DEV Community: Vynce Montgomery

Collaborating on Collaborating

Vynce Montgomery — Fri, 12 Apr 2019 06:45:18 +0000

In early days of a project, two collaborators are making sure they’re on the same page and scheduling meetings.

To me, one of the more interesting projects I’ve found on FindCollabs is ResearchCollabs, a collaboration tool specifically for academic research. I wondered why such a tool would be useful, given the existence of FindCollabs. The answer is manifold. One part is that people engage better with a tool that is correctly scoped. If it is too narrow, you never get a user base; too wide and your users have trouble finding their flock. Trying to get academic research going on FindCollabs would threaten to either scare off projects that were not academic research, or leave researchers wading through unrelated projects and missing each other. There’s a reason that research labs are not generally in the Quad or Commons Dining Hall.

But the larger part is that they wanted ResearchCollabs to be a platform for collaborating on research, and FindCollabs is intended to be a platform for finding collaborators.

FindCollabs does not look to replace Slack or Trello or Github or whatever gets you where you’re going. Why reinvent the wheels? FindCollabs focuses on tools for finding projects and collaborators. Individuals can search for projects that look interesting, and project owners can invite individuals to join their project. User profiles can also serve a role in organic project discovery, as every project a user is part of is listed on their profile. More importantly, a user’s profile also shows reviews of their past collaborations. This is the beginning of a reputation system that will afford working with proven, effective contributors.

I’ve got five stars. It’s probably the hat.

Yes, there is a chat room for discussing the project, but it is not intended to be the team communication tool; it’s more like the reception desk. “Hi, this is what we do, are you interested?” If so, you join the team and then work together however that team works together. In the chatroom, you can see the attachments and links that are associated with the project; for a small or ephemeral project, that might well be enough. “Let’s put this song together” might not require more than FindCollabs offers. But if 5 people are going to form a band, putting together an album, going on tour, and selling merchandise, they probably want to find each other, and then wander off into their own team space with a toolset more targeted toward their task.

Software feedback and near instant gratification.

With that in mind, if there are features you still find you want, the good news is that FindCollabs is still young and growing. You can collaborate on the future of the website through the FindCollabs Meta Project page.

Unfortunately, the Meta is not eligible for cash prizes, no matter how much you contribute. However, any project you start is eligible. The FindCollabs hackathon runs until midnight Pacific time on April 14th. It’s not limited to software; any creative, collaborative project is welcome to enter. Details are available at https://findcollabs.com/hackathon.

Winning Isn’t the Only Way to Win

Vynce Montgomery — Thu, 11 Apr 2019 09:23:19 +0000

But winning can be quite nice, too.

You’d think that even in Silicon Valley, five thousand dollars ($4000 for top project, $1000 for second) would be motivating, but at the FindCollabs hackathon, I heard almost no chatter about the prizes. People just found what they wanted to work on, and got to it. Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter at all; I’m sure it tipped the balance for a number of people in terms of showing up to the App Academy meet-up last Saturday.

In game design, we talk about aligning incentives. The idea is, you want to make it fun to do the thing that makes the game work, and make it rewarding to do the thing that’s fun. The hackathon is a great example; people didn’t show up just for the cash. They showed up because they wanted to collaborate on interesting projects.

The FindCollabs chatroom is not intended as a full project management tool or a team communication tool, but it can serve basic needs.

Edaena, being one of the contest judges, is ineligible for a prize. But winning isn’t the only way to win. She’s a software engineer and a podcaster, but Saturday she was also a game artist and a graphic designer. She was working on cards for Supercompute, a deck-building game. We spoke about things we’ve liked and disliked in other board games, and how to learn from them to make these cards easy to read. She wasn’t the only person working in a capacity different from her day job; for a lot of us, the chance to do that is really the point.

Game design in particular is a hobby and dream of many. At this moment, there are about a dozen game-related projects on FindCollabs looking for collaborators, from playtesters to artists to designers. Some of those are computer games, such as Knight of the Living Dead and ARhythm, an augmented reality beat-matching game. Some are board games, such as Supercompute and my own Lunatic Market, which three attendees helpfully play tested with me.

Searching on FindCollabs is easy, fast, and fruitful.

Teaching an early prototype of a game is a challenge of its own. For one thing, during a first playtest I personally often don’t know when the game should end. As I see it, usually it doesn’t matter, since a first game is usually stopped early when something breaks. But you should still know what you’re trying to do, so Marcell asked me at one point, “How do you win?”

“We’ll get back to that,” I said.

“You win by being the designer!” quipped Edaena.

“You’d think that, but as the designer, all I know is how I think the game will work. Playtesting reveals how the game actually works.”

Admire the high quality board, the carefully designed cards, and the full color stock certificates and money. Truly a glamorous business.

When we stopped playing, all the playtesters had interesting things to say about what they’d like to try differently. We talked about game end conditions, surprising emergent properties, which decisions didn’t seem to matter, and what plays we didn’t expect each other to make. And we talked about what winning should even mean. As it happened, our front runner in points was Marianna, who commented that she had played a few board games before but felt like she enjoyed them all more now, having seen the creation process and understood where design decisions came from. I was last. But I did learn a lot about what made the game fun, and how to make the game work better, and that’s what I wanted.

