tl;dr: direct PDF download link to our guidebook

At our last Camplight retreat by the sea, we did something terrible … at least in the eyes of centralization aficionados. We facilitated a workshop for setting our goals as a community and something extraordinary turned out. I was marveled by it. We realized we don’t want to become a big company, consuming everything. Right now we’re 20 and can grow to 200 if we wish. But we don’t want to grow “vertically”. Instead, we want to inspire 200 other companies that transparent, self-organized, sustainable, happy and freedom-based business is within their reach. This is something far greater than bubbling Camplight to unfacilitationable size.

[People] … should do their actual living and working in communities small enough to permit of genuine self-government and the assumption of personal responsibilities, federated into larger units in such a way that the temptation to abuse great power should not arise. Mahatma Gandhi

After our goal-setting workshop, I reflected on what happened. In my opinion, Camplight is already developing beyond our capacity to handle entropy. We’re becoming more decentralized in our decisions, experience greater flexibility, have astounding mobility and remote habits and our processes are producing more business experiments than ever before. So we’re leaving everything to unfold organically and blissfully.

A map illustrating where we were “camplightining”, hopefully inspiring local “sparks” within communities.

That’s why we try to mature mindfully instead of grasping every possibility and frantically expanding. What ecosystem are we building and what are our footprints? How are we evolving it? Is this role model a sustainable approach for the next decades?

I see that our species thrive when cooperating. During the last ~8 years of existence as a digital cooperative, we felt how easy it is to collaborate with organizations with similar values and habits like ours. That’s why we’re now trying to be more mindful and work in symbiosis with fellow human beings.

We hope to inspire and intensify this movement by being transparent in our journey about how a business can be progressed as a humane and fulfilling co-adventure.