Transparency Wins
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Transparency is a powerful means of making change. Open source increases the speed of software development and leads to higher quality code. These patterns of how we make software are changing how we do business and how our governments work. These aren’t just patterns of how we write code; these are patterns of how we interact with each other, teach and learn new skills, and experiment with new ideas. When we make our work visible, we expand its potential, and increase the chances of dramatic, unexpected impact. Ruby Conf Taiwan, Sept 12, 2015
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Transparency Wins
- 9. Community
- 11. Using mobile phones in Haiti after the earthquake
- 20. Toledano
- 22. Community
- 27. Donald Cooper, Kalpathi Krishman, Grace Hopper, N
- 28. Moving the Needle: How SF Ruby got to 18% — Sarah Mei
- 32. –the Starfish and the Spider “The Nant’an led by example and held no coercive power. Tribe members followed the Nant’an because they wanted to, not because they had to”
- 34. – Jo Freeman the Tyranny of Structurelessness “ there is no such thing as a structureless group”
- 37. I Pull Requests
- 39. Tyranny of the Pull Request
- 40. Transparency is the antidote to false meritocracy.
- 44. Business
- 45. Lean Startup
- 46. – Steve Blank “A startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.”
- 47. Transparency increases the speed of learning.
- 48. Learning Faster Make Better Decisions
- 52. Social Mission Almost 50% of the world’s languages are endangered. One goes extinct every 2-3 weeks A global, crowdsourced living language community can make documenting an endangered language easy and accessible to all.
- 58. Web site traffic is like unit tests
- 64. Experiment with Paper iterate on paper till it works “play test” your app prepare for the unexpected give yourself space to imagine new things
- 68. Learning 2.0 Student Guided Multiple Voices Social
- 72. The Play Test is a Game
- 73. Rules for Play Testing “Shut up and Watch” Cooperation and Engagement: What can board games teach us? by Matt Leacock
- 74. Rules for Play Testing “Shut up and Watch” Take Notes Take Photos Resist providing answers. Ask questions.
- 80. Code
- 86. Open source reveals the work in progress,
- 88. Open source reveals the work in progress, and allows for unexpected collaboration.
- 93. Imagine the Epic Win Identify Small Steps Make your Process Visible Collaborate with your Customers Create Opportunity for Participation
- 94. Imagine the Epic Win Identify Small Steps Make your Process Visible Collaborate with your Customers Create Opportunity for Participation @ultrasaurus #rubyconftw
Editor's Notes
- Often these days, when we make things… Watch Gears: Golden, KellarW https://www.flickr.com/photos/kellarwilson/15876712023/
- we share our work in process ralphbijker, motion gears -team force https://www.flickr.com/photos/17258892@N05/2588347668
- even very early sketches and ideas, we post publicly on the internet Svilen Milev http://www.freepik.com/index.php?goto=41&idd=42515
- We live in a time of Unprecedented Transparency — with open data, open source, lean startup and the rise of social networks and online platforms that allow for communication and visibility
- can be used to create accountability (and that can be very important, especially for governments and non-profits, but can also increase trust in for-profit companies)
- transparency increases participation whether we’re engaging with people in real life..
- or displaying our test results for all to see
- Transparency increases participation in coding through open source, in Business with Lean Startup techniques Open Source Community Code Documentation Lean Startup Business Development Customer Collaboration
- what these have in common is the creation of community
- I believe that open source is the path to enlightenment in Ruby especially, we believe that programmer happiness is a worthwhile pursuit That the coding itself can be joyful, regardless of the outcome Enlightenment, Harpagornis ~back~ https://www.flickr.com/photos/14886702@N05/2073812640/
- The focus of my talk today is about when we create software where the goal is to make it useful for other people… when our software empowers people after it is released into the world UK: Department for International Development (DFID) Using mobile phones in Haiti after the earthquake https://www.flickr.com/photos/14214150@N02/7561270846/
- how to use transparency in order to increase participation, how and why to involve people in making the change we want to see in the world, we can’t just make things for them, we must make things with them
- Let’s do something fun to get you all participating.
- to create higher quality work at lower cost
- If you illustrate your vision and the path you think to follow to get there, people can join you on that path. I think the gaming world does this well… Upper River during Qing Ming Festival, National Palace Museum in Taipei.
