Working With Technology Vendors
by Adam Huttler, Executive Director at Fractured Atlas
I’ve worn a lot of technology hats in my day. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of lines of code, started and run a boutique software development firm, overseen large scale open source development projects, and made minor contributions to other people’s open source code. I’ve been hired to advise large organizations and small ones. Thanks no doubt to these visible battle scars, I frequently find myself offering advice — solicited and otherwise — about how non-profit arts organizations should (and shouldn’t) go about hiring technology vendors.
This has become an extremely important skill in the modern business world, and the truth is that most of us are pretty clueless. I was delighted to see this blog post from Derek Sivers over the weekend. His approach gets a little formulaic for my taste, especially when he addresses the specific sites where you should be looking for freelancers. However some of the basic guidance is priceless, and very well articulated. A couple of gold nuggets:
Dream the big dream of everything your site/service/company might be some day, and write it all down. But then think of the bare minimum that would make you happy, and people would find useful. What are the three most essential features? What is the most essential feature? Call this Version 1.0. Save the rest for later. No need to even tell people about the rest unless they’re really really interested.
and:
Leave off all details that the programmer doesn’t need to know. For example: If you want to sell videos, you don’t need to say what’s in the videos. Just “sell downloadable and streamable video files.” If you want the site to translate ancient Arabic poetry to Spanish to increase global tolerance, just say, “Translate paragraphs from Arabic to Spanish.” Be succinct. Programmers love that.
Include people in a story, using the terms you use. For example: “A company creates an account, then creates a new project with a title and description. In the project, they upload multiple documents to be translated. Each document has a from-language, to-language, and a name. The system counts how many words are in each document. When the company marks the project as ready, it is announced to the translators. The announcement shows how many documents, how many words, and a price. The translator rejects or approves. They log in to translate the documents, one at a time, marking each finished when done, which sends the file back to the company for review.” From this, the programmer will look for nouns and verbs, so start to think in those terms to help you communicate better. (A programmer would see: Company, Project, Document, Translation, Translator, etc.)
If there’s even a 10% chance that you’ll be involved in a custom software development project sometime over the next 5 years, read the whole post. It’ll save you thousands (if not tens of thousands) of dollars and at least a full bottle of headache medicine.
Adam Huttler is the Executive Director at Fractured Atlas, a nonprofit technology company that helps artists with the business aspects of their work. To learn more about Fractured Atlas, or to get involved, visit us here.
