Thanks for the links and tips. This style of working; agile, shared, mobile etc will certainly help shape the future. It feels too early to tell how this will look once the entreprenurial endeavour actually gets traction and turns into an organisation that requires cultivating something that has a signifcant lifecycle and involves larger numbers of people who generate their income from it.

This goes to the heart of my (re)quest. There are countless people who are gathering in communities that allow them to operate individually in new ways (compared to conventional work). This is important cutting edge stuff. But our society and economy depends on organisations, or lets call them ‘productive systems’. It can be luxurious to invent new ways of working that are good for sole operators, but useless for organisms of people (playing with words here) that are designed to be consistently and specifically productive.

If the kinds of people who attend startup camp, or hang out at Joes on Fridays, or are part of the Ruby on Rails community were leading organisations, what would they be doing to ccultivate commercially sustainable and innovative vocational communities?

Time will tell … my hope is that the ideals that drive people to operate like this now will not get suppressed, but will find ways to grow and thrive and form new practices when/if they find themselves in bigger projects.

I don’t know of any businesses that are truly creating new ways of being – but a few people who are creating new communities organised around vocation. Some examples:

Melbourne Jelly: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/910095/

Melbourne Start-up Camp: http://groups.google.com.au/group/silicon-beach-australia/browse_thread/thread/90f1e41de16693ba

The whole Ruby-on-Rails thing (A coffee with Pat explains all): http://rubyonrails.com.au/

There are bound to be more, these are some I’ve just bumped into recently. They are more than ‘events’ but not official ‘organisations’ as defined by corporate law.