Blender’s final presentation started with announcing the coming of the new inteface. In fact, the Winter Camp event came just at the right time for them to work on the 2.5 release. By improving their interface they aim to be ready to attract the best designers, pushing the product to the next level. Referring back to the Winter Camp networks theme, Tom Roosendaal has four keys focus point to build up a good community. The first is to understand and facilitate people’s self-interest, that people want to also get something out of it or will leave. The second point is to not take yourself to seriously but, and this is point three, set ambitious goals. In Blender’s case this means saying to Hollywood… “up yours” and produce high quality animations without the dominating Hollywood business model. Point four is to stop the navel-gazing, to jump out of the ivory tower and get those feet wet, go where the things actually happen without thinking to much on a abstract level about who you are and how to do thing different and, and this is the last point, don’t listen to people who talk, but look at what they do

…so get to work!

Blender finished with a series of their productions, showing what they can do and how they have evolved during the last two years. Although they have set out to become a serious competitor to Hollywood, I did think it left a bit too strong of a Hollywoodesque feeling; differentiating from Hollywood might also be a good strategy. For now however, it seems a smart way to show there is an alternative to the big players and at the same time get a free ride in the slipstream of the Hollywood animated movies marketing apparatus.

Blender is the leading open-source 3D graphics application that can be used for free, and by anyone  to create “Hollywood-style” art and video animations. While there are over 50,000 people participating in the online community, the “active” development team is composed of about 50-60 people.  At Winter Camp nine of the member came together to discuss improvements for the software. I had a chance to join Blender on Day 1 while they were getting warmed up.

The group focused very granularly on topics such as the MVC model for Blender, and how they should handle default keymapping in the case of users that have international keyboards. And while these discussions seem to be relevant for future releases of Blender, even the group admitted to me that the topics covered at this workshop are of much more interest to the developers and not for the end-user.

I had a chance on Day 3 to follow up with Blender members Campbell Barton and Brecht Van Lommel regarding Blender and their thoughts on Winter Camp. When I asked them about Blender’s competition they responded very slowly as if it wasn’t something that they’d thought much about. “We’re not really competing with anyone”, said Lommel. The guys agreed that Blender’s success had grown large enough to keep the project moving along – as well as keeping them employed – so they don’t have to worry whether “Hollywood” is paying attention or not.

“An amateur could see something like Lord of The Rings and say, ‘hey, I need to go out and get the same expensive software if I want to be serious about 3D design’, but the truth is they probably won’t use all of the complex functions”, they exaplained. Therefore, Blender’s target audience is the low-to-mid level 3D designer. Also, it is especially useful for high schools and colleges that want to offer 3D modeling courses, without the pricey overhead to afford a high-end software package.

After sitting in on meetings with five of the networks here at Winter Camp the difference between the technical groups like Blender and the more theoretical groups was striking. Blender, for instance, has a concrete goal that is almost tangible and therefore within the group there has been little to no discussion about the group’s identity or “hierarchy”. Barton talked about his experience at the plenary session, “Maybe I don’t understand the abstract talks we’re having at these meetings or if it doesn’t so much apply to Blender. We’ve been working well together for a few years now, and I’m not sure how useful it is for us to think…ok well each of us are nodes, and so-and-so here is our network diagram.”  In the case of Blender, an abstract discussion on Blender’s own network structure may be more beneficial to the other networks here at Winter Camp hoping to learn about how a successful network operates. As one of my colleagues here commented, “It seems like the groups that are confused about their goals and identity are having the most trouble collaborating this week, while groups like Blender and GOTO10 are too busy to worry about it.”

When you enter the domain of the Blender network, the first thing that strikes you, especially when compared to many other networks present at Winter Camp, is their level of professionalism. Their meeting consists of elements such as targets, planning and design&development problems/solutions. It’s clear they have a common goal, a product, intersecting at a common believe in the strength of the open source method.

Blender is one of those networks that do not reflect much on their own network topology on a conscious level. For them the questions raised at Winter Camp are for a great deal obsolete or too theoretic. One of the main developers for the Blender Foundation, Tom Roosendaal, believes (although brought in a humorous way) that once you start reflecting on what you are, what it means to be a network, it’s the end of the road, its gone. Going into the discussion of what kind of network they are, does, however, bring to the surface some main topics of Winter Camp; what are the dependencies and constraints of a distributed network diagram in relation to being able to professionalize. What could be a possible business model for new networks of production?

Blender is an international group with members from all over the world working together on the free open source 3D content creation suite. They work on products online and have offline conferences where they join up to have more hands-on sessions. Although the group is managed by Tom Roosendaal, and the Foundation does seem to have some authority concerning planning, at the same time the way they work is very distributed. The members work autonomously to tackle their own part of the puzzle, sometimes to improve or customize their own in-house release of Blender and sometimes to work on shared project such as the animated movies series.

Rosendaal’s way of managing the team is based on finding a balance between setting specific targets in the near future, having long term goals, all grouped together in projects where it’s fun to find solutions to complex problems. An example of this is the animated movie Big Buck Bunny, where the characters had to be hairy furry animals. Making those hairs move as envisioned also means solving complex development problems. The upcoming project will be more of an action movie with kung-fu fighting and other nice heavy action stuff, undoubtedly posing more interesting development challenges.

Hearing that some of the members also have a daytime job, gave the impression that they might be working for free. This is however not the case, there are some different models working simultaneously so their work is rewarded properly. One member for instance is working for a company which is using Blender software. At the same time he is a developer for Blender which actually allows him to work partially on the Blender project within paid working hours of his company. Another one of the members is a graduating student, being financed by the university to work on Blender.

Overall I believe that they have found a nice balance between using a more hierarchical structure to drive the projects and retaining the distributed structure so that people can work in a manner they feel comfortable with. In the end, I believe that its good to think critically and theoretically about new networks, but it starts with having a good platform and a motivated community.