Bulldozer00's Blog

If you feel you have something to offer the world, the best way to expose and share your ideas/experiences/opinions/knowledge/wisdom is to release it from lock down in your mind and do the work necessary to get it into physical form. Write it down, or draw it up, or record it. Then propagate it out into the wild blue yonder through the greatest global communication system yet known to mankind: the internet.

You are not personally scalable, but because of the power of the internet, the artifacts you create are. Fuggedabout whether anybody will pay attention to what you create, manifest, and share. Birth it and give it the possibility to grow and prosper. Perhaps no one’s eyeballs or ears other than yours will ever come face to face with your creations, but your children will be patiently waiting for any and all adopters that happen to come along.

The agilista community is fond of trashing the “traditional” artifact-exchange method of communication and extolling the virtues of the effectiveness of close proximity, face-to-face, verbal exchange. Alistair Cockburn even has some study-backed curves that bolster the claim. BD00 fully agrees with the “effectiveness” argument, but just like the source code is not the whole truth, face-to-face communication is not the whole story. As noted in the previous paragraph, a personal conversation is not scalable.

Face to face, verbal communication may be more effective than artifact exchange, but it’s ephemeral, not archive-able, and not nearly as scalable. And no half-assed scribblings on napkins, envelopes, toilet paper, nor index cards solve those shortcomings on anything but trivial technical problems.