- In this game of StarCraft (Boxer vs. Yellow), Boxer maneuvers his marines and keeps them from being hit while taking out his opponent's units. In this small skirmish, Boxer displays amazing micro skills, but even novice players often win in these situations, giving them more confidence to pursue bigger goals. and in StarCraft you aren’t just fighting battles with random aliens…
- … you are fighting for control of the galaxy… in a more advanced game, you can see that both sides have built up very large armies. Boxer wins and his opponent has left the game. In this screenshot from another game of Boxer vs. Yellow in 2009, Boxer is on the right using the army that looks like machines, whereas Yellow is on the left using the army that looks like organic bug aliens; Yellow's base is now under attack by Boxer's tanks.
- and Blizzard does a fabulous job of inspiring people to pursue an EPIC WIN
- Toledano’s photo portraits of gamers show intense emotions… Jane McGonigal describes “the EPIC Win” as an extraordinary outcome that you didn’t believe was even possible until you achieved it — almost beyond your threshold of imagination, something that teaches you what you’re truly capable of. “Gamers always believe that an epic win is possible, and that it’s always worth trying, and trying now.” “Gaming can make a better world”
- Building an Open Community with Transparent Processes First RailsBridge Workshop
- Over 6 years ago, I co-founded RailsBridge with Sarah Mei…
- We held our first workshop in June 2009 — there was such a long waitlist that we expanded it to have 8 teachers, and with the help of dozens of volunteers, we accepted over 80 students. The success of RailsBrige in the Ruby community in San Francisco was in large part due to the help we had from the community — companies offered space and sponsored food, everyone with skills offered to teach. RailsBridge is a great example of open source process, not just open source documentation + code
- Our main focus was been to address the widening gender gap in technology. This chart shows the gap in women Computer Science graduates, and we see similar patterns in the commercial software industry. However in open source, the gap is much wider with only 2-3% of contributors who are women.
- but we know that the first programmers were women. In the early days, at least in the United States, the field of software development was created by women
- Our Epic Win is to create a time in the future where people work together regardless of gender or ethnicity in numbers equivalent to their representation in society. SI Neg. 83-14878. Grace Murray Hopper at the UNIVAC keyboard, c. 1960. Grace Brewster Murray: American mathematician and rear admiral in the U.S. Navy who was a pioneer in developing computer technology, helping to devise UNIVAC I. the first commercial electronic computer, and naval applications for COBOL (common-business-oriented language). Credit: Smithsonian Institution
- We demonstrated results at a small scale that caused people to believe our Epic Win was possible, and that individuals taking the small step of teaching weekend workshops could make it happen. We wanted to structure an organization that would support this enthusiasm, our goal was to let nothing get in the way of someone creating a workshop. http://www.slideshare.net/sarahmei/moving-the-needle-how-sf-ruby-got-to-18
- I was very influenced by this book: the Starfish and the Spider, which has the tagline: the unstoppable power of leaderless organizations. I wanted this movement to be unstoppable. The metaphor of the book’s title: the Starfish and the Spider…
- is that if you have a spider, and you chop off it’s head, it dies… Image: Spider in my bath, Martin Cooper https://www.flickr.com/photos/m-a-r-t-i-n/17369640456/
- but with some starfish, you cut them in half and you get two starfish. Image: Chelsea Marie Hicks https://www.flickr.com/photos/seafaringwoman/6954822623
- The book has dozens of stories of these kinds of resilient organizations. The most inspiring for me was about the Apache native American tradition. Instead of a chief, the Apaches had a Nant’an—a spiritual and cultural leader. The Nant’an led by example and held no coercive power. Tribe members followed the Nant’an because they wanted to, not because they had to… before the Spanish and English settlers came, the Apaches used to have settlements themselves, but they were consistently attacked and raided… all it took was for one Apache to have the idea to become nomadic and many followed that leader and those Apache survived. This form of leadership made the Apache resilient and survived much longer than most other tribes.
- RailsBridge grew all over the world, this map was made a couple of years ago, now there should be even more dots in about 50 cities… I realized — we were not leaderless we were leader-FULL. Hundreds of individuals were stepping up and taking a leadership role, and we were building this new kind of distributed organization..
