Dan Dixon, who worked with us to help us define our ’social architecture’ and to develop our initial product roadmap, has a chapter called Pattern Languages for CMC Design in the forthcoming Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems. It will be a chunky tome, over 1,000 pages, but even so a list price of $495 does sound like they are actively discouraging individuals from buying it. If you are a student, or work at a large corporate enterprise, I guess you could hassle your library to pick up a copy. Otherwise you might have to settle for reading Dan’s blog.
As I said at the time:
The patterns workshop (which Dan and Ed ran for us) gave us a way of thinking about what we wanted to build that neatly bridged the gap between vague hand waving about ‘community’ and getting sucked down into the nitty gritty of interface design.
If you think you could use some similar help I highly recommend getting in touch with them.
Between the 5th and 7th of December the second Social Innovation Camp will take place in London and hopefully Jiva will be at the event to both contribute and learn from the other attendees.
According to the ‘About’ section of the SI Camp website it is “an experiment in creating social innovations for the digital age” which is something we here at Jiva fully support – in fact its an underlying principal in our work on Beanbag.
The first SI Camp took place in April and was won by (the very impressive and worthy) Enabled by Design and Visiting Prisons however there was one project I was particularly interested in. On the Up (as it became known after the event) was a clever idea about building a kind of online, personal, ‘record of achievement’ or ‘development plan’ based on goals users (particularly young people) set for themselves and activities they undertake to achieve those goals. I have been in touch with one of the leaders of this project after I mentioned it elsewhere and while its currently on hiatus it is hoped that it will start up again. Its my hope that something at least as interesting with an education focus comes up again this time (in fact I have one or two ideas myself).
It is a great idea and something that I think appeals to alot of people in and around the web community so I was really pleased to see that there is going to be another one in the same year thanks to support of the Young Foundation and Nesta.
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.