Spark and restart

I'm at Las Vegas with Microsoft discussing the future of architecture. Actually, not with Microsoft so much as a group of architects and analysts with a lot of collective expertise and practical knowledge about services architectures and Web 2.0 (software-as-a-service was also on the list of converging forces we're supposed to be discussing, but there are no hardcore practitioners of that here apart from Dave Linthicum, CEO of Bridgewerx.

It's been a couple of months since I posted to Loosely Coupled, precisely because I wanted to think about the impact of these three forces (SOA, Web 2.0 and on-demand) on how Loosely Coupled evolves. So it's appropriate to restart blogging at Spark, even if I haven't quite finished the work on the backend that I've been doing to streamline the way the site operates. So please excuse us if the news on the site remains a little out-of-date until I get back home from this trip.

What of Spark? We had a day's discussion yesterday to tease out the key drivers changing architecture and will aim to tie it all together today. Yesterday's session ended with a huge collection of ideas pinned up on a set of boards at the front of the room, but I thought this flipchart summary encapsulated everything that mattered:

• Facilitation of user as center of universe — and as part of community
• Balance of control:
  • $
  • technology
• Change
• Connectedness

I was especially glad that we got $ in there, which is one of my special bugbears. Kudos to Anne Thomas Manes among others for pushing on it.

I jotted down some other areas that seemed to have become important pools of interest during the discussion:

• control/accountability
  
  trust/reputation
• sharing/interop
  
  collaboration/communication
• speed/scale
  
  change/agility
• facilitating user-centric innovation/Web as context
  
  generation Internet/social use of computing

And we must also not forget that this is all made possible by the existence of what you might call firehose connectivity — the unprecedented capability we now have to connect and to publish/consume (the flipside of which is the volume of hype that we have to filter out before we arrive at a real understanding of what's going on).

Spark continues today and I'll publish more later.

posted by Phil Wainewright 5:04 PM (GMT) | comments | link