Joi Ito's Web

Bamboo thicket on Aproxymator

I've been talking a lot about agile development and how the speed and cost to a minimum viable product (MVP) has been reduced so much that it is changing the startup scene completely. I've been working with Pivotal Labs on my fund and my portfolio companies, having them help get many of my companies up and running with their best practices to take advantage of the latest methods.

Recently, the CTO of Pivotal Labs, Ian McFarland, sent me an excited email about a shop in Ireland called HyperTiny. If Pivotal Labs is the High Council of Jedi Masters, HyperTiny are two young Jedi at some outpost. Ian had recently done a project with Paul (developer) and Brian (designer) at HyperTiny and they knocked out an MVP for him in 2 weeks.

I was fascinated with the idea that one designer and one developer writing fully test driven development (TDD) and Pivotal Tracker based code could super-code a Rails 3 product in weeks. It made total sense, but I wanted to see it myself. I engaged HyperTiny to scratch an itch that has been bugging me ever since I moved to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

In the UAE, Flickr is unfortunately blocked. People trying to access Flickr get a silly screen from the ISP telling you that it's not safe. I'm working to try to get this unblocked, but in the mean time, none of my friends in the UAE can see my Flickr photos. I've been dreaming of a site that mirrors my Flickr photos and provides a way for me to have most of the functionality of Flickr from an unblocked site.

I talked to Paul and Brian and my Freesouls.cc friend Christopher who has been banging on the Flickr API for years and came up with a basic feature set. We talked on Skype and put all of the features (stories) into Pivotal Tracker. While we were on Skype, I set up a GitHub repository, a Engine Yard account, set up my Amazon Web Services (AWS) account and got the domain name (Aproxymator) and off we went.

After that, every two or three days, we'd do a conference call on Skype, going through the delivered features, giving feedback, iterating and coming up with new ideas. Paul would walk us through the code and explain how the tests worked, how he was refactoring everything and helping us keep our heads around everything. Along the way, I pulled in Sean, Ado, Jim, James and Kuri and it turned into a Rails 3 tutorial as well.

One month (three actual work weeks of Paul and Brian's time) later, we have a working site. It's still half way between a vanity service to fit my own needs and something useful to others. I'm going to have to noodle on it and figure out whether we should continue iterating on the multiuser stuff or to focus on making it more useful for me.

Right now, it allows you to enter your own AWS account and use the service to backup and mirror your own Flickr feed. It's got some basic API stuff that we're working on. Christopher is now taking over the code, which was super-easy with all of the stories in Pivotal Tracker, all of the tests properly written and everything beautifully documents.

One thing that I do know for sure now. You can get to an MVP with one designer and one engineer and HyperTiny (and other shops like them) can help teams bootstrap in a way that allows a smooth transfer of the code to another development team. I saw it with my own eyes. True story.

Back in May, I visited the BBC in London and did an interview with Carrie Gracie for the BBC World Service. It was for a show called "The Interview". It was a lot of fun and she let the conversation cover a broad range of things including my world view. ;-)

There is a web page for the show which includes links to the books and things that I talk about in the interview and a link to the audio.

There is also a BBC News article which summarizes the interview. Unfortunately, the article calls Creative Commons a "copyright-free, sharing movement online," which it's not. Creative Commons provides technologies and tools so that people can use copyright to help them share their works the way that they would like to legally. It's not "anti-copyright" or "copyright-free" - although it is about "freedom".

For the last three years, I've been teaching a course at The Keio Graduate School of Media Design (KMD) on Digital Journalism. Each year, I've tried to iterate on the format and see how I could manage my own interaction more effectively and make it impact more people.

This year I met Philipp from P2P University (P2PU). P2PU's mission is:

The Peer 2 Peer University is a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements. P2PU creates a model for lifelong learning alongside traditional formal higher education. Leveraging the internet and educational materials openly available online, P2PU enables high-quality low-cost education opportunities. P2PU - learning for everyone, by everyone about almost anything.

The online courses are more like communities of self-learners supported by a facilitator. The content is all licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike license that allows anyone to reuse the content as long as they share it back. The courses build on the work of the past.

After some conversations with Philipp, I decided to try to do a mashup of the informal not-for-credit learning of P2PU and the formal for-credit course at KMD. I got a bit of resistance from the university at first about making the material available under a Creative Commons license and the idea of peer-to-peer learning, but we successfully navigated the committee meetings at KMD and were able to pull it off. (Thanks to everyone at KMD for this!)

We used P2PU's website and the forums as the central hub of communications augmented with a mailing list, UStream, Twitter (#kmdp2puDJ) and an IRC channel that was also accessible via a web interface on the P2PU website. Each week, we had assignments and a real-time seminar. The physical space was the Keio Hiyoshi campus, but I would video conference in via H.323 when I was out of town and we had guest speakers and remote students video in via Skype. We then streamed this and recorded it on UStream, using the IRC channel as the discussion and question area. We would tweet the UStream sessions and would gather an tag-along participants in real-time. The video of the seminars recorded in Tokyo in high definition and were uploaded later. (html/rss)

I think the complexity of the technology threw some of the participants off and there is a lot to be improved, but considering the complexity and the figuring-it-out-as-we-went-along aspect of it, it went amazingly well. We typically had dozens of people joining via UStream and a dozen or so people on the IRC channel.

The ad-libbing was really fun and worked well. For example, we were able to convince Hiroko Tabuchi of the New York Times, who at first was a viewer and retweeter of the UStream, to come and give a presentation in class the next week. I was then able to get Executive Director of Greenpeace Japan, Jun Hoshikawa to Skype in and talk to Hiroko and the class about the failure of the Japanese media in tracking the Greenpeace Japan trial.

In addition to the assignments, forum discussions and the real-time discussions, participants were asked to create or join projects. A number of interesting projects were launched. Hala started a blog about Muslims in Tokyo; Gueorgui, Alan and Richard started a project to work on non-GDP/market assessments; Gilmar and Gustavo started a blog about new abilities for modern journalists; Lena and Nadhir are working on a report about the course; and Richard and Rick started a blog about digital journalism in Tokyo.

The downside was that the participation from the Keio students was fairly limited. I think it was a combination of the English, the Monday morning scheduling and the amount of work that threw them off. However, the few students who survived made some great contributions.

I think that for the people participating from all over the world, the issue of the sessions happening at the same time in the Japanese time zone made it nearly impossible for some of them to participate in the real-time conversations.

Finally, I think that having so many modes of communications made it difficult to keep track of the threads.

However, I was really excited by the effectiveness and the quality of the discourse. Also, I realized that in many ways, the less planned serendipitous stuff worked the best. Cruising down my IM buddy list to find someone to pull into the class via Skype seemed to work very well.

We're going to try to see if we can keep some sort of persistent community going via the mailing list to try to iterate on both this mode of interaction as well as how best to learn about online journalism.

Update: Andria wrote a good post about the course.