I had an interesting email from RHINO announcing that they are beginning ‘public development’ of their CAD software, i.e. using the crowd for iterative development via their feedback. This is mostly what AnarkikAngels is about and our website covers the main reasons for adopting a crowd sourcing model for developing Cloud9 as a haptic sketch/modelling application, plus funding the development. We spent the best part of 18 months investigating how best to do this, listening to both detractors, advocates and enthusiasts.
So it is very gratifying to read that Rhino are to use this type of model to develop their next version of their great CAD software from prototype to Beta to release.
Also, on the 4iP website ‘38minutes’, where I have joined 2 groups, one of these groups, ‘Crowdsourcing for Crowdsourcing’, started a discussion last November. One stream is about the value of developing a tool for crowdsourcing. I am kind of sceptical about this as there are so many different reasons for crowdsourcing and therefore various ways of doing this – can one tool cover all the methods needed for different types of crowdsourcing without getting overly complicated (I am a great advocate of ‘slow’ everything …. but what has slow got to do with complexity, hey!)?
I have been mulling over this idea of a tool as we are going to have to develop tools for our website to enable us to efficiently and fairly manage the feedback. This is not just about information to inform development but also needs to be the communication channel for a) digging deeper into the why’s and where fore’s within the feedback received and b) reasons behind how we select to develop one feature over another. Maybe the forum format is the best method, with blogs to cover other issues that are pertinent.
It will be interesting to see how this pans out as I also think that there are so many tools already out there it is just a matter of how these are pulled together under one ‘roof’ as it were, hoping there is enough compatibility between them to avoid the domino effect where one crashes, they all crash!
All comments gratefully received! See www.anarkikangels.co.uk
AnnMarieShillito's Blog 