully to fruition. — Ellen Dash

An audio version of this article is available on SoundCloud.

As is our style, I would like to write a short follow up to the article Genesis by Marie Markwell. It may seem a bit redundant for the staff to expand upon an introduction article, however I believe there are a few things to be said and I wanted to take the first feedback article as an opportunity to say them.

Intentions

First of all, thank you so much for your support and feedback. Projects like this are difficult to gauge initially, so your continued support and interest has only strengthened our resolve and given us an indicator that there is a space, and an audience, for writing about the complex nature of human/company interaction. Obviously this subject is not everyone’s cup of tea, but given how often we rant about these issues, we do have a passion and interest in presenting long-form writing on these topics and others. That said, the staff would like to apologize for the clumsiness of the launch and continued delays.

As stated in Genesis, we plan on releasing Audio versions of the articles alongside the text version. This was the source of the first delay, as the article was ready on Monday, however, it was not complete without that audio version and hence it was delayed until Audacity decided to co-operate. I understand that to some people this may be an insignificant problem to delay the launch of website and the publication of an article, but we believe the audio version to be of equal importance to the text version. I assure you that as we get into the groove of things, things will get smoother and the quality issues with the audio version will be ironed out.

That said, I would like to reiterate our intentions. Genesis was about explaining high-level ideas and giving a general overview of what we intend to be. As alluded to previously, the purpose of this publication is to provide a place for discussion of the (often) problematic business interactions and provide potential solutions to these problems. These interactions may be public interactions such as business-customer relationships, issues of governance, and issues of internal politics and policies that may affect the perception and health of an organization. Hence, we want to lead by example, experimenting in both an alternative governance structure and different mediums to express our ideas.

Governance

I also wanted to expand upon the discussion of our governance model and how Inatri actually functions as an organization. Building on the lessons learned by Gratipay, ATUnit and other projects, Inatri will operate as a worker owned co-op. We expect this method of governance to be fluid and dynamic, changing with the needs of the organization as well as feedback gathered. The short-term goal is to create the simplest, workable co-op set-up possible and then iterate upon that model continuously. We plan on actively soliciting feedback from staff, readers, and contract-based contributors, and this will have an effect on the governance of the organization.

Exploration of Alternative Mediums

The medium of audio was discussed above briefly, however, this is not the only medium we wish to experiment with. Audio versions of the text articles are only one of the ways we wish to utilize audio. We have plans of running a podcast that would sum up the week’s discussion and perhaps provide a jumping off point for further discussion. One of my more ambitious plans is to create a podcast for a round-table format discussion, similar to what you’d see if you watched The Agenda, however, that would require much more time and resources than we have currently. We also have plans to integrate other mediums in order to further our discussions. As some of articles deal specifically with software and website interaction, there are plans to experiment with those mediums in order to provide examples as to how a problem could be solved elegantly and quickly.