I discussed my visit to CALM Alpha and the new Kanban certification scheme with a client yesterday. We came up with a few ways to monetize knowledge.

Ways to monetize knowledge:

1. use the knowledge in your work, get paid for the work,
2. encapsulate the knowledge in a product, get paid for the product,
3. put it in a book, which is one kind of product. Except books don’t make a lot of money. Books can be an accelerator of other ways,
4. create a training around it, sell the training,
5. do consulting on it,
6. certify others to give the training, take a cut of the training revenue, or sell the certification,
7. spread the knowledge under an unclear license, and later harass people into paying (also known as the planning poker model),
8. certify others to practice the knowledge. Sell the certification (repeatedly by requiring periodic re-certification),
9. use the knowledge to build a product that is not about the knowledge.

Or a variation on the last, find a problem, use all your knowledge (which is a superset of “the knowledge” by a fairly large margin) and build a product that solves that problem. Get paid for solving the problem by selling the product (or licenses, subscriptions or heaven forbid ads on the product).

A wise person said yesterday at the eXtreme Tuesday club: “You need to decide whether you want to share or not.”

Some ways encourage sharing. Others do not.

We’ve done a small safe-to fail experiment with one of the certification pyramids. I’m not sure whether it has had any impact, positive or negative. If you want me to write more about it, contact me, or better, leave a comment .

You may also want to read what Liz Keogh wrote about Cynefin licensing and what Chris Matts thought of his visit to CALM Alpha. The comment threads to both posts are well worth a read.

Which would you choose? What do you see as downsides or upsides of each of the ways? Are there better ways?

Semi liveblogged on the train home to Bath. Dissent, ritual or not, welcome.

Beforehand I thought the CALM conference was an interesting attractor, but I was not sure what the boundaries were. I was hoping to meet new interesting people, get to know others better and maybe see the space of agile and lean move forward (or die, also good).

Chatting with Jim Benson and Steve Freeman on the way out, I said I left, because I didn’t feel I was learning or contributing. Jim came with a nice bastardization of ghandi: “be the learning you want to see in the world”. I should have made it more specific – I felt I was about to stop learning or contributing because I was tired.

Outcomes were reached: I met interesting people, learned, and went home with things to explore and exploit.

In the goldfish bowl discussion after lunch, I spoke up – meta – as I was about to nod off, and requested we’d spend some time mashing up stuff. I felt we were not using the experience in the room well. Yes, you can participate in a goldfishbowl, and most of the time most people are listening. Steve suggested I could have done that earlier. I hesitated to do that. There was a fair amount of presentation going on. I know I have less patience with presentations than other people. So I decided to sift for nuggets and do some writing in the meantime. There were already enough organisers, and other people butting in on conference structure does not always a better conference make.

After the goldfishbowl Jon Kendall was kind enough to show how he uses the cognitive edge sensemaking tool on an actual job. Which helped me put the pieces Marc Evers gave me together.

Steve wondered why there was not more debate during the goldfish bowl after lunch. At SPA there used to be heavy debate during goldfish bowls. I guess the timing after lunch wasn’t great, and before lunch we had had a couple of presentations / case studies which for me was tiresome after an interesting evening in the bar. I loved the ritual dissent exercise though.

Another explanation for the lack of debate might be that this is one of the few places I’ve been to in recent years where everyone present can hold strong opinions loosely. People and authors checked there egos at the door, and everyone freely shared how they worked and, more importantly, what had not worked out as they wanted.

I didnt’ feel like debating, because I did not hear much (except during some of the presentations yesterday) that struck me as shortsighed or bad use of metaphor. Which may of course be due to limited understanding on my part. Unlike say at conferences where a certain agile methodology prevails, and people believe long term planning is filling a backlog or if something doesn’t work well ‘the product owner or fill-in-cookie-cutter-rolename-here should do this.

Instead there were seasoned practitioners of various things, and most discussions were more like ‘what do you do’ ‘I’ve done this, and the effects of it are like this’. ‘Oh, interesting I’ve done a variation of it and the effects where like this’.

Personally, I am glad the organisers did not try to cram discussing the whole of complexity science in two days. Instead we had people who had applied practices from cynefin, agile and lean and were willing to be frank about what had worked for them and what not, as well as bring in things they didn’t quite understand.

In order to show that I care, As a Cynic, I’ll say that this Cynefin Lean Agile Mashup is never going to amount to a hill of beans. Please move along. Nothing to see here (while some skunks go off into the sunset and do interesting works).

Devnology Community Day, Saturday February 4, Baarn, Netherlands

Keeping with my plan to do more shorter, local conferences and not keeping with my plan to avoid weekend conferences, I’ll be hosting Robert Chatley and Matt Wynne’s eXtreme Startup at the Devnology Community Day

It was great fun to run it at last years’ XP Days Benelux. It’s always amazing to see how focusing on incoming feature requests lets you easily forget the big picture.
Participants at Devnology should have at least as much frustration So bring your laptop or pair up with someone and join the fun. The only
thing you need is your favorite programming environment and a way to respond to HTTP requests.

