Showing posts with label Open Source. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Open Source. Show all posts

Friday, January 22, 2010

Open Source, with a twist.

Although People, Ideas & Objects is a project that subscribes to many of the principles of open source software. We don't qualify under any of the currently existing Open Source Initiatives approved licenses. My two concerns regarding this project are that the ability to run the binary of the applications be limited to People, Ideas & Objects exclusively. I am also concerned with the industries desire and behavior of parsing "opportunities" to have multiple companies "compete" for the crumbs they leave for service providers in the oil and gas industry. These competitive strategies have left all of the power in the hands of the bureaucracy as to what and when a project will get funded, implemented and deployed in the oil and gas industry. Name a good oil and gas accounting or ERP application in the market space and you'll see the results of the oil and gas industries micro management of the software vendors. This 1950's style of management is inappropriate for the oil and gas companies to continue. They have enough to do in this new age of costly energy to be concerned with the competitive makeup of any of their service industry providers. Please see the Resource Marketplace Module for further information on how this is handled in the People, Ideas & Objects application.

However, in order to provide the security and stability of the application it needs to be subjected to as many "eye-balls" as possible. This provides the innovative oil and gas producer with assurance that there is no inappropriate code contained within the application. What "our" license will provide is the ability to inspect, test and review the code, but not to run the binary.

At this point in time, lets also be clear of how the application binary will be provided to the innovative producers. The cloud computing concept is in its infancy, but I see no other way then to run an application of this size any other way other then on the cloud. Oracle has recently termed the phrase "industry in a box" and that applies clearly to the application modules of People, Ideas & Objects. The size of this application may have several thousand members of the Community of Independent Service Providers and multiples of this being their employees, millions of users, tens of thousand of producers, hundreds of thousands of Joint Operating Committee's and tens of thousands of service industry firms.

An application of this size can not be undertaken by multiple vendors. The intellectual property that supports the Draft Specification is a result of my six years of dedicated 14 hours per day of research. To come up with a competitive offering someone is going to have to come up with a different hypothesis and build it through research such that it solves the industry problems in similar ways that the People, Ideas & Objects Draft Specification does. This too will take them six years and will have to be done by people who are sworn not to have, or will ever, read any of the material in the Preliminary Research Report, Draft Specification and this blog. Good luck.

Clearly the ability of the industry to sponsor multiple applications like People, Ideas & Objects is not within what could be practically done in the time frames available to them. No doubt management will attempt to do so, and I wish them good luck. Focusing the energies on this one project will be a challenge for all concerned. Diluting our efforts with competing alternatives will only cause the industry to expend more cash and time. This is primarily due to the fact that an innovative oil and gas producer does not garner any competitive advantage from using their ERP system. People, Ideas & Objects focus is to provide the innovative producer with the most profitable means of oil and gas operations.

It is however, not the basis of whether the producer will earn any profits. Their profits are based on focusing their energies on applying their ever increasing scientific and engineering capability toward their unique and mutually exclusive asset base. People, Ideas & Objects provides this natural way of operations but cannot take credit for a producer being profitable when it has nothing to do with the science or assets of the producer firm. What I can assure the innovative producer is that whatever the decisions and assets look like, using People, Ideas & Objects will ensure these assets earn the most profits then either SAP or Oracle. That is People, Ideas & Objects competitive offering.

I am pleased to note that yesterday Sun and Oracle have received European approval for their merger / acquisition. Sun has been our hardware and software (Solaris, Java, NetBeans, GlassFish and others) vendor. Now with Oracle being part of the mix, its important to note that the two technologies of theirs that are being added to this project. The first is the Oracle Database, the place where I was indoctrinated on relational theory, and Oracle Coherence. We will not be using any of the Fusion Middle Ware products and as such are able to maintain the blank slate approach to this most unique of industries, oil and gas.

Oracle and I have a bad history together. They are single-handily responsible for much of the management of the applications intellectual property in this fashion. In 1993 we signed a comprehensive agreement to jointly develop oil and gas systems for Canadian producers. In 1997, after expending mine and others capital, Oracle Energy was announced. We chose to move to make our applications operate with Price Waterhouses oil and gas applications and said good bye to the likes of Oracle. Oracle Energy was quietly put six feet under in 2000. So here we stand, again.

If there is an opportunity to resurrect the 1993 agreement between Oracle and People, Ideas & Objects, I'm there. An application of this scope needs the resources of Oracle to be a fundamental aspect of its deliver-ability, reliability, accessibility and security. The only thing I would ask Oracle to make this happen is they recognize the market space of the energy marketplace is People, Ideas & Objects. Provide me with some compensation for their activities in 1993 to 1997, and together we can make this real.

Oracle stands to earn significant revenues and profits from the licensing of Java, Databases, Computer sales, service and support. IBM also wants this business, however, I feel the market is best served by Oracle and expect that they are the most capable. Oracle, here is my email address. If I here from you before March 31, 2010 the business is possibly yours.

This is why we are Open Source with a twist. For more information on Open Source and its benefits, please review this recent Sun interview. If these strategies resonate with your firm, please support these developments here. If your a user, or maybe want to be come part of the Community of Independent Service Providers, please join us here.

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Sunday, August 16, 2009

The past quarter's performance.

The conflicting information and contradictions present in the energy business show how difficult the industry has become. Prices have at least halved since last year, record levels of capital expenditures in 2008 have produced substantial 5 - 6% declines in production. Inventories are bursting with oil and many Super Tanker are idled with full loads of product. Yet here in Calgary we are met with significant shortages of gas. Companies such as Chevron have ceased to drill for any Natural Gas on the entire North American continent. With this technical, political and recessionary environment; is it any surprise that earnings have been challenged? Or that production and reserves continue to decline? What's a producer to do, they can't perform in the short or long term. I would ask if the past organizational methods, the bureaucracy, are appropriate for the current and future needs of the industry? 

The Times Online have prepared a summary of the most recent quarterly performance of oil and gas firms. Stating that lay-offs of 5,000 to 10,000 people will be cut in each of the International Oil Companies (IOC). Discussion in the article turns to how the industry may solve these problems. 
Anthony Lobo, head of oil and gas at KPMG, said that in the short term small mergers of, say, £20 billion, and joint ventures with national oil companies (NOCs) are more likely than huge mergers. “The deals of £40 billion or more seen in the last decade are unlikely to happen because one international oil company [IOC] buying another arguably compounds the problem,” he said.
Joint Ventures which are managed through the Joint Operating Committee and are the global and natural means of conducting oil and gas operations. The problem we face today is the development of Information Technology has focused on the technical capabilities and not on the business of the oil and gas business. The JOC is the legal, financial, communication, cultural and operational decision making framework of the global oil and gas industry. Using these "Joint Ventures" provides the industry with the ability to hit the ground running and deal with the unique attributes of the specific JOCs they are members of. Applying the JOC's unique strategic, financial and technical resources too the National Oil Companies reserves.