Winning isn’t the only way to win. But as the old adage has it, you cannot win if you do not play the game. The FindCollabs hackathon runs until midnight Pacific time on April 14th. It’s not limited to software; any creative, collaborative project is welcome to enter. Details are available at https://findcollabs.com/hackathon.

Conventional Wisdom and the Value of Convening

Vynce Montgomery — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 22:07:17 +0000

This past Saturday, I walked into App Academy’s classroom on Battery, unsure what I would do. I knew it would be full of strangers, but I was unsure how many. All I knew was that I intended to spend the next six hours working on creative projects with people I had not yet met, at the meetup for the inaugural FindCollabs hackathon. I was excited and energized before I even knew what I would be working on.

To assemble; to congregate; to unite; to come together. We’ve created many words to express this fundamental idea, which is so powerful the words themselves become laden with connotation and resonance. The reasons for this are, of course, myriad. Psychologists will speak about the value of interpersonal communication; how people who have good friends and strong community live longer, healthier, happier. They’ll evangelize those interpersonal relationships being held “in person”–a term itself loaded with judgment and meaning to unpack–so it can include the non-verbal communication that SMS and email will never capture, no matter how many emoji we carefully craft and sprinkle. (But, for the best possible experience when not interacting face-to-face, FindCollabs project chatrooms do support reaction emoji.)

Reading the room is an important skill; emoji reactions let you do it from half a world away and asynchronously.

And that’s all true, but collaboration also has value to the ideas and projects themselves, outside of its benefits to the people. Together each achieves more; many hands make light work; et cetera. “Diversity of thought” has been getting a lot of ink the last couple of weeks, and while there’s much to say on that topic outside this scope, it’s easy to see that multiple viewpoints give a better understanding. But really, the benefits of collaboration start even before that.

After introductions, I checked in on Dan Pitrowiski’s Knight of the Living Dead browser game, hoping to help on the game design. Created originally for a class project, he wanted to extend it; but first, he gave a demo. There’s a magic that happens in problem solving when you explain what’s going on; a certain clarity one finds only when trying to explain something you know well enough to take for granted. You first break it into chunks that can be communicated; then you see those pieces as if from new eyes, before the new eyes actually see them. As Dan showed us what he had, he spotted flaws he had forgotten; trying to explain how the game worked, he was able to see ways that it could work better. And, having a set time to meet with others served as a motivation to do it then, rather than putting it off. At the end of the day, he had changed very little, but he had, as he said, gotten the cobwebs out.

Marianna Campbell didn’t mention a project during introductions. She mentioned a lot of skills, a number of accomplishments, and an enthusiastic willingness to work on other things. But later, she started to explain, and get really excited about an idea she had. During long distance chats with family, by both running the app, users would be shown the same pictures. This would put digital photo albums, otherwise collecting digital dust in the cloud, to good use: providing memories, emotional connection, and shared context to conversations. As a brand new idea, she wasn’t really sure how to work with anyone else. After a couple user interviews to establish which aspects resonated with others, she cranked up a Trello board with task lists and started organizing them as if she would hand them off. That highlighted dependencies and priorities; it provided direction for the next steps, even if she does them herself.

As a game designer, I experience this often. I have what I’m sure is a brilliant idea for a game. I get really into it, debating with myself about curves and cadence and the edge cases. And then I try to make something people can playtest, and realize I have nothing useable. But as I try to use it anyway, cruft falls away, details fall into place. Then I teach the game, which is the second trial by fire, and the next metamorphosis. By about 2:30, I had four players seated around a table, holding hands of cards, and evaluating their options. My game was simple, clear, and — by 3 o’clock — enjoyable. I hope you get a chance to try it.

Finding Collaborators and Feeling Free

Vynce Montgomery — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 20:21:03 +0000

On the beat, I paused the music, put down the finger I had been waving in the air, and then clicked back to my findcollabs.com tab. Fingers poised above my keyboard, I looked up. Jeff was looking at me, three rows away.

"Can I get your ears on this?"

"Yeah, give me two... five minutes, at the max."

I had just read the elevator pitch for a family-centered communication tool and wanted to give my first-impression feedback before it faded. This was a hackathon. More accurately, it was the six-hour in person session - hosted at App Academy - of a month-long hackathon sponsored by FindCollabs.

At another hackathon, you might expect to find recent bootcamp grads writing MVP prototypes of a phone app. You might envision a rapt audience of friends watching someone playing through a web-based hack-and-slash fighting game, snapping open the dev tools when an animation froze. You might imagine people pitching their ideas to recruit a team to help them in the hopes of snagging a cash prize. At the FindCollabs hackathon, I saw someone jamming on a baritone guitar they'd never heard of, people sketching art for a board game they'd never seen played, and, yes, people doing all those software development things you might expect. As a twenty year veteran of Silicon Valley's code-to-live, live-to-code culture, it was a wonderful change.

