Innovation in Software

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

As Manoj said, I am now the lead on organising OpenCoffee Manchester. Manoj has done some great work on bringing these events to the North, so I just hope I don’t completely break everything and nobody turns up from now on.

One of my goals is to give these events a slightly clearer agenda and to make them geared more towards collaboration rather than networking. There’s going to be no major changes, but I’m fascinated by some of the success stories of past OpenCoffee events.

For example, as I understand it edocr was effectively conceived of at OpenCoffee and the partners attending decided to take an equity split in it. It wasn’t until several people (particularly Manoj) prodded me last month into releasing flaky code and “getting on with it” that I got around to releasing vagueware.com. At the same meeting I saw a prototype for a project that was discussed at a meeting a few months ago and several offered feedback that will get reflected in the code before launch. I’ve met people who I already know I’m going to end up collaborating with in future.

OpenCoffee Manchester then isn’t just about networking. It’s about finding people who you can work with and getting on with it. It’s about quickly developing ideas. Nobody intended for it to be like that – although Manoj has been an instigator in many of the success stories – but I think that’s where we need to set out the agenda for the future. A kind of mini-Project Sahara whilst we wait for that project to show results and to get buy-in from the key players in this city.

Of course it’s also a nice way to spend a Tuesday morning once a month.

I hope to see you all at the Starbucks behind Central Library next month on Tuesday 27th November, starting at 10am. This will be our last meeting of 2007, as the December meeting would have landed on the 25th – I think we all have alternative plans for that date – so it will be interesting to hear what people want to do from 22nd January onwards.

I’m currently reading Wikinomics and finding it incredibly engaging. I’ll write a fuller review when I get to the end of it sometime later this week, but I’m that enthusiastic I had to give people a bit of a heads-up before the weekend. The full review is likely to be long. This post won’t be.

To date, the only truly successful wiki has probably been Wikipedia – it’s probably the only one that the mythical ‘man in the street’ can name. In Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams document an emerging trend and show that it’s not just wiki software that is describing the new spirit of collaborative development, but blogs, UGC sites like YouTube and social networks. It is the interactive element that adds value into the business, not the technical definition of what a wiki actually is.

Where the really interesting things are going to happen though are where collaboration happens between end customer and producer, and the middle men who connect half a dozen businesses to a single customer desire.

Outsourcing has reached a point where an industrial designer and a marketeer can design a product over coffee, firm up designs overnight, have prototype units being developed by a Chinese company within a matter of weeks, and support provided by an Indian company the day the unit goes on sale. The flexibility of this kind of out-sourcing is allowing start-ups to get very big, very quickly.

Some are beginning to realise they can even outsource the product design to the customer. It’s not just small companies either – major companies are seeing the value of a porous membrane between internal R&D and the rest of the World.

Vagueware obviously has a vested interest in this model. I haven’t quite worked out the dynamics, the money side of things and how we go about making developers take notice, but I’m hoping that others who like the idea of open collaborative design in the software industry will help work that out with me. I’m currently toying with ideas on how to reward those outside my business who directly add value to it. If you have ideas on how that can happen, you know what to do

I’m not alone. We’re about to enter an era of real businesses with real products being built this way. The knowledge economy is going to be very flat, with each of us having the ability to act as independent agents working on the ideas that interest us. Economically, this is going to be fascinating.

From what I’ve read so far, Wikinomics is a good introduction to how this new World is starting to unfold, and I think if you’re interested in these new models or if you’re interested in what the next 2-3 years of web application development is going to look like (if you’re a bespoke developer or designer, your future clients are either reading this book already or will do soon), you need to grab yourself a copy.

You can buy it from this link if you’re in the UK or this link if you’re in the US. Enjoy!

Whilst pretty rough around the edges – and I’ve not got many ideas in the system yet – vagueware.com is now up and open for business. Depending on when you measure it from, it’s either a few weeks or a few years over-schedule. At least nobody can argue it’s over-budget.

