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!