DeepMake Public Handbook

The DeepMake public handbook is the official guide for how we run the company. It's a living document that is continually updated. It includes information about the company, product, teams, and workplace policies and practices. Search for keywords like "benefits" or "support process" to find the relevant entry.

As an open core company, we value transparency and learning in the open. We welcome feedback and encourage contributions. Please leave a comment to suggest improvements or add clarifications. Feel free to adapt from this handbook.

As a public document this handbook is necessarily missing information that relates to the security of the company including information on financials, vendors, and other security measures.  This is not done to hide our practices, but to protect the company from bad actors.

Company

DeepMake is an Open Core Company built on the principles of open source and public benefit. We originated from ideas learned making FaceSwap into the best Open Source Deepfake software in the world.

About ​

Mission & Vision​

DeepMake is built around Open Source and is dedicated to the vision of software that helps everyone.  We come from Deepfakes and while there are ethical challenges in that field we've built a code of ethics that we believe in.

What the company does​

DeepMake builds tools to bridge AI and Video. We want to make it as easy as possible to make videos with the only limitation being your own creativity. To that end we make software tools tha tmake it easier than ever to make AI work for video.

History of the company​

DeepMake's origin stretches back to the beginning of Deepfakes, as the leading open source repo Faceswap has brought technology and innovations to Deepfakes since 2017.  DeepMake was founded in 2022 to bring Faceswap into the next generation of Generative AI.

Open source stewardship statement ​

As an Open Core Company we stand behind Open Source and believe that it's the future of software development.  We agree completely with and adopt those standards as our guiding principles.

• Development in the open. You can submit issues in a public issue tracker. This is not a read-only interface.

• Business in the open. Our company handbook and policies are in the open.

• Clear Direction. Our Direction document clarifies the current project priorities and what is possible in the upcoming releases.

We believe that the light of public awareness burns away corruption and that business in the open benefits everyone.

Culture​

Values​

DeepMake believes that profit cannot be the sole motivation for a sustainable ethical company.  We instead strive to balance the 3 "P"s.

• Profit

• People

• Public

Instead of seeking profit at all costs, we endeavor to keep the balance with our people and the public needs.

Life at DeepMake​

DeepMake strives to create a positive working environment, one where people are excited to be a part of something.  We are committed to being an inclusive and inviting community.  We fully believe that life must exist beyond just work and have an unlimited PTO policy where employees can take the time they need to unwind when they need.

We're a fully remote company.  Nobody at DeepMake is required to work in an office or commute to a particular location to do their work.  If ever this does become a requirement, we promise that it will only apply to the smallest subset of employees as possible (I.E. it's reasonably possible that upper management will need to relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area once we seek venture capital funding.)

Benefits​

Benefits are given to the employee in the hope that they will be used judiciously and when appropriate.

Benefits are handled through payment provider.

• Medical, dental and vision

  • 100% paid for the employee and 50% for any dependents

• PTO

  • Unlimited

    • First 15 days a year accumulate

Objectives and key results​

Key performance indicators ​

Handbook ​

This handbook is an open and evolving document.  It should grow and develop as DeepMake does.  Feel free to add to this document in the form of comments or questions.  We will review these suggestions and comments to inform future changes to this handbook and policies..

Rituals ​

Team stories​

Communication​

General guidelines​

Email and Slack are the preferred methods of communication.  Email has been a mainstay for decades and many rely on it, but today's noisy inboxes mean that some may shun this method.  For a more "realtime" and casual means of communication, Slack has been adopted.  There is a company Slack server which includes various channels for employee communication.

Levels of confidentiality​

Not everything can be publicly released.  We must protect the company, clients, employees, and public.  This means that information that may be damaging to any of these groups needs to be subjected to additional scrutiny. If you're unsure if information is sensitive or confidential, please seek clarification from your management.

Meetings ​

Meetings should be limited to the bare minimum necessary to accomplish the goals.  This means that generally meetings should be planned before they happen.  There should be an agenda detailing what needs to be discussed including any additional context that may be necessary to reach a consensus.  This agenda should be provided as far in advance of the meeting as is reasonably possible -- the day before is a good target in any regularly planned meetings.  

Obviously emergency meetings may struggle with this requirement, but an agenda is still highly recommended  to keep the meeting focused and wasting a minimum amount of time.

Using Slack, Email, Zoom​

All these tools will be given to you during the onboarding process.  Each login should be saved in your password manager with a secure password.  If you lose access to any of them, please reach out to your supervisor as soon as possible so we can ensure that they are secured and available for your use.

Operating Procedures​

Policies​

Remote office subscription​

The home office should be conducive to quite and effective work. If your office cannot meet these needs please talk to your manager about options such as a remote office subscription to a service like WeWork or similar. If you choose to take the remote office subscription then you will be inelligible for the home office furniture allowance.

Home Office Furniture Allowance​

If you have a quiet space in your home but you need some equipment or furniture to help with your work such as a chair, desk, laptop stand, lamps, or similar then you may opt for the Home Office Furniture Allowance. This is for equipment and furniture that helps you to do your work in your home office including any equipment needed for ergonomics or comfortable working. Anything purchased under the furniture allowance is yours and does not need to be returned to the company.

