I also quite appreciate the organization/management posts, as someone else commented above.
I’ll also add that cultivating and retaining institutional knowledge with a regular team is already quite a task in itself, and sustaining sufficient ontological and practical coherence with contractors can lead to a lot of inheritance type issues. This kind of overhead cost can often be overlooked or trivialized, in my experience.
However, I can imagine a scenario where there could be the deliberate training of certain contractors to fulfill a particular ecosystem’s common needs. For example, most EA organizations would benefit from legal work (amongst other things like accounting) supported by specialists that are at least sympathetic to the philosophy of the community. In which case the overhead cost of one organization taking on outsourcing might reduce the cost of another organization in the same community taking on the same contractor. This could make sense for the contractor too, because they can develop their own niche and get more clients. To coordinate this though would require exceptional sharing of learning/intel across the community, which warrants more writing than this comment can serve.
Accounting for “overhead”, or higher order costs/gains that a lower order action may create, is really interesting to me. I hope there’ll be more discussions in the future.
I also quite appreciate the organization/management posts, as someone else commented above.
I’ll also add that cultivating and retaining institutional knowledge with a regular team is already quite a task in itself, and sustaining sufficient ontological and practical coherence with contractors can lead to a lot of inheritance type issues. This kind of overhead cost can often be overlooked or trivialized, in my experience.
However, I can imagine a scenario where there could be the deliberate training of certain contractors to fulfill a particular ecosystem’s common needs. For example, most EA organizations would benefit from legal work (amongst other things like accounting) supported by specialists that are at least sympathetic to the philosophy of the community. In which case the overhead cost of one organization taking on outsourcing might reduce the cost of another organization in the same community taking on the same contractor. This could make sense for the contractor too, because they can develop their own niche and get more clients. To coordinate this though would require exceptional sharing of learning/intel across the community, which warrants more writing than this comment can serve.
Accounting for “overhead”, or higher order costs/gains that a lower order action may create, is really interesting to me. I hope there’ll be more discussions in the future.