An update on Transreality

I have written from time to time about transreality on the Internet. This is where real life and virtual products mix and match. Where virtual products become real products and real products become virtual products.  Industry week has an interesting article about the next wave of user-generated content. This is user-generated, community-driven manufacturing. As the 3-D development tools become better and better, they lower the barriers to entry for the creation of virtual models of real products. The article focuses on 3-D development tools and how user communities are emerging to design and rapidly create real world items using these tools.  You can check out Motorola’s rapid prototyping process to see one way this is being done.

 

Techcrunch has an article that goes into more detail  “Forget Crowd-Sourced T-shirts: Print Objects In 3D”. They cover this emerging user generated content very well.

 

Some of the companies in this emerging trend are:

http://www.shapeways.com/login

Netherlands-based Shapeways is a community for consumers where they can “print” 3D objects n plastic or metal and share the items.

 

http://www.ponoko.com/

Ponoko is a marketplace for product plans. Creators and consumers use these plans to share, buy, sell and make individualized goods.

 

 

http://www.emachineshop.com/

Where you can create real metal and plastic objects in a virtual machine shop!

 

It would seem that Transreality is now here and that the wave is just now forming for the newest user communities based on a producing real products from virtual 3-D designs.

Another part that makes this possible is that information is being shared around the world. For example material from a MIT course “Toy Product Design” is now available to anyone. Not only the 3-D tools are getting better, information on how to design is improving and readily available. The barriers to entry are coming down rapidly. Transreality is now can take place almost anywhere in the world. I have already watched 3-D design community’s form in Second Life. I am now watching new 3-D collaboration communities emerge around lines of products like jewelry. The world of user-generated content is just beginning in the 3-D world. The creation of both virtual products and real world products has just begun.

Links to Inoneweekend blog and Lifespoke

I was ask where other information about Inoneweekend was available.

Here is the link to the Inoneweekend blog.

Here is the link to the company that the July 11th Inoneweekend event formed www.lifespoke.com .

Check out start-up-junkies

For those who need more of a startup fix you may find start-up-junkies interesting. You have view it for free on HULU.

Did you toss an egg instead of a bird?

This is the last of my planned blogs about Inoneweekend. Some people asked if this event was successful. Due to the nature of some of my postings they could not tell. So to set the record straight, in my opinion it was successful on many different levels. This blog is about one of those successes I wish to share with the people I write my blog for. There is a saying about ideas failing because they were not developed enough before they were tried. The saying goes, “you tossed and egg because you did not allow time to for the chick to hatch and grow enough to fly”. I have watched what happened on several of the efforts to create an Internet startup in a weekend. There seems to be a rush to announce the company and the details as soon as the weekend is over if not during the weekend.  When you look at the sites posted you generally do not see things like trade marks, copyrights, and other forms of intellectual property protection.  Lifespoke.com was not released until the Friday following the event. The website had both trade marks and copyrights. Articles and blogs about the company talked about patents and other non-disclosed intellectual property protection. It makes one wonder if these other efforts lost important assets in their rush to announce to the world what they accomplished. In the corporate world there is little forgiveness for ideas that are floated to early. With the Internet, there seems to be a rush to get something into BETA as quickly as possible. Taking the time to identify critical intellectual property and protecting it seems to be critical to a startup of any kind. After all, many times success depends on the intellectual property that a startup has. It leads back to my first question of “did you toss an egg instead of a bird”. Something to think about when you are planning a startup.

What a great dad.

One the most impressive things I observed during Inoneweekend, was a father who brought his college age son with him. Roy Gilbert, Global Director of Global Consumer Operations at Google, pointed out the importance of obtaining experience during his talk Friday. The most important asset an executive has is the knowledge; talents, etc. gain through challenging ones self. Unfortunately, it can be a catch 22 situation when it comes to getting an opportunity to challenge ones self. Many times you are required to have experience in order to gain the opportunity to challenge yourself. Without the experience you will not be given the opportunity. In business this is understandable because you hire someone who can fill the requirements of a job. You may not be able to take the risk of hiring someone who may be able to do the job.  Events like Inoneweekend, Toastmasters, etc. provide safe ways to obtain experience and expand ones abilities. With toastmasters you can vastly improve your ability to effectively communicate, a very important function in business. With Inoneweekend I found people expanding their understanding of what a startup business is all about.

