A few months ago, I did a short interview for the Engadget Show on the state of real-time bus information here in NYC.  The interview was for a video segment which led into a live interview with the reporter I worked with, Rick Karr.  The whole episode is now available online.  Before our section is an interview with Nicholas Negroponte, talking about OLPC and visions for the future.

35 min into the show is our part.  We’re standing right outside of Penn Station, checking out the real-time bus information that’s available now on 34th Street via dynamic signage.  We talk a bit about the current state of real-time on NYC buses and the challenges that the MTA has faced getting real-time implemented thus far.  In the live interview, Rick mentioned some of the work we’ve been doing at The Open Planning Project, including the iPhone-based OpenBusTracker experiment we did last summer, and our general belief that real-time can be implemented for less than you’d expect using commodity hardware and open source software.

Of course, it’s tough to watch yourself on video, and it’s even tougher to hear your own edited answers.  Note to self: work on snappier soundbites!  But it was really fun doing the interview, and great to get the real-time transit discussion out there to a wider audience.

I had a great crowdsourcing experience yesterday.

Here at TOPP Labs, we’re doing a 6-month check-in on our annual employee reviews.  What that means for me is a 30-minute interview with each of the folks on my team (about 20 in total), where we look back on the past six months to see how we’re doing re: professional goals outlined in the annual reviews.  So, today and Monday, I’ll be having 20 30-minute meetings, each followed by 15-minutes of write-up time by me.  That’s kind of a lot to schedule.

Here’s how it went down:

1) First, I cleared my schedule for today and Monday.

2) “Hmm, I guess I need to ping each person to see when they can meet up.  Ugh.  Time to procrastinate.”

3) “Since I’m out of the office today, it will be super annoying to email every single person from my phone.  I’ll just write one email to the team list and have each person email me back times that work for them.  Nice.  Offloading the work.”

4) “Wait!  Even better, I’ll just ask everyone to add their own appointments to the team Google Calendar.  Now we’re talking.”

So in the end, I just had everyone schedule their own meetings on a first come, first served basis.  Kind of empowering to just let other people schedule two whole days for me.  Plus, the communication overhead went from a lot to zero.  Yay for crowdsourcing.

• Massive funding from a visionary with a dream (in OSAF’s case, Mitch Kapor, in TOPP’s, Mark Gorton), where that dream may not always be perfectly articulated;
• Rapid staffing around an open source project attempting to satisfy that dream (OSAF’s Chandler to TOPP’s OpenCore /  OpenPlans CoActivate);
• Due to both of the above, a propensity to expand scope and broaden the potential market(s).

Since Dreaming in Code (the book chronicling the story of Chandler and OSAF) was published in 2007, Kapor has stepped away from the project and pulled his funding.  Through 2008, OSAF operated under his funding, but with a scaled down staff (10 down from ~25).  Long story short, the project failed to get enough traction and was just too expensive. There has been lots of commentary about why this happened, so I’m not really attempting to describe anything new here.

For my own understanding, though, I want to jot down the takeways that seem most relevant to my work at TOPP.  Here’s what it seems that OSAF couldn’t do, and what I’m hoping to do at TOPP Labs:

Choose one market to start with, and satisfy it fully. In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore describes a (high tech) market as the following:

• a set of actual or potential customers
• for a given set of products or services
• who have a common set of needs or wants, and
• who reference each other when making a buying decision

According to Moore, it’s the last one that tends to hang people up — it’s not a market unless the members reference each other.  In other words, you need to focus.  In his “beachhead” (aka D-Day) strategy, he advises putting your full effort into your initial market segment, generalization be damned, and satisfying other users with what’s left over.

If there aren’t any real constraints, create some. If embrace change was the mantra of the XP movement, and embrace constraints is the mantra for web 2.0 startups, then perhaps introduce constraints to create change should be the mantra for over-funded tech non-profits.  Some constraints that are particularly relevant in this case are:  target market (see above), team size, project scope and timelines, and if all else fails, funding.  Granted, it is difficult (but not impossible, IMO) to introduce other constraints when funding is plentiful and reliable.

Don’t get too academic, OR, let the market drive your decisionmaking. This is perhaps just an extension of “constraints”, above, but I think it’s worth mentioning separately.  Looking at the way Things (team of 2 devs) and OmniFocus (experienced sofware entrepreneurs) ate Chandler’s lunch, it’s clear that there was a failure in the product development process.  While the Chandler team was debating database infrastructures and making endless product spec notes in their wiki, Things brought a simple, usable product to 1.0 in just over a year.  They didn’t have the luxury of lengthy debates; they needed to get something out there, get people using it, and get feedback.  Since their 1.0 release in January 2009, they’ve steadily released relevant updates based on real feedback.

Can you be market-based and constrained in an open source environment?  I think so; it just required leadership and understanding of these factors.   It could be argued that Chandler wasn’t able to implement these kinds of changes because of its open source nature and collaborative process, but I believe that it’s possible (and this has been clearly demonstrated) to maintain market focus and constraints in an open source project.

So, now that we’ve got that straightened out, it should be smooth sailing, right?