About

The Organic Design peer group is a small trust group whose members work well together as a team on various projects involving common interests. The team members all share common values, covered in our manifesto but include, amongst other things, 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.

The peer group has been working on a long-term project that involves defining a standard system we call the Platform specification. This is a system allows organisations to operate in accord with the principles outlined in the manifesto. We've been working on this in the background for over ten years as a long-term research project, and even though we've done a lot of development, it's all been in the context of research and prototyping.

We're now at the stage where we have a clear idea of the software and content we'd like to see in a packaged-up and releasable form. The peer group's role in this phase will be that of project architects. The input we'll have in terms of the software development will be focussed high-level technical direction. Our hands-on work will be mainly focussed on the ontology, which includes documentation, procedures, educational material and other system-oriented aspects.

Our aim is to minimise the amount of software development required, by using our current wiki organisation framework as a unified interface that effectively glues together a number of other applications into a mashup.