dangerouslyawesome

IndyHall’s office is almost 1 year old. We signed our lease on August 10th, 2007, began occupying the space on August 13th, and over the next 2 weeks, built out our intial office. At the end of August, we threw our inaugral party.

It’s August 2008. That means we’ve been at this for a year, which still blows my mind. It’s time to celebrate.

There are 31 days from today until the end of August. In the next 31 days, we’re going to put our birthday party together, but we’re not going to do it alone. Just like IndyHall came together as a community, so will our first birthday party.

So here to explain what we’re doing is…well…me!

OK! So you have 1 week from today to give us your best connections to the raddest venues in Philly.

The constraints are:

• Hold lots of people
• Serves alcohol
• A stage/sound system would be really helpful for some of our other ideas
• Outdoor is cool, but remember the weather is unpredictable!

Send your venue connections/ideas to me or leave us comments here or on the IndyHall blog.

You have one week to complete this challenge, if you choose to accept it. Let’s make this the best birthday party ever by open sourcing it and powering it by the community that makes Philadelphia a place we love to call our home!

and for some it’s a win, others a loss. Shopify is a RoR based hosted eCommerce solution that, over the last 9 months, I’ve fallen in love with and done over a dozen shops with.

First, lets focus on the win.

The 2nd screenshot from the right is the first Shopify store I ever did, Surfer Supplies online surf shop.

Shopify’s “brochure” site is now at a .info domain. The content is a cleaned up, reorganized version of the previous marketing site, and I quite like the look/feel. I also rather like their screenshots page, which currently has 2 shops I worked on (NoonaCo and Willotoons), though I’m a little sad it’s not paginated. What happens when the current featured screens get pushed out? I’d like to see them archived.

The new Shopify DOT COM site is featuring a screenshot of a global product search…interesting move, I wonder how this will pit competing Shopify store owners against each other. A cool move from a visibility perspective, a questionable one from a community perspective.

In fact, while I’m on the topic of community…thats one of my favorite things about Shopify. The development community has always been awesome, and incredibly supportive of each other. It was a great place to send newbie Shopify developer. Today, Shopify released a new pricing scheme. Previously, their service was free until you made a sale. At that point there was a 3% commission. While this was a tough sell to large volume stores, it was perfect for the MAJORITY of what Shopify is used for…small, boutique shops. Minimal cost until a sale was made. Beautiful. And for me, the sale was easy-as-pie. I had so many people geared up to use Shopify for their next shop.

Then, today brought change. And the people, oh, they’re pissed. The new pricing model is definitively geared towards volume sellers. Great…for them. But what about the little guys? Shopify’s Cody says:

I don’t think that paying $24 / month puts Shopify out of range of low capital startup projects. Installing, securing, backing up, and hosting your own server with Zen cart will surely be a lot more costly, either in dollars or man hours, than having a Shopify subscription.

That will help the sell…but nonetheless, I’m confident I’ll be losing customers to this. Luckily, current customers are grandfathered in. But if you haven’t put your credit card in yet, you’re lost. Never mind the fact that I had the old selling points memorized…this grid is MUCH more complicated, and makes it much harder to make a decision and a sale.

At this point, I’m going to be keeping a close eye on this. I’ve come to love Shopify as a product, and as a selling point. I was able to enable my customers in a way no other product could, and consistently impress. Shopify’s staff has been incredibly responsive and supportive since day 1, so I’m hoping that they take the community’s interest and coming to a middle ground.

This is a great example of creating a passionate community and then, when they could have been involved with the discussion of the direction of the product, they weren’t and now the community is in dissent. It’s only a matter of time before someone starts posting HD DVD encryption codes all over the forum. sigh.

In the mean time…while the community and Shopify’s staff come to terms, I regret to say that I’m forced to look for an exit plan…and at this point in time, I’m really, really stuck to find one that fits as good as Shopify does. Well….did.