Seven minutes later, I was taking off headphones. "Wow." The new version was much better already. "Did you speed it up? I've got some lyrics that I think are going to work really well for this. It's, uh... It's outside my comfort zone, stylistically, but that's great. I'll grow into it." After a little more detailed feedback, Jeff put his headphones back on and put himself back in the zone.

As the organizer and originator of both FindCollabs and today's hackathon, Jeff Meyerson is, of course, ineligible for any of the $5000 in prizes. But he's not in this for the money, anyway; he enjoys the process of collaboration. "I like to work with creative, committed people." Luckily for me, music is one of his happy places. "I produced an album, recorded entirely with people I hired through Fiverr," he later tells me. It's part of the origin story of the FindCollabs project, and similar to how I ended up there.

Years ago, I asked my family, friends, and whoever else felt like it to record my songs. I called the project "Feel Free". I had written a few songs - because I am always writing songs, if making up ditties for crying children counts - but I couldn't finish them. They had lyrics, and a cappella "singing in the shower" sketches, but I had never recorded instruments or, indeed, written down the tunes. So I was asking people to perform any of them that caught their fancy, however carefully or creatively they desired. The only rule was: Feel Free. Want to edit the lyrics? Feel Free. Modify the melody? Feel free. Change the genre? Make up a new rhythm? Mash them all up together? Feel Free. I got some really interesting recordings, which I could hardly call my songs any more. By that point, they were communal efforts, well outside my usual style. It was great. Exactly what I wanted.

And so, when I wasn't drumming on the desk figuring out how this very new version of one of my fairly old songs was going to go, I was bouncing around offering feedback on the other projects. Lots of people were a little outside their comfort zones. It was great.

The FindCollabs hackathon runs until midnight Pacific time on April 14th. It's not limited to software; any creative, collaborative project is welcome to enter. Details are available at https://findcollabs.com/hackathon.

Discoverability at the FindCollabs Hackathon

Vynce Montgomery — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 09:44:44 +0000

Attendees at the San Francisco branch of the FindCollabs hackathon were, in some ways, representative of the larger culture of the Bay Area tech world. We came from all over. We varied from students at coding bootcamps to programmers with decades of experience. We were hobbyists and directors of cutting edge startups and individual contributors at stalwarts of the industry. And we came with vague ideas, concrete plans, and unpledged skillsets ready to be pointed at a Github repo and told to have at.

Dropping into a Github repo with no connection or community is as intimidating and disorienting as coming face-to-face with an eight-tentacled cat.

That variety was surprising and refreshing to Krzysztof, who expected everyone to show up with their own projects, unready to work on other ideas. He said that’s been his previous experience. But the focus on openness and creativity at the FindCollabs event, plus the fact that it was not limited to in-person code contribution over a very limited time, seemed to bring in people ready to help others. I was surprised, too, to meet Marianna from Detroit; I moved from the Midwest to the Bay Area half my life ago, but I am still struck with joy when I meet others who did the same.

It took a little longer than 36 hours, even aside from getting waylaid in Chicago.

One programmer in particular exemplified that joy and offered hope, though. She introduced herself to Jeff and explained that when she moved to the United States and decided to learn programming, her regimen included the Software Engineering Daily podcast. She didn’t yet know English, so she learned it from his voice. Her project is Zeitgeist; a browser extension that would present simple poll questions when opening a new browser tab. Admittedly, it wouldn’t be very scientific, but it would provide a little spark and awareness of the world beyond the computer screen.

Those moments of serendipity and organic discovery are essential to Noble, an attendee for whom presence in the real world around us seemed a nearly sacred aspect of life that he fears we are losing in the race to digitization. When we discussed where to go for dinner after the event, everyone reached for their phones to search; but Noble advocated for walking up the street and seeing what looked good. Not that he’s a luddite; he’s excited by good data presentation such as visualizations) and wants to find ways of using our senses and their natural data-processing strengths to the best effect. Wouldn’t it be great to be presented the data in a way that allowed us to be present in it?

Browsing the Social Networking projects on FindCollabs

Discoverability is, of course, a perennial topic in the modern computing experience. The FindCollabs main project list is ordered by recency of updates, which means every time you go, you might see the newest project. There are filters, of course, by both project category and open roles, as well as project search tool. It’s also, unsurprisingly, a common topic of the projects.

It really seems to be the next logical step after streetview.

Ombi wants to improve the process of discovering places you’ll love by remotely checking out the “vibe” via candid video walkthroughs. You can use the style search to find a coffeeshop with an industrial aesthetic, or a friendly, communal feel. Other projects include music calendars and ad-hoc casual meet-up organization, as well as social networks specifically for university students, academic collaboration, and of course, geek subculture pursuits like hardware hacking. Exploration and discovery. The world is so large and so full of interesting things that there’s no way to see it all. Sometimes the secret is to just open your eyes and take in what you see. Sometimes it would be helpful to have these magic boxes help us find what we don’t even know we’re looking for.

If you want to bring your ideas, plans, or unpledged skills to bear on creative endeavors of various stripes, the FindCollabs hackathon runs until midnight Pacific time on April 14th. It’s not limited to software; any creative, collaborative project is welcome to enter. Details are available at https://findcollabs.com/hackathon.