Contract Process

Contracts at OSE apply to paid staff and volunteers.

The following need to be specified with utmost clarity:

• Open IP Guidelines
• Focused, non-negotiable core work plan - visible to world
• Scope of work - what activities are and are not allowed
• Specific guidelines for communication with other team members and the rest of the world (including brand identity, authority, transparency, triangulation, etc)
• Specific guildelines for purchasing
• Specific guidelines for organizing and holding effective meetings
• Simple and transparent means of documenting work product - visible to world
• Simple and transparent review process - visible to world
• Measurability: measurable, assessable task assignment. Ie - how is the task framed so that assessment is easy and that the assessment can be made by anyone in the world
• Distraction management - given the integrated complexity of project, how do we assure navigation on well-defined path of responsibility
• Clear requirements on process documentation - how somebody else is to carry on a task in person's absence, or to distribute a particular task to remote collaborators.
  • The basic guideline for OSE work is that we intend to change culture by becoming the Most Collaborative Project in the World. In order to achieve scalability along the Critical Path and to change world culture towards open collaboration, we need to involve others. The critical way to involve remote collaborators effectively is to reduce barriers to on-boarding of those collaborators. This means educating them about our process to make an ask of them easy and transparent. For this, we use RACI Cubed (see last 2 points of this method). Therefore, we can leverage our core team to develop collaborative process, distibute tasks to others, and continue to define further collaborative process with the core team. The scope of such task distribution includes production of instructionals, conceptual designs, technical designs, documentation, review, and others.
• Microinstructionals. Participants are required to document their work, and one effective way to document are vlogs and mincroinstructionals. Vlogs may be used to generate microinstructionals, which are scripted, short instructionals on mission-critical components of the project that are relevant for scaling the project via replication of OSE Incubators. In the immediate term, important microinstructionals on Factor e Farm-specific topics are also desirable. Topics specific to Factor e Farm include experimental methods which amy not necessarily be used by other OSE Incubators - but which may evolve over time towards replicability.
• Compensation terms (confidential) and who covers what costs. What resources are brought to the table by each party.
• Method to handle contract violations, conflict, exit, contract changes, and other contingencies