Collaborative Development
If you’ve been following our project manager or our chief technologist on twitter or our invitation to a revolution in software development, you’ve been exposed to our new religion. We are evangelizing a new way of developing software. We believe that the current custom enterprise software development process is inherently flawed: pride, draconian disclosure policies and lawyers all drive companies to go it on their own. Each company pays a premium to have their own version of the same thing their neighbor has. If we took this model to your house, imagine a builder asking you to define where the trees should be cut and the stone quarried, the dimensions of the lumber, the makeup of the wireing, plumbing and finishing materials and then charging you premium hourly rates while all of those things are manufactured from scratch…in some cases, requiring you to pay for the factory to built too. It makes no sense! So we’re looking to do something different: collaborative development. You can read all about it in our blog entry on collaborative software development, but as we’ve been pounding the pavement evangelizing, we’ve learned a few things about fear. If you’ve been following our project manager or our chief technologist on twitter or our invitation to a revolution in software development, you’ve been exposed to our new religion. We are evangelizing a new way of developing software. We believe that the current custom enterprise software development process is inherently flawed: pride, draconian disclosure policies and lawyers all drive companies to go it on their own. Each company pays a premium to have their own version of the same thing their neighbor has. If we took this model to your house, imagine a builder asking you to define where the trees should be cut and the stone quarried, the dimensions of the lumber, the makeup of the wireing, plumbing and finishing materials and then charging you premium hourly rates while all of those things are manufactured from scratch…in some cases, requiring you to pay for the factory to built too. It makes no sense! So we’re looking to do something different: collaborative development.
You can read all about it in our blog entry on collaborative software development, but as we’ve been pounding the pavement evangelizing, we’ve learned a few things about fear.
- Collaboration brings with it the opportunity to share ideas with like minded individuals. It allows the development of industry best practices and a community to help solve new problems. This is why many of the open source development projects are communities not individuals. But it also brings with it a fear of looking stupid. Most organizations fear engaging with their peers for fear of being behind the times or of demonstrating their lack of sophistication. As someone put it, letting everyone under your covers can get personal.
- New ideas, despite their obvious value are still new. And people fear being the first one to do anything. As all trailblazers know, getting the first client on board to evangelize with you is the tipping point, even if you have to give away your product/service/offering to that first person. So what are we doing about fear? We’re trying to find a market where the need outweighs the fear. We’re bringing collaborative development to non-profit groups. We’re looking for a group of like-minded, forward thinking, non-competitive non-profits to develop some software amongst them to make their lives better. We want these organizations to be the beneficiary of our revolution in software and to be the poster-children for its success.
Many hands make light work. If you know of any non-profits that fit the bill, drop us a line.
**UPDATE: **this is cross posted from one of my many other endeavors: E-By Design
