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

The OSE project is evolving towards a scalable, open source product development platform. To get there, we are developing the Extreme Manufacturing agile development methodology, and applying it 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 budget requirements. We propose herein a self-funding human resources strategy to eliminate dependence on external funding for keeping a well-staffed organization.

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, collaboration with Creation Flame, and over 100 active wiki contributors.

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 time scale of beta product release in 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

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.

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

Solution

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. Our proposed solution revolves around a self-funding human resource strategy.

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