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.

On the GeekUp mailing list, some business development advice was being asked for in terms of growing revenues and finding sales channels.

The advice being offered was to specialise: choose a niche and excel within it. Good advice, but the recipient started talking about the problems that come with specialising in CakePHP – a technology framework for rapid development of web applications – and I felt compelled to chip in with advice I think might be worthy of putting to a wider audience:

Don’t get caught in the trap of thinking specialisation means technology specialisation.

Business people don’t know about CakePHP. They know about e-Commerce, or customer forums, or customised marketing emails, or intranets where employees share knowledge.

Talk in their language, not yours.

When I go out and do sales, I talk about using Agile methodologies, iterative development, growing the technology base as revenue and budget allow. We use methods that ensure desired behaviour is captured and tested against cheaply, so changes in business assumptions are cheap to re-factor in the code – i.e. we reduce the cost of change to as close to zero as possible.

They couldn’t give a stuff what I’m actually saying is “we code Ruby on Rails with Cucumber, Culerity and RSpec tests”, because that doesn’t mean anything to them.

So, follow the market specialisation, not the technology specialisation when you speak to clients. Sure, choose the tech you like working with, but talk to your clients in terms of eCommerce stores, bold new ideas, e-mail marketing or super-slick brochureware sites as part of marketing campaigns.

Same as with selling anything: you sell benefits, not features*

All the big agencies I’ve seen thrive have chosen this style. The small guys seem to bang on about technology (or even worse “we only use GNU/Linux tools in production of your website”), and being able to do “anything” and get frustrated when people aren’t lining up at the door – the clients who like those shops generally aren’t the ones most of us want anyway.

* Before somebody points out that some gadgets “sell” on feature lists, that’s not what’s happening. When I say “this camera has triple 15 megapixel CCD sensors”, you might think I’m selling a feature. I know though that a geek who is into this price niche will likely transfer that feature in their head into “I can take really sharp pictures with good natural colour definition pictures with that camera”. I sold you a benefit via your own knowledge of the possibilities of the feature. :-)

It seems obvious, but most people miss it. Talking in the language of technology and features is a mistake I made for several years and am still struggling to deal with as I develop my new marketing material. The simple truth is, if they knew what all this BDD and Agile stuff was and why it was so good, they probably wouldn’t need our services. Now all I want to talk about when doing sales is business problems, issues and ideas and how to address them. Take heed, young grasshopper.

Last weekend Rails Rumble took place, which is where teams of developers attempt to write an entire web application in a weekend. It is a testament to the power of Ruby on Rails that professional quality web applications can be built from scratch in just a couple of days, and more development teams should attempt to work this way.

Next week I’ll review each of the applications in more detail to look at how the lean development process worked and didn’t work in each case. For now however, consider going to vote. And I’d ask you to consider voting high for the Bartender application – it’s a Mancunian team, and the perfect accompaniment to a bank holiday weekend.

I have my “Chairman* of Fly The Coop” hat on here.

Fly The Coop, as some of you will be aware, is an Independent & Provident Society (read: non-profit co-operative), here to help all you freelancers and SMEs out there collaborate and co-work on a regular basis.

We have an opportunity to get involved in the new Hackspace in the Northern Quarter and take over the first floor to call our very own. However, we need to do a feasibility study and work out whether this is even viable before we commit ourselves to taking the space.

So, if you have 5 minutes please do go and fill in the survey.

We’re also interested in finding companies who want to “sponsor” the space, without perhaps making use of it in the same way. Perhaps you’re a service provider who doesn’t need a desk, or you only need one desk but want to provide more support than one desk gives us, whatever. This sponsorship would help us offset move-in and first year costs whilst we get settled in. If you’re interested in sponsorship, please do get in touch with either myself or email info@flythecoop.co.uk

* Until the next AGM, anyway

One of Vagueware’s more established clients has developed a product called CAESER to help organisations understand how their suppliers behave in terms Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

In order to try and raise CSR as a topic within the business community as a whole, the team have recently been blogging and twittering their thoughts, and an article this morning by Miana Capuano caught my eye:

Whilst unemployment in Britain rises as the nation struggles to deal with the current economic climate, it is no surprise that companies are cutting their corporate giving and charitable support. Research in the UK has shown that while donations to charities have dropped, demand for their services has grown. In such turbulent times the impetus for responsible business practice is now even greater than ever before. With a lack of funds, companies need to move away from philanthropy and explore more innovative ways of supporting their communities. By integrating CSR (corporate social responsibility) activities to core business objectives, engaging in partnerships with organisations such as other businesses, social enterprises and charities, adopting environmental strategies that save energy (and money!) and engaging in pro-bono work, it will help to ensure that responsible business practice is not swept aside in these difficult economic times.

