As I approach the two year anniversary of my first public post about the Ogoglio project, Foundations, I happen to be in a period of introspection; at a pivot point in my life. Coincidentally, I've also had the chance to spend a few hours in an online city not entirely unlike the online city I'm dedicated to building. Though this other city, Liberty City, was designed for a very different function than Ogoglio City, many of the techniques and technologies underlying it are the same and it was built in roughly the same period that I've been working on Ogoglio City.
A few points of comparison:
Point #1: Rockstar, the makers of Liberty City, had a budget of US$100M and a team of 1000 people. Those numbers includes marketing, distribution, licensing, and production costs but that's three orders of magnitude more money and more than 300 times the headcount than has been applied to Ogoglio City.
Point #2: Grand Theft Auto IV, the game in Liberty City, has grossed US$400M in about a week, making it one of (if not the) largest entertainment launch in history, and it is receiving top marks and kudos from industry rags and my gamer friends. Ogoglio City is basically unknown outside of serious virtual world wonks and the occasional Forrester report.
Point #3: I'm exhausted but recovering. This period of my professional life has been a mixture of optimistic public work and hectic business development. With my left hand I've been directing time and resources to the creation of an open platform for online cities and with my right hand I have been the fledgling chief executive of a startup aimed at merging 2D productivity web apps with simple online spaces. The efforts aren't entirely independent, but they're not entirely in sync and the balancing act has been hard on me physically and very hard on my personal life. I'm back on a good path, but there were costs.
When I look at the progress made towards Ogoglio City in comparison to what can be done with resources like those that went into Liberty City, it's clearly time to change organizational strategies. I have a clear picture of where the project needs to go culturally and technically, but the time for bootstrapping startups is past.
Option #1: Create a non-profit, raise money from VW companies, use that money to fund group events, a content library, and more open tools. This would require some group to immediately step in with a large enough donation to make this very low-risk for me, financially.
Option #2: Find a host company forward thinking enough to hire me to work on the Ogoglio project for some portion of my workday. The Ogoglio platform is already in use in a few internal projects at companies which are growing, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that they might find it in their best interests to ensure its continued development.
Option #3A: Recruit a new project lead and hand over control to someone with fresh ideas and resources, then go join a company with interesting problems.
Option #3B: Make Ogoglio City a hobby project, return to my previous career as a software engineer and geek wrangler for innovative software companies.
Right now I'm investigating the possibilities of options #2 and #3B. The companies in the running for the former are smaller and remote, while the front runner for the latter is huge and local, but is apparently excellent to employees. (No, it's not Microsoft.)
Based on the email and comments you've sent about various posts to this blog, I know that a fair number of VW pros read this feed. So what do you think? Fish? Cut bait? Go pro? Moonlight?
