Do we need to rethink Good-Cheap-Fast?
This set of rules popped into my head today while grazing my Twitter:
For most things this is a no-brainer. To do sometime better takes time while costs more. Easy. But I’m wondering if social media tools, and the Internet culture that creates them, change this.
Back when Stef and I started Created in Birmingham one of the (many) things we wanted to show was how you could get a perfectly good website for next to nothing. At the time most civic-style websites were costing tens of thousands of pounds to deliver and a frightening number of them were, frankly, rubbish with short lifespans. We used Wordpress, which is free, and an off the shelf design, which was also free, and had it up and running in an afternoon. The only thing that cost money was the content which, we felt, was how it should be.
So in this situation it was good and cheap and fast. For what we wanted to do, anyway.
Sure, there’s still a huge market for bespoke web design and even with plugins and such platforms like Wordpress won’t always do exactly what you want them to do. I’m not suggesting the death of the website building industry by any stretch. But the fact is I can have a website up and running in minutes that is cheap, if not free, and very good indeed. Especially when compared to some of the bespoke rubbish the snake-oil salesmen sell for absurd sums. (And I’m not tarring everyone with the same brush. The same applies to the nascent social media industry, if not more so.)
“Good” is subjective so let’s assume free software like Wordpress is good and park that. It’s cheap because, well, it’s free software. So the thing that’s aparently been eradicated is fast. Since you can’t have something from nothing, where did fast go?
When you get something bespoke it generally means a handful of people have worked on it. If it takes 5 people a week to deliver then you’re looking at 200 hours of work which you’ll be billed for. But Open Source software is written by thousands of people over many years with no cost to the end user. Why this happens is a subject for another time but it boils down, I feel, to a culture of collaboration and sharing for mutual benefit.
So when you pay someone to develop a site run on Wordpress they’re not building it from scratch. They’re modifying something that has had hundreds of thousands of hours spent developing it. This speeds the process up no end.
I’ve scratched the surface here, mainly because I didn’t want to get into a long explanation of stuff like the Free Software movement, but also because I’m more interested in whether we can get to a place where you can get good and cheap and fast in the offline world. Can collaboration and sharing be applied to business in this way? Or is that just Socialism by another name?
Your thoughts would be appreciated.
FAILcamp has a blog
FAILcamp has a blog now, so all my witterings about it shall go there, along with Ben’s and anyone else who gets involved.
There’s also a Twitter which Ben’s looking after, before you think that’s my voice on there. It’s not.
We’ve got a tentative date of October 17th but no venue yet. Plenty of time though.
Conceiving FAILCamp
One of the cardinal rules of blogging is don’t do it when you’re drunk. But rules were made to be broken. I’m drunk and I’m blogging. And I will hit publish before I’m sober. You have been warned.
Towards the end of the excellent Moseley Barcamp I found myself a little drunk sitting at the back with Ben Whitehouse having a bit of a, well, let’s call it a BitchCamp. What we were bitching about shall remain in the realm of all drunken conversations but at that moment one of us, I think it was Ben, suggested doing a Barcamp which wasn’t all about the amazing things people had done and instead looked at the failures, the stuff that didn’t work and the problems inherent in this stuff. I think. Ben’s sort of on record as having a healthy skepticism about the Birmingham social media scene - the phrase “Brumtwitter mafia” emerged tonight - and while I might not agree with the details I like his attitude. I think it’s important.
Meanwhile I’m getting bored. Well, maybe bored is the wrong word but I want to shake things up a bit. The way I see it once you’ve got something established it’s time to move on. Sure, there’s an important case for sticking around and solidifying this new thing but that doesn’t interest me and there’s no point pretending. I want to be excited and amused. Going over stuff that’s worked well is good and important but the notion of slapping any complacency about how utterly fabulous the Brum Interwebs community is with a big fish and turning it all on its head appeals no end.
And so FAILCamp was born. As a joke. And then I tweeted it which made it real. And then people retweeted it which meant it had to happen. And now I’m blogging about it which means it’s really going to happen. When and where I don’t know, but it will.