The other reason I was impressed by the father who brought is son was the mentoring he was providing him. I have worked for major companies most of my adult life. When a job is posted I find generally two types of people applying for the job. The first is someone who has experience doing the job. The second are the ones who believe they can do the job but have little or no real experience. However, there is another important group one never sees. These are the ones who really could do the job but because they lack direct experience will never apply for it. I see these people working at the same job year after year as new people enter the company and are rapidly promoted. The companies need the jobs they are doing performed so no one ever notices the terrible waste of talent. These are the ones who believe that if they just do their jobs will they will be given opportunities for promotion. Unfortunately for them, that is not how the world works. The manager who is hiring may have several people to choose from and will likely pick the person who has some type of experience that proves they can do the job.

This is where mentoring and events like Inoneweekend can become very important. I have seen a few, and I do mean few, companies truly develop talent. They seek events such as Inoneweekend, charitable events, Toastmaster, etc. to use as a means to develop their talent. Such a systematic method, that recognizes and takes advantage of opportunities for development, provide those few companies major advantages. Instead of building a management team of just commanding personalities, they have facilitators, social, and the rare techno in management roles. They do not have to depend on people believing in themselves. The can show people to believe in the talents they have by helping them find safe opportunities to develop those talents. In the year 2008 I know this can be done because I am seeing this take place in an area most people would not believe. There are multi-player on-line games where people who did not think they could do things are finding themselves doing amazing things. I am not talking about killing monster. I am talking about 45 year old house wife’s who are becoming guild masters. Organizing and forming working communities with every bit as much skill a middle level manager in a Fortune 500.  If you really follow some of the social networks that are forming you will see incredible talent being demonstrated from the most unlikely people. All these people needed was an opportunity. Many times they did not seek the opportunity; it was thrust upon them due to circumstance.

It cost just one hundred dollars to take part in Inoneweekend. When you compare that to the average of eighty five dollars for a single PDU credit in most business training, the cost is cheap. The father who brought his son was able to give his son some great experience. He was also able to share a great experience with him. Hopefully, I will be able to do the same next year when my son starts college.

It was a lessons learned moment.

 

DAVID HOLTHAUS had an interesting observation in an article he wrote about the Inoneweekend event July 12^th. “There was dissension: As the group prepared to vote on the company name, one member disputed the voting method. After an admonition to offer solutions rather than problems, the vote took place as planned.”I remember this event very well. It concerned the process used to vote on items. Each idea was written on a separate piece of paper. All of the papers were taped to the wall resulting in a series of papers along one wall. We were given colored sticky notes and were to place our sticky note on the paper that contained the item we liked best.  A pretty simple process, to obtain quick results. It was noted by one person that the first time this process was used it resulted in some people waiting to see how the voting went before they used their vote. It was a correct observation; in fact I wanted to wait for the crowd to clear some myself. When I finally got up to the wall I really did not focus much on items that have not received any votes. Much of my focus was on the items that had the highest votes. In fact my votes went to the three items that had received the most votes at the time I was at the wall.

When the vote for the company name came up one person made this observation. Was it dissension or was it a lessons learn moment. First, the person who made the observation made a statement based on fact. Secondly, it concerned the process that was being used. Because time was critical only something that was important and urgent could really justify changing the process that had been selected to be used for voting during the weekend. The process being used to vote was good enough to meet current needs so the observation was not urgent. There was not enough time to examine the current process so the observation was not important to the success of the weekend event. So was admonition to offer solutions rather than problems needed. Or was it rather a case where the group as a whole needed to focus on the execution of the task and the examination of the task itself really needed to take place at a later date when time could be devoted to truly understanding the observation? There is a concept in project management call lessons learned. It is all about taking factual observations throughout the life of a project. Some observations will be acted upon immediately. Many others will simply be documented for after the project when the processes used to accomplish the project can be examined and improved for the next project.

