Immersion Program Retention

Intro

• The immersion program is design to enlist full-time contributors to OSE, by virtual of revenue streams that allow the work to be sustainable.
• We have proven the Extreme Manufacturing revenue model.

Risk Analysis

There are several risks:

• Attendance - getting sufficient numbers of people to sign up
• Defection - long term commitment is desirable, but the open source nature of the work allows anyone to defect. What structure encourages people to remain rather than defect?
• Copying - we encourage anyone to copy our work. Our competitive advantage may be the time required to learn our trade. Someone would need to learn the technologies involved in our work - which requires a decent level of intelligence. We offer rapid learning, so people are encouraged to come to us for this service. We are also not concerned about this, as all of our work involves mundane, deep markets, and focuses on primary sectors that balance natural resource use with economics. We push the limits of that to the max, where we enter into productive meaning and abundance, so that does not appear to be a concern. Our model of change is to innovate continuously for import substitution, which means that we are replacing enterprise with knowledge. The more people that are producing - effecively - the more people can turn to creative pursuits as a result - as inefficiencies are eliminated when a civilization transitions from 0 to 1 on the Kardashev Scale. Copying is not seen as a major risk - all enterprises are at a risk of getting copied. We make it easy for others to copy us, but since we are introducing purpose with our products, we don't mind that. It is good if others carry on our work, if it is open source. If it's not open source + distributive, we have a competitive advantage. If it is open/distributive - we're glad that others are doing our work. We'd be very excited if others are continuing open source development, as that means wealth for everyone.

Collaborate vs Defect

This is a definite risk. Why does someone stay with OSE if they could go off on their own with our knowledge? Nothing prevents them from doing so, and since we believe in freedom, we don't want to keep anyone against their will. The question remains if we can make this business model work out. Let's look at specific cases - which still rely on free will and contractual agreements. OSE Fellows are not employees, as that is not consistent with OSE's mission of training entrepreneuers. The assumption here is that Fellows are indepedent contractors or volunteers, and very little of any type of coercion is designed into OSE.

• New Fellow- definitely the incentive is there for them to collaborate as they have support and a learning environment. Interacting with the OSE team provides rapid learning - and participating on the OSE Dev Team means priority access to inside knowhow. People can certainly learn our materials otherwise - but our program offers rapid learning specifically - via immersion training. As such, people can take months or years learning our work, or they can get the immersion in 5 weeks.
• Seasoned Fellow - for those who have now mastered an enterprise, it is possible for them to go on their own running workshops by themselves and capturing the full earnings. While a defector may not have the power or reputation of OSE, they can easily provide a great product - as they have been verified to do so. To address this:

• OSE has a promotion track where individuals graduate to higher levels of responsibility and avoid defection. There is no simple formula here, which makes promotion complicated. OSE likes to reduce its overhead and increase efficiency. Managing promotion could be a serious admin overhead if not designed correctly. Currently, the general strategy of OSE is for OSE Fellows to request promotion when they are ready to take on extra responsibility (and reward). See OSE Career Advancement.