Open-tasking is a web service that enables people to create and manage tasks that can be altered by other people to include more detail. In Open-tasking, people collectively design vertically deep or horizontally wide projects based on other people's skills. The distributed and open architecture of the Open-tasking system enables a person to manage his or her own complexity, so a worker becomes a manager and visa versa.  
                       
                       
Open-tasking    
                       
Open-tasking provides a unified management space where tasks, documents, and people can be viewed and controlled in relation to each other.   People save documents directly from Treehouse applications to their tasks.  
                       
                       
    In Open-tasking, a person takes the responsibility of a task, articulates it, and defines subtasks. Then the person who is assigned to the subtasks does the same thing. Eventually, the task gets more granulated. This tree structure regulates a top down hierarchy between the tasks. While the growth of tasks have a hierarchical structure, the relationship between people has a decentralized topology. The contract system is designed so that, the person who is executing the subtasks of a root task can create new subtasks and hire the person who is started the root task. So in Open-tasking, the network of people is a directed graph and it is connected to the hierarchical task structure. This hybrid system as the core of Open-tasking lets people discover interesting scenarios in the system.
  
                       
                       
Tasks-People   Here the colors represent people. When people have tasks, they can create new subtasks and hire other people. While tasks have a hierarchical structure, the relationships between people exhibit a directed graph.      
                       
                       
    The tasks in Open-tasking are primarily defined by a title and description. The other attached data types are starting date, duration, budget, status (pending, done, etc.), link to parent task, and responsible people who are creator and executer. The contracts between people are loose rules that enable people to explore various scenarios that meet their needs. By using the Treehouse Project’s suite of digital creation tools people are able to create and store documents online, and use them in their tasks. Besides the task operations, the Open-tasking system is supported by a virtual bank implementation that enables people to get paid when they are done with their task. So the relationships between people have been developed in both social and economic sense.

The main design goal of the Open-tasking system was to let people use their existing tools rather than introducing new ones. For this reason, the Simple Project Syndication (SPS) scheme has been created to easily syndicate the tasks and related data outside of the Open-tasking system. SPS is a dialect of XML and it organizes the information flow in an online work environment where people, documents, and tasks are distributed in a network. It enables people to subscribe to their project's SPS feed and get updated as it is executed.

With its hybrid structure formed by the distributed network of people and their connections to hierarchical order of tasks, Open-tasking is an alternative model to centralized institutional management systems of our time.		  
                       
                       
                       
Related

SPS (Simple Project Syndication) is designed to organize the information flow in an online work environment where people, documents, and tasks are distributed in a network.

OPENSTUDIO has roots in Treehouse Studio and Open-tasking.