Tonight's topic:  Team construction

Part 1:  Gathering people

• Starting out; friends are a good baseline - already familiar with styles, capabilities
• Move forward with careful consideration - avoid offering too much, too fast
• Avoid vague or open-ended calls - you'll do more work to filter through people than actually working

Part 2:  Dividing owners versus contractors

• Be dispassionate - separate the personal from the business, for practicality's sake
• Agree upon the assigned responsibilities - have a primary, but support with secondaries and separated concerns
• Get important legalities in signed writing, and get all owners to contribute to writing / reviewing them, sooner rather than later
• Our approach:  those at ground floor, with sufficent motivation and drive, are owners; all else, contractors

INTERMISSION:  Chris ~ Amaterasu - Weaving the Threads of Time - Chrono Trigger (OC ReMix)

Part 3:  Vetting people for contribution

• Evaluate dispassionately; not out to hurt feelings, smash dreams
• Match gaps to skills, and iterate to narrow down which is which
• Be flexible with deadlines and turn-around time, but expect some manner of initiative
• Pay attention to reactions and openness to feedback
• Important: set very clear expectations around compensation, not necessarily monetary

Part 4:  Spinning up supportive services

• Integrate and centralize - everyone must be able to communicate reliably
• Our situation:  Google (e-mail, calendar, storage), Trello, wiki, main site
• Keep an eye out for specialized collaboration tools / services as needed
• Asynchronous communication is a necessity, an awful, horrid necessity