Developer Science: Analysis Framework

Alexis Tocqueville

The art of association then becomes, as I have said before, the mother of action, studied and applied by all.
Alexis Tocqueville, Democracy in America

At every moment in the history, human communities have been a way to spread the knowledge. Randall Collins has shown in his amazing book The Sociology of Philosophies, the effects of the communities of philosophers and scientists in the development of the philosophies. The foundation of institutions such as the Royal Society has been influenced by networks of people surrounding specific individuals such as John Evenly or Giovanni Domenico Cassini. Those days, the communications were in Latin and by postal mail, but the networks of people were very similar way to nowadays.

Recently, users and programmers of mainframes IBM OS/360 and mini computers, such as the PDP family, created a community about these technologies. The first versions of UNIX were distributed also in a dedicated community of academic centres. You can get a great story about these times taking a look of the classical The Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick P. Brooks.

Certainly, communities have flowered around software production as in no other technology or science. It might be the reduced needs of capital (CAPEX), have lowered the barriers for newcomers, students, freelances and fans of software development, skyrocketing the production and fostering the innovation. Moreover, FLOSS licences and Internet as a platform have created the perfect ecosystem for one of the most successfully open innovation experience.

Currently, the developer concept includes not just programmers with high technical skills, but also other people with low or even null technical skills, contributing to the open innovation process. The analysis of the technological, sociological and economic effects of  this knowledge management for open innovation arena and technological transference between different stakeholders, bring us to a new expertise area which we could call Developer Science or DevSci.

Understanding properly the developer communities requires an analysis of the historic development during the last three decades. Assuming that alternative views are acceptable, a proposed analysis framework is presented below. In my experience, it is very useful to design strategy for a developer program i.e. technology transference in open innovation scenario.

Mr. Kahneman and behavioral economics

Daniel Kahneman

It is difficult to find a book where the author blends a beautiful story of personal commitment with the science, a great discovery which changes the fundamentals of the economy, defeating the monetarism, and finally, a new trend on public affairs which starts a revolution on politics and economy of public goods.

In "Thinking, fast and slow" Mr. Kahneman is a storyteller that from the epistemological point of view, shares with the readers what he and his friend Mr. Tversky have been doing for a a whole life: finding questions and trying to answering them. Even though the book is not a biography, the author includes small snippets of his life, showing a undeletable commitment with the science. And everything seems to be so quite, so peaceful, just walking around during many hours at day, just talking with Mr. Tversky about the human and the rational decisions. Their experiencies should be a mandatory subject for every young researchers. Even I would say more, a mandatory subject for every STEM college.

From a scientific point of view, Mr. Kahneman and Mr. Tversky, across many years, were profiling how the humans think, finding at the end a new rational human being, with a richer concept of “rational’. As he said in his conclusions, it isn't a matter of irrationality, but just a richer concept of rationality. The remembering self and experiencing self bring a new schema for marketing and even more important those concepts could mean the end of the monetarism and the idea of the markets as we have been knowing so far. The contributions to the economics, psychology and sociology are endless: analysis of heuristics and biases, prospect theory, his contribution to the happiness theory or his model of rationality (System1/System2) are so important that it is worth to read the book at least a couple of times.  Every activity we do in our life has been affected by his scientific work. Every manager/entrepreneur/technologist  should read at least the chapter The Engine of Capitalism.

Finally, the Conclusions chapter contains one of the most interesting insights about public affairs that I never read before. Barely Mr. Kahneman exposes how, the new idea of rationality means the end one of the pillars of the monetarism. Even more, taking account the current situation about the economics and the disastrous effects that the debts have produced in the world, many people are thinking to bring back the Nobel prizes of Mr. Friedman's and the rest of the Chicago School. But more important than that, it is the actions taken by English Government enlightened for Mr. Kahneman and many others: the creation of the Behavioral Insight Unit or Nudge Unit. Don't miss their blog for more information.  Hopefully this will help the renewal of the many traditional politics, without answers for the current times.

Therefore, this book is totally a revelation.

Developer Science: Segmentation

Introduction

This is the first post of a series about my experiences in developers program management. It is a very personal point of view but, no doubts, it includes many insights from my work as teacher in a Computer Science school,  after as community coordinator in a open source community, Morfeo Project, and lately, as Developer Program Manager in BlueVia.

First of all, I have to clarify that my vision of developers program is a scientific vision i.e. the management has to be scientific, including segmentation, product definition and tracking with proper metrics. Many useful strategics and tactics can be extracted from educational industry (mainly STEM universities), organizations working on technological transference, knowledge management, open source communities and, obviously, technological star-ups (technology adoption cycle). Some useful references are [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9].

Aircoin: topping up digital currency

Nowadays, mobile payment platforms are one of the most active hypes of the technological arena. Banking and telecommunication companies are looking for a new era of services. Without the constraints of consolidated banking system, emerging countries provide the right scenario for testing new ideas.

Million of new mobile users, and a rich entrepreneurial ecosystem, provide the right scenario for a Cambrian explosion of disruptive innovations in banking throughout mobile companies. As usual with disruptive innovation, the ingredients can be very simple: provide liquidity to airtime (mobile prepaid time) throughout a digital currency.

The creation of a new digital currency, the aircoin, would introduce secondary markets for airtime, increasing their size, unblocking the users' money stuck in the mobile top-ups. Obviously there are still many details to be concreted, but defining a APIs platform for aircoins exchange seems to be rather easy.

Indeed, following an open innovation approach, it could as simple as providing to developers with an API to exchange top up between mobile users and just seeing what might happen. Besides to the entrepreneurial spirit, the phenomenon mobile first could do the rest. Successful experiences such as M-Pesa, Bitcoin, Ripple, Octopus Card or Chipknip could show the potential of the idea.

