Communicating Open App

our core offering (graph search across the emerging Giant Global Graph and federated instances of OpenApp)

To me that sounds like quite a change of focus from "a suite of of integrated and open sourced apps which support transparent, democratic and decentralised organising."

Have to admit, whilst I understand the ultimate need for such systems to exist, and that in order to build "a suite of of integrated and open sourced apps which support transparent, democratic and decentralised organising" properly and in a way that scales, such lofty goals inevitably come onto the table, I was kinda hoping this project would be a little less ambitious and a little more pragmatic (like Loomio and Cobudget seem to be).

As a potential user I'm really not too bothered about "graph search across the emerging Giant Global Graph" in the short term. I just want functional tools to use now.

I think part of my fear comes from having known and met lots of tech people over the years who've had very similar goals and have also had a inclination to perfectionism - resulting in very little running code ever actually getting released (at least from an end user perspective), despite oodles of talent.

But maybe the time has indeed finally come for doing things properly? An increasing number of the underlying tools/ libraries needed to build such systems do seem to now exist.

I have a preference for funding to come from entrepreneurs who want to develop apps

Could you elaborate? Do you mean tech entreprenuers who code themselves funding with their time? or time and money? or what? And what about entrepreneurs who want to use (as opposed to develop) apps? Those that see the need for such tools but who don't code themselves. Where do they fit in?

demos of what we believe to be the ‘OpenApp difference’.

What are you thinking of here @simontegg @ahdinosaur? What exactly would such demos demonstrate? Are such demos what you are now working on (alongside "a simple website, some content and better docs and README ")?

Hope all these thoughts and questions are useful somehow! :)

Just to add, I think we need to think about who are audiences are.

From my perspective I can see at least two segments here:

1. People who want to use the tools (who aren't developers and beyond hearing a few nice shiny words like 'open source' and 'decentralised' or 'distributed' don't really care/ understand/ need to know the technical details of how those tools work behind the scenes)

2. Developers who are excited about the challenge of building the tools (who want to know the technical vision and need to know the nitty gritty details).

The communication document @simontegg and @ahdinosaur have been working on seem to be more focussed on group 2. This makes sense in turns of attracting more developers with aligned goals. But I'd argue the the "simple website" and most of the comms would perhaps be better aimed at group 1 with a 'developers' link somewhere for group 2.

Of course, I probably don't need to say this (I note the Loomio site doesn't even have a 'developers' link anywhere on the home page). Just thinking out load really and trying to make sure that all the people who are inspired by Loomio/ Cobudget and “a suite of of integrated and open sourced apps which support transparent, democratic and decentralised organising” remain exited (or get even more excited) when they see the Open Apps website (instead of being immediately turned off by technical stuff they don't really yet understand, e.g. talk of “graph search across the emerging Giant Global Graph”). I mean “graph search across the emerging Giant Global Graph” is incredibly exciting and inspiring to those who grok it, but is completely meaningless to most people.

I think I'm with Simon on this. We have been loosely connected to a planned crowdfunding campaign with Sensorica (the second time this has been planned - the first died aborning). A lot of work. Sceptical that it will be worth the effort.

And the campaign attracts people who are looking for money but may not share enough of the same values to make the collaboration work.

So we look for developers who actually want to collaborate and connect their projects but who are not waiting for money before they do any work.

In other words, assemble the network first, then figure out how to make it financially sustainable. Which might or might not be crowdfunding. Crowdfunding is a boost, but is it sustainable? How many times can you crowdfund for the same project?

(But yeah, “graph search across the emerging Giant Global Graph” doesn't turn me on, either...;)

And the campaign attracts people who are looking for money but may not share enough of the same values to make the collaboration work.

To be clear, my idea was to try and help crowdfund money to support the existing aligned developers and designers already working on Loomio, Cobudget and the OpenApp ecosystem, if they deem that useful (as opposed to raising funds to bring additional developers).

This has been a great discussion for surfacing assumptions, thanks everyone.

I agree that talking about the "why" is much more inspiring and more relevant to people in our 'vertical'. @joshuavial's original pitch was about actions (democratic organising) and this is what originally inspired people (including myself) about OpenApp.

I think these are useful appealing narratives and I'm open to including these in OpenApp comms material. What I'm unsure about how these connect to OpenApp's marketing strategy in particular. Does OpenApp need to appeal to users? Do Linux and MySQL need to appeal to users? Most people do not know what these are yet they are highly successful FOSS projects.

Delving deeper, Loomio is a cultural play, not a tech play. It cultural/action offering is collaborative decision-making. Loomio has uptake in groups that already get collaboration. However, these groups usually have 0 or small budgets. An important class of client are organisations that don't yet get collaboration but would like to. They sometimes become paying clients of Loomio's and pay for consulting work where Loomio helps facilitate a shift to more collaboration in the organisation. This requires a deep commitment on behalf of the org for it to work. For loomio, this is "high touch" consulting work and is difficult to scale.

Early on, we've talked about Holocracy orgs as potential clients of OpenApp. Holocracy isn't democratic but it implements some useful ideas. Holocracy is averse to consensus and more about delegation than collaboration. If the OpenApp narrative frontfoots cultural offerings like the above or is strongly associated with tools like loomio won't this create unnecessary friction in the uptake of OpenApp?

OpenApp's very core offering is super-generic and broadly applicable to orgs of all kinds (User account creation, group management, directory, search). However, it will have some built-in biases to democratic thinking. I was thinking that OpenApp's "cultural virus" would be more subtle: "Oh, you've been using these generic tools for a while, btw have you considered loomio and cobudget?"

tldr:
OpenApp should try to appeal to developers and entrepreneurs who want to do things in a different way. Apps that are part of the ecosystem have specific markets and narratives. To grow users, its more efficient to appeal to entrepreneurs and then let them target their own vertical.

Thanks @simontegg interesting thoughts. I'm mull them over :)

@richarddbartlett's and @alanna's comments in the doc have drawn out the following narrative from me.

There's a social problem: Netarchial Capitalism and power relations that favour giant pools of money.

A technical problem underlies this social problem: software architecture'd around platforms.

A bunch of smart people have been busy over the last decade and have a technical solution to the technical problem!: Linked Data.

A promising social alternative to the social problem is growing!: social enterprise, and power relations that favour people and high-trust groups.

OpenApp is implementing the technical solution! This gives social entrepreneurs an edge and evens up power relations between the people and the giant pools of money!

Bubblegum for everyone! :)

For more context:
Loomio plans to implement a plugin ecosystem and federated architecture in 2015. These are hard technical problems. I'm 70% sure that OpenApp know how to solve these problems (drawing on @ahdinosaur's experience in this area) and we would like to proof out how it would work.

At market rates a plugin ecosystem and federated architecture would cost upwards of, idk, $200k? to R&D and implement.

OpenApp could offer consulting and documentation on how to do that in a way that aligns with Loomio's core values (the commons). Doesn't this almost sound like a sustainable business model? :)

Good stuff @simontegg. My problem with these manifestos floating around is they tend to be disconnected from the social context. If we really want to shift social relations, we're going to have to work with the people who have been working on that problem for generations, and they get immediately turned off by shallow technoutopian narrative. They want to hear that you have a bit of a clue about e.g. identity politics, or classism, etc, before they're going to take you seriously.

Also FWIW I am growing increasingly wary of 'social enterprise' as a phrase. Yep there are lots of social enterprises doing good things, but there are also a lot of them that are (sometimes unwittingly) doing the dirty work of neoliberal governments, implementing their austerity agenda, privatising social services for profit.

I'm currently thinking 'commons-based peer-production' is a more potent and revolutionary concept, and it is a phrase that is impossible to colonise. The two important ingredients being: the ownership model, and the coordination technology. Using this terminology aligns you with Yochai Benkler too, who is basically the perfect antidote to the technoutopian strawman critique.

Sorry this is a bit of a ramble. I'm currently writing a blog post called 'putting some flesh on the technoutopian strawman' - hopefully I will be clearer in time :)