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

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.

The OSE project is evolving towards a scalable, open source product development platform - as a combination of non-profit and for-profit organizational ecology. To reach the scalable, open product development platform, we are developing the Extreme Manufacturing agile development methodology. We are applying this agile methodology 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 (1), an OSE Campus - or 24 staff and 200 students on site at near-zero external cost (autonomous operation) - and (2), large-scale replication (an OSE Campus for every 100,000 population in the developed world by 2018).

Our goal for the nonprofit sector, collaborative product development platform is to raise $5M by year-end 2012 and to build up to a team of 24 full time developers (entrepreneurs, organizers, fabricators, engineers, disruptors) towards developing the OSE Microfactory by year-end 2014 ($80k/month/4000 square foot facility/4 people)- with the first OSE Campus built by year-end 2015, and 12 students trained by year-end 2016, 100 by year-end 2016, 1000 by year-end 2017, and 10,000 by year-end 2018. We expect a full open economic option (collaborative development for any goods and services) to be unleashed by 2018.

One emergent pressing need is a scalable strategy for motivating and retaining development talent while maintaining low budgets. We propose herein a self-funding human resources strategy to eliminate dependence on external funding for keeping a well-staffed organization.

To extend our open product development method towards a rapid, agile, parallel, scalable development platform requires an improved human resources strategy. Rapid refers to a beta product release time scale of 3 months with 3 monthly prototyping cycles - while maintaining high quality control and producing complete documentation. Scalable means extendable up to 24 parallel projects). It is the goal of this write-up to define the recruiting strategy by communicating the enterprise and values model.

Problem Statement and Solution

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

Progress to Date

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 and with Creation Flame, and over 100 active wiki contributors, and approaching a million hits for the Global Village Construction Set TED Talk.

OSE Campus Operational Model

The OSE Campus is a mix between a non-profit education institution and a for-profit enterprise.

The OSE Campus is intended to be a Distributive Enterprise training facility (Open Source University) that combines a lifestyle of lifelong leaning and work. It includes entrepreneurship training, education, production, product dog-fooding, and open source start-up incubation in one.

The OSE Campus is essentially an open source, learning and enterprise community. The organizational ecology involves a university-like campus, where in addition to entrepreneurship training, the participants engage in the use and testing of the products and services that are developed. Since the products are related to the creation of living and working infrastructures of communities based on local resources - the OSE Campus is effectively an autonomous, high-tech village. The OSE Campus operational model involves a community that produces a modern standard of living from local resources. This notion is typically socially unacceptable - but this critique may no longer be relevant if it can be shown that such a task takes 2 hours per day to achieve by the community. The social model involves a village designed to disrupt the economic paradigm of artificial scarcity, towards one based on pursuit of higher purpose.

The unique funding model includes:

• Strong emphasis on unleashing human abilities, life-long learning, and breaking the habit of being oneself.
• OSE Microfactory and related productive operations - robust production is the backbone of economic prosperity and sustainability, operated in the for-profit sector
• Students pay tuition, with financial assistance available from Kiva microloans.
• Immersion education program - 1 year beginner's course, 2nd year advanced course.
• Students have an option to repay their tuition via apprenticeships where they generate value from production runs under the guidance of production mentors.
• Faculty and staff participate for 10 hours per week in productive activity to bootstrap fund their own salaries at $50k/household/year.
• Local production allows for zero overhead costs for the built environment, utilities, and other critical infrastructure
• A farm manager produces all the necessary food with assistance from apprentices or volunteers
• Intensive week-long, augmented reality short courses provide another revenue stream for the community - where state-of-art production techniques are converted into Real Startups
• Publication sales add funding to nonprofit branch
• 50% of profits from OSE Microfactory and other productive enterprises goes back into open source product research and development, development and growth of the community, and capitalization assistance to OSE Campus replications.
• No employees, only entrepreneurs, partners, and volunteers.
• Deep culture of responsibility as a means to addressing pressing world issues.
• Full autonomy is present in community as complete import substitution occurs for all essential items, but is optional for luxuries. That is - food, energy, and fuel are produced on site.

Scaling Strategy

Scaling strategy: Impact, Organization (staff, campus infrastructure, org infrastructure, replication strategy), Budget, Economic Sustainability

Progress to Date

We have released 4 beta products of the GVCS in the Civilization Starter Kit. Improvements are ongoing. We have been so far able to capitalize basic off-grid infrastructure at low cost - a 4000 square foot workshop at $10/square foot, and a 3000 square foot living unit for $15/square foot - by using our open source compressed earth brick press, power unit, and soil pulverizer. We are currently modifying the tractors for robust operation. To date, we have b