Warren and Bill's guide to the Serverless #guildcraft "float"

Alex Papworth asked me whether guilds at my present org have a purpose. The answer is two purposes: build the guild culture and drive forward professional practice in targeted manner.

Mark Downham quipped whether guilds were a Cloud computing platform -- very astute, Mark.

Think of it like Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway (and also reflect on the Sage of Omaha's wisdom and humility). Warren uses the concept of the "float":

1. Warren skips to work or drives his hail-damaged car he got a deal on, he sits at his desk, overlooked by his certificate from Dale Carnegie--the only qualification he deems worthy enough to display. He settles down to work
2. He goes through the balance sheets
3. Profits generated by companies that are part of Berkshire Hathaway group are pushed back up to the parent company, the "float". Geiko is in this category
4. Warren redirects/redistributes that capital into other companies or new ventures to strengthen the network
5. He has a steak and a coke and goes home

Read this:

More here:

Now think of it as Cloud computing's Function as a Service (FaaS), colloquially known as Serverless:

1. I have a fleet of compute managed by a container orchestrator (ECS - Amazon's proprietary version of Kubernetes)
2. Snippets of computer code as submitted to this compute with metadata stipulating how they run
3. The orchestrator distributes the compute to the functions based on need in a similar manner to Warren's "float"

This is an extension to/derivation of Google's Borg platform, a precursor to Kubernetes:

https://ai.google/research/pubs/pub43438

Note 1: picture the blue centre as the hyperconnected guild float and the darker grey as purpose/topic etc. Outer lighter grey is perhaps outside world having needs including the official org. Guildcraft as bootstrap hivemind innovation vortex. Imagine this in 3d with the blue centre above the treeline.

Note 2: liminalities and recruitment, people are sucked in through topic etc. They want something done but actually need to join the guild. This is their hero's journey switcheroo, they cross the event horizon into a leaderless, peer-to-peer, packet-switching multidimensional simulation ontological/epistemological networked hyperverse:

Now here is what we are able to do with guilds at my present org and now more widely:

1. We build a "float" of cultural and interaction creed capital based on people's compatibility with #guildcraft
2. We then redirect this energy to a series of topics curated in Microsoft Teams, one channel per topic
3. We have regular meetings for some of the topics we are focussing on
4. In meetings we switch the discussion onto the topic or building the culture as the need arises
5. But in teams we try to stick to the topic in posts and text

Here are some of the guilds and their purposes and status:

• Culture and leadership --redefining what these things look like in the new organisation and importantly building these up using the new culture and leadership norms--cf. bootstrapping, keeping it real etc. Our biggest accomplishment to date: writing the playbook for the new post-transformational IT organisation
• Cloud acceleration--building out self-service products as part of our Autonomy as a Service vision for public Cloud. Our biggest accomplishments to date: building the Autonomy as a Service offering and mindset, including guard rails, boundary policies, delegation of authority, Infrastructure as Code automation. We also incubated and swarmed to assist in the migration of our main website to AWS
• API and integration--defining vision, principles and standards. Biggest accomplishment is forming a community of practitioners
• DevOps--crowdsourcing contributions to the standards and growing the practice. Biggest accomplishment: catalysing the adoption of Enterprise DevOps throughout the organisation, a mainstay of our transformational strategy
• Storytelling--brand new but hopefully an authentic way of sharing guild success stories

At the end of the day #guildcraft is really just unconditional mentoring to channel abundance and learning:

So while I may prefer to blog about the more group dynamical aspects of what is going on we are actually doing something with our newfound levels of collaboration and development of professional practice.

And so can you.