Over the last few years I – through Vagueware – have attempted a few projects aimed at engaging with charities, social enterprises and community groups, including:

• Substantially discounted rates for charities and non-profit organisations for larger projects
• Discounted rates for local businesses, in order to increase take up of new technologies locally
• Support for community technology groups in general
• Training/Development of school kids who don’t have access to technology mentoring – a project that has stalled but “watch this space”
• Speak to a Geek. I loved doing this. I think all of us on the panel did
• Co-working groups, encouraging collaboration within the scene, etc.
• The occasional charitable contribution to community groups in need of some technology to keep going

And yet, what has it amounted to? What impact have I actually had on the local charity/non-profit sector? Offering to throw some money into a pot for a new motherboard for a community cybercafe is one thing, actually helping to run the cybercafe and turning up to do some training on technology is something quite different.

We could collectively as a community be doing a little bit more. “Software runs civilisation”, as they say, and most of you reading this blog post are in the higher priestly order of “alpha geeks”, armed with knowledge that could revolutionise a charity or non-profit for the better. We could help with social media, development of technology, general IT literacy and support, and more.

I’m not suggesting we start to wear hair shirts and abandon our business plans in favour of forming a socialist utopia, but we can start something interesting.

There are notable existing efforts, of course. We could all put some 20% time into Circuit Riding and get a warm glow every time we get on a bus to Hulme or Cheetham Hill, but isn’t there something more we could do?

I think there is. I think you have ideas too. So I’m going to bully you into sharing your ideas.

Whilst the services idea bank has stalled a little over the last few months, I think the concept of collating and voting on ideas is perfect for brain-storming and prioritising what we could do together as a community.

I’ve kicked off a Geek Social Responsibility forum to collect ideas and votes, and seeded it with a few simple ideas of my own. For the next few weeks my 20% time will be spent in part trying to drum up interest in these ideas and getting some of them rolling.

For me there are a couple of key areas we could address:

• Increased access to technology
• Increased access to knowledge about technology (including empowering groups and individuals with the ability to create new technologies)
• Better collaboration and co-working for community and charity groups (i.e. adopting working practices we’ve pioneered as a sector)
• Substantially discounted/free access to specialist skills and knowledge for charities and communities

P.S. – one of the next areas to be addressed by the CAESER team is Equality & Diversity. I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion, how broken we are as an industry in that regard, but the industry is currently so heavily dominated by misogynistic pricks, I don’t even know where to start on that one.

Last night was GeekUp Manchester night, and as a one-off the geeks combined forces with Manchester Digital and Northern Digitals to have a “Bastille Day BBQ” at Atlas on Deansgate.

I haven’t been to GeekUp in a while, and I’d heard that attendance was dwindling down to almost Manchester BSD UG levels (which is now half a dozen mates having a few drinks in the Briton’s Protection).

Last night – with 250+ members of the local industry looking to let their hair down – was quite a different affair.

In fact, it had the air of something much bigger and interesting than anything I’d seen in the city since the days of my department at MMU running Wired City (recently resurrected, but I can’t find an authoritative URL for it), and was kind of like all the social events across the city combined, run by some of the people behind Big Chips, all with more beer and food. It was also surprisingly upbeat, with everybody busy and nobody complaining about the economic slow-down – in fact, some of the discussion was about how to get hours down to a manageable level so as to take weekends off.

I ended discussing something last night with Dan Hardiker of Adaptavist that I realised I hadn’t really stated publicly yet: I don’t need to lead or direct something in order to participate in it

I am a man who likes to be in charge of my future. I do not react well to being directed into anything, and resist attempts at management if I consider it futile or inefficient (I was a pain in the backside for some of my teachers at school).

My community involvement in the last few years has as a result been mostly trying to lead things. BarCamp Manchester, helping where I could with GeekUp, pushing along co-working and other collaboration opportunities, cheering on NWDC and all of its participants… and more.

I’ve enjoyed my part in all of that, and I’ve met some incredible people in the process. However, a couple of months ago I informed the other directors of Fly The Coop that I intend to stand down as chairman at the next AGM. I do not intend to run another BarCamp. If somebody wants to run a co-working day or HackSpace I’ll show my face and take part if workload permits, but for now I have no plans to lead or direct anything other than my own businesses (I’m currently director of four, soon to be three, then back to four again probably), and to focus on helping my customers.

It took me six months in the wilderness to understand it, but now I have, I think I can be of more value to the community as somebody in the cheap seats, participating. I hope you’ll agree.

I also discussed the fact that word-of-mouth is the very best sales channel available.

I’ve been doing some serious sales work in the last couple of months. I have mined the Official Journal of the European Union for public sector opportunities, I’ve done cold-calls, I’ve done networking events, I’ve really pushed the boat out in order to secure the cashflow to hire the three full-time staff I want to in the next couple of months (more about those guys soon, I hope!). I got the odd tickle, but nothing solid so far.

