Dave,
Thanks for your inputs. Some more background.... The board retreat was
an extremely important checkpoint to refine our scope and reach some
agreement on what we could achieve in the near term. We only finished
the requirements last week, after a final round of review with key
local group stakeholders. I'm working on the RFP for release later
this month, hopefully. Of course I agree with you that "getting it
done is now to me the highest priority". How is opening this effort up
for more public wrangling and design-by-committee going to get this
done faster?
Yes, the explosion of local groups happened on my watch, and it's why
I took over project management of this initiative in July. Since I've
been leading the project, we've moved from having some initial
wireframes created without any research or needs analysis that I'm
aware of, to a stage where I'm confident that we understand some of
our members' key needs. I now believe we can define an RFP and hire
dedicated resources to get this thing built.
This coming week, I will be speaking with developers who are going to
help us understand costs. Where did your $100k estimate come from? The
best hosted solution we've seen, HiveLive, is estimated to cost $10k
to deploy and perhaps $2k/month to sustain. We're not waiting for
fundraising; we are going to wait to understand our costs before
starting fundraising.
Please help me understand how we have a cultural issue with the
current scope, which again is focused on member profiles, event/
calendar, and local group mini-sites. Local groups and members are
clamoring for this material! The cultural issues I see will lie with
our subsequent (and yes, highly necessary) abandonment of the Mailman-
based discussion approach. This is absolutely going to be a political
issue and one for which we need to turn to our community in order to
assess its viability.
It sounds to me like you're saying that you want a chance to build
these new features on your own/with other volunteers. I do think IxDA
should consider leasing an inexpensive server slice for you & others
to have a sandbox for developing our next-generation infrastructure. I
just think that you guys should focus on the DISCUSSION and resource-
type features and not those that we've been working on for many months
now.
Cheers,
Liz
On Nov 1, 2008, at 3:42 PM, David Malouf wrote:
Liz here is what I want to see before the end of the year from the
board before giving up the idea of opening this up, and having the
board relinquish control over the project (but not leadership/
stewardship).
I want to see an RFP. I have suggested this privately to the board
through Nasir and then through Josh MONTHS ago after your
requirements have been done. Waiting for the retreat was "nice", but
now that is a month already.
What I'm MOST concerned with is that the board has shown itself
(BTW, as much as when I was a member as with now) of being incapable
of leading real initiatives. (please don't force me to go into more
detail), Jeff has done all of the current stuff so far on his own w/
o much board intervention at all. I suggest we need to foster a
similar model. The Board needs to get the heck out of its way and
"design ideologies" aside, getting it done is now to me the highest
priority.
Waiting for "fundraising" feels a tad off to me and the only way we
are going to get anywhere is with SERIOUS (K's of $ on the order of
$100k) to get this done under the current requirements.
BTW, I totally agree w/ you that the infrastructure needs to be
blown up. No one knows that better than me, but to be honest, that's
actually easy. Personally, I think the board (including my own
history) has been high on Web 2.0 cloud stuff that actually in
theory can meet our needs, but in reality WON'T. We need to build it
all and host it ourselves. Why the board hasn't gotten a dedicated
server from which we can just build whatever we like is really a
problem for me. W/ a minimal investment in a hosting provider this
can be done easily and once done we can become experimenting,
coding, exploring, and prototyping. W/o it we are stuck theorizing.
I think that "crowdsourcing" is not really the right terminology.
What is needed for real is the Open Source. And yes, even DESIGN can
be and has been open sourced with success. If any project is
"designing for yourself" this one is. And the more "selves" we
involve the better the project will be.
Transparency of design, process, accountability, costs, decisions,
etc. is key for the success of this project, b/c it is going to
require so much cultural change in our community (that Jeff already
alluded to in his message in this thread).
So why the RFP ... Well, if you as the board want to hold onto this
(despite the call by members to take ownership and for the board to
let go of it), show us that you can move forward. You talk about
local groups not getting squat, but that explosion happened on your
watch, Liz. The best thing the board has done for local groups is to
empower them to not wait for the board. Why not just take the same
tact with this project?
-- dave
On Sat, Nov 1, 2008 at 6:10 PM, Elizabeth Bacon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
Dear heavens.
OK, guys, if we're going to "out" ourselves...I will reveal that I
fundamentally don't believe a crowdsourcing model for DESIGN is even
possible, much less advisable.
I believe that crowdsourcing can be helpful to garner ideas (e.g.
that wepc thing at the top of this thread), identify requirements or
brainstorm features (e.g. as Will did on the list the other day),
and settle on shared definitions (e.g. wikipedia).
