Kendall Card 2.0

Open source in the world of software is quickly proving to be THE way of the future. Take this software platform, WordPress for example. While blog platforms like Blogger took a couple of years to come up with categories (one of the few visible features in the most recent release of the “new” Blogger) open source blogging platforms like Word Press or Nucleus keep adding features as fast as the both self serving yet community oriented programmers can make stuff.

But what about the retail world or businesses? Would a community become so involved with a retailer, say, like eBay, where the business sees the value and works with the community, allowing it to provide tweaks and add ons? Perhaps. Or would the sense that the profitability of the owners of a business, like eBay, be too big a pill to swallow when deciding to “give” to fellow community members? Or on the flip-side, would a business expose itself enough to the community and competitors alike to allow for such intimate interaction?

Take a look at SteepandCheap.com, commonly known as SAC and owned by Backcountry.com. This website has a STRONG following of gear aficionados who thrive on a deal and who enjoy the craziness that is SAC. The discussion each day is filled with common faces. People on the discussion would initially poke around in the code to determine how many items were up for sale. A lot of smart people within the SAC community were passing along info they garnered from the servers of Backcountry.com (the parent company) to inform each other about how many items were up for grabs. Rather than squash it, Backcountry.com let it ride. (nice move – no action was the best action to take)

Next there sprung up a separate forum for SAC addicts which was first called SacAddicts.com but has now been changed to GearAddicts.com. This community gives suggestions on gear they want to see and SAC responds. Backcountry once again applauded this new forum, reached out to them in acceptance and stepped aside to watch this grow. But let’s take it one step further.

Enter SACAttack.com. This guy in Canada has mined the data on the SAC servers and written some amazing scripts that give SAC addicts more data on the deal than they have ever had. Some of the widgets he had created were even beyond what the Backcountry team had come up with. Here was an example of the community being more innovative and quicker to the punch than the company. Backcountry reached out to him with 40% off discount codes to drive traffic back to it’s stores where left over SAC items show up, further capturing business that missed the SAC deals.

(Rumor has it that Backcountry wanted to hire the guy, which in my opinion would damage the relationship that a community member has with the business entity, making it worse in the long run.)

So two weeks ago Backcountry launched another website – WhiskeyMilitia.com – built on the ODAT model (One Deal At a Time) and low and behold it has incorporated one of the main features that SACAttack has, that of an item quantity status bar. This was something that in SAC was considered . Coincidence? Not one bit. An example of the community and a retailer working together? Sort of. More it’s an example of a business coming up with something unique, the community forming around it and pushing it to the next level and then the business embracing and incorporating the concept in it’s 2.0 version. (WM being the 2.0 of SAC.)

Where am I going with this? No where in particular. This train of thought was brought on by the video below, created by Novell and presented at the Novell BrainShare conference. (to much laughter from what I heard).

But the question stands. Would a community embrace a specific business to the degree that they have embraced Linux or Word Press? And would a company expose themselves enough to embrace a community? Is there a marriage to be made?