How to Convince Your Company to Embrace Mashup Culture

Kevin Lawver

This is a presentation. If you'd like to view all the slides like a normal web page, you can.

Introductions

• Kevin Lawver - Web standards dork, microformats nut, newly minted Rails geek
• Alla Gringaus - Time Inc. Frontend Dev Lead
• Arun Ranganathan - AOL's AC Representative at the W3C, yogic cassanova
• Greg Cypes - AIM Developer, evangelist, golfer
• Steve Chipman - Javascript genius, artist, part-time amateur ninja

What Came Before

• Convincing your company to embrace web standards

What's Next?

• Once you've embraced open standards, the next step... open APIs!

What's Mashup Culture?

• Open
• Agile
• Data wants to be free
• Nothing is sacred, and everything can be squished, mangled or munged to make something new and interesting.

Why Mashup Culture?

• Entrenched processes engender entrenched thinking
• Get out of the ditch of the same old thing
• Innovate more quickly
• Allows for a sense of play, which can only help morale and boost productivity
  • (That one's for the managers)

Alla

• Slides

Arun

So, The Saga Continues

• Last Year's Story: Web Standards
  • Efficiency, Reuse, Elegance, Accessibility
• This Year's Story: Guerilla Standards
  • Community Openness.

Guerilla Standards: Case Study

• AOL and OpenID
  • Lots of Internal Debate, Discussions at Mashup Camp, and Blogosphere Stuff
  • And then: 63 Million Screennames can be used as OpenIDs
  • http://openid.aol.com/screenname
  • http://journals.aol.com/screenname or journals.aol.com/screenname/blogname
  • Ficlets accepts OpenID
• Liberty Alliance's Notions of ID
• Proprietary ID

Viva La Revolution

Greg

• Slides

Steve

• Slides

Wrapping Up

Don't Forget to Ask

• Nothing changes if you don't ask.
• Ask
• If you don't like the answer, come up with a better question

Embrace the Agile

• Show that things can be done quickly - embrace new technology
• Embrace small teams moving quickly

Example: Ficlets

• I asked if I could build a prototype as an experiment
• 2 copies of Agile Development With Rails
• 2 developers
• 3 designers on the main project
• 3 months from concept to launch
• Creative Commons and Flickr API
• Launched Wednesday, cuz why not?

Conclusion

• If we can move a large mature company with entrenched processes like AOL, you can move yours.
• Start small. Don't be afraid of prototypes and mockups
• Have fun. Mashups are about fun and exploration - so go explore!
• And get great people to help evangelize.