The difficulty is we have to develop the systems and organizations to define and support this natural and global manner of business operations. That is what we are attempting to do here at People, Ideas & Objects. Importantly, the author of the article takes the Joint Venture concept further.
“The magic formula is the combination of cash and reserves. The IOCs have cash and access to debt but the NOCs hold the keys to many of the reserves. As NOCs are not up for sale, we are likely to see international oil companies proposing joint ventures.”
This is because the “easy” oil — on land and in politically friendly regions — is drying up. NOCs own 80% of the world’s reserves, leaving the industry to fight over a shrinking number of fields in hard-to-reach places. Manouchehr Takin of the Centre for Global Energy Studies said: “The IOCs need the NOCs a lot more than the NOCs need them.”
I have established the revenue model for People, Ideas & Objects to consider this potential reality. Noting the two sources of revenue of this software development project are the oil and gas producer who needs to organize their approach to exploration and production. Secondly I have noted that the governments that are in producing regions. Have a vested interest in ensuring this software development project represents their compliance and governance frameworks. To ensure the management of the property in their country, state or province are consistent with their regulations and requirements. The financial resources necessary to develop the software for each of these unique jurisdictions, must be sourced from the individual governments themselves. There are three reasons this must be done.

  1. The financial resources needed to address the unique characteristics of Joint Ventures operating in a certain jurisdiction. These compliance and governance demands may total $40 to $100 million in software development costs per region. For the software developer to raise this type of money from anyone other then the governments themselves is impossible. As evidenced by the lack of any current applications in the market space. Who would benefit from a return on these types of investments?
  2. Secondly the producers are not motivated to fund these developments. It is not in their best interests to spend substantial financial resources on developing systems for government compliance in each region they operate. In the past the question of which producers should develop these systems is answered with the response that "all of them need to." So each producer firm should pay $40 - 100 million in software development costs in order to be in compliance with each jurisdiction that they operate in. Here I begin to define the surreal nature of the expectations of the oil and gas software developer.
  3. Governments need the energy industry to be an active member of their economy. All members of that community. The article incorrectly suggests that the IOC's should be the ones that propose Joint Ventures with the NOC's. From my point of view, why would a jurisdiction like the North Sea, Texas, Saudi Arabia or Alberta limit the number of producers that are capable of operating in their jurisdiction. Limiting operations to only those producers that can develop an ERP system with the scope to manage their jurisdiction. The entrepreneurial and dynamic focus of the producers will provide the longer term value of the natural resources of the NOC's. Bringing all producers into their environment requires the ability to operate in their country. Whether that is an IOC or a geologist with an interesting idea. This type of environment can be facilitated by funding People, Ideas & Object's software development to provide this capability to operate in their country. Opening their economy to all capable producers will ensure that their resources are developed in a competitive and open business environment. 
It's important to stress that People, Ideas & Objects are an open source strategy of development. The code that makes up the system will be available to those interested parties to ensure they are operating in compliance to the guidelines and regulations of the country where the JOC resides. Access to the software code provides a transparency to both producers and governments that their operations are calculated correctly in the software they use.

If we take the scenario that is the software developers competitive business model that exists today. The various software developers are required to undertake these large investments on behalf of their producer clients. Investments in software that do not provide a competitive advantage, but clearly offer a reason for the producer not to use the software. The surreal nature of oil and gas ERP software development business is being addressed in People, Ideas & Objects business and revenue models.  Please join us here

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Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Interesting comments on Open Source

Open source software development provides solutions to the majority of the issues the business brings. Open source is the method of software development for People, Ideas & Objects. The value is attained through different groups seeing advantages from different perspectives. From a developer point of view, I found this series of quotes from a developer on the Google Chromium blog
With the release of Mac Chrome to the dev-channel, I wanted to talk about open source and expectations. What was the point of releasing at this stage, you might ask? It's clearly not finished. Clearly. It's missing a large number of features, some half implemented, others not at all. Why even bother? Doesn't it just make us look bad? 
Open source projects aren't simply about a runnable binary, they're about the community of users, testers, and developers who devote their time and skills to working on a product they believe in. They go hand in hand: there's no binary without the community and there's no community without the binary. At some point in the life-cycle of a project, you have to stop thinking solely about your small band of developers and start growing the larger supporting community that will become your users, testers, localizers, documentation writers, and possibly even new coders.
In "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", Eric Raymond writes:
"When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise. Your program doesn't have to work particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do is (a) run, and (b) convince potential co-developers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the foreseeable future."
Eric Raymond is also the originator of the saying "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". Writing software doesn't start off with the perfect piece of code. It develops over time and iterates through many people reviewing, contributing, testing and correcting throughout the lifetime of the code. Everyone can contribute changes, individuals who have changes test their code to make sure it doesn't "break the build" and then submits the change file to a committer to review it and commit it to the code that makes up the application. These iterations continue on through various phases of the development. The phases include alpha, beta and everything in between. I raise these points now as these quotes from the Google developer accurately reflect the development perspective. 
We're not done yet, nor is it ready for the average user. It is, however, ready for those who want to live on the bleeding edge and help lend their talents towards completing it.
Another pillar of open source, along with releasing early, is releasing often. To that end, the dev channel will automatically receive weekly updates as development continues. You will be able to see the product improving from week to week and help immediately identify when things break. Getting feedback on new features as soon as they are completed helps the developers know if they hit the mark and helps close the feedback loop with the community. The community benefits by being more involved and connected and promoting further transparency in the development process. This wouldn't be possible if we only teased users with releases at widely-spaced intervals when most decisions had been set in stone (end-users who want that can use the beta or release channels).
Please join us here.
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Sunday, May 17, 2009

More comments on the 36 hour work day.

Last year I noted the pace of development of this software's development was accelerated through what I called the 36 hour work day. A global application developed by the global oil and gas industry has the benefit of accessing more regions simultaneously. Earlier I wrote the following;

Lastly I want to add fuel to the fire of my adversaries by noting that the compression of time is something that will be implemented in this application. Instead of budgeting for four years, I think it can be done in two and half years to initial commercial release. (Maybe even less!). We are approaching a systems use that may start the day in Russia, China and India, move to the Middle East, Europe and then the United States. Users from these regions will be able to collaborate in an asynchronous manner. Hence providing for potentially a "day" of user driven development that totals 36 hours. 
The more that I have thought about this type of development, the more I have difficulty in recommending any other method. Software development has been, for at least a decade, a collaboration by individuals and groups that are scattered around the world. Many never meet, ever. Whether the development team is just outside the door to your office, or the other side of the globe. It makes no difference in the methods used to develop the applications. The Open Source model has proven time and again to be the superior means to develop software. 

Since I first wrote about this concept the main issue that I have focused on is the User / Developer interactions, and I have the following comments. The Draft, Preliminary, Detailed and Final Specifications aggregate the industries knowledge in the form of wiki's and globally accessible medium. Starting with the text of the Draft Specification, Users will build the detail, UML, diagrams, voice, picture and video mediums to express their understanding and needs of the system. As the Developers interact with the Users through these rich media, it matters not where the individuals, teams and groups are located. All will have the current understanding available to them, and more importantly the history of how these decisions, standards and specifications were determined. A rich, searchable environment that defines the key attributes of the innovative oil and gas systems necessary to support the innovative oil and gas producer. 

