Don Marti

Tue 31 Jul 2012 06:52:27 AM PDT

Links about connected organizations, and a must-read 1989 book

Islands in the Net: might as well read it because we're already living it.

So here are some thought-provoking articles on networked organizations and related topics, that might be familar to readers of Bruce Sterling's book:

Ruslan Meshenberg explains Open Source at Netflix. "We’ve observed that the peer pressure from “Social Coding” has driven engineers to make sure code is clean and well structured, documentation is useful and up to date. What we’ve learned is that a component may be 'Good enough for running in production, but not good enough for Github'."

Mike Hendrickson tries the new developer laptop from Dell: Dell’s Sputnik – Git what you want. "As I explored, what struck me was that, out of the box, Sputnik was not full of unnecessary bloatware apps. Some folks have said that Macs don’t come with bloatware either. To them, I’d ask: have you used Safari? To me, it is not in the same class as Firefox or Chrome—yet you have to keep it on your system or all hell breaks loose."

Sean Park on designing a loosely coupled organization: The Connected Company. "By explicitly embracing a networked rather than hierarchical structure we have built in the ability to experiment and fail while at the same time giving us many more chances to succeed."