Introducing GOSPEL (Global Open Source Permissionless Enterprise League)

Every thing is constrained by the environment in which it was developed.

For example, theaters used to be the only way to distribute video, therefore “movies” were usually between 90-120 minutes. Not too long to sit in a theater comfortably, but long enough to make it worth the trip. With the proliferation of television, and later streaming services, the limitations on length were eliminated. People could lay in bed and binge on-demand, picking up where they left off.

While in 2001, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone came out as the first movie in an 8 installment book-film adaptation, 10 years later — in 2011 — Game of Throne’s Season 1 came out as the first season in an 8 installment book-tv show adaptation.

The length of each installment increased by an order of magnitude. This is because limitations on distribution were alleviated through technological progress[1][2].

The Internet is an unbelievably disruptive force. Almost everything we do will be transformed by it. In fact, it is as significant a breakthrough as the discovery of fire. While fire is theorized to have helped humans evolve more advanced networks of neurons, the Internet is causing humanity to develop more advanced networks of people[3]. As we set apart ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom, so too will our future connected societies be distinguished from our historical ones. But to get there, we must adapt to the new technological landscape.

Problem: The way people work has not changed much since the advent of the Internet.

We work on different things (knowledge work instead of farming) and we use new tools (PowerPoint instead of plows), but we haven’t moved past the assumption that communication can only occur if two people are in the same geographic location.

This fact has been so omnipresent through human development that it is deeply embedded in everything we do. Our work processes have evolved to take it for granted[4].

Our enterprises have yet to realize almost anyone can instantly access information from anywhere in the world. They claim to know it’s true, but haven’t come to terms with its implications. An organization that has truly internalized this mind blowing fact will likely turn itself inside out and completely reorient itself to take advantage of the new possibilities this brings. We have seen a paradigm shift in what’s possible, but not a paradigm shift in how corporations operate.

Companies today are quite productive and it’s hard to imagine much of an improvement. We’ve hit a plateau in managerial science, similar to clock speeds of single-core processors. GOSPEL is trying to usher in a revolution by harnessing the Internet to make enterprises multi-core. GOSPEL is the distributed systems approach to work. There are trade offs, it’s not right for every enterprise, but it unlocks an entire world of new possibilities.

So… how does it work? Let me explain:

GOSPEL (Global Open Source Permissionless Enterprise League) is intended for commercial tech enterprises that operate in accordance with the following three tenets.

Operate globally

• Communicate via long-form writing.
• Execute asynchronously.

Open source everything

• Make source code, internal communications, and business strategy public.
• Some things may need to be proprietary, but that should be the exception and not the norm.

Enable permissionless contributions

• Since everything is open source and globally optimized, allow anyone in the world read the source code or business strategy and get paid to contribute (i.e. fixing a bug in the app).
• Contributors may still be able to opt for salaried employment.

These three tenets work in concert to provide enterprises with certain benefits:

Better talent.

• The purpose of hiring globally is to access a larger pool of highly skilled labor, not to cut costs.
• Permissionless contributions enable enterprises to tap into the global talent pool without experiencing the significant friction of navigating foreign labor markets.
• Contributors can be pseudonymous and are compensated based on merit. This provides opportunities to those excluded from the traditional hiring process and allows enterprises to utilize underrated talent.
• Top talent often prefers the flexibility of remote, asynchronous work.

A more robust organization.

• Long-form written communication extracts important information out of the heads of individuals and small teams, and places it into version control.
• Problems are often detected earlier in open source projects because there are more eyes on them.
• Optimizing for permissionless contributions makes it easier to replace lost personnel.

Becoming a nexus of industry.

• Transparency builds good will among customers and the community.
• Sharing implementation and execution details attracts talent when they are trying to learn.
• An enterprise is constantly creating internal content, but wasting valuable opportunities to use it for content marketing due to unnecessary confidentiality.

The potential to attain “workforce autoscaling”; by simply paying more, a workforce can be blitzscaled with few bottlenecks.

Open source projects have pioneered many of these methods because they have had to truly harness the Internet in order to survive. So why do not-for-profit open source projects often struggle? Because they face specific challenges in the domain of sustainability and funding. They are operating this way out of necessity. In other words, it is their life support. Imagine if these projects needed to interview, onboard, and delegate to contributors before they even could look at the code AND they didn’t get paid. Such “open source” (not-for-profit) projects would never scale beyond one person.

This idea is very much in its infancy, but I believe through my own personal experience that it is possible for commercial enterprises to use these tenets with great success. Many of the assumption holding companies back from operating in this way don’t make sense in the Internet era. Further, for-profit enterprises have a better path toward sustainable funding and proper governance than not-for-profit ones.

These Internet-native methods that make not-for-profit projects possible can be used to supercharge for-profit ones. And at the same time, they can also provide substantial benefit to workers.

GOSPEL is a league of enterprises that wish to research and experiment with these tenets. I will be dedicate my efforts toward finding organizations that want to work this way. I will also build tooling to unlock this new way of work.

If you are interested in this idea, please subscribe to this newsletter and reach out to me. Together we can build a more productive, transparent, fair, and inclusive world.

About me

I am a software developer with experience:

• Managing community contributions and working as an engineer at a prominent cryptocurrency company
• Founding a startup with cofounders and employees in radically different timezones and countries
• Most recently, building software supporting COVID-19 immunization and working as a tech lead at one of the world’s largest vaccine distributors

I have been greatly inspired by some personal friends who have had success building global workforces, as well as the thought leadership of Balaji Srinivasan.

[1] Technological progress has also enabled content size decreases by 1 order of magnitude (YouTube) and now even 2 orders of magnitude (TikTok). Despite this decrease in length per piece, screen time has gone up.

[2] Factories used to rely on a central steam power systems. As a result, all the machinery had to be placed in a central location. With the advent of electricity, factory owners simply plugged their existing machinery into the power source without rethinking the placement of the machines. It was not until later, that they realized that with electric cables they could lay out the floor in a much more efficient way that could massively increase output. Source [Editors note: source missing due to Revue shutdown]

[3] A powerful way to think about humanity is as a super organism. A human’s body is a complex system made of cells. Individually, each cell takes seemingly insignificant actions, but in concert they produce a human. The human colossus is the idea that humanity itself is a giant organism and humans are like individual cells making up that complex system.

[4] As biological analogy: People evolved to be outside. As a result, our bodies took for granted that they would be exposed to certain levels of sunlight. We need Vitamin D to survive, which we derive from sun exposure. Now that people are inside more, many are Vitamin D deficient. Our bodies evolved with the assumption that sunlight would be present.