Nick Bradbury: If You Want to Write Useful Software, You Have to Do Tech Support Quote: If you really want to write useful software, stop spending all your time keeping up with technology. Don’t worry if your resume isn’t filled with the latest buzzwords. Instead, invest your time in talking with your customers. They don’t care what programming language you use – they only care whether your software meets their needs, and the best way to ensure that is by breaking out of your cone of silence and opening the lines of communication. (categories: businessdevelopmentsupportcustomerservicesoftware )
scottberkun.com » The Lefferts law of management The Lefferts law of management: It is your fault. There are a dozen reasonable excuses in any situation for why things are not going well: don’t use them. If you need more help, it’s your job to ask for it. If someone let you down, it’s your job to plan better next time or find a way to recover. If you are the bottleneck, it’s your fault for not delegating more. Whatever the thing is that isn’t going well, you are the primary person to do something about it. If you’re not sure what to do, it’s your job to ask others for advice. If you have the title ‘manager’ in your name, step up. Practice the habit of absorbing blame for what is going on, while distributing the rewards. When all else fails, be the fall guy. If people see you take enough bullets for them, soon they’ll be taking some for you. (categories: businessmanagementscottberkunfailure )
apophenia: I want my cyborg life Had multiple conversations about iPhones / laptops in meetings last week. Agree that it’s helpful to be connected during a meeting / presentation, but I wonder sometimes if we could cut meeting time in half if everyone was paying attention for the entire thing. Half of the onus is on the presenters IMHO: get better at presentations. (categories: attentionlearningsocialmediatwitterconferencesbackchannel )
The Content Conundrum – Boxes and Arrows: The design behind the design Quote: Whether it’s visual comps, or a prototype, it’s important that whomever is responsible for creating and approving the content is actually involved with the visual designer and prototyper as they ‘package’ that deliverable. It’s impossible to fully evaluate the effectiveness of a web experience without having the content represented and under the same microscope as the design. Brand, product, and even training teams all have their own perspectives about what the content must communicate and are contributing to its development and we don’t want our design to fall apart once this ’collaborative’ writing process starts. Assign accountability to content upfront and place content professionals under the same creative deadlines you’re marching to. (categories: designiauxusabilityprocess )
Military Open Source Software Couple interesting companies we should hit that are attending: Redhat, Accenture, Alfresco. Interesting to note that we could have participated / attended under the guise of Openfire. (categories: opensourcemilitaryconferencesevents )
Talking with Cathy Marshall about tags, digital archiving, and lifestreams « Jon Udell Two interesting phrases / quotes: a) the use of "intentional tagging" and b) "…For psychological reasons, people will want to think in terms of monolithic containers that keep stuff in one place, and monolithic services that do everything related to that stuff. For architectural reasons, though, we’ll want to federate storage, and also decouple classes of service — so that storage, for example, is orthogonal to access control and authorization, which is orthogonal to social interaction." (categories: collaborationcomputingtaggingsocialsoftwareinformation )
Solving problems collaboratively trumps isolated expertise « WorkEx Update Quote: … Instead, they say, the formula for success was to bring together people with complementary skills and combine different methods of problem-solving. This became increasingly apparent as the contest evolved. Mr. Volinsky’s team, BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos, was the longtime front-runner and the first to surpass the 10 percent hurdle. It is actually a seven-person collection of other teams, and its members are statisticians, machine learning experts and computer engineers from the United States, Austria, Canada and Israel. (categories: collaborationinnovation )
TransparencyCamp 2009 This un-conference is about convening a trans-partisan tribe of open government advocates from all walks — government representatives, technologists, developers, NGOs, wonks and activists — to share knowledge on how to use new technologies to make our government transparent and meaningfully accessible to the public. (categories: governmentpoliticstransparencyconferencebarcampunconferencegovernment2.0 )
Subtraction.com: A Good Day’s Busy Work Quote: … Apparently, it means a compulsive dedication to what essentially amounts to busy work: checking in with your followers or friends repeatedly and often, authoring bursts of quasi-communiqués at all hours of the day, continually updating your statuses, tending a limitless onslaught of friend requests, managing an unyielding firehose of housekeeping tasks. It just means spending a lot of time just wasting time. And not just that, but it also means creating all of this busy work for other people, too; creating or updating or inputting more stuff for everyone to read — or more accurately, for everyone to feel they have to keep up with. We’re all blindsiding ourselves and one another with trivial obligations. (categories: twittercommunicationcultureproductivity )
The Old Solutions Have Become the New Problems – BusinessWeek Some interesting rules that may relate to social business software: No. 1: Race to I-Space: Business is no longer just about the product. Now it’s about solutions for the individual. Economic value is hidden in consumers’ unmet needs and is released by providing people with the means to fulfill those needs. New Rule No. 2: Advocate, Don’t Alienate. "Who are you? What do you need? How can I help?" This creates a dynamic of advocacy and mutual accountability. The more trust you build, the more value you release, and the more wealth you create. New Rule No. 3: Collaborate and Federate to Compete. When you’re in I-Space, you need to collaborate and federate to provide the support individuals need. You can’t do it alone because the needs of individuals don’t conform to existing organizational and industry boundaries. This means learning how to manage what you don’t control or own. These economies of trust are becoming even more important than economies of scale. (categories: businessinnovationeconomyharvardcollaborationmanagement )
pubsubhubbub – Project Hosting on Google Code A simple, open, server-to-server web-hook-based pubsub (publish/subscribe) protocol as an extension to Atom. Parties (servers) speaking the PubSubHubbub protocol can get near-instant notifications (via webhook callbacks) when a topic (Atom URL) they’re interested in is updated. (categories: pubsubpubsubhubbubrealtimefeedsrssatomhttpwebhooks )