The natural inclination right now for geeks of a certain type is to start dreaming up new standards bodies, or how they can participate in the Open Web Foundation to make a Super Awesome Twitter API Evolution Committee. Here’s my recommendation: Don’t. Don’t do any of that shit, and don’t run off to make membership badges for the Treehouse Club quite yet. Instead, just iterate and ship. Keep making new apps and see what you can do to stretch the limits of the existing methods and structures.
[quoting Anil Dash]
It’s everywhere. It’s natural. I’ve written about it before as “designer’s ego.” I’m not a developer and I don’t understand the full implications of the Twitter API, but the logic applies universally. People just really want to do great things in big, carefully planned and orderly ways — but that’s not how the best stuff gets made.
Conventional wisdom says that open standards are created by endless deliberations among experts and big tech companies, and those do sometimes gain traction.
But this is how it usually happens: Someone goes first. No one thinks of it as an open standard. Then someone clones it. All of a sudden people get ideas. Inspired, someone goes third. At this point it’s inevitable that there will be a fourth and fifth and so on.
[quoting Dave Winer]
Creating new things is all about putting different things together — e.g. WordPress or Tumblr + the Twitter API — but the moments of opportunity don’t last forever. Opportunities don’t stay ripe forever, sometimes if you don’t make something out of them right away, they’re gone before there’s time to ask permission or run it by the committee (assuming you can even explain it without a working model).
Copenhagen might be another example case where the desire for Super Awesome Committees (and Super Awesome Rallies) has got in the way of actual accomplishments — though in that case I think big attention-getting efforts may help the cause, even if they don’t accomplish as much as we’d like in real terms.
In other words, sometimes we need a big lever, sometimes we can just use our hands and the lever just gets in the way.
It depends. It comes down to managing a moving equilibrium between open and closed approaches by applying a kind of Coasean logic.
As long as agents can effectively conduct transactions (or “integrations” in these cases) without some kind of overarching structure, then no formal association is required. But for some cases the cost of finding and facilitating integrations might be high enough to require an organizational structure or plan.
The problem is that once you make it structured, the structure itself consumes maintenance resources and attention, even if nothing is accomplished.
Umair Haque had a great, thought-provoking post on something like this today.
Start from the ground, look at what’s around us and what we really need. Don’t trample what’s already growing in order to plant a new orchard… you might starve before fruition (if there’s any at all).
