A Testimonial for Sharing
03/05/11 15:46
As creative people in a technical field and technical people in a creative field, we are faced with in interesting and somewhat unique decision regarding the distribution of our work. One school of thought is that in a competitive job market one would be foolish to distribute the tools and techniques that they have developed to assist in the creative process and technical implementation of their projection/media designs. The other school of thought, which is becoming increasingly prevalent in the interactivity and projection design community, is that if we share our work with our colleagues though they are often, to some degree, competition, we will all benefit. When you think about it, the former seems pretty intuitive. Take me, for example. I have literally spent hundreds of hours developing the user actors that I use with Isadora for projection design and I continue to spend several hours a week adding functionality, developing new ones, and ironing out little bugs that crop up in existing ones. Not only that, but I have actually passed on a couple of paying jobs when I felt that my workload was such that accepting them would impede my ability to continue to devote time to working on these user actors. Of course all this pays off in the end since I have a set of tools that allow me to execute my projection designs with a degree of speed, complexity, and creative flexibility that would be completely impossible without them. So here’s the situation, I have expended untold amounts of labor, which is worth money, so that I can work better, which is profitable. Of course this logic totally breaks down when I give away the vast majority of these tools, including most of the more complex and powerful ones, for free on my website.
While this decision isn’t necessarily entirely logical at first blush and, in fact, I considered the possibility of either not releasing or charging for access to my Isadora Timeline Toolkit and some of my more recent projection mapping actors, I have always ended up back at a point where I post them on my website and add a download link. In the end, this has worked out fantastically well for me. The opportunity to get feedback from other users has led to the inclusion of numerous additional pieces of functionality in my Cornerpin Projector actor and most of these I now “couldn’t live without”. In a similar vein, I have also been able benefit from the fact that multiple users are significantly more likely to find bugs before they crop up during a performance or while teching a show, which is critical to my ability to confidently use my own tools. Furthermore the opportunity to work on these tools for others, not just myself, has given me the impetus to spend more time programming. This, in turn, has resulted in a my becoming a very fast and effective Isadora programmer (if I don’t say so myself). Were it not for a user request, I would probably still be working without utilizing Quartz Composer, a tool which I now use on a daily basis and find to be a thoroughly invaluable piece of my technical workflow.
At a more concrete level, the publicity of sorts that my shared tools have garnered has driven a significant increase in traffic to my website as well as a significant increase in the number of paying jobs I have been offered as a projection programmer. A couple of weeks ago, for example, I responded to a QLab user’s request for some help with achieving a particular result through the integration of a Quartz Composer patch into their video cues. Sure it took me about forty unpaid minutes to work on their patch and explain how to use it but this week they offered me a particularly high paying programming project without even asking for an interview. I ask you to take a moment and think about how much time you spend, on average, wooing a potential client before they actually offer you a contract. At least in my experience, it is usually a lot more than forty minutes for a job of this size. When it comes down to it, I am convinced that my “generosity of time” is actually a pretty efficient marketing practice for my services.
In the end my argument is pretty simple. I am by no means telling people to work for free; that doesn’t really help anyone in the long term. What I am suggesting is twofold. First, if you are already producing a piece of work that others might find useful you might as well share it. Projection is a small enough community that a good tool will be noticed and your colleagues will benefit from it while you benefit from their benefiting from it. This is what we in the biz call a win-win. This also encourages a culture of sharing, which will mean that you and I get to use great tools made by others who might not have otherwise been inclined to hit the upload button. My second humble suggestion is that productively implanting oneself in a creative and technically minded online community is a good business decision (and personally fulfilling). Join a forum or two (you can find me on the TroikaTronix forum among others). You might find that the business it produces and what you learn from the process more then offsets the occasional hour spent doing someone a favor. I just want to clarify that this isn’t some sort of get rich quick scheme (or even a scheme to get rich slowly), it is merely a way of functioning in our community that I find to be both prudent and, perhaps more importantly, significantly more fulfilling and enjoyable then hoarding my actors away in my own little Global User Actor Folder and I would encourage others to try it if they aren’t already the sharing-inclined sort.
While this decision isn’t necessarily entirely logical at first blush and, in fact, I considered the possibility of either not releasing or charging for access to my Isadora Timeline Toolkit and some of my more recent projection mapping actors, I have always ended up back at a point where I post them on my website and add a download link. In the end, this has worked out fantastically well for me. The opportunity to get feedback from other users has led to the inclusion of numerous additional pieces of functionality in my Cornerpin Projector actor and most of these I now “couldn’t live without”. In a similar vein, I have also been able benefit from the fact that multiple users are significantly more likely to find bugs before they crop up during a performance or while teching a show, which is critical to my ability to confidently use my own tools. Furthermore the opportunity to work on these tools for others, not just myself, has given me the impetus to spend more time programming. This, in turn, has resulted in a my becoming a very fast and effective Isadora programmer (if I don’t say so myself). Were it not for a user request, I would probably still be working without utilizing Quartz Composer, a tool which I now use on a daily basis and find to be a thoroughly invaluable piece of my technical workflow.
At a more concrete level, the publicity of sorts that my shared tools have garnered has driven a significant increase in traffic to my website as well as a significant increase in the number of paying jobs I have been offered as a projection programmer. A couple of weeks ago, for example, I responded to a QLab user’s request for some help with achieving a particular result through the integration of a Quartz Composer patch into their video cues. Sure it took me about forty unpaid minutes to work on their patch and explain how to use it but this week they offered me a particularly high paying programming project without even asking for an interview. I ask you to take a moment and think about how much time you spend, on average, wooing a potential client before they actually offer you a contract. At least in my experience, it is usually a lot more than forty minutes for a job of this size. When it comes down to it, I am convinced that my “generosity of time” is actually a pretty efficient marketing practice for my services.
In the end my argument is pretty simple. I am by no means telling people to work for free; that doesn’t really help anyone in the long term. What I am suggesting is twofold. First, if you are already producing a piece of work that others might find useful you might as well share it. Projection is a small enough community that a good tool will be noticed and your colleagues will benefit from it while you benefit from their benefiting from it. This is what we in the biz call a win-win. This also encourages a culture of sharing, which will mean that you and I get to use great tools made by others who might not have otherwise been inclined to hit the upload button. My second humble suggestion is that productively implanting oneself in a creative and technically minded online community is a good business decision (and personally fulfilling). Join a forum or two (you can find me on the TroikaTronix forum among others). You might find that the business it produces and what you learn from the process more then offsets the occasional hour spent doing someone a favor. I just want to clarify that this isn’t some sort of get rich quick scheme (or even a scheme to get rich slowly), it is merely a way of functioning in our community that I find to be both prudent and, perhaps more importantly, significantly more fulfilling and enjoyable then hoarding my actors away in my own little Global User Actor Folder and I would encourage others to try it if they aren’t already the sharing-inclined sort.