Finishing Phase One

After a hectic month and a much deserved vacation, it's time to finish phase one of the project.  I pushed myself to the limit and delivered the best possible content in my tutorial.  It was tough pulling it together at the end, but with exception of mismanaging the time,  I think I delivered the content I thought my audience needed to hear.

Perhaps to a fault, I focused my entire effort on delivering the best quality content possible.  I wanted to stress that too many open source projects were failing because of a lack of resources, that non-profit status could help projects find those resources, and that the lean startup methodology was a viable path for finding users, developers, and customers.

Some attendees loved it, some hated it.  Which according to Kathy Sierra is where you'd rather be than stuck in the "meeh" zone.  I reached out to one face I remember from the class and I got some frank commentary.  I'm glad I did, because I learned a lot. 

As I had done through out the week, I bounced my ideas off people to see what resonated with them and what didn't.  In the end, each conversation was an iteration that I now need to fold back into the project.  And finally, I am once again blown away by how important market research is in any project.

According to the Lean Startup methodology, I built something, measured it, and now it is time to reflect on what was learned.  The challenge now  is crystallizing the essence of each encounter into improvements (bug reports) and start the next build cycle.

Final Tutorial Slides Are Done

Ready for #oscon, well almost...

Over the weekend, I uploaded the final slide deck for my OSCON tutorial.  For anyone registered for the conference it's available on my "How to Organize and Fund Free Culture Projects" tutorial detail page. I also uploaded it to my SlideShare Profile Page. A link is also available in the side bar section "Top Downloads."

Call for Feedback

If anyone has some free time, I'd love to get some feedback on my slide deck.  I think it's a pretty tight set, but with a few more tough edits, I think the flow and continuity could improve.  All feedback is welcome. Thanks ahead for your cooperation.

As long as we are on the subject of social network metrics, I've got 1,740 views on SlideShare.  We'll have take a peek at that number in a month or so.

Kickstarter Stats - Project Success By Category

Popular crowdfunding site releases project statistics page.

The first thing I did with the new Kickstarter data was to throw it into a spreadsheet and generate some graphs. This graph is an analysis of project success rate by category. It's clear from the graph that some categories are much harder to achieve success in than others. (Click on the image to get a bigger image).

Of keen to most everyone is that technology and publishing are below the average by more than 10% points, each with 28.8% and 31.86.  In simpler terms only 3 out of every 10 technology and publishing projects succeed.  I think it's fascinating that theater and dance have significantly better success rates out of all categories.

Kickstarter Stats

Why (some) Kickstarter campaigns fail.

Is 20% the Magic Number?

Seth Godin recently announced his entrance into the crowdfunding market with a new project "THE ICARUS DECEPTION: WHY MAKE ART?" It's no surprise that the project is already funded at +550%; meaning, the project succeeded in meeting and surpassing their $40,000 project goal. As usual, Seth did his research before launching his 1st project, in a recent post, he suggests that any project reaching the 60% is almost certain to hit 100%. Great job Seth!

According to the Kickstarter Stats Page, I'd say that most projects that fail, only raise between 0 and 20% of their goal; 83% of the failed projects never pass 20%. So I'd say if you can hit 20% of your goal, chances are. your project will be a success.  


I would assume, however, if you did hit 20% that you were executing well on your online marketing plan, extracting the most value possible from social media.  Every Kickstarter failure analysis I've read cites misuse of  social networking, or, to quote Seth, Failure to build a "bigger/louder/more influential tribe."

Collecting, Compiling, & Comparing Foundation Data

"Follow the evidence."

Which foundations raise the most $$$?

I've come to a critical juncture of my class preparation.  One of the things some reviewers expressed interest in seeing was an apples to apples foundation comparison.  So I've already collected the financial data for six popular free culture foundations, now I've got to compile them into a database so I can graph and compare them.

