The Cathedral & The Bazaar

Restaurant Sharing is Caring

Eric Raymond is a software developer best know for his essay & book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. His work has been very influential in the open source software movement. I am going to let Claude.ai do it’s thing to give a quick overview of the essay:

Here's a concise explanation of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" by Eric Raymond in bullet points:

• The paper contrasts two models of software development: the "cathedral" model (centralized, closed-source) and the "bazaar" model (decentralized, open-source).

• Raymond argues that the bazaar model, exemplified by Linux development, is superior for creating and maintaining complex software systems.

• Key principles of the bazaar model include: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" (Linus's Law), frequent releases, and treating users as co-developers.

• The essay suggests that open-source development leads to higher quality, more innovative, and more flexible software than traditional closed-source methods.

I found the comparison of the Encyclopedia Brittanica (Cathedral) and Wikipedia (Bazaar) to also be a helpful shorthand here.

There is one quote from Raymond’s book that distills why I think The Cathedral & The Bazaar is so relevant to the world of restaurants today. He’s talking about software bugs.

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".

Now, you probably know what a bug is but a clear definition is helpful in this case:

A bug is a design defect in an engineered system that causes and undesired result.

The restaurant industry, operating and economic model is full of bugs. We need more eyeballs.

But each restaurant exists as a Cathedral, centralized and closed source. I can’t see a path to this changing, nor do I think it should. A restaurant is too personal, too unique to it’s neighborhood and specific location, too non-binary (not ones and zeros), too….everything, to be fully open source. I’m advocating for this metaphor and I have no interest in eating at an open source conceived restaurant.

But as an industry we have a lot of bugs, design defects that cause undesired results. And we need to be thinking about what parts of our world ought to be Bazaars to unleash the collective passion and capabilities inside the industry and out. A Bazaar of Cathedrals, maybe?

What could this look like? Imagine 10’s, 100’s, or 1000’s of restaurants voluntarily:

• Daily data of sales, labor cost, purchasing and product mix information to be mined for shared insights

• Sharing anonymized profit and loss statements at a detail level to normalize categories and KPI’s by segment

• Complimentary concepts by day part, food and beverage offering, and price point that are geographically close coordinate hours and schedules for sharing labor efficiently

• Complimentary concepts bundle loyalty and marketing to amplify reach and create a more compelling offering to guests

• Shared, detailed purchasing and cost reporting

This sounds a little insane to me as an operator even as I write it, but there is a precedent in an adjacent industry of hospitality. Hotels, through the STAR report, volunteer critical information about the performance of their properties to compare against the broader market. Competing hotels share how busy they are, what they’re charging for rooms, and more so that they can operate their business better within a competitive, but shared, context. And this is not a few hotels- it’s over 80,000 across 190 countries, many sharing the information on a daily basis.

A sample STAR report comparing one hotel property to it’s competitive set

I haven’t thought about the STAR report since my years as a student at Boston University School of Hospitality. I remember thinking ‘why would a hotel ever share that information with their competitors’. Having come full circle twenty plus years later, including a number of years teaching at BU, I get it better now.

"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow".