Why keeping it to myself just sucks?

Recently, there has been a wave of information being sent via email within my organization. People seem to be excited in sharing information and ensuring that others find excitement in the “issues” that they have seen. Issues could be defined invariably ranging from topics such as Obama to Agile methodologies. Why do people share such information and why is it necessary to make sure that you are not the only one who is the “care-taker” of such data? Last night I read a book on Agile methodology that was sent to me by a colleague of mine. The book talks about implementing a new style of project management, design and implementation but also about “Getting Real” in life as well. I found it interesting that the 37signals guys do not mind sharing their framework - Ruby on Rails with the whole world. Why would they do that? I guess fundamentally they knew that the work that they were doing was great and they were getting paid some money for it as well and “hey, why not share it with the world”. It really caught my attention because I consider myself a “social-capitalist” or at least want to be one - one day :). This idea of ensuring that knowledge is shared among individuals could be considered a sub-set of it.

So why does it suck to keep things to myself? Well for one, how do you know its a good idea? If you pass the message around, get some feedback and if its positive - you could be onto something. Hey Agile again - message being shown off as obviously code/prototype.

Let’s take the simple case of an issue I had about two weeks ago on a client engagement. We were dealing with some caching issues and the developer from the client side and I were working on it, trying to see how to resolve the issue. We were miles apart but working on the same damn thing. We spoke, shared a few ideas, he gave me some leads and I gave him a few threads. Passed the message around a few people who are working on the same platform and in the end we got a decent solution. If we had gone with the idea of “ok let’s just put this out here and than stick with it” - well, I would not have known what others were doing and whether there was something better out there. By not keeping it to myself , trying to genuinely validation information and in the process sharing some of the lessons I have learnt and seen, I was able to get valuable feedback.

I have been in the world of “doing a lot of talking”. Hey I bought this domain about two months ago. Went around trying to do all kinds of things and then never really got to anything - cause I was trying to do too many things. Decided to just test out a new blog, and than move on from there. I am trying to see whether just doing small things at a time can get the ball rolling for me - at least in the development world and than see what the world thinks about it. At least by not keeping it to myself and putting it out there - I know I am getting free feedback and atleast a comment by my friend that the site sucks and I should just get a life. And that is just priceless.