Announcing the "Drupal Open Co-operative Business Model"!

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fouadbajwas's picture

Okay everybody,

Neil McEvoy, you have tempeted me to announce the "Drupal Open Co-operative Business Model", the first of its kind, this too will be a Business Center of the marketplace. This will also cut down on the issue of pricings, Asian's cutting your profit grips and all that stuff! So here it goes:

Copyright Notice 2005, Fouad Riaz Bajwa, All rights Reserved till further notification:
Remember this business model titled "Drupal Open Co-operative Business Model BMOC" is neither patented nor it is available for patenting under US Federal Laws or international WTO-TRIPS and only falls into Copyright of creative expression, it is the Official Copyright of Mr. Fouad Riaz Bajwa, General Secretary and Co-Founder of FOSSFP: Free and Open Source Software Foundation of Pakistan resident of Lahore, Pakistan and is announced as of June 20th of 2006 on http://groups.drupal.org/marketplace as part of ongoing discussions to formulate a Drupal Services Consulting Marketplace. On my behalf, I officially authorize, Jenny Hsueh of On Demand Network, NJ and Neil McEvoy Bootstrap Ventures (I hope you two don't mind!) to defend this model and its Copyright legalities in New Jersey, USA, or, anywhere they deem there is a violation or misuse of the business model titled "Drupal Open Co-operative Business Model BMOC".

This business model titled "Drupal Open Co-operative Business Model" is for defining alternative business models for the open source general services and specialized services markets both online and offline. The model defines a format for developing a Software Development Co-operative based around the Drupal CMS the avenues of services or market opportunities it has provided. This model also addresses the marketing power and recognition that Drupal requires in the global ITeS marketplace by providing a strong case for marketing Drupal globally.

This is completely an Electronic Marketplace Model, a virtual organization that only has marketing deployments but no inhouse development centers, development is managed virtually and the model has not development overhead costs, no large software house requirements and is free from the physical factory model. This model capitalizes on knowledge products developed by knowledge workers residing in remote locations servicing international clients and contacts maintained by the business.

According to this model there are three major collectives (Business Centers or Profit Centers for that matter) of the Drupal Open Co-operative Business Model (now will be termed as Drupal-BMOC):

1. Marketing Collective -(BMOC-MC)
This is the marketing frontend of the Co-operative

2. Development Collective -(BMOC-DC)
This is the development backend and the mutual fund of the Co-operative

3. Support Collective - (BMOC-SC)
This is the Open Source Software, Artwork, Capacity Development and specialized techincal services group (TSG) of the Co-operative that creates all the websites, training materials, provides the infrastructure for the co-operative, it is the blood and heart of the organization.

1. Marketing Collective (BMOC-MC)


The Marketing Collective (BMOC-MC) is the marketing frontend of the model, whereby this collective will carryout extensive marketing activities for promoting the Drupal platform and services built around it globally both online and offline.

It is not necessary that the human component of the model be 100% specialized in Drupal Services but should be well prepared regarding the opportunities that Drupal offers in the commercial services supply chain sphere.

The BMOC-MC will prepare all the marketing collateral as well as important training materials provided by the Support Collective (BMOC-SC).

The marketing collective will extend international and localized websites for marketing of Drupal services as a corporate product and opportunity.

The BMOC-MC will market the service offerings and products being made available by the Development Collective (BMOC-DC) enabled through the BMOC-SC.

BMOC-MC will adopt and promote Open and alternative forms of carrying out business in the market with relevance to their region and continent of operations.

BMOC-MC will also take care of a legal advisory branch to manage the its collective and should only support the BMOC-DC and the BMOC-MC and not take a governing role of the Co-operative.

Each BMOC-MC unit is assigned a BMOC-DC unit based upon the type of services it is marketing and the business contracts it is bringing in to the Co-operative.

The BMOC-MC will only interface with the client with a selected member of the BMOC-DC, usually a Director or a CTO or Project Manager in order to resolve querries and take user requirements or complete UAT procedures and deliverables.

More to come on this model.

2. Development Collective (BMOC-DC)


The Development Co-operative is a software development model under which global software development services are recruited for catering to the growing ITeS demand globally.

The Development Co-operative is a project management model with a fund to manage the projects that are recieved under this model.

Anyone who joins the Drupal Cooperative will not pay any upfront fees or may do so if agreed upon by the administrators, all this money goes into the BMOC-Global Fund that will maintained as a Fund in any US bank as agreed by the administrator according to the laws of the US.

For example, if everyone pays US$100, and we have over 100 initial developers and consultants, the collective shall have a Fund of 100000, as time passes and the fees are raised, the amount will increase but the Fund is not dependent on this amount neither is encouraging it, it is to maintain the functioning and costs of the platform.

