02.23.07
Posted in Business, Sustainability at 10:40 pm by Colin Steele
Once again from the good folks at Worldchanging:
No Sweat Apparel, a Boston-based start-up committed to producing sweatshop-free, 100% union-made apparel. No Sweat bills itself as the first “open source” apparel manufacturer, meaning that they openly expose and share what’s behind their product, and they invite cooperation in keeping the sources open and improving the inner-workings of those sources, to produce a better end result.
The food and clothing industries need to adopt many of the same strategies towards true transparency: disclosing origins, contents, and sourcing policies.
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02.20.07
Posted in Business at 3:47 pm by cvillecsteele
A little slideshow I gave at SAIC about distributed application architectures. Enjoy:
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02.16.07
Posted in Sustainability at 8:10 am by Colin Steele
Use Community: Smaller Footprints, Cooler Stuff and More Cash is another great post from worldchanging:
Like many people, I want less clutter and hassle in my life. I already have too much stuff I have to store, too many things I have to maintain and keep track of… …these things take up much of the time, energy and money I might otherwise apply to having the experiences I want in my life. I want an institutional tool for owning less and doing more.
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02.12.07
Posted in Sustainability at 3:31 pm by cvillecsteele
What if we, as a species, were about to pitch off the edge of our ecological and evolutionary cliff? What if all the signs were there, but we were just too muddleheaded to see them? What if the bees are smarter than we are?
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02.01.07
Posted in Business at 4:39 pm by cvillecsteele
I’ve been doing some subcontracting IT work (programming) for the last couple of months, and although it has been hard to put aside working on Perfect Flavor, I’ve found it worthwhile. One reason is that it pays quite well.
Besides the money, there are other rewards, and somewhat surprisingly, they relate back to the business of starting a new company. First, let me explain that the subcontract is for the government. Specifically, the DoD. This means Big Business, and it also means I’m four levels of subcontract deep. From this vantage point, it seems that the “customer” falls into the category of mythical animal, like Nessie. Spoken in hushed tones: “Yeah, I heard that Bob talked to the customer once. Bob was walking the dog on a cool fall morning, back in ‘04. Suddenly the customer appeared out of nowhere. Before Bob could pop off a shot with his cameraphone as evidence, it disappeared back into the mist.”
My “ut-oh” meter went off early. During the training session at the start of the contract, the trainer literally begged us, “Please, PLEASE try to think like one of the users, and don’t use terms like ‘adjacent record set’ when you mean ‘more results’.” But the problems run deeper than just bad information architecture, and I can’t really blame the developers. I couldn’t put my finger on it for the first few weeks, but eventually it hit me.
This program lacks an architect. It lacks an architect because no one is in touch with the customer. Nobody is in charge.
Various problems manifest themselves as a result. Very few people seem to understand the whole system. No one can articulate anything resembling a system metaphor. Feature and design decisions seem to be made on an ad-hoc basis, and the rationale behind them, if any, never makes it down to us grunts.
Piles of redundant, decaying code, abandoned subystems and decrepit, leaking interfaces lie scattered about. I wander, flashlight in hand, gingerly turning over spadefuls of this stuff, how on earth it could possibly still work. I’ve seen this problem before. When decisions (and hence responsibility) are made without a compelling common vision, an organization retains neither control over nor knowledge of its own destiny.
So, besides an fat paycheck (our tax dollars at work), I’m taking home a lesson about having clear goals, well communicated. And I am rededicating myself to sticking to my customers like glue.
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Posted in Perfect Flavor at 12:59 pm by cvillecsteele
“Even at the typical ice cream serving temperature of -16° C, only about 72% of the water is frozen.” From Structure of Ice Cream.
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