Through the years at GMking & co, we’ve actively worked in an open source style team environment.  In fact, it’s one of the main things we attribute our success!  Over time we’ve found some things that keep our team spirit and creative juices flowing.  Today, I’m going to share some of those with you, and dissect the planning of a GMking project.

Keeping the Team Happy

In order to keep our teams happy and motivated, we make sure we have goals to work toward, and a guideposts along the way so everyone can see the progress being made.  In MarkUp, the goals is easy: To Release the Next Issue, and Make it Better Than Ever!.  The guideposts are typically, finishing a number of articles, then a series of drafts, finally the “release candidate”, and the release.  For some of our other projects, this is more difficult to define, but goals are always in place.

Public Discussion

We do all the decision making we can in public with our teams, even administrative decisions, because involvement is important.  If we made many important decisions totally in private, we would have issues gaining additional volunteers to join our teams.  Why?  No serious contribute will stick around long if all the decisions are made by secret council.  Giving everyone the opportunity to have their say is important.

Case in Point: MarkUp 14’s Cover

Discussion on MarkUp 14's Cover