Now what happens is that based upon their experience, the service providers are taken under various software development/project management heads, for example, as
1. Project Directors
2. CTOs,
3. Development Managers
4. Developers

Operational Overview:
(Arbitration and Escrow issues are part of the legalities, risk management and operational working of the system that shall communicated later on the closed environment for discussions)

  1. Each Project Director reports to the Co-operative Management.
  2. CTOs support the Project Director in managing Development Managers.
  3. Development Managers manage developer teams around the globe.
  4. Developers are not aware of each other and only develop components assigned by the Development Managers.
  5. Development Managers are not aware of the client accounts and submit completed project to the CTOs who evaluate the projects on the basis of SQA-Testing Quality of product development and document patterns or best practices of development of these projects that are further extended to the BMOC-SC for documentation and compilation.
  6. The Director oversees the delivery and manages the submission of revenue to the fund.
  7. The fund will retain all the funds paying out to all the operational Human Resource of the system.
  8. The fund will charge a commission to all the developers.
  9. The fund will retain a percentage of the income of the developers as a retainers fees and quality check system
  10. This retained fund will continue to grow and if the developer resigns from the system shall be paid back the amount.
  11. The retained fund, the commissions, the joining fees, support the creation of the Fund, the Fund in return pays the Drupal Project money to sustain the project.
  12. The fund funds all the marketing and provides seed investments for business center startups but eventually takes back that money to grow, interest on the money funds the technical infrastructure of the system.
  13. The fund will offer an Initial Pubic Offering equated on the basis of its holdings and will only IPO one business or profit center one at a time to avoid buy offs by competitors (if any).
  14. The rest of the operational secrets shall be revealed on the closed group.

Here is an example of how the BMOC-DC will work. For every service market profit center, there may be one director, for eg:
Director CMS Services
Director Web Design Services
Director Graphic Design Services

The BMOC-MC under each Director may have, 4 CTOs, 16 Project Managers and 4 developers per project manager. The rest will be communicated later.

3. Support Collective - (BMOC-SC)


Support Collective (BMOC-SC) may be termed as the Finance, Administration, Technical Service Centers or the major backbone of the Co-operative infrastructure.

The BMOC-SC manages all the support to the BMOC-MC and BMOC-DC enabling extension of the overall marketplace, provision of marketing collateral, technical support, legal advisory, contracting, NDA/SLA issues, Fund management, organizing events and new profit centers for the Collective, managing marketing offices, hosting servers, providing program technical and managerial support.

The BMOC-SC will be responsible for attracting investment and entering IPO in the future.

The BMOC-SC will manage the Drupalversity and Certifications globally that will eventually become the standard criterion for joining the Co-operative and the Fund.

The business model for this project is being designed, Jenny please take note. My brain is still working and let me think what I can come up with, I am not a genious, just using all of the free spaces I have got up here :)

Comments

Well done

NeilMcEvoy's picture

Excellent work CEO Fouad ... ;-)

I think you've set out a great framework to start the ball rolling, and your enthusiasm is quite contagious, so we'll do everything we can to help fire it up.

As mentioned we've been working in this direction, so have momentum to throw in the pot. For example for the front-end marketing objectives, we're starting sites like web2-blog.com. Obviously still rough, but you get the idea, describe Drupal in different terms for different target markets to attract end-user demand. Web 2.0 is an obvious one because it's so hot and Drupal such a ready platform for it. I've started having a crack at this, showcasing relevant features, but I'm sure it can be done much better by experts etc., so happy to hand it over to the cause.

Within your empire structure we can each concentrate on what we do best. I'll try and sell stuff, and failing that, make some lovely tea...

Neil.

Putting up the Drupal Like SubV or CVs?

fouadbajwas's picture

Thanks Neil,

Everything you see here is from a community for the community for a cause. Why ask when we can benefit everyone in the Ecosystem. The BMOC defined upstairs is an Open ICT Ecosystem employing highend Web 2.0 capabilities that corporate US is still dreaming about. As we have contributed to the Web since 1995 and have seen it grow into what it is now, is miraculous, infact, every penny that I have earned and fed my family with is from this beautiful invention of mankind! Then why should we not believe in our ideas, the Drupal inventors did and look, have they not employed everything in the Web 2.0 vision, they were the ones to envision it some time back. It's them, they shared it with us, why not us share it back with them as well as the whole world. The BMOC-MC is the Web 2.0 vision, can anyone realise it?

Envision it with me, I am just the catalyst, build upon it, I am sharing my life, my career with all of you here, even though it's not a from a US guy carrying an extensive corporate American career, but a small one in a small low income developing country in South Asia, but some how it made its way here.

