Becoming a Camplighter
People email us wanting to join the Camplight 🔥 fire. They believe in our self-organizing model, they imagine what it’s like collaborating with honest and sincere people in a transparent way, they love our notion of organic culture or they’re just sick of working in hierarchical companies. Whatever the reasons for becoming a Camplighter, it is not easy. Mainly because:
- Somebody should invite you from the inside. We don’t have open positions, HR department, growth milestones… ⚠️ FYI Camplighters may be busy thus not being able to properly onboard you or even get in contact with you. Patience is virtue 😉
- We should vibrate around the same level in terms of principles, skill set, ethic and moral understandings. Going on retreats, having a beer, coworking or chatting is a good way to align and sync.
- We’re totally transparent so we first need to establish a strong trust bond. This can be done after a couple of trials and familiarization experiences. We don’t have any rituals and we’re usually busy so we’ll rely on you to explain/show us how you’ll prove that you’re worthy. We realise that it can sound arrogant and impolite at some extent, nevertheless, we’re open for suggestions although this method passed the test of time. We usually do some open source/organizational work together
- Taking the fact that some people become Camplighters in 6–9 months’ time into consideration, we should not forget that really good things don’t happen fast. 🌱 So don’t rely on having one interview with us and after that you get the job. We don’t become only colleagues, we become friends/soul mates/Camplighters. You should have alternative plan in case it doesn’t work out between us and we cannot co-create our future.
Nevertheless you don’t need to be in Camplight in order to understand how we’re thriving and evolving. Our fire is the sum of all of team members well-being and self-improvement. Our lifestyle determines who we are. That’s why it’s crucial to be aware that your future depends on what you do today.
Camplighter as a lifestyle
I’ll outline my view on this topic:
Have integrity. Do what you say and say what you do. Everything else is susceptible to managing expectations and collaborating around intentions.
Be Honest and become trustworthy.
Make a point of being a good leader or follower. Your day-to-day roles are constantly changing so you need to adapt and experiment.
Love your body and mind. Be aware of your footprints. Aim for healthy co-existence and improve constantly.
Proactivity should be your baseline. If you notice something is going wrong, act or collaborate to fix it. Otherwise everything will rot.
Embrace flat, transparent, decentralized relationships. The world is so dynamic that every notion of control is an illusion.
Even if you have the correct lifestyle (or even better) this doesn’t mean we’ll be able to self-organize towards your onboarding. As you know Camplight is remote. This implies that right now there’s an organic process for collaborating with people around our empathic circles.
Our onboarding process
We have a Trello board for internal organization when onboarding people.
We have column “Incoming contacts” where we just list people who cold-contacted us. We have a column “People to Contact” from our social graph with emails, CVs, description with whom we would like to collaborate. Our next list of contacts is the “Considering” column where we have friends who we believe can be suitable for the camplight. Right next to this is the “Onboarding” column with people who are in the process of becoming Camplighters. You can judge for yourself with the number of people in the last two columns (”Onboarded” vs. “Didn’t work out”) what’s the ratio of acceptance. Some of the people left Camplight because it was too stressful to self-organize. Others we turned down…
It’s important to understand that joining the people around the fire is solely your choice of existence. Being a Camplighter has it’s Pros and Cons and although it is a wonderful journey (I, personally, don’t plan to change the company in the next 1000 years) you should be mindful that it all depends on how you walk the walk. You can be a Camplighter who’s always worrying about something or you can enjoy the blissful moments of co-creation and keeping the fire burning 🎭
Thank you for your understanding 🙇