I've seen most of the data when I collected it, but that was only briefly.  I still have to plug everything in and produce the graphs.  I'm certainly hoping the story I saw in the data is confirmed by the data.  I'll borrow Gil Grissom's famous line "Follow the evidence," except in this case it's "Follow the data."

In order for graphs or any type of visual statistical analysis, without the raw data, they are almost meaningless.  Unless I can grab the data and reproduce the graphs myself, it's only a hypothesis.  The evidence, the data,  must agree with the hypothesis.

Banner Bling

What's that? Oh yes, yes it is some new banner bling atop the homepage.

I've added one of the banners O'Reilly provides speakers to help promote their session. Many thanks to the entire conference management team over at O'Reilly.  It really is an honor to work with such a supportive organization.  Together, I think we'll make this year's O'Reilly Open Source Conference, the best ever.  Enjoy!

Call For Participation

I just placed this call to action on the O'Reilly Broadcast Blog: "Call For Participation."

For anyone who has already registered for this year's OSCON, and have selected my tutorial "How to Organize and Fund Free Culture Projects," I cordially invite you to self-identify yourself so we can work together to make the tutorial everything you need it to be.

How to Connect

Dig in on the project's newly completed website, where you'll find out the status of the "How to Organize and Fund Free Culture Projects" tutorial and a multitude of opportunities to become involved. For instance, the first section of the slides are already available over on SlideShare. I'm wrapping up the second section of slides and then I'll be be able to start sharing more of the key graphs from the tutorial. It's going to be pretty active up until July 16.

Don't forget to join the Financing Freedom project to stay abreast of all the latest news.

Top Posts

For the duration of the project, I'll be monitoring closely the top posts, and sharing them on the right side bar.

Sharing a smile

I think it's important to share with the community what they have selected with their views as the top posts. In the fire hose stream of information that passes by our smartphones, tablets, televisions, billboards, and computer screens every day; it's easy to miss something.

Closing the loop and providing metrics to a project helps provide the transparency and a sense of momentum that engenders trust.

Platform Sweet Platform

New social engagement platform is finished.

I think I removed any last references to the old addresses.  So it's official!  Financing Freedom is home on my Web2.0 platform Fanz.ly.  I've got to extend the platform and tie in a few other tools, but most of the heavy lifting is done. It feels good to be home.

Always be Shipping!

Version Three of Financing Freedom

Three

New updated slides are available!

I wrapped up the next version of the first section.  The slides are available on SlideShare.  At this point, I think this is a final draft for section one.  I'm focusing on fleshing out section two, right now. Please feel free to download a copy of the slides for "How to Organize and Fund Free Culture Projects"

I'll be working on the timing of the slides I have so far.  The About Financing Freedom page has a nice breakdown on the tentative agenda. I've broken the tutorial into two sessions (per the O'Reilly guidelines), each session is one hour and thirty minutes long.

To give me some flexibility and to ensure a well-paced class, I've broken each of the sessions into 30 minute blocks.  That will give me two intermediate time targets each where I can adjust for, you know, life.

The KickStarter Bible

During my researching of fundraising, I came across this hidden jewel. From the eBooks web post:

"If you're thinking about crowdfunding anything, it's [The KickStarter Bible] worth a look for its detailed discussion of what to consider from start to finish. It includes a number of interviews with folks who ran successful campaigns but it's also quite useful for its discussion of campaigns that failed."

I won't be able to review this before the final set of slides are due. I've got the basics for now. But if you're ready to go for it, read this free eBook!

Four Crowd-funding Mistakes

Key failure traits from un-funded projects using crowd-funding. From Inc. Magazine,

1. You didn't nail the presentation. 
2. You didn't ask for enough. 
3. You didn't put enough work into working the crowd. 
4. You failed to put your eggs in different baskets.

Again, mastery of marketing using all forms of media is one of the key failure points.  While Internet and Social Media are the easiest and most cost effective, project leaders need to use every medium available.

