The Fusebox Co-op: An Introduction

Dec 14, 2002

By Steve Bryant

You Are Not Alone

If you are like many developers, you are either self-employed or you are the only web developer in your company or division. Sometimes trying to figure everything out on your own can be a little overwhelming. It would be helpful to have other developers to work with on occasion.

Most developers are involved in one or more development communities, whether the community is a mailing list like CF-Talk or a Forum like on Macromedia's site or even a local CFUG. Fusebox developers form one such community (which is centrally located on the new Fusebox forums (http://www.fusebox.org/forums)).

These communities are very helpful in our development life, but sometimes it doesn't seem like they are enough. We would like to be able to exchange more than ideas with other developers. We would like to be able to get help on large projects and to share code. We would like to be able to interact more significantly with other developers.

We Can Help

What we want is more than a community. What we want is a co-op, a group of individuals working together for the good of all of its members. A co-op can do things as a group that can't easily be done by individual members.

A co-op can provide more capabilities than a single developer. With multiple developers working together, you have the advantage of multiple specialties. This allows each member to draw on the specialties and experiences of other members, resulting in vastly more capabilities than one developer could have alone. Two heads are better than one!

A co-op can provide feedback on your work. So often in our own work, we know that things can be done a better way than how we are doing them, but we don't have the time to spend looking for the best method for everything we do. But with a co-op, we can get feedback on how to do things better. We can find out our own strengths and weaknesses.

Working with other developers in a co-op can provide us all with experience. We will have more opportunities when drawing from the co-op. By getting feedback from other members, we will learn more about web development. By working on projects with other developers, we can gain experience that would have been difficult to get otherwise.

What We Are

The Fusebox co-op is being built right now. It is an expansion of the Fusebox community. The Fusebox community is a strong and active community in which we are involved.

Plenty of other communities are large enough and active enough to be fertile grounds for a new co-op. CF-Talk is certainly the most obvious choice based on those criteria. So why are we focusing on the Fusebox community? In short, because we feel that for the co-op to work there needs to be a framework to start with. Some sort of common development ideology is needed for this to work. Fusebox has the right combination of a good framework and a good community. Other good frameworks exist as do other good communities, but Fusebox has both and so this is where we start.

This is also an effort to give something back to that community. All of us involved in building this co-op have benefited from our involvement in the Fusebox community. Now we want to give something back. This co-op is our contribution.

Right now, the founders of the co-op are Drew Harris, Paul Blanchard, and Steve Bryant. Hopefully more people will join us as we make progress. We all wanted a co-op, but one did not exist. So we are building one.

What We Are Not

First and foremost, we are not a get rich scheme. None of us are in this to get rich. None of you will get rich by being in it. The co-op is aimed at helping developers, not making them rich. It is likely that being a member of the co-op will make you a more productive developer. But that is up to you. You will not make any money directly from your involvement in the co-op -- nor will you pay to be a member.

Secondly, this may all sound very communal, but it is not communism. To find out more about what separates the co-op from communism, read our upcoming articles "Collaborative Development" by Drew Harris and "The Barter System" by Steve Bryant, soon to be published in Fusion Authority and on Fusebox.org.

The Possibilities!

The potential here is enormous! Most developers and development companies have their own libraries of code. Imagine if we all had access to a joint library of code for several developers. Admittedly, this would not likely contain our most enterprise level applications. Even so, we could all have an enormous library of mid-sized applications. If a client doesn't like your solution to a problem, show them a dozen more that you have available to you.

The benefits of code sharing and collaborative development could be very similar to those of pair programming. We would each benefit from interacting with other developers and seeing their approach to problems. At the same time, we might each be able to develop more specialized skills and we could each benefit from the specialized skills of others. For example, we could build a first-rate shopping cart and have a superior CMS system available to use from someone else.

Find Out More

The potential is there for all that, and more. If you are interested in finding out more, you can look a few different places.

Look for the upcoming articles listed above.
Join the Fusebox Co-op mailing list at HouseOfFusion.com (many thanks to Michael and Judith Dinowitz for hosting the list). You can subscribe to the list at http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/index.cfm?method=subscribe&forumid=22 . If you don't have an account at House of Fusion, you will need to create one to subscribe, but it's fairly simple and it doesn't take long. Once you've created that account (via the sign-in page at http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists), you can subscribe or unsubscribe to any list you want on the House of Fusion system.
You can view the latest 20 threads of the Fusebox Co-op list at http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/index.cfm?method=threads&forumid=22&maxrows=20 .
Also, we are hoping to have www.Fuseboxcoop.com up in a few months.