A. We have about 4,000 employees, but on average you’ll see a couple hundred posts a day. And that doesn’t include the Friday List, which is a separate site where all the funny things are. Memo List is about the business. And I go through it every single day. I would say probably three-quarters of the people are on it every day, either reading or posting.

Q. Isn’t that time-consuming for the company?

A. Here’s the simple way I would put it: Engaging people in how decisions are getting made means it can take forever to get decisions made. But once you make a decision, you get flawless execution because everybody’s engaged. They know what you’re doing and they know why you’re doing it.

Image Jim Whitehurst is president and C.E.O. of Red Hat, the provider of Linux and other open-source technology. Long before the Facebook era, he says, the company started forms of social media where all employees could air views on issues. Credit... Librado Romero/The New York Times

It’s a very different model than what happens in most companies, which is that a small group of senior people make decisions, and then execution is difficult. I’m not saying we’re perfect by any stretch, but by the time we’ve actually come to an agreement on where we’re heading, we’re halfway there.

Q. You mentioned the Friday List. What are some funny things that have shown up there?

A. Somebody will park and take up two spaces, and then another employee who sees this will take a picture, post it, and write, “Really? Did you have to do that?” Or someone will leave a mess in a conference room, and somebody will take a picture and write: “Hey, come on! Your mother’s not here to clean up after you.” It’s interesting because behavior in the company becomes self-policing.

Q. What’s an example of something you worked through on the Memo List?

A. We used it to create our mission statement. A lot of companies will either hire an external firm or have a management off-site meeting where, over a couple of good bottles of wine, 10 people do this. It took us five months to do our mission statement because we did it from the bottom up. We took in every idea. We had debates. We had work groups. It changed, and it was modified and tweaked. But by the time we finished, everybody — even if they don’t agree with it — knows our mission statement and the subtleties of every word.

Q. What did you come up with as your mission statement?

A. “To be the catalyst in communities of partners and customers and contributors building better technology the open-source way.” I know that sounds long, but there are some subtleties. For example, we said “to be the catalyst” rather than “to lead.” We don’t lead anything because leadership implies that you have control. So we catalyze; we don’t lead. So, in a way, I’m the chief catalyst for Red Hat. I catalyze, I help direct, but I don’t formally lead. And so that was a key word we spent a lot of time on.