Emergent organization

This screenshot, from my World of Warcraft (WoW) login screen, is of my main character, Capistrano. She’s a level 60 gnome warlock and member of We Know, a guild – that is, a player-founded and -run organization – on the Eitrigg server. (See a snazzy promo video for our guild here, complete with Capistrano cameo. You can also read a bit about the guild here, although the article greatly exaggerates the ‘movers and shakers’ factor.)

If you’re interested in Capistrano’s equipment – WoW is a very gear-dependent game – you can see a profile of her stuff here. People who play WoW will probably recognize the warlock gear from the picture – it’s mostly bits and pieces of the Felheart Raiment, an epic warlock equipment set. I particularly like the horns.

I’m chatting about my character and her guild not because I like to show off my character (I do, but that alone is a little too dorky even for my blog), and not because my character is particularly awesome (better than your average maximum-level warlock, I’m thinking, but there is far, far better gear available in the game from far, far harder dungeons), and not even because my guild is particularly awesome (it is, and it’s great fun, but there’s thousands of them out there.) Instead, I’m writing because the Felheart Raiment gear that Capistrano is wearing drops exclusively in the Molten Core, a ‘raid’ dungeon that requires forty people working together to kill the particular monsters there. Some of the other gear – the cape, a ring – drops from dungeons that require twenty people to run. One particular piece – the Flarecore Pants – was made by a fellow guild member from items that dropped only from Molten Core, in a decision that required the guild to prioritize assignment of resources. (Lest you think I’m extra-special, I was probably 20th in line to get to use these communal resources – we’ve been running Molten Core for a while.)

Think about that for a bit. Forty people, all physically remote from each other, all coordinating to achieve a common goal. More that forty, actually – We Know contains over three hundred accounts all told, and I’m going to guess and say at least eighty venture into these twenty- and forty-person dungeons at least occasionally. This is partially facilitated by the WoW interface, but the guild administration functions in WoW are pretty weak and limited – a listing of names and roles and a simple note-taking facility. Most of the coordination of guilds in WoW, and ours is no exception, is done through a series of third-party tools and a system of negotiated policies and procedures. Our guild is not especially unique, and we use a website, a wiki, a forum system (the very sexy Vanilla), voice communications software (TeamSpeak), a loot distribution tracker (RaidUI), a game plugin for event tracking (GroupCalendar), and a game plugin for raid coordination (CT RaidAssist.) Specific tools vary, but the only genre of tool not commonly used by the thousands of guilds like ours is the wiki. Many businesses have sprung up offering services for guilds, many trying to be one-stop shops (see GuildPortal, GuildUniverse, Uberguilds, etc. etc.)

At the same time, the guild has had to establish an elaborate series of policies to determine who gets recruited, who gets to go to an event like a raid, how loot is distributed within the guild, how guild members should behave, what happens when guild members don’t behave, and so on. (You can see our bylaws here, and a description of our loot distribution system here.) These are not exactly simple decisions. At the moment, for example, the guild’s discussing how to best ensure guild members will spend DKP on items that are upgrades when they could choose to save up the DKP for better-but-rarer upgrades from a harder raid dungeon – perfectly legitimate, but causing the guild as a whole to suffer because gear upgrades are getting turned down. A number of DKP refund schemes for upgrades are being debated.

The guild organization is entirely voluntary, and the level of commitment from each participant varies widely, but the guild itself is as complex as any organization I’ve worked for, and the decisions made are just as complicated and carefully considered. As our guild custodian put it in a recent article,

Long frustrated by the fairly conventional hierarchies in even the most innovative technology companies, Mr. Ito says he sees in his Warcraft guild a new way to organize, manage, and motivate people. With his guild doubling in size every month, he does a lot of learning on the fly. “Every week or so, I have to add a new rank, build a whole bunch of new rules, and throw in kind of ad hoc structures,” Mr. Ito says. “I’m playing with all the different kinds of management ideas I’ve had for companies with a bunch of people who are actually very dedicated. They will set their alarm clocks for 3 a.m. to run a raid of 40 people. They are committed to each other like people in a normal company wouldn’t be committed to each other. So as a test bed for these ideas, this is actually pretty amazing.”

In a work environment decentralized by ‘net-based communication tools, I don’t see why the emergent organization that occurs in a World of Warcraft guild couldn’t be extended to other ventures, including legitimate companies with legitimate product offerings. I’d argue that open-source software projects (facilitated by tools like Sourceforge) and wiki-based documentation projects (facilitated by tools like MediaWiki) are other types of emergent organization. But all tools to facilitate organizational formation are either domain-specific or cover too small a feature set (like a forum or an IM client), and no one that I know of has solved the problems surrounding division of equity and profits – emergent organizations are largely non-profit organizations. The general tool set that allows individuals to create, join, and contribute to an organization and then receive real ownership or compensation for their slice of the collective effort hasn’t been built yet. But it could be, I think, and could potentially be the next revolution in work.