Virtually every single sale I’ve landed on the order books in the last couple of months has come from somebody, somewhere, being in discussion with a client and saying something along the lines of “I think we need Paul Robinson for this one…”, and bringing me into the project. Six months from now, I hope to have a team who everybody who knows it wants involved in more projects.

Reputation is everything. I have no idea where I got mine from as 95% of my work is behind the scenes and under NDA involving back-end processes and intranet functionality, but I’m grateful for it anyway.

As such, I need to be more public about the work I’m doing, provide a better public profile of my clients and what I do for them, and go to a lot more events where I try and find partners for future projects. The Internet might be making geography irrelevant for a lot of work, but it doesn’t make relationships any less important – in fact, in a World where there are thousands of development teams a click away, a team you can trust is becoming more valuable than ever.

And lastly, I discussed for a while Vagueware’s plans for the future and if I’m going mad.

I concede that from the outside, my behaviour must look quite odd. A couple of years of scrabbling away, a year of landing a whole bunch of contracts in one go (one of which became very intensive for a while and so the sales cycle seized completely), all punctuated by random bursts of community activity, and then a half-year of what seems to be freelancer-grind, culminating in… a recruitment drive and an announcement that suddenly this company is about to get medium-sized quite quickly.

Some people think I’ve struck gold, others seem to be confused still as to what it is Vagueware does, and others don’t get the idea that managing true R&D innovation is difficult and can’t just be done the same way you build a regular e-commerce platform. Some ask about Kagtum, others want to know about the idea bank. It all seems a bit of a mess, and many people seem confused. If I’m honest, I’m still clarifying some of the details myself.

This is all entirely my fault. It’s not that the direction isn’t clear, it’s that is not clearly communicated. Over the next month the website will get an overhaul to make it clear:

• What Vagueware does, and who it does it for
• What Vagueware intends to do in future
• Why you should give a damn given I’m just that bald guy at the social stuff that talks a lot

I actually feel as if I’m letting some of you down at times, but last night it became clear why until recently growth was so hard to come by: it’s difficult to get leads if people don’t know what you do.

So, my bad. Sorry.

Last night overall was pretty great and I definitely think we should do larger events like that more often. The diversity and depth of the sector in this city is one of its strengths and last night left me considering long and hard whether I really want to move away next year (more on that some other time).

We tend to silo ourselves far too much – designers only hang out with designers, developers with developers, and so on. It is only by mixing it up we can find the best opportunities for collaboration and go forward together.

We should be abandoning titles we assign ourselves and start to think about how to help each other more. And that means more events like last night.

Well done to the organisers, and here’s to the next one.

P.S. there was something else brought up last night: some of you have been pulling my accounts from Companies House. Save yourself some money, and next time just ask me, I won’t be offended and I won’t even ask you why you want them – as a member of the public you’re legally entitled to them on demand.

What does irk me slightly though, is the conversation I had suggested some of you had been discussing said accounts between yourselves and picking holes at my 2-year old accounts (2008 hasn’t been filed yet), behind my back. That just seems a bit rude. I’m sorry if I’ve offended or upset you in some way to the point of you wishing to find chinks in my armour in any way possible, but if you have something to say to me please just say it to me. I know my style can come across as arrogant and patronising to some, but I genuinely would prefer to have an open discussion with people rather than you spend time questioning an ancient business model of mine behind my back.

See you all again soon at the next GeekUp or other similar event.

Friend of Vagueware, Manoj Ranaweera has recently announced his web 2.0 play edocr.com has launched some new services for companies wanting to create a public repository of all their documents.

It’s no secret that many in the local tech scene have marvelled at Manoj’s persistence and enthusiasm for edocr, but for a while some have been waiting for him to carve out his own unique niche, and I think this is a big part of it.

Yes, there are other document sharing sites out there, but how many of them are so focused on business and business research? There are lots of clever widgets on the other sites, but how many of them allow a company to start producing their own document channels easily like Howarth Clark Whitehill, allowing anybody in the organisation to upload a file and have it converted into a web-friendly Flash document? Yes, you could produce your own repository, but is it findable? Where is the serendipity? Isn’t it easier to outsource it all to the brains behind the scenes at edocr?

I’m starting to get what he goes on about now, and think if he keeps this up he’s on to a winner. Manoj’s twitter stream suggests a tweak to the design of the site and a move to EC2 is on the cards – I think if/when those things happen, there’s nothing stopping him building this into a major web industry player.

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” – Douglas Adams

Thanks to Twitter, Facebook and blogs, it’s no secret within the local geek scene that I had a mild health scare around this time last week.

Note, for somebody who has never been to hospital other than as a visitor, a “mild health scare” feels like the scariest thing in the World.

The short version is, something odd happened, it could have been a lot worse but the diagnosis is ultimately positive in that it is not the very worst it could have been.

