Author Archives: navin

“Crowdsourcing” means that the project originator does all the work

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In a recent interview with Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux), I found this great quote by him. He is talking about something that people very commonly get completely wrong when creating an open-source or crowdsourcing project:

“The first thing is thinking that you can throw things out there and ask people to help,” when it comes to open-source software development, he says. “That’s not how it works. You make it public, and then you assume that you’ll have to do all the work, and ask people to come up with suggestions of what you should do, not what they should do. Maybe they’ll start helping eventually, but you should start off with the assumption that you’re going to be the one maintaining it and ready to do all the work.”

I have some experience with this, because 3-1/2 years ago, I made the same mistake. I started PuneTech with the naive belief that if I start a wiki with the purpose of creating a knowledgebase about all interesting technology in Pune, people would contribute to it and it would become a great crowdsourced resource. In reality, what happened is that I got lots of encouragement and thanks, but few actual contributions. I ended up doing most of the work myself. After a few months, Amit Paranjape joined the effort. But, by and large, the fact remained that most of the content had to come from me.

It is only now, after going at it for 3-1/2 years that people have started contributing more substantially. Vivek Shrinivasan and Meher Ranjan are actively updating the PuneTech YouTube Channel. Mayank Jain is creating the PICT PuneTech Group.

Moral of the story – when you start some new initiative in the hope that it will become a community activity, then be prepared to do all the work yourself for the first few years, and only then will it become a community activity.

Wiio’s Law: Communication usually fails, except by accident

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Just found this interesting set of laws, called Wiio’s laws:

  1. Communication usually fails, except by accident.
    • If communication can fail, it will.
    • If communication cannot fail, it still most usually fails.
    • If communication seems to succeed in the intended way, there’s a misunderstanding.
    • If you are content with your message, communication certainly fails.
  2. If a message can be interpreted in several ways, it will be interpreted in a manner that maximizes the damage.
  3. There is always someone who knows better than you what you meant with your message.
  4. The more we communicate, the worse communication succeeds.
    • The more we communicate, the faster misunderstandings propagate.
  5. In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be.
  6. The importance of a news item is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
  7. The more important the situation is, the more probably you forget an essential thing that you remembered a moment ago.

And there are three corollaries by Korpela:

  1. If nobody barks at you, your message did not get through
  2. Search for information fails, except by accident
  3. Give the student a chance to realize he misunderstood it all

These are all taken from this blog post.

At this time, I don’t have any thing else to add to these laws. But I’m sure that in the years to come, I am going to quote Wiio’s laws #1 and #2, and Korpela’s corollary #1 repeatedly to people. (Just like I love to quote the Three Chinese Curses:

  • Third Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times
  • Second Chinese curse: May you come to the attention of important people
  • First (and most dangerous) Chinese curse: May you get what you wish for

And this concludes my first ever parenthetical remark which has a bullet list embedded in it (And also concludes this blog post))

Rejoice: German-style board-games now available in India

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I have been a fan of German-style boardgames (aka Eurogames or Designer Games) for over 10 years now. My friends know that I have a big collection of these games, and this year, we’ve started the concept of ‘Games Night’ at our place where 10-20 people show up on a Saturday and play these games until Sunday morning.

I bought most of these games while we were staying in the US, and kept adding to the collection on every US trip. Unfortunately, my US trips have stopped, and my collection is now no longer fresh. That is why I was particularly happy to see this website which now makes these games available in India. Very cool. I haven’t ordered from them yet, so cannot comment upon their customer service etc., but hopefully soon.

Those who’re wondering what’s the big deal about these games is, here are the salient features:

  • These are board games, to be played with real people, face to face, not computer games
  • These are games that are not as stupid, and mindless as monopoly, but also not as brain-bending as chess
  • These games are designed to be played by families or groups of friends – lots of interaction, lots of fun, and get over in a couple of hours.
  • The games have beautiful components

For a more detailed explanation, see the wikipedia page