Innovation in Software

It’s been a couple of weeks since I announced my rather confusing and eccentric plan to work for the community for cheap for a few months next year.

The response has been so-so. I still think it’s feasible, I just think the way I laid it out has confused a few people.

It looks like the most popular ideas are:

• Run a startup weekend
• Teach the basics of programming to at least 100 kids and/or unemployed people (the feasibility of this could be challenging)
• Run a “Skills Gap Camp” for Undergraduates

These and other ideas can get voted on here:

http://ideas.vagueware.com/pages/33882-pledge-ideas

I think by the end of this week we’ll be settling on the top few, and I’ll commit to offering up 30 full-time days over the next 3 calendar months to make them all happen (and cover all costs of doing so) providing the cash can be raised to cover those costs. Expect the can to be rattled sometime next week – I’m thinking about letting people pledge any amount, not just £60, we’ll see.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have something valuable to offer you: a big pot of bubbling time.

I’ll be frank with you about something nobody ever tells you about this industry when you get into it: every year during December and January work gets quiet for a bit. As a consequence, I get bored. Very, very bored.

I have spent the last few weeks banging the sales drum to try and stop the interminable coma that normally sets in, but once again everything looks quiet. That leaves me with a conundrum: what to do for the 8-10 very quiet weeks that are about to arrive.

I’ve thought through some options. There are some projects on the go based on Lean Product Development principles I’ve been ranting about, and that will occupy some of my time, but I thought I would propose an idea I’ve wanted to do for some time. It’s only now I feel it might actually come off.

In short, I’m prepared to offer 50% of my paid time to the local (Northern UK), digital sector community in return for a heavily discounted fee.

That time would be in addition to the time I already spend working on Fly The Coop, at events like GeekUp, replying to e-mails from people seeking advice on a whole host of matters, and generally championing the local sector.

With this additional time, I could take on one or more of a variety of projects:

• Do some research/development on behalf of the community
• Travel around as a kind of Northern “digital ambassador” promoting local firms and startups
• Work on some open-source software of particular benefit to the community
• Organise some community events
• Go and spend some extra time on circuit-rider activities helping local charities
• Write up some training materials or run workshops (with caveats: see below)
• Some of the ideas from the Geek Social Responsibility Page could be worked on more intensively
• Anything else you can think of by adding an idea in the special idea forum I’ve created for this

The appropriate skill set you can work with is:

• 15 years commercial software development experience
• About 3-4 years experience of providing training (I’m now a part-time lecturer to boot)
• A well-known community champion who could network on behalf of sponsors
• Ability to churn out research and reports, as well as pretty much any kind of written word you can imagine (heck, I’d try and write you a musical if you really wanted one)
• Lots of contacts across technology, finance, public sector and other fields

What’s more, I’m prepared to do a deal on costs: I will give my time to these projects for £200/day + VAT, which is considerably less than my clients pay for my time (ask them if you want). I feel I can afford to do this discount because it’s only half my time, and these projects will benefit the community at large and so I will be compensated for the loss of income via a warm feeling inside.

To summarise, I’m prepared to offer 30 days of my time over the next 3 months for a total of £6,000 + VAT for a community-orientated project or group of projects. This is for time only, so any material costs (such as travel, etc.) would need to be found too – I’ll work that angle once we get there.

Now, here’s where you get involved. I could just go and try and find one big sponsor and spend the next few months spending their money doing what they thought would be good for the community. I’d like to try something more creative and inclusive: I’d like to try and get 100 people or businesses to pledge £60 each (£69 including VAT) to these projects. In other words, I’d like to be the “employee” of you, a substantial number within the community for half my time for the next 3 months.

Some people/organisations may wish to pledge more, but I don’t feel that should give them more voting rights – the community will decide what the work consists of, not just a few with deeper pockets.

What do you get in return in addition to my time? Simply: your name/company name and logo or picture and link up as a sponsor; the ability to ask me to fetch you cups of tea from time to time; knowledge that your will is being done on behalf of the community; a subsequent warm, fuzzy glow inside that a small amount of your money has gone into benefiting the community.

