One of the things that has always intrigued me about Google is their 20% rule…. basically engineers there can spend up to 20% of their time working on projects outside their normal scope of work. Google News is one of the products that came from 20% time.

Now Atlassian (makers of JIRA and Confluence) are going to try it as well – and here is the neat part – they are going to blog about their experience! They are calculating this is going to cost them $1,000,000 so it’s not a trivial experiment and I’m looking forward to future posts!