It’s a bright morning in AZ- I am happy to announce that the Grid7 site is live! This project has been a labor of love for the past few months and I imagine this is about how a parent must feel when watching a child graduate and enter a new phase of life. Visualize for a second this scenario: you’re working with brilliant people who contribute their skills to help you execute an idea you have for a side project – one that has been on a backburner and you wouldn’t have done on your own otherwise, but given the “perfect storm of contributors,” it’s something that ends up coming together painlessly and now runs in the background generating passive monthly income. In exchange for the help you receive, you contribute your unique skills to bring their ideas to life and all the while using free hosting, specialized collaborative tools and access to a pool of contacts to make things happen at 5x normal speed. The osmosis effect alone of surrounding yourself with all these experts in their respective complimentary fields is that you absorb huge amounts of knowledge of relevant, peripheral skills which you can then apply towards your day job. But your day job gradually loses whatever appeal it might have had because you’re now waking up in the middle of the night with eureka-type moments centered around these project ideas…
Well we’re one week into the pilot program for Grid7 with a team of project assasins hand-picked to be our charter members and so far this comment from Matt (one of the pilot members) sums it up best -> “this FAWKING rawks.”
We will be working closely together over the next few months to implement a handful of the proposed projects in order to prove the cooperative model. Rather than explain the whole Grid7 concept here, I would instead invite you to cruise around the new site and discover for yourself what type of idea could possibly generate enough thought and dialogue to make an 8′ whiteboard look like this.
I’ll be sharing what I learn from our pilot program over the next few months on this dedicated Grid7 feed here . I _can_ say that countless hours of thought have gone into this effort and that at the very core of this whole thing is the noblest of intentions to bring people together to build cool stuff and to ensure that toxic work environments like this one go the way of the dinosaur giving way to ultra-efficient, ad hoc teams of specialists working together cooperatively to realize their dreams. There’s little chance you could have the level of excitement that we in the pilot do right now but if you have something to say about any of this, let us and the rest of the world know. And if this idea we’re proposing resonates with you and you want to be considered for membership to the Grid, fill out an application on the site and help us all… Build Something. BIGGER.
-sean
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Sounds like a great idea, but does the world really need another exclusive CF Coders Country Club..? Too bad it couldn’t be more inclusive.
Jay,
it’s not specific to CF- in fact it’s not specific to programming at all. Sorry if that isn’t clear from the site but check out the news annoucement regarding our ilot- we’re actually using all Ruby on Rails for this first round of apps. The Grid will be heavily developer/designer centric for the purposes of the Pilot but we anticipate inviting people of all realms to contribute their skills to launch these projects. I would personally love to see us have an accountant, a patent attorney, a tax attorney, marketing and sales members join immediately after the pilot concludes. We need to stay focused at least for now on testing aspects of how we can collaboratively work together to prove it though so we’ve weighted the group heavily with the skills that will help us get some quick wins under our belt.
Sorry if this wasn’t more clear from the post- total agreement that the world doesn’t need another CF clique. My blog is syndicated under the CF section of fullasagoog and mxna so perhaps that’s where the confusion stems from. Give a closer look at the site though, I think you will be surprised how open we’re actually trying to embrace things. It’s not about focusing on developers, it’s about focusing on people who have big ideas and are good at something.
Sean
Thanks for your reply, Sean.
When I made the comment about inclusiveness I was trying to suggest that it would be GREAT if you could find a way to share with the community the output of the "Creme de la Creme Brain Trust" that you are assembling with Grid 7. For example… Grid 7 Blog with code samples, project management approaches, toolsets, etc. etc.
Hope that’s clearer… ;-)
Jay,
that’s definitely the plan. We’re setting up a dedicated blog for the Grid7 site for us to share not only lessons learned about the cooperative business aspects but also for our members to feed back code samples and aha moments to the community. It’s essentially an opensource approach in a private environment if that makes any sense.
sean
Sean, you can find my email address on http://www.jimjeffers.com :)
what time is the meeting on Sunday? And where? I already have some things I have to do but I really want to go.
P.S. I have a concept written out for a project I’ve been wanting to build for a long time now. I’ll share it with you at the meeting. The teaser page is all I ever made along with 10 page document describing the service.
Jay,
that's definitely the plan. We're setting up a dedicated blog for the Grid7 site for us to share not only lessons learned about the cooperative business aspects but also for our members to feed back code samples and aha moments to the community. It's essentially an opensource approach in a private environment if that makes any sense.
sean