Citizen Agency

It’s always good to have heros and to be able to identify those folks whose good acts are worthy of imitation. They provide lessons to learn from, a prototype to tweak and a refreshing outlook on what’s possible.

From time to time, we’d like to chronicle those who inspire, excite and offer leadership for citizen agents like us, here on our blog. Feel free to play along too and tag your posts with “Upstanding Citizens” as these folks tend to deserve more recognition than they sometimes receive.

To start, I’d like to excerpt some pieces of a recent interview with Dan, Nathan and Steven from silverorange, a small web development and design firm from PEI whose clients include Mozilla (which is where I first encountered them), Digg and others.

Robert Paterson: So what then is your organizational goal?

SilverOrange: I think that it is to foster an organization that supports our “Whole Lives”. To create and maintain a platform that enables each of us to do the things that we want to be able to do. To set in motion an organization that would be self-sustaining and that we can rely on to support all of us for a long long time. So we definitely do not set out to conquer the world which is implicit in the Total Financial Growth Model. Nor did we sell out in the boom and just take the money.

The interview continues and concludes with:

Robert Paterson: So now the big question — how in this unusual culture of fierce mutual support and accountability do you relate to your clients?

SilverOrange: We will no longer act as merely a supplier. We seek clients who wish to partner with us. This is more than words. In commercial sites we offer the site as a foundation of a contract where we both act to improve the tool to grow the results of the clients and hence for our business. We share in the growth that comes for using our tool. We don’t sell a product we sell our ongoing expertise in an area where we help a business grow their web business. In this way we mirror with our clients what we do at home with each other.”

“We aim for sustainability and hence growth that can be relied on. We tell each other the truth - especially about doing it right rather than easy. We respect the other person’s skills that are often not our own and we rely on those that have the knowledge to take the lead. We share the risks and the rewards. We in effect own a piece of each other. We have fun and we like each other.

Oh, and if that sounds as good to you as it does us, they’re hiring.