To me, however, crowdsourcing seems utterly antithetical to the act
of designing. Design involves acts of conscious intention coupled
with creative insight to bring coherence and order to a system. I
strongly believe that design projects must have a strong lead to
succeed, both at the design helm and the project management helm.
Nowhere in the modern world can I think of any example of a group-
mind, a crowd, moving towards greater systemic coherence and order
without a strong individual or individuals at the helm guiding the
crowd's thoughts and intentions.
Now in case you think I'm some "genius design" practitioner, bear in
mind that my core IxD practices were forged at Cooper, a design
consultancy that pioneered the use of personas and two-person teams
to achieve design solutions. I am highly team-oriented, take pains
to remove ego yet retain ingenuity in the design process, and
believe that IxD benefits greatly from collaboration with other
skilled practitioners as well as across disciplines.
That said, working on design problems and delivering solutions as a
small team is not crowdsourcing.
Now, we may have a less radical disagreement here than I fear. Nasir
wrote:
"I like the idea of crowdsourcing the design of this puppy.
Suggestions on how to manage the process? Two challenges I see:
# Of all projects with a self-referential design element, this one
kinda takes the cake :-).
# The temptation/risk of falling into a design-by-committee trap is
high
# Being designers, we could iterate and iterate until, like, the end
of days
If we went with a crowdsourced model for the design, I'd propose
going with the curated-crowdsourcing that Mozilla adopts. They have
a public free-for-all tree, but the features that make it into
Firefox, etc. have been cherry-picked by an architect and integrated
into the codebase."
What Nasir is proposing is NOT crowdsourcing the IxD of the next-
generation IxDA infrastructure, but crowdsourcing feature
definitions and perhaps also brainstorming the way those features
manifest in their form & behavior. And note that he also invokes the
importance of having a lead designer to bring order to the system.
But here's my HUGE concern if we were to pursue this route. I
strongly believe that IxDA.org needs some serious new infrastructure
YESTERDAY. Our local groups began exploding in March, right after
our first conference, and we haven't done jack squat for them except
open up Basecamp projects and talk about things. Local group
websites are now being developed piecemeal -- and they're all quite
wonderful, but totally disconnected from each other & IxDA Global.
Our general membership has also increased radically this year, and
there's extremely little visibility that anybody has into or across
this deep, valuable pool of individuals except for a freaking
Mailman query the list administrators can do of how many subscribers
we have!
Given that the board has already done requirements and feature
definition over the last four months for the IxDA.org features that
we want to deliver in very short order (namely again: 1) richer
member profiles; 2) an event/calendar system; 3) local group micro-
sites; 4) tools to help local group leaders) we'd be throwing
ourselves back to the starting line. Furthermore, I'm quite sure
that it would take a least a year from now for us to arrive at some
group-mind agreement, much less achieve the *development and
delivery* of whatever it is we conceived.
Therefore, I'm highly averse to pursuing a crowdsourcing effort on
these areas from a scheduling perspective.
I want our organization to get serious about following through on
its intentions by hiring professional development resources to meet
our needs. Presently we are not closed to the option of purchasing a
hosted solution, but are leaning towards an open-source CMS so that
IxDA can really own the platform and give community members ways to
further enhance the user experience. I aim to publish an RFP on
these features in November, and we want to be able to launch
solutions by the Interaction 09 conference. Can anyone seriously
argue that these schedule targets are achievable if we were to
pursue a crowdsourcing effort or seek pro-bono development support
from within the open source community?
Please understand that I am confident that crowdsourcing ideas,
requirements and feature definitions from within this amazing
community of ours could provide us with some extremely innovative
and powerful design concepts. So, let me make a suggestion. Perhaps
a more appropriate design target to harness the great grassroots
energy starting to be exhibited here is around the next generation
of our DISCUSSION features. At the IxDA board retreat, the board
identified this important area as nevertheless secondary to serving
the local group and membership-oriented needs listed above. The
infrastructure team also has given far less attention thus far on to
how to bring IxDA.org up to speed in this arena. This design space
would also include providing better tools for members to dynamically
share perspectives & information and self-generate resources for the
betterment of the community.
So how does that scope sound, Nasir, Dave, Will, al.? Please, do not
derail our current effort.
Writing in pure agony at envisioning near-term delays,
yours truly,
Liz
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Vice-President, IxDA / www.ixda.org
CDO, Devise / www.devise.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
--
David Malouf
http://synapticburn.com/
http://ixda.org/
http://motorola.com/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Vice-President, IxDA / www.ixda.org
CDO, Devise / www.devise.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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