And it won't stop there. The code that is developed based on the Users specifications is accessible by the Developers and Users of the systems. This is done for a number of reasons, firstly to ensure that the systems are doing what is expected of them. The days of attaining assurance of the software vendors code accuracy and consistency. Assurance being attained by the size of the software developers balance sheet and cash balance I expect is over. These assurances don't provide any value in comparison to the variety and volume of eyeballs that can and will access the code the applications are derived from. Reading the code that makes up the application is reviewing the facts. Facts that Oracle and SAP don't provide for, I wonder why that is?

Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Sun's in the news.

We see a bid being made on Sun Microsystems by IBM. Sun is our key vendor, and as a software developer they are the key to our technology stack. Java, JavaFX, GlassFish, Solaris, NetBeans, MySQL, and SPARC to name just a few of the more important ones. In addition to the products, there are the research and development capabilities which brought about these technologies. Other then Apple, no other firm, in my opinion, has the diversity and completeness of product and service offering. I would include IBM in that comparison.

That is why I think the acquisition by IBM is smart. They need these technologies. And to a large extent I think this will be a positive for the assets formerly known as Sun. There is a concern that Sun has been living on its cash flow since the dot com meltdown. Unable to turn their research and development into a monetary gain or business that is self sustaining. I think the main owners of the company, who are also the founders in the early 1980's, might agree with me that the technologies are better in IBM's hands. 

IBM has many of the same desires as the management / ownership as Sun. Cloud computing is the future. Java is a key enabler. And open source software are the only way. These assets would be in the hands of the next best custodian in IBM. 

Apparently the company was shopped around to both Dell and HP. Neither of those firms were interested. I find that hard to believe. What I don't want to see is Sun assets being taken by Oracle specifically. Watch them step in with a bid to spoil IBM's party and raise the takeover price. Microsoft, probably couldn't take Sun due to legal reasons. or someone else who wouldn't have the resources or where-with-all to optimize the technologies.

So this is a thumbs up for the potential merger of IBM and Sun. Smart move by IBM, and maybe the best way to realize the technologies potential developed in Sun. People, Ideas & Objects started off working with IBM and moved to Sun when IBM were getting out of the oil and gas industry. The one gain we would have if this merger went through, is access to IBM's DB2 database and maybe a renewed commitment to the energy industry. 

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Monday, March 16, 2009

Open Source as Innovation Platform

It would be no surprise that I subscribe to Jonathon Schwartz' web log. The CEO blogger from Sun Microsystems. Jonathon is way out there in terms of his devotion to open source. And is the reason that Sun has opened most of their software openings. He has undertaken to write a series of blog posts on the methods that Sun is using to commercialize their open source offerings and how it sells hardware. Moving to the video format might not really work for him, you can view the three posts here, here and here, I would recommend that you subscibe to his blog here.


I found something that was said, or maybe it was the way it was said that made me realize another of the many benefits of open source solutions. Picking winners. I have been in this "business" of technology in one form or another since 1992. I refer to those days as the wild wild west. Nothing but gunslingers, bandits and posies. If you thought you missed something, believe me you didn't. 

The idea was you needed to get a big vendor interested in your ideas, code or customers. This was prostitution at the highest level of business. Those that where anointed by the vendors from California, would rightly strut themselves a bit faster then other lesser software providers / hardware vendors. These were the days and if you were lucky the relationship would last upwards of a few years before your customers and vendors quietly found themselves and their allegedly better business arrangements. 

Used and abused you leave the software industry and hope that one day it will mature into a real business. In my case I saw that Intellectual Property could provide a reasonable safe guard to the antics of the western minded, but when combined with open source, it was a good time to get back into the software business. Now how does that relate to the Sun CEO weblog video series. 

There is no picking of winners and losers. There is just doing the business of doing the business. If you have a good idea, you win. If you have a bad idea, hopefully you'll keep trying until you get it right. No more of this so and so has supported what's-his-name. Just do your job the best that you can and let the upside depend on your skills to add value. You don't need to get into the rut of trying to impress and promote someone into a business they should have been in if they hadn't been sleeping. All this as an added feature of open source software.

If you were looking for a place where the open source world would help in the oil and gas industry, look no further. Please join me here

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Friday, March 14, 2008

Why this software development project needs to be done.

I am writing the draft specification of the Partnership Accounting Module and it strikes me how and why this software needs to be built. And this community is the only way in which it can be done. Compare the differences and advantages.

User defined software development

People need to have an influence in the development of their software. Influence in order to get things done in their day to day. And influence on how to improve them, how to change them and make their jobs easier and more productive. Who else can define, build and use an application like People, Ideas & Objects, as I note below, there is no one else.

There is an important time-lapse element in the process of this project. A user may find a change is needed to the software due to a bug, a change in regulations or a general enhancement. In this project the user is the key change driver, all they will need to do is ask. Which circumvents the long tedious and ultimately futile current bureaucratic process where really there is nothing that can be changed?

Who has the authority to make the necessary changes? When a contradiction arises between the vision and the implementation, who can orchestrate the necessary changes? How about the user? The user is the only group of people who have an understanding of the industry in its entirety.

Top down software development.

Let’s assume that some of the large producers attempted to satisfy their software needs by hiring a group of developers to build an application for them. Where does the passion and desire to make the application its best come from? IT departments have no interest in developing new applications; they’re busy keeping the old ones running and have no time, motivation or interest.

Assuming a custom development for a handful of producers was successful. What about the rest of the industry, will they have access to the system? This has been tried in Canada with the application being released and announced dead on arrival early in 2007. What was the problem? Was the user group compensated, where are the vision, passion and drive? Is the IT department the reason that this last application was unusable?

Having developers work in isolation provides you with some of the nicest code ever written. Without the users actively demanding and communicating to the developer exactly what it is they want and need, the developers will be coding in a cloud. Certainly these developments are not structured to compensate the user for their time, passion or vision. Usually the people are told to use the application after a few days training.

Legacy systems.

How many applications were initially developed in the 1980’s that are still in use today? My answer would be far too many. But these applications have been able to generate large percentage market shares because of a familiarity of the users in getting things done. Simply the users begin to understand how the application works and are able to devise work around’s to get their work done. Without large spreadsheets to help this process along, people would be working night and day trying to keep up. Nonetheless, no one is championing the cause to have these relics continuing towards the future.

The software vendors will do it.

Software vendors as I have mentioned are constrained by customers and particularly by their code base. They don’t want to change. Although there is strong demand for change, there are no financial resources available for them to do so. It’s a fundamentally flawed business model that the Open Source world sought to resolve and indeed ended. To begin the process of adopting user driven developments would increase their budget substantially. Since they have limited money for developers, it is reasonable to assume they have no money for users.

This would also apply to SAP and Oracle. Although for other reasons the industry has tried those applications and was disappointed. I doubt that another opportunity would be provided to them.

