Community

Depot, an exercise in Community-Sourcing

Gerry Heidenreich — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 04:43:59 GMT

No downloads or pics, just a quick rundown of a very cool app idea while it's in my head.

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a small winforms app. It's stayed very rough around the edges and hasn't gone anywhere from the original prototype. This prototype (I called it Depot) was written as a proof-of-concept of the simplest possible community-sourced bookmarking / tagging / searching tool that could possibly exist. A self-organizing business-specific link / text library could provide immense value to a company.

Depot hinges on 4 basic features common with collaborative apps:

1. Producing: Adding content in the form of URLS and/or text (2 different fields that can be used individually or combined)

2. Tagging

3. Searching for any item by any combination of title words or tag

4. Sharing: All content is automatically shared, and open to edit & extend, by anyone within the network

The search is an autocomplete textbox, that works with any combination of title words and tags. Typing 'catering' displays all catering items, but as you start to type 'catering madison', the suggestions filter appropriately. As you would expect, changing the text over to 'thai madison' updates to items tagged or titled with thai and madison.

The url + text fields is an interesting feature - a user may want to toss in a quick note for a catering url someone else added, like "Beware the red curry!!!".

The app seemed to work beautifully, but the algorithm is not built to scale up yet. Everything is cached heavily on the client-side. There are no concurrency checks. Also, to be fit for production, it will need some kind of user-auditing, history, and probably some kind of browser integration (or at least bookmark / favorites sync).

I don't know yet what will become of Depot. I hope to find the time and motivation soon to dust it off and start polishing it up for a pilot group. If nothing else, I got an ornery hog of a tag-search algorithm that may come in useful someday.

Stackoverflow.com = joelonsoftware + codinghorror

Gerry Heidenreich — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 03:37:58 GMT

Jeff Atwood has paired up with Joel Spolsky and today they both announced stackoverflow.com, a new community support site that doesn't exist yet... but will be run by Jeff, created by the community for the community, and narrated weekly via podcast. Looks like a digg-like structure where diggable items are answers to questions posted by the community. Submit questions, submit answers, vote for answers...

[Jeff's announcement]

[Joel's announcement]

[stackoverflow.com]

[podcast #1]

This will be interesting...

The Thirsty Developer, Project Euler

Gerry Heidenreich — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 16:28:31 GMT

I can't believe that I didn't post about this! My site was acting up when we did this, so I probably didn't have a place to post it.

Larry Clarkin & Dave Bost from Microsoft have a podcast called The Thirsty Developer.

Back in December I met up with Larry, Dave, and Damon Payne at the Ale House in downtown Milwaukee to talk about Project Euler. I remember having a lot of fun, despite being a bit nervous (my first experience on that side of a podcast!). It was very loud in there as well; I think Larry did a great job of editing.

[Here is the Project Euler episode]

[The Thirsty Developer]

[Subscribe to The Thirsty Developer Podcast]

[Subscribe to The Thirsty Developer Blog]

Noun-Verbing!

Gerry Heidenreich — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 13:28:11 GMT

In the spirit of my last 2 posts... things are too serious around here, and it's bugging me...

Deeper In .Net 2008, 7AM tomorrow, Marriott in Waukesha, www.wi-ineta.org for details!

The headline to this video is the best part: Biker Nails A Perfect 380. Been there... concussions, dislocations and all... good stuff. They should have kept rolling, because it's not funny until he gets up and walks away from it.

Community-Sourcing

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 19:10:06 GMT

I have been a HUGE fan of Digg.com for years. The content is generally good, the community is fun and (again, generally) intelligent, but the model: Submit/Vote/Discuss/Report... brilliant.

MyStarbucksIdea.com, and Dell's IdeaStorm.com follow the Digg.com model, but in the context of innovation focused on a business. They are crowdsourcing their innovation to the world, and their future offerings are going to be more organic than ever before. The new tool on their belt gives them a clearer idea of their actual customers' wishes. Minimize the assumptions. Outsource your innovation to the one group the really cares about your product, and spend next to nothing for the data you get from it... brilliant.

Wikipedia (currently) defines Crowdsourcing as "... the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call."

I am in the habit of repurposing (or desigining my own) social-network ideas as internal solutions, and along the way I have occasionally had my share of failage/lesson-learnage, but I've also scored some wins. Like everybody else that thinks they have a new idea worthy of its own name, I have started calling it 'community sourcing'.

I reformed the definition above to fit my needs:

Community Sourcing
The act of taking a task traditionally performed by a specific member of the group, or consultant and exposing it to a controlled, generally large group of people who share the same interest as the group, in the form of an open call.

The term seems to be out there (google 2080 hits), and the purpose looks similar.

