Beer Or Food (or clothing?)
I've just send the design for an Outerthought T-shirt to the printer. During the Cocoon GetTogether, we will provide food, drinks and clothing to the people of Cocoonia - we must be Samaritans :-D

No, no Cocoon logo on it, just our logo and byline.
4:20:22 PM    comment []  

Cluetrain
Yep. It has finally happened, even in conservative Europe. I must get my old copy out of my bookshelf and dusted. Due to email lists, instant messaging, weblogs and other tribal communication tools, it is sometimes easier to understand what is going on in a company than when viewed from the inside. The cubicle walls are apparently higher than the headquarter's skyscraper walls.

Thanks to the dotcom boom, people also realize there is no silver bullet. It's just work that has to be done, and I believe working inside and together with a community is much more fun and spiritualizing than trying to productize and sell everything.

Update: Matthew argues this can be a hard sell. If the business case allows us, we just provide the customer with a reduction if he is willing to release the code afterwards. Financial arguments always help. Also, we give him continuous access to the project, but only using "open source" methods: mailing lists with CVS commit messages, and the necessary knowledge for grabbing the sources and building/running them locally. They don't do patches right now, but even after some complaints in the beginning, it seems they are pretty happy with this way of working. After all, they happen to see how much work you put in the project on a daily basis.
4:15:53 PM    comment []