Gridshore is the commercial alternative to the opensource model
If you have a good look at the available opensource inititives, you must conclude the opensource model is succesfull. Take a look at Sourceforge, Apache and all other opensource websites. Why can these projects be a success. People all over the world are working on them, lots of people are using them, and most important a lot of people are having fun with them. Won't that be great, having fun and get paid for it. Is it possible to use these opensource concepts within a business model, or maybe some of them. This is what gridshore is all about. We want to take the parts out of the opensource world that work for a commercial business.
Collaboration
The most important part of an opensource project is Collaboration. Ofcourse there are opensource projects that deal with only one developer, but all others have multiple lead developers and a lot of contributors. To be able to saveguard the sources, you need a Repository. Most of the projects work with lead developers that control the actual sources in the main branch and with contributors that contribute patches. These patches will be verified by the lead developers and added to the sources if they are oke. The tools available to the community (like sourceforge) support the collaboration of the different users of the project.
The right Toolset is important within the gridshore concept. One of the things that can work as well is the relationsship between lead developers or contributors and all other contributors. When a plain contributors keeps giving good patches or contributions, he might become a lead contributor as well. Getting others to know and appreciate you is very important within the gridshore concept as is in the opensource model.
Communication
Wiki's, blogs, forums, newsletters, instant messaging, skype
Productivity
Improve the productivity by letting the developers have fun. As a software house or other company you can keep the best developers since they are having fun.
Quality
Improve quality by having reviews by all users of the project and control by the lead developers. One of the most important methods to ascertain quality is the Continuous Integration. This way you assure a continuous stable build. This is the responsibility of all lead developers.