Uclusion uses a lot of open source software and free forever is our way of giving back. The first hit for “open source asynchronous organization” is Asynchronous decision-making: Helping remote teams succeed written by Bertrand Delacretaz Apache Software Foundation Member and Director. He has three requirements for good open source collaboration:

Central asynchronous communications channel

Uclusion calls this a workspace. You can see screen shots of example usage on our home page. The only difference is that where Bertrand describes a very general communication tool or even worst case having to use email, Uclusion workspaces are specifically built around deciding on requirements, proposing and getting approval for stories and tracking progress at a glance.

Consensus-building mechanism

Uclusion offers two mechanisms — Dialogs and Initiatives. Dialogs allow you to propose and vote certainty on a number of alternatives at once. Initiatives are for an up down vote on one idea.

Case management system

Uclusion is not trying to replace issue trackers and we use Github boards ourselves. However we do distinguish between issues and stories. An issue should be something that has to be fixed — just a matter of when. Also the implementation of an issue should be fairly straight forward. That is to say an issue should not require a lot of collaboration or its a story.

For stories Uclusion has a built in workflow. If you are not ready to do the story yet then edit the workspace description with the new potential requirement. Everyone else will be alerted and automatically see a diff. When you are ready to do the story you can create it and everyone will automatically be notified to vote on whether or not you should do it. If you are uncertain of implementation you can create a dialog within the story.

Then Bertrand says

The nine members of ASF’s board of directors make a few dozen decisions at each monthly phone meeting, which last less than two hours. We carefully prepare for these meetings by making most of our decisions asynchronously in advance. This allows us to focus the meeting on the complex or uncertain issues rather than the ones that already have full or partial consensus.

Shorter or no meetings because we prepared online is how Uclusion operates using our own software. You can sign up for free here. Then if you decide you like it just create an issue with label requestfree in this repo explaining you are using Uclusion for open source purposes.

Originally published at https://github.com.