This month was full of extremes, apart from the adventure of building a new forum for Letsevo and my new more aerodynamic hair style, I was fortunate enough to join two good friends onto another adventure, Crossing the Alps between Italy and France. Together with Jochen and Johannes, we biked 363.34 Kilometers, climbing a total of 13935 Meters during 8 days of our tour that started in Pinerolo (Italy) and ended the Mediterranean city of Ventimiglia, also in Italy.
It was the second time I rode such tour, the first time me and Jochen crossed the north east of Spain together with Basti Hess (very missed), also amazing. This time we also went freestyle (no camping tents) just sleeping back and the faith that rain wasn’t going to pour, and it almost didn’t.
We crossed the Alps everyday, switching from “Bon Giorno!” to “Bonjour”, rustled ourselves between hardcore uphills and hardcore downhills, following the paths and tips from a tour published at Mountain Bike Magazine.
Thanks to Jochen, our GPS data from the tour can be seen in Google Earth making it possible to travel back exactly through the trails we made, how awesome is that? feel like traveling to time? Make sure to turn on “Show Terrain” feature.
My thanks to Jochen for organizing the route and to Johannes for bringing the cooking utensils, also Mark Assies for the sleeping bag! and Timon Rutten from Hans Struik Fietsen Shop for hooking me up with some bike parts I needed for the tour.
Where should we go on the next tour??
We are proud to post here the first entries to our “Artist Series” initiative of the ecosk8 project. To know more about the Artists and their work, make sure to visit the project’s gallery
While reading about open source software development, I bumped into a product development methodology that seems pretty different than the methodologies being talked about in Design Schools and yet very interesting to be spread around further into product design context.
Meet SCRUM, a methodology mainly used in software development in which phases can strongly overlap without compromising the development process. It’s name comes from a Rugby terminology where the “whole team tries to go to the distance as a unit, passing the ball back and forth”*
This quick video by Hamid Shojaee from Axosoft explains very well how SCRUM works:
SCRUM’s short and fast paced framework makes each step (Version Release) an independent process, making it possible to overlap phases of the project easily without leaving people lost or losing time. This strikes me as a very interesting feature for projects in collaborative innovation networks which letsevo is trying to be. In a conventional Waterfall development methodology, it is really hard to accept contributions outside of the scope of a specific phase. As I am staring to realize, in collaborative environments like open networks, the outcome of a project depends on the ability of people to form teams and to jump in the process even if a project phase has already ended.
A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called requirements churn), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team’s ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements.*
For those wanting to get a deeper view on this project methodology, I suggest this Goolgle techtalk given by Jeff Sutherland one of the co-creators of the SCRUM software development process.
If you know examples of SCRUM applied to a collaborative product development we would be glad to hear your thoughts.
