Just a HUGE shout-out to Jeffery Bennett for helping us out and creating the cool Bravo Book. You can go get your own if you’re a Bravoteer. I’ll spend some time soon on a blog redesign so I can incorporate this in the base template.
In response to some tongue-in-cheek criticism of polluting the “alpha/beta” project status namespace with yet another term, I’d like to explain.
My experience is that outside the valley, alpha/beta never makes sense to non-developers. One could even argue that it’s been misused, as many products have been released as “beta” even though they are hardly feature-complete. I believe that the original permanent beta tags on Flickr were somewhat of an in-joke (which the step up to gamma sort of shows). On the other hand, pretty much everyone in the states has gone through phased writing exercises, where a rough draft might touch on all the fundamentals of an argument in an unpolished, rough, and sometimes erroneous way. The later drafts reflect a more polished work, but final drafts of high quality imply a high level of editing.
This is much more close to what we are trying to experiment with at BravoNation than alpha/beta. We are also targeting not only developers or people from the Bay Area, so we are also more comfortable with reinventing the idiosyncrasies of the Valley when they don’t work for us. Our goal with the Rough Draft label is to build the expectation among non-technical AND technical audiences that we will be editing, modifying, and re-architecting the entire thing according to the usage that we see. This is the type of project which could gain strong momentum early on in its life, but needs to have a chance to grow quickly while making small mistakes before hitting a huge, mainstream usership.
Anyway, it’s important to note that this was, in major ways, our project. Yahoo! believes in our team to the point that we were given a high degree of latitude in the way we’ve developed, launched, and branded BravoNation, while supporting us and getting us prepared for the types of issues that we’ll need to deal with as a Yahoo! project. So when we call it a Rough Draft, that’s the 4 of us in the main project team, not the mothership, making that call.
