Openness at Civil

Working Together Towards Openness, Transparency & Decentralization

Our mission is to fuel a more free and just world through self-sustaining and crowd-operated journalism. This starts with openness.

Openness describes how Civil works to its core. It is in everything from its technology, product and operating model, to community and team relationships. Over the past several weeks, we pushed ourselves to decide what it means to be open, transparent and decentralized and why it matters. We quickly realized, without openness, Civil will fail.

We know this will take ongoing work, countless iterations, and most importantly, lived experience to achieve the standard of openness, transparency and decentralization that we strive for at Civil. So it is in the spirit of openness that we invite you to share your thoughts and ideas for future inclusion in the comments or on Slack.

Open Teamwork

We are committed to building a workforce of diverse and inclusive teams, with strong relationships built on trust. Building that trust requires transparency, and from that flows empowered and cooperative decision-making.

There is no question that transparency is hard.

It inherently keeps us honest and holds us accountable to ourselves and our teammates. It makes us more vulnerable, and it takes intentional time and effort.

No longer siloed or shielded by hierarchical structures and restricting roles, we can work more freely, creatively and efficiently, but with that comes the responsibility of communication. We discovered that we are better off sharing our struggles and weaknesses in order to support one another in our work, and carry each other through to higher achievements.

So what does openness look like on a day-to-day basis? Here’s how we practice transparent communication today:

• Sharing early and often about your work to invite collaboration and to avoid siloed decision-making and time-wasting rework.
• Over-communicating daily about roadblocks, successes and failures. Asking for help and giving help when needed.
• Openly discussing our strengths and weaknesses with each other.

In short, we see these values being represented in our teamwork and structure in a myriad of ways, starting with the following:

Fair. Equitable. Valued.

At the core of Openness is the idea that we can make our teams more productive, whole and motivated, simply by acknowledging that we are people, not employees.

As we build our team, we are increasingly aware of the role that compensation plays in making people feel valued, recognized and empowered. We designed a compensation structure that intends to be fair and inclusive, champion equal pay, and bring diverse candidates through the door.

August and Buffer are two role models when it comes to transparent compensation: they use market-driven formulas to arrive at salary and equity breakdowns, all of which is shared publicly. Not without its own challenges, Buffer found this practice not only fostered greater trust within the team, but also boosted their effort to acquire top diverse talent. More qualified, culturally aligned candidates came through their door, while deterring those that might not mesh well from the start. Plus with compensation made public, negotiations are rendered moot, making the interview process more inclusive (like addressing the gender wage gap) and focused on what matters most in the long run — mission and culture alignment.

There is no playbook. We are on a journey that will require learning by trial and error. We hope that by actively testing, living and breathing these transparent processes within our core team, we can foster greater openness in our community.

Open Community

On Radical Listening articulated our vision for responding to and working with our community.

In the coming weeks, we will launch our Open Roadmap — an initiative to both make our work more transparent as well as encourage community participation, including opportunities to earn CVL tokens in advance of our token launch. We believe the power of opening up our work is vast, and aligns with our mission in the areas of independence, transparency, and the democratic sharing of knowledge.

The power of crowd-driven work has been demonstrated in significant ways throughout Internet’s brief history, but token economies will fuel even more rapid development through decentralized platforms, such as Civil. Our token-based model will incentivize journalists, users and developers to build and support a strong future for journalism.

At the highest level, openness and decentralization will enable the Civil community to fuel a more civil society through self-sustaining journalism.

So where does this leave us? How do we sustainably put these practices in place?

We open our doors to you.

Chat with us.

We will soon be hosting live Q&As with our core team and partners around various topics including openness and the future of our technology and organization.

Follow us on Twitter, Slack and Medium to stay tuned.

Work with us.

Volunteer free time. Join our Slack community & check back soon for the release of our Open Roadmap.

Join our team.

We are currently hiring a CTO & Senior Engineer.

Don’t see the job you want? Write to us with your dream job!

Written by

Stephanie Soussloff leads research and development at Civil. After studying geography, economics and social entrepreneurship at Middlebury College, she dove headfirst into the New York startup scene as a customer-centric analyst. She is excited about Civil’s potential to strengthen and empower communities globally.

→ Contact: stephanie@joincivil.com

Our team

Lillian Ruiz leads marketing and partnerships at Civil. She studied history at Wesleyan University before beginning her career in the digital marketing space, where she has served startup media companies and non-profits alike. Lillian comes to Civil energized by its paradigm shifting vision of a fully autonomous media landscape, and is eager to share its story with new audiences.

→ Contact: lillian@joincivil.com

Matthew Iles is CEO of Civil, leading strategy, product and team-building. He studied journalism at Duke University before an 8-year career in digital marketing and startup entrepreneurship. He believes journalism is core to a healthy society, but that legacy business models are holding it back. He started Civil to energize journalism for the 21st century by rewiring how it works using emerging social technologies. For more, read “What if the news were run by the people?” and “Why Civil?”

→ Contact: matthew@joincivil.com