There is an old saying “When you are up to your ass in alligators, who has time to drain the swamp”. It is not uncommon when one is in the execution stage of an event to focus on just the issues that are relevant to the execution. However, if the event is going to be a repeatable event, then it might be a good idea to collect information that could allow you to DRAIN the swam the next time. This is where collecting lessons learned becomes so very important. After all one definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results. The opposite of this is an iterative process where learning takes place and is acted upon before the next iteration.

So I never saw dissension. I saw a person make an astute observation that should have been saved as a lesson learned so it could be examined at a later point in time. Such treatment encourages people to come forward with their insights and observations. While at the same time, allowing the focus to remain on the execution of the task at hand. 

So that is why my idea had to die !

Why my idea needed to die!

As I go over Inoneweekend I continue to examine what I have learned and what I believe there is for me to learn from this event. If you have read “about this blog”, then you know that this blog is for some special people I know. So today I examine MY understanding of why my idea that I put forward for the Inoneweekend event had to die. First, what was the purpose of Inoneweekend? From the Inoneweekend site: “One hundred people gather to create a start-up venture from scratch in one weekend”. The final result that had to be achieved was a start-up venture. This was to be accomplished using the collective experiences, knowledge, and talents of 100 people who were willing to pay money and give up their valuable time to make this happen.

To make such a venture work you have to get 100 people, who are likely to be type “A” personalities, working together effectively. To state it more simply, you have to have them all pulling together in the desired direction. There are many ways to accomplish this and the method as I see it that was used was to create a concept that encompassed the shared experiences of the people who attended.  According to the Heritage Dictionary one can define a concept as: A general idea derived or inferred from specific instances or occurrences. This “general idea” is key to remember, for it does not depend on a specific idea. As I observed Friday night it depended on recognizing a pattern emerging from a collection of specific ideas. This pattern provided the basis for the concept that would later evolve into Lifespoke.

So why did my idea have to die? The heritage Dictionary defines an Idea as: Something, such as a thought or conception, that potentially or actually exists in the mind as a product of mental activity. My idea existed in my mind based on my knowledge and experience. When we broke into small groups I had to get something that existed in my mind alone into the minds of six other people. These other people did not have my knowledge and experiences. I had only words and body language with which to make my idea exist in their minds.  If I could not get my idea to exist in their minds then how could this small group create a shared understanding?  The ideas that did emerge were ones that members of my group could make exist in their minds based on common knowledge and experiences. Of the ten groups working on ideas, around 60 ideas survived the groups to be put before the total body assembled. We could only use one concept this weekend. We all had to be pulling in the same direction when we left Friday night. So, we were each given three votes and the process of selecting the top three ideas was started. However, we were really not selecting the top three ideas. For what happened was that as the ideas were examined during the voting it was discovered that several ideas shared common elements. These were put together as the voting progressed. Two of these groupings consisted of many ideas. The two largest groupings became the foundations for two concepts. The final concept was based on the winning grouping of ideas. The concept became a general idea consisting of several of the key components of the individual ideas.

Why was this important? The small groups selected ideas that enough of the people in that group could get their minds around to support. The voting process and merging of similar ideas created a concept that the majority of people could get their minds around. This made getting everyone to support the final concept easier. It also allowed harnessing the collective knowledge, wisdom, and experience of the people assembled to take the concept and grow it throughout the weekend into a start-up company.  Was my idea bad? It was like my grandma growing a peanut plant in Alaska. It required great effort and care to grow a single peanut plant in Homer, Alaska. The environment is not the kind where a peanut plant can flourish. It had to be grown indoors, receive special lighting, and heat. However, Grandma grew some of the best rhubarb I have ever seen. This was because all the conditions in Homer, Alaska were right for rhubarb to flourish. It was the rhubarb crop that made money each summer. The poor little peanut plant only every produce a couple of peanuts. Are peanuts a bad crop? In the right conditions peanuts are a very important crop. What happened Friday was like selecting the seeds that will grow in the environment you have to work with. My idea could not flourish in the environment available. So that is why my idea had to die.

Was Inoneweekend just another weekend coding event?

