COS has a crippling case of founder's syndrome and an inability to prioritize or set an institutional strategy other than "do all the things for all the people". At the same time, employees (who genuinely care about the mission and each other) are treated as disposable and punished as malcontents if they try and advocate for change. I was told by their most recent COO "I'm not even sure how I feel about the whole concept of employee morale".
The business model is addicted to sugar daddy science: big grants based on degrees and inflated numbers rather than a demonstrated history of being able to deliver on promises. Once grants come in, the grant commitments go out the window and are replaced with excuses or explanations about how something we built for another grant already is what we actually promised to deliver.
The software tools they build, while a noble effort, clearly show their origins as an old graduate student project. The true value of these tools is impossible to estimate because they refuse to decide what problem they are actually trying to solve or for whom, and because evaluating actual usage would devastate the inflated numbers used to secure grant funding and for self-congratulation.
