Ongoing ~ Leadership and Management

[theo-armour]

Hi Team

Me again, This should be the last message from my own post mortem on our hack.

My feeling is that we started something that could be of interest to many types of organizations, but what we currently have is a demo and not a ready to use product.

The primary things that are needed are finishing off the user interface and, say, adapting the interface for specific uses. In other words a lot of the technical challenges have been met, much of what is left is detail work. At least for a Rev 1.

Within the FOSS realm:

Do you think that we have the basis for a viable product?

Can you think of potential users? For example a large firm of architects that currently a dashboard that shows much data about current projects but provides no embedded views of projects.

Are there some of you that want take take on a leadership role here?

This could include the following:

• Finding good ways of letting lots of people that this product exists.
• Responding to questions from organizations that might want to implement the app.
• Managing the feature requests and their priority and implementation
• Project managing the development process

I think that there are some interesting aspects about the development process going on here.

We all seem to have somewhat stable positions and nobody is pressed to finished something quickly or by a certain date. In other words we can take our time to build a nice thing.

We seem to be happy with the project being open source. In other words nobody is desperate for an IPO or whatever

Perhaps the interesting question is this: suppose a large organization did want to take on va3c and was willing to pay good sums of bounty money in payment for adding features they needed, could we be organized and capable enough to deliver what they needed?

---

Enough thinking. Time to get back to coding...

Theo

[jeremytammik]

Hi Theo. Thank you for taking this in hand. Re publication: once we know what the product is capable of and where we want to take it, i can publicise that on The Building Coder Revit API blog. that will address a certain spectrum of AEC users, at least. Cheers, Jeremy.

[JonatanS]

Wow, I love that there is still so much energy even the day after the hackathon...

Similar to Jeremy talking to Revit users, Ben and I would be happy to create a polished Grasshopper JSON-exporter plugin with sample file, and to spread the word in the Grasshopper community. This would also help us get more people involved as far as development goes. We could use our va3c.github.io viewer with drag and drop interface to get people to use it.

Otherwise, we are exciting about this being open source, and I certainly plan continue to contribute starting June, once back from London.

[howesben]

@theo-armour - another excellent follow up. Here's my two cents on a few of your points:

Re: Basis for a viable product. Absolutely! I agree that we built a demo not a product. I think between the exporters and an embeddable version of the viewer, we can interest a large set of potential users. These users are authors of 3D content who want to publish that content on their own websites - your arch firm example certainly fits the bill. I could also imagine contractors using this to assist with field work (easier to build something if you can see it in 3D, and click on an element to get it's cut sheet). Any other use cases coming to mind out there?
There's another less tech-savvy user who could use the standalone viewer (what we'll run on va3c.github.io/viewer) to share their model with a remote audience - upload the json file to dropbox, and send the audience a link.

Re: Leadership role. I'd very much like to stay involved with this project as it matures. As @JonatanS mentioned, we can spread the word in the GH community, and can certainly blog and tweet about #va3c periodically on our CORE studio channels. I'm certainly up for helping with PM work and prioritizing feature requests and such. Theo - any thoughts on how to handle requests from large organizations? Do we need a dedicated team of reps to deal with these or could anyone handle them on a first come, first served basis?

Re: What if a whale lands on our doorstep? Excellent question, and I think we should be prepared for that house call if and when it comes. I wonder if the va3c organization would handle this as a whole, or if the team members would be engaged individually (or as small teams) for this type of work? I think the latter is easier in organizational terms - I imagine it would be quite a challenge to get everyone involved in this project to date engaged in a LLC or other corporate structure together, whereas individuals within the team are ostensibly already set up to take on consulting work like this. Thoughts? Let the va3c consulting bidding wars begin?

Like @JonatanS, I likely won't have time to contribute much code until mid-june once I'm back from vacation. After that, watch out y'all.

[howesben]

One more thought - I think we need something like a mission or vision statement for the project. If we don't define what we are building together, it will be difficult to evaluate whether or not new ideas fit within the scope of the project. I imagine getting a lot of exciting feature requests, and we are going to need criteria for saying 'yes that is awesome and we'll add it to the viewer' vs 'no we won't add that to the viewer - it sounds like an awesome idea for a fork though ... you should build it!'

Would anyone mind if I took a stab at this on the bottom of the project homepage? I imagine I'd lift/revise some text from my initial project description on hackerleague, and add some more about the high level decisions we made together at the hackathon. Here's the hackerleague website if anyone is interested in a refresher:
https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/aec-technology-hackathon-2014/hacks/three-dot-js-aec-viewer-model-exporters

[theo-armour]

Hi Ben:

I think we need something like a mission or vision statement for the
project.

Actually we need both:

Mission

Vision

Go for it!

Theo

On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 6:08 PM, Benjamin Howes [email protected]:

One more thought - I think we need something like a mission or vision
statement for the project. If we don't define what we are building
together, it will be difficult to evaluate whether or not new ideas fit
within the scope of the project. I imagine getting a lot of exciting
feature requests, and we are going to need criteria for saying 'yes that is
awesome and we'll add it to the viewer' vs 'no we won't add that to the
viewer - it sounds like an awesome idea for a fork though ... you should
build it!'

Would anyone mind if I took a stab at this on the bottom of the project
homepage? I imagine I'd lift/revise some text from my initial project
description on hackerleague, and add some more about the high level
decisions we made together at the hackathon. Here's the hackerleague
website if anyone is interested in a refresher:

https://www.hackerleague.org/hackathons/aec-technology-hackathon-2014/hacks/three-dot-js-aec-viewer-model-exporters

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/10#issuecomment-43950287
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[bhowes-tt]

I added some mission / vision copy today. Comments?