Yak Collective

The Yak Collective is a network of over 300 independent consultants, coaches, and freelancers with varied technical and creative skills. https://www.yakcollective.org/

Venkatesh Rao is a key player.

Aug'2020: Presidential Campaign as Decentralized Org

Every couple of months brings a new proposal cycle. Each proposal is led by one or two project leads, who head working groups which work towards the creation of a specific deliverable. For instance, The New Old Home project sought to envision “the return to the home as a site of production”, essentially asking, ‘how is the home going to change, now that COVID is forcing us to spend most of our waking hours there?’.

These spontaneously-created groups, such as the one that created the New Old Home, are formed to solve problems, critically imagine futures, and otherwise explore complex questions. Often, these projects focus on creating “collisions” in response to a problem or question, and these collisions typically are found at uncharted intersections of various types of domain knowledge. Once the deliverable is created, it’s then handed off to Yak Collective to share, market, and otherwise signal boost.

There are several kinds of organization that precede Yak Collective in working in a similar decentralized manner. Possibly, the largest-scale analog, in terms of impact and sheer human-power, are political campaigns within representative democracies.