Philip Rosedale and Ryan Downe’s new baby LoveMachine, encapsulates what I mean by beautiful social design. Always foward thinking (Rosedale founded Linden Lab), LoveMachine is redesigning work systems: How workers get rewarded and how start-ups can efficiently …well, start up. Kevin Rose and Tim Ferriss discussed LoveMachine on their July Random Show. It seems Rose has implemented LoveMachine at Digg. He says that co-workers basically give each other their bonuses – by sharing the love. This is beautiful social design; the design of the system is bringing people together in new and positive ways. When someone does something great, a fellow employee rewards that person with “Love.” For example, “<3 Thanks, Heather, for staying late to finish the project 3>.” This love is then available for all to see. LoveMachine says: “The collective opinion of everyone is the highest quality review of a person.” Lovemachine also claims that their service will enable companies to:

Eliminate 90% of management time spent on reviewing performance

Greatly increase morale

Evaluate employees more accurately

Know much more about what your company is actually doing

I find this refreshing – it assumes that peers can possibly attribute value better than managers. Rose is all for the experiment at Digg. As a researcher, I would love to study how this system is working at Digg… (The Lovemachine discussion begins at around 18min)

Jerry Paffendorf (Destroy Television, Loveland) told me about Philip’s project last Spring – but I believe Jerry is more interested in the back-end of LoveMachine.This is another beautiful feat – the back-end appears to be entirely automated. People – anyone willing – can bid on the current jobs. This means they have a very lean staff. Also, they have no official office space. No rent. No electricity bills. Lovemachine’s servers are in the cloud. When they want to have a company meeting they simply choose from one of the 2000 venues in San Francisco. Most of the time Philip and Ryan work on their laptops in cafes and swanky hotel lobbys like the W. I could get used to that.