As far as walking-the-walk goes, we have working 'community sourced' systems used every day for content-management, marketing, and project management. Newer and (therefore, I hope) less-used solutions include link-tracking (think del.icio.us), and yes, a submit/vote/discuss/report app, which, in my humble opinion, is... brilliant.

Deeper in .Net 2008!

Gerry Heidenreich — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 05:36:56 GMT

Deeper in .NET 2008 is just around the corner!

Our schedule is full, and all of the speakers are top notch! Jason Beres from Infragistics is returning again this year for his fifth visit. In addition, Mark Miller from Developer Express, Richard Campbell from Strangeloop and .NET Rocks, Charlie Calvert from the C# team at Microsoft and Scott Wisniewski from the VB team at Microsoft are on the schedule this year.

We're working with a number of sponsors to support the event. Our Annual Sponsors are listed on the side of this page -- please be sure to support and thank them. Additionally, we are working with a number of companies to provide many prizes to give away throughout the day.

Mark your calendars for April 5, 2008, and sign up now! Space is limited, and registration (FREE!) will be required for this event.

Free training! Free food! Free books and software giveaways!

[Register here]

Saturday, Apr 5, 2008 at 07:00 AM
Deeper in .NET 2008 will be held on April 5, 2008 at the Milwaukee Marriott West (Map & Directions).
Check-in will begin at 7:00 AM.

Salesperanto AND Coderian?

Gerry Heidenreich — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:03:47 GMT

"Stop Thinking Like A Programmer"

I swear it's the theme this week.. I was actually told this by someone at work. In my own defense, I was thinking like somebody that would rather script a solution than wait 3 weeks for it (ok yeah, that's like a programmer)....

Think about this...

1. Business: Coders should be able to think in terms of features, interface complexity, barrier to entry, design and visualization, and capable of elevator pitching their product (notice I didn't say solution?) to a customer in these terms.

2. Innovation: getting the "I can do that" people (e.g. your engineers/architects/coders) to be able to speak directly to the "it would be cool if..." people (e.g. your billers, customers, parents, etc)

3. Apple's innovation/momentum and Microsoft's shift in perspective & ability to compete: Microsoft has always been guilty of "thinking like programmers", and it has been very profitable for them, but things are changing, and they are reacting accordingly.

4. Black & White: on one side are the geeks that appreciate your architecture and could debate code/frameworks/paradigms all day. On the other side are your customers, who want to know how you are going to make them more profitable/efficient/confident/marketable/competitive. Not much of a grey area here. 2 different languages: Salesperanto AND Coderian.

5. Intentional Programming [wikipedia]: Your skillset is in demand, but we are getting closer to the day that "Everyone Writes Software"... Lutz has a section dedicated to this. Developers must learn to understand the intent of their users. Stop thinking in syntax, start thinking in semantics... Mashups, FDD, REST, RDF, Pipes & Popfly (Google SETS prediction).

There is a pattern developing here, and there is A LOT of money being tossed around because of it (check this out!).

MIX, TED - there goes your day...

Gerry Heidenreich — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:01:41 GMT

MIX Session videos: http://sessions.visitmix.com/

Follow-up email from TED conference:

And now, when you're ready, take 18 minutes to watch this astonishing talk from Harvard-trained brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor. It drew a huge standing ovation in the first session of the conference and, by general consensus, counts as one of the most memorable TED talks of all time.

We also had a chance to hear details from Craig Venter of just how close he now is to creating synthetic life -- for example, bacteria designed from scratch to gobble CO2 and generate advanced fuels. This could be one of the biggest scientific stories of our lifetimes. It will either thrill you or scare you -- or both.

The astronomer Roy Gould ended weeks of blogosphere speculation by unveiling a beautiful new product created by Microsoft's Curtis Wong: the WorldWide Telescope. Here's the hi-res version of this talk. It's spectacular.

Ballmer on Yahoo!: "we will be a PHP shop"

Gerry Heidenreich — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:02:31 GMT

I hadn't even thought about it...

MIX '08 keynote with Guy Kawasaki, about 43:28 into the interview. Also, I noticed Rob Zelt got to ask a question during the Q/A afterwards...

The interview covered Yahoo, as well as MacBook Air, Google, Apple, Firefox, and some Monkeyboy love for web developers.

.Net Users Group VS'08 Load Fest & Holiday Party

Gerry Heidenreich — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:50:00 GMT

Join the WI .Net Users Group and Microsoft on Dec 11, 7PM for a Visual Studio 2008 Install-Fest / Holiday party!

This event is going to take a different approach than our usual meetings: better prizes, [rumored] better food (nothing wrong with the pizza though, of course), VS '08 licenses! (bring your laptop), and more..

Scott's announcement is HERE.

WI .Net UG announcement, location details & registration HERE.