Innovation in Software

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.

In the middle of my RSS feeds this morning was a link to a wiki that – if it works – could develop into an incredibly useful tool.

Chris Heilmann (author of Beginning Javascript has set up the Business Case for Web Standards wiki because “there are a lot of presentations written about it but all differ in approach and content and collating all these great ideas can help us form a solid approach to selling web standards to the business.”

It’s obviously just starting out but it’s not too shabby already and should give most people a few pointers in the right direction. I particularly like the “Counterarguments” page where several of the arguments you’ll hear from managers and clients against adopting web standards are listed.

Don’t forget: it’s a wiki. If you think there should be something on there that isn’t, you know what to do, right?

It’s taken a while to get there, but the move is now done and dusted. Even better the blog (which you’re reading right now), actually looks like a blog all of a sudden. I never really got on with the Hemingway theme I’d used since starting this site with its 2-stories-side-by-side-on-the-front-page, so it’s nice to be using my own cut/variation on ‘Simpla’ credited in the site footer.

I’ve thrown up an article or two into each of the main sections in the main site to test the platform more than anything else. The goal of course is to get people out there interested in throwing articles up, but I’ll be putting up about 2-3 articles a day for the next two or three months until it starts getting a bit full. Please, if you want to get involved at any point, you can register and dive in – it’s an open Wiki and it’s meant to be used by anybody interested in software development. The Research and WEBINT areas will develop a Wikipedia-esque tone about them, and virtually no software topic or company is out of scope, so it should be easy to get started: if you’re not into the Development side of things, I don’t want to leave you out.

I’m also really pleased that I can now start writing ‘proper’ articles here again without the underlying niggles bothering me. The plan is to write 10-15 short articles a week, and 1-2 longer more ‘in-depth’ articles for the next month or two. The focus is going to be on innovation going on within the industry, providing updates on how the ‘experiment’ at the main site develops and the creative process when trying to come up with new ideas for software.

It strikes me that these days every software product people think of – whether open source or not – is effectively a business in its own right. I’m very tempted to do a series of articles on entrepreneurship but I think that given my own business is so highly experimental at this stage it may be I’m not the best person to hand out advice.

I’ve still got to decide how I’m going to handle conversations better within all this. The comments section on this blog is not sufficient for the variety of content I’m dealing with on the wiki, and commenting on wikis has always sucked. I think in the next week or three it’ll be time to look at the issue of dedicated forums or a mailing list.

This is a new beginning for Vagueware and it really feels like I’m starting from scratch all over again in a lot of ways, so I’m feeling a bit nervous about everything – it’s going to take a lot of work to get to where I’m aiming.

If you have any thoughts, please feel free to leave them in the comments.

Once again, delays have creeped into my “Vagueware will take over the World” schedule, but this time for a good reason: honest.

The server this site (and the new wiki) is hosted on is being moved between two data centres and will be down for about 24 hours later this week. In addition, I need to move them both off onto a different physical machine in the next few weeks anyway, so I want to get all this moving done before I start ramping up activity.

The good bit is that because I’ve put more time into thinking through the next stage, I realised it might be useful to have a couple of half-completed applications to play with at the beginning. I now have a couple of really nice applications focused on aggregation, but with a twist. Each of them has the potential to use for experiments that could develop into interesting research exercises, and I hope to release code before the end of the month – I don’t rule out changing my mind on this just yet though. Once again, “the project” has taken a bit of a turn but one for the better I hope.

Also, I’m giving a talk on “Mystery Ruby” (read: I haven’t finished deciding what goes into the talk) this Tuesday at the NWRUG in Manchester.

Lastly, whilst I’m doing house-keeping, I have had an invite – and plan to attend – Hack Day next month. I’m hoping by then that the new wiki’fied Vagueware will be already picking up a bit of steam and I will be trying to get people interested as I write my “hack” over the course of a day and night.

I always like the first launch of something new. It’s exciting as you see what the reaction is. Right now, I’m busy coding away on a project for a client but am looking forward to spending this evening and tomorrow morning putting up a couple of dozen articles into the new Vagueware site.

As you can see there are a couple of areas I didn’t mention when describing what I wanted to do. I thought I’d run through the sections now and see what people thought:

Development is going to be the core of the site in many ways. Here I’m hoping people will describe problems software can solve and then a collaborative effort will work out various solutions. The solutions will start out using a template based on Edward de Bono’s “six-hat thinking” which is just a way of making people think through every angle of what it is they’re proposing. I’m hoping that in time they’ll evolve into functional specifications you could hand to a programmer, and they’d be able to produce working software.

I hope to be amongst the first of those programmers. It’s not enough to just talk about software – it actually needs to turn into an executable at some stage, or it doesn’t count.

There are a lot of issues about the Development area I’ve yet to resolve with regards to how it’ll work. I haven’t suggested a license or dealt with copyright completely yet, but need to in the next day or two. I’m not sure how communication will work. I’m not even convinced anybody will turn up and help – I could be talking to myself permanently. It’s hard to know.

Research is more fluffy as an area of the site, with the aim of providing strong articles on areas of software research and innovation. You can think of it as a software-dedicated Wikipedia if you like, but with a more informed style and less dry in tone. I don’t think it’s possible for you to learn anything from Wikipedia’s articles on software – they act as a reference, a reminder for the already informed – whereas I want this area to be somewhere people go to discover and learn something new. It’s an ambitious goal, but you’ve got to start somewhere.

WEBINT was something I setup for no other reason than I didn’t want the research area clogged up with company and product-specific information. This is the area where profiles can be built up on specific companies, services and products. Whilst the research area might have articles on the technical, sociological and political impacts of social networking (for example), WEBINT would list all the social network websites and provide a list of features provided. There would be a coupling between the Research area and WEBINT obviously, but it would allow those who interested in one aspect of a technology to research and delve into it without having to be dragged into an article they consider too deep or too superfluous.

I’m still playing with TWiki and deciding if it’s the right tool for the job. Right now, it looks like it does almost everything I need and seems user-friendly enough. But. I’m also tempted to just go back to mediawiki because everybody recognises it and knows how to use it. I’m holding off for now, but need to make a call in the next 24 hours because that’s when I really want to get the show on the road.