In startup land, early customer adoption is king.  You want to release early, release often, and work towards that sweet spot where you have a captive audience that will jump all over your product that is filling a void. 

Taking a commercial open source approach to developing your business can give companies more wiggle room as well as get them more in touch with the end users main pain points.  One of my new favorite vendors that has taken full advantage of this model is MindTouch, and I had the opportunity of catching up with founder Aaron Fulkerson while at OSCON.

After pushing out releases for some time, and picking up customers along the way, they decided it was time to drop a use case survey out to their customer base and community to find some strong re-occurring pain point patterns in order to focus their dev efforts for the next release. 

After all was said and done it was product and services documentation that seemed to hit home the most, and so they focused their efforts and MindTouch 2010 s the outcome of it.

Software and technology focused organizations are no strangers to putting their internally produced content and documentation online.  As more and more business sectors see their leads and revenue coming from on line the information they are producing and putting out there for their customers and partners continues to become an increasingly strategic asset.

The problem is getting it in front of those seeking it.  This usually means worrying about curating the content from various sources, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and proper organization and navigation, so the consumers can drill down as quick as possible to get the answers/content they need.  The more content you have, and the bigger your content consuming base is, the bigger a task at hand you face.

More and more orgs want to leverage community, whether customers, partners, etc, to help in this great task.  It could be as small as a suggestion/comment, or work its way up to content correction, all the way to new additions to the content-base.  These scenarios can pose even more data management issues.

In comes MindTouch to save the day.  They have been working on these issues across their product lines for some time, and with MindTouch 2010 not only deliver the latest and greatest for content needs, but pushes things even further with several key new bells and whistles which content hungry communities are sure to lap up.

Two such bells and whistles that stand out for me are user behavior driven experiences, and what they dub "curation analytics".

Few things are more difficult that trying to make heads or tales of a growing mass of content that should be easily consumed and shared.  By relying on user behavior driven experiences MindTouch provides the curators to organize things in a more loosely coupled manner and let the fine-grained navigation and search result sets be driven by user behavior over time.

On the curation analytics side of things, MindTouch 2010 delivers the ability to track things such as content quality, aging characteristics, and aggregate or topic driven search behavior.  These aspects become very key not only from a support perspective, but also from a customer lead generation perspective.

I have been long time fan, and participant in the commercial open source application space.  It makes me happy to see orgs like MindTouch utilize the business model to its full potential.  Where some open source "purists" like to turn their nose up at companies delivering both open and commercial solutions, the model is very effective at bringing solid solutions to market that resonate very well with the communities that form around them.

If you are interested in document and content curation, and are looking how best to interact with your community, I suggest you head over to MindTouch’s website to checkout their story.