- by increasing transparency, we empower new people to get involved we need to make our process visible, make our decision-making visible, make our leaders visible and the way in which new leaders emerge… http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm
- Rachel Myers is one of our spiritual and cultural leaders. In Jan 2014, she put up this repo with the idea that anyone could create an issue for a workshop they wanted to organize and host. Her idea was that the title of the issue would have the workshop location and date, but she didn’t say we should do this. She said “it’s awesome if…” She left space for people to have different ideas or post a workshop that didn’t yet have a date or a location.
- A year and a half later, this has been in active use. The instructions now make clear that anyone can make a workshop (just that it must be free, outreach, code-of-conduct) everything else is open to innovation. You can see that there are 11 open issues, which are 11 workshops which are right now in the planning stage. We also have a pull request…
- a side bar about pull requests. I love pull requests…
- but I need to talk about the dark side of the pull request mechanism. It’s really the dark side of open source. I think it is important to really understand what some call a false meritocracy…
- There’s a power structure implied, which creates a place where hidden biases can emerge. Sometimes people aren’t even aware of their own biases — they just hold different people to different standards. Some pull requests might get merged right away, where others are criticized in more detail or ignored.
- We each have the opportunity and the responsibility to create a different kind of open source society.
- It’s exciting to see that we have been somewhat successful in creating a transparent organization with RailsBridge. We still believe this can be improved, yet…
- when MobileBridge started up last year, they replicated the idea from RailsBridge and made their own organizing repo..
- Switching gears to a different kind of transparency. Transparency in business and product development with Lean Startup techniques of experimentation in public Image: Experiments with Long exposure and lights-015 by Tea, two sugars https://www.flickr.com/photos/mysnapps/2801546472/
- As we openly explore how to find customers, our idea of our target customer and the product evolve in parallel
- In defining your business, transparency increases the speed of learning
- To illustrate this section, I will tell you about my startup Mightyverse Image: Entering startup, Mike https://www.flickr.com/photos/dierken/948171048
- We have a social mission… Almost 50% of the world’s languages are at risk. The people who decide which languages we keep are five and six years old. When we as adults show we value a language, the kids learn it. We believe Mightyverse can help demonstrate the value of language diversity. Our EPIC WIN is to not just to make documenting an endangered language easy and accessible to everyone, but to shift the narrative to one where diverse cultures and languages are valued with an increased awareness that language is shared understanding between people and, as such, is constantly evolving and changing. http://blogs.wsj.com/numbers/how-many-languages-are-endangered-195/
- There are over 6000 languages in the world… the majority of them are spoken by a tiny fraction of the population, and almost 80% of us, speak only 83 languages We have a model where endangered languages will always be free. ..to have the big languages fund the little languages to support the valuable diversity of culture on our planet. http://www.ultrasaurus.com/2009/02/who-cares-if-languages-become-extinct/
- The first version of the Mightyverse website… lean startup approach showed the phrase videos that we had collected but wasn’t really even an MVP (minimally viable product) since there was no way to submit new videos…
- I realized that we weren’t getting search traffic because we had inadvertently created a design which meant that all of our thousands of phrase recordings were effectively hidden from google and other search engines, so we made a small change
- we created a phrase page, so that every recording had a unique URL… so to the search engines our site now appeared to have 26,000 pages.
- now our traffic goes up year over year…
- but web site traffic is like unit tests, — do you ever have that experience of when all of your unit test pass, but your app doesn’t actually work. Of course, you can have web site traffic, a popular site, and still not have a business, it is an effective first step…
- Our next challenge is to create an engaging experience for our customers. I believe the most effective way to do this is by getting people in our target audience to participate in the act of creation. We’re creating a community, the software is just a facilitator of that. This is true of most software we create today… we cannot do this work in isolation.
