Dokit had suspected that making its knowledge open source might have been a bad business decision, but it was that choice that led to its success.
It’s not always easy to recall details from the very beginning of a project, but it can sometimes help you understand the project more clearly. If YOU ask me, the earliest idea of Dokit as a platform for creating user manuals and documentation came from my childhood. When I was growing up in a house full of Meccanos and model airplanes, a big part of games for me was hands-on, taking individual pieces and putting them together to create something new. My father worked for a DIY company, so the house was full of construction, repairs, and instructions. My parents also let me join the Boy Scouts when I was a kid, where we built tables and tents and mud barbeques, all of which helped me to have the same fun in learning together as I did in open source.
The skills I learned in childhood to fix things and recycle products became part of my job. Then I decided to recreate the wonderful feeling of learning how to make and repair things at home or in a group, using a line. Dokit was born from this idea.
In those early days
It wasn’t all plain sailing, and after we launched the company in 2017, I quickly realized that the biggest, most rewarding goals are generally the hardest. If we wanted to achieve our plan — to revolutionize the way old manuals and user manuals are written and distributed, and to make the most impact in this niche (which we knew very well) — it was critical to establish a dominant mission, and it was about how the project was organized. This led us to our first major decision: to prototype our idea in a short time using an existing open source framework, MediaWiki, and then release all of our code as an open source project.
MediaWiki was already up and running, which in hindsight made our decision a lot easier. The platform already has 90 percent of the functionality needed for what we envision as a minimum usable product (MVP) and has 15,000 active developers worldwide. MediaWiki is best known for being the engine that drives Wikipedia, and without its support, things would have been much harder for us. Confluence, a documentation platform that many companies use, also has some nice features, but ultimately it’s easy to choose between the two.
Out of trust with the community, we put the initial version of our platform entirely on GitHub. We haven’t even started marketing yet, and the excitement of seeing makers around the world using our platform seems to indicate that we made the right choice. Despite the maker and Fablab movement Fablab, a small workshop that provides electronic manufacturing services, including 3D printing, to individuals, encourages users to share instructions and says so in Fablab’s prospectus, but real-world documentation is still rare.
The number one reason people love using our platform is that it solves a very real problem: a really good project with really bad documentation — a project that could have been better. For us, it’s kind of fixing a crack in the maker and DIY community. Within a year of launching our platform, Fablabs, Wikifab, Open Source Ecology, Les Petits Debrouillards, Ademe, and low-tech Lab all installed our tools on their servers, For creating step-by-step tutorials.
Before we had even sent out a press release, one of our users, Wikifab, started receiving praise in the national press as “the Wikipedia of DIY.” In just two years, we’ve seen hundreds of communities create projects on their Own Dokits, from fun and funny to formal product manuals. That’s the kind of community power we want to harness, and we’re really blown away by how many projects — from wind turbines to pet feeders — are using the platform we created to write attractive product manuals.
The open source project
Looking back at the success of the last two years, it’s clear that the choice of open source was a key factor in our ability to achieve results quickly. The most valuable thing is the ability to get feedback on open source projects. If a piece of code doesn’t work, someone tells us right away. Why wait for meetings with consultants when you can learn so much from people who are already using your services?
The level of community interest in our project also reflects the potential of this market (including profit potential). Paris has a very good and fast-growing developer community, but open source brings us from a small pool of thousands of locals to millions of developers around the world who will be a part of what we create. At the same time, the openness of the code made our users and customers feel more assured that the code would survive even if we were no longer a company.
If all of this is in our expectation of open source, there are a lot of surprises along the way. Because of open source, we’ve gained more customers, prestige, and precision promotion that we couldn’t afford on our limited budget, but now don’t have to pay for. We found that open source also improved our hiring process, since candidates could be tested with our code before hiring, and the onboarding process was smoother once they were hired.
There’s a bit of awkwardness and solidarity about developers writing code in full public, and it helps us improve the quality of the product. People can give each other opinions and feedback, and because the work is completely public, people seem to want to be the best they can be. In order to keep improving and reinventing the way Dokit works, we know we need to do a better job of supporting the community in the future.
What’s next?
Although we’ve always believed in what we’re doing, and we’ve seen a lot of great product specifications come out of our software, we’re constantly excited about the growth of this project, and we’re pretty sure it’s going to be great.
In the early days, we were very nervous about giving away our knowledge for free. It turns out the opposite is true — it’s open source that allows us to quickly build a sustainable startup. The Dokit platform is designed to give its users the confidence to build, assemble, repair and create new inventions through community support. In hindsight, we built the platform in an open source way, which is exactly what Dokit was trying to do.
As with fixing or assembling a physical product, things go better when you’re confident in your approach. Now, in our third year of entrepreneurship, we are beginning to notice increased interest in this area worldwide, as it caters to a new generation of customers who want to use or reuse and assemble products for their changing home and lifestyle needs. We are creating a platform where people can feel more confident about making things themselves through the support of the online community.
Via: opensource.com/article/19/…
By Clement Flipo
This article is originally compiled by LCTT and released in Linux China