This struck me reading Adam Bosworth’s essay ICSOC2004 Talk in The Best Software Writing I :

those systems which best take into account the complex, frail, brilliance of human nature and build in flexibility, checks and balances, and tolerance tend to survive beyond all hopes.

So it goes with software. That software which is flexible, simple, sloppy, tolerant, and altogether forgiving of human foibles and weaknesses turns out to be actually the most steel cored, able to survive and grow while that software which is demanding, abstract, rich but systematized, turns out to collapse in on itself in a slow and grim implosion.

So it also goes for product development and even systems development that supports internal company operations.

This struck me, I guess, because our my (I should speak for myself here) natural tendency is to try to put tight controls around the external world. But the world doesn’t respond well to that—actually, it checks out, unless it has no other choice (like using an ERP system mandated by corporate headquarters).

So instead of controls, we should be thinking of checks and balances and a way to encourage folks to do the great job that they really want to do in the first place.

Command and control or guidance based on communication?

Definitely recommend Joel Spolsky’s The Best Software Writing I

Picked it up today during lunch at the neighborhood Barnes & Noble; really enjoying it tonight.

Joel and the joelonsoftware readers have done a great job picking well-written, iconoclastic, thought-provoking, entertaining and inspirational pieces.

Here are links to all the essays to get a sense of it, or to burn up all the toner in your printer.

But there’s a distinct tactile, physical pleasure to reading the book, sitting on my couch, drink in hand.

Currently, consumers discover vendors that fit their needs.

Dave Winer and Doc Searls are making the case that the discovery should be happening in the opposite direction.

Dave talks about allowing people to express their desires more easily:

People like me who were in Billings last month and last year and the year before, or who might be here right now, maybe even in the same hotel. Maybe I’ve been here before and did these searches and found a perfect place and now would like to find another….

So, how? I think the answer is to put the tools for constructing data formats into the hands of users. We’ve been going about it all wrong, coming up with straight-jackets for users, and expecting them to conform to some set of rules that make no sense about how the characters should be encoded, when it’s ideas and relationships to other ideas that we want to make it easy for them to express.

And Doc Searls says it more succintly:

As a customer, I want to present myself to a marketplace and have providers there compete for my business.

Of course, put this way, it’s a problem that has had application-specific offerings for years now. Can anyone say LendingTree ?

But a broader, more general set of descriptors with vendors doing the searching/matching/quoting is compelling.

I’m not sure if Dave’s prescription is right; like Steve Gillmore, I don’t quite get what he’s doing with OPML yet. As annoying and self-righteous as I find Dave’s public persona (don’t know him except from his blog posts, podcasts and the occassional video), this deserves more exploration.

I immediately go to a social application driven by tags ‘cause that’s the hammer of the moment. Like any other social-app solution, it has to be useful to individuals out of the box to overcome the scale problem and reach the critical mass that it needs to attract vendors. To help clarify the desireability of the transaction (for either vendor or customer), a reliable reputation engine would be critical.

Whatever the implementation, this is definitely ripe, fertile territory for exploration.