Specific Tasks for the Extreme Enterprise Hackathon

How to coordinate thousands of people in a collaborative effort? Outside of using open and accessible online tools and protocols for collaboration - the tasks themselves must lend themselves to wide collaboration. And, these tasks must be explainable in a short time, and the workflow must be modular such that many people can work in parallel.

The promise is 48,000 hours (2000 people, 24 hour hackathon) of effort. If coordinated effectively, that is equivalent to 24 human years of work! Then the question becomes - how can we leverage such an amount of effort effectively?

The general workflow for publishing involves a number of assets: creative writing, technuical writing, pictures, diagrams, icons, build instructions, workflows, bills of materials, budgets and economic models, potential business plans, training materials, uinstructional videos, diagrams, informative articles about the state of housing, and actual publishing. Since the final product is publication - the most clear way to organize the work is as 2000 pages of content.

We simply allocate ~1 page per person, and 2000 people collaborate on the product in parallel.

However, there is also the presentation level. Each of the 1000 pages should follow coherent formatting, fonts, color scheme, iconography, and content types. Thus:

A graphics team generates a set of icons. These apply as visual headings for content types, as well as icons for representing design information. Thus:

Every single item in the BOM has a technically accurate CAD corresponding to it, and an icon corresponding to the part. The icon allows for visual representation of anything being built - as a visual pattern language. In particular, OSE uses an Open Source Technology Pattern Language so that every product or design can be represented by the icon - as building blocks. This is similar to the periodic table, where any chemical can be represented as a combination of individual atoms.