The problem.

Time is now passing by rather quickly. The producers were able to find more oil then they produced up until a few years ago. Now some are finding only 15% of their production with multi-billion dollar budgets. This is a road to oblivion that the producers management seems content with. Their pensions are safe and they have the situation in hand.

Producers are paralyzed by their own complexity. Incapable of responding to any and all change signals. Yet it is management that may be one group that responds to this opportunity. Holding two opposing views on a topic is apparently one of the things we humans do well. If their retirement is already planned, what about some post retirement consulting fees?

The solution.

New forms of organization, such as the Joint Operating Committee as the key organizational construct, work hand in hand with today’s Information Technologies. Imagine an application that covers the whole scope of the industry, where the development and user costs are shared over the entire industry. Where the entire industry has access and the application operates seamlessly like it was built by the people who use it.

These issues need to be addressed from the start. After the publication of the draft specification, what’s my role in this software development? I have two choices absolutely nothing, and absolutely everything. The scope of this application is well beyond one or even one thousand people’s capacity to understand. The more I would try to involve myself, the more damage that would be done. It’s the user’s software. Another thing I can do is build the necessary infrastructure for the developers, users and the application itself. More processing power, network bandwidth, and money for the users and developers for this work building the People, Ideas & Objects application. A user-driven software application that achieves a new level of organizational performance for the industry. One that enables the innovations in the science and engineering that are needed and beyond the reach of today’s hierarchy. Join me here.


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Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Open Source is democratic.

Users and Developers need to think of this system as theirs. For that is what it is. A place where Developers and Users can come together and solve the energy industries problems, through new and innovative software. These development are the beginning of how people will sign-on to the system to do their work. Where the daily commute is replaced by the daily access. Where people are engaged by producers to conduct their administrative, management and business activities on-line, irrespective of their location.

Not everybody has an idea to contribute and not every contribution is an idea. It will take all different kinds of people to make the application that is needed to do the job. Maybe someone will find through the process of this development they have an effective means of communicating with Developers. And maybe that person will find the freedom and compensation in doing that work more satisfying then their current activities.

The first thing a User or Developer should do is to process the information necessary to join this community. When enough people have joined then the community should begin the process of nominating people to the Executive Committee and each modules Expert Group. Establish the roles and responsibilities of these groups and establish a time frame in which each will sit. Once these nominations are set, the voting for each position can begin.

This process isn’t written in stone, it is only my idea of how the development “might” work. If the User community wants a different process then they should adopt it. This is your system. My vision of how this “could” operate is what I have written in the innovation blog and draft specifications. My role now and in the future is to support the community with what it needs to get the job done and be successful. This primarily focuses on sourcing the financial resources from the producers to pay the Users and Developers.

What I foresee some Users and Developers doing in this community is making the system a cornerstone of their own business operation. Where they may have, or will develop, a firm that integrates the land and accounting information of a producer into these systems modules. Or you may have a business that you conduct an element of the production accounting for a variety of JOC’s. Or possibly a business that provides technical support for a number of producers and / or JOC’s. Some will be one-person operations, and others will have a large staff base. The common denominator of all these businesses is the producers’ needs and the software systems that are being built here by its Users.

A further clarification of where the beginning and end of these businesses start and stop is that I only have an interest in the software. The software is supported indirectly through these businesses, and it is the business of those independent businesses that makes it stand on its own. The final clarification is that I pay for the User and Developer involvement of defining and building the software, and therefore may be considered by some of these businesses to be a paying customer.

But what about the producer, how do they fit into and benefit from this eco-system? Simply they pay to have their systems development done on a cost basis amortized over the entire industry. Unlike SAP and Oracle that repeatedly charge for the software to each company, each company in this system is only paying for their proportionate share of the software development and infrastructure costs. A proportionate share that is being determined as a function of $x.xx per barrel of oil equivalent per year. Whereas if the cost per boe per year is determined to be $1.00 in the first year of development. Then a company such as Encana, which produces 700,000 bbls per day, would pay $700,000 for one year’s access to the system. Each year would be a different value based on the software development needs of the community.

The point of this is that the total cost of the community is shared over the entire producer base. For Encana to pay $700,000 for these services would be a single digit fraction of what they are paying now. Lets hope they begin to see the value of this methodology and start their participation, which is desperately needed, and provide the funding for this community.

The methodology being proposed here, where the producers pay the annual cost of software development mitigates the two impediments to innovation. The two impediments are code and customers. As a software company gets more of each, it begins to take on a Herculean task to re-write and update the code. The software vendor then becomes sensitive to the desires of the community and begins to reject changes on the basis that the costs are not supported in their revenue model.

The producers knowing the software developers potential market is small further aggravate this situation. By limiting the financial resources the producer starves the software developer of the financial resources they need to grow and prosper. A desperate software developer must eat and will do things that are against its best business interest and capitulate to the marketplace.

The reality of the situation in Calgary is, I think, further aggravated by the lack of investment capital for software development. Who after all wants to invest in the scenario that I mentioned above? And secondly, banking for intellectual property just doesn’t exist.

These situations are real and manifest themselves in the fact the software stagnates for 30 years with a 70% market share.

When the financial rewards of exploration and production are as prosperous as the $100 price of oil. Then I think we need to start doing things differently. What I am proposing eliminates these problems and provides a competent software development capability that serves its community. Join me here.

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Sunday, February 24, 2008

"Democratizing Innovation"

Professor Eric Von Hippel of MIT

There are two free books that help provide an understanding of how People, Ideas & Objects software development project will proceed. And most importantly the role of the Users and Developers involved. The first book is the above titled and can be downloaded from here. The second book "The Future of Ideas" is also down-loadable, and written by Professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford University.

Professor von Hippel's book documents the means to attain the innovation that we seek. In Chapter 1 he provides a summary of the entire book. This summary provides coverage of the points that I want to make, so lets begin.