I have Blogged about Inoneweekend this week. Part of this was an effort to look at a small area the Information Technology side that I was interested in and to put forward some views that I personally believe about software development and project management. It may have given the impression that this was just a bunch of computer geeks gathered together to hack some code in a weekend. This was very much not the case. What Inoneweekend in Cincinnati July 11^th was in reality, a hundred very talented and motivated people working to produce ONE viable company? After July 16^th there are likely to be much written about this event. As you read about it I would like to give you some websites to visit. Inoneweekend will likely be compared to weekend coding efforts or to coding competitions.

I would like to first direct you to “Building Web Apps Really Fast: Why Developers are Drawn to Weekend Code-a-thons“.

This article does a good job of explaining weekend coding efforts such as

Blitzweekend, startupweekend, railsrumble, barcamp, hackday, superhappydevhouse, ventureweekend, and weekendaps to name a few.

 

 

I would also suggest you checkout the King of all coding competitions  TopCoder

 

As you compare the above to Inoneweekend you will likely find, as I did, that all aspects of what it takes to make a startup company work was involved in this effort. Designing and Coding software was just one functional area that some of these talented people worked on. So if you hear this event being described as just another weekend coding effort, take the time to visit some of these sites and really compare Inoneweekend to some of these other efforts. I know I found it to be a unique experience.

 

Was Inoneweekend about herding PIGS?

As I attended the Inoneweekend I tried to understand what software development style would work for such extreme software development. The closest I could find was Scrum Scrum can best be described by a joke about a pig and a chicken.

A pig and a chicken are walking down a road. The chicken looks at the pig and says, “Hey, why don’t we open a restaurant?” The pig looks back at the chicken and says, “Good idea, what do you want to call it?” The chicken thinks about it and says, “Why don’t we call it ‘Ham and Eggs’?” “I don’t think so,” says the pig, “I’d be committed but you’d only be involved.”

So the pigs are committed to building software regularly and frequently, while everyone else is a chicken: interested in the project but really irrelevant because if it fails they’re not a pig, which is they weren’t the ones that committed to doing it. The needs, desires, ideas and influences of the chicken roles are taken into account, but not in any way letting it affect or distort or get in the way of the actual Scrum project.

Pigs

Product Owner – represents the voice of the customer.

ScrumMaster – whose primary job is to remove impediments to the ability of the team to deliver the sprint goal?

Scrum Team – has the responsibility to deliver the product.

 

Chickens

Users – for whom the software will be used.

Stakeholders – people that will enable the project, but are not directly involved in the process.

Managers – who will set up the environment for the product development organization?

 

Because there were so many unknowns to start even SCRUM may not be enough.

The KEY concept of SCRUM, which is basically giving the PIGS work and leaving them alone to get the work done, had to be maintained. However, you had to setup a system to FEED the PIGS. There had to be three sides.

1.      The business side determines what work to do. They create the requirements, define process flows, etc.

2.      The architecture side determines how the work could be done. They have to make sure that everything is in place so the PIGS can produce work.

3.      The PIGS doing the work and need to be left alone to do the work.

 

In a 72-hour event like Inoneweekend the business side and architecture side had to both work together to FEED the PIGS. If the two did not communicate effectively then it was likely that the PIGS would pay the price. For example if the Fact model own by the business side did not match the data model owned by the architecture side, the business may want information like a customer’s age stored but the database may not have age setup on the database. Such issues will only slow down the SCRUM team.

What makes it interesting is that things are moving so fast that one can’t really say here is a unit of work for the PIGS to do that they will complete in a two-week time frame. What is really happening is a scramble to put together a logical unit of work that can be performed by the PIGS while making sure the tools are in place for the PIGS to do the unit of work. To add to the insanity you have to create groups of PIGS each working on producing a different unit of work. This is only possible by properly defining tasks. 

A key to defining the tasks is to define the interdependence between any two-project tasks with respect to problem solving based on the probability that efforts to perform one of the tasks to specification will require related problem solving in the other tasks.

