OSE Developers
OSE Developers are the official members of the OSE Engineering or Documentation Teams. This is a globally distributed volunteer team of designers, documenters, and prototypers. OSE developers commit a minimum of 10 hours per week to a coordinated development process on key OSE priorities, for a 3 month or longer duration. After the 3 month mark, OSE Developers have an option to continue.
The title of volunteer still has formal requirements of collaboration on active working teams, and is not to be taken lightly. The expectations are similar to the requirements in a 'regular job,' with timelines, project plans and team responsibilities. OSE Developers are selected for participation based on an application. The application process is maintained by the HR Team, and the onboarding process is shown at the HR Operations Manual.
The OSE Developer is the highest status of OSE development collaboration. The title of OSE Developer marks the official development team that is working actively on the OSE Roadmap. Otherwise, ad-hoc contributors are welcome to contribute to the OSE Wiki, the official development platform of the OSE project.
Development Teams must include a Heavyweight Product Manager, a Product Owner, and a Process Manager to steward a Concurrent Engineering process. Development teams should have 12-24 people to show clear and visible development velocity. An interdisciplinary team is needed because many projects include elements of mechanics, electronics, hydraulics, sensors, software, etc. An effective team works on projects taken from the perspective of module-based design - where each project is broken down into modules that can be developed in parallel. Development cycles are run on a quarterly basis (the 90 day period), with the intended outcome being a product release. If OSE Developers are required to contribute 10 hours per week, then the 12 person team is effectively a 3-person full time equivalent. This is the minimum required for significant progress. Once a well-performing team is established, new teams may form. The minimum number of Developers for starting a new development team is 12.
OSE is starting a more formal team development process in order to produce better results in its prototyping efforts. The volunteer developer model works well when a good infrastructure is in place to handle a large distributed team, similar to powerful efforts such as Linux.org or wikipedia.org.