Large-Scale Collaborative Design

Introduction

For large scale collaborative development to occur, there are 3 scales of operation for contributors. This applies to any collaborative design, whether CAD, graphics assets generation, video production, documentation, etc. At each level, the base atomic unit of development must be defines.

Basic Coordination Requirements

1. Focus. If audacious goal is clear (such as getting past COVID), focus is still needed to develop products fully.
2. Scalable platform - wiki is used in OSE's work. Social media, Jitsi Video Bridge, part libraries, FreeCAD, are all examples of scalable platforms. Scalability key is simplicity and rapid onboarding.
3. Rapid Onboarding - one hour onboarding course for basic performance, and 4 hours for integrated process. One week (40 hours) for qualified process managers, who are ideally product owners.
4. Collaborators - who is collaborating? Need a team based on massive transformative purpose, where 10x Is Easier Than 2x
5. Documentation - most important asset. The OSE wiki is our repo.
6. Development Process - standard product development, such as embodied in Development Template
7. Task division - Kanban board, modular breakdown of Module Based Design, Collaboration Architecture
8. Prototyping - Ideas are nothing without prototypes to validate them. There are many ways from 3DP, to calculations, to partial prototypes of Test-Driven Design. Doable via hackathons, startup camps, Incentive Challenges,. Extreme Manufacturing Workshops, Summers of Extreme Design-Build
9. Review - SMEs and users feedback on the development
10. Communication - video, social media, Slack, collaborative video protocol.
11. Distillation - upvoting. Critical.
12. Application - Developers must either engage in dogfooding or production/distribution to outside markets
13. Physical Plant and Hardware - dev kits, meetups, conspiring/development places, hackathons
14. Stigmergic Design - Team Story Game for Collaborative Video protocol; seeded templates on the wiki. Wiki assets for a stygmergic, construction set appraoch.
15. Agility - Things change fast. A common trend for large development attempts is: (1) things explode in fruitful activity; (2) things collapse from all the activity. The solution is protocols and collaborative literacy of protocol-users. When documenting, always think of the next iteration, and how that will be documented, and how your documentation can be scaled readily to other projects, modules, and systems. Any development project should be Fractal - both self contained, but also a building block.

Links

• Collaboration Architecture Log