F'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y6hNVmBxl0

I know you probably get recommended a million things a day, but you might like this talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y6hNVmBxl0. It's about open management practices, common problems and solutions, and the addressing problems in community engagement. SCALE would be a pretty friendly venue for OSE, I would think... Encouraging our students/devs to give conference talks would probably be a great way to spread awareness of the project and help them boost their CVs.

Communications

Melanie sez: My goal is being part of making the open hardware revolution happen, decades in the making now and needed more than ever. I'm no longer a young person like I was when I watched your Ted Talk, I'm in the middle of my life. I want to look back at what I do during this time with pride.

I think we're at the crux of that revolution and one of the things that's going to facilitate this is the introduction of a methodology of open hardware data modelling. I think it is a critical innovation in technical communication that makes sharing open hardware projects like sharing open software projects. It makes it very easy to track changes to hardware projects among many other benefits... You may have heard Alexa reference this, too - that's because she and I both are collegiate with the Mach 30 team. I've recently been contributing to the project via pair programming. It's not ready yet, but we're hoping to accomplish it in the next year.

But while that's in progress, I see opportunities where I could offer content strategy suggestions, training docs update and maintenance, instructional design advice, and assistance with getting OSE on decentralized social media. I think that with my advice you would see people getting the message more quickly and onboarding faster. I'd like to help the team create an OSE kasm workspace on Github. And I'd like to participate in one of the builds. And, I want to refresh and improve the pen plotter documentation, which I'll work with Alexa to do.

I know you probably get recommended a million things a day, but you might like this talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6y6hNVmBxl0. It's about open management practices, common problems and solutions, and the addressing problems in community engagement. SCALE would be a pretty friendly venue for OSE, I would think... Encouraging our students/devs to give conference talks would probably be a great way to spread awareness of the project and help them boost their CVs.

Sometimes I find it hard to find my opportunity to speak in panel settings, especially with very talkative folks, so I appreciate you making sure I was able to contribute some thoughts during the call. I was a little sleep deprived, but hopefully I still managed to communicate some useful information. I think it was a good first call.

P.S. - I'm currently volunteering with Tetra Bio Distributed who has an open design for a PAPR. https://tetrabiodistributed.github.io/papra/ I'm actually going to DEFCON this year with it to do a demo lab, with the hope of recruiting more community involvement

Regards, Melanie Site: https://mnallen.net Portfolio: https://mnallen.online

MJ sez:

Set Your Own Work, Set Your Own Pay

We’re developing a flexible model we call “Set Your Own Work, Set Your Own Pay.” It’s designed for people who are aligned with our mission and ready to create real-world impact.

Here’s how it works:

You choose what to work on. As long as it’s aligned with OSE’s mission—building open, regenerative infrastructure and knowledge for public benefit—you’re free to focus where your skills and passion intersect. Whether it’s machines, education, software, organizing, agriculture, housing—you choose.

You propose your own compensation. You set a pay rate that you believe reflects the value of your contribution. We aim to pay for tangible outcomes—houses built, machines deployed, revenue generated from mission-aligned services—not for abstract plans or content. This helps us stay grounded in real impact.

Now here’s the rub—and the opportunity: We don’t yet have stable, enterprise-grade offerings beyond Seed Eco-Home construction and some builder training programs. While we’ve built and prototyped many machines (like the CEB press and 3D printer), these aren’t yet at the level where someone can plug in and earn a livelihood running a reliable business around them. That’s where you come in.

If the enterprise doesn’t exist yet, you can create it—and we’ll collaborate to make it succeed. That means working with you not just on product development, but on enterprise development: testing, packaging, documentation, training, and building out a replicable model that others can use. It’s about making open source actually usable—at the level of real, economically viable alternatives to mainstream systems.

If that resonates with you, the next step is simple: propose what you’d like to work on, how you’d like to contribute, and what kind of compensation makes it viable for you. From there, we’ll explore how to make it real—together.

TLDR;

You propose your own compensation. You set a pay rate that you believe reflects the value of your contribution. We aim to pay for tangible outcomes—houses built, machines deployed, revenue generated from mission-aligned services—not for abstract plans or content. This helps us stay grounded in real impact. And of course the proposal must make sense: be based on reasonable pay scales corresponding to realistic productivity expectations, ie - be based on proven revenue streams. Otherwise we have to prove the revenue streams - which is development work and unpaid. Development is not paid. Production is. Anything we develop for the public good is not paid work. Productivity that comes out of production is paid work, as is anything for private gain as opposed to public interest development.

Therefore, the key differentiator for pay vs free is whether the work is for private or public benefit. Another way to interpret this is information work vs material economy work. But that is not as accurate, as both information work or material work can be for public or private benefit. The key is to be clear on public vs private. Public work is any information work that benefits everyone. It is hard to justify production work as public work, unless it is for a completely public purpose, in which pay may be questionable.