Chapter 1

Professor von Hippel starts off with framing the context in which he sees innovation occurring. Defining both User centred innovation vs manufacturer centric innovation. For the purposes of this blog entry, von Hippel's focus on the use of "manufacturers" is consistent with our understanding of oil and gas user based innovation.
Users that innovate can develop exactly what they want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents. Moreover, individual users do not have to develop everything they need on their own: they can benefit from innovations developed and freely shared by others. p. 1
This software development project is global in scope, use of the Joint Operating Committee is the cultural norm throughout the industry. The People, Ideas & Objects project is conceived in the open source model and will provide the Users, developers, and producers with innovations developed elsewhere. I believe this is possible and Professor von Hippel indicates how this is happening.
At the same time, the ongoing shift of product-development activities from manufacturers to users is painful and difficult for many manufacturers. Open, distributed innovation is "attacking" a major structure of the social division of labor. Many firms and industries must make fundamental changes to long-held business models in order to adapt. p. 2
This very point was addressed in my original thesis. Anthony Giddens is currently more famous as an adviser to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, however, in 1984 he published "The Constitution of Society" which introduces his structuration theory. Structuration suggests that people, organizations and society progress at the same rate, any imbalance in one would lead to failure in the others. I had suggested that the energy industries use of the hierarchical organizational model had exceeded its useful life, and indeed was inhibiting both people and society. I think that we are beginning to see and understand the failures that the energy bureaucracies are having on society. Moving to the industry standard Joint Operating Committee is the fundamental change that is necessary to avoid these failures. How these changes are implemented is through a clean break from the old business model.
Innovation user and innovation manufacturer are the two general "functional" relationships between innovator and innovation. p. 3
We need these two types of innovations. One is the systems, developed by its users, that support the innovative energy industry, and in turn support the innovations that need to take place in the earth sciences and engineering disciplines. Professor Giovanni Dosi shows that science is influenced by innovations which in turn leads to new sciences and new innovations. Consumers and producers of innovations may be more a reflection about a point in time rather then an individuals role in the long term. Software systems need to adapt to changes like these. This is what I am setting out to provide to this user community.
In figure 1.1, the increased concentration of innovations towards the right indicates that the likelihood of innovating is higher for users having higher lead user index values. The rise in average innovation attractiveness as one moves from left to right indicates that innovations developed by lead users tend to be more commercially attractive. (Innovation attractiveness is the sum of the novelty of the innovation and the expected future generality of market demand.) p. 4
Who these innovation leaders are is unknown at this time. But as this project continues to achieve mind-share in the energy sector, I think we will begin to soon find out.
Mass manufacturers tend to follow a strategy of developing products that are designed to meet the needs of a large market segment well enough to induce purchase from and capture significant profits from a large number of customer. When users' needs are heterogeneous, this strategy of "a few sizes fit all" will leave many users somewhat dissatisfied with the commercial products on offer and probably will leave some users seriously dissatisfied. p. 5
A drive that I am attempting to lead away from the generic industry software solutions of IBM, SAP and Oracle. The energy industry is too unique to share any similarities to other industries.
The social efficiency of a system in which individual innovations are developed by individual users is increased if users somehow diffuse what they have developed to others. p. 9
Encapsulating the value of today's collaborative Information Technologies.
When we say that an innovator freely reveals information about a product or service it has developed, we mean that all intellectual property rights to that information are voluntarily given up by the innovator, and all interested parties are given access to it - the information becomes a public good. p. 9
This is how the second book "The Future of Ideas" written by Professor Lessig's comes into play. If everyone is only concerned about the access rights to their own ideas this entire community will be eventually reduced to a place where only Lawyers will be happy. The licensing model for this project simply enables the free and unencumbered access to the ideas and intellectual property contained within this project. This is derived through myself granting Users and Developers free access to all of the intellectual property. In turn each User and Developer assigns the rights in their ideas and innovations back to the copyright holder enabling immediate re-distribution of the idea. This is necessary to maintain the free access for all concerned, and, that I have a strong position to assess the energy producers for the appropriate financial resources necessary to pay the Developers and Users to do this work.
Innovation by users tends to be widely distributed rather than concentrated among just a very few very innovative users. As a result, it is important for user-innovators to find ways to combine and leverage their efforts. Users achieve this by engaging in many forms of cooperation. Direct, informal user to user cooperation (assisting others to innovate, answering questions, and so on) is common. Organized cooperation is also common, with users joining together in networks and communities that provide useful structure and tools for their interactions and for the distribution of innovations. Innovation communities can increase the speed and effectiveness with which users and also manufacturers can develop and test and diffuse their innovation. They also can greatly increase the ease with which innovators can build larger systems from inter-linkable modules created by community participants. pp. 10 - 11
I think that this is by far the best method in which this community should be built and achieve what is possible in this time and place. I would challenge anyone to suggest a more effective means of this communities innovations, and avoid the following.
Intellectual property law was intended to increase the amount of innovation investment. Instead, it now appears that there are economies of scope in both patenting and copyright that allow firms to use these forms of intellectual property law in ways that are directly opposed to the intent of policy makers and to the public welfare. p. 12
This discussion is the method that Open Source projects have used in the technology environment. Not all open source projects fall within this category, only what I perceive as the commercially successful ones.
User's ability to innovate is improving radically and rapidly as a result of the steadily improving quality of computer software and hardware, improved access to easy to use tools and components for innovation, and access to a steadily richer innovation commons. Today, user firms and even individual hobbyists have access to sophisticated programming tools for software and sophisticated CAD design tools for hardware and electronic. These information based tools can be run on a personal computer, and they are rapidly coming down in price. As a consequence, innovation by users will continue to grow even if the degree of heterogeneity of need and willingness to invest in obtaining a precisely right product remains constant. p.13
and
I conclude this introductory chapter by reemphasizing that user innovation, free revealing and user innovation communities will flourish under many but not all conditions. What we know about manufacturer - centered innovation is still valid; however, lead user centered innovation patterns are increasingly important, and they present major new opportunities and challenges for us all. p. 17
Thank you Professor von Hippel for noting these key points and the free access to these important concepts in your book. If we miss this opportunity it will not be as a result of a lack of access to the intellectual property.

Professor Lessig has a unique understanding of some of the legal implications of the Internet. I recommend reading his book as a companion to Professor von Hippel's book. Lessig's book provides an understanding of many of the issues and opportunities around intellectual property. I think that the most effective way in which these ideas can be populated and built upon are addressed in Professor Lessig's book, and implemented in People, Ideas & Objects.

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Sunday, February 17, 2008

Why Sun Microsystems is our vendor.

This may be possibly one of the most important technology announcements ever made. (Click on the title of this entry for the article.) If it's not the biggest, I can assure you that it is the largest that I've seen and probably ever will. This announcement tells the current bunch running IT the party is over. Pack your bags your out the guard is changing.

Information Week reports Sun's CEO Jonathon Schwartz states Sun's vision and strategy are now focused on providing support to the start up software firm. In doing so Schwartz expressly calls his current key partner Oracle, the competition.

Schwartz said Sun is repositioning itself as a disruptive software supplier, using freely downloadable open source code to initiate relationships with developers in young Internet companies. With MySQL in its arsenal, Sun has become "an arms dealer" for the next generation of those companies, said Rich Green, the vendor's executive VP for software.

But Sun may find itself offending some communities even as it builds new ones. Oracle is an old partner that has sponsored Solaris sales to customers that want to run the Oracle database. By offering free or low-cost MySQL subscriptions, Sun is now a threat to Oracle's database cash cow. "MySQL will work fine alongside Oracle," Schwartz said in response to an InformationWeek question, "but I prefer to focus on acquiring new customers, not on the competition."

This hurts Oracle. Oracle could see the Open Source writing on the wall and launched a massive takeover of established software vendors. Sun has driven database sales for Oracle for many years. Oracle is now forced to hang its hat on the old generation technologies as the key to their sales growth.

I have documented the two constraints of a software vendor in this blog before. The constraints of code and customers motivate the "established" software vendor to sell the status quo. Change becomes unspeakable in terms of innovation or progress. Old generation software companies had to die in order for change to occur. This has been reflected in IBM's jettison of Qbyte a few years ago. So how does a software vendor compete in this new generation?

