DARnet

Thanks for the plug, I’ll be amazed if this one comes off, but, if you don’t ask…

Where this punt has legs, for me, is this.

Imagine you are a smallish company doing good work and you are about to spend £X on promoting your stuff with some half-arsed advertising campaign. You are probably thinking, “there has to be a better way than paying for ads that nobody wants, few people even see or worse just lining the pockets of Google for visitors who don’t give a toss”.

Well, if you are a progressive, cool, company… why not pay for something you actually need and could use that ends up being genuinely useful for the rest of society.

I’m imagining that the resulting piece of software wouldn’t even need all that crap about attribution because everyone would *know* and love the company that did this. This is true remarkability marketing in a way. (Actually, it doesn’t HAVE to be a wiki-oriented project at all, it just has to be something cool company wants that everyone else can benefit from).

Is that too fanciful? I don’t think so, in a way, there’s nothing to stop this process happening right now.

The only reason it doesn’t happen is …

a. They haven’t realised they need a wiki yet.
b. They don’t see open source software as having huge marketing potential (if done right)
c. They haven’t spotted that the stuff they might benefit from in-house (collaboration tools in general) would be gratefully received by us, the general public)
d. They simply want to spend their all their money on advertising

Lots of this sort of marketing has been (and is being) done, the most famous example I can think of is the Asterisk PBX.

The issue for Cool Company Inc though, is not just getting the product out there, it’s the ballsy commitment required. In order to make this work, you don’t just release it into the wild, you have to keep supporting it and making the changes the userbase wants in order to develop it into the platform that everyone wants to use.

To realise the endgame bang-for-buck, you really do have to divert a lot of resources away from whatever Cool Company’s core business actually is, and that is very hard to justify.

In the end, money spent might be cheaper than time invested.

Is Asterix PBX is famous I’m a dutchman.

As for diverting resources, you wouldn’t be diverting any, Cool Company Inc would be doing it anyway, only perhaps with an eye on making sure their needs were abstracted to a level where everyone else wouldn’t be precluded from benefiting.

As for support, well, to be honest, Cool Company Inc haven’t signed up to support it. And besides Cool Hackers Org who were huge fans of the initial work done by Cool Company Inc end up supporting it anyway.

And “bang for buck” is exactly the sort of thinking which ultimately spoils everything

Well, not to argue with you unecessarily, but I’m a little worried by how you define ‘famous’ if you think Asterisk isn’t. In my opinion, if you ask “what should I use?” and 95% of the industry replies with your product name, that’s famous. I don’t think you can hope to beat Coke in brand recognition or anything.

And “bang for buck” is exactly the sort of thinking which ultimately spoils everything

I know this line was a joke, but it is indicative of why companies don’t give people like you, projects like this. I’m not trying to be cruel and I really do wish you luck, but you can do like the song says and wait for the world to change into an opensource hippy utopia where nobody cares about money anymore, or you can develop a real business case which hinges entirely on the term ‘bang for buck’.

Any coder can tell you that it takes 70% of the project timeline to polish a product for public release. Internally, you can deal with certain inadequacies by controlling the procedure, but for a project to go live, it has to be moron-proofed, and validation and error checking is where most of the code is in any project. A real business case needs to be made for that… and on an ongoing basis, as compared with a marketing spend which only costs money, not time.

Anyway, as I said, I do wish you success. I hope that instead of sitting there getting angry at me, and muttering about how much of an idiot I am, you take a moment to realise that if you can’t adequately address my concerns, you have little hope of pitching this to anyone else.

Good luck.

Famous: The Web, Amazon, Blogs, Stephen Fry, iPhone, Apple, iPod

Not Famous: Hugh Laurie, Wikis, Asterix PBX (as in I would bet that nobody I’ve ever met has heard of it), other stuff I’ve not heard of, such as what a PBX even is.

“People like me”? That’s fighting talk where I come from….

“Any coder can tell you…” . Meaning you you mean?

Anyway, let’s go back to the “Bang for buck” bit. I wasn’t hanging out for a hippy utopia merely pointing out that it’s not a lot of work… and if Cool Company Inc wanted a half-decent wiki building ANYWAY then to release your version into the wild is almost no work at all. In terms of “bang for buck” you couldn’t get much better… all you need (apart from love) is…

* A shell/PHP script to make configuration (of the community, not the technology) simpler
* Making some decisions about interface/layout based on experience (and good old UCD), and PHP improvements, to do with finishing off the FCKEditor integration (which could be given back to the community that did it in the first place), mainly theme changes.
* CSS hacks to make it look nice (more theme work)

So, it’s essentially Theme creation (which can be shared easily) and somework that could be rolled back into the MediaWiki+WYSIWYG disto if done to the right standard…. the “bang” gets even more bangish when you realise that code is getting created out of the marketing budget rather than the IT budget.

To be honest, I didn’t expect anyone to fund this… partly because, as I said, to be a person that recognized…

a. They need a wiki to play with
b. The wiki created could be “set free” and shared
c. There could be some marketing spend in there

…would be pretty progressive and unique (and not need me) …. I was just, in idealistic, hippy way, put some positive intention out into the void and hoping, sharing, thinking out loud.

And as usual, I bump into someone who is happy, pleased even to tell you why your idea can’t be done… funny that.

Thanks for wishing me good luck, I think I’ll need it with all the people like you out there

Hi Tom,

couple o’ questions just to make this more practical (yes, I want a wiki but bets are on a different solution… this week):

- What’s the funding you want like? Can you put a price on it? Payment against milestones or were you thinking of some other option?
- I assume you would be accepting customer input in the development? Your list of functionalities and your idea of what to modify look very well, but any taker will likely want to put their mark.
- You can guarantee the quality level of the code so it can indeed be distributed as an “option” or “version” or mediawiki and not a totally different line? Since Andy’s plugging you, I assume you’re good :-).
- Have you thought about the open-source afterlife? Support for the software? Would you handle it off-budget?

This initiative would be as much of a marketing boon for you as for the company using the result (if they do it well), each in its own arena. You seem to make little of the difficulty (and cost) of turning an empty wiki into a marketing tool worth its salt :-), which is why you will draw flak from a lot of people. The “buck” is serious.

On the other hand, I can attest there’s people willing to pay for such a tool (I’ll be buidling and fostering a wiki as a marketing tool under the sponsorship of a couple of companies). So you’re not that far off the mark.

Looking forward to those details, best regards,

Miguel

Tom, no offence intended. “people like you” simply refers to people who don’t treat the bottom line as being all-important, as it absolutely must be in business.

I love altruism in business, and I think social responsibility is an incredibly important part of running a company, but you don’t get to do any of that stuff if you ignore the bottom line.

Anyway, I understand “building a wiki anyway” but to me there’s a world of difference between cobbling together a tool for their purpose, and polishing something for release.

I really did mean ‘any coder’ though. Releases are tough as a bridge bolt sandwich… As Miguel points out above, and as I’ve said before, clearly the notion has legs, it would just be a little more confidence-inspiring if you conveyed an appreciation for what scares investors.

Again, I wish you luck.

Hmmm.

I’ve definitely heard of Asterisk PBX, and I’d say that it’s pretty famous in the VOIP community.

On the other hand, Asterix PBX IS new to me, perhaps it was used by the Gauls to communicate about how to confound the Romans?