State of GOSPEL (2021)

The Internet lifts a massive constraint off of mankind. Now, any two people can communicate with high bandwidth regardless of their location in space. This should completely transform the way that people work together. Institutions should reorient themselves to adapt to this new landscape. Productivity should be through the roof.

Unfortunately, none of this has happened. Nobody knows how to use the Internet to its full potential.

Doing so requires costly experimentation. Individual enterprises need to focus on operating within their core domain. Very few can tolerate the risk of operating their organization in a radically new way. Nobody wants to pay the cost of figuring this out.

The Global Open Source Enterprise League (GOSPEL) is an attempt to solve this problem.

Enterprises participating in GOSPEL typically operate according to the following 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.

The aforementioned 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.

During the industrial revolution, electricity transformed the production of physical goods. It ultimately enabled “mass production”, an increase in manufacturing capacity many orders of magnitude above the historical norm.

Today, the Internet is set to fundamentally transform the production of information-based (virtual) goods. This will drastically raise living standards across the globe and, like industrial revolutions past, usher in a new era of prosperity. However, this transformation has barely begun.

To understand the adoption of the Internet, it is helpful to understand the adoption of electricity. Florent Crivello writes, “…factory owners initially failed to realize the benefits of electrification because they didn’t adapt their plants to its new logic. They just replaced their old steam engine with a big electric motor driving their plant’s steel shaft, and it would be decades before they finally started rethinking the plant around the new technological paradigm.”

He then quotes BBC’s article, Why didn’t electricity immediately change manufacturing: “[Due to electrification] factories could be cleaner and safer – and more efficient, because machines needed to run only when they were being used. But you couldn’t get these results simply by ripping out the steam engine and replacing it with an electric motor. You needed to change everything: the architecture and the production process.” [emphasis added]

Right now, most organizations are ripping out their physical operations and replacing them with digital analogs, without changing operational architecture or processes. Meetings turn into video calls; paper gets replaced by Google Docs; Slack becomes the new office. Fundamentally, we are still working in the same way we always have, just with better tools. We are acting as if we are constrained by geography, when in fact we are not.

We are at a similar inflection point to the electrical revolution — which freed us from the constraint of dietary calorie driven work. The Internet can unlock orders of magnitude greater production of virtual products, just as electricity did physical ones.

No single person or group created the ideas behind GOSPEL. These ideas have been evolving over time and are being implemented in many different ways by companies, DAOs, non-profits, and groups around the world.

“GOSPEL” is an attempt to label and codify the experience of these different participants, so that new entrants can work off of a proven playbook and toolset.

Currently there are two projects officially associated with GOSPEL

• Pull Request Stories - a blogging platform for developers designed to incentivize companies to open source their code.
• [Name To Be Determine] - a platform that combines DAOs and GOSPEL principles to supercharge app development.

And one community

• 777 - a discord for discussion about GOSPEL, pseudonymity, and related topics

Here is a list of historical writings about GOSPEL:

• Introducing GOSPEL (Jul 1, 2021)
• GOSPEL FAQ #1 (Jul 14, 2021)
• GOSPEL Update (Nov 8, 2021)

[Editor's note: the links above have been updated after re-posting]

To get involved, head over to the 777 discord or DM @lzrscg on Twitter.