WEBVTT

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My name is Paolo Sammicheli,

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and my next car will travel
at 40 Km per liter.

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I am here to tell you
the story of Wikispeed

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and of a modern hero,
with a heroic name: Joe Justice.

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In 2008, Progressive Insurance

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offered a ten million dollars prize

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for an XPrize competition,

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challenging the attendees to build a car
that could travel 100 miles per gallon:

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for us Europeans,

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this means 100 Km
with 2,8 liters of petrol.

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In 2008 there already were
some 100Mpg cars.

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But they were more like this bobsled:
they could just host the driver,

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and sure they didn't meet
legal road safety requirements.

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One of the things
the XPrize commission asked

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us to do was to meet
these road safety requirements

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to drive in United States.

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Joe Justice decided to join,
and at first he was basically alone,

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but thanks to social media,
he started sharing via web

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his experiences, his mistakes,
and the lessons he was learning.

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And pretty soon,

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a community of 44 people,
from four different countries,

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virtually knocked on his door to help.

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And so Wikispeed was born.

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Wikispeed, in just three months,

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with no corporate or university support,

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built the first prototype
and joined the competition,

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achieving a whopping tenth place,

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beating more than 100 other cars
from all around the world

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sponsored by universities and companies,

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in what the New York Times
called "incredible".

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How did they do that?

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Joe Justice, just like me,
is a software developer,

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and he took the best practices
of software engineering

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to enable him to create products
and innovate quickly.

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Flexible methods with weird names
like Scrum, Kanban, eXtreme Programming.

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With the $10.000 consolation prize,

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the team could afford
their car's road legalization tests.

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In 2011, Wikispeed received an invitation

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to show the car in the world's
largest auto show.

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In Detroit, Michigan, in a sense
"the belly of the monster".

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The world's most important
car brands would also attend.

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Great excitement
in the team, but also panic!

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The Wikispeed team wanted
something nicer, for a car show,

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than the prototype
they used for the challenge.

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But creating a custom shell,
would take three months and $36,000.

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So Joe came back to school,
and took training in composite materials.

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Once back with the team,

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they started making models
of the new Wikispeed body.

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Small at the beginning, 
and a full size model later on.

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And in only three days,
at a cost of just $800,

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they built a carbon fiber body
for the exhibition.

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It was so beautiful.

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Thankfully, because
they were placed on the main floor,

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between Ford and Chevrolet.

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Everybody talked about them that day:

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The New York Times Online;
The National Geographic; Wired Magazine;

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even Rai 3 with "Report", in Italy.

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Today Wikispeed has 1000 members
from 40 countries, and they build cars.

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If you go on the Wikispeed website

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it's just like any open source
software project:

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you can download the plans for free
and build it yourself;

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or you can order the parts,
and mount it yourself;

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or you can ask them
to build one for you.

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And they are doing
other interesting projects

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like micro-houses
that cost less than 100 Usd

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with a bed, a bathroom,
and a lockable front door

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to help involuntary homelessness
with recycled material.

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But the most stunning thing

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that Joe Justice
and the Wikispeed team did

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is showing that you can apply
some specific software methodologies

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to build tangible products,

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debunking a common belief
that this wasn't possible.

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They organized the team
with a method called Scrum,

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that in software creates cohesive
and very productive teams.

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All members work in pairs,
taking the idea from eXtreme Programming,

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so that knowledge is passed
from a team member to another,

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thus also increasing quality and safety.

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And the car is designed

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with what we call in software
"object-oriented programming",

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destructuring the car
in pre-defined modules,

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with stable connecting interfaces

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so you can change or improve
single parts of the car

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without redesigning the entire project.

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Still today, the Wikispeed chassis

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is the lightest chassis
on sale in the United States

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with a five-star rate
equivalency in a crash test.

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They achieved it because security tests

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are designed and created
even before the components to test.

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We took this idea from software also:

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it's called "Test-driven
development".

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But above all, they proved
that even in building physical products

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a team's mood
is a productivity multiplier.

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Every industry
can benefit from these ideas.

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And today, Joe works as an advisor,
helping companies all around the world

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to find new ways
to create better products.

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And here's where I met him last summer,

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Colorado, north of Denver,
at the Scrum for Hardware Gathering,

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which was the first international meeting

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of these crazy software guys

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driven by the idea
of contaminating the industry

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with ideas coming from software.

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We've been discussing for two days

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about those software practices
that are best portable to hardware,

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and the less portable ones.

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Eventually we wrote
a document, a manifesto,

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with principles and values
coming from our own experience.

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Saturday morning we went
to a garage, at Hubert Smith's home,

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the guy with the glasses behind me.

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We had a Wikispeed build party -

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namely, we built
a Wikispeed car from scratch.

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Upon my arrival to the United States,

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I said to myself,

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"I'll probably be the only Italian,
maybe even the only European."

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I was wrong.

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Upon my arrival,
seven out of 30 participants,

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plus me, were Italians, all working
on a company based in Ivrea,

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founded decades ago
by former Olivetti employees.

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During the day,

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we had a lot of fun building the car.

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It was also quite tiring.

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At the end of the day Joe was super happy.

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We mounted the four
suspensions on the chassis;

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attached the wheels, the brakes,
the steering mechanism;

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fixed the body, which got damaged
during the shipping;

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and integrated all the parts

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to ensure a perfect coupling.

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According to Joe,

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we did two and a half days worth
of a normal team's work

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and could we have stayed
four more days in the US, he told us,

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we could have turned our Wikispeed car on!

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At the end of the day, exhausted
as we were, we all drank a beer together.

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I went close to our host and I said,

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"Hubert, your next car
is going to be built

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by a bunch of nerd programmers,
and most of them come from Italy.

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I suggest you buy
an all-inclusive insurance!"

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(Laughter)

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That day, a community of people was born,

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with the idea to contaminate
industries of all kind

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with ideas coming from software.

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They wrote a document, a manifesto

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with principles and values
around this idea.

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In English, firstly, then
translated into Italian.

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A website was then made

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with experiences from companies
around the world

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who started using these ideas.

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In English, firstly
translated into Italian.

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I felt something similar

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during my first travel
to the US, years ago.

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I went to California, to Silicon Valley,
to attend a conference at Google HQ.

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On Saturday, with other colleagues,
we went to visit some museums.

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And in San Jose,

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the administrative capital
of Silicon Valley,

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at the Museum of Science and Technology,

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we found an exhibition

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about Leonardo da Vinci,
a 16th century engineering.

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Once in, just around the corner,

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I found the history of Siena's engineers
and our old aqueduct.

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On my way out,

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our district's flags
hovered around the ticket office.

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I basically flew across the ocean,

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going to the world's
most technological place,

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to find out that the world's
most technological place

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was my own town, but 500 years ago.

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Now it looks like a new
Industrial Revolution is coming,

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they call it the Fourth
Industrial Revolution.

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They say that it will no longer
be the bigger fish eating the smaller,

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but the faster fish eating the slower.

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That's exactly what happened
in the software industry

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in the last 15 years.

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In a few years, a bunch
of young guys in a garage

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beat the giants of the stock market.

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So if all the things

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that gave glory to software
in the last 15 years -

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the sharing, the open source,
the team work and the audacity -

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if all these things

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are about to seep
into all kind of industries,

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well, I'm sure it's going to be awesome!

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Thank you!

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(Applause)