The Workclub is our free work cafe on Market Street in San Francisco, and it’s now OPEN!   We’ve had a good number of people show up in these first couple days, rapidly creating a very cool, creative space and culture.    Come and join us!  We are located at 1825 Market Street (at Pearl, near Guerrero).

The idea of the workclub is to create a cafe work environment that is a great place for mobile work:  Free coffee, lots of power, great street location, good music, and a clean bathroom.   Additionally, we hope to facilitate people actually meeting and working together with each other – for example you might drop in and get some help from a social media specialist, a bit of graphic design work, or help with an esoteric development topic.  All we ask of you is that you register for CoffeeandPower and login when you are here, so that we can put your picture and skills up on the wall monitors and website so other people can potentially find you or get help from you.

Some other fun/informative pictures:

The wall monitor shows who is in the club and what their skills/status is.  Great way to meet people!

Coffee cart, along with food and goodies dropped off by Workclub visitors.  Thanks!

That’s right… THREE different connections to the net.   We have cable, DSL, and line-of-site microwave bonded together behind our WiFi.   Typically about 10Mbps.

5Kw, 220V Space Heater.  You will not get cold here. 

Hi all!  If you are in San Francisco, and would be interested either in making a few extra dollars at lunchtime this week or getting some things done that you might otherwise not have time to do, read on and come help us.

We want you to help us test a new service, located at http://www.coffeeandpower.com.  It is designed to be a sort of live version of craigslist – a very open-ended system that allows people to buy and sell small things from each other, in real time.   We don’t know exactly what people will do with it (and we think that is a lot of the fun).   It let’s you create ‘Missions’ that are either small things you are willing to do (like teach me Spanish in Union Square at lunchtime), or small things you want done (like check if there is a line at BuyRite for ice cream).  It is early/alpha and lots of parts of it are rough, but it is useable and the money/missions are real.

The details:  What we would like you to do is help us by signing up and creating some missions, chatting, and just generally trying it out, around your lunch hour this week.   When you signup, there is a field for ‘Special Code‘.  Use the code ‘LOVE1‘ to tell us who you are.  If we see that code, we’ll give the first 100 or so people (if that many show up) some extra spending money that will allow you to try buying things, and we’ll also give you extra money if you manage to complete an actual mission (either as the buyer or the seller) with someone else in San Francisco, between the hours of 11AM and 2PM, this Monday through Friday.

Thank you!  CoffeeandPower is a part of our bigger vision about how technology can enable people to help each other and interact in new ways.  It feels like there is an opportunity for people (especially in big cities) to help each other out and add a lot of value, if there were just a fun/easy platform to make it happen.  We’ve seen this already with the Worklist, where many people with different skills have helped us to write our software, and now we’d like to see if we can do this on a broader scale!  If you can give it a try and hopefully get some use out of it in this early phase, we’d be very thankful!!

This recent video is a talk I gave down at Zurb in Campbell.  Don’t watch if you are looking for epic video quality or don’t want to feel like you are looking up my nose.    One hour video about Second Life, about entrepreneuring in general, and about our new efforts to create a different way of building software through the Worklist.  Good stuff in here talking about the worklist and how well it is working.

If you’d got a small software project and are considering using eLance or another freelance site to get it built, email me instead and try building it on the worklist.

Kevin Rose did this great video interview with me the other day at our new office on Market Street here in San Francisco.   We talked about stuff ranging from my first computer (the swap-meet purchased Timex Sinclair 1000 – picture below) to the ‘CEO Survey’ where at Linden Lab I would send out a quarterly anonymous surveymonkey survey asking everyone:

1.  Do you want to keep me or get a new CEO? <yes,no>

2.  Am I getting better at my job?  <yes,no>

3.  Why?

The video also includes mention and pictures are of our under-construction ‘Workclub’ where we hope to create a great open cafe space for the use of developers and other people who want to work together in a fun and stimulating environment where you don’t need to get up and buy a coffee every hour or so and get overly caffeinated.   Plus many many power outlets, 10Mbps+ dual-homed WiFi, and possibly even jerky.   More on this secret project when we get it ready to open.

Develop in very small/parallel contracts: Rather than hiring a core team of developers like a typical startup, we chose instead to break our work into small well-described chunks which were open to public bidding.  We wrote a piece of software called the Worklist to manage this process.  It lets us breaks large pieces of development into small pieces  that would typically take just a few hours to complete (our team has done 2,200 jobs over a years time, meaning an average of 8 per working day) – the average job had about $160 in fees attached to it.   We made the process of reviewing the code (see below), making a bid, getting a code review, and then getting paid for your work fast enough to allow working in these very small units feasible.  We also set up a sandbox system where on bid acceptance a developer could immediately login, start make changes and immediately view the results of their work as well as show them to the entire community of participating developers.

Keep all Source Code in Public:  From day 1, anyone has been able to see all our code as it is being developed.  The license isn’t open source, but the code is open.  This means that if you want to come and do engineering work for us, you can easily examine the code you are about to work on.  This is an important part of making the small jobs system work, because in order to be willing to take on a small job (for relatively less money), you need to be able to see the code before bidding.  Although there are certainly competitive risks to doing startup development with an open codebase, we think the benefits have greatly outweighed the risks.

