The IndieWeb community has it nailed: #selfdogfood


Endless meetings. Disagreements over gory details that may never even get implemented in the real world. Philosophical grandstanding. Paper standards. etc. etc. We’ve all been there, and it can be terminally annoying.

Which is why the Indie Web community is so refreshing. Other than that they are doing extremely useful work on re-decentralizing the internet :-)

Their #selfdogfood principle means that you have to have implemented yourself what you propose, and you must be running it on a daily basis for your own purposes. If that isn’t true, nobody is interested in what you have to say. Imagine!

One thing that always impressed me when I was working for BMW many eons ago, was that those BMW engineers definitely built their cars for themselves, and used them every day for their own lives, with a passion. Boy, would they come back to the office next morning and complain and insist that changes be made. It makes for better products. More intense, more honest, products.

#Selfdogfooding is like that. They build it, and they only build what they mean. It’s so refreshing. And some really cool stuff is coming out of it, like distributed blog comments, or checkins without Foursquare and the like. Their movement is growing, not surprisingly.