As a part of my job I find myself being introduced to all sorts of new ideas and the latest of these is using the Scrum methodology for running projects.
http://flickr.com/photos/jessflickr/163006527/
Scrum is an agile methodology that aims to empower the developers and also be flexible enough to realise that specifications change over time and creates a framework that can evolve with that but also regularly deliver solid outcomes. At Jiva I am going to take the role of Product Owner for Beanbag, which after some background reading seems to suit me fine. As far as I can tell the role of the Product Owner is to act as the voice of the user/customer and set priorities for each “sprint” (a short, in our case 3 week, period of work with deliverables at the end), then to get out of the way and let the developers do their work. To maintain the rugby theme its kind of a scrum half role, pointing the guys who do the hard graft in the right direction but leaving them to do the nitty gritty then grab the glory at the end!
Pete is going to take the role of Scrum Master – the main feature of this role as far as I can tell is to keep the Product Owner and any other stakeholders off the backs of the developers during the ’sprint’. The role has many more features but that was the one that struck me the most as I know how hard it can be trying to act as a firewall to protect a team from pressures from above and give them the space to get on and do what they were hired for.
I’m looking forward to seeing how it all works out and getting more directly involved in the evolution of Beanbag.
[this post was recycled and remixed from my personal blog if there is any deja vu occuring!]
Now for me and people of my generation when you start talking about Hobo the first thing we think of is a TV show from the late 70s, early 80s that featured a dog that was kind of a working class Lassie, wandering Canada saving the day.
Hobo means something a bit different in the Jiva office as it is at the core of Beanbag and the upcoming Advisr.
To quote HoboCentral.net
“Hobo is a plugin for Ruby on Rails that brings a number of extensions, some small some large, to Rails application development. The common theme to these extensions is rapid development.”
The Jiva team have been lucky enough to work with Tom Locke who is responsible for Hobo on much of the development of Beanbag and it really does enable a rapid development cycle that allows us to iterate quickly and keep improving the Beanbag site.
If Ruby on Rails is your thing or you are just interested in rapid development its well worth popping over to HoboCentral.net for a nose around.
Clay Shirkys Here Comes Everybody is required reading here at Jiva and even if your humble blogger does have some issues with how well it works as a book I do fully subscribe to the concepts and ideas that Professor Shirky writes about.
So I was very interested to come across a couple of videos where Shirky is interviewed about how these ideas can work with education. With much of my work here at Jiva focused on Beanbag Learning at the moment this is a topic close to my heart.
You can find the videos here on Will Richardsons’ blog – http://weblogg-ed.com/2008/clay-shirky-interview/ – the interviewer was Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach a prominent edublogger in the States. The content is obviously a very US take but no less interesting for that.
One of the final parts of the Q and A is especially interesting for our work at Beanbag and I’ll quote it here:
Q: What would happen if there was no public education? Would society still value taking responsibility for individual learning?
A: Home schooling is growing for every economic class except the very well-off. Create some social model for learning, organized online? Coordination of problems; find others struggling with the same issues. When you are diagnosed with a disease, you go online to read about it and find a group. Similar approach to education could work. Go online to find others who have kids who are having problems with a particular issue.
So I typed Jiva into the all knowing Google and lo and behold there was a Wikipedia entry so I thought I would have a look.
Apparently Jiva in Hinduism and Jainism is a ‘living being’. Now that makes us ‘Living Being Technology’ which given our focus on the concept of People Search with Beanbag and Advisr I think its a nice fit. Kevin and or Jon are probably going to tell me this was always the plan but I’m going to take a bit of convincing!