However…

It scared me. I’ll be honest: I work harder than most, I enjoy my social life more than most, and I have found it hard over the last three years to say “no” to anybody. I want to be involved in everything, if not organising it. I have the kind of lifestyle that worries mothers and makes fathers yearn for their own youth.

To find myself in the position I did made me realise I was risking everything

Between the scare and the diagnosis I had a lot of time to think about how that strategy was failing me, my family and my clients. I have started to evaluate what it is I want to continue to do that I did before, and what I am happy to consider left behind, dead.

There are lots of impacts that have emerged, wide-ranging in their scope. However, I shall limit myself to a discussion of the professional impacts here:

Basically, If I work 60 hours per week (as I have done), I get ill. We all do. You can perhaps do this for a short period of time or doing menial work, but if you’re doing abstract thinking to deadlines at that load for three years, you will break. Therefore including travel, I’m not prepared in future to go above 45 hours per week.

Going to geek events, reading mailing lists and RSS, etc. I now have to consider work.

Given my clients and other business need me for about 40 hours a week, I therefore have to be selective about the other things I do. Whilst I will remain a champion of Fly The Coop, NWDC, and remain a vociferous supporter of the local tech industry and help it when I can, I will be:

• Unsubscribing from most mailing lists I’m on
• Going to fewer geek events
• Saying “no” to more requests (but please don’t let that stop you requesting)
• Spending more time doing the things I think I do best

I don’t expect most people will notice or care, but I do note that people sometimes notice when I’m “quiet” for a while, so this is advance warning. I am no longer receiving mail for most groups I’ve been active with regarding email. I will show my face at about a quarter of the events I did before.

The flip side, is this blog is about to return to the regular, well-researched writing that highlighted its early days. For blog readers, this is excellent news.

Good luck to all of those in the community – I will be back, but only once a few other things are sorted out.

Yesterday I travelled to London and back to give a talk at Sun Microsystem’s Customer Briefing Centre as part of their (Startup Essentials Meetup)[http://www.meetup.com/StartupEssentials/]. There were around 60 people in the room, and it felt slightly odd being back in a scene where my face was pretty much unknown. In Manchester, it seems every event I go to has at least a half dozen people I know.

My presentation was about what I’ve been helping clients do recently: firm up process around software delivery. Some of my clients don’t consider themselves to be software companies, but they are because they are delivering a significant chunk of their revenue through bespoke web applications. This poses a problem – they don’t know how to manage software development, and it can’t be managed the way you manage a sales team or a marketing strategy.

That’s where I come in. In my highly-opinionated, bombastic, but oh-so-cuddly way, I beat developers into submission with big sticks marked “Interface first” and “TDD” and so forth. I still write code sometimes but that’s because without doing so, how else can I appreciate architecture decisions and help developers make sure their decisions are aligning perfectly with business needs?

Below is the handout from last night.

I’ll provide explanatory notes if asked.

Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk about. It was a realisation that came to me whilst travelling back from London on the last train about how that room of new faces looked to me, compared to the Manchester/Leeds/Liverpool/Sheffield scene.

The simple reality is that the Northern scene is far more close-knit than I had realised before last night. I’m not saying the London scene isn’t “as good”, just that my brief dalliance with it last night made me realise a few things about the Northern scene. Specifically, the reason the Northern scene is so close-knit is probably social media.

Here’s what generally happens to somebody approaching the scene these days: they start out by joining the GeekUp list. Many unsubscribe after a few days, but some stick around. Quite a few make it along to a GeekUp near them. They meet other people, find that there is this wide community of people like them. Then the really weird thing happens: we start adding each other as friends on Facebook or as contacts on LinkedIn, and following each other on Twitter.

This does something strange. No longer do we act as a group of people who see each other once a month at a GeekUp, chat on a mailing list and catch up with each other occasionally: through Twitter and Facebook we effectively live and work together. I know out of the crowd I follow who is most into Wispa chocolate bars, who is having problems with their kids right now, who is reading what in the blogosphere and how things are going for people in general. This isn’t just business networking – we’re existing with each other.

As I reflected on this, I realised this meant that others probably knew me more than perhaps I’d realised. Followers yesterday would have watched me admit my tears as I saw my sister fly off to Canada with her family for two years, prepare for my talk last night, travel down, move across London, and exhaustingly travel back to Manchester before having a nightcap in my local pub in the early hours of the morning. What does that say to my potential customers? Well, it makes me pretty transparent for starters. I think that’s a good thing.

And here is where I think the North is going to get an advantage. As a community we’re small enough to pretty much know each other to a reasonable degree (although we’re going to have to think about (Dunbar’s number)[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number] eventually), and yet because we are effectively working and living as one weird amorphous unit we have the ability to work together in ways unthinkable before social media.

I don’t know what the true consequences of this, but I’m pretty sure it’s a good thing if we allow it to bloom.