2013 update: The project has started. We now have demonstrable software and a business plan with a 100 year horizon. We also have a sweat-equity team including legal counsel, business counsel, hosting provision and user (stakeholder) input. We are now looking for a complete development team including:
- DBAs
- Python (Django) developers
- Web user interface designers (HTML5, Javascript, CSS)
- Internationalization, localization, translation expertise
- Researchers and domain experts
We plan to raise venture funding as soon as we have a viable team so that sweat-equity becomes an option rather than a necessity.
If you are one of the people we need, please get in touch without delay.
Mike Dewhirst July 2013
These documents are the basis of a sweat-equity project which I intend to commence in the near future.
For my own project, while it would be great to have a co-located dev team it would seem to be difficult if not impossible to achieve. Hence for a sweat-equity project it is assumed most or even all dev team members would be working remotely.
The aim of both sets of guidelines is to ease the interface between Stakeholders and Developers. Naturally it assumes these are two separate groups although in many projects such lines can be blurred.
The equity agreement is intended to provide some structure for developers able to work for equity instead of salary.
I wrote these documents and put them in the public domain here at github. Maybe they will help others get started on projects which have not yet achieved venture funding.
Feel free to use and improve them and thank you very much for your comments and feedback.
Contact me directly if you are interested in a non-disclosure agreement.
Mike Dewhirst
May 2012
PS: In the Code tab (above) the .txt files are minimally marked-up in Markdown and you should have no difficulty seeing through that. The equity_agreement.odt is in open document format (written using OpenOffice.org) and also exported as a .pdf file. I believe MS Office can read .odt files.
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