Pattern Recognition: August, 2007

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August 21

How to be good (as a company)

My company's mission is to "Enable people to use their language and cultural conventions on the web, while allowing them to bridge cultural and language borders." This is what the company does, but lately I have been realizing that it also matters a whole lot how a company does things. I am talking about values here, not the practical execution, although the latter should be guided by the former.

What should my company's values be? I'm sure I can find an infinite number of value statements on the web. Now, some smart people at Google thought about the same thing and came up with the phrase "Don't be evil". According to the Wikipedia entry Larry Page said "I think it's much better than Be Good or something. When you are making decisions, it causes you to think. I think that's good." Sounds like a smart approach, doesn't it? But see where it got them with regards to their China policy and the many other decisions that were weighed against this rather undefined motto! (yes, a more detailed explanation of their philosophy is available, but they are often judged referring to the short phrase). Thinking after the fact leads to relativism.

Another thing that is important to me, is to build a social enterprise. The best guidance that I found for this is from somebody who built one of the most exemplary social businesses of the last 100 years - nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. The key phrase in his guest commentary for the latest G8 summit for me is "Many of the problems in the world today, including poverty, persist because of a too narrow interpretation of capitalism." Right! Where is it written that companies have to exclusively subscribe to the profit motive? Looking beyond profits also helps to avoid problems like this.

So after all this laying of the foundation, here are the values my company should embody:

For profit. Services and software that add value for the customers are to be sold for profit (otherwise I'd make it a non-profit)
Open. Where reasonable source and data should be open. What do I mean with reasonable? In regards to source code my goal is to use open-source as much as possible and contribute improvements back to the community. I think open-source works particularly well for infrastructure that is used/useful for everybody (e.g. operating systems, general algorithms like the ones you can find in an algorithm book, algorithms that implement standards). Algorithms that implement the "secret sauce" of a company's main idea into an application are neither reasonable to open-source (see 1.), nor do they necessarily benefit from open-sourcing and neither do they benefit the community (often they are too specialized). I guess in this approach I'm not too far from Google's.
The same approach applies to data - data gathered from public sources or raw data provided by the user should be openly accessible (user data of course only to the user who provided it). Data derived from this data by the "secret sauce" algorithms however, should not be openly accessible.
Green. Any software my company provides should be as power efficient as possible while still reaching the stated purpose. The operations of the company must be run in a sustainable way (reduce, reuse, recycle).
Secure. Software needs to follow commonly accepted industry security standards. Data needs to be kept secure to standards.
Human Rights. Any projects that the company participates in must respect human rights. It shouldn't be necessary to state this, but I'm afraid nowadays it is. (I will contribute to open source projects that could potentially be used violating these rights. The open-source licenses unfortunately don't usually address this issue.)

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