Hi Guys! So far many amazing things have been happening. We have accomplished several milestones that are worth celebrating. There are also sufficient work and experience done, to reflect upon, and discuss how it can go better. Just as a summary bare in mind everything we have been trying out as a small team:
what has happened?
Vinay, Jannes and I started a crowdfunding campaign, with videos and materials, but also a pilot project. The book I made has been a nice communication item, to raise the attention of different stakeholders. This all came from the sessions and discussions we had together.
Vinay and I followed the Mozilla Open Leadership program, which helped us learning and trying out github, better documentation, recruitment and workflow standards.
This experience also led us to make a hackathon, and teach others github and open source. (the hackathon made in TU Delft by Jannes, Vinay and I was effective and promising. We should try to repeat it in cycles)
The preparation of the hackathon led to the best collaboration effort we have reached so far with polemidis, and the major work done by him has been fundamental to show stakeholders and partners what we are trying to do.
We have learned a lot about git, github, collaborative design and development.
We have captured a bit of money, which we are using already to pay some of our bills.
:sparkles: This all deserves a proper celebration :1st_place_medal:
1. Where are we now?
We have are finishing the documentation of the machines that are ready (Grapples, and CNC). Polemidis has been the one executing most of these tasks, and the rest have been trying to some how support him in doing so.
We have been also exploring with the tractor project, mainly Vinay and Jannes, in a very initial and fuzzy phase. But this exercise has been also important as a training.
I have been mainly networking, writing stuff, trying to facilitate the process, recruiting people and supporting the different projects.
Things we are still trying to figure out.
1. Sustainability,viability and scalability of our project. How to make it grow, steady and easy for people to join.
2. Efficiency and effectiveness in our work. We are working in very different tasks, very concurrent, and with different levels of intensity varying per member. From my side, I think we are in a level of maturity as a core team to incorporate new best practices in our workflow, to take it to the next level. As we did with github, and learn git, we can learn new things. Vinay and Jannes have also been learning freecad and getting better at it. Learning tools step by step, I think is part of the process.
3. Consolidating our group in a proper legal structure. We have been discussing about this already. Association? Cooperative? NGO? I think Association is a good one, for the context of Netherlands, it can eventually also operate as a business in case we need it.
4. Making a business out of the products we create as a community . We have been making a business plan around one of the machines. Exploring also where there is a nice market fit for the CNC machine. The licensing aspect has been quite elaborate to make enable small business and entrepeneurs, and to have an inclusive approach.
What strategies are we trying out to consolidate our project
1. Crowdfunding campaign, crowd-sourcing our project. The campaign has not been effective enough and the scope have changed. There are also other methods of doing crowdsourcing like suscriptions, etc.
2. Working with staff of universities mainly in Netherlands and lately on Cuba.
3. Finding out people that one to do open source projects, that have machines to share, and want to join forces (it worked well with polemidis).
4 . Teaching people the open source way of doing things . By this I mean becoming excellent and highly proficient in open source best practices, we still have a long way to go, but we are getting there everyday. When professors asked me what we offered in Cuba, I could only offer them to teach them to lead, manage and become good at collaborative and open source design. If this is going to be a major distinction of our team, we have to improve this aspect.
Where are we going?
This we have to discuss in our meeting, based on our reflections, the success metrics we have set up in our Open Canvas, and the roadmap of the initiative which needs to be revisited and adapted if needed.
Hi Guys! So far many amazing things have been happening. We have accomplished several milestones that are worth celebrating. There are also sufficient work and experience done, to reflect upon, and discuss how it can go better. Just as a summary bare in mind everything we have been trying out as a small team:
what has happened?
:sparkles: This all deserves a proper celebration :1st_place_medal:
1. Where are we now?
Things we are still trying to figure out.
1. Sustainability,viability and scalability of our project. How to make it grow, steady and easy for people to join. 2. Efficiency and effectiveness in our work. We are working in very different tasks, very concurrent, and with different levels of intensity varying per member. From my side, I think we are in a level of maturity as a core team to incorporate new best practices in our workflow, to take it to the next level. As we did with github, and learn git, we can learn new things. Vinay and Jannes have also been learning freecad and getting better at it. Learning tools step by step, I think is part of the process. 3. Consolidating our group in a proper legal structure. We have been discussing about this already. Association? Cooperative? NGO? I think Association is a good one, for the context of Netherlands, it can eventually also operate as a business in case we need it. 4. Making a business out of the products we create as a community . We have been making a business plan around one of the machines. Exploring also where there is a nice market fit for the CNC machine. The licensing aspect has been quite elaborate to make enable small business and entrepeneurs, and to have an inclusive approach.
What strategies are we trying out to consolidate our project
1. Crowdfunding campaign, crowd-sourcing our project. The campaign has not been effective enough and the scope have changed. There are also other methods of doing crowdsourcing like suscriptions, etc. 2. Working with staff of universities mainly in Netherlands and lately on Cuba. 3. Finding out people that one to do open source projects, that have machines to share, and want to join forces (it worked well with polemidis). 4 . Teaching people the open source way of doing things . By this I mean becoming excellent and highly proficient in open source best practices, we still have a long way to go, but we are getting there everyday. When professors asked me what we offered in Cuba, I could only offer them to teach them to lead, manage and become good at collaborative and open source design. If this is going to be a major distinction of our team, we have to improve this aspect.
Where are we going?
This we have to discuss in our meeting, based on our reflections, the success metrics we have set up in our Open Canvas, and the roadmap of the initiative which needs to be revisited and adapted if needed.