Some months ago, we decided I would be the one to take Kyle’s computer and put it to use. Today felt like the day I could remove the PC without doing further damage to my soul.

Offering community managers a forum to build a community is like giving a project manager a kanban board. Yes, they can make it work. But is there really a “kanban market”?

What is software development really if not a sprawling, borderless puzzle for which the lid with the big picture on it is long gone? To me, it seems obvious that the biggest hurdle to team-based software development is how difficult it is to communicate well.

Most substantive community work is about consensus seeking, and software is naturally very bad at this. How do you put humans at the center of community software? Don’t build better algorithms, build better workflows.

The greatest sin of any developer is thinking they are cleverer than the users of what they build. “I can guess what you want.” In truth, guessing what someone wants is far easier than helping them achieve what they actually want.

Platforms exist to remove interaction barriers between users. The folly of platforms is believing they can entirely rely on algorithms to control & shape human interaction.