Minimum Viable Product

Stephen Bau -

How do we tap into the talent pool of the local design culture?

What is the business model?

This is a small market next to a large market. What are we selling? What problems are we trying to solve?

My own problems have to do with proximity to workplaces that might hire me. With the internet, proximity matters less than it did, but it still matters.

What is the product? What is the goal?

I was able to make my pitch to a design student. I realized that this particular student is my audience. I need to learn from this individual what we need to build.

Showing the slide deck and the lean canvas prototype was key to having a conversation about an idea that resonated with a desire to do something about climate change.

The vision of building a community and the strength of actionable ideas is the product.

Advertising would kill it. It’s not about selling widgets and being part of the attention economy. It’s about focusing time, energy, and resources toward what really matters.

It is still about attention, interest, awareness, and action. The action is not market conversion. The action is behaviour change. That starts with a change in mindset.

The question is, How do we create culture?

The general interest magazine also makes sense, because the problems we are trying to solve involve the interconnected relationships between all areas of life and cannot be about the modern magazine’s business objective of serving a particular audience and market niche.

The problem is universal. The solution needs to be universal.

Technology

What is the minimum viable product?

Glitch gives me some clues about what is next. The ability to connect directly with GitHub in a way that is easy for non-technical people to grasp is great.

Using freeCodeCamp as a learning platform is a way to on-board people.

Simplicity is key. Glitch reduces the friction for creating with code. It does this through design constraints. Node servers with limits that connect to GitHub.

The infrastructure is already built. Now, we need to help people learn how to use the available technology to do the next right thing.

Vox helps us understand the world. Who is helping us do the right thing?

The reason people are leaving religions is that they do not help us do the right thing. They are holding pens for people who think the same way. They are physical manifestations of our mental and social filter bubbles. They are polarization engines.

What can bring us together? I have seen a glimpse of what is possible through A Rocha. Caring for the earth and sharing food together is a universal good that is nourishing to mind, body, and soul.

Community gardens and community kitchens might be the place to start.

Tap into the culture of Delancey Street and Homeboy Industries. Home, community, education, work, business.

Learn about what people are already doing.

Vox media built Chorus to publish at scale. It’s about the advertising model.

Now, we flip the model. Empower people to create using free, open source tools.

  • Simple
  • Maintainable
  • Learnable
  • Flexible
  • Adaptable
  • Minimalistic
  • Inexpensive
  • Shareable
  • Collaborative
  • Respectful

The fewer dependencies, the better. Digital tools to connect people. Break out of the centralized model of media. Let my people go, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter.

Decentralized media will show people that apps and walled gardens are not the future. The future is about empowering people to do the right thing, to imagine, design, and build the future together.

The perfect CMS will build its own API. A database that exposes JSON and XML data.

Build from the ground up a system that can manage data within the browser.

COPE

  • Create once, publish everywhere
  • Central repository of data
  • Database
  • JSON
  • XML
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • Git
  • CMS

Why build my own CMS?

Symphony came close to being the system I wanted. But the software updates required have made it difficult to migrate. It has not been as portable as I would have liked. It could not export to static files easily.

The pieces need to be decoupled. The separation of concerns.

  • Data
  • Transformation
  • Structure
  • Presentation
  • Behaviour

That was the original model, the standards on which the web was built.

  • XML
  • XSLT
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JS

A platform for the people should be simple. We should not necessarily have to keep learning the next new thing. It should be possible to build better things on top of these standards, but these should be the foundation.

We have limits. The more we build, the more we need to maintain.