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Facilitating the Conversation

I was prompted by something Andrew Shafer of Reductive Labs said (on the FooCampers list, so I won't reproduce it here, since it was forwarded to me) about the quality of communication among software developers. He was talking about how communicating the overall design and intentions of the project is vital, so the developers are not left guessing about how the application will be used and what its architects think it should do. What is important is the existence of a conversation between the leaders of a project and the developers writing the code. This hits very close to home, because our farmfoody.org project is essentially there to improve the flow of information between producers and consumers of food, to enable a conversation.

It occurred to me the solution is to throw away the flash cards and bulleted design specifications and just facilitate the conversation. Why not use social networking tools for developers to communicate? (You can get a sense of another approach from his post Working Together… with Techology). This sounds like an amazing experience using software much like the "multiplayer" networked text editors (SubEthaEdit) that have cropped up in recent years that let a group of connected people edit a text document .

An equivalent of Twitter for programmers would be interesting. A social activity and message feed to keep everyone in the loop. Why not post messages about activity into a feed. This already happens with users signed up to version control services (like Assembla or Sourceforge), but through email. It needs to be through a unified social feed or "wall" some call them, where notifications about code commits, coding activities, etc. can be distributed to a group of "friends" or "followers" of the thread of development. Instead of each project posting a feed, each developer would post a feed. Or perhaps both, with users being able to "follow" a project and also keep up with "friend" developers, which could cut across projects. The latter would be useful because it would help developers keep an eye on allied projects or perhaps a mainstream of code their project fits into, merely by adding that project or an individual developer from the project to their friends (or perhaps they would be "fans" of the project to keep personal friends separate...the terminology doesn't matter).

It should be very possible to build a social "stack" on top of existing "pastebin" applications to achieve this.
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Unknown said…
Steve,

I like your idea about building something around a pastie app, that has potential.

We've been using a Skype group chat to do something like this. I'm not sure how many people that can accommodate, but it works pretty well for a small group. You can chat in real time or post stuff when no one else is around and they'll get it later.

yammer might work too. I haven't used it but supposedly yammer is like a sectioned off twitter with only people from the same email domain.

That will have to make do until the next generation of collaborative tools emerge.

Cheers,
Andrew
02 January, 2009
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