Well, there's that one background image ("dropzone_repeating_pattern.png" in both; I'm not sure of the original source for this image). But otherwise it seems like a sort of standard JS-GUI interface, and not all that much exact overlap in functionality beyond commonalities you'd see in anything that tracks tasks through stages.
FWIW, it looks like BetterMeans is using JQuery-UI and PivotalTracker is using YUI, and I don't notice any commonalities in their source with a quick review... so it may well just be mostly that bg image (which they may have both gotten from a common & free source).
Dunno if you see a smoking gun somewhere, but I haven't thus far.
PLEASE don't use security as a price discriminator. The web is already too full of shitty security. "Enhanced" security should be baked in to the app for EVERYONE.
There's a reason the "command and control" model has evolved. The history of mankind has shown an increasing tendency toward specialization of expertise in our daily jobs. One of the risks of doing things this way is that people that aren't specialists in a field and have no context about how a proposed decision came about will start dragging down the group like lead weights. Think about the kinds of comments you see in newspaper articles. It's lowest common denominator for a reason. Everybody there is commenting on stories that are, at best, second-hand information (not to mention whether the information is even accurate to begin with).
I wish you the best of luck, but I have to admit I don't think I would find your tool to be very useful. If people working for me are that unhappy that they feel the need to resort to anarchism, then maybe they should question whether working for the company is something that they should even be doing. Put another way, if I were working for somebody and felt like a pawn, I'd choose to work elsewhere if trying to engage the leadership and persuade them on issues failed.
No major ones. Until something goes wrong and every deliberation and discussion about how to respond is dissected and quoted without context in public. I mean are you going to do everything in public? Hiring and firing decisions? Whether to sue someone who screws you over somehow? Whether to change hosting suppliers?
As I write this I'm arguing with myself about the power and value of genuine transparency, it's something I believe in deeply but done asymmetrically, as you are doing verses your competitors or as our governments are doing verses the private sector does provide a huge soft underbelly for easy attack.
I agree about the huge soft underbelly.
It definitely feels exposed and vulnerable to write everything in the sky. But after a while you get used to it. It keeps us honest (well more honest), and fair, and hopefully encourages more and more people to join.
What we lose by the competition reading our every move, we gain by having a large, engaged team.
I don't think it's for everyone, and there's definitely a place for stealth, privacy...etc. But I do think that businesses can afford to be a LOT more transparent than they are today. Hopefully it doesn't blow up in our face.
Also, there are no hiring or firing decisions. Anybody can contribute, contributors have non-binding votes.
Members can nominate contributors to become members (this voting happens in private) and then they can have binding votes. It's a mod of the apache foundation governance and it's baked into the platform.
FYI, the columns on that page run into and obscure each other when you shrink the browser size (in Safari 5). This starts to happen well before 1000 pixels.
This is cool! I've was looking for something like this earlier in the week. Obviously this isn't the place for filing bugs, but after signing up, http://rm.bettermeans.com/my/account is a broken link for me? Which kind of makes it hard to try my hand at a demo project.
-As someone else posted on the site, attempts to create a new workstream meet with a 403/not authorized despite being logged in.
-It may just be a placeholder, but the "Browse all enterprises" and "Browse all workstreams" seems to be an unwieldly way to discover new enterprises/workstreams, since after the launch is well underway, that list will explode in volume. The search box is nice to find enterprises you already know about, but really what's needed to make it easier to find new enterprises (IMO) is some way to hierarchically categorize or tag your organization. And also those "Browse all..." type pages should definitely be paginated; they're way too long already.
