Getting Agile

Michael Platt has expressed his thoughts on edge architecture with his Edge Manifesto. It seems to be a play on the Agile Manifesto. I have a few comments which I would like to share about the manifesto elements:

• Community and collaboration are more important than organizations and contracts
  There is a tendency towards providing collaborative tools for the community to drive traffic to a site and thus generating value. I am not sure if it is true that this will outweigh organizations and contracts. I think that contracts provide not only constraints but also define the responsibilities of a relationship. This definition supplies a certain level of trust between parties and increases the extent to which those parties to collaborate. Some information lends itself well to full community participation and other information must be used within trusted relationships.
• Value and sharing are more important than price and ownership
  This seems to be apparent in the viral marketing which happens over the Internet. If a broad audience finds significant value in a product or service which they hear about through their personal community interfaces, the product or service will most probably deliver value either through product sales or site traffic and advertising.
• Individual skill and contribution are more important than processes and tools
  This seems to contrast heavily with the first point of community and collaboration importance. Process and tools, whether heavy or light weight, create an atmosphere in which teams can collaborate effectively. The agile manifesto itself encompasses the values of effective collaboration. I value individual skill and contribution but delivery comes through community such as the open source community and their derived tools and process.
• Relationship and trust are more important than security and laws
  Contracts are a basis for relationships and trust. Even if I have to be authenticated to a site such as Wikipedia to edit wiki pages I have entered into a contract. There is a certain level of trust which has been gained by my registration and authentication tokens which allows for less law to be imposed. I do agree that this statement is true but I believe it goes against the first item again.
• Flexibility and improvement are more important than plans and schedules
  I entirely agree with this statement. The ability to apply agility through continuous improvement is highly important at all levels of being, personal, team and community. Sometimes plans and schedule drive us too far down paths which are detrimental and we must be able to change direction with the least amount of friction possible.

I want to say that I like the idea of developing a set of values to provide a basis for further exploration. I am interested in seeing the future posts from Michael regarding this edge manifesto.