… before the spark

[ by Bogdan ]

When I first thought about this concept I had absolutely no idea about business. In the fall before my first year of college (2007, that being), I went to this IT conference. It was mainly about open source technologies and how they can change education. It’s a nice idea and everything, but it there was a lot of talking and no facts. No on-going projects. No concrete results. No actual improvements or anything to work with.

… and that’s just plain annoying. 

And then I thought about …

… all these schools which have computers and networks … but that don’t have the right software, they don’t make the best out of the hardware.

And I thought… what if you could actually have a software which brings value to the educational process? What if software could make classes cooler and more fun and more productive?

What can computers provide and a blackboard cannot ?

Connectivity between users. Collaboration. Real-time, that is. Like, everybody working together. Sharing small contributions. Not like chat or e-mail. But as actually doing a puzzle together.

[ All these things went through my mind as I sat there, annoyed and bored out of my mind, looking at all those people yapping on about how things should be, could be or would be - if someone else did all the work]

[ Getting back ]

Ok. So what would this synchronized, real-time collaboration mean ? How would it be useful?

People (especially kids!) could draw. They could work on essays. Do reserach for papers. Presentations. Mind-maps and brainstorming. Linking stuff together. Lateral thinking. Diagrams. Schematics. Equations. Chemical formulas. UML. All that was just streaming through my mind.

It’s not like I’m working on something and you’re working on something and when we’re done we exchange the results. No, no, no. It’s like – for every small update or change – we both know about it, we both see it !

And there’s great potential in that – it’s like we’re thinking together. No just the two of us. But a whole team. A classroom of students. A group of programmers. More teams – team leaders and team members. All this scenarios unfolded…

Google had already done it – of course. Google Docs. But for some reason – the first thing that came to mind was Doodle. The Yahoo Messenger plug-in thing. Yeah. It’s pretty stupid. But when you want to be creative, you gotta start stupid.

I had (and still do) all this ideas about how many things people can do in synchronious collaboration. At first, I had no idea where to start. But but but – I knew that the power of such a platform would be in its ability to but together as many apps as possible. Not 2. Not 3. Not 15. As many as the users asked for. As many as the developers could come up with. So that was my first task on the to-do list: making this whole thing easily extendable.

If you want to add something – don’t recompile, don’t even restart the platform. This whole process of adding new apps should be interactive. And (?almost) in real time.  Just like everything else.

Damn, the very thought of such a thing made me forget about how bored I was..

… the best part is, I needed such a platform. As a student. As a programmer. As a random guy who had things to share and people to share them with.

Oh and one more thing. It should be persistent. The users should be able to save. To resume. To restore these collaborative sessions, regardless of their being blueprints for airplanes or sketches for how a new website should look like.

(… the ideas just kept coming and coming together …)

 

At the end of the conference, I gave them my feedback. I told everyone how sad is when everyone is talking and no one is actually doing anything. For education. For the development community. For the open source community. I told them I’d rather work for a corporation which actually does something (evil, massive, proprietary software) than contributing an “open” community which does nothing. I even told them about my idea and they thought it was really cool – but I doubt they would remember it today.

Anyways, that’s how I got the idea. I had no name, no plan and I had bigger plans at that moment – I was focusing on getting this job as a research & development programmer (and I got it ).

But the whole synchronious collaboration concept got stuck in my mind. Deep.

Explore posts in the same categories: Concepts, Stories

Tags: collaboration, creative, idea, potential, spark, start-up, synchronisation, team

You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.