Connect participants in a live chatroom: Although there are a number of people working from around the world on the software, they are connected by a live chatroom that we built allowing everyone to easily communicate, get help, and see what other people are doing.  This is a critical step – the feeling of working together on a project in this way must be like being in the same room together.  So we created things like notifications via SMS when jobs are ready to review, a searchable chat history allowing a new person to look up everything ever said about a topic, and a way to quickly ‘ping’ other developers to reach them.

Trust participants to set their own prices for common activities: When jobs are added to our system, developers submit bids for the actual development work.  But our process also has smaller fixed-fee items like code reviews or identifying and entering a bug that don’t make sense to bid on.  For these things, we simply suggested that developers set their own fees, choosing a number that was appropriate given their work, bearing in mind that everyone else can see their charges and that (of course) we might not accept new work from them later if we felt the charges were inappropriate.

Lots of interesting takeaways emerge from this experience.  For example, the graph below shows the total amount of money that different developers made during the year, from largest (around $30-40K) to smallest (about $5).  You can see that this has the classical ‘long tail’ seen in many internet distributed collective systems, like Wikipedia or Second Life:  There is a core of substantial contributors and then a larger number of people who do smaller pieces of work.

We were able to get help from a wider number of people with diverse skills sets, while still operating on the limited budget of a startup.  Having 100 people help to build an application is something that typically could only happen in a larger company – so for example we were able to do iPhone development, add real-time sockets for chat and other live data, link to Facebook, and get some very cool javascript data visualizations, without having full-time team members with those skills.  If you look at this curve it suggests that from a competitive perspective a company can perform better if it unlocks value in the tail by supporting this kind of a model – if not for all it’s development, at least for some of it.

Another critical discovery was how well and reasonably people behave and set prices when in a supportive environment with a high degree of transparency.  For example, the process we built for code review invites developers to review other developers work (required prior to check-in) and then simply add a fee for whatever they feel is a reasonable price for their work. Because these prices are public (anyone can review the prices charged by anyone else), they tend to rapidly settle to a fair amount without our needing to haggle over their value with the developers.   As an example, here is a typical job with fees for code review attached.   As an additional incentive, we’ve experimented with a bonus system where every month or so, the developers working together are given an substantial amount of money that they can electively give out to other team members working on the project in any way that they choose.  This sort of system effectively delegates bonus allocation to everyone in a way that further creates a strong self-supporting community.   This isn’t a surprising outcome, given the success of other decentralized peer systems like open source, but it is a novel step to apply it directly to compensation in a work environment.

Clearly there is an obvious and interesting comparison to open source software development, where participants can see and share all code, submit changes in parallel with a variety of different check-in processes, and (typically) aren’t paid.  Our intent was to combine some of the powerful aspects of the open source process with a model in which we actually paid people for their efforts.  It seems that we have been successful in this regard – the experience of live communication with other developers, peer reviews, and a diverse set of contributors feels very similar to the open source experiences we have been involved with.

Although our system is new and definitely will need lots of refinement as we grow (and we have encountered and overcome many obstacles already in building it), it shows great promise.  As an example, the majority of the live chatroom described above was built using our system in a period of about 10 days in February 2010 at a cost of about $5,000.  It was really exciting to watch the core system come online over a period of hours and days as the different pieces were tested, reviewed, and checked in by the contributors.  Having been involved in software development for a couple decades now, I’ve never seen anything built so quickly and effectively.

We are also interested in adding other software projects to the worklist, to see how well this process can build other systems and be used by developers other than it’s original authors.  If you have a project that you would like to host on our system, please contact us about how to get started.  And, of course, if you are a developer interested in joining us and working within this system for pay, please visit the Worklist, get an account setup, and start making bids on jobs!  We’d love to have your help and feedback.

LoveMachine is now backed by angel investment from a group of incredible people:  Mitch Kapor, Jeff Bezos, Bill Tai, Jed Smith, Mike Murray, James Currier, Chad Boeding, Divesh Makan, Mitch Zuklie, Stan Chudnovsky, Brad Hefta-Gaub, Marius Moscovici, Ryan Downe, and Philip Rosedale.

So don’t misinterpret our light-hearted spirit and experimental approach – we’re not kidding about this whole thing, and we’re also hiring.   We’re just starting work on our second project, which is related to digital currency, work, and live communication.  Join us!

I talked about how we are likely to inhabit and enjoy cities even when technologies like Second Life have made the necessity of meeting face-to-face irrelevant, which along with physical goods commerce (now in many cases also outmoded) are the original reasons cities formed.  We are a social species and we like to gather together and experience each other.   I bet that Zipf’s law, which can be used to predict the sizes of large cities and also showing that the largest cities get larger fastest, will continue to hold regardless of these changes. Perhaps we will make the largely abandoned skyscrapers (once used for all those work cubicles and meetings) into playgrounds or museums, the way we have already made many of the industrial sections of large cities into live/work lofts.   We talked about top-down versus bottom-up city planning, and both agreed that bottom-up would likely prevail given the speed of technology change and adaption outpacing what government can do.  We talked about Detroit – how it is an example of that bottom-up phenomena as the city responds to the huge change created by the end of auto industry there.   I love those images of the downtown returning to a forest, with trees and vines growing out through the windows of abandoned buildings.

