In the last 3 months, the LoveMachine has built 3 major projects, using about 50 contributors, at a development cost of about $30K US.  We’ve created an impressive shared chat client, a contract worklist that supports open development teams with small tasks, and the corporate recognition messaging system that is our namesake.

This is remarkable velocity.  There are still lots of open questions about the process, but I feel confident this is going to scale, and hopefully become a discussion point for the industry around how to do software development.  By developing a high-transparency shared environment and a very lightweight system for suggesting, bidding, and doing work we’ve gotten somewhere interesting and new.  What is hard to describe is how much more fun it is to work in this type of environment.  It’s very refreshing to have a software team where everyone’s card are on the table, contribution value is clearly articulated, and changes happen hourly.

The image below is a graph of fees paid to team members over these last 3 months.  It is fascinating (but unsurprising) that the graph has the classic power law and long tail of so many collective contribution architectures, like Wikipedia or Second Life, etc.   More to come!

LoveMachine Earnings

LoveMachine means several different things, some of which you’ll have to talk to us to figure out. We’re working on several different projects. We believe that the right band of people can work together, have a huge amount of fun, make a bunch of money, and try to save the world.

Right now we are two guys: Philip and Ryan. In the real world, we are wandering San Francisco looking for interesting alternatives to more conventional office space. Rather than applying for a job, you can start by just helping us out: Check the worklist, and see if there is anything that you can do to help – we’ll pay you by the job if you can. We’ll be changing it and adding things frequently.

You can also follow our adventures at our blog.

Love,

Ryan and Philip

We need a great looking wordcloud that is generated on the server as a graphic, so that we can put a frequently updating wordcloud on our site. We’d love to pay someone to develop such a thing for us, if there isn’t something out there already. I’ve put up contracts to build something on eLance and ODesk (search for projects from lovemachine), if anyone would like to jump in and help.

love,

Philip

We’ve been working on our first secret project, using a novel (well we think so anyways) dev approach involving lots of small simultaneous contracts. If you have PhP/MySQL/Apache experience and want to help, create an account on Elance and check out our projects. You can look up the stuff we’ve already done, and bid on new ones.

We’ll write up some notes soon about the experience so far – we’ve been working for about a week. It’s a really interesting meditation on how to try doing software development a bit differently. Right now we’re just buried in managing/starting/reviewing all these little contracts… it’s really really fun and very different from the traditional stay-up-all-night-coding approach to a startup.

…how very lovemachine. I was intrigued by the observation that if you read different blogs about what we are doing, the average picture created by reading them all is better than any specific one. This is so very self-referential, because the design of the lovemachine (the original company culture tool) is in part that the average of all peer opinions about you is the most accurate indicator of your performance.

Anyways… it is so cool and flattering to read the various postings about what we are doing! But, like that bloated horrific spacenavigator dude in Dune said… “I see plans within plans.”

Yes, we are working on making a version of the Linden Lab LoveMachine (and some other tools too), that hopefully we can sell to some companies and help them out.

No, that is not all we are doing.

love,

Philip

But of course, we just can’t do it the old-fashioned way. Enjoy our crazy craigslist posting in all it’s majesty.

You know, it takes time for these strategies to work. First couple days, quiet. But now! Some good entries coming in. Haven’t met anyone yet but we’ll get right to it on monday – the people completing all the steps in our challenge, well, they’ve just got to be worth meeting! Not a trivial set of assignments.

hey thanks for all the great resumes on the in-world office manager role too, we’ll get our act together on what to do next there soon too.

I’d include another picture of Ryan from his music video days but I’ve just gotta run off to dinner…

love,

Philip