Distributive Enterprise Assessment

Intro

This is an assessment to determine whether a certain project qualifies for collaboration with Open Source Ecology within the framework of a Distributive Enterprise. OSE products follow a Product Selection Metric.

Assessment occurs at two levels: first, the technology itself - and second, the organization that produces the technology. The latter is key in terms of leveraging potential collaboration to facilitate development work. Without a group of collaborating stakeholders, any development would still be about 'reinventing the wheel' - as hardware blueprints only without support around them require a lot of work. Unless they are extremely well documented up to the enterprise level - which generally doesn't exist.

Controversial Idea

Why ask somebody to 'give away their business model'? Doesn't it sound like they would lose?

They would lose market centralization, but likely gain on innovation and sales.

How? We believe that if we combine efforts, more people working in enterprise - by collaborating openly - means that more innovation happens, and everyone wins.

Just take a look at... wait a minute, nobody has shown this yet.

That's right. That's why we are here to pave the way.

We believe that this idea will work in essential enterprises - ones that have at least $1B market size. Other less essential enterprises - maybe not as easy - as the market may simply be too small to allow unlimited collaboration. By 'large market', we roughly mean that any community of 10,000 or more people would benefit from running a certain enterprise. Such as cordless drills, bycycle manufacturing, and power transistor-making - among obvious ones such as farming or building houses and cars.

Assessment of Technology

For a positive assessement, these are the requirement:

1. Does the device itself, or products that can be produced with this device - command at least a $1B global market? The market must be significant, meaning that the product can be considered for scalable, Distributed Market Substitution
2. Is the license OSHWA and OSI compliant? Must comply with economic freedom. NC and P2P licenses do not qualify.
3. Distributed Manufacturing -Does the product lend itself to distributed manufacturing, or can it be modified to be produced in a distributed way? (Easy sourcing, common materials, Distributed Quality Control)
4. Closed Loop Material Cycles - does the product lend itself well to full lifecycle stewardship?
5. Product Ecologies -Does the product fit with OSE Product Ecologies to create a Civilization Starter Kit or Global Village Construction Set?

Other Useful Points

1. Community - Is there an open source community around the project?
2. Collaborative Literacy - Is the community or its leaders interested in collaboration? This is a key point to ask. If the community is interested in collaboration, good synergy can result. If the developers go off in a corner and work in isolation, coordination and synergy may be limited.

Collaboration Assessment

Given that OSE is about collaborative development - we assess known industry standards, and work with them to distribute the enterprise. The incentive for the collaborator is being part of a broader effort to scale the technology. The publicity involved drives sales and growth, and aims at a circular economy.

If the collaborator cares about the following, they may be good partners:

1. Circular economies
2. Distributing enterprise - creating new entrepreneurs
3. Collaboration on creating education materials
4. Technological Recursion to make more local production possible
5. A collaborative economy based on IP-free task-solving - ie, free of competitive waste

From the OSE perspective, we evaluate organization for promoting:

1. Supercooperation - Are they not threatened by somebody stepping on their toes? Do they see that the pie can grow for everybody?
2. Education - are they willing to teach their material - both technology and enteprise?
3. Entrepreneurship - for us, it's: "Are they open to sharing their enterprise blueprints fully so that others can replicate, either collaboratively or independently?" Are they willing to support the collaborators, and publish for the sake of independent replication?
4. Maker - transition from consumerism. Does the organization create makers?
5. Open Source - as core of culture that allows all this to happen. Does the organization not only endorse, but require, open licenses? Yes for JOGL, One Community, or OSE, not for Fab Labs or Wikifactory or Ouishare or Peer Production License.

Template

Grading is 1-5 stars - which denotes everything from negative contribution (they detract from that qaulity) up to exceptional out of the ball park contribution. Negative, low, medium, high, exceptional are the 1-5 stars.

1. Supercooperator - One star if they are complete assholes or display unethical or a-ethical behavior related to Political Ponerology. Low if they cooperate solely on commercial interest. Medium if they actually claim to be collaborative, but none of their programs reflect the same. High if they demonstrate being collaborative. Exceptional is if they are off-the-charts - understanding that we are at Kardashev Scale 0.0001 and that abundance is a real possibility.
2. Education - Zero - they do not disclose any of their economically-significant know-how, and would even sabotage yours. Ponerological behavior. Low - if they provide some useful material, but none of any economic significance. Medium - if they actually spend visible effort bringing others up to speed - such as publishing useful technical infrmation with economic significance. High - if tney actively endorse economically-signification dissemination of knowledge - applicable directly to enterprise operations. Exceptional - if they are really good at training others for distributive enterprise.
3. Entrepreneurship - Zero - no knowhow shared. Low - provide some entrepreneurial insight and development. Medium - they spend a significant fraction of their energy on entrepreneurship training in addition to other activities. High - they are enterprise-centril. Exceptional - they are really good at what they do.
4. Maker - Negative - they create consumers - their audience is discouraged from making things, in the negative sense of 'the pen is mightier than the sword'. Low - they give little or no attention to building real things. They endorse maker culture theoretically, but do not have means for actual expression of this through their work/product. Medium - they appreciate and promote building things - as part of their program. High - their product is build- and production-centric on the part of the user. Exceptional - they contribute signficantly to provision of material needs through distributed means.
5. Open Source - Negative - they are not transparent, have proprietary information, and prevent others actively from using their technology. Low - they publish under CC-NC style licenses, which allow one to examine the content, but not to use it for commercial purposes. Medium - they don't have IP that is worth protecting, or they don't care about enforcing IP, and actually share their IP. High - they are open-source centric as a brand, but possibly not on ethical grounds. Exceptional - they succeeded at wide uptake and livelihood creation from their work, and actively endorse the libre and distributive aspects of a technology.