Walking one step further, the future MVNOs could provide complete solution for communication, messaging and payments based only on APIs and client app for differents platforms of hardware. I got some ideas about business models, but I prefer to keep them in my mind yet.

Thoughts?

La luz de vuestra desdicha

Ay de los que abrazáis la doctrina, por miedo a la pregunta...

de los que ansían la tierra firme, ahuyentados del nadar del lobo..

Ay de los que no esperan a morir para abandonar...

No existe resguardo para la tormenta... 

Abrazar el infortunio, lo azaroso, bendecid la angustia,..., sera la única luz que iluminara vuestra desdicha..

Cabalgad, malditos, la agonía de vuestro tiempo

Epistemological modesty or our deepest mistery

Compiling dozens of references to the latest researchs, The Social Animal, by David Brooks, includes sparks of knowledge illustrating how much we actually don't know about ourselves.The technology, the progress have put the human monkey in the middle of a challenging society. Surely, the story about how a fast development of technology, end up destroying a society of intelligent human beings, has been wrote by some fiction science writer already.

So, it's true. We are our deepest mystery. Our life, is an emergent system, where the whole is not the sum of the parts. The essence is on the connections.  Our society is a society of mysteries. We dive in a ocean of complexity. Let's illustrate the challenge in the following way: The humans prefers patterns of fractal density of 1.3. Is there any value, in terms of fractal density, of our society as emergent system? Could be this (the distribution around 1.3) a measure of the level of social conflict?

In our painful way to wisdom, it seems to that we have lost all the valid moral / emotional frameworks. Once again, the moral. And once again, how we need moral references to survive. If the genes are our evolutive baggage of millions years; the culture is the acummulated experience of thousand years and the family and the education are the evolutive tools for the contemporary life, then, the moral seems to be the evolutive chain connecting daily experience with the DNA.

The selfish gene survives thanks to the moral.

Animales en la máquina del tiempo

¿Qué es incendiar una ciudad comparado con mostrar el infierno a los hombres?

Durante el siglo XIX y XX se introdujeron propuestas de orden moral a la búsqueda de la justicia social, signifique esto lo que signifique. Estos nuevos enfoques sociales, gestados durante la revolución francesa, fueron sazonados por el trágico revulsivo social que supuso la revolución industrial. Las corrientes materialistas de mediados del siglo XIX tuvieron un desenlace sangrientamente esperanzador con las revolucion rusa y china. El horizonte de un nuevo regimen social aparecia al alcance de la mano. Millones de personas fueron parte del experimento; millones de ellas murieron, literalmente, y muchos millones permanence, aun después de recuperadas las libertadas, alieneadas, según puede desprenderse de la situación actual en la antigua Unión de Republicas Socialistas Sovieticas.

Mobile heart for Mozilla Persona

CC By-SA © 2011 Andrés Leonardo Martínez Ortiz. Some rights are reserved. This document is distributed under the ”Attributions-ShareAlike 3.0” Creative Commons License available here.

Why emerging countries need that Mozilla Persona includes MSISDN as identifier.

Nowadays thousand of millons people are using Internet. To them, digital identity means blogging, mailing, social networking but also it means financial services, e-Health or e-Government. The uncontrollable growth of services has created multiples autentication processes, appearing many identity's holders, making harder the security and UX. As a conclusion, digital identity is a highly risk business for everyone.

Digital poetry a.k.a human bytes

CC By-SA © 2011 Andrés Leonardo Martínez Ortiz. Some rights are reserved. This document is distributed under the ”Attributions-ShareAlike 3.0” Creative Commons License available here

A veces noche,
a veces, rio
a veces piedra,
y otras frio.
A veces sueño
a veces, vivo
a veces hoja,
y a veces filo.
A veces, llanto,
y otras brillo
A veces muerdo
y a veces, solo a veces, rio.

La secta del mal *

El lenguaje es una bella locura, asi que elogio,... elogio pues a la locura.

Vivimos tiempos de sectas, azules y púrpuras. Bajamos la guardia. Una vez creimos desenmascarar la secta del mal, pero si bien la cruz es el peor de todos los árboles, el bosque sigue poblado.

Deberiamos haber roto mucho tiempo atras las tablas de los eternos descontentos, ya que quien no puede mandarse a si mismo debe obedecer. Y ahora descubrimos que el camino no existe. Que el invierno es el domador de todos los rios.

El dolor dice: pasa y acaba.

Creimos que para quien tuviese la voluntad del leon, conocer sería su mayor alegria. Pero descubrimos que ya no es época de reyes: lo que hoy se llama pueblo no merece rey. Mucha cosa es siempre dos, cuando no miles.

Si ha de parecernos falso toda verdad que no traiga consigo, cuando menos una alegria,... !En pie pensamiento vertiginoso, surgido de lo mas profundo de mi ser. Yo soy tu canto del gallo y tu alba matutina, dragon dormido!

* Ensayo creado a partir de extractos de la segunda parte de "Asi hablaba Zaratrusta", reformulados bajo mi propio prisma.

Hacia el abismo de la sospecha

CC By-SA © 2011 Andrés Leonardo Martínez Ortiz. Some rights are reserved. This document is distributed under the ”Attributions-ShareAlike 3.0” Creative Commons License available here.

En quien quiere ser justo hasta el fondo del alma la mentira misma se transforma en filantropia.
-- De la mordedura de la vibora

Asi pues parece como si F. Nietzsche arropara a la naturaleza de carácter moral; sea porque la razón es inalcanzada o superada, su negación nos arroja la sospecha como instrumento no ya mayeutico, sino existencial. La razón, es donde se refugian aquellos acobardados por el mar abierto, aquellos temerosos del nadar del lobo.