About

Template:Webpage Organic Design is an organisation set up to facilitate the development of a number of projects being worked on by a small group of people working together as a team. The members of the team all share common ideals regarding free software, decentralised solutions and the general idea of maximising re-usability of these solutions and actively sharing them with others.

Since all the members work together as a functional unit, each can confidently take on jobs that they otherwise wouldn't have the expertise to complete alone, and since all the members are associated with many potential clients, the availability of good projects to work on is also improved.

Wiki Organisation

There are many diverse software tools required across the diverse aspects of the projects and organisations, but its the shared documentation system that ties them all togther into a single unified structure. This site is our ongoing effort at creating an organised and reusable system for organising all these aspects using wiki software.

This wiki organisation system involves establishing and refining a set of best practices which are conventions for all the members to adhere to when working together on projects managed within the site. In addition to these, all the procedures are documented and refined through use which optimises reuseability and knowledge sharing. It also reduces human error and makes tasks require less mental energy to perform.

Our site is based on the MediaWiki software which was designed for the Wikipedia online encyclopedia. Wikipedia is a massive project involving thousands of tasks being performed by thousands of users, so it's a very good example which we've learned a lot from during the development of our own system. Some of our ideas for wiki organisation are more specific than Wikipedia, so we've developed many extensions to the software to help it support our way of working more effectively.

Even quite diverse projects tend to have many needs in common, such as financials, contact management, invoicing, stock and suppliers, document and knowledge management, code development, web sites, printed material, LAN's and servers. The organisation has built up a number of procedures and best practices covering these aspects of organisation as a result of documenting its own administration requirements during working on internal projects and taking on work for other clients.

The documenting of procedures and the establishment of conventions is the basis of the organisational system we're refining and distributing. As we structure this knowledge more effectively, our means of allowing it to be re-used by others will also improve. Eventually the distribution of our system along with all the free software and knowledge necessary to use, refine and redistribute it will form the foundation for seminars and workshops that we'll be putting on around the community.

We've found that in working together as a group, some concerns come up once in a while amongst the participants regarding their contributions and the distribution of profits made by the organisation. Following are the main concerns that have cropped up within our group and our perspectives on them, which may be of use to other groups wanting to work in a similar way.

Working on projects together

The people working together on projects are using the freely available system of procedures, extensions, best practices. The site has no ownership or relationship directly with these projects. Each project is an agreement purely amongst the client and those working together to achieve the solution. Any profits or losses generated by the projects are the responsibility of those who accept payments or contracts for work covered by the project. The site procedures, templates and structure offers advice on what aspects should be discussed and agreed upon before moving to each phase. This way of working is very similar to using sites like RentACoder and eLance, except that the infrastructure is not taking a cut and is more casual and therefore reliant on a certain level of trust amongst members working together. In fact many of the jobs we work on together have come from bids that members of our team have made in RentACoder or eLance.

Work done improving Organic Design

Some of the people working together on projects within the site have put significant time into developing software and content solutions used by the site and its organisational system. All the software and content is free to use and modify under the GPL or LGPL licenses, and most work done on it is done voluntarily, because those developing it realise that working on good freely available software brings opportunity, for example the ability to offer consultation, installation or administration services. The content that the members and public are spending time refining and improving is freely available to be set up on any of their own servers, and the method of doing that is documented clearly as procedures, so all such work is beneficial to all contributors.

Some of the work on open source software in the site has been funded by clients requiring various functionality, their incentive to allow it to be open source is that we usually offer a lower price to work on open source projects, and often refuse to work on proprietary software regardless of price. And some of the work required by the site may require financial incentive before any roles commit to working on it. These situations are handled as projects in the system for the members to discuss the resource requirements and allocation as they would for any normal client project.

Organic Design revenue

This aspect has started to become relevant because the site has begun to build up a small online community mainly around MediaWiki related expertise and resource. The organisation may generate revenue from hosting other sites, or selling products for clients through some of the sites running on its servers. These revenue streams are independent of the members working together on projects within the site, and some such projects may be completely unknown to the members - i.e. the Organic Design organisation was set up specifically to support a number of open source projects and goals, but is also a business entity representing one member who is entitled to work on private business operations. All the other current members also have one or more of their own businesses and sites and are free to use the resources and knowledge learned on this site to carry out their own private business ventures in addition to those carried out together in the site.