We Are Team Rubber

This is an interesting article about the management of meetup.com ‘giving up control’ and allowing employees to set the company’s priorities and projects.

Developing effective ways to collaborate and organise is the biggest challenge faced by bright, creative people working together to do something great, so I’m always looking for ways to work smarter, better, with more panache, flair and fun.

The comments about meetup add some fascinating extra details to the picture: employees are publicly supportive of the move, (some) vocal users hate the new product.

On that basis, I don’t know if meetup have taken a bold creative step to set talent free, or executed a staggering abdication of leadership. What I am sure of is that in our kind of business, ‘control’ is an illusion. Management can guide, lead, direct, inspire, but it’s no easier to ‘control’ talented, inquisitive creative people than it is to herd cats.

Bristol Harbour Festival

No money required and absolutely no burning piers….

Apple are usually pretty tight-lipped when things go wrong, so this email (copied below) I received from them is interesting for two reaons:

1. It’s refreshing to see Apple admit failings - historically Apple have a habit of asking Mac users to believe the Mac experience is seamlessly and endlessly shiny even when it’s not.

   An example of Apple getting it wrong is their toxic policy of deleting messages from their own support forums when they indicate problems with Apple products (I don’t mean to imply that Apple should allow posts of absolutely any type however negative, rather there are better ways to moderate these things in a community than blanket deletion).

2. The message is almost a perfect model of how to admit something went wrong and say sorry. It’s easy to be afraid of both.

– Update –
Apple have followed up the mail with a ‘Status’ blog, another obvious move which shouldn’t scare businesses but often does.

Amazon have a similar status service for their Web Services; arguably Amazon do it better (although their audience appreciate and require this level of detail more than some Apple customers might).

– Apple’s email –

“An important message from the MobileMe team. We have recently completed the transition from .Mac to MobileMe. Unfortunately, it was a lot rockier than we had hoped.

Although core services such as Mail, iDisk, Sync, Back to My Mac, and Gallery went relatively smoothly, the new MobileMe web applications had lots of problems initially. Fortunately we have worked through those problems and the web apps are now up and running.

Another snag we have run into is our use of the word “push” in describing everything under the MobileMe umbrella. While all email, contact or calendar changes on the iPhone and the web apps are immediately synced to and from the MobileMe “cloud,” changes made on a PC or Mac take up to 15 minutes to sync with the cloud and your other devices. So even though things are indeed instantly pushed to and from your iPhone and the web apps today, we are going to stop using the word “push” until it is near-instant on PCs and Macs, too.

We want to apologize to our loyal customers and express our appreciation for their patience by giving all current subscribers an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription free of charge. Your extension will be reflected in your account settings within the next few weeks.”

“The OpenCoffee Club was started to encourage entrepreneurs, developers and investors to organise real-world informal meetups to chat, network and grow.” I’ll be there.

Starbucks, Park Street, Bristol, UK, July 29th 2008. Usually Starbucks offer free drinks to participants, which is nice.

More here: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/group/4416/

– update: John Bradford sent notes for the event –

“I was at the launch of NESTA’s latest research report on Hidden Innovation in the Creative Industries up in Manchester. One of the findings was that many business model innovations and particularly those occurring in the digital and creative sectors aren’t being captured by Government & researchers.
http://www.nesta.org.uk/hidden-innovation-in-the-creative-industries/

What innovations have you seen (and can share), and what barriers exist still need innovations to remove?”

We can talk about other things too of course.

The Number 10 response to an epetition from last year shows some brilliant thinking from the government. After our own campaign to get an extra day off in the 3 month drag between August and Christmas, this official response suggests another Bank holiday in around May/June- Double thumbs up to them for that great piece of thinking, I’m with them all the way- why have only 2 Bank Holidays in May?

Chris posted a nice link on our Rubber Republic blog to this video explaining Social Media in Plain English. Be prepared for ice cream stall metaphors and appealing cut-out animation!

Paintworks is lovely in summer; seagulls, sunshine, river, nice atmosphere, lovely buildings to work in. I was there the other day meeting Wildfire about a secret project, and it’s a great place: full credit to the people behind it, Bristol needs this kind of place.

On the other hand, Paintworks is a 12 acre site, a small dot in a big city. I would say pimple, but I don’t think the analogy is fair to the achievement of Paintworks. But we need more than a dot; we need a thread of creative business and innovation woven into the fabric of the city. The seeds are there, they need to grow.

That means providing clear support through planning, the built environment, and leadership. Some of that can only come from the public sector. The rest, we can do.

– Extra food for thought —

• Silicon Valley is 40 miles long and 15 miles wide.
• How to be Silicon Valley and why geography may not be destiny (a fairly well-known essay by Paul Graham)
• Counter point arguing geography is destiny

I don’t think we should be Silicon Valley. Only Silicon Valley can do that.

I think we should be Bristol, without any reservation or limitation to our self-belief in doing so. We should understand the texture of the city, and above all how to make the most of it - through networks, physical environment, and the story we tell about Bristol.

(The comment on texture originates with Dick Penny)

This is slightly old news, but worth a blog nonetheless…Super Seeder Joanna scraped the internet for new Euroball mentions/buzz and came across this wonderful little article on our beloved tabletop penny flicker. We were site of the Day as of July 1st, this is another compliment nugget to add to our praise arsenal!

Nothing makes a catchy headline like an unsupportable proclamation. Do Google really have nothing on Claude C. Hopkins, self-declared creator of measured advertising? Well, probably not, but Hopkins did stack up a mountain of achievement a long time ago. That’s the strongest impression I formed from reading Hopkins’ book My Life in Advertising / Scientific Advertising.

In the early 1900s Hopkins was measuring and optimising direct-response advertising to an impressive degree. His tactics included:

• Detailed and endless revision of ads based on split tests of their performance, similar to the split testing now being widely adopted by digital agencies of all sizes (thanks to our ubiquitous friends Google and their Website Optimiser).
• Tailoring of ads to suit specific locales, regions, dialects, attitudes - on high circulation campaigns, using primitive technology.
• Crunching a lot of numbers to assess the performance of ads.
• Writing great copy - the secret sauce that measurement and revisions can only ever support, never provide.

For those who know direct marketing inside out, Hopkins might be less impressive. For those who are sometimes tempted to believe that advertising has been thoroughly re-invented by Google, Hopkins is a salutatory read.

So, after going all round the Wrekin on a Travel West Midlands bus trying to get into Wolves I have now ended up at LUG Radio Live.  I’ve just listened to a 60 minute talk on bzr from a Canonical employee and Bazaar developer Robert Collins.  After giving us an overview of Bazaar and the design goals (laudable principles such as user friendliness and hackability), he showed some demonstrations of some cool plugins.

I very much enjoyed the bzr search command which I could imagine using all the bloody time.  There’s also an IRC bot plugin, much nicer than using the CIA disc image I have been.  As the SVN binding are different in design to git (which put me off dVCS systems) I’ve decided to have a play next week and see how it works in practice.

I also have a SUSE cuddly toy.