Right now you can:

• Add new ideas – the whole point is to get ideas for innovative software solutions into the system. What counts? If it’s software and it doesn’t currently exist, it counts
• Edit existing ideas – It’s a wiki. I’ve still got to sort out proper version control, but any registered user can edit ideas so that collaboration can start with developing the idea itself. At the moment you can only add tags, not delete them, but that’ll get fixed in the next update
• Vote on ideas – voting up or down allows for a weak interaction. People who don’t want to comment but have an opinion can provide it, and hopefully better/more popular ideas bubble to the top
• Comment on ideas – It’s a conversation after all

There is a long, long way to go to get to where I want to be, but at least it’s now up and people can start getting involved in what I’ve been talking about.

Over coming weeks and months I’ll be adding features (you can of course suggest features by adding them and tagging them ‘vagueware’), but for now the basic framework is in place and ready to start taking ideas.

Here we go again. A round-up of links for a Sunday spent in front of the PC, or if you’re a corporate slave, a way to pass Monday morning bunking off doing real work.

What is the Secret Behind Contagious Behaviour – This video from Stanford’s Always On summit has some fascinating discussion about contagious behaviour, implementing innovation and working out how to give up control of marketing and products to your customers. My favourite phrase from it probably has to be “fragile fires”. Mitchell Baker of Mozilla, Perry Klebhan – inventor of the modern snow shoe, and Gil Penchina of Wikia discuss how to get users doing the work for you. Moderated by Bob Sutton of Stanford and Diego Rodriguez of IDEO.

Collaboration doesn’t Work – if you’re afraid of the Kool Aid, this article from inc.com suggests teamwork and collaboration doesn’t work. I think the conclusions drawn here are all wrong (obviously) but for a simple reason: the author thinks that collaboration can be done by anybody, without training. It’s a skill that needs time to develop, much like the skill of being able to write software, write a PR release or do a cashflow forecast. Asking people to just walk in a room and start brain-storming without any prior training is asking them to behave in a business context using skills that to this point they had only learnt in social contexts, i.e. contexts where being polite is more important than being right.

Wikipedia Forks – It’s quite common within open source projects for groups within the project to reach disagreement and one set walks off with a copy of the project (which is legally OK for them to do), set up camp somewhere else and create a new project with the old code as a base. This is known as ‘forking’ and it happens a lot more than the media would have you believe. Now a group from Wikipedia believe it’s time to create a new project that has the good bits of Wikipedia but with the oversight of experts, and so off they march. Initially we as readers won’t see much difference, but the proof of the pudding will be in the long-term eating. I wish them well.

iPod users prefer CDs to iTunes – and who can blame them? The issue here of course is ‘DRM’ or ‘Digital Rights Management’. If you buy music through iTunes, Apple get to tell you which devices you can play that music on and how. If you buy a CD and rip it into iTunes you get a physical back-up, you can play the music where you want, and the ripped files can be copied to any device including ones not made by Apple. I genuinely think that within the next 3 years there will be a massive consumer revolt at DRM and the only way to deal with it will be to completely restructure the way music labels (and in the future, Hollywood studios) make their money.

8 Steps to better IT meetings – In fact, not just IT meetings, but any meeting. A nice round-up of how to keep meetings on track. Personally, I think meetings should be avoided completely – individual conversations work much better and if kept to the point can be a great deal quicker and more productive. Having everybody in the room really is as productive as having nobody in the room. However, if you insist on meetings, this is a great way to make them less brain-dead.

The 25 Worst web-sites in the World, ever – I remember most of these when they launched. Truly horrendous, and in my opinion the number one spot holder deserves it – utterly awful website (I won’t spoil the surprise for you though). That said, none of these were as bad as Microsoft Bob in the ‘I… don’t… believe… they… did this…’ stakes.

50 favourite design resources – for those of you who, like me, find design something that has to be worked on as a skill rather than something that comes naturally, here’s a crib sheet.