The greater the interdependence of tasks the PIGS are working on the greater the chances are the PIG teams will be getting in each others way or the product produce by a group of PIGS will have to be reworked. This is really an old concept.
In 1973 Herbert Simon made an argument with respect to “decision making”

Tasks as follows:

“The division of labor is quite as important in organizing decision making

as in organizing production, but what is being divided is different in

the two cases. From the information-processing point of view, division of

labor means factoring the total system of decisions that need to be made into

relatively independent subsystems, each one of which can be designed with

only minimal concern for its interactions with the others. The division is

necessary because the processors that are available to organizations,

whether humans or computers, are very limited in their processing capacity

in comparison with the magnitude of the decision problems that

organizations face. The number of alternatives that can be considered, the

intricacy of the chains of consequences that can be traced — all these are

severely restricted by the limited capacities of the available processors.”

 

The greater the communication and coordination required among problem-solvers the greater the complexity and amount of time that will have to be devoted to problem solving. The key in a 72-hour project is to properly partition the tasks as to reduce the total amount of communication and coordination required to a minimum. Interdependencies have to be identified and eliminated when possible.

A good work on this was written by Eric von Hippel, Task Partitioning:An Innovation Process Variable (Published in Research Policy (1990) 19, 407-418.)

 

So even if all of this works properly you still need a PIG herder. With several PIG teams working at the same time there needs to be a PIG herder who’s job is to work with the SCUMmasters to handle any communication and coordination issues. The herder has to make sure the PIG teams are moving in the right direction and not fighting each other. If the Herder and Scrummasters are doing their jobs then the teams of PIGS can concentrate on delivering product.

What make the job more interesting is that for every task that can impact other tasks based on dependencies there is a risk of the impact happening that can be assigned a value of probability. This probability is based on the rate or likelihood of change, the complexity of the task, and the level of unknowns or assumptions related to the task. With these variables taken into account the potential impact to the PIGS deliverables can be determined with some degree of confidence and risk management plans can be created to deal with them. With only 72 hours available much of this is going to seat of the pants flying with a lot of assumptions being made. Anything that can be done to properly organize the tasks is going to be of benefit.

Inoneweekend = tons of Planning and Preparation

When you are going to create an Internet startup in 72 hours, it really is a come as you are party. I do not mean that there are not resources that you can’t bring into the party. I mean you can’t depend on being able to get those resources at the time you need them if you do not bring them to the party. When I was a young man, decades ago, we had IT wizards who did their IT magic which no one on the business side understood. These IT wizards had extreme confidence in themselves. They could work through any problem and fix any issue as it arrived. I survived a number of death march projects working with these wizards in my youth. (for those of you who do not know what a death march project is, it is a project that is doomed to failure that you must stay with till the failure is complete) Those scars are what led me to discover the world of project management. Even more importantly they showed me the value of preplanning and developing processes for the thing I was going to do.

So what does this have to do with an Internet startup in 72 hours, everything! Inoneweekend was not an event where we just showed up and decided what to do. The people behind the event planned it out. They developed a process that they felt would result in an Internet startup. During this event it became very clear to me that if a group is really going to produce anything of value, from a proof of concept to a beta release, then there has to be work done before the event. What amazed me is the amount of work that can be done before an event such as this. Think of it as getting a group of great chiefs together to cook up some new dishes for a restraint they will open. To really do it right they need a working kitchen with all the pots, pan, and other equipment they will need to work with. But the kitchen alone is not enough. They also need ingredients to create their masterpieces with. Because they do not know what they will actually create, they need to have what they may need readily at hand or they have to have sources identified from which they can be speedily obtained.

Well the same applies to creating an Internet startup. There are areas where preplanning will potentially payoff. For example, if resources are tight or non-existent then it is highly likely that open-source or low cost software solutions will need to be used on the software side. On the hardware side it is equally likely that either someone is going to be asked to donate server space or a hosted solution is going to be used. This line of thinking can be extended down to the smallest of details such as images that you may need for test data. What if you need to use public domain or non-copyrighted images? You can easily produce a collection of audio, video, and picture images that can be used without having to worry about copyright laws before the 72 hour event. Think of the advantage of having this data on a server with easy access as you need data to test with or an image to quickly prove a concept. Instead of spending your valuable time trying to create the ability to create, you can use your time creating what is important. Life is full of events that require a lot of planning and work compared to the time actually spent for the event itself. Inoneweekend was one such event.