We talked about how virtual worlds more resemble the real world than science fiction, and how we have built more of the real world with it’s chairs and walls and ceilings into them than you might have expected (though there are certainly lots of amazing work outside those bounds as well).   I suggested that this is both because we first build what we know and value, and also that we probably have an innate need to build safe spaces for ourselves, in much the same way that cells have walls and bodies have skin.  Perhaps virtual worlds, however unstructured initially, will come to contain these recursive, enfolded spaces of membership: the country, city, home, bedroom.

Finally, at breakfast the next morning, we talked about different world cultures and how the willingness to take great risk will increasingly be a characteristic of successful cultures.   That’s a favorite topic of mine.  The pace of technology change, as it increases, favors risk-takers with greater upside.  This also means that organizational culture will need to shift to support and reward more autonomy and risk-taking, which is of course part of what we are trying to support with the LoveMachine work sofware.

I was running a few days ago on the Golden Gate Bridge and encountered this sign, which is an icon-laden attempt to give you the rules about crossing the bridge on foot or bike.  Priceless.  Doesn’t the information just jump out at you?  The point I’m trying to make here isn’t to ridicule the designers of this sign.  Quite the contrary:  the thing is, some problems are just really really hard.  Too hard to figure out how to reduce to simple icons.  This sign is trying to convey a ton of information.  Read it and copy down the rules conveyed to text, and you will find they are really long.  There may in fact be a way to simply convey this with icons, but this isn’t it.

People always complain about how some site or some user experience or another needs to be made simple or elegant… “it should be like the IPod”.  But like Einstein said about the rules of the universe, there is a limit to how simple you can make things.   Comparing a site to Google.com, you have to keep in mind that the challenge faced by Google’s initial design was pretty basic – collect a line of text and do a search on it.  So, yes, an elegant design is discoverable.

But now consider editing your avatar in Second Life.  In this case you have a design challenge where you want to let a person sculpt their digital identity: change it’s body to look like anything they can possibly imagine, look at it from any angle, dress and adjust the fit of clothing, and attach and fiddle with things like shoes or jewelry that they have bought from other people.  This is a simply unbelievable design challenge to make simple.  You can just sit there all day and think about it, and not make it any simpler.  You can’t reduce it to some clean principle, like “just use pie menus!”.

We’ve worked on making a number of ideas simple here at LoveMachine, and I think we’ve had some great success.  Our worklist, for example, is fairly complicated in terms of what it needs to do, but we’ve made it  simple and fast.  My gut, though, is that it’s a problem that can be reduced to smaller pieces and then figured out in one’s head if you have passion and skill.  But by comparison most of the core UI problems in Second Life are much deeper.

It may well be that many design problems are close to impossible to solve or reduce to simpler versions without immense determination and probably some blind luck.  Like a bigger Rubik’s cube, or a ten-part fugue, there are just certain problems that we don’t have enough intelligence to make optimal solutions for using our version 1.0 brains.

I’m so happy these guys are making it work (they’ve been at  it for a couple years) with something similar to what we are trying.  It’s funny – when Second Life started there was another company in the space and their CEO was incredibly competitive and aggressive – was clearly unhappy we existed.  But I always (unsuccessfully) tried to urge him to realize that he was making a mistake.  Competition for scarce resources (or customers) is often assumed by early-stage ecosystem players to exist when it actually does not.  In fact, in the early days (and LoveMachine and Rypple are brave pioneers in the very earliest days of changing work cultures), the only real ‘competition’ is all the people who think your idea just isn’t going to work at all.  The people doing the same crazy stuff as you – those should be your allies.  The fact that they exist means you might just be right.  Also, selling stuff to companies (or consumers) in the early days is typically like being 2 peanut sellers in St. Marks square… there isn’t much need to worry about competition or pricing or whatever, because you could wander that giant square all day long and never run into each other or the same customers.

Slowly but surely, businesses are going to start adopting new models for how they organize themselves and value people.

That was my office yesterday…  I was completely powered by the sun, online via wi-fi.  Macbook Pro battery never dropped below 100%, as I sat in the full sun and worked, connected to everyone via our chat journal.   Talk about technology that will change our lives!  The solar cell that made this all possible (on the right in the picture) is a flexible cell – folds up to the size/weight of a book – printed with some sort of crazy nano-tech process onto a rubber/plastic substrate.   The solar cell, which you can buy here is about $600.  So for about $2,500 per person, you can equip your team with enough gear (MacBook, solar cell, and EVDO card for internet access when there isn’t wi-fi) to relocate your business to the nearest beach.  Look forward to many great pictures to come… LoveMachine-goes-the-beach, LoveMachine-on-a-boat, etc.   Wouldn’t you really rather work for a company that can spend a day a week on lawnchairs in a circle at a park?