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e premte prill 08, 2005
Chairman's award for blogs.sun.com! Hurray! According to Will our virtual team won what is called at Sun the chairman's award (I don't know what it is exactly but it sounds good:-), for creating blogs.sun.com.
The mail I received mentioned Will Snow, Simon Phipps, Dave Johnson, John Hoffmann, Tim Bray, and myself.
I guess there must be money involved and you need to be currently employed by Sun to be part of it: because Danese Cooper with her constant evangelism for blogs, and Dave Edmondson who created the PlanetSun and PlanetSolaris aggregators would really deserve it as well.
I say virtual team because we're all from different organizations within Sun: Will and John from sun.com, Simon and Tim from CTO office, Danese from the evangelist group, Dave Edmondson from Solaris, myself from Portal, and Dave Johnson, who created the software that powers our blogs was from SAS before Will got him in. And it worked out really well: today, after a year in operation, blogs.sun.com is humming, growing both in audience and number and bloggers.
For Dave Edmundson and myself it was really a side project, what folks at Google call their 20% project...except that at Sun we don't have this formal notion of 20% project:-(
The few lessons I take out from this experience helping build blogs.sun.com:
- Dare speak up, however experienced and wise the other people in the room are supposed to be: at that initial meeting Tim Bray suggested to have all of us signup for Typepad. I was a user of MovableType at home, and a user of the Sun reimbursement process, and thought it would be a bad idea. I had installed a Roller instance internally, so I spoke up and suggested we used Roller, which was in java, well designed for hosting, and open source. Then Will spoke up and said "I manage sun.com and we can install it next week".
- Do first what you're passionate about: at that time I helped blogs.sun.com get started, and with Alejandro Abdelnur and Elaine Chien we were starting the ROME Rss and atOM utilitiEs (ROME) open source project. These were 2 "20% projects", with no recognition from my manager, and I put them first in my priorities. Looking back 1 year after this was the right thing to do: they're both thriving.
- Virtual teams work better than formal teams when they are bound by passion: what is true for individuals is true for teams as well. Passion about what the team is doing is what makes things tick and remove all obstacles that would be problems in virtual teams doing more mundane type of work.
We've had a blast building and growing this system: I'm glad that we get this kind of recognition for our work. Too bad Danese and Dave can't benefit from it as well.
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