First of all, as in all things on the Web, your mileage may vary. But yes, my list at the Knight News Challenge blog was definitely geared toward entrants into that particular blender of funding and ideas.

In my case, I had some experience working with developers and some experience doing very lightweight development myself. I’m an edge case. But I’ve noticed that a few of my fellow News Challenge winners tend to be edge cases themselves. So that’s the audience I was preaching to in that particular post.

To your points:

1. If you’re on a larger team, congratulations. You either know what you’re doing already, or you have enough padding in your grant to make a few mistakes. That’s good! Fail fast, and move on to the next iteration.

2. You’re absolutely right. In the case of the second version of ReportingOn, I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 hours (over the course of a few meetings) in a room with my development duo, with one of them standing in front of a whiteboard guiding the discussion, figuring out what I had in mind, and all of us having some very vivid conversations about the details. I’ve boiled that down to “telling them what you want” because if you’re not willing to put in the time to make your vision clear to your team, you’re not going to get anything out of the exercise that resembles what you imagined.

But by all means, don’t mistake what I’ve learned from experience as a general prescription! If your mileage doesn’t vary in one way or another, then something’s gone horribly wrong here.