Test Granularity

An optical illusion. Square A is exactly the same shade of grey as square B. See demonstration. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In testing assumptions, I consider it very tricky determining just how granular I will need data. I could throw every in bit.ly and see what sticks or just focus on the key metrics:
- Sales
- Follows
- Participation.

I think I can manage with just those, but if I can't resolve any assumptions, then that will be the trigger that I need more detailed data.

Setting Open Source History Straight*

This infographic from ubuntuBuzz is an excellent summary of the state of FLOSS:

* that is if like completely ignore the FSF!

How to Fund Your Free Culture Project

Fail! Why Kick-Ass Kickstarters Don’t Get Funded

Killer Conclusion: The beauty of Kickstarter is that it forces a proof of concept before the product hits shelves. Though investors may be crestfallen over a project's failure, just imagine the pain of having sunk thousands of dollars along with the sweat equity of manufacturing, marketing, and fulfillment into a product that was doomed to fail.

Read the Seven P's of KickStarter Marketing at Wired.

FYI: This is an excellent rabbit hole I'd love to follow, but I don't have the time. What are the failure factors for KickStarter projects? Have there been any academic papers written on the topic?

Cycle Time - The Metric for Project Execution

How fast does your team produce new artifacts?  Blog posts, forum messages, check-ins, anything that can be measured?  Whether it is Eric Ries' Build-Measure-Learn, or any of a dozen other approaches, how quickly can you work through each step of your process and ship?

If your'e not moving, you're dying; losing momentum.  If you lose momentum, you are an interruption away from losing all of your momentum.

Head down, keep shipping.  Even when you're checking off just one task off of your infinite list. It is one step closer. It is movement.

Financing Freedom is Moving

Moving...

I'm in the process of migrating this blog to a new domain and hosting site. Soon Financing Freedom will be available from FinancingFreedom.com. I've got some key infrastructure things I need to get done, but it's top priority; Along with 10 other top priority tasks.

Many thanks to Marcos Polanco from ClearShore for the branding suggestion for this project.

Community as a Lean Startup

Developing a community entails a cornucopia of risks; even more so if you hope to unite their individual contributions.  No, for you to iterate through the validation of all of your assumptions, you'll need to carefully mitigate all risk.  The best tool to resolve assumptions is testing.  Some type of metric which aims to confirm or deny a single assumption. 1 by 1.

Lean manufacturing; rapid prototyping, agile software development, lean startups, & so on; they're all the same.  Any complex task involving critical unknowns must evolve (learn how) to replace unknowns with data.  Every test must confirm or deny an assumption. 1 by 1.

The victors spoils go to those who can cycle through their tests most efficiently. Fail fast. Evolve even faster.

Time To Knuckle Down

SourceForge Research Data Archive Producing Highly Relevant Results - About a week ago, I received access to the Open Source Software Research project. The project provides a SourceForge Research Data Archive (SRDA): A Repository of FLOSS Research Data. The project is located in Notre Dame, which is in my home state of Indiana. So it was a real pleasure to work with folks back home. ;-)


I've just completed my first set of data analysis queries, and I've already uncovered some incredible results. The monthly snapshot archive provides a basis to do time comparisons. The delta between time x and y, whether the measure is monthly, quarterly, or annually, the analysis provides accurate data. It does so, because it is built on the delta created by comparing two or more snapshots.

Knuckle down - to position
your hand correctly to
play marbles 

For the most part, all of the supporting research on open source participation is complete. I've got to "knuckle down" and get those results documented and complete the first half of the class.  The second half is less research based, and is derived from my work on Mis Tribus and Guagua Publica, so it should come together quickly.

Nonetheless, the next month and a half are going to be busy. It's going to be great.  Time to go into "deadline" mode!

Initial Mind Maps

OSCON 2011Tutorial Mind Maps for "Financing Freedom":

These were my initial mind maps for the tutorial I proposed last year.  The class was not selected, however.  So this year, I revisited my original proposal and reworded it a little.  With a new focus on leadership in OSCON 2012, the proposal was well received. The rest will develop over the next few months.

