Collaboration...

I'm now time-sharing Lisa Hoag's office space in the totally awesome Eastworks building in Easthampton. Nice change of pace from my home office way up in Greenfield. I'm there mainly on Wednesdays and Fridays.

I'm also resurrecting the Javascript meetup that Stan Silver began earlier this year. Same place, coincidentally.

My "musician's website backend" project is gathering momentum. Lisa and the rest of the Oxbow Collaborative (a cross-disciplinary team of freelancers) are getting involved. We're all excited about bridging the gap between programming and design, to do great things with "web technology"... to make it smooth, simple, playful, artistic, useful.

Website backend for musicians etc

Just "backend". I don't want to call it a CMS, content management system... that makes it sound like a big corporate IT morass. This backend is for musicians, artists, entreprenuers -- people who don't have the time or desire to deal with something like Drupal, WordPress, or worse. People who want to leave the details to the experts: programmers and designers, who also generally don't care for Drupal, WordPress, etc -- so this backend is for them too. Above all, it's for me... I'm a musician-artist-designer-programmer-entreprenuer :)

Take my dad for example. He's a musician (and professional engineer). For the past couple years he's been using the Django admin UI to post news and events on his music website, while I've been maintaining the more complicated stuff by coding HTML templates, CSS, Javascript, and Python. It works well enough (at least he doesn't have to wait on me for every little update) but it could be better... more direct and intuitive on the surface, simpler and more flexible underneath.

With this new backend, my dad will login to his site and it'll look just like what everyone else sees, except certain parts will be glowing or something, indicating he can click to edit or add stuff. Just the kind of simple stuff that any idiot can post on Facebook: text, events, photos. And the backend will re-post some of that stuff (particularly events) on sites like Facebook and ReverbNation so he doesn't have to deal with them. We're trying to simplify his life a little!

Underneath, the editable parts are "widgets" -- text box, photo, photo album, event calendar, news/blog, Twitter feed, etc. Pretty much like "widgets" in WordPress, Django, etc... a bit of html/css/javascript code for viewing/editing stuff in the database. I'm not exactly how generic the widget API should be, but I'm leaning toward concreteness. I don't want it to be scary.

There will never be "plugins" and "themes" in the WordPress sense. I expect web designers to configure their sites via good old-fashioned text files, and to get help from programmers for heavy customization. You may be the world's greatest graphic designer, but if you can't code, you ain't no web designer! This is even more important now that smartphones are popular: it's not enough for your website to look good on a big screen, it's gotta look decent even when rendered on a tiny screen, and it's gotta convey meaningful information (hmm, I guess that's the gist of "semantic markup": a human can look at the raw HTML, or any rendering of it, and see what the author meant. It's human-readable.)

Other people (i.e. clients/bosses) shouldn't mess with website configuration. The admin UI should only let them change things they need/want to change AND can change without wrecking their site.

The Oxbow Collaborative

This is a new group of freelancers (not a formal business entity) which so far consists of:
Eric Cohen: technical and business writing;
Donna O'Meally: project management, finance, marketing;
Lisa Hoag: web design, graphic design, photography, etc;
Daniel Lieberman: social networking, marketing, SEO, etc.;
and now me: programming, database admin, etc.

The basic idea is that we'll each have our own clients and projects, but we'll subcontract within the collaborative when it makes sense. Since we'll be working together regularly, we'll be able to work directly with each others' clients at times, instead of the traditional SNAFU Methodology which dictates that clients communicate with specialists via one or more management/marketing intermediaries. :)

Depending how well this experiment works out, I see a need for more programmers (it's no fun being "indispensable")... and writers, artists, etc... and other collaborative groups, for example, videographers.

We'll probably need a server administrator... I was talking about that with Al Canali the other day. Nobody wants to do it because it means panicked clients calling you at 4am on a Monday, typically because a programmer screwed up something you have no control over. And they don't want to pay you in the first place... you're invisible. I'd like to think we could build the cost into our maintenance pricing, and make it more of a 9-to-5 job, mostly preventive maintenance and improvement, not on-call firefighting.

Anyway, the website is http://oxbowcollaborative.com/ - and wow, that WordPress site is really chugging along slowly today... we need this sleek new Node.js "musician's" backend I'm working on! :)

"Shared Value"

In the Oxbow Collab and related circles, there's been a lot of talk about a recent article, before OWS but relevant to it:

Creating Shared Value
by Michael E. Porter and Mark R. Kramer
Harvard Business Review, Jan-Feb 2011

Don't take this as a recommendation from me. It's pompous, tedious reading. But those guys are influential bigwigs... it's interesting to see this idea gaining traction in the stuffy corporate world.

Here's my editorialized synopsis:

The problem is that business is caught in a vicious cycle: corporate abuses and fuckups lead to widespread distrust, followed by government over-regulation, so businesses cheat and cover it up and lobby for deregulation or simply move to countries with less regulation. The solution, the authors say, is to align business interests with society's interests -- by redefining the corporation's goal as "creating shared value" rather than mere financial profit. This is different from socialist redistribution (e.g. "fair trade"), and different from "corporate social responsibility" (i.e. do-gooderism, which is more about appearing to do good deeds than actually doing them). Because of their focus on cost-vs-benefit, businesses acting like businesses can actually do a better job of meeting society's needs than governments and nonprofits can. The incentive for business is that "externalities" (including pollution, disease, poverty, and crime) actually do hurt business. "What goes around comes around" could refer to value destruction OR prosperity creation.

Businesses could increase prosperity by meeting society's real needs instead of stimulating artificial demand for crappy and useless products (the usual bullshit). "Too many companies," the authors write, "have lost sight of that most basic of questions: Is our product good for our customers? Or for our customers' customers?"

The corporate world has screwed itself over the past few decades by commoditizing and marginalizing suppliers, squeezing employees, gipping customers, and outsourcing production to countries like China in order to profit from wage/currency arbitrage -- thus increasing transportation and energy costs amid growing strain on energy supplies! As realtors say, "location, location, location!" It matters. Local clusters of related businesses are vital to healthy regional economies, which are vital to a stable global economy.

(end synopsis)

Local clusters are a form of shared value... the workers, know-how, etc. A straightforward example is the CDC Food Processing Center here in Greenfield; it's a facility shared by a bunch of small businesses, which in turn provide an outlet for regional growers. Schools, roads, bridges, police, etc are some other often-mismanaged components of a local economic cluster. The Oxbow Collaborative is a local cluster, part of a larger technical/creative cluster in Western Massachusetts.

In my own life, I'm using open-source software, and creating some of my own, and writing/mentoring on the subject of programming. I don't care whether I get paid directly for this work or not. It improves my tools, my social/business network, and the professionalism of people I work with. Those things in turn make my work more pleasant and profitable. It takes a year or more, and it can't be proven with numbers because I'm dealing with intangibles and externalities, but the effect is very real.