Scott, Tobi, Daniel, Cody, Paul, James, and the rest of Jaded Pixel: I’m a devoted fan of Shopify, and hope to stay one. Please, please do best by your community, your users, and your customers.

Wild and crazy final thought: what if Shopify had this plan as a hosted option, and then…open sourced the platform. That is, for people who want ease of hosting, deployment, maintainability, etc…you pay monthly for that service. For those capable of deploying patches, arranging hosting, security, backup, and all of the other costs that go along with e-commerce, provide a self-hosted and open source option. This would be an awesome way to go back to the community roots that you’ve served and have served you, and calm the community down by making every-body-happy.

[tags]shopify, jadedpixel, changes, community, dissent[/tags]

In his first post on his new blog at BMC Software by William Hurley (A.K.A. Whurley) wrote of a metaphor for the open source community called “Opensville”, and alluded to how its a place where everybody wants to hang out but nobody wants to live because socially and economically, it’s straining. This discussion has boomed over the last few days, and has been generating some excellent commentary on Open Source communities.

Dave Rappo, a good friend of mine, has a project which has the primary objective of taking some of the strain off open source project managers as well as developers who wish to contribute to open source initiatives. This initiative uses monetary incentives in the form of “bounties”, placed on tasks and feature requests, by the users who request them. Essentially, he’s created a streamlined workflow for the concept of “put your money where your mouth is”.

This project is appropriately named Bounty Source.

Bountysource itself is a Ruby on Rails application, coded by co-founder Warren Konkel (in his free time no less…he’s a full time contractor for the famed Revolution Health Group). Another very interesting part of the model is that Bounty Source, which acts as an integrated project management and source control tool (similar to Trac and SourceForge), is itself driven by the BountySource incentive model, and portions of it are open source (the SVN browser, for example). That is to say, the tools used to make BountySource what it is are available to have bounties and feature requests placed on them. Then, like any of the projects that they host, a developer can come through, choose a task, complete it and submit it for review. Upon approval, the bounty is released to the developer.

Bounties vary in size because they are created by users who want to see a feature included. If they want to see the feature really really bad, and can afford it, they could place a rather sizable bounty on it. Also utilizing the power of strength in numbers, multiple people can contribute to the same bounty. So if someone else wants the same feature you do, they can chip in (less, same, or more than you) towards the total value of the task.

This realistic monetization of tasks takes away a large amount of the dissent in the OS community, where projects stagnate due to a lack of resources, or developers and project managers get frustrated about the number of feature requests with no “contribute back” factor. Many open source USERS forget that OS is a two way street. Bountysource goes out of its way to remind people, and lets them contribute in a real tangible way.

One of the latest bounties posted to BountySource actually stemmed form a conversation Dave and I had in the car yesterday, regarding the lack of Firefox extension support in Camino. Evidently, someone had just posted a ~$200 bounty on creating a fork of the Camino project that had a single customization: enable middle-clicking on tabs to close them. THAT WAS IT. Someone wanted this feature SO BADLY that they were willing to pony up 200 bucks. Dave and I weren’t ready to drop $200 on a single feature, but we agreed that we’d switch to Camino for speed and stability if it supported XUL/Extensions.

So Dave created a bounty for Firefox extensions and addons for Camino within the same project, dubbed “Alternative Camino“. This bounty calls for Firefox 2.0 Extension support (at a minimum) in Camino. I’ve dropped $10 of my own money (as did Warren) on this feature request, and if you’re a mac user frustrated with the general instability of Firefox (not unusable instability…its just not Camino) but stick with Firefox for plugins…drop a couple of bucks and see if we can’t get this bounty fulfilled.

And while you’re at BountySource, check out some of the many (372) projects that they do host, and see if you want to ask for anything, or take on a challenge to collect a bounty yourself.

[tags]whurley, david rappo, warren konkel, opensville, bounty source, communities, opensource, incentive, camino, camino + firefox[/tags]