Be more human

Posted by Brian on 5 December 2007

What does it mean to "Be more human?" The concept of being more human has been running around in my head for a number of years now. The basic premise is this: we as people can group together with a few (dozen? thousand? million?) like-minded individuals and get some great stuff done. What is that "great stuff?" For me, the great stuff revolves around making the web easier, more fun, and more exciting.

The "Be more human" aspect really comes in when you think about what it would take to achieve that great stuff. In the web industry, those of us who create software and websites (those terms are almost indistinguishable for the kind of work we do) spend a lot of time in front of computer screens. Ten to sixteen hours a day is common. During those ten to sixteen hours it's easy for us to focus on the next new feature, the next browser compatibility issue, the next Ajax debugging technique. All those things need to be done, sure, but there needs to be more context. That context is, quite simply, being human.

What are the things that make us human? What are the things we value as individuals? These are the things that need to funnelled into our work, our software, our websites.   

The people who work at SilverStripe and the people who are part of the SilverStripe community are open, honest, technically savvy, and genuinely care about raising the bar for websites, web apps, and CMS's. "Be more human" is a reminder to us to live and code the principles we believe in. When we do that, we take the best of who we are as people: the creativity, the honesty, the boundless energy and desire to make the web more interesting, and create awesome stuff  for our clients and the world.  

Two examples of ways we're trying to be more human:

1) One of the primary focuses for SilverStripe has been on ease-of-use of the SilverStripe CMS and framework. We know there are people who manage and build websites who don't want to spend a lot of effort on lower-level stuff. Put another way, as an industry/language/anything evolves, the technology gets more abstracted so people can focus on higher-order stuff. The trick is to not be so abstract as to be unusable by those who do want to dig into the details. We will never completely "solve" this one in that it's a moving target and something we continually strive to do better. 

2) We open sourced our core technology, the CMS and the website application framework under the liberal BSD open source license. We did this because we believe we've built a good thing and importantly, we want the world to use it to make the web better. One way to look at this is as a trust issue. It can be mighty scary to open source proprietary software. But we trusted that the web building community would be better off if we open sourced. An awesome side effect of this is that the open source community has been very supportive in contributing patches, new features, and generally holding us accountable to make sure what we put out there rocks.    

You'll see more about "Be more human" on our site in the coming weeks and months and we're happy to hear your thoughts about this journey that we're on. It really is about all of us, as web builders, but more importantly, it's about us as humans.