Measuring FLOSS using Google Trends

I have to give Stephen O'Grady all the credit; using Google Trends to obtain a barometer reading of the state of FLOSS is brilliant. It's not a perfect barometer, but one of the most accessible. In my research this confirms my general feeling that interest in FLOSS and free culture is losing the mindshare.

In this analysis "The State of Open Source: Startup, Growth, Maturity or Decline?"  Steve used Google Trends with a few popular projects and keyword phrases, and shared the results. Frankly, there is nothing surprising.

There were two main conclusions: (a) mature projects are trending downward; (b) while newly created projects and new markets are growing very quickly.

The Google Trend for Apache shows a clear downward trend. This trend is seen in Linux, open source, MySQL, gpl, and PHP. While the trends are similar they are numerous theories for the why they're going down. Like Steve, I'll stay away from the why, there's an infinite reasons why (or why not).

However, when it came to exploding markets, then FLOSS is clearly the dominant technology. For example, Hadoop is nearly unchallenged by any major software maker. This exploding demand trend is also seen in other emerging markets, including: nosql, linux cloud, & notably, android(*). * There is debate raging just "how much" of Android is FLOSS, but at least the kernel is Linux.

Analysis

In general the state of open source is mixed. Some good, some, not so good.  Is this a credible measure?  Only more time will tell.

One thing Steve's research helped me do, was to recall Google's roots; measuring academic references is what lead Google to search. So maybe there was a another way to measure the statue of open source using search. I recently spent sometime with Google Scholar, and I'm happy to report that it does provide a fairly accurate way to produce another measurement. The number of academic papers about open source by year, since 1998. In addition, using the same technique, I was able to generate the number of academic papers about free software by year since 1985.  We'll jump into those findings in the next post; for now they're in the version 0.2 of the Financing Freedom slides.

Rebranding the Project Financing Freedom

On March 21, I had the pleasure to spend some time with OSCON Chair Sarah Novotny. I think Sarah and I almost immediately reached rapport, and discovered that we share many observations concerning free culture and FLOSS.

We also took a look at the slides and Sarah had some wonderful ideas, that I think have made the presentation stronger. I make some pretty bold predictions, and Sarah asked if I had any data to support my theories. So I've added them to the slide deck.

I've also decided to rebrand the presentation.  My good friend Marcos Polanco, suggested that "Financing Freedom" was something that he could get behind, so I've added it as the lead for the title.  It will also become the code name for the project, eventually...:-/ (Note: This is a recent decision, so it'll take a while to get it reflected everywhere ;-)

So here's version 0.2 of Financing Freedom:

Financing freedom section1.02

View more presentations from Kevin Shockey

Section 1.01 Slides released today!

The first slide deck is now available on Slideshare: "Funding Free Culture". Well actually it's about the first third of the first section.

Let the learning begin....

Now what's this all about again?

Got FLOSS?

Thanks to Guagua Pública

I now have a publishing platform for authors.

If it wasn't for the research I've done on GP I would have never been able to piece it together. With Fanz.ly, I can now quickly release a new brand using a well defined business processes that multiplies my efficiency. To think this all started with a curiosity in transmedia.

We're all transmedia producers now. We have to be able to tell a consistent story across a variety of mediums (social network systems).

A Journey, Towards Communion

The path ahead is a long one, that's for sure. But I step upon it with boldness. I know exactly what I need to do. I need help and just as I will demonstrate through this project, help is available. Sometimes, it's just as easy as asking for help, but you have to ask.

To ask consistently and with permission, however, requires a platform. That's what "Funding Free Culture," will provide. It'll take countless loops through the build-measure-learn loop, this is just the first.

How many iterations will it take to build a community?  I'll have to get back to you on that one, but I'm sure that working together, we'll get their faster.

"Time, the ameliorator of all our endeavors. Time is an illusion." Todd Rundgren

Minimum Viable Product

From Eric Ries "The Lean Startup" - Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is the minimum production necessary to adequately confirm assumptions.