- I believe that the best way to engage people with a new product is with a paper prototype. It is best because it is fast… I also believe the low-fidelity nature of this kind of prototype makes people more comfortable giving feedback. It accelerates learning…
- Of course, before we create a prototype, there are lots of ways to learn about what our software needs to be. With Mightyverse, we started with the idea that we were building a language learning utility, but we also wanted to make it fun,
- So we studied game design in both old fashioned board games and online gaming… Cooperation and Engagement: What can board games teach us? by Matt Leacock https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdTVcFo2EQw Photo: C Lloyd
- and started our prototype with a game you could actually play with index cards and markers
- paper is a wonderful medium for experimentation… in between experiments when you have real people using your imaginary software, you can just sketch a new part of it… even if you are not making a game, thinking of it as a “play test” helps frame the challenge
- We got our friends to try out our game…sometime in the middle of a game, I would just throw away a card, or make up a new one
- A crowd-funding campaign is a great way to find customers and validate your idea. You basically need to construct an advertisement for your product before it exists. Coming up with that marketing material will often influence your product design. If people will pay for your product in advance, it’s a good indication that they want it. Though our goal with the crowdfunding campaign was to find customers and validate that our model of language learning could be fun, we also made a commitment to produce the paper prototype as a real-world card game. You can now buy it on Amazon.
- So, we’re developing this mobile app… and this design looks lovely, but it doesn’t actually work for real use cases….
- instead we’ve built a few iterations of the simplest possible thing and we’re iterating on it with people using our completely real, and really incomplete app…
- when I look at it, all I can see are the bugs that I know about…
- There’s a Lean Startup saying that an Minimally Viable Product (or MVP as they call it) isn’t a half-baked cake but rather a cup cake…. But they also say, that an MVP is the smallest possible thing you can learn from …and what would I be learning while I fix those bugs? so… I’ve created my own framework…
- One way to look at it is that the play-test itself is a game.
- when they run into a bug, especially one you already knew about, don’t say “oh, that’s a bug” ask “What did you expect to happen?” … you might end up fixing the bug differently
- It’s really hard, at first, to just watch…
- but then you notice something you didn’t expect and it starts to be fun..
- here’s a sequence of photos from the end of that session… I always think it is a good idea to provide cookies to our usability test subjects. Judy decided to record a phrase about the cookie and you can see in the last frame that Ian is looking at the app with this wonderful expression on his face — he is listening to Judy’s phrase. Find those moments of delight that happen when people are using your app… and try to re-create and amplify them in the next software iteration.
- Writing code in the open Image: matrix, Gamaliel Espinoza Macedo https://www.flickr.com/photos/gamikun/2564208746
- Another example, from a more traditional open source project, which is for a product I work on in my day job. The US Federal Government has millions of employees, and like most large organizations, people work in silos and often a little group has a very small budget and doesn’t have the resources — people & skills to act on an innovative idea to solve small, but important porblems. This is an application for crowdsourced talent inside the federal government — it provides a place where people can post “opportunities,” actionable ideas that other people in other departments or agencies might help with, allowing them professional development opportunities and to make connection across this huge organization, the US Federal Government.
- Epic win in three ways — Open Source, which I’ll talk about in more detail, but also the participatory nature of the software itself for its target audience of federal employees, lastly the direct impact of the projects that people do on the platform is huge
- Benefit to open source: no one has to get permission to experiment with midas, particularly important in government Transparency helps people understand what we expect from them and what they can expect from us. We have a google group and publish a calendar of our standup meetings where anyone can join us via Google Hangout, but we found that many of our engineering discussions were happening on Slack and we had to constantly remind each other to re-post on the Google Group.
- We found this open source project “slackin” which let us create a webform that allows anyone to join one of our slack channels. It is exciting to have newcomers drop into slack and be able to chat with us.
- Open from Day 1 We’ve found that public comment early builds allies from your critics. For example, an open source project that started a few years ago was data.gov which had some strong critics at the outset, the team responded and modified some of their approach, and critics were converted to supporters
- revealing your work in progress can be scary.. you make yourself vulnerable
- Learning in the open provides a way for people to see what you are doing and connect with you proactively. Most of the time when I was blogging, no one ever commented and I got no response. Then out of the blue someone would surprise me. What I didn’t think about then is that it is really amazing when new people write beginner blog posts, it’s something that is actually hard for someone who is super-experienced with a specific library or framework. If you are a novice, blog about your experience. It is a huge gift to the community. Also, notice the authors of the blog posts you read, especially if they are new in the community, and pay attention to the authors and follow them on twitter and if you end up at the same conference, introduce yourself, mention something about what they wrote, that small act make a huge difference.