How to clone the Crisp DNA

The Crisp DNA is open-source on github, so you are welcome to copy it and create something similar.

Why clone the Crisp DNA?

Perhaps you are an independent consultant and want to start some kind of collaboration with others. You don’t want to run it as a traditional consulting company, and yet you don’t want to invent a model from scratch. In that case you can start from our model and modify it to fit your needs.

Although we happen to work as IT consultants, there is nothing in our model that is specific to the IT consulting business.

What’s the licensing model?

The Crisp DNA is licensed under Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International. This means you are welcome to edit the text anyway you wish, even for commercial purposes, as long as you attribute the original text to us, and keep the license, so that others can fork off of your ingenious changes. But go read the license, it is well worth the effort!

Can I call my company Crisp?

Please don’t. We can’t legally stop you from calling your organization Crisp, but we prefer that you use a different name. Otherwise people may think there is some kind of relationship between our companies. If you pick a different name, our brands can evolve independently.

How do I create my own copy of the Crisp DNA site?

Simplest way is to fork the crisp-dna repo on github. Something like this:

1. Surf to http://github.com/crispab/crisp-dna.
2. Press the “Fork” button on the top right somewhere (here’s a direct link).
3. You should now have your own copy of the crisp dna!
4. Start editing! The articles are all in the \_docs folder, and the table of contents is in \_data. Try opening \_docs\index.md, and press the little pencil icon on the top right to edit it, and then commit.
5. After your first commit the site will be auto-published at http://YOURNAME.github.io/crisp-dna (or whatever you decide to call your repo)

Once you’ve cloned the dna, it’s no longer the Crisp model, it’s your model! Crisp is just your ancestral (and slightly weird) uncle. Change stuff as you like. Rename the company. Remove pages that aren’t relevant. Change the content. Replace the pictures. Go wild.

But wait, there’s A LOT of content here!

No worries, once you’ve forked it you can remove the stuff you don’t need. The gist of our model is summarized in What is Crisp and How Crisp works, so you might decide to just keep those two (but with your company name).

Another option is to skip the techie stuff (cloning and forking), and just steal the bits you like anyway.

Either way, please do mention on your website that your model is derived from (or inspired by) Crisp DNA, and summarize the key similarities and differences. Spread your learnings!

How can I help improve the Crisp DNA?

Glad you asked, cuz Uncle Crisp always wants to improve! :o)

If you have an improvement suggestion (big or small) you can:

• Fork our repo (as described above), make changes, and issue a pull request on our repo. If we like your change we will pull it back into our version.
• … or File an issue (pick a suitable label to the right)

We appreciate all feedback and hopefully someone will respond, but we can’t guarantee it. Remember, we’re all volunteers :)

How do I ask questions or give feedback?

If you have a question feel free to join our Crisp DNA Slack channel. You can also file an issue on the crisp-dna repo (pick the “question” label to the right). No response guaranteed though.

If you have a general comment (for example “Wow, Awesome!”) then the best place is probably on the blog post announcing this launch.

If you want to read more, see blog posts about the Crisp DNA.