collaboration over competition
TRANSCRIPT
CollaborationCompetition
Joshua StrebelFounder
1Thursday, September 9, 2010
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Competitorsor
Collaborators?
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Competition
• Animals compete over water supplies, food, and mates, etc.
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Competition
• Humans compete for water, food, and mates.
• When these needs are met deep rivalries often arise over the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and fame.
What’s up with Jersey?
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Competition
• Necessary and Healthy for business, but...
• Us vs. Them
• Silo’s of Information
• Zero sum game
• Marketing Charades
• Scarcity Mindset
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Collaboration
• Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals — for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature — by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus
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A Story
• 8 years in the business
• The Phoenix Skulls
• Gangplank (http://gangplankhq.com)
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BE DANGEROUS
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Gangplank Manifesto• collaboration over competition
• community over agendas
• participation over observation
• doing over saying
• friendship over formality
• boldness over assurance
• learning over expertise
• people over personalities
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1/3 actual size | total space is 16,000sqft
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Let’s Work Together
• 90% of patents are improvements to existing products (I made this up)
• Sometimes you must invent something new, but most of the time you can improve what is there.
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Let’s Work Together
• Pair Programming
• Side-by-side, or long distance teams.. 4 eyes are better than 2.
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Let’s Work Together
• WordPress forked b2
• b2 was a good product but inactive.. forking made sense to build upon what was there.
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Let’s Work Together
• 10,968 plugins in extend, most of them crap.
• Do we really need 110 (Tweet button) plugins that do virtually the same thing? Why not work with an author and improve existing code.
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Let’s Work Together
• More themes than you can shake a stick at, most of them crap. (and now frameworks)
• Why not design themes that are compatible with existing frameworks.
• Guarantee framework developers would promote your theme for you
• WooThemes has done a good job of bringing in outside designers
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What’s Worked for meYMMV
• Competitors can be your allies. (obu + drawbackwards + forty)
• Engage the tribe and tribal elders early. (page.ly + SP + Woo + Press75)
• Partner with specialists that do it better.(9seeds, wphelpcenter)
• Leverage existing products and services in a win-win-win. (you, them, and the customer)(page.ly + akismet, page.ly + themes, page.ly + firehost page.ly + vaultpress), mojothemes
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Speak up, we can’t hear you
• How are you Competing?
• How are you Collaborating?
24Thursday, September 9, 2010
Who wants a free iPad?
• Goto http://page.ly (upper right corner of site)
• Tell us why you love WordPress
• Ends September 6th
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