Openness

At MaidSafe our code is completely Open Source. We don’t do it for brownie points or box-ticking. We do it to give everyone the freedom to access our code, freely and without any restrictions, therefor allowing innovation to thrive.

At MaidSafe we realise without any understanding of how it has been developed and without the ability to see every commit, how can we expect the dev community to fully understand our code.

Imagine, instead of taking part in a lecture with complicated whiteboard drawings throughout, we just gave you the final drawing; a mass of lines and shapes and scrawlings of text. How would you be expected to decipher this and understand where the lecturer was coming from?

We strongly believe that the community should not just obtain access to our code; but should be actively encouraged to view its development, getting involved along the way.

At MaidSafe, openness is something that we truly embrace. We take pride in being an open company and believe in Open Development; giving users and developers the freedom and flexibility to contribute to and modify any of our products. We want to create a collaborative environment where anyone can obtain access to our code from the beginning and fully understand it as it is being developed.

Not content with having Open Source Software and Open Development, we then decided we should have ‘Open Business’. Our weekly staff briefing sessions are now recorded and uploaded to YouTube. This is an uncut, behind the scenes insight into the company and how we operate. We believe in total honestly, giving you everything… our code, our commits, our knowledge, our thoughts. Anyone who wishes can see us discussing and making decisions that will allow us to turn our vision into reality and let people understand how we arrive at our decisions (rightly or wrongly) and watch as we discuss the weekly ongoings within the company. This means, that as with our code, people observe not just our achievements but also our mistakes and more importantly, see us acknowledge these diversions and take action to remedy them.

In time we hope to have people following these meetings and getting involved in video chats which we can stream on YouTube. This would enable others to get involved as deeply as they wish. We welcome suggestions, ideas or different points of view that may help us achieve our vision. Becoming so involved with the very people who will be using our products allows us to tune in to what the world is asking for… not just what we assume it needs.

Written by Justine McLevy