Community, geeks and accounting

One of the great pleasures of attending IT events is that I get to meet interesting people, often for the first time. Last week while at SAP TechedEd I met Duane Nickull, senior evangelist for Adobe, punk rock musician, mathematician and all around fun person. He was leading a teaching session at RIA Hacker night on the joys of building applications using Adobe technology. Still awake? Trust me, it’s fun stuff.

Duane’s the only person I know (though I’m sure there are plenty of others) who derives genuine pleasure from reading the math problems shown in IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine. That’s seriously geeky! The pic below was taken when Duane hauled out his latest well thumbed copy to show what he means:
Ahem! All the same, I was curious to find out more about Duane and the following night a crowd of us (including Duane) shared dinner at an Art Nouveau bar/bistro/restaurant in downtown Vienna.

It turns out that Duane spends a lot of time traveling the world sending out the Adobe message to those who choose to listen. In that regard he’s a bit like my pal Craig Cmehil who is currently in the midst of the world wide SAP TechEd roadshow.

Like Craig, Duane makes videos and the one at the top of this post neatly encapsulates some of the things that community and geekiness have in common. If you’re not interested in code then ignore the last 10 minutes but please watch carefully what he says about community in the opening 8 minutes. As others have noticed, Duane sees that the 1-9-90 Nielsen inequality law applies to software developers just as much as it does to pretty much all other communities.

Around about the 4-5 minute mark, Duane is shown in conversation with developers in India. Pride in their work, a desire to achieve something that’s near perfect and a genuine pleasure in what they do seem top of mind. Professionals may not say so but I’m sure it’s something with which many can identify – even if only articulated to their peers. Why does any of this matter?

I’ve been thinking a lot about why professionals seem so reluctant to engage in community activity even among themselves. While you can never pin things down to single factors without running the risk of missing something, it seems to me that there are a few things in play that need addressing:

• Where are the evangelists, the community leaders who will spread the word about community value?
• The ‘what’s in it for me’ thing is not well addressed. Problem solving might be a good starting point.
• Where are the reward mechanisms for sharing? In the geek world, individual recognition is a given although there are times when people drop the ball. In the professional world? Not so much.
• One tends to think of software as proprietary to a vendor even though similar skills are required across different vendors. The same is true for professionals (think understanding tax codes) yet there is a fundamental difference in attitude between professionals and developers.) Code people like to share in order to learn. I don’t see that same desire for learning among professionals and yet at this time perhaps more than any other, learning should be a high priority. What do we need to do to change that?
• Community serves to foster a human-ness and helps develop relationships that otherwise might never happen. Professionals seem rooted in the notion that relationship takes place at the 19th Hole. That’s an incredibly restricting view. When I think about my own experience, some of the finest people I’ve come to know are as a result of using freely available technology. That could almost never happen at the 19th Hole. The immediate benefits are numerous, not least exposure to diverse thinking, fresh and/or alternative ideas from people who thrive with the notion of being part of something bigger.

Of course all this might be wishful thinking.

Bonus link: a video mashup of RIA hacker night showing Duane doing his thing

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Tagged as: Adobe, Craig Cmehil, Punk rock, SAP, sapteched09