Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems

Esther Schindler wrote a thought-provoking column on CIO.com last week, Business Social Networking Geography: Does It Matter Where My Contacts Are?

Although the Internet is global, and you may do business with people anywhere in the world, most people tend to look for people-networks close to home. Or do they? Should they? If the point of social networking is to connect with other people, ought it to matter where we are?

At Freelock, we have a handful of remote clients, but upwards of 90% of our clients are local. I founded the business on the assumption that people want to know who they’re doing business with, be able to see them face to face, and grow to trust them over time. Nothing breaks the ice like talking about a project in person, over a coffee or better yet, a margarita.

Good or bad, business gets done through personal relationships. How many deals have been cemented on the golf course? It’s a lot harder to say no in person, than it is with a quick dismissive email. So much communication happens non-verbally, through body language, tone of voice, and other channels that just aren’t available online. A video conference is a poor substitute for a face-to-face meeting.

I’ve gotten quite a bit of help from IRC. We have a private company jabber server so when we’re not in the same room, we can still have the feel of a team. We’ve had people helping us out from Bellingham, 120 miles north. The Internet enables some amazing things, and I definitely think it’s possible to work effectively at a distance. Many professions, including writing and coding, can be done quite effectively by individuals working by themselves, anywhere in the world.

But you can’t directly diagnose a connectivity issue in an office in Bellevue when you’re in India, or replace a hard drive. You can’t assemble a car from the other side of the world. And even for creative types who can work effectively on their own, relationships and trust only truly get cemented by meeting their editors, testers, or project managers in person.

Another founding principle of my business is that it’s much easier to ensure quality by having people work in person. If team members can do impromptu code reviews of each other’s work, quality goes up. The solitary developer working late at night may bang his head for hours against a problem that a colleague could solve in a 5 minute conversation. Having a team of people with complementary talents and different strengths working in one place leads to better results.

Once you’ve established that level of trust, remote work becomes more effective. You know when somebody’s cracking a joke, and it doesn’t sound so strange. You’re more likely to ask a quick question in a chat when you can preface it with a comment about an outside shared interest.

Yes, location matters. It’s not everything, and the Internet makes it possible to work together from a distance–but it still matters.

LugRadio has a very interesting discussion in their current podcast about the role of a community manager, in creating a vibrant community around an open source project. They came to the conclusion that each project needs a leader that people trust to take the project in the right direction, someone to be a diplomat to resolve issues among people in the community and keep everyone rowing in the same direction, and a strong technical lead to solve the hard problems.

This sounds quite similar to the challenges a small business faces. “The E-Myth Revisited,” by Michael Gerber, is essential reading for anyone wanting to start a small business, and some of the same ideas apply to building a successful open source project.

Basically, Gerber says you need to have 3 personalities in your business:

• The entrepreneur, the person with the vision to drive the business/project forward, always a step ahead working on what’s next
• The manager, somebody to make sure all the work gets done on schedule, delivered on time, and that everybody is working in the same direction with the same priorities
• The technician, who actually does the work

And small businesses, like open source projects, are almost always started by technicians, people who just know they can do a better job than anybody else, so they set out to do it themselves. The reason why so many businesses fail is because the founders spend all their time building something without setting enough overall direction or managing their cash flow. Sound familiar?

The key to creating both a successful business and an open source project is balancing out these 3 personalities and making sure all are represented to an appropriate degree.