I can still remember myself in American School when Mrs.Walker used to teach us gardening in the sandbox, collect and recycle Pepsi cans and can tips outside our classroom and then Mrs. Lansengen helped us sell our first lot of lemonade and juices at the annual carnival back in 1983 and Mr. Gill who helped me build my first Dinasaur database on an Apple computer that would be in museums today, and his wife Mrs. Gill our PE teacher who helped me learn swimming, they all had a reason to do it, make something better out of us, and they did, so, help and facilitate me to carry their vision on!

I have continued to teach the Web and Web 2.0 creating over 2500 webmasters and web-engineers ................ so I am still sharing! Ah did I mention the dancing and music! Lets move to the rythem!


Fouad Riaz Bajwa
FOSS Consultant
FOSSFP: Free and Open Source Software Foundation of Pakistan

fouadbajwas's picture

We need to setup the same CVs or sub-versioning system as in the Drupal Development structure, that would be a very good way to start working with our coding area, atleast we have to put things in place!

Regards

Fouad Riaz Bajwa
FOSS Consultant
FOSSFP: Free and Open Source Software Foundation of Pakistan

Assuming drupal is going to

sime's picture

Assuming drupal is going to be the platform, You could use a sandbox in the drupal CVS system.

Definitely Drupal

finch's picture

Drupal will definitely be the overall integration framework for Drupal-BMOC . Does sandbox also allow non-drupal code? That will be cool if it does, as I'm most certain that we will have to integrate some 3rd party code, as well as developing some one-off code that is just for the BMOC platform.


Jenny Hsueh
http://ondemand-network.com

You can store non-drupal

sime's picture

You can store non-drupal code in a sandbox with your other drupal-specific code, but it should be maintained there, and will be covered GPL. Obviously this is a grey area, but if the code is to be used in a drupal project then I don't see a problem (I don't have the last word of course).

If you have 3rd-party code that is maintained elsewhere (GPL or not), the accepted method is to put a link in the README.txt. This link would point to where this code can be downloaded.

With non-GPL 3rd-party code, you just need to check that the other licence doesn't invalidate drupal's licence when used with drupal. But normally, Drupal and proprietary code can be used in combination.

HTH.
Simon

cool

finch's picture

Thanks Simon. we certainly need to look into more on the license stuff as we progress. Do we have a CVS volunteer ? :)

Yes, I'll be watching this

sime's picture

Yes, I'll be watching this topic and will help where I can. Certainly I recommend CVS (and particularly drupal's CVS) because that will take advantage of existing knowledge in the community. Frankly, I don't know if it is better or worse than Subversion.

I'm not a dedicated participant yet, I don't actually understand some of what is being proposed, so I won't say I support the proposal. But rest-assured I'm interested, and watching what's going on - I will help people with their CVS problems, or point them to resources.

also

finch's picture

Also, I heard a lot strong points about subversion over cvs, what people's thoughts are on this?

SVN vs. CVS

sun's picture

Subversion is the successor of CVS. Here is a simple comparison http://www.pushok.com/soft_svn_vscvs.php, already requiring some basic understanding of a RCS though.

Daniel F. Kudwien
unleashed mind

Daniel F. Kudwien
netzstrategen

well well done

finch's picture

Fouad,

just had time to carefully read through once again of what you have written here. Excellent job! we couldn't pay enough to find someone to write such a tailored business plan just for Drupal. Keep your thoughts coming, I'm sure we can get another 40GB hard disk for Dries when you run out of space to write.

cheers,
Jenny

Excellent work in progress !

woepwoep's picture

Hi Fouad and Neil and Jenny ,

Excellent piece of work. I would like to contribute on the subject of awareness.

"Developers are not aware of each other."
"Development Managers are not aware of the client accounts."
"The Director oversees the delivery."

From the above three statements i get the feeling that the author seeks to express a core value : that team members should seek out to be unique rather than overlapping , to restrict and focus rather than to extend and conflict.

My contribution would be in the area of attention, of which i am a student. Attention is very much a quantum process. Some 90 years ago, Werner Heisenberg wrote about Radium B-atom : "we know that our knowledge is incomplete, and we also know that we can not know more than this".

I believe team members could benefit from this statement. There is a difference between not knowing / not being aware ; and the voluntary act of giving up on the quest for more knowledge / awareness. The first one is static, dead so to speak, yet very much alive in today's business of command and control. The second one is dynamic, is growth in terms of itself (self-reference).

Web 2.0 ; the work that Neil et al do with ODN ; my own work ; and there are many others... I believe that at the heart of communication is this free will, this voluntary act. Not enforced by hierarchy, but by free will.