This allowance does NOT need to be used for any business tools that are required for your work such equipment provided with the work laptop (including any mouse, keyboard, monitors, printers/scanners, or other such tools).

This allowance is for up to $1000. These purchases should be done by a manager with access to a company card. If a purchase would go over this amount, it cannot be made with a company card, but must be done by the individual and then request reimbursement with the receipt.

Work Laptop​

The company will provide a laptop that is appropriate to your work needs. In addition, any parts or add-ons needed for the laptop such as mouse, headset, webcam (if your laptop is not equipped with one) or other tools will be provided by the company as needed. Talk to your manager to get approval and to get these ordered if you need one.

These should always be purchased with a company card. Exceptions need to be approved on a case-by-case basis.

These items remain the property of the company and are expected to be returned upon separation from the company for any reason.

Code of Conduct ​

Our employees are all expected to act with ethics and honor at all times. Anything which looks bad on the individual looks bad on the company and we must strive to maintain an impeccable reputation. We expect all our employees to act with the same care that they would expect taken if they were on the other side of the situation.

Company goal setting ​

Spending company money ​

Company money should only be spent for the good of the company. This means that any time that company money is being spent, the company should be a beneficiary. That does not mean that the company can be the sole beneficiary, but any time an employee benefits outside of other policies, there should be a review on whether or not this would violate ethics on self dealing or if there is a conflict of interest.

Departments

Business operations​

Finance: Accounting, payroll, expenses ​

BizOps: Tooling ​

People Ops: Hiring, benefits, celebrations, gifts, departures​

Customer Success​

New customer onboarding ​

Customer meetings​

Customer requests ​

Customer codenames ​

Customer Support​

Support process ​

Support responses ​

Engineering ​

Sprint planning​

Sprints will be scheduled for a fortnite (every other week).  This gives time to complete all your tasks even if something comes up such as sickness or emergencies that prevent you from working for a short time.  If at any time you believe that you cannot complete all assigned tasks for your sprint period you should immediately contact your sprint planner or supervisor to inform them of your problems and get the support you need.

Release process ​

DeepMake utilizes a continuous release system.  Because of this, all Pull Requests should be vetted and tested before being sent to the main branch. An effective way to do this is to commit code to a branch matching the Jira task that is being fulfilled with the commit and then merged into main through a pull request.  The full commit guide should be followed including the release checklist to ensure that the commit meets all current development requirements.

Oncall rotation ​

If business needs require someone oncall to solve any problems, all employees who can solve the problems will rotate through oncall.  This includes management up to the CTO.  Because of this, any Oncall rotation must be approved by the CTO and must have sufficient business justification to implement.

If for any reason an employee cannot complete their scheduled oncall shift, their manager will take on that oncall shift and the employee will be responsible for the manager's next scheduled oncall shift.  If there is a permanent change to the oncall schedule where someone must be removed, then the changes will take place at least 2 weeks in the future with the missing shifts until then filled by management.  When any employee fills in multiple additional (at least 2 extra) shifts in a single rotation, they will be left out of additional rotations matching the number of additional shifts they pulled.  The point of these policies is to reduce the burnout of all employees including management.

Outages ​

Non-critical outages which don't affect business needs should be dealt with at the next regular work shift.  If there would be a significant issue due to the outage then it may be necessary to work outside of the normal work shift.  In this case, all efforts should be made to limit the additional work required to a minimum.  It is expected that any time an employee is asked to work outside of their normal hours that they take at least double that time off within the next week.

In the case of any serious outages, an incident postmortem should be performed at the earliest opportunity.

Incident postmortem ​

The first step in an incident postmortum is to develop an agenda detailing what happened, how it was fixed and a recommendation on how to prevent future replications of the incident.  This should then be scheduled with management up at least 2 levels or to the CTO, whichever is less.

Marketing ​

Brand and style guide​

Creating blog posts​

Social media guidelines​

Sponsoring and attending events ​

Press releases ​

Product​

Planning, prioritization, and process ​

Managing requests ​

Releases ​

Beta features ​

Feature flags ​

UI design​

Usage statistics ​

Sales​

Contracts ​

Salesforce lead status flow​

Resources: decks, videos, content ​

Security​

Security is critical to operation as a company. We must keep private information secure and ensure that we're meeting all requirements for our business and data.

Policies ​

Passwords for business related sites and services should be stored within the company provided password manager. This ensures that passwords do not get lost or unavailable in the case of time off or unavailability. If you lose access to your password manager account you should contact your immediate supervisor for a reset or lockdown of your account as soon as possible.

Account recovery ​

To recover your email account you should email your manager using whatever accounts you have access to. This should preferably be an account that your supervisor is already aware of. Once you've been verified, we can reset your email account so that you can access it.

Physical Security​

Employees are responsible for the physical security of any company property. This includes any equipment, software, and data that is owned or controlled by the company. If anything happens to any company property it is necessary that you report it to the company immediately. This ensures that the company can do everything necessary to recover or mitigate any risks due to the accident.

Vulnerability management ​

In order to ensure that vulnerabilities are minimized, regular security audits may be performed. These audits will check to ensure that all accounts and data are properly protected.