Input CoWork Nanaimo Tech Meetup Notes

[boris]

On July 17th, we went over to Nanaimo for the day:

Coworking in Nanaimo + Input Cowork Nanaimo Tech Meetup

We're going to be spending Wednesday, July 17th over in Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, and are hosting a tech meetup in the evening. This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://blog.fission.codes/coworking-in-nanaimo-input-cowork-nanaimo-tech-meetup/

@patdryburgh joined @expede and I, and did a fantastic write up and photos of the whole day:

A day in Nanaimo — Pat Dryburgh

Thanks, Pat!

For the lunch time Input Cowork members-only session on product thinking, I shared a couple of follow up links:

Pirate Metrics, as a way to think about how customers engage with your product and truly use it:

AARRR Framework: Metrics That Let Your StartUp Sound Like A Pirate Ship

Useful framework for thinking about how to onboard / get people to use your product or service. These are totally custom for every product, but can be useful in building hypotheses about what matters / what works in getting usage. Acquisition: this is initial sign up. You might want to say this is email sign up and verification – that someone came in, waited for a verification link, and then came back. Activation: this should be doing at least one core action of your product. eg. for a mu…

Stewart Butterfield’s memo on “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here”, in thinking about what you actually sell with your product:

We Don’t Sell Saddles Here, Stewart Butterfield, 2014

There are many quotable quotes. The concept is, we “win” by having people adopt and care about the outcomes enabled by the software and services we sell. The saddle — the product itself — sells itself. Encouraging people to explore decentralized web tech, build open source components, take control over their data, adopt specific technologies like IPFS — all of these are things we can promote which lead to increased usage of our product. Despite the fact that there are a handful of direct co…

Tech Meetup

In the evening, I gave a slide-less talk about Open Source, and about how we need to start promoting and sharing the base principles about it again. And that maybe, we need something like the GPL, but for data, that means data remains open for users of an app.

The actual process of creating code together rather than the legal license is something that I’m exploring a lot. See Commons Based Peer Production for further reading:

Explaining Commons Based Peer Production, er, Open Source - Ted Leung, 2005

https://www.sauria.com/py-bin/pyblosxom/pyblosxom.cgi/computers/open_source/1233.html The problem with the term open source is that everyone means something different when they use it. Some people just mean licensing. Some people think of a particular community’s set of practices. Others think that it means some kind of fuzzy democracy and mob rule. Covers open source not as licensing, but as the collaborative practice of making together.

@expede gave an updated IPFS 101 talk, which included a bit of a talk about the opinionated serverless framework, Asimov, that we’re starting to plan. You can check out the IPFS 101 presentation on Notist.

• Sign up for alpha test access at https://tools.fission.codes
• Further background and links on the FISSION service in the Dev forum

Finally Carson Farmer @carsonfarmer from Textile gave us an overview of what they’re building with Textile – sort of like an open source, distributed iCloud:

• Textile developer tools/docs: https://docs.textile.io/
• Textile photos app: https://www.textile.photos/ – you can use this link to join a group I made for the event
• Presentation slides: Dropbox - File Deleted - Simplify your life

And yes, Textile hiring, looking for a GoLang developer.

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Thanks to Adi & the Input CoWork / Logic crew for hosting us!

We’ll do a similar event in Victoria in mid-September – sign up to get notified when we confirm it.