Open Company

Glimesh, Inc. is a new type of company, an open company. For Glimesh, this means that we develop all of our products publicly, from planning to development. All software we write is open source, and it’s active usage by others is encouraged. Our intellectual property is developed in the open and is published for all. We regularly share financial reports and other company data, without compromising customer privacy.

The line of transparency is an easy one to walk when you embrace a couple of key points:

1. Work in the public by default. Use tools like Trello, Github, blog posts, etc that embrace the public eye by default. Have conversations in open channels.
2. Don’t share private customer information. Transparency of the company does not mean that private customer data is at risk. We consent as a company to open our books and records, but customers do not consent to their data being shared.
3. Have regular meetings with open minutes. Solidify decisions by discussing them publicly, and codifying the results of them into minutes.

In the original manifesto published by Chad Whitacre of Gittip, open company philosophies were concretely defined. Specifically they included 3 important values: Share as much as possible; Charge as little as possible; Don’t compensate employees. As the open company philosophy started growing throughout companies, those values started to become more independent.

Today the open company philosophy is more focused on the transparency aspect, with the “price to cost” and “don’t compensate employees” split out as unique concepts. Many companies you know are now practicing open company ideals, like sharing their internal documents, open sourcing all of their code, and sharing their financials by default.

Open companies & non-profits share a similar base of transparency, however an open company is not synonymous with a non-profit. Think of a non-profit as a legal organizational structure, and open company as a philosophy. A non-profit can be an open company, a for-profit can be an open company, but a non-profit cannot be a for-profit.

An open company is not encumbered by how work is organized and decided upon. A company can have a traditional reporting structure, a flat reporting structure, a democratized system and still practice open company values.