A Cathedral conjures an image of a top down control of a business or people. Or a top down flow of information.
A Cathedral is a hierarchy but a Bazaar is a general graph.
Many people think it’s how things should work in business and in other organizations.
A Bazaar on the other hand conjures an image of being disorganized.
There have been some notable examples of organizations being structured like a Bazaar that have produced some very high level and important outcomes.
The development of many open source software products including Linux! In fact the term “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” was coined by Eric Raymond (aka ESR) who is a notable software developer in the Open Source community.
Many successful art and creative communities tend to be organized this way.
The notion has also even showed up on large corporate structure through flatter management structure.
How could such an apparently disorganized organizational structure work?
In Graph Theory, a hierarchy is an example of a graph (aka network) that has certain constraints put on the connections that it can have. You can only be connected to superiors and subordinates. It is also a directed graph. Control is directional from top to bottom.
Decisions have to get made and work has to get done. To make decisions, information has to flow from bottom to top to understand the conditions the organization faces. For larger organizations this could easily cause overloading. The further up we go in the hierarchy, the more nodes there are downstream. So a hierarchy suffers from issues of scalability.
Further, because control is from top to bottom and given that information may bottleneck because of these scalability issues, hierarchies tend to rely more heavily on documented rules. This consumes a lot of resources because of the maintenance and policing of these rules.
A Bazaar structure or a more generalized graph (or network) structure solves some of these issues. For one thing by permitting connections anywhere, the network can evolve to help information flow to the points of leadership. Also, this structure can scale up and down. It is more resilient to random loss of communication or people because the graph may be scale free. Because traffic (information and support) can move more freely there is less dependency of rule based thinking and more opportunity for freedom and common sense. With less constraints on what information is shared with whom and the ways in which an individual can contribute, creativity and problem solving can flourish.
Many organizations may have a structure that has several nodes organized in a hierarchy but there is no resistance to other ties that theoretically break the hierarchy. This might be the future for the organization of people.
[...] I suggested that the open configuration of the meetups might actually be very functional and attempts to structure it may harm the viral nature of creativity and the rate at which relevant social ties that get formed. I likened the unstructured social as a Bazaar. [...]