First published on Medium. Companies with the newer “sharing economy†business models are gamifying work. They are making people work hard in ways that resemble how they play video games. To better understand this, I compare their models to the components of a game as given by Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal: Goal: A […]
How companies like Uber and Airbnb are gamifying work Read More »
First published on Medium. When role models are risk adverse, they change the game for everyone. Last night at kickball, a young woman on the other team decided to start bunting and she changed the preferred strategy for women on both teams. She was a strong player and she obviously thought her best option, maybe
When you are afraid of risk, you create weak teams Read More »
“Where there is no competition, there is no market. This is why start-ups who “have no competition” have trouble engaging partners and making sales.” – Geoffrey Moore, Escape Velocity Open source projects often shy away from competition. They value collaboration and leveraging existing solutions. But competition is good for more than making you run faster.
Your competition helps explain who you are Read More »
I recently listened to a talk by Michael Lopp about how to be a great manager. During his talk, he stressed the importance of hallway conversations. Hallway conversations are informal conversations about projects, goals and status. As Shez says, they are great for bouncing ideas off people you might not normally interact with and just
How to have hallway conversations when you can’t see the hallway Read More »
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks talking about why we have so few women in open source and web development and how to encourage more women to join. (I even got to spend an awesome afternoon with a bunch of girls. I was supposed to be mentoring them but they
The secret to my success in a field of men? All my friends. My guy friends. Read More »
Can forking a free software project enable you to regain your internal motivation to work on a project? My current theory is that if you work on free software, then you get paid to work on it and then you get laid off, that you would work on a different project. Because the first one
Forking an open source project: regaining internal motivation Read More »
“How do I raise enough money to be able to spend all my time working on my favorite free software project?” is a question I hear often. I have a few ideas and I’m very interested in hearing others as I think the world would be a better place if we all could afford to
How do I raise enough money to work on my project full time? Read More »
If you follow any of the links to Amazon in this post, any purchases you make will send a referral fee to the GNOME Foundation. Peter Drucker‘s Managing the Nonprofit Organization was full of good ideas. I started ripping off pieces of my bookmark to mark interesting pages and ended up with no bookmark! Managing
Book Review: Managing the Nonprofit Organization Read More »
501(c) organizations are US non profit organizations. 501(c) is actually the name of the IRS tax code that defines non profits. There are actually 28 kinds of 501(c)‘s. I’ll focus here on just two: 501(c) (3) – the GNOME Foundation is a 501(c) (3) 501(c) (6) – the Linux Foundation is a 501(c) (6) They
501(c): (3) versus (6) Read More »