I started to reread Crossing The Chasm and had an notion to write this blog entry.

Part of the idea with my website name, Cognitive Metaphors, is to take existing constructs that already work well and to translate them as concepts/constructs in what I still think is the fronteir of the Computer Science industry.

I've always wanted to be a writer expressing myself and explaining topics to a listening set of readers that would be better off after hearing what I wrote.

One of the well oiled, high money cultures lives in California's movie industry. In this culture, there are a ton of writers who try to sell their screen plays to studios. The hopes are that the screenplays are optioned as movies instantly catapulting their career.

I think an open source project can do the same. If you come up with an idea that you love, you can only take it so far on your steam. You build enough of the idea to convince other developers out there to lend some of their steam to the project. Before you know it, you've got a big budget production that seems into the imaginations of non technical consumers ala the iPod. You've fathered an idea that is now in the mainstream.

Will your career catapult after that? Maybe. Again, I think the point is that you showed a passion about building out an idea in your imagination. With determination and persuasion, you made it happen. The IT world does not have enough people who make it happen. People who take advantage of how culture works (i.e. getting other developers to add their energy to yours) to build something bigger than themselves. There are not enough people out their who strive to understand how things work.

I'd like to create an open source project that like George Lucas' screenplays becomes part of American culture. A model that reflects what makes America great - innovation born by a free thinking, the only limit is your imagination society.