At [mySociety](http://www.mysociety.org/)'s annual retreat I gave a lightning talk about how I've come to realise that products and markets are the same thing. I'd originally intended it to be a blog post, so here you are.
It’s a story of geeks learning. What is a product? It really is magic.
Before the invention of products (whatever that means!) you had to make bespoke things. You want a tool, you have to bash the rocks together to make your own custom tool.
Today’s audio blog is about the excellent DoESLiverpool, and why you should be their friend too.
listen to “Do epic shit” on Audioboo
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Complaining that I have a deluge of interesting things that I never get round to blogging, Neil suggested I use audio instead. Here’s the first one.
listen to “Public Knowledge Gap Filler, a new profession” on Audioboo
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Links to the topics in this audio blog:
This is the second part of a series of two posts. Part 1 explains how we came to make PledgeBank, what it does, its similarities to GroupOn and Kickstarter, and how we iterated on the product. It ends asking, “Why did GroupOn and Kickstarter succeed, when PledgeBank failed?” This part gives my answer.
Here’s what I think:
1. Giving up.
In his essay “How not do die”, Paul Graham points out that the real reason startups fail is that the founders give up. They stop changing the product, they stop doing deals.
“I’ll do X but only if N other people will do Y”
I was abuzz.
A cafe in Holborn. 2003. A secret meeting. James Cronin and Tom Loosemore, who’d made the genius does-what-it-says-on-the-tin FaxYourMP, bought me coffee and changed my world.
Wow, there’s actually other people who think computers can revolutionise democracy!
And they’ve an amazing top secret, ludicrously ambitious project to repurpose the whole of Hansard to make Parliament easy for the masses.
We really struggled.
We felt guilt. Wracked with pain.
It’s the mid 1990s, and computers are impossibly hard to use.
Anyone who could program them, and who also cared about people, was ashamed.
So we fixed it.
Books were published, websites launched, a new profession was born.
It took a while but many of the key insights from that furore benefit us all every day.
For example, on an iPad, or in Google Docs, you don’t need to remember to press save to not lose your work.
“If you really want to … truly ancient history, you have to go back to delta decks on punch cards.” (Jim Rootham)
In a world where [biographies of cod](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cod-Biography-Fish-Changed-World/dp/0099268701) are not just accepted, but rightly popular, it wouldn't seem entirely crazy to write a history book on how computer programmers store the vital product of their labours - source code.
Since neither you nor I have time to read or write such a thing, we’re going to have to settle on this one blog post.
I’m pretty sure lots of people are going to ask me why I just joined the Green party, so here’s the reasons.
Finally, and to be clear, I think the Labour party, Liberal Democrat party and Conservative party are all excellent. I think the recent Labour Government did many good things particularly in its first term, and I think that the Tory/Lib Dem coalition is doing many good things and will continue to do so too.
You know when you have those really annoying arguments that turn into disputes about definitions of words? And they end up a tangled mess of pointlessness, and you just don’t want to be there any more?
Well, I’ve just realised that they’re much more important than I thought, but you have to think about them in terms of shared group culture. By which I mean, lack of shared group culture.
Every now and again a project comes along that could change everything. I’ve been lucky enough this year to come across two of them.
The first I wrote about in Seven facts about Unhosted. It has the potential to decentralised the web again, while simultaneously keeping it just as easy to use and powerful.
Today I’m writing about the Global Village Construction Set. It has the potential to decentralise our industrial society.