I think there’ll be two prongs to this. One the one hand there’s Ben’s “oh for crying out loud enough already” strand which I’ll let him expand on but I’m sure it’ll be provocative, necessary and above all fun. A bubble-busting reality check, if you like.
And on the other hand there’s my take on this. One of the major tenets of social media is that failure is good. When the cost of doing stuff drops to zero you can afford to fail so failure becomes part of the process. Jon Bounds is a great example of someone who uses failure effectively. Jon seemingly launches a new project every other day be it a blog, a collaborative Google map or some other thing. Most of them don’t gain traction and fade into obscurity but those that do succeed do so in really interesting ways. And, I believe, without that constant failure Jon’s take on the Internet wouldn’t be half as radically insightful.
So that’s the basis for FAILCamp. A day where you tell us about your online experiments or experiences that went horribly, terribly wrong. If you’re sick of social media “experts” like myself saying the brave new online world is full of WIN this is the event for you. And if you’ve found a big bucket of WIN by learning from repeated FAIL this is also the event for you. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you might even engage in a group hug. It’s FAILCamp.
(And it’s nothing to do with last July’s FAILCamp which I just found out about - amusingly that took place at IndyHall which I mentioned in my talk today. Deeply intertwingled indeed.)
Moseley Barcamp this Sunday
Moseley Barcamp or MozCamp is this Sunday, the third such event from the WXWM stable. I’m going to be talking at this one. Looking at the schedule I guess I’ll be on around 4-4.30 ish so if you’re not going and for some reason want to catch me live then tune into the stream about then. Not to worry as mp3s will be available later.
I’m planning to talk about coworking and how it relates to Internet culture. The basic premise is coworking is not actually that strange and yet it’s considered a revolutionary new way of working. Why is that? Is it the Internet echo-chamber re-inventing the wheel or is there a shared attitude and approach to the formation of online communities and the creation of offline workspaces. I’ll be referencing the coworking people I met in Austin, specifically Alex Hillman from Indyhall, and it’s no coincidence that the Moseley Exchange coworking space is opening next to the MozCamp venue.
Or I might talk about something else entirely. We’ll see.
MozCamp is sold out but you can listen live, follow the Twitter - hashtag is #mbcamp - or check it out later. and if you’re going I’ll see you there!
Be Vocal and the mashing of local data
A few weeks ago I started Local Blogging Birmingham, a simple blog to track all the local blogs that exist in the city and in doing so figure out exactly what a “local blog” was. As a process it’s been useful for me but as a resource it’s not that great. It my defense it took me 5 minutes to set up so I’m not too worried but there are much better ways to display this information. Howabout a map?
M’good chum Nick Booth aka Podnosh is running a new blog, Be Vocal. It’s part of Digital Birmingham’s Open City project but specifically looks at how “the web is being used for what you might call civic good” and in particular mashups of local data.
The Brum Blogs map is a simple but effective example of that. It takes some basic data about local blogs (the name, location and web address) and automatically plots it on a Google map. Now we can navigate the the local blogosphere visually.
Another example is Twittermap which takes the location from people’s Twitter profiles and maps their tweets. Whereas other twitter mapping services look at the whole globe you can limit this one to a radius around a location - here’s the current Twitter activity within 10km of Birmingham. It’s actually very simple to do. They’re just taking this standard Twitter search and mapping it.
Here’s another example:
Like most police forces Leicestershire has a helicopter which frequently buzzes around annoying the hell out of people, especially at night. They’d probably be less annoyed if they knew what it was actually doing up there. This map takes the location data that they presumably produce in their reports, adds the level of information usually issued to the press and maps it. It doesn’t stop helicopters being annoying but it adds context and informs any discussion about the practice. (via Midge)
The reason maps are popular for mashups is people can immediately understand what’s going on. But that’s just scratching the surface of what can be done by combining data sources and delivering them in new ways. Quite often a mashup is is greater than the sum of its parts. and because we’re using computers the mashing up process is often automated from existing activity.
If this sort of thing interests you then keep tabs on Be Vocal, in particular if you have ideas for mashups but no idea how to go about doing them. One of the aims of the blog is to inspire new ideas that can then be helped into reality by Digital Birmingham.