Anil Dash Follow-Up Session

Convener: Anil Dash (@anildash@me.dm, @anildash.com)

Notes

• Book Recommendation: The Information by James Gleick

• Hypertext theory - creating tracks and trails of links.

• Trick is how to get people who are new to the community to see the specialness of the communities of the web?

• Anil (paraphrased by me): social aspects of communities: ’learn how to write an app via my grandma’ This hasn’t happen, yet it does for learning to cook, play guitar etc.

• Casual Finance YouTube Channel to check out (Stefan)

• Anil: Broad pattern –> if a regulation or a policy makes it that there is only a fee/price associated a law it’s just a fee/price. It’s a constraint on the less wealthy. A constraint to be gamed… Investors are going to see a new constraint and work around.

• Constraints make rich people work around them.

• Very different world than what we were in during the early days.

• “We’re the mammals. We want to make them the dinosaurs”

• The fickle are fickle enough to go back

• Hypersolve a problem we’re having today

• How specific and narrow can we get. To help people solve a issue that is unsolvable that a big company can’t do and won’t scale

  • Personal and specific

• WordPress and what’s going on with Mullenweg and Silverlake

  • Avoid what’s going on with WordPress

    • It’s complicated, it’s been interesting to watch.

    • Power effects people.

    • Omarki « Centralization of control in open source

    • Manifestation of the BDFL not being so Benevolent

    • Open source at it’s best are movments

      • But need to be leadered not not lead.

• Anil Dash said roughly “When I was a CEO at a company I spent 5 minute per day on the product. Every time I woke up I was going to look at the worst problem in the company. And that was rarely the product.”

• Consider “Good Governance” at a particular point in time. Things change over time.

• Anil: If you hate AI, build your own AI (most people don’t know how to deal with this)

• growth of open platforms strategy ideas

  • mostly don’t know we exist and if they do think that’s where those weirdos are

  • easiest thing to do is to stop leading the community

  • anti-pattern stack overflow, wikipedia?, other open platforms - quiet leaders allow vocal minority of difficult users to remain and end up driving community away.

  • encourage participants to care more about leading the next phase of growth rather than fearful of the pushback

  • find ways to invite public to join out of joy of open networks rather than fear of big tech

  • people look to peers to guide reaction thus positive engagement is a powerful practice

• match the expectations of the billions of users

  • e.g. gmail as infrastructure vs running own email servers