scales, robert scales

NewsForge: More On BarCamp

Bruce Byflield of NewsForge joined our group at BarCampVancouver last week-end. As it turns out, he had a pretty swell time: met some good people, was thoroughly impressed with the organization, learned a lot, was intellectually stimulated, and seemed to have had some fun along the way.

You can read his article in its' entirety online here. In it, Bruce highlights some of his positive experiences, while suggesting on how the Camp might improve as well.

Below is an small excerpt from his article after speaking with me after my session on Open Source Business.

"Open Source Business" by Robert Scales, the president and CEO of Raincity Studios. Scales explained his conviction that an open source business model was about more than working with technologies like Drupal and Ruby. Instead, Scales has tried to build his business as a cooperative, offering generous benefits and bonuses and encouraging employees to attend conferences. In addition, he has tried to build reciprocal relations with companies in the same line of business so that they can recommend each other when one is unavailable to work with a potential customer. Last year, he even went to the extent of making the company's financial position public , even though Raincity is not publicly traded. While he could not detail individual employees' salaries or the size of contracts due to Canada's privacy laws, he did give overall figures for both. "I'm really open," he says, sporting a Mohawk and all black clothes... However, it seemed obvious that, for all the humour, for Scales, his business model was not so much a buzz word as a way of life.