Proposal | reboot11
Taking action for autonomous work
How to support autonomous working relationships and reinvent yourself publicly
As will be old news to rebooters, in the last decade(s) working relationships have undergone profound changes: We have seen a shift from long lasting to temporary commitments, from the worker as a consumer to the worker as a producer of his/her qualification, employability etc. Nevertheless, this change is facing serious obstacles that hinder people from embracing it fully: Inflexible structures in companies and inflexible management tend to suppress any tendency to create flexible, creative and meaningful working relationships.
One way to help overcoming those obstacles is to provide an online
platform that links supply and demand of flexible work while cutting
out typical middle men. Or at least we thought so. For over 10 years,
projektwerk.de has been striving to do exactly that, and has been
quite successful economically in doing so. But still we felt that our
goal of enabling people to work together autonomously wasn't reached
yet.
What to do, then? Yes: Taking action!
We took a working, successful platform and discussed how it could be
shifted to fulfill our goal more completely. And we decided to remake
it from the ground up. Throwing away established workflows and
features, we started from scratch, scribbling and painting metaphors
and building software "interface first".
Since those radical changes were meant to focus on users' needs, we
quickly decided that we had to change perspective as soon as possible:
Show our users what we were doing and asking them to participate. So
we went public alpha on June, 11th, with an incomplete, rough and
buggy version of the new projektwerk. And we are ready to go along
with what comes up.
In our session, we'd like to reflect on our experiences with taking
action and supporting people to take action. And we'd like to pose a
couple of questions:
- What's really needed to enable people to establish working
relationships autonomously?
- What does it really mean to listen to users instead of trying to
anticipate them?
- What's more important - business opportunities or business plans?
And how do you discuss radical decisions with your investors?
- Could the current crisis be a possibility to take chances instead of
relying on trodden paths?
- What would you do?
Christiane of projektwerk and Wolfgang of mindmatters have been working together on the projektwerk platform for the last four years and are now looking forward to some radical change.
The page header of our public alpha experiment.