This might seem a crazy idea, I know. If it doesn’t work, we’ll all have learned something I hope.

The first thing is for you to decide how you think I should spend that time, so:

1. Go to the Pledge ideas forum
2. Add ideas, or vote for other ideas
3. AND/OR fill in the pledge signup form so we can keep you updated as we move into the next stage
4. Once 100 people have expressed an interest and the ideas are getting more solid, I’ll set up a proper pledge at pledgebank.com and you can decide if you want to go ahead or not. We’ll contact you using the details below

If we don’t get the full pledge, we’ll revisit what the sticking point might be and take it from there. If there are several projects with lots of votes, time will be divided up between them, and you can always withdraw your pledge, it’s not a bind commitment (we’ll ask for cash down the line though).

There are however a few caveats:

1. I/Vagueware can’t do anything illegal, so please do not pledge if your idea is a bank robbery on behalf of GeekUp attendees.
2. Vagueware banks with the Co-operative Bank which places some ethical constraints on our business activities as a condition of us being able to bank with them (which I agree with). No arms trading or ideas involving animal testing, please.
3. Vagueware can’t go into breach of contract, so I can’t work on something competitive to an existing Vagueware client project, and some areas of training may be off-limits due to exclusivity guarantees. I don’t think this will be a problem, but if it is, I’ll say so as soon as the idea is mentioned
4. I get final say on whether I want to work on a project. If you suggest something I would loathe or is unworkable, I’ll let you know and you can choose to withdraw your pledge or not.

Feel free to discuss in the comments or elsewhere. You should soooo discuss this on Twitter and your own blog…

I await your thoughts and instructions. In the meantime some FAQs:

There is this project that needs some work, and…

OK, stop right there. Projects should ideally be discrete. If I need to go and convince somebody else to show me stuff or let me in behind the scenes because a mob has asked me to, this could get complex. We’ll need to negotiate. Ideally this should be completely blue-sky, blank, brand new projects. If you have an amazing idea that needs me to go in and “fix” something, I’ll look at it, but it’s probably – 90% of the time – going to be a bad, bad idea. I’m also not interested in helping people with projects they’ve messed up without a good reason – it causes political issues all over the place. If it’s a commercial project that needs fixing, it’s probably not even worth suggesting it.

Why would I trust you? Is this a ruse/scam or something?

Vagueware Ltd has been trading for nearly 4 years, and we have never had a problem with trust. I personally am well-known locally in parts of the tech/digital sector in the North of the UK, and I don’t want to trash my reputation. If you don’t know, you might have to take it on trust that I’m not going to run off with your cash, but to further put your mind at rest, you will be able to pay in instalments and get regular progress updates if you wish. Further, I can’t actually touch the cash until the work it corresponds to has been completed – to do so would basically be illegal (or at the very least would upset my accountant and other advisers).

Can I pledge less than £60? I’m skint but want to support this!

If lots of people pledge less, we need more people or the time that’s paid for has to come down to reflect that, but yes, email me and we’ll talk about it.

I am a multinational corporation who wishes to abuse this project for my own nefarious means. Where do I sign up?

If you want to pledge more that’s fine, but realise that one pledge is one vote in terms of how I spend my time, no matter how big the pledge is. If you’re cool with that, email me and let’s talk.

Can we just gang together and pay you to do something stupid?

No. I get final refusal on all project proposals, and will only do things that have a clear benefit to the community either in a broad sense or specifically the digital community. My time is scarce, please consider using it for a greater good.

Hey I’ve got a question you haven’t answered!

Leave it in the comments, and I’ll address it.