As you can imagine the business model has to change, or should I say has changed. Open Source software shows the way. The code base is never settled. It is in a constant state of development. Go to any open source project and you can select any version of the software that you like. The bleeding edge, the alpha, the beta and a few versions of the supported code base in "stable" condition. Innovation doesn't stop, how could the code? The customers demand that the software be reliable and operate as promised in their firm. Any variation needs to be addressed with very specific processes. And no two companies are ever the same. This is where the constant development model meets the reality of the installation and the software User becomes the key in the Open Source community.

To many people in the oil and gas industry, dealing with a start-up on such a large-scale project is not something they thought they would have to do. But how else can you approach such a difficult task as is faced by the energy industry as a whole. Can you continue to live with software that was conceived in Germany for manufacturers? If you believe you can then you know who to call.

Sun's Schwartz has legitimized People, Ideas & Objects as the key to the future generation of IT enabled oil and gas producers. And completely de-legitimized the non Open Source vendor. And in the process has told the Emperor he has no clothes. In my books that is a big announcement.

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Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Succeeding at open-source innovation.

An interview with Mozilla Chairman Mitchell Baker.

McKinsey remains very topical with the work that is being done here. In this interview, Mitchell Baker reflects on the successful innovation she has experienced at Mozilla. A Lawyer by training she has been involved with Netscape / AOL / Mozilla for over 10 years.

The interview begins with the focus on Mozilla's participation model. With a staff of 120 and an army of volunteers, each group contributes to the code base, Ms. Baker credits both elements as critical and key to Mozilla's success.

McKinsey asks, "How do you motivate people to contribute to Mozilla, especially after ten years?" Ms. Baker notes the evolution of the browser, its dark side of pop-ups, spam and spyware and the greater conflict that Microsoft brought to the browser arena. And the elimination of gate-keepers in accessing the Internet. If not for Mozilla, Microsoft may have intimidated browser vendors to the point of extinction. These are the reasons that many have joined the Mozilla community and contributed. And;

Second, our product makes a giant difference in the lives of our volunteers, and they take ownership of it. I don't know if you could build this degree of motivation for something that really didn't change people's lives, something that they weren't emotionally committed to. But the number of people who feel that Firefox is partly theirs is very high.
I know this emotional commitment exists within the oil and gas User community.

I want to highlight these comments of Ms. Baker's and draw a parallel to the community that is being built here. No one individual knows all there is about oil and gas. To build a comprehensive system as I have described here needs the diverse and robust community to define it and build the software. I can't think how that can be done without the Users of the software emotionally involved in the manner that Ms. Baker speaks about her volunteers. And as I have stated before, this community has to be financially supported by the oil and gas industry. Both developers and Users need to be, and will be, compensated for their time and efforts.

In answering the McKinsey question "What has been the biggest surprise in the time you've been working at Mozilla? "Ms. Baker states;
That we had exactly what was needed at exactly the right moment. You often see this in start-ups that burst onto the scene and grow dramatically. There's a lot of hard work and smarts, but also some piece of timing is right. Those things, you can't control; you need to be ready.
I hope that I would not be considered presumptuous in stating that I think we are ready. Join me here.

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Sunday, August 26, 2007

A call to action for those in the energy industry.

I'm sensing that the time in which we start software developments is near. I took the better part of the past month to evaluate many of the technologies that we propose to use, and upgrade my skills to the current technology offerings. This started off with Sun Microsystems offerings of Java 5.0, GlassFish and NetBeans 5.5.1 Integrated Development Environment (IDE). The new "Open Source" development models and associated products are maturing, and they will have remarkably positive effects on the quality of the software built from this point forward. Many small changes that will have a revolutionary impact in the next 10 years.

I also am sensing that these tools have changed to now include an inherent addition of "the user" in many of the underlying concepts. The ability to communicate with the user is enhanced, bringing an expectation that the users will be more technically savvy then they may have been in the past. Not that the users will be the ones to write the commercial code, but are the key to software quality and effective designs. Excluding them is responsible, in my opinion, for the failure of most of the past software development projects. Open Source access can enable the user to better understand what is being done and this will demand a very strong understanding of the Java programming language.

And this is the opportunity for those with the business, engineering, and geological understanding of the energy industry. To apply their current skills to the development of their software. The developers are involved in their own science and need to focus on that, the more that we as users can understand of their information technologies, methods, processes, terminology, syntax and computer science, the better off we all will be. I would predict that in ten years the average user will be as intimately familiar with the JDK and other tools as they are today with email and Office applications. It is a software development revolution that is being facilitated through the technologies that I've mentioned and the users as its core. The next 10 years will come to be known as the golden era of software development. If I needed 1,000 developers I could easily attain those resources from the large pool of enterprise capable Java developers. And this will be easily done with the resources of the energy industry, a $2.5 trillion industry. What I will not have and will desperately need is the 8 to 1 volume of users-to-developers ratio for research, definition and overall direction of the developers.

There is a much faster pace of progress in the development of these technologies then in the very near past. I think it is that we are no longer constrained by the pace of "Windows Innovations." (An oxymoron as far as I am concerned.) Anyone with a good idea can have them easily implemented with in the technology stack for the benefit of everyone. And the ideas are coming from everywhere. The changes that I see in NetBeans over the past 18 months are truly shocking. Java as well and Glassfish was barely a concept then. There is one technology that adds a new element to all these technologies and that is Sun Microsystems Dtrace. Dtrace is a tool that can evaluate and analyse the interactions of the application's code. Taking the idea of a debugger to a level that previously would have been barely able to comprehend. Errors, bugs and other nasty side effects of the development are exposed immediately. Many of the bugs identified by Dtrace were not even known to exist 18 months ago! Dtrace brings the level of application code quality to the level of a pure science.

I have always been a fan of the three leaders in the industry today. Sun, Apple and Google are very much alike in their approach to business. They are also the ones that are primarily responsible for this golden era that I speak of. Buying their stock has always been a given to me. I am also very impressed with the fit and finish of the "Google Apps for your domain" services that I have decided to begin to use for www.people-ideas-objects.com. Having the users, developers and any others who need to access this future software service will soon begin to learn and appreciate the far-reaching vision of Google. I cannot imagine what these three companies offerings will be like in ten years from now. The capability of implementing the vision that I have articulated for this project is a given, for that I am now very certain. There is no technical risk associated with the large objectives that I have set out here in this blog.

Lastly Web Services seems to be passing as the last great technical fad. I can assure you otherwise. Web services will be the way that almost all industries, business and people interact commercially in the next ten years. Although I have no evidence of this, the technical infrastructure is in place and there is nothing to stop it from becoming "real" in the very short term. One company that I did find that holds out much of the promise of web services is David Duffield's www.workday.com offering. Mr. Duffield's previous company, PeopleSoft, provides him with a level of very high credibility. Our use of his web-services for General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Payroll and Human Resources provides us with an api and a small fee for each transaction we process using their technology. Enabling this community to focus on the truly unique needs of the energy industry. The promise of web-services will materialize in the next 18 months. For that I am certain.

