Skip to main content

The Software Prosumer

The affects of prosumerism are well documented in the evolving economy of content, but the pattern applies equally well and valuably to software creation.

You are most likely a consumer, and if you're an American you think that is a Really Good Thing, most likely. The producers pushed that, and benefit from it. That is not to say we don't benefit from the relationship. Have you seen the price of tube socks at Wal-Mart? I can live with that.

Nonetheless, someone always has to complain, attack the norm, and think they know better. Anyone betting on the dominate future of the “prosumer” is likely right on that current negativity. We don't just read the news. We filter, amend, and combine it. Every novel today spawns even more words of fan fiction. Slashdot1 would be completely worthless without their prosumer users. The barriers between those who produce and those who consume are blurring and the two are mingling. The party is just getting started.

Prosumerism in Software Development

We already are seeing the affects and benefits of adapting the prosumer identity to software developers. Things like free software and Greasemonkey, which allows anyone with a little JavaScript know-how to alter existing websites, are good examples of the software prosumer. Ideally, the prosumer will consume more than produce, and what is produced can be consumed on the same level by peers. I think we have seen this with Greasemonkey and user scripts. I might not even use Firefox if it were not for the user scripts I employ. Obviously you can't say Firefox is somehow above or better than extensions to it which are more important to the user than the product itself.

There is an obvious lack of interest and motivation to promote the prosumer by software developers. You can attribute that to a subtle fear by developers in providing the users with a way of replacing them. The more development can be done among the users, the less real developers we need. However, we can also realize that the more development can be done among the users, the more can be done for the product by all. The more flexible we make our products, the more work the users will do for us. Prosumer software cultures are also great ways to get free marketing, dedicated users, and to satisfy user needs you could never find time for or even be aware of.

Plugin systems are a great way to encourage prosumerism. Some products are developed almost entirely as extendable frameworks, with all the “real” work done all in plugins. When the traditional producers work in the same environment as their prosumer base, the ability of those prosumers will rise. When the traditional consumers' only path to prosumerism is wrought with difficulty, hackish patching, and little or no producer support, the results do nothing but harm both sides of the equation.

The next time you're doing a project, keep some things in mind. If you need a new component and you could open the plug-in API a little to allow making it an extension, do so. If you can develop in an accessible (not compiled) language, do so. When you have some spare cycles, set up a repository of user contributions. A few small steps can go a long way.

Some examples and references:

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

CARDIAC: The Cardboard Computer

I am just so excited about this. CARDIAC. The Cardboard Computer. How cool is that? This piece of history is amazing and better than that: it is extremely accessible. This fantastic design was built in 1969 by David Hagelbarger at Bell Labs to explain what computers were to those who would otherwise have no exposure to them. Miraculously, the CARDIAC (CARDboard Interactive Aid to Computation) was able to actually function as a slow and rudimentary computer.  One of the most fascinating aspects of this gem is that at the time of its publication the scope it was able to demonstrate was actually useful in explaining what a computer was. Could you imagine trying to explain computers today with anything close to the CARDIAC? It had 100 memory locations and only ten instructions. The memory held signed 3-digit numbers (-999 through 999) and instructions could be encoded such that the first digit was the instruction and the second two digits were the address of memory to operate on

Statement Functions

At a small suggestion in #python, I wrote up a simple module that allows the use of many python statements in places requiring statements. This post serves as the announcement and documentation. You can find the release here . The pattern is the statement's keyword appended with a single underscore, so the first, of course, is print_. The example writes 'some+text' to an IOString for a URL query string. This mostly follows what it seems the print function will be in py3k. print_("some", "text", outfile=query_iostring, sep="+", end="") An obvious second choice was to wrap if statements. They take a condition value, and expect a truth value or callback an an optional else value or callback. Values and callbacks are named if_true, cb_true, if_false, and cb_false. if_(raw_input("Continue?")=="Y", cb_true=play_game, cb_false=quit) Of course, often your else might be an error case, so raising an exception could be useful

How To Teach Software Development

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Education is broken. Education about software development is even more broken. It is a sad observation of the industry from my eyes. I come to see good developers from what should be great educations as survivors, more than anything. Do they get a headstart from their education or do they overcome it? This is the first part in a series on software education. I want to open a discussion here. Please comment if you have thoughts. Blog about it, yourself. Write about how you disagree with me. Write more if you don't. We have a troubled industry. We care enough to do something about it. We hark on the bad developers the way people used to point at freak shows, but we only hurt ourselves but not improving the situation. We have to deal with their bad code. We are the twenty percent and we can't talk to the eighty percent, by definition, so we need to impro