Opening up for collaborations
I’m writing lots of notes, but I’m not doing much with them because they’re not well-formed enough to be blog posts or brief enough to be status updates. I’m not happy with how much I’m “producing”. I don’t desperately need to fix that by producing more but I do feel the need to get a few more things done and at the same time, I’d like to be more able to collaborate with people online and face to face. I have lots of ideas, little nuggets that get squirrelled away, that I get excited with with one person, but then I don’t have time to follow up or write up. I’m also aware that my strength is in starting new things, doing them once and then moving on, but I’ve known for some time that that makes it difficult for people to buy what I’m doing, which in turn makes it difficult for me to keep doing things.
I was inspired the other day by seeing that Vinay has a public to-do list so that people can chip in. I want to go a bit further – there won’t be much that I keep hidden away because I can’t think of anything that wouldn’t benefit from another pair of eyes.
So I’m going to try an experiment. I’m going to start wikifying my notes and start leaving outlines, stubby bits, half-baked ideas, lazyweb requests for help etc lying around for others to muck around with if they feel like it. I may well tweet little bits or point to things on the blog from time to time if I’m thinking I really, really want to work on this but don’t have anyone to play with.
The details of how it works will emerge – obviously if things turn into projects or products that get sold, then the people involved will have to negotiate how the work gets done and how any proceeds are shared. I’m thinking that everything will be under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. I reserve the right to change my mind and stop doing anything at all at any time, but I hope that some of it may prove useful to someone, somehow, someday.
Not sure where I’ll put it, I’d rather host something myself than put it in the trust of pbworks or similar, but I’m open to suggestions on that.