Whats the Plan?
Continuing with a little more boot strapping, this post outlines my plan for using this blog, and other mechanisms, to track information space exploration activities.
As noted previously the information space in question includes the evolving market areas for software applications and the current players, the technologies now available to build applications, the funding sources and business models being used by startups and larger organizations to support the development process, and (somewhat recursively) the tools and mechanisms to document such a shared information space.
Its worth noting here that my personal strength is, I believe, in the area of organizing and working with teams to build high quality software applications. My specific experience has been in the areas of Java development, Network Management, web-based apps, wireline and wireless VoIP, and (back in the day) AI and knowledge engineering. Like many of my peers I’ve had my head down for the last few years and now find myself having to catch up on a lot of the latest developments. As such some of my observations and discoveries will appear naive to those who have been more recently steeped in this stuff day to day. I believe, however, that as our industry expands in all directions more and more people find themselves in my position at the end of each gig. We put our heads down for a few years to get something done, maintaining only a general knowledge of industry trends and keeping up with the specifics of areas close to home. Then when we have the time to look around again the industry has evolved.
So what is my plan?
My plan is to use this blog to capture general information, observations, and thoughts which can stand by themselves; and serve as an interaction mechanism with the rest of the world. Then I’ll use my site on informationspace.net to capture more well structured and long lived information using a wiki and whatever other mechanisms prove to be useful. If I do it well the wiki, blog (and whatever else) will form a single integrated knowledge base. My hope is that this knowledge base will be of use, and contributed to, by folks other than myself; and that having put the effort in to getting back up to speed and documenting what we’ve found it’ll be easier to stay up to date going forward. I’ll also be putting specific actionable business and application ideas up on informationspace, sharing with folks that would like to be involved, and building up a database related to each idea in order to explore its feasibility.
As things evolve I’ll need to come up with a common taxonomy or indexing mechanism to categorize posts and wiki pages. Initially I’ve identified ‘trend’, ‘idea’ and ‘technology’ as categories I’ll apply to posts, some similar tags will apply to the wiki.