Saq: With BT being such a large corporation, how are you finding that transition to the different working environment? Are they treating you okay?
Jeremy: Yes! BT is a phenomenal company, it scarcely recognizes it itself. But BT’s corporate culture is .. I think, after three months of being with them, is one of the most spectacular things. At BT, for a variety of reasons, the company instinctively uses quite emotional language to describe what it does. We judge the outcomes of events not merely financially, but also in terms of how it makes people feel, and the good that we’re doing in the world. That kind of culture, compared to, well, the last big corporation I worked for was in an investment bank, which had a noticeably different culture. But BT now is a successful company, and this culture is so deeply embedded in it, that for me it’s been at once a kind of familiar environment, because it’s friendly and nice, but exhilarating, because the capabilities we’ve got here to do stuff are phenomenal. BT has got so many people in the UK and around the world, and so many resources, and many of those resources are exactly the things that we need to make an immense difference in parts of the open-source community. There’s some fantastic potential.
Saq: So you mention your new team at BT-Osmosoft. What’s your general impression of the team you’ve put together?
Jeremy: I’m delighted with the team. Basically, we’ve hired two people from outside - Phil Whitehouse and Phil Hawksworth, both of whom I’ve worked with in the past and knew exactly what I wanted them to do. And Phil is doing an amazing job in what we call a ‘Community Advocate’, to try to build a bridge between the interests of BT and the interests of the community. He’s the kind of sensitive man that is doing an amazing job at that.
Saq: From my own experiences in the last few days, I would definitely agree with that.
Jeremy: And he organized all the drinking sessions too.
Saq: Of course, always a big bonus.
Jeremy: And Phil Hawksworth, who has done some amazing work with theming TiddlyWiki. I mean, he’s got an eye for design that I admire tremendously. And the rest of the people in the team are actually already people from BT. Many of them are involved in interesting Web 2.0 projects, and what they did when I arrived was, because there was a certain amount of discussion about my arrival, I was lucky enough that people kind of came bounding up to me saying, ‘can I get involved?’ And so I had the fascinating, fantastic job of trying to figure out the best set of people to put together here. And now we’ve got six people who were existing BT staff, and all are now at a pretty decent level of familiarity with TiddlyWiki, and have become a part of the community. And in the last two weeks, we’re starting to see our ability to produce stuff gearing up. It’s tremendous excitement.
Saq: Right. Well Jeremy, it’s time for the moment of truth. You’ve got a young, dynamic team on your hands, so except for yourself, of course, who else is the weak link? <grins>
Jeremy: Oh, gosh. That’s an interesting one. The weak link is obviously me. I mean, running an open-source project, you have to be transparent. You can’t hide behind a layer of marketing or communications or something. I’ve learnt that my kind of limitations or weaknesses are abundantly clear, I think, and they’re the classic ones that developers have: Jeremy’s not too good at documentation, for instance. The community has, in a very natural way, compensated for some of the things I’ve done badly. But really interestingly, there are some things I think of myself as doing really badly, and nobody’s compensated, and actually, end-user documentation would be the case in point. If I was running a company, I’d probably have invested money in the end-user documentation.
Saq: One of the other things I thought might be quite interesting for the community to hear about is the role of Martin Budden in the Osmosoft team, because from what I hear, he has a bit of a different role to play.
Jeremy: Yes, indeed. So Martin, I think he first got involved in TiddlyWiki a year and a half ago or something, and at the time, he was the chief architect at Symbian, the mobile phone software manufacturers. And as it happened, he was working just around the corner from where I was living. As he started contributing more and more, I’d met him a couple times for beers and so on. For a number of reasons, he was ready to move on from Symbian, so when BT came up to me, I was really interested to find ways to, y’know, get more of Martin into TiddlyWiki. And the obvious way to do that was to explore hiring him to come work for BT. BT’s a great company to work for, in the ways I said, but also it’s the bread and butter – it’s a nice, secure employer, and for many of us in the industry, it’s a reasonable company for us to work for.
But one of the things I was worried about through the acquisition was that TiddlyWiki might start to feel too much like a BT thing. Like it’s sponsored by BT. And in fact, people expected it to have ‘sponsored by BT’ on it, which we resisted doing. I was probably oversensitive to it, but that’s the best way to be. One of the things I was worried about was that the core code of TiddlyWiki is mostly either written by me, or very tightly gatekeepered by me, which is a very common characteristic in open-source projects, but it’s Jeremy that’s moving to BT. It’s me that now has BT in my name. So I wanted to provide a balance for that, to show that on the one hand, we want the continuity of Jeremy still having a hand in the core, but we want some feet in the core that have nothing to do with BT. So I came up with this idea of having Martin work for UnaMesa, the non-profit foundation within TiddlyWiki, but still sit in my room as part of the extended team. So that means we treat Martin as a member of the community, like you, in fact, but just happens to be one we’re providing office space for and so on. So he and I get the advantages of him being a member of the team, and he’s there for the discussions that are going on, and can help the other guys in the team and so forth, but he also can be a stubborn character, in the best possible way, and he can stick his feet in the ground and say ‘no, that’s not the right thing’.
Saq: So in other words, you can count on Martin to keep you honest?
Jeremy: Yeees. I mean, hopefully, you can count on me to keep you honest, but Martin, yeah, provides a check and a balance. And of course, his background in software is phenomenal and BT is lucky to have him in any capacity. And I should say that BT is contributing money to pay Martin, via UnaMesa.