Team Levels

Team Levels or Team Maturity is a metric that defines the maturity of an OSE project team, scored from 0-5, in so far as the metric leads to assessing the potential for rapid parallel development leading to Distributive Enterprise. This metric is useful to Process Managers - in so far as it helps the manager assess how much energy should be given to a certain team. For mature teams, it is OSE's interest to support these teams as much as possible - with supporting information or other ways that lead to the creation of Distributive Enterprise and the open source economy.

Project progress depends on the completeness of a team. Parallel development depends on the number of people available for development, their skill level, their Collaborative Literacy (understanding of collaboration and their willingness to engage in ego-less development), and processes/protocols to guide massive parallel development.

In the OSE Model, six or seven figure product development budgets are rendered obsolete, as an open, distributive enterprise protocol can both develop products and fund their development via Distributive Enterprise creation.

The Level 0 team contains a solo open source warrior without a declared IP license, while Level 5 inluces a full team with leadership, clear goals, SME-level expertise, and a membership with a clear team charter.

The following is a description of the elements defining a certain level of team maturity, taken from the perspective of distributed, autonomous development (ie, voluntary, unpaid development). The reference point is a zero-waste development process, with zero barriers to participation, resulting in Distributive Enterprise and the next trillion dollar economy, the open source economy.

Level 0

There are 3 types of Level 0 contributors: solo warriors, non-documenting practitioners, and individuals from other well-documented projects.

This is a solo developer who is producing design that they may be willing to share under an OSHWA-compliant license. This developer publishes some results, but without clear instructionals to enable easy replication. This developer does not use the OSE Wiki or other platform with open source contributor terms. For the practical purpose of building upon such work, open source developers should attribute such work, use it, and contact the developer requesting further documentation, and clear license terms. Such due diligence is required to determine whether this person's work is usable at OSE. For all practical purposes, such a developer may have useful information, but the content may not be usable by OSE due to license incompatibility.

Another Level 0 contributor - one not seen by OSE - is one who is working somewhere in the world on meaningful content, but without publishing replication-enabling documentation, such that any broader audience is not aware of the work, and as such, cannot build upon it. Such knowledge is as if it did not exist from the OSE perspective, and is considered wasted human effort from the perspective of time-binding. This happens to be the case for many people coming in contact with OSE - individuals who say that they are working on great things, but as long as these things are not published - it is as good as if it didn't exist. Some of this non-transparency may be due to limited time, and at other times, it may be based on fear or a lack of commitment to open source principles.

The most potentially useful projects to OSE are well-documented, OSHWA-compliant license projects outside of OSE. These can provide a goldmine of relevant product development experience - if discovered. Thus, discory of such projects is an important point to pursue because of the potential payback - especially when these projects are directly related to the GVCS or to the OSE Roadmap. As sopp

Level 1

A level 1 contributor works under a declared, OSHWA-compliant license, and uses the OSE wiki for documentation. Because this individual uses the OSE wiki - this information can be found in a search - and from the time-binding perspective - it exists. However, this information may be distributed as random bits on the OSE wiki, without organization via any of OSE's existing documentation/development protocols and structures. Thus, this information may not be easy to find or build upon. However, since this information does exist - it may be subsequently organized and structured on the wiki - and is the reason why wiki pages that seem disconnected from the work of OSE should never be deleted, unless they are spam beyond any doubt.

Level 2

The Level 2 contributor adds OSE documentation and development protocols on top of their Level 1 contributions. This includes at the very minimum being listed and maintained under the OSHW Dashboard as an external project, such that it is findable on the OSE wiki. For OSE projects, an OSE Level 2 contributor means that they have started a Work Log, and use the Development Template to document Conceptual work, Technical Designs, Calculations, BOM, Build Procedures, and Testing Data Collection. The Development Template includes the OSHW Dashboard.

Level 3

Contributor adds adherence to the OSE Roadmap for choosing the items to work on based on the priorities and timing of OSE International. This includes developing a team of at least 3 people for a specific prject. A minimum team includes a Process Manager, Technical Lead, Team Facilitator. Collaborates with Recruiting Team to recruit full team membership, and leads remote Design Sprints to make progress. To attain Level 3 teams, Process Manager training is required to enable the OSE Development Process knowledge to be disseminated widely. Also, the OSE Design Guide, Development Process, and Development Template needs to be clear to the Facilitator, who must teach all team members. The Development Template must be clear to the Technical Lead. Process Management is most critical, as this requires on-the-fly decisionmaking regarding development steps, and this role may be compared to that of the Linux Lieutenants meritocracy in terms of collaboration between trusted project members.

Level 4

Adds livelihood goals to the way they work - ie, using the development as the basis for making a living in the future. Agrees with the Distributive Enterprise aspect.

We emphasize this point because the Level 4 contributor has a specifically high level of commitment to shipping product, as opposed to contributing as a hobby, or wanting to help others in a general sense as opposed to dogfooding the outcome of their work.

Level 5

This is the highest level team maturity, achieving a high performance team capable of generating about a dozen person years of development time per month via a round-the-clock, globally distributed effort.

• Full and high performing team (minimum 5 person, but typically 120 people) aligned on a explicit DE goals.
• Time to Minimum Viable Product is 1 month, and Time to Distributive Enterprise is 6 months.
• Ability to deliver a new DE on 6 month time scale, and to train new DE participants on a 1 month TFRE - Time to First Revenue Event
• Documents and reports progress aligned with the Roadmap on OSE media channels
• Coordinated with the OSE Core Team and subscribes to a Team Charter.
• Has succeeded in demonstrating a Distributive Enterprise, and is using such proceeds to fund and expand further development towards Distributed Market Domination (de-monopolizing of a field of endeavor) via Distributive Enterprise.