Seed Project: Free Technology Guild

=My Project Idea=

Seed project proposal for the Free Technology Guild as a member project of itself. (Back to proposals.)

Name
The Free Technology Guild

Group
Free Technology Guild Working Group

One Line Summary
This project proposes a model for sustainability for the Free Technology Academy.

What is the proposed solution?
We will build opportunities for participants to learn in practice working on free technology projects.

How will you make the change?
We need to build a network of interested students, mentors, clients, and service providers. We are networking both within the Free Technology Guild and in other groups of researchers/technologists/activists/learners. We need to build a light-weight platform that all of these people can plug in to, find each other, and start collaborating, learning, and making money.

What is your value proposition?
We will create a new "agora" for free technology. Many people need to learn about how to work with free tools, but we will be unique in combining a learning focus with highly skilled teachers/co-learners.

Why is this different from other offerings?
We provide mentoring and connect learners up with mentoring opportunities, while maintaining a co-created knowledge base about the subject domain(s). Sites like StackExchange are good for "one-off" questions. But the FTG provides mutual support throughout the life of a project, and deals with not just technical issues, but all aspects of project management.

=Team: bio, expertise, and role(s) in the group=

Member 1
Joseph Corneli, Team Leader. Member of the Board of Directors of PlanetMath.org, Ltd., and Ph. D. candidate in the Knowledge Media Institute at The Open University, UK.

Member 2
Wouter Tebbens, Team Leader. President of the Free Knowledge Institute and Director of the Free Technology Academy. M. Sc. in Mechanical Engineering.

Member 3
Fabrizio Terzi, GNU Apprentice and Director of the Sensory Immersion Augmented Reality (S. I. A. R.) project. Graphics Guru and Experience Engineer.

| Fabrizio Terzi:

Blue Team: Bergamo hub Seed Project: Bergamo (Italy) HUB Laboratory Project Art & Open Technology Incubator

Member 4
Red Team Leader, TBA

Member 5
Blue Team Leader, TBA

=Stage of the venture=

The project is "new". We had time to submit a preliminary proposal to the HP Labs Innovation Research Program, in response to the topic "Research in the Dynamic Support of Future Business Environments" (not funded).

Date of founding
The first request for comment was circulated on the FTA mailing list on December 9, 2011.

Milestones achieved

 * Working group created
 * Foundational documents written
 * Roadmap proposed

Milestones yet to be achieved
A couple of key points here; see our Roadmap for details.


 * Develop a platform and/or components that plug into existing platforms that enable display and interaction with profiles and system objects (like development contributions, Q&A, documentation, use cases, reputation, etc.)
 * Apply again for grant (or startup?) funding to support research and development work, or find clients who can support this work directly (outside of the grant/startup model)

=Support required=

Who else do you need on your team to make the project a success?

 * We are working on a couple of parallel prototypes (FTA website in Elgg, PlanetMath in Planetary/Drupal 7), but we do not yet have anyone building "the FTG Platform". For this, we need a "Blue Team Leader".
 * We need to recruit more interested and active participants who can assume the roles needed for the FTG to thrive. For this, we need a "Red Team Leader".

Are any of these people in the Academy/Guild?
Possibly. Currently, we are sharing responsibilities for Red and Blue teams. The FTA is currently working on its own revised plans for how to run courses, and we can network with those people for purposes of "coordination" (at least).

What in general would you do with funding or volunteer support?

 * We need to build the platform (both with code and personnel).
 * We are in general eager to find clients are interested either in paying for services, or volunteers who are interested in providing services to "bootstrap" the platform.

=Market and Competitors=

Quantify the market (if possible).
We would like to be able to integrate with every free software and technology project out there. There are a lot of projects! Again, while StackExchange etc. provide good one-off support, we aim to provide life-of-project support in a similar domain. Not everyone will need/want that kind of support. And, not everyone will want to be part of providing such support (they would rather get on with hacking). That's OK. We are only interested in a "slice".

Specify your target niche (my target is "any Internet user" is not an answer)
We are interested in people with a "learning orientation" -- people who find the current bug tracking systems insufficient or confusing, people who are not satisfied with existing textbooks and manuals, and people who especially like to learn and teach "in practice" in hard work. We recognize that these people generally need an income, so we are seeking to provide employment or pathways to employment for such persons. In other words: we particularly want to work with hackers with social skills.

We are in some sense competing with organizations like Y Combinator, and at present, they have the upper hand, since they can offer funding to new projects, whereas we at present are pretty penniless.

=A few numbers=


 * Our present aim: income for "ground floor" members by October (even if just a few hours of work a week). Let's put this at 200 EUR per person per month total salary.
 * Our next milestone: Integrate with 100 active projects by this time next year. Salaries increase in proportion to workload.