Distributive Enterprise Assessment

Intro

This is an assessment to determine whether a certain project qualifies for collaboration with Open Source Ecology within the framework of a Distributive Enterprise. OSE products follow a Product Selection Metric.

Assessment occurs at two levels: first, the technology itself - and second, the organization that produces the technology. The latter is key in terms of leveraging potential collaboration to facilitate development work. Without a group of collaborating stakeholders, any development would still be about 'reinventing the wheel' - as hardware blueprints only without support around them require a lot of work. Unless they are extremely well documented up to the enterprise level - which generally doesn't exist.

Assessment of Technology

For a positive assessement, these are the requirement:

1. Does the device itself, or products that can be produced with this device - command at least a $1B global market? The market must be significant, meaning that the product can be considered for scalable, Distributed Market Substitution
2. Is the license OSHWA and OSI compliant? Must comply with economic freedom. NC and P2P licenses do not qualify.
3. Distributed Manufacturing -Does the product lend itself to distributed manufacturing, or can it be modified to be produced in a distributed way? (Easy sourcing, common materials, Distributed Quality Control)
4. Closed Loop Material Cycles - does the product lend itself well to full lifecycle stewardship?
5. Product Ecologies -Does the product fit with OSE Product Ecologies to create a Civilization Starter Kit or Global Village Construction Set?

Other Useful Points

1. Community - Is there an open source community around the project?
2. Collaborative Literacy - Is the community or its leaders interested in collaboration? This is a key point to ask. If the community is interested in collaboration, good synergy can result. If the developers go off in a corner and work in isolation, coordination and synergy may be limited.

Collaboration Assessment

Given that OSE is about collaborative development - we assess known industry standards, and work with them to distribute the enterprise. The incentive for the collaborator is being part of a broader effort to scale the technology. The publicity involved drives sales and growth, and aims at a circular economy.

If the collaborator cares about the following, they may be good partners:

1. Circular economies
2. Distributing enterprise - creating new entrepreneurs
3. Collaboration on creating education materials
4. Technological Recursion to make more local production possible
5. A collaborative economy based on IP-free task-solving - ie, free of competitive waste

From the OSE perspective, we evaluate organization for promoting:

1. Supercooperation
2. Education
3. Entrepreneurship
4. Maker - transition from consumerism
5. Open Source - as core of culture that allows all this to happen