Mark Roseman's Blog

Should Your Next CEO Be a Philosopher?

That article title caught my eye. Must be a justification of my undergrad philosophy minor; admittedly the phenomenology and existentialism work was helpful at times doing HCI, and some HCI folks have drawn from that intellectual stream. However...

John Robb on the Wiki Market.

I'd probably question John's sentiment in regard to the timeline. I think interest, and willingness to pay, has gone up a lot recently, and is increasing.

Job Fallout.

Pauline's resignation made for an interesting week. People have come up to her and told her a lot more about other docs who've left in the past, and other blowouts - knew about some already, but found out about a couple more, plus some additional details on the (similar) circumstances. Also dug up a number of articles from the local paper about all the docs that have left (which admittedly we should have looked for before we came here, though I don't think it would have ultimately changed anything).

She's started talking to some other folks in the area... KW is hugely underserviced when it comes to psychiatry, and there's pretty much nobody specializing in psychiatric care for people with physical illnesses. One hospital has a pretty minimal CL component, the other doesn't have a psychiatrist at all. So certainly a lot of options to explore, to say nothing of private practice opportunities.

As well, the timing was a bit funny because it turns out the cancer centre in Hamilton (who still haven't filled their psychiatry position after a year) had a big meeting last week about the need there. When they found out about Pauline being available about four people from there pounced within a day. There's a new CEO there (who is reportedly very clinical/education oriented, as opposed to the last guy who was totally research oriented), they're making sounds like they admit they screwed up last time big time, and several people in the psychiatry department there have bitch-slapped the person on that end who "let her get away". The director of supportive care in Hamilton is also good friends with the guy who was Pauline's direct boss in KW (for the one month he stayed before getting fed up and leaving), so has a pretty good idea of what went on. It's been entertaining anyway, but we'll listen to what they have to say.

un-managing learning management systems.

Insightful early thinking from James Farmer about the tension between centralized (organization-controlled) and distributed (user-controlled) resources. Lots of interesting dynamics to explore here, and possibly very deep implications, which I'm beginning to see. There are important lessons buried here about the design of the tool (in a very broad sense) profoundly affecting the nature of the collaboration. A post truly worthy of the blog's name, "incorporated subversion".

Wiki Wars.

Yes, it is too good a title to pass up... however. First go have a peek at what Ross Mayfield had to say about a small jab that Jot took at his company, Socialtext.

I'll confess to be a bit puzzled by Jot as well... go search for "ProjectForum" on Google and you'll see a Jot ad. Frankly, I don't think anyone in this space is big enough that cherry-picking will yield much in the way of results, nor provide the satisfaction of besting a mighty foe. That, and I've always thought of them as trying to do a sort of Hypercard-database-meets-wiki thing, which I can see being valuable, but is not really what would turn the crank of 90% of our audience.

I'll sometimes mention competitors here... but let's be honest, I think Ross and the Socialtext guys are doing some good work, and I'm not afraid to say it. They've got a solid application, have helped build awareness about wikis in the market, have generated some decent and well-deserved buzz, and seem like a decent, smart bunch of people. I know the work it takes to appliance-ize and scale an ASP application (we did that with the TeamWave technology a few years back).

Is Socialtext the market leader? I would tend to think so, though CourseForum and ProjectForum have a larger number of customers (we have a broader range of price points though, so while some sales are for more bucks than some of the Socialtext offerings, many are for less). But does it really matter?

There's a lot of room for different solutions right now, and I agree with Ross that the important thing is expanding the market, or in more meaningful terms, bringing this type of technology to real people to help them communicate and interact in new and better ways than they could before. There's ample room for everyone.

Frankly, if there's one thing I've learned doing collaborative software, it's that the software needs to get out of the way of people communicating, and everyone communicates differently. Now if that's not a predictor for having many different solutions, what is?

Enough Nonsense.

So Pauline submitted her resignation last week, though she'll stick around until April to properly wrap things up with patients, start sorting out her plans, etc. Unfortunate it had to come to that, but there was really no point in continuing the way things were going. We're both happy to have some closure on this.

Software Reviews.

Always nicer to get more thoughtful reviews that show someone spent some time thinking about it, rather than the usual rehashed press release. Spot on with the limitations and other observations too (definitely things we've been thinking about for a while).

Coffee Shop Software Company.

Story about Delicious Monster's "shared office space". Not a bad way to go. Have to say, even though I know they'd generated a ton of buzz ahead of time, I'm still very impressed with their first month revenues.

Cross-Service Tags.

Technorati has that up and going now. I guess the next step in the folksonomy evolution should be tag spamming...

Where are they now?

I don't know about you, but I always find it interesting to keep tabs on where people I've worked with in the past are at these days, which ones kind of settle in, which ones are doing totally new things, etc. Stumbled across a couple of articles recently about Orchid Partners, the early-stage VC company that David Friend from Sonexis started up; no surprise to see a few of the other senior people from Sonexis ended up there as well.