Quit Your Day Job

Collaboration and open source

September 23rd, 2008

I’ve managed to increase my reading speed from around 270 words per minute (wpm) to just over 500 wpm.  My goal is that by the end of the week I will have it up around the 650 mark.  Obviously practise is huge part of the process and I needed to find a book that I was generally interested in but not desperate to read if reading quickly was a disaster and left me with no recollection of what I was reading.  So I grabbed Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, figuring that it wouldn’t hurt to read that and if it were a little dry then at least I was getting the speed reading a workout in exactly the way that I wanted - get something read before I get distracted by whatever new shiny thing comes along.

Fortunately the book rather than being a chore to read has come as a revelation to me and has opened my mind up to some of the fantastic concepts and promise of Web 2.0.  As I’ve gone through it I haven’t been missing any of the concepts and yet have still maintained just under double my normal reading rate.

One of the practises though of getting real value out of speed reading is collaboration, a topic found quite heavily in Wikinomics.  You read a book quickly whilst others read books of their own quickly and then you present the core concepts and ideas of each book to each other, thus allowing you to grapple with a lot of information in a fraction of the time.

Since I’m not in one of those study groups I figured I would just share some of the key concepts here, maybe you’ll get something out of it, I certainly will and since it’s my house I can do what I want.

One of the first parts of the book talks about the benefits in open collaboration to corporations and individuals.  How the idea of being transparent with your intellectual property can lead to financial rewards rather than failure.  It talks about companies that have begun sharing what was once closely guarded secrets are now reaping the rewards of having the whole web community as their research and development department and by shifting their revenue avenues making more profit.

There is a company that I had a very small role in evaluating last year called Squiz, specifically we were looking at their open source CMS solution MySource Matrix.  It took a little bit to get used to the idea that the company itself was developing an open source product that anyone can download, install themselves and configure to suit their needs.

Surely the company would sink because they are giving their product away for free, which actually wasn’t the case at all, their product was the value add that they offered as they are the absolute experts in the product.  You can, if you are so inclined spend the time trying to configure the system yourself, but they can do it quickly and more efficiently than you probably can.  They can also customise modules for you, build up new capabilities and train your people.  This is where they can make their money.  

The key thing about this whole situation though is that everyone benefits from improvements made to open source framework.  The Squiz research and development team is their entire client base and as people tear the software apart and make improvements, the framework gets better and better.  They then can focus on delivering their services to the clients who are driving the direction of the CMS.

At least that’s how I imagine the theory works and if it isn’t exactly that way it still makes in my mind good business.

You see you can look at it in a non-info-tech scenario to illustrate why open sourcing your product isn’t the end of the world or profit:

Plumbing.

There is no army of lawyers and corporations trying to keep you from understanding how plumbing works, there are about a million books on do it yourself plumbing etc.  You can buy the tools and the materials from your local hardware store without licensing or signing non-disclosure agreements.  There is nothing stopping you from learning everything there is to know about plumbing.  

But some of us just are no good at plumbing, I don’t imagine it is easy for one minute.  I don’t personally have the inclination or the time to learn how or to develop the skill-set.  Which is no problem because there are plumbers.  Plumbers who are very good at what they do and can make a decent living selling their skills.  But they don’t sell you the secret of plumbing, because there is no secret, in fact most plumbers I’ve ever dealt with are more than happy to tell me what the problem actually is and how they’re going to fix it.

There will always be plumbers, despite the source code of plumbing being available.  I imagine the same for software.

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Categories: Books, Web Design | Tags: Anthony D. Williams, Books, don tapscott, open collaboration, open source, reading speed, research and development, speed reading book, wikinomics