Democracy at DreamHost

November 25, 2008 on 12:18 pm | In Business, Insider View by Dallas Kashuba | 9 Comments

Where Democracy Happens

As you may know, DreamHost was selected for the WorldBlu Most Democractic Workplaces 2008 list.  We’ve talked about it a little in previous blog posts, but have never really said much about the specifics of democracy at DreamHost.  I’ll start things off with a bit of an overview of the concepts of democracy that apply to how we run things.

 

Democracy?

When I first heard about WorldBlu and their list of the most democratic workplaces, the concept was new to me.  At first I was even a bit unsure how what I knew about democracy as a concept even fit in with what I knew about workplaces.  I knew DreamHost had been doing things in a unique way all along, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it might be part of a larger trend.  To figure out how it all fit together I did a bit of my own research, and here’s what I found.  Democracy as a concept has a few key ideas that I think are the most interesting to us here.

Information for All

Access to Information 

Crucial to democracy is easy access to information.  For a workplace that means information about things like what the business does and how they do it, and how it was done in the past.  It also includes information about policies and past decisions, and anything else that might provide insight about the business.  This goes beyond the scope of what a person needs to get their day to day job accomplished.

Free Exchange of Ideas and an Open Dialog

A free flow of ideas and information is what democracy is really all about.  The theory is that flow of ideas will lead to decisions that will be in the best interests of the majority of the people while also not infringing on the rights of the minority.  In a business the best interests of the majority are sometimes difficult to define, but with an open dialog the interests of the business itself will be more in line with the individual interests of the workers.

Set 'em up!

Opportunities for Meaningful Participation

That open dialog and exchange of ideas can’t be just a dialog with no real weight, though.  It has to have the potential to have an impact on the decision making process, and the functioning of the company itself.  It has to be meaningful or it won’t be successful.  

Democracy is Not Just Voting

This is a key idea.  I think a lot of people here in the US might say “Democracy is Voting”, but voting is really just an implementation detail of the representational democracy we have here.  In the workplace democracy model voting may be useful as a participation tool, but it’s definitely not necessary.  In the case of DreamHost voting is not widely done, though we do have a polling system built into our own internal employee tools and it does get used to gather votes on specific issues.

9 Responses to “Democracy at DreamHost”

  1. Maverick Says:
    November 26th, 2008 at 2:03 am

    Is it me or haven’t you actually given any information to what makes Dreamhost so democratic?
    Only thing that I’ve read about that is that Dreamhost has a polling system built into the internal employee tools?

  2. BUGabundo Says:
    November 26th, 2008 at 2:53 am

    yeah, I’m with Maverick on this one

  3. Tim Says:
    November 26th, 2008 at 8:31 am

    And I’m a Private Server customer who has waited over a month to be moved to the new hardware … yet still hasn’t been moved :(

  4. makkale.blogcu.com Says:
    November 26th, 2008 at 2:06 pm

    I’m sure you know what you’re doing http://www.makkale.blogcu.com

  5. sdayman Says:
    November 26th, 2008 at 2:32 pm

    Me three. The one bit I did get is that voting isn’t the only aspect of democracy. And the pictures don’t really enhance the message. Maybe Josh bumped off Dallas halfway through the post (rather than voting him out).

  6. Mike M Says:
    November 29th, 2008 at 4:07 pm

    We were going to tell you all our secrets, but we voted against it. :)

  7. tavis Says:
    December 1st, 2008 at 8:42 pm

    When I worked at DreamHost, I was the storage guy. We were always playing catchup with disk space and filer deployments. Then Josh announced a huge sale he was going to put into affect which gave customers a whole lot more disk space. I posted a message to the internal message list with a subject something like “Fear of the Sale” where I voiced my concern about running out of disk space because of the sale. Josh responded by postponing the sale for a few days even though he believed (and was correct) that the sale wouldn’t in fact increase disk usage all that much. Democractic ? I think it is.

  8. Dallas Kashuba Says:
    December 12th, 2008 at 12:52 pm

    You guys are correct that this post did not actually include much information about how we specifically are democratic. This is intended as the first of a few posts on the topic and is laying down some background on the concept of democracy in the workplace.

    I guess I didn’t make that very clear, but I did say this towards the beginning.. “I’ll start things off with a bit of an overview of the concepts of democracy that apply to how we run things.”

    I just didn’t mention that more posts on the topic are planned!

  9. Gwyneth Llewelyn Says:
    December 25th, 2008 at 2:55 pm

    Dallas, I’d also welcome if you address how you see the extension of “democracy in the workplace” towards the customers as well. Yes, I’m aware of several aspects of “democratic procedures” applying to customers: they get ample information; if they post things against DH on DH-hosted blogs, you don’t remove their accounts (or at least I think you don’t!); and there is a little-used feature voting tool.

    Perhaps an article detailing on how DH is thinking of engaging customers more in the decision-making process would be nice.

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