For a couple of years now, I’ve been fascinated by the possibilities of a field known as Augmented Reality. In a nutshell, AR allows a digital device to “overlay” digital information onto the physical world. This is quite cool stuff. Watch:

So, that’s nice and everything. We can take a digital device, and through the multitude of sensory input, we can start to use it as a viewfinder. We can even start coming up with zany ways of manipulating the image we’re seeing, which people with very little expertise are starting to play with:

What’s intrigued me though, is can we find more interesting ways to interact with the device. It’s great that I can point my iPhone at a piece of paper with a special block printed on it, and a wind farm comes out, or I can point it at the environment I’m stood in and get extra information that isn’t otherwise easily found. What else can I do? Well, thanks to the same technologies developed for those applications I can suddenly create a virtual reality headset (either to augment my environment or to travel to another distant one):

Again, pretty and interesting and opens all sorts of possibilities. But how much further can we go? I have no doubt we’re just seeing the early adopter stuff here, and that with time lots more interesting applications will become available utilising these technologies. Watch that space carefully.

One of the issues raised by this technology though, is our addiction to it and the fact we become chained to the device. All of us have suffered that weird syndrome that happens when out with friends and suddenly all of you in a group are staring at small boxes of plastic and metal, interacting with virtual worlds rather than the one you’re physically in. If we start to augment reality through this technology, do we lose something about the sense of place and interaction with the real physical World? Do we start to become machines ourselves?

Thankfully, a rather interesting prospect is on the horizon. Even better, it’s open source and achievable with cheapish hardware. It might take a moment for this to “click” with you, but this will likely be the most valuable 10 minutes you’ll spend this year on understanding the future of human interfaces with technology in the next few years. Trust me. If you haven’t clicked that link, do so before going on, or if you want to skip the background and just see it in action, here’s a demo clip with cheesy music for you:

The idea that the device disappears is not all that new – we have seen devices getting smaller and denser for years with that goal in mind – but the way this has been done fascinates me. This technology once developed a little more into something more consumable eradicates the need for a high-end smartphone, multi-touch technology like the $40,000 Microsoft Surface, portable media players, the lot.

What you need: a camera, a projector, a data connection and a pair of headphones, all plugged into something that can understand all of them. Right now, the hardware looks cumbersome, but that’s just a hardware engineering problem: there are already smaller projection devices and cameras coming to market that will make this technology nearly invisible when worn.

What you can do with it: anything a camera, mp3 player, iPhone, desktop PC, laptop, mobile phone, projector, surface table, AR application, in fact anything you can do with any digital device, all in one go. And all of it with the device being near invisible.

What you use it with: ordinary pieces of paper, walls, tables, your hands, the objects and people around you. Instead of staring at pieces of plastic, suddenly you are encouraged to look up at the World.

When something interesting happens you don’t fumble around, open a shutter, focus, click, crop, tag and post. You just make a shape with your hands, and there’s your photo. When you want a flight-time update you don’t fumble, open an app, type, click, read: you just look at your boarding pass. You’re in a bookshop and you wonder if the book in your hands is any good so you fumble, type (or perhaps photo the barcode), click and read, perhaps clicking around a few stores on a small screen. With this, you just hold the book. That’s it.

You might think this is sci-fi, that nobody would ever use all of this or that the “back-end” needed would be too bulky. I would disagree. I would say it’s one of the most interesting developments in technology this decade. I will be watching for the release of the source code due soon with some interest. Pranav’s site is a good place to keep your ear to the ground.

For the last two years, the digital sector has been a minor miracle in the wider economy. Whilst everybody else was fretting over bank collapses and credit crunches, the software sector has held firm.

Services companies (like Vagueware), have seen revenue growth as people seek efficiency gains, more streamlined processes supported by software and ways to leverage data in more creative ways. Product companies have ridden the wave of efficiency gains as people upgrade to compete. Together, we’re probably the only areas still recruiting and holding firm. The recession is something we’ve been sheltered from for the most part.

No more.

This morning Adobe – creators of the cornerstone software of many a web outfit in Photoshop, et al – announced they’re shedding 680 employees, a total of 9% of their workforce in order to “align costs with its 2010 operating plan and budget [...] and the realities of the business environment”.

So that’s 9% from one of the industry top dogs. Ouch. Maybe they were heavy, and it was time to restructure, but that’s one big kick in the stomach for a sector that’s been strong whilst all else flails.

Add into the mix EA’s 1500-job cull and things start to look grimmer still.

One phrase springs to mind: buckle up.