Johnnie identifies a theme that is very close to my heart from Reboot 7
...the advocacy of taking small steps over theorising. David Heinemeier Hansson, who built web application Ruby on Rails, stressed the advantage of getting something basic up and running fast. In a presentation on The Skype Brand, Malthe Sigurdsson talked about getting out frequent, small revisions.Pretty closely related was the idea of ordinariness and "good enough" solutions. David Weinberger championed "good enough" knowledge classifications; Skype favoured simple language ("Talk" not "VOIP").
I named this website betaroad in part becuase of the very ideas that Johnnie articulates. The need for us all perhaps but organisations in particular to get something basic out and then build or perhaps a better analogy is cultivate.
The idea of something basic and simplicity are fundamental in innovation but technical people, those who heavily understand complex ideas, often forget that these things are complex because they are made up of lots of very simple things. People can't relate to the complex, they need the simple otherwise it become magic (not high tech). This applies both to customers and those inside an organisation who struggle to manage.
So for beta read partly simplicity but also the other concept of taking the step in terms of something good enough. Beta releases are the step before a final release (in software terms) and I wanted something to convey this idea of 'its never finished only published' in some way. It does help that the road in which I live is called betaroad however the choice of naming was for the reason above.
Its this idea of exploration and the new that drives me and how I approach things. Not that new is always right but that the discovery of what could be and the creative moment of something new. Like Johnnie's observations.
Posted by Paul Goodison at June 14, 2005 09:51 AM | TrackBack