The World is Flat By Group 2 AKA Drew, Craig, Heather, Alex, Brian & Randi

Let the Flattening Begin…

Flattener #3 – Work Flow Software Let’s Do Lunch: Have Your Application Talk to My Application

Flattener #3 – Work Flow Software Let’s Do Lunch: Have Your Application Talk to My Application “I’m sure in Magellan’s time there were plenty of theologians, geographers, and pundits who wanted to make the world flat again. I know the world is flat, and thank you for your support.” Scott Hyten, CEO, Wild Brain

Flattener #3 – Work Flow Software Let’s Do Lunch: Have Your Application Talk to My Application Higglytown Heroes Recording Session: New York or LA Design & Direction: San Francisco Writers: Florida, London, New York, Chicago, LA, or San Francisco Animation: Bangalore

Flattener #3 – Work Flow Software Let’s Do Lunch: Have Your Application Talk to My Application When the walls went down, and the PC, Windows and Netscape browsers enabled greater connectivity, people wanted to do more than just send & pictures. They wanted to make things, sell things, create things, buy things, and read somebody’s X-rays, and do their taxes...from anywhere in the world

Flattener #3 – Work Flow Software Let’s Do Lunch: Have Your Application Talk to My Application The glory of vanilla… Software applications needed to be able to connect with other software applications quickly, easily, and efficiently. Therefore we entered the next stage…

Flattener #3 – Work Flow Software Let’s Do Lunch: Have Your Application Talk to My Application To get REALLY flat, not only did the software applications need to talk to each other, but internal departments needed to become interoperable… The Marketing Bone’s connected to the… Sales Bone. The Sales Bone’s connected to the… Accounting Bone. The Accounting Bone’s connected to the… ++=

Flattener #3 – Work Flow Software Let’s Do Lunch: Have Your Application Talk to My Application Next came the language translations… XML plus SOAP = data description language and transport protocol XML & SOAP

Flattener #3 – Work Flow Software Let’s Do Lunch: Have Your Application Talk to My Application Once this technical foundation was in place, more and more people starting writing work flow software programs for more and more different tasks.

Flattener #3 – Work Flow Software Let’s Do Lunch: Have Your Application Talk to My Application Standards don’t eliminate innovation, they just allow you to focus it. They allow you to focus on where the real value lies, which is usually everything you can add above and around the standard. Joel Cawley, IBM Strategic Planning Unit

Flattener #3 – Work Flow Software Let’s Do Lunch: Have Your Application Talk to My Application Customer to Customer (C2C) Transactions:

Flattener #3 – Work Flow Software Let’s Do Lunch: Have Your Application Talk to My Application The next level of standards will be about automating all these processes, so they flow even more seamlessly together and can stimulate even more standards…all of these standards, on top of the work flow software, help enable work to be broken apart, reassembled, and made to flow, without friction, back and forth between the most efficient producers… Joel Cawley, IBM Strategic Planning Unit

Flattener #3 – Work Flow Software Let’s Do Lunch: Have Your Application Talk to My Application We interrupt this angelic vision with a few notes from our little devil’s advocate…

Flattener #3 – Work Flow Software Let’s Do Lunch: Have Your Application Talk to My Application A few problems have arisen that make it clear that this software flow vision is not exactly seamless: -Time zone problems -Cultural problems -Software and hardware configuration problems -Educational compatibility problems -Language problems

Flattener #4 – Open Sourcing Self-Organizing Collaborative Communities

Flattener #4 – Open Sourcing Self-Organizing Collaborative Communities The open source movement for software involves thousands of people around the world coming together online to collaborate in writing computer code…building from the bottom up instead of from the top down

Flattener #4 – Open Sourcing Self-Organizing Collaborative Communities The intellectual form of open-sourcing has its roots in the academic and scientific communities where for quite some time self-organized collaborative communities of scientists have come together to solve a problem.

Flattener #4 – Open Sourcing Self-Organizing Collaborative Communities Apache software was web-based code for managing servers. This is the code that enables computers to host web sites. It was originally created by the National Center for Supercomputing. When they failed to make timely improvements on it, an ad-hoc group of programmers began to rewrite the code on their own. Eventually the community of programmers grew to over 1000, each making contributions that were peer reviewed before it was added to the base code.

Flattener #4 – Open Sourcing Self-Organizing Collaborative Communities Why would people want to work in this way? Friedman says it is all about ego. The people working on these problems feel they are pretty bright and writing a particularly tight piece of code is a way to show their peers just how brilliant they are. So open-sourcing is nothing more than a variation on peer reviewed science

Flattener #4 – Open Sourcing Self-Organizing Collaborative Communities Open-source programming is characterized by the collaborative innovation of many people working in gifted communities, as opposed to the industrial revolution where it was characterized by individual genius. More people = better sandcastles

Flattener #4 – Open Sourcing Self-Organizing Collaborative Communities But here is the rub. If everyone contributes their intellectual capital for free, were do the resources for new innovation come from? If there is no monetary motivation for improvement, who pays to make it better?

THE END