ADempiere Bazaar- Pioneering the Collaboration Economy

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"Twenty years from now we will look back at this period of the early twenty-first century as a critical turning point in economic and social history. We will understand that we entered a new age, one based on new principles, worldviews, and business models where the nature of the game was changed.

"These four principles—openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally—increasingly define how twenty-first century corporations compete. This is very different from the hierarchical, closed, secretive, and insular multi-national that dominated the previous century.

"The difference today is that the organizational values, skills, tools, processes, and architectures of the ebbing command-and-control economy are not simply outdated, they are handicaps on the value creation process. In an age where mass collaboration can reshape and industry overnight, the old hierarchical ways of organizing work and innovation do not afford the level of agility, creativity, and connectivity that companies require to remain competitive in today’s environment. Every individual now has a role to play in the economy.

"As these effects permeate out through the economy and intersect with deep structural changes like globalization, we will witness the rise of an entirely new kind of economy where firms coexist with millions of autonomous producers who connect and co-create value in loosely coupled networks. We call this the collaborative economy.”

Wikinomics p. 30

Don Tapscott

Anthony D.Williams

The ADempiere Community is uniquely poised to capitalize on the collaborative economy. The product core is designed ground up to flexibly meet varying and unique business requirements, giving the ability for millions of businesses and individuals to dynamically shape system business processes to meet their local needs. The established peer production community moves fast but in tandem, and there are individuals and sub-groups innovating on a number of levels, truly collaborative to an exemplary degree. Enterprise Business Software, by it’s very nature, requires the full spectrum of involvement, from network engineers, to business analysts, users, developers, dba’s, CEOs, customers, customers of customers. And finally, ADempiere has no traditional corporate structures to shed.

If ADempiere is so well positioned, the question arises, why involve a corporate entity? Is this not building a ‘Cathedral’ in the middle of the ‘Bazaar’?

The analogy comes from an essay written by Eric Steven Raymond. At first thought, the analogy may appear to be a comparison of organization vs. chaos. Taken as a guiding principle, that would argue strongly for no corporations. However, that is not at all the point of the illustration. Note these entries from the essay:

  • I believed that the most important software…needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time.
  • the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches … out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.

So the issue was not organization vs. chaos, but rather quiet vs. noisy, opaque vs. transparent, isolation vs. community.

Organization is inescapably inherent in every viable entity. Every cell, every body, every family, every tribe, every city, every club, project, and application manifests organization. After all, the English word shares the root with organic, implying that life and growth and structure are related. Thus the viability of ADempiere over time requires organization.

Again borrowing from Wikinomics: “Participants in peer production communities have many different motivations for jumping in, from fun and altruism to achieving something that is of great value to them. Though egalitarianism is the general rule, most peer networks have an underlying structure where some people have more authority and influence than others. Peering succeeds because it leverages self-organization.”

From the moment of conception, the ADempiere bazaar self-organized. Forums were started and a code repository established. Domains, websites, wikis, branding, and company names were all acquired. Then teams began to form, the ADempiere Council, the Commit Committee, and later the Business Development Committee. Each of these an interest group self-organizing the structure needed to build and grow for the benefit of the whole. The legal formality of a substantial corporation is an absolute requirement in the minds of many businesses that wish to adopt ADempiere, and thus the customer portion of our community demand self-organization here too.

The difference proposed for ADempiere is the precisely the one demanded by the collaborative economy: A company and business plans that are noisy, transparent, community driven. “Rather than something to be feared,” writes Tapscott, “transparency is a powerful new force for business success. Smart firms embrace transparency and are actively open.”

Thus, we develop here in the open the myriad requirements of business structure: charters, business models, participation.

Again from Raymond: “It's fairly clear that one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode. Linus didn't try it. Your nascent developer community needs to have something runnable and testable to play with.

So here we stand on the shoulders of giants. We start with business plans that have been used before. They provide runnable and testable business propositions, they are now there for you to play with.

Joel Stangeland April 24, 2007