It is also interesting to me that www.workday.com have implemented "Ram Resident Databases". This method of running a database of course is not new, but provides a performance kick to the tune of 100,000 fold over disk-based databases. With the relatively low cost of a TeraByte of Ram, this is an innovation whose performance is very cost effective.

We need to get moving on these ideas and concepts today. Time is wasting and the technical revolution has begun. Peak oil is not a flawed theory. If you are someone in the oil and gas industry who knows that this is a better way for Information Technologies to interact within the industry, please write to me here, and lets get started.

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Sunday, June 10, 2007

The Software Concurrency Revolution

Another Google video in advanced programming languages. Click on the title to view the video.

Advanced Topic in Programming Languages Series: Effective Static Race Detection
Stanford Professor Alex Aiken

I am certain that I share a concern with many of my potential customers. That concern is of using a "web service" that services the commercial business needs of an entire industry. The concern is that not all the bugs are worked out and as a result things begin to be recorded incorrectly. One of the unique ways in which these bugs could be exposed is by pushing the science further then it has been pushed before. And, taking into consideration, the understanding of how Moore's law is being achieved through threading and multi-core processing that "concurrency" becomes an issue.

A Race Condition is defined as;

"The same location may be accessed by different threads simultaneously without holding a common lock. (And at least one access is a write.)"
Concurrency (Race Condition) is essentially the ability to have one variable overwritten by another unrelated variable and corrupting the data. This has been handled well in the various relational databases with a number of locking scenarios that ensure that the inserts, updates and deletes are done effectively. But what about the memory registers in the program itself. With multi-core and threading enabling multiple reads and writes to those memory registers, how does the program ensure that the ordering of those memory items maintains the programming logic? One particularly nasty point about these bugs is that they may be random, no one is aware of their existence and sometimes they are unique and therefore not re-creatable as other bugs are. How common are they? Professor Aiken said he found 392 race conditions in the open source Derby Database. An open source product originally developed by IBM.

As we progress down this road, and start development, these "race" conditions are of grave concern. These bugs are state of the art in terms of the types of problems that the academic community and developer of the Java Programming Language (Sun Microsystems) are working on. This video discusses this problem and the difficulty in identifying and resolving "race" conditions. Professor Aiken does an excellent job in making it known that identification of race conditions is the tough part, with their resolution very easy from a programmatic point of view.

As the tools, policies and techniques continue to develop we will be spending more time on this critical issue. The need for data integrity is first and foremost in the usability of this system. I trust the majority of these issues will be resolved and rectified when we go into commercial use of this needed software.

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Tuesday, March 27, 2007

We've been Haacked!

And I do like it. Phil Haack runs a blog that

"attempts to infuse technology and software development with humor and a pragmatic eye... Attempts."
Phil read one of my recent posts and commented on it in his blog.

I certainly would welcome Phil and his community to have a look at this early stage project. The scope is large and therefore, "one day", will have ample amounts of paid developers working on it. No time like the present for a little introduction, and self-promotion, I think.

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Monday, February 05, 2007

Breakthrough ideas for 2007

The online version of the February 2007 Harvard Business Review contains the "HBR List". Which is described as their "Breakthrough Ideas for 2007". Upon reviewing the material I would have to concur. The authors alone are worth the price (apparently free).

Several of the Breakthrough Ideas that I am interested in include:

Algorithms in the Attic

The article starts off with its summary concept:

"For a powerful perspective on future business, take a hard look at mathematics past. As computing gets ever faster and cheaper, yesterday’s abstruse equations are becoming platforms for tomorrow’s breakthroughs. Companies in several industries are now dusting off these formulas and putting them in the service of new products and processes."
In Partnership Accounting I noted the complexity of the algorithm used to calculate the operations in oil and gas could be modeled in the current programming languages and particularly Java. This Harvard article is similar in terms of what the processing power and algorithms of past advanced maths could be used to form new business models and opportunities.
The Leader from Hope;

"Hope is good thing, maybe the best of things, and nothing good ever dies." Is a quotation from the movie "The Shaw-shank Redemption". This Breakthrough Idea is the controversial use of hope in a changing environment. The article states clearly;
If you are an executive trying to lead an organization through change, know that hope can be a potent force in your favor. And it’s yours to give.
And I see absolutely nothing wrong with that sentiment.

An emerging hotbed of user centered innovation (Danish Research Unit for Industrial Dynamics and Danish User-Centered Innovation Lab)
The Danish Government's 2005 strategy for the next 4 years states that, “strengthening user-driven innovation" is a national priority. In response, a group of researchers from Copenhagen Business School in Denmark and MIT Sloan School of Management in the US - supported from Danish Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs – now establish the Danish User-Centered Innovation Lab.
I will be paying close attention to this Danish initiative. This is a topic that suffers from a lack of research, however, it is new and extremely important. This software development project will hopefully develop many of the positive attributes of this worthwhile research.

Here comes XBRL;

This Breakthrough Idea article notes SEC's Chairman Christopher Cox's initiative to use the XBRL reporting language. This is directly in line with what I had written on this blog back in May 2006. The XBRL technology will be truely revolutionary, just as the Harvard Business Review notes.
"All this undoubtedly sounds too good to be true to managers who are rightfully jaded after decades of false promises that the next IT silver bullet is (this time, really!) just around the corner. So what makes XBRL different? Unlike all past technological developments, it doesn’t come in a wide variety of proprietary flavors, like ERP systems, operating systems, and customer relationship management systems, to name just a few. XBRL is an open-source standard that was developed by an international public consortium of nearly 500 organizations from 27 countries, including companies, investors, analysts, auditors, regulators, and aggregators of financial data, such as Standard & Poor’s. (For more background, see www.xbrl.org, the standard’s official Web site.)"
Innovation and Growth, Size Matters; (A future research Field)

An interesting theory has been put forward here, one that I will be picking up as an area for future research. "Superlinear" growth could help to attain the metrics in performance that the industry needs. The individual energy industry clusters, such as Calgary, could potentially benefit from the knowledge that innovations can be leveraged from size.
"Though our research has focused on cities, the social and structural similarities between cities and firms suggest that our conclusions extend to companies and industries. If so, the existence of superlinear scaling that links size and creative output has two important consequences: First, it challenges the conventional wisdom that smaller innovation functions are more inventive, and perhaps explains why few organizations have ever matched the creativity of a giant like Bell Labs in its heyday. Second, it shows that because organizations and industries must apparently innovate at a continually accelerating rate to avoid stagnation, economizing by reflexively cutting R&D budgets and creative staffs may be a dangerous strategy over the long term."
The best Networks are really Worknets; (A future research field)

Building off of Metcalfe's Law which is essentially N Squared and applying it to a situation where-in a business collaborates at a large scale. Noting there is incremental value beyond what is aggregated. Something that is intuitively understood, but never quantified.

