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 intended to pave the way for a generalized open economic development platform. Operating cost reduction is one of our keys to maximizing platform scalability towards large-scale replication (an OSE Campus facility for every 10,000 population). We have been so far able to capitalize basic infrastructure at low cost (such as a 4000 square foot workshop) at $10/square foot. One 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 practices, trade secrets, or intellectual property access.

Typical human resource budgets are typically over 50% for nonprofit organizations (such as ~70% for salaries and independent contractors at at Benetech, p.6.). In order to facilitate internet-scale phenomenon scaling of an organization - one possible avenue is creating a self-funding, modular organization. We are taking on a unique approach to achieve this.

Solution

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