FOSDEM – Sunday February 5, Brussels, Belgium

If you break a plan, do it in style. So I’ll also be doing something on the Sunday. Stephan Eggermont has arranged a Smalltalk Devroom at FOSDEM

We’ll probably be doing a longer version of Back to the Future, (Re)Learn Smalltalk like we did at the SPA Conference last year.

To keep my sustainable pace, I’ll just move my weekend to the Monday and Tuesday after these conferences. We’ll see how that works out.

Mini XP Days Benelux – Monday April 23, Heeze, Netherlands

Keeping up with the two main session themes of last year, smalltalk and configuration management, Stephan Eggermont and yours truly will rerun our session on getting started with Chef and Puppet at mini XP Days Benelux, the full program is yet to be announced.

Rob Westgeest kindly championed our session, as he assumed we learnt from the feedback from the previous session. The lego-themed slides were well received, but we could have focused the introductory stories more on one or two complete examples, as opposed to telling a bunch of benefits related to things we’ve done. The same went more or less for the code samples. It wasn’t clear to all participants how the ‘big picture’ fit together, so we’ll see if we can visualize that.

I look forward to seeing you at one of these conferences!

I’m refactoring my business to become the simplest thing that could possibly work for what I’ve been doing for the last couple of years. Developing valuable software and helping others do so.

I was at the chamber of commerce yesterday to change my Inc (Besloten.Vennootschap.) to a personal company (eenmanszaak). Writing down the details of the takeover my personal company does from the Inc, I noticed it was exactly ten years ago, on 27 December 2001 my business started.

Yves Hanoulle suggested I write a short post about it. So here it goes.

The reason I’m de-incorporating my company is that incorporation was doing more harm than good. I originally incorporated to participate in the founding of Seek You Too, since this year better known as Seecr. They are ten years today, because Eric (my then business partner) and I had to incorporate our personal holdings first. Why did we do this? Our then accountant advised us to do so. When we wound our collaboration down in 2004 it did provide somewhat useful as we at least got the basic rules of engagement down in a contract.

Before that we’d already changed accountant. Our new accountant frowned somewhat at the complexity and cost of three Inc’s for two people. But it’s a lot harder to get out of incorporation than it is to get into, probably because it is less common. Apparently when a business grows, it incorporates, and when it fails it is liquidated.

The state where a business is profitable, but the overhead of an Inc is too much is rarer, although the person who handled the registration of my new company at the chamber of commerce said he saw quite a lot of it lately. I scoured the internet for hints on how to unwind a BV, but nothing much turned up. If you’re interested I’ll do a dutch write-up after it’s completed.

If you’re making less than 150.000 Euros in profit after costs and your salary it’s not worth the trouble, unless you need it for other reasons. Paying yourself a minimum salary of about 34000 euros is obligatory here, because the tax man is afraid you’re not going to pay enough taxes otherwise. Pro tip: wind the incorporated company down when you’re still profitable, being incorporated while not making more than your salary + costs sucks. there were many months I had to figure out how to pay income tax while waiting for payments to come in. Luckily I had two very good years, so I could compensate for the losses I made the years before, and I’ll start the next year as simple as necessary. Same name – Living Software – new company.

As I wrote in about the name  a couple of years ago, a company is still the best way for me to search for those moments and situations when I am most alive. I’m looking forward to the next ten years!

What do Extreme Startup, Smalltalk and Server Login Considered Harmful have in common?

I’ve made some slides to promote sessions about them at XP Days Benelux. Competition for the most hilarious Official Half Minute Pitch at each half day of the conference is fierce. This year sessionorganisers can send in slides. Luckily Stephan Eggermont reminded me that the deadline is right about now. With a few iterations, film poster-like slides are my themes for this year.

When Robert Chatley asked if I wanted to be stand-in for Matt Wynne, who has more sensible priorities than most of us I thought for half a minute and said yes. The eXtreme Startup is a hands-on session that lasts a morning, but allows for new participants halfway through. I attended it at Agile Cambridge, and found it loads of fun and educational. Can you and your partner code against the market and your competitors? Will you deliver the most business value against changing demand? Can you balance the flow of euros against technical debt? Join us this friday at 9:30 in room 16 and find out.

One of the ways to iterate quickly while finding out what is a good market fit, is to use a language and environment that was build to explore the unknown. Join Stephan Eggermont and yours truly this Friday at 16:30 in Room 16 and find out how web development can be like desktop GUI development, and how Debugger Driven Development optimizes your inner software development loop! No code was harmed in the making of this session.

So, you’ve found your strategy to find your market and keep up with it and you’ve found a development sweet spot. Now your deployments can’t keep up. Servers burn down, your mail is a spam magnet and as a systems administrator you are getting tired of late night phone calls. Devops configuration management to the rescue? Come to our session “Server Login Considered Harmful” and find out if Chef can save your Puppet’s bacon. Find out this Thursday at 11:00, again – surprise surprise? – in Room 16.

XP Days Benelux is already sold out, I just wanted to share the fun Ihad in preparing it. Still hoping to see you there .