Core Team

Core Team Duties

The Core Team is the organizational heart of OSE's product development. A core team leads the development of each of the 7 product areas shown in the Overview. The Core Team is responsible for producing the due dilligence and engineering- specifications, designs, fabrication procedure, bill of materials, reviews - to make prospective supporters sufficiently confident to support the products in development.

Core team members should have technical expertise, but it is not necessary. We are interested more in people who can solve problems. The nature of our appropriate technology (AT) development is such that the material, by nature of ST - is simple, user friendly, and intuitive. It may be said that the utter simplicity is the hallmark of a great product. Therefore, only the

Core Team Size

   * Core team should be small, but funders should be many
 
   * Funding cycles should be short - one month - to make progress visible and help risk sharing
   * Simplest way to phrase the neosubsistence economic model is "Buying Club for Open Source Product Development"
         o The Buying Club metaphor goes only so far as distributing cost among buyers to purchase better, lower cost products
   *
     We need to focus on recruiting core teams to accelerate progress
         o This is time-taking work, but there is no easy way to produce mass participation
   * We should use a Wikipedia-like model - gather a core team of distillers who add value to information from a large number of sources
         o The main difference between our model and Wikipedia is that Wikipedia gets random, voluntary contributions (of content). We will solicit those contributions (of information), since our contributions are of a far more directed, though not necessarily more technical nature (as Wikipedia has some very technical content).
         o It may be an interesting avenue to solicit help from the Wikipedia team to get our core teams organized. They may point us to people who may be interested in being on our core teams
         o We need to define the roles of the core team more clearly. Recruiting the core team should be an ongoing, piecemeal effort. There is no magic bullet.

Scope of Product Development

The OSE product development effort is unique in that it does not stop with the development of a good product. We continue for the sake of replicability, such that the products developed can enjoy a wider audience. We continue our product development process to the design and building of a production facility, such that people who support our effort can later have access to products at reasonable cost. Not only this, but also, one of our inherent goals is optimization of the product and its production process. To introduce the possibility of even wider markets, we are also designing a training and apprenticeship program to our product development. We aim to train other entrepreneurs in the production of products, and as such, our work constitutes a business incubator. Because we aim to train others, we are introducing the possibility of production levels similar to mass production methods, except with the participation of a large number of producers. Because we are focusing on optimization for cost reduction, we believe that we can compete with the mainstream market, without any ecological or geopolitical compromises.

Additional notes

• Sam Rose is working on http://socialsynergyweb.org/opensourceecology/node/add/wikipage as a space for coordinating core teams, Core Team members should visit this site regularly
• In order to appreciate the nature of the economic model that we are testing, Core Team members should start with http://p2pfoundation.net/Neocommercialization , and this definition should evolve to help communicate the model