The building43 manifesto
An interesting “manifesto” from the new Building 43 blog. Although I’m a little confused by the name (and the fact that they’re partnering with Rackspace, which hosts (among all the other sites) 43things.com, I like the spirit with which it’s starting.
The trend I’m seeing is that businesses are jumping on the non-zero sum bandwagon. By being open, responsive, attentive, generous, accepting, and friendly, all businesses both new and old stand a better chance of not only surviving, but liking themselves while they survive.
Here’s the full list because I think they’re greater as a whole than they are as separate points.
1. Live in real time. You’ll see several components on the site that incorporate Twitter and FriendFeed. We’ll be adding others, and we’ll be on Facebook and video sites in the near future. Your business and your life work at real time; so should your community.
2. Build on other people’s technology. We could have taken six more months and built our own forum, our own video distribution system, or our own content management system, but instead we just got started by using WordPress, Blip.tv and FriendFeed, among other technologies.
3. This is an industry-wide effort. You’ll see more than Rackspace and its customers here, and you’ll see things discussed here that won’t impact Rackspace’s business at all. At building43, we’re developing an industry-wide conversation about how to improve the Internet for everyone. We’ll help businesses and people use, and get excited by, new tools and technology.
4. Teach, don’t just hype. Hey, hype is important, especially for fanatics. When we get excited about something we love to hype it, and tell other people about it. But hype alone isn’t enough. We need to teach people how to use these new technologies, even ones we take for granted. You might know what an HTML tag does, or what FTP stands for, but many, many people and businesses don’t know what those things mean. And those are things from the 1994 web. Imagine how daunting stuff such as Open ID or Facebook Connect will seem to people who are struggling to learn the basics. Let’s try to get them there.
5. We’re a decentralized community. As much as we’d love you to visit building43 every day, we know you probably won’t. So we’ll publish to Twitter, to FriendFeed, to Facebook, to Blip.tv and to other communities.
6. Be open. That means all of our videos are licensed under Creative Commons so you can use the videos in whatever way you want. That means being transparent about where we’re going, what we’re doing, who we’re talking with, our goals, our successes, and our failures. As we build technology for the community, we’re going to aim to be as open as possible, giving away source code and building APIs that are simple.
7. Link to the best. I’ve been learning to do this on FriendFeed, where I’ve liked, or linked to more than 19,000 items. Please add your own links to great resources for people who are fanatical about using the Internet to help their business.
8. Be two-way in everything we do. That’s tough to do, even with technologies that let us listen as well as broadcast. But this community is a way for us to listen and learn, just as much as it is to talk and teach.
9. Build a community of friends. The Internet is a rough and tumble place. It’s easy to troll, to spam, to be a jerk, to argue. It’s hard to make friends and treat them well. We’re going for the hard road here. Why a community of friends? Well, we want to hang out with you around the world, and we like hanging out with nice people.
10. Stay up to date. We’ve watched other communities whither and die because, for whatever reason, they couldn’t keep up. We will be traveling the world, meeting with the best businesses looking for the newest thinking to share with you.