The Dragon Wakes

We’ve done a lot of projects in the last decade, and while most of them have come and gone (The joy of political projects. We’re looking at you, Kinky.) a few of them we still maintain. In the last month it seems like a lot of these projects that have been dormant for months to years have suddenly started to twitch and are about to open their baleful, terrible eyes and gaze out on the new world of the social web. Clients are waking up to the new state of things. 300 million people on Facebook. Full browsers on cell phones. These are things we didn’t have to consider when we built web projects five or six years ago, but now they’re here.

Viridian compadre Bruce Sterling had a great panel at SXSW Interactive yesterday where he talked about how the generation after us is going to hold us accountable for what we’ve built, the small pieces loosely joined that are shaking themselves apart, and we’re going to have to help them fix it all. This is especially concerning for those of us in the web development business that feel responsible for previous projects. It’s easy to say ‘they’re never going to pay what the upgrade should really cost, we can’t do anything for them’, but I’m wondering whether or not this approach is the best. There are plenty of developers in third world countries that could disassemble our creaky PHP code and ensure it’s ready for a Facebook Connect world, but that means a lot of time creating documentation that didn’t need to exist back then, or bringing someone else up to speed who may or may not be there in a year or two either.

In the end we have to decide whether past clients are just that, past clients who paid for a fixed set of deliverables, or whether we’re somehow more fundamentally responsible for our creations on the web.