Richard Feynman defined science as the belief in the ignorance of experts. In the same sense, communication is the belief in one's own ignorance. The leader should never assume that team members understand how their attention affects the attention of their peers. So communication is about growing ignorance awareness ; and team work is joint attention management.

The new sentence then might be:

"Developers are fully aware of others, and they have the core task of defining and communicating their own autonomy. "This is what i do, this is what nobody else does". When two developers clash, both stop working immediately, until the overlap is resolved or the work is claimed by a third developer."

"Development Managers are not aware of the client accounts." ==> this is none of my business ?
"The Director oversees the delivery." ==> i am offering a dialogue here

Ronald Wopereis

http://www.whatisattention.org

Dark matter is free attention. The more we free our attention, the more our physical universe expands.

Dark matter is free attention. The more we free our attention, the more our universe and our cosmos expands.

Clarification plus Explanation!

fouadbajwas's picture

Hi Ronald,
Thank you for your intellectual input and very informative discussion on the Law of Attention.

I just wanted to make one clarification towards the models being discussed here. First we are dicussing various options and opportunities that may be adopted, joined in parallel or simultaneous unions or evolution of a model that is completely new in it's actuality.

The BMOC is a component of the overall model. The choice is with the people who join the various models.

  1. Maybe, you just develop modules and want to sell those, least bit concerned with the BMOC system that is operating in the separate window on the same marketplace.

  2. Maybe you are a very experienced person in IT that has less to do with developing software and more on managing software development, where do you fit in, does the model allow you to join in. Maybe you want to become a Development Director to lead development of a project by your company, we give you the interface and bring you in as a Development Director. You choose your team from our Fund pool. You than lead a project and have it completed through our system, you are least bit concerned about the members of the pool but are more concerned with the service that the pool offers that cannot be recieved from anywhere else in the world due to the fact the pool retains the best, retains a sustainability, is available 24/7, has the best project management systems in place, has the best to offer. What will you choose? Will you choose spending time chatting, or will you employ the distributed model for software development to achieve the target of creating your unique project. The project is paid by that Development Director's company and he shares the code with our system and then in the future comes again to benefit from this unique model. Is it possible to envision this system?

  3. Why are high level expertise not able to contribute to the Drupal model whereas after supplying the core, Drupal can be used to developed specialized services that are not even yet concieved. Because we fall short to just making websites forgetting the core of knowledge management is the content management strategy. We only fall short to the core of KM without extending the KM shell to build upon that loosing the potential to the real market of drupal. Thats what we want to extend, will all the developers be able to visualize this, will attention on this issues help them in a way where there is hardcore module development and software development going on and the business model by the Development Director is so complicated that 4 CTOs are managing the core integration from over 30 developers worldwide? You will have to understand the open source distributed model to interface with this issue at this level.

  4. A small example, DrupalVoice, whats that, its called Drupal Voice Over IP, a combination of Drupal plus IP is developed by the BMOC-DC managed by the BMOC-SC and then marketed by BMOC-MC. The problem with the development of such a system is that developers will be distributed in remote locations, one of my friends who has developed the core that is used in all communications applications worldwide resides in Cyprus, another buddy who does call interfacing is in Germany, another one who does cool SIP interfacing is in Karachi, Pakistan, so, if I put these 3 guns together, they are in different time zones, are dedicated to their fulltime jobs with some part time hours in development contributions, can't deal with all the issues of communications or relationship building but want to gain from the Fund by contributing to the community. They say no, we can't be RAC like coders, we just want to develop the certain modules and are least bit concerned with what the rest of the world is doing, its a whole new approach.

  5. I have to be considerate with geeks because I am a geek myself. Our preferences are not abnormal but our endeavours are not purely native to the common corporate world. This has to be kept in mind including the spirit of the Free and Open Source Software Movement.

  6. I recommend maximum participation even from those that are less involved in talking and more involved in development.

  7. It's quality that we have to bring to the system and not detach that.

  8. Attention in the software development is more documentation and art form of programming based that extends the expression, to be more expressive, no new forms have to be adopted, instead code extends expression with proper attribution to the developer through relevant copyrights or credits.

I hope Ronald, you were able to now confide in what I have detailed here. The system we are planning for has various types of markets in them, one is the BMOC that I have proposed and the intention of it is to build a quality services supply chain model. That supply chain model is more concerned with quaility input and quality output while benefiting everyone in the process both developers and managers as well as service buyers. The merits and quality is chosen by the system, not by the developers themselves because otherwise who will choose between the level of quality and the merit of skills required to achieve that.

RAC, ELANCE and Guru type websites waste so many days in the bidding process only to find that the developer hired was just mouthtalk and nothing to show and just walk away leaving the buyer to find someone else.

Another example, letting me be part of the advisor panel, you give me one hundred Ideas and I will deliver you 100 development models, again, I don't do it in weeks, I do it in some hours, how, its called knowledge management. I need teams of developers to build the end products, there are millions like me out there who are handicapped due to large development team needs, the BMOC addresses those. It's more of a Medium to Enterprise Services Supply Chain improvement.

Thats what all this is about, we are not talking about developing websites or simple get a thousand dollar a task models, we are talking about building some good open alternative models to what is in practice and revolutionize everything in the process renewing the confidence that was to be gained from the "21st Century Innovative Company Model" coined by MIT but they fell short in some ways. We want to remove those errors.

Regards

Fouad Riaz Bajwa
FOSS Consultant
FOSSFP: Free and Open Source Software Foundation of Pakistan

simplify

sime's picture

Fouad, while I had to read his manifesto to get where he is coming from, Ronald makes an interesting point about the supposed lack of knowledge that certain elements are supposed to have of the whole.

Another concern I have is the extreme length of these documents that I am reading. I keep losing my place in the text. There is a lot of text.

Could you please create a new simple document that contains the beginning's of a mission statement/principles, in bullet form, and perhaps add the text this document is maintained so that we are creating a living document that people feel comfortable consuming. Minimal or no preamble.

If you can't make it sticky, then we can grab a site-admin to do that.

Here's something like what we need in a living document.

Mission Statement
1) To provide a framework for the creation of high-quality drupal websites for standardized cost to the consumer.

The "7" Objectives
1) To define and benchmark all stages of the drupal development lifecycle.
2) To certify all project participants in each defined activity.
3) To standardized the input (user-requirements) according to the defined benchmarks.
4) To measure the output (end product etc) against these benchmarks.
5) To make all non-human resources created available under GPL.
6) To create a source of funds for the Drupal (which doesn't have a foundation btw).
7)

Blah blah, I mean already I feel like combining 1,2 and 4 with something more general like:
"To define and benchmark all stages of the development lifecycle and measure all activity against these standards."

What do you think?

agreed

NeilMcEvoy's picture

A logical first step forward.

You could follow the objectives with the start of a membership section. Membership levels can then start to be mapped on to Drupal roles, and so we can start thinking about the workflow logic for a site that will make all this work.

Yeup, it is long but to be simple..

fouadbajwas's picture

Yeup, Sime,

It's pretty long, because it was a model, let's finalize on those steps that you have shortlisted with everyone here, I will include them on the first page of the marketplace so that they are there to follow, then we can make 7-8 story sections to lead the discussions further relavant to the issues. What do you think gu


Fouad

sounds fine

sime's picture

Yes. A base camp at Mt Everest, so to speak. And of course I'm not against words, I'm sure many words will follow.

RE: clarification + explanation

woepwoep's picture

Hi Fouad, thanks much for your elaboration. Best regards, Ron

Dark matter is free attention. The more we free our attention, the more our universe and our cosmos expands.

Hey Bro

NeilMcEvoy's picture

What's a nice scientist like you doing in an Internet like this?

Good to see you man, hope you're well.

Neil.

Wonderful Neil

woepwoep's picture

I came here because i am working with Yvette Dubel on a quantum version of marketplace - she calls it Cultural Fusion. The development site is here : http://comfusion.pbwiki.com. I think Yvette got the site name from Jenny ? Anyway, i saw your name on Fouad's posting, and that's what got my attention.

I'm doing just fine. Yesterday i saw the third dimension when i looked into the eyes of my girlfriend. Was really an eye opener. You know how we men are able to deduct the third dimension (infinite depth, eternal time, unlimited volume, whatever the label) from the first two. And though i have had the experience of actually sensing this third dimension (sometimes called source) , this was the first time that my mind was very actively involved. It was ' Wow ! ".

Ofcourse this all could only happen on a nude beach, haha.

Well, i need to reconsider my whole theory of attention. That is wonderful !
Best regards, Ron

Dark matter is free attention. The more we free our attention, the more our universe and our cosmos expands.

Cooperative Stuff

discursives's picture

Hi All,
http://groups.drupal.org/drupal-worker-cooperative
I've been doing cooperative type agreements with people I work with for years. I read up during the process of devising my methods from public information sources. I decided to try and open up the application of the research by getting some documents started. Anyone can organize a Drupal coop, basically. Perhaps if we spent some time looking at it in smaller chunks we could see other areas where we can all work together.

http://alexrollin.com

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