Building a Team

Last Updated April 18, 2012.

• Scaling strategy: Impact, Organization (staff, campus infrastructure, org infrastructure, replication strategy), Budget, Economic Sustainability
• Metrics, Milestones, Project Evaluation & Review

Abstract

The OSE project is evolving towards a scalable, open source product development platform. To get there, we are developing the Extreme Manufacturing agile development methodology, and applying it to the development of the Global Village Construction Set as a test case. We have been so far able to capitalize basic infrastructure at low cost (such as a 4000 square foot workshop) at $10/square footOne emergent pressing need is a scalable strategy for motivating and retaining development talent while maintaining low budget requirements. We propose herein a self-funding human resources strategy to eliminate dependence on external funding for keeping a well-staffed organization.

We have already demonstrated measurable success in recruitment. This includes 600+ True Fans and growing, 3 full time OSE developers (Marcin, Aaron, Yoonseo), 3 current DPVs (Jose, Brianna, Andrew), several Replications around the US including 2 enterprise startups, collaboration with Team Wikispeeed, collaboration with Creation Flame, and over 100 active wiki contributors.

To extend our open product development method towards rapid, agile (beta product release in 3 months with 3 monthly prototyping cycles - while maintaining high quality control and producing complete documentation), parallel, scalable (extendable to any number of projects) development platform requires an improved human resources strategy.

Problem Statement

We are developing the open source economy - an economy that dramatically increases the rate of innovation by optimizing both production and distribution of wealth - while promoting environmental regeneration and social justice. Our route to the open source economomy is a scalable, mainstreamable, open source product development platform - which relies on unleashed collaboration - unrestrained by monopolistic tendencies, favoritism, trade secrets, or protected IP.

Tradition enterprise solutions for organizational scaling involve significant human resource budgets ($5M for Wikimedia Foundation or Kiva, or typically 20-80% of operational expenses). In order to produce the potential for internet-scale phenomenon scaling - one possible avenue is creating a self-funding organization. We are taking on a unique approach to achieve this.

Self-fungibility requires low development cost matched by robust generation of visible economic value. Both of these can be addressed with a strategic approach to human resource development

Solution

As an open source project with high social capital (access to TED, Shuttleworth Foundation, and other support networks), we are well-position to leverage widespread volunteer support while to leverage available funding for high impact. Our proposed solution revolves around a human resource