Last month I was invited to Washington DC to present One Click Orgs at the Summit on Next-Generation Governance Models organised by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. This one-day summit brought together fifty senior academics, figures from the Obama administration and technologists.

There was a huge amount of interest in the project. It was a particular pleasure to meet Oliver Goodenough (Co-Director of the Berkman Center’s Law Lab) and David Johnson (Senior Resident Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology). They were jointly responsible for the reforms passed in the Vermont state legislature in 2008 opening the way for virtual corporations. Both Oliver and David have graciously agreed to join One Click Orgs’ Advisory Board.

One of the most interesting topics discussed at the Berkman summit was the way that virtual corporations could undermine key planks of the corporate regulation regime. Currently the vast majority of corporations are registered in the jurisdiction in which they’re located. The notable exception is the United States where the state of Delaware has a long-standing reputation for business-friendly company law which has led a lot of ventures to incorporate there.

The emergence of virtual corporations threatens to cut the tie between the location of a business and the jurisdiction where it registers. Just as shipping businesses register their fleets under “flags of convenience” such as the Bahamas where regulations are looser and multi-national firms organise their tax affairs around the laxest regimes, businesses will increasingly be free to incorporate in whichever jurisdiction in the world has the most favourable company law. This raises a host of questions about how governments will be able to fulfill their responsibilities to protect consumers and shareholders from abuses and fraud.

The invention of artificial personality and limited liability by the UK Parliament in the nineteenth century reflected a quid pro quo where joint-stock corporations gained significant privileges and protections in return for which they submitted to state regulation and agreed to place key information in the public domain. That bargain is now in danger of unraveling.

Virtual corporations pose many other questions for society. The internet has given rise to millions of online communities which will soon have an easy route to acquire legal personality. Are we ready for a world where “guilds” in the online game World of Warcraft can become corporations, own assets, have their own governance systems and enter into contracts with the rest of the world?

Important advantages are offered by virtual corporations. They will permit entrepreneurs to set up a venture in a matter of hours in response to a new opportunity and greatly reduce the bureaucratic friction involved in running a company. But we need to be sure that the regulatory regime keeps up with the challenges presented by this new world.

Tomorrow the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University is hosting a summit in Washington, DC on next-generation governance models . Charles Armstrong will be speaking about One Click Orgs and participating a panel discussing virtual corporations and company law.

This Saturday I’m giving a presentation about One Click Orgs at OpenTech in London. My session is due to kick off around 12:40. This will be a particularly exciting day for the project as we’re hoping to give the very first public demo of the alpha release. There will be several of us at the event so do come and say hallo if you’re there.

Since we launched the new website for One Click Orgs last week we’ve had a deluge of encouraging messages and people saying their groups need the service as soon as possible. On Thursday Nat Torkington posted a link to us on the O’Reilly Radar blog with the marvelous comment that:

We’re one step closer to Charlie Stross’s vision from Accelerando of a twisty maze of cross-shareholding organisations whose bylaws are Python scripts.

See the post here. Thanks Nat!

Rewired State, the influential initiative connecting government with technology innovation, has signed up as One Click Orgs’ second alpha customer. Following their hugely successful “hack the government” event on 7th March 2009 Rewired State has been besieged with interest from government and developers alike. Now they’ve decided to form an organisation to build on this momentum and One Click Orgs was the natural choice. Find out more at http://rewiredstate.org/buzz.

I’m delighted to announce that One Click Orgs has formed a partnership with the Open Knowledge Foundation, the respected think tank campaigning for sharing and reuse of information. OKF is kindly providing the servers and collaboration infrastructure we need to build a larger open-source developer community, provide this public website and host our initial customer platforms. Many thanks to Rufus and the other board members at OKF for supporting One Click in this vital way.

We’re looking for a UX whiz to help us with One Click Organisation. Details below. Please forward them to anyone who might have the appropriate skills and be interested in the project. Thanks!

: c :

Wanted: User Experience Designer to help us revolutionise organisations & group decision-making

How does an individual engage with decision-making and governance for organisations they belong to? All too often these are remote processes, defined somewhere in a dusty constitution and overseen by self-important officials. One Click Organisations is changing this, creating a new way for groups to run themselves on the internet; radically increasing transparency and enabling any members to play a full role in decision-making.