In Defence of Ready, Aim, Fire;

How the open source software movement succeeds and provides value to business.
"This presents a conundrum for business. Clearly, firms can’t just start trying everything. Management overhead is real, and the costs of failure can’t simply be laid at employees’ feet. As a result, open system–like innovation must necessarily continue independent of any firm’s ability to either direct or capture all of the value. Some companies’ product lines or employee structures may not allow radical experimentation, but smart managers will look for ways to take advantage of this sort of broadly distributed effort. In environments where organizations can reduce the cost of failure by farming out a problem to individuals—who may be induced to participate solely by the chance to learn new skills or to gain the respect of peers—we can expect open systems to make increasing inroads into standard commercial efforts."
The folly of Accountabilism;

There would be little to doubt that the need for accountability has escalated significantly in the past decade. This article deals with many of the related issues that stem from the abundance of accountability in business today. It's concluding comment accurately captures the issue;
"Accountabalism tries to squeeze centuries of thought about how to entice people toward good behavior and dissuade them from bad into simple rules by which individuals can be measured and disciplined. It would react to a car crash by putting stop signs at every corner. Bureaucratizing morality or mechanizing a complex organization gives us the sense that we can exert close control. But grown-ups prefer clarity and realism to happy superstition."
Seven out of twenty of these articles are directly related to the work being done here. Two provide new material for future research and one is a rich resource on the topic of user centered innovation.

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Friday, February 02, 2007

Mondrian Code Review.

Guido von Rostrum, who wrote the Python scripting language, is also an employee of Google. Guido has been with Google for a little over a year and is presenting his Mondrian Code Review project. The development of Mondrian is what he has done with his 20% time that Google pays him to do the things that interest him. Mondrian Code Review fills a nice hole in most IDE (Integrated Development Environments) and is a natural extension of the standard concurrent version systems, like Subversion, the choice of this development project. With the variety of projects that Google is involved in, the tool would provide real value. A real value for any large software development project.

I have reviewed many of the videos that MIT produces and it is a source that never fails to inform and entertain. Google on Google video looks to me to be as high a quality of source of useful videos. This review provides the petroleum user with a window on the methods and procedures of how software is built in an open environment.

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Thursday, February 01, 2007

How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People.

Google has had the capacity in the past few years to draw in many of the pioneer's and industry leaders to work for them. Two of these people, Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick are leaders in the open source world. Both have worked on Subversion which is the version control system used on this project. Of note, Google hired them to implement Subversion through out their product line, and in the process giving the tool the most significant test I could imagine.

The experiences they refer to throughout the presentation are based on work done for both Subversion and Apache. The topic of discussion focuses on how to avoid the toxic or poisonous people that can infect an open source project. The most important aspect of any contribution is to ensure that the team is not drawn down by people not reviewing the archives. Contributions have to be incremental to the work that has been done, not reiterating what has already happened.

The presenters open with their 4 areas of concern.

  1. Comprehension
  2. Fortification
  3. Identification
  4. Disinfection
The resource you are trying to protect is the Attention and Focus of the user and development community. Keeping disparate groups from losing focus and spending their attention in the wrong areas will lead to project failure. The methods to guard against these incidents is highlighted in their video. The first note is that poisonous people can;
  1. Distract.
  2. Emotionally drain your community.
  3. Cause Needless infighting.
You need to avoid paralysis.
  • People can derail forward progress by people being.
    • Perfectionists.
    • People obsessed with process.
    • Even nice guys can do this unintentionally.
    • The perfect is the enemy of the good.
The presenters then bring up the analogy of "Painting the bike shed". Which was an analogy that was used in the development of BSD Unix. The analogy goes; a nuclear plant that was needed to be built was progressing as good as it could. The entire development then stalled to determine what color the bike shed should be painted. The debate then ground to a halt on both the bike shed and the nuclear plant. Here the authors noted "The amount of discussion on a feature, is inversely proportional to their value. And is noted to be one of Parkinson's Law's.

Fortifying against the threat.

Politeness, Respect, Trust and Humility are necessary in an open source project. All of the deficiencies that the presenters had experienced originated from these 4 points.

Have a Mission, where do your want to go. Limit your developments scope. Define the project so that future requests can be classified as "its on our list of things to do" or "its not"

Mailing lists are a critical tool of the open source project, etiquette should be monitored and enforced. Review of the archives, don't let users disrespect any previous conversations by not reviewing the archives. A few more of their points include;
  • Design documentation.
  • Bug fixes.
  • Document Mistakes. (Ensures that travels down dark alleys are limited and not repeated.)
  • Code Changes (Change Log)
  • Code Collaboration policies. Email is the key to participation.
  • No powerpoints.
  • Do big changes on branches for easier review. (Be generous on creating branches.)
  • Spreading the "bus factor" so that developers move around alot. (Bus factor is how many people need to get hit by a bus before the project fails.)
  • No names on top of source code files. (Makes people nervous) Everything is owned by everyone. (Cuts the pettiness.)
  • Have well defined processes.
  • Releasing Software
    • Backport Bugs
    • Test and release tarballs.
  • Accepting and reviewing patches.
  • Admitting new committers
  • The community founders establish the culture.
    • The culture becomes self selecting.
    • Voting is a last resort
      • A healthy community should rarely need to vote.
Identifying poisonous people.

Communications Annoyances
  • Uses silly nicknames
  • Uses multiple nicknames in different media
  • Overuses Capital letters.
  • Uses excessive punctuation.
  • Acronyms are used.
General lack of a clue as to what is going on.
  • Unable to pick up on the mood.
  • Doesn't understand common goals of the community.
  • Asks incessant questions.
Hostility
  • Insults the status-quo.
  • Angrily commands help.
  • Attempts to blackmail.
  • Attempts to deliberately rile people .
  • Makes accusations of conspiracy.
Conceit
  • Refuses to acknowledge the opinions of others.
  • Makes sweeping claims.
  • Usually about the projects future success.
  • Re-opens topics that are long settled.
  • Without reading the archives.
Lack of Cooperation
  • Willing to complain but not help with anything.
  • Unwilling to discuss design.
  • Too insecure to take criticism.
Disinfecting your community.
  • Is this person draining attention and focus?
    • If so, is the person really likely to benefit the project?
  • Is this person paralyzing the project?
  • Is the dispute likely to finish soon?
Don't...
  • feed the energy creature.
  • give jerks purchase.
  • engage them.
  • get emotional
Do...
  • pay attention to a newcomer.
    • even if they're annoying at first.
  • extract a real bug report if possible.
  • know when to give up and ignore them.
  • know when to forcibly boot them from community.
Summary
  • Comprehend:
  • Preserve attention and focus.
Fortify:
  • Build a healthy community.
Identify:
  • Look for tell tale signs.
Disinfect:
  • Maintain calm and stand your ground.
And finally, the presenters put a special emphasis on decision making. All decisions can be discussed off-line, no decisions made without the documentation in the email lists. The reason why and what alternatives will show up in the archives and contributors can see the reasons and justification for the previous decisions. All of these excellent points will form a major part of the code of conduct that will be one of the first deliverables from this community.

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