# (7) 23 Aug 2010, 09:45PM: Two Tips On Convincing Managers & Executives To Invest In Your Technology Projects: From a years-old job-advice email to a friend. The sort of knowledge that Rachel Chalmers or Karl Fogel finds obvious but that some of us still haven't quite integrated into our day-to-day communications and long-term strategies:

You need to be able to express your suggestions to your boss in terms of financial incentives and losses.

A few things I've picked up during a recent class in "Technology in the Business Environment" (when I was doing the master's in tech management at Columbia):

I) Management focuses on the things that drive the organization (directly making money), and tends to ignore things that support the organization's drivers. If you're directly making money, lowering the cost of producing the product/service, increasing management's control, increasing product quality, increasing the knowledge available to an important decisonmaker, or improving customer service, you can describe your work as a driver. Can you find a way to describe your high-level TODOs in one of those ways?

II) Here's a model of management's priorities for technology investment. The higher up this list you can get, the more attention you can grab from management.

1. Revenue. Guaranteeing a financial return. Not just cutting costs, but actually MAKING money from customers.
2. Increasing scarce productivity. If the demand for a product exceeds the supply, then this is attractive. [1 and 2 indicate that the company is growing, and interested in the future. A good sign!]
3. Cutting costs. More popular in a struggling company.
4. Competitive advantage -- this means the company is already behind its competitors and has lost first-mover advantage.
5. Tech for the sake of tech -- pizzazz and leadership.

So can you explain "creating system-monitoring scripts, streamlining processes, and installing and configuring new programs on the server" so that they're way up on that list?

Let's say a system-monitoring script would take your service from 95% uptime to 99.9% uptime. That's #2. Maybe one of the high-level tasks you do will make it possible for your company to serve twenty units instead of fifteen (#2) or even start a whole new line of products (#1). But "It's more elegant/technically correct" is #5.

I welcome comments, tips, examples, disagreement, and cake.

---

# 24 Jun 2010, 03:40PM: The Second Step: HOWTO encourage open source work at for-profits: At the excellent Open Source Bridge conference earlier this month, people seemed to enjoy my talk. The one-liner:

Even at pro-FLOSS businesses, logistical obstacles and incentive problems get in the way of giving back. I’ll show you how to fix that.

My session notes are now available. If you were there, please feel free to clarify them and add your notes or links to your notes elsewhere.

The very short version: a company does not upstream its patches, even though it should for long-term practical reasons, because of problems in four general categories. The company might lack a FLOSS culture. There might be legal confusion about what employees are allowed to do, and how to get permission. The project management workflow and timelines might not allow time for proper engineering. And the external project might have a terrible UI for new contributors.

Once you abstract these categories away from the specific problem of accidentally hoarded code