Inspiration and disillusion at Better Software, Firenze 2010

Better Software is a great italian conference at its second editon now. Better Software is about software development and project management, web and mobile, agile, startups, open source and making better software in general; it is an event Italy really needed, in fact.

At the conference, that gathered more than 350 people this year, I presented a different approach in web project management on an early-morning talk: Unconventional tools and tecniques for project managers.

The talk comes maily from some experiences in managing international projects, where we (myself and the Team, of course) have focused on getting more effective in improving overall quality also by adopting this less formal but more
powerful approach: creativity.
Slides are available on Slideshare (www.slideshare.net/francescociriaci/unconventional-tools-and-tecniques-for-project-managers).

Beside my talk I’d like to share my personal notes and opinions on the event itself: first of all it has been inspiring!

There are talents in Italy, incredible persons.

I really enjoyed and got inpired by Leandro (leeander.com) both from  stage and after (chatting about startups and self-tracking) and Giacomo Guillizzoni (www.balsamiq.com) which has deeply inspired almost all participants to the conference: the hint? “Be so good they can’t ignore you“. Morever he gave on stage one of the best representations of an “overnight success after ten years”.

Ciccarelli (working at the www.densitydesign.org) showing horribly wrong dashboards and giving great hints on data visualization, Andrea Provaglio (andreaprovaglio.com) on systemic approach to the organization and Andrea Santagata (www.banzai.it) on statups in Italy.

Content-wise I really appreciated Luca Mascaro (www.lucamascaro.info) on UX Agile Design (whose workshop I attended last year), Alberto Brandolini (ziobrando.blogspot.com) especially on the part on education and, last but not least, Fabio Castronuovo, not only for some great new elements for project management but also for the insight on Jazz :-)

And of course I need to thank all friends (including the incredible Develer Team, the organizer of the conference), colleagues and new great new people I met at the conference!

Then came also disillusion.

Francesco Cirillo (www.metodiagili.it) gave me the hint and I realized (again?) that in Italy there is still very little knowledge of agile, very little interest for quality in software, especially in web software, and I’m afraid also very little attention to UX. There are incredible persons in Italy and a widespread mediocrity.

Moreover: Leandro and other “veterans” confirmed that NO, I can’t make such a startup as Miomood in Italy (in Italian: noncelapossofarcela!). Let’s say that the probability lowers from 1:50.000 to 1:1.000.000.

It’s time to take some more risk…

Pagella del Web2.0 in Italia – Maggio 2009

La settimana scorsa sono stato a Better Software, prima edizione di una conferenza che in Italia veramente mancava.

I temi principali: progettazione agile, open source, web2.0

Il talk che mi ha colpito maggiormente: Interaction Design e Analisi dei Social Network di Davide Casali e Gianandrea Giacoma

Voglio ringraziare qui gli organizzatori per l’ottimo lavoro, in particolare Simone, Giovanni e Francesco, per la dedizione e l’energia che hanno messo in questa impresa!

La conferenza è stata l’occasione di fare un po’ il punto della situazione sullo stato del web/web2.0 in Italia. Da cui l’idea di una pagellina semiseria che, in base a criteri assolutamente arbitrari, cerca di riportare in modo sintetico il giudizio medio che possiamo pensare di dare al nostro paese.

Nota: i voti, come nelle antiche pagelle, vanno da 1 a 10.

 

Criterio di valutazione	Voto	Commento	Trend
Diffusione Enterprise 2.0	4	Interessanti presentazioni e discussioni, ma ben pochi casi di successo. Il rapporto “L’Enterprise 2.0 al tempo della crisi: la concretezza di chi osa” uscito da poco.	in crescita, con moderazione
Diffusione social network	6	In crescita, ma per la maggior parte ancora legata all’esplosione di Facebook in Italia	crescita buona
Capacità di web-marketing	3	Poche le aziende specializzate, pochi veri esperti, a detta di chi era presente alla conferenza. Questa offerta ridotta va insieme ad un ridottissimo investimento in web delle aziende.	in crescita, notevolmente inferiore a quella di altri paesi
Volume Web advertising	4	Roberto Ghislandi, nella sua ottima introduzione al marketing nel mondo web2.0, presenta numeri aggiornati sui nostri investimenti in advertising online: investimenti semplicemente ridicoli.	crescita di molto inferiore a quella di altri paesi
Volume e-commerce	5	Sempre Roberto Ghislandi ne parla nel suo talk. Discussioni successive, ma lo sappiamo siamo molto indietro.	crescita, notevolmente inferiore a quella di altri paesi
Idee e progettualità web2.0	7	A better software si è ritrovata una piccola rete di persone, aziende, progettualità. Molte idee, ma ancora limitate ambizioni di trasformarle in business su vasta scala.	in crescita
Business Angels & Venture Capital	4	Esperienze dirette e indirette riportate durante la conferenze; il consiglio di quasi tutti è: “meglio se vai in Silicon Valley a cercare, anzi, forse è l’unica soluzione”.	leggera crescita
Capacità di sviluppo tecnico	7	La comunità italiana degli sviluppatori, project manager, designer, information architect, ed esperti web è piccola ma molto attiva. Speriamo non emigrino tutti.	stabile
Legislazione e giurisprudenza	3	Elvira Berlingeri ha fornito un quadro molto completo e non proprio positivo della situazione italiana per quanto riguarda i rapporti tra legislazione e giurisprudenza e il web.	stabile

Valutazione complessiva

La media, in verità sarebbe più vicina al  4 e mezzo, ma, come a scuola, prendiamolo come voto di incoraggiamento.

Consiglio vivamente a tutti gli interessati di questi temi di scaricare dal sito di Better Software le slide messe a disposizione dai diversi relatori. Tutte le presentazioni che ho potuto vedere sono state veramente buone, ben preparate e molto chiare.

Speriamo che l’anno prossimo l’Italia arrivi almeno alla sufficienza!

Decoupling content structure and behavior

Here we go with the last brainstorm in Reflab, started from both an observation of what the (Zope3) technology allows us to do, recent product developments (such as geolocation or relations) and some works and thoughts by Martin Aspeli.

The basic idea is to rethink the concept of Content Type itself.

In a few words current idea of a content type in CMF/Plone is the sum of a data structure (the Schemata), plus some behavior (Note: the word “Behavior” is used in other technical contextes with other meaning: in this particular context meaning is purely non technical and related to what a content behaves in a CMS from the User perspective.)

Examples:

A News Item has Title, Description, a preview image, a text body, etc. as main fields (data). A News Item, because of it’s type, shows in the News portlet when published, and shows it’s preview image in listing, cannot be commented, shows in searches, etc. (behavior).

An Event has Title, Description, a text body, a lot of contact information, etc. (data). An Event shows up in the calendar portlet and Events portlet when published, shows in searches, can be commented, etc. (behavior)

This are very basic examples of course, but the should alreay give the sense of it.

So the question is: why content cannot simply be “newsable” or “calendarable” or “mappable” or previewable”, etc. despite its basic structure? In fact many simple behaviors are already separated from the data structure itself.

Here is a  uncomplete overview with some add-on products as well:

What I’d like to work on is on complete separation of the two (for all contents, defaults and add-ons): from the user perspective there are loads of use cases and scenarios where an extremely decoupled approach makes sense and would make the life of integrators and custom products developers a lot easier.

In fact this kind of new products development has already started: no more content patching or subtyping when you can adapt. And very interesting, tiny, small and simple products are popping up.

Still I’d like to point out that the process started from the very developer-oriented perspective and often the user and the integrator are left behind.

This is only a first braintorming on the idea, I’ll stop here for now. :)