A prototype system is up and running. It’s already being used to manage BarCamp London. Now we need an experienced UX Designer to join our small team and ensure non-technical users can meet their needs smoothly and intuitively through the platform. We’re looking for someone who’s excited by the challenge of changing how organisations work and has a deep grounding in user experience. The platform is built in Merb. Familiarity with any web frameworks will be a plus.

This is a volunteer project where everyone’s contributing a couple of hours a week. To keep everyone on the same page we have a project meeting every three weeks and two “hack days” a month. There’s no salary but you will have the opportunity to become a full voting member of the project team and gain international recognition for your work on the project.

If you’re interested:
Please write to Charles Armstrong with links to some recent work: charles [at] CIRCUS-foundation [dot] org

The project will also be featured at a workshop on Tuesday 17th March, starting at 7pm in Shoreditch. The holding page at oneCLICKor.gs includes a link to our Facebook group where further details will be posted.

About the project:
One Click Organisations is creating a revolutionary web platform that makes it easy for groups to create a simple legal structure and make collective decisions. Initially the project is targeting the needs of social entrepreneurs, collectives, activist groups and associations.

Yesterday evening the BarCampLondon Planning Association (the organisation putting on BarCampLondon) became One Click Orgs’ first alpha customer. The association held its founding meeting at the Trampery and adopted a Themis constitution running on the prototype server. This is an important step forward for OCO, the first time an independent group has used the platform to help it manage a complex project. We’ll get a lot of valuable feedback from this that’ll help us refine the platform to meet users’ needs.

Meanwhile our presence at the BIL Conference was a great success. I was the second keynote in the main auditorium talking about the relationship between technology and organisational structure, the principles of emergent democracy and the One Click Organisations project. Then Emma had a main-auditorium session on the Sunday afternoon discussing the democratic open source development approach we’ve pioneered with OCO. Both sessions were well received and we met a lot of people who are interested in the project and/or have groups wanting to use it. The conference as a whole was overflowing ideas and projects. I’ll link to videos of our sessions as soon as they’re published.

We’re doing two sessions on one click orgs at this weekend’s BIL Conference in Long Beach, California. I’ll be presenting the concept and purpose of the project while Emma discusses the democratic open source methodology we’ve adopted for development.

BIL is the place to be for big new ideas and unconventional thinkers. i visited the first BIL last year and i’m excited to be there again this year. Come and see us if you’re there!

If you’d like to help guarantee us prime speaking slots please register on the BIL community site and mark our sessions as “favs”:

http://bil.nowgetsocial.com/talk/details/43
http://bil.nowgetsocial.com/talk/details/85

Meanwhile 2009 has got off to a great start for the project with new team members, new features and the 1.0 roadmap close to finalised.

The founding meeting for One Click Organisations was held on Monday 29 December at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, attended by Jef, Emma, Martin, Jan and myself. We went through the draft constitution clause by clause making sure everyone understood how it worked and considering any revisions. The founding vote was passed unanimously at 8:26pm, at which point One Click Organisations came into being as a legal entity (specifically an unincorporated association).

We were careful to observe established practice in convening and running the founding meeting, conscious that beyond this point we’d have few conventions on which to grasp. One of the nice things about unincorporated associations is that they are governed by the law of contract which means the members can collectively agree to adopt whatever rules they wish. So long as there is a clear paper trail leading up to the founding vote the courts will adjudicate that the constitution adopted at that point (with any subsequent modifications) is the legitimate basis on which the members have agreed to come together.

One of the most important characteristics of the Themis Constitutions is the complete absence of machinery for convening and running meetings. Therefore it was distinctly ironic to find ourselves going to such lengths in connection with the founding meeting. As the platform matures we’ll be able to streamline even this part of the process (though this first meeting will still be necessary) by providing a “wizard” which automates the production and circulation of the agenda, guides the convenor step by step through the workflow then circulates minutes at the end of the process.

From the moment of the founding vote One Click Organisations was irreversibly locked to the decision-making tools hosted on the system. Every decision registered there is binding on the organisation. As far as we can tell this is the first time anyone’s done anything like this. Whilst the system remains at such an early stage of development it’s slightly nerve-wracking. Day by day we’re thinking of more edge cases. What’s the legal situation if the server fails? Or if a bug leads to spurious decisions? Gradually we’ll add cover for cases like this in the constitution, but this definitely feels like terra incognita.

We’ve had a lot of offers of help and advice which have been gratefully received. 2009 promises to be an exciting year for One Click!