Thanks to my friend (and open source guru) Raven Zachary, I had the privilege of beta testing the new Obama ‘08 for iPhone application. The idea, the potential and the implementation is tremendous - create grassroots opportunities to participate at the ‘edge’ of the internet. In other words, let people participate in the campaign from their perspective, instead of uploading their data to a central place or getting anonymous instructions from a central place.

How specifically? The key feature is that this iPhone app looks at your address book, sorts your contacts by battle-ground states, presents you with those people and then keeps track of whether you’ve called those people.  As the help says:

As you make calls, you can keep organized by updating the status of your contacts.

 Your privacy is important: no personal data or contacts will be uploaded or stored. Only the total number of calls you make is uploaded anonymously.

I love this idea because it allows me to help in a more hands-on way, but without having to deal with trade-offs like being a parent and employed vs. spending five weeks in a battleground state.

Additionally, it serves as a nice central place for me to find out more about the campaign.

Kudos to Raven and his team!

Recently, I’ve begun to blog there as well. On occasion, I’ll link through from here to the recent blog posts. This time there’s two posts. My first post was simple look at our product development process in terms of feedback loops: FiveRuns Development - Feedback Loops. As a side note, ever since Tim Tischler and I had a great discussion about scrum and how he saw it as feedback loops, I now see the issue in terms of open and closed feedback loops; one side effect is that I end up abstracted from any particular brand of approach (e.g. scrum), and more able to pick and choose how best to find and close the open feedback loops. The second post was a comment on using CMS’s as part of development: What If: Content Management & Software Development.

Regarding FiveRuns, I’m thrilled to be @ FiveRuns (going on five months now); the team is incredible and I’m glad to be part of it. Stay tuned as we produce some great stuff.

For me, it seems an interesting pattern to use to compose a simple pitch of an idea (e.g. for a startup). So, here’s some attempts to try that pattern out:

(worldview) Desktop apps and Web-based apps will co-exist for the foreseeable future. The web-based application market is strong + beyond conventional desktop browser access, access continues to improve (e.g. iPhone and other mobile web devices). At the same time, there is a resurgence in elegant desktop applications for the Mac - and their ease of use and aesthetics are unbeatable. Right now, it’s a frequent forced commitment to choose (for a particular function) between working on the desktop or in the clouds. The longer this goes on, the more important it will be to banish that artificial choice - and allow both transparently.

(benefit) We build productivity applications that transparently offer the best for your use regardless of whether your are on a Mac or via the web - we take care of making everything work together.

(worldview) There are often repeated patterns (e.g of activity, thought, etc.) that occur across many disciplines. Recognition and sharing of those patterns will have some unknown and unexpected benefits.

(benefit) We have developed an open community system where patterns are documented, explained, discussed, organized and connected to actual uses in the real world.

Nice.

It goes something like this: I’ve wanted a better tool to manage my professional relationships (something I’ve been thinking of as a personal CRM). As a result, I’ve been looking for what Mac apps fill that niche - and there are some nice candidates (e.g. Contactizer, Daylite, even Crm4Mac). At the same time, I see web-based solutions as well (and here’s the ‘in the clouds’ part), such as Highrise, Etelos, even a customized SugarCRM.

Unfortunately, none of these has the right set of features - which would have closed the deal and locked me in (either as a source of recurring revenue for the SaaS solutions or as a grateful customer for a Mac app)

At the same time, it’s itched my concern about whether to committee further ‘down’ into my local box with a Mac app or ‘up’ into the clouds with a web app.

All that leads to this - now that I’ve used my iPhone for a few days, and I’m successful at doing some of my basic tasks on it (e.g. reading blogs, web pages, email) it’s tipped the balance ‘up ot the clouds’. In other words, with no clear feature leader, I will make a solution work that’s an SaaS so that I can use it on my iPhone whereever and when ever I want.

Seperately, I’ll blog about what I really want in a Personal CRM.

How? Consider this - if an OpenID enabled set of tools existed to extend OpenId so that when you registered, a plugin (ala greasemonkey) would run to take your OpenID related profile data and place it into the registration.

It would require a community of trusted “registration plugins” to be created that used your augmented OpenID data.

Big or Bullshit: Vertical Social Networks

In a recent issue of Wired, there’s an article about how a new city in China is being designed with what amounts to a well thought out infrastructure optimized towards energy use

It’s an interesting contrast between that approach and the agile software approach of evolving the infrastructure (and the approach to infrastructure that’s true for most cities as well). Of course, the infrastructure in software is much more malleable than the physical infrastructure of a city - yet there are still great costs and challenges with evolving software infrastructure.

Why haven’t we figured out how to make this easier?

I have to say, after many years - it may be corny (but not surprising to those who know me), that I still fell privileged to have worked with such a great group of people who all shared a common purpose. For many of us, the world-changing potential of online community (now known as social media) was not just a j o b - but meant something personal.

I’ve been fortunate to work with some of those folks since then, as well as to help create similarly rewarding groups as well. I hope that continues.