Nina Meiers (a respected member of the DNN Core Team) posted these questions on my Yala page on Snowcovered.com (heretofore the largest marketplace for DNN modules and skins, recently acquired by the DNN Corporation):

What are you actually selling? Is it a portal? Is it a CRM? Is it forum? I can't work it out and I've been to your site - is this enhanced DNN modules? Do you have screen shots or demos of what you are selling?

These are perfectly fair questions. Of course, I have screenshots and demos.

Yes, it is a portal – the DNN portal.

Yes, it most certainly is relationship management software – but not in the sense of Call Centre telephone operators wanting to pull up customer files and update them real time. There is plenty of that stuff about.

Yes, it is a kind of forum. But why does anyone need to reinvent that wheel? DNN’s forum is good and Active Modules’ possibly better.

It is also social networking software but not in the sense of Facebook or MySpace (and active social covers that ground already).

It is a kind of issue tracker. But frankly that is old hat. Why do you need an issue tracker module or a to-do list module? Most people could knock up a fair approximation of one of those in the Form and List module (the good old User-Defined Table).

It is also kind of like a feedback channel but there are lots of those on Snowcovered already, not to mention DNN’s own feedback modules.

You could think of the Yala as another kind of Survey tool, and it is. But DNN has a perfectly good Survey module and you can enable Polls in the forum module. Who needs yet another Survey module?

You could describe the Yala as pattern recognition software, and it is. Except that computers are frankly terrible at pattern recognition - not a patch on the massively parallel processor of the human brain at face recognition, for example.

Clay Shirky (in this video on my News page) says that if someone really wants to know what Facebook is like, you have to reply that it is like Facebook, it is not like anything else. I could say that a Yala is like a Yala, it is unique, it is something else - but that is not much help to you either.

I could always give you a high-concept answer, and say that a Yala “automates the Discourse Management process” and that the value it delivers is “improving the Quality of the Discourse”.  Then you would want to know what I mean by the Discourse Management process and I could come back with a snappy reply like “managing who talks to whom, what they talk about, how they talk about it, who else knows, and also why they might want to talk to each other at all”. You would reasonably ask what I mean by a Discourse, and I could say “a set of conversations”. Then you would want to know what I meant by Quality in a Discourse and we could start talking about the difference between dialogue and debate (in the sense of, say, a political debate on TV versus a dialogue conducted by people like the Public Conversations Project, Future Search, Open Space Technology and others). And, after all this, you would be still be little the wiser about what a Yala is or does.

Nothing exists in a vacuum, so I could tell you about the origins of the Yala in other systems and software. Alternatively, I could dazzle you with the intellectual roots of the Yala in Epistemology, Political Science, Applied Social Psychology, Complexity Science, Behavioural Economics, best practice in Risk Management and on and on. So what!

But to start the discussion of a new web application with details of the tool itself is also to miss the point.

First, most of the screens and reports are radically simple and very familiar. That is quite deliberate. OK, “the interface is the product” but I have chosen to stick closely to the look and feel of DNN rather than add a new interface to the User’s learning curve (unlike, for example, the DNN forum module).

Second, I totally believe that the tool is not important; what matters is what you do with it. Heresy, I suspect, in this forum. For example, if you begin an explanation of “the kind of a thing a blog is” with a description of the view and edit screens then you are going to rapidly conclude that its only novelty lies in its unusual sort order: new posts go at the top rather than the bottom of the list, so what. You might describe a blog as a naked conversation, but again so what. There is no obvious merit in a naked conversation. The web is now flooded with the embarrassingly self-conscious and self-indulgent outpourings of second-rate writers with nothing to say.

If you really want to understand the kind of a thing a blog is then don’t start with the tool, start with the value it creates. As in, good blogging puts a human face on impersonal corporations; good blogging can turn “those hard bastards at Microsoft” into “the microsofties”.

In that sense, I believe I have already given you the best possible answer to the question “the kind of a thing a Yala is”.

I know this is hard on the early adopter. If you really are wrestling with how to improve the performance of complex relationships, buy a license and you will get support from me not just on which box to tick but on getting the Yala to deliver value in your business or community. At this price, it is a gift.

However, if all you want to do is rewrite the Yala in Drupal or Joomla then you are going to have to take the plunge and cough up what is quite a lot for a DNN module license before getting to see the screens.

Isn’t this what the DNN framework should be about? Not merely spawning endless me-too variations of existing tools, but making the technology so user friendly that the people who really know the requirements have a fighting chance of creating exciting new applications themselves.

For many years, the computer has been a solution in search of problems. In the sixties, Peter Drucker described it as “the hoax of the decade”. If you really drill down to the value they actually delivered for many organizations, you could argue that was largely true in the 70s, 80s and 90s, too.  The interesting thing about IT is that it forces you to think about what you mean by value.

This is the next stage in the evolution not only of DNN but also of the web itself, Web 3.0 if you like: when the new tool stimulates the creation of the next generation of tools. From the Stone Age to the Bronze Age to the Iron Age… to the Information Age, to what Daniel Pink would have you believe is the new high-concept, high-touch Conceptual Age, this is the story of man-the-toolmaker’s ascent as the dominant species on the planet. Tools don’t themselves have any intrinsic merit. Nevertheless, the tools we use change the work we do and the way we organize ourselves to do it. The wheel goes around and the new tool spawns new tools in its turn. Seeing Open Source software like DNN as a robust platform on which to develop the next generation of truly original new web applications is what it is all about.

I really respect your questions but I know this is not quite the answer you are wanting. I started developing this more than ten years ago in Access, VB script with Dreamweaver for the html, then in Classic ASP , then  again in ASP.NET, but it was first IBuySpy and then DNN that enabled me to bring it to fruition in a way that far exceeds my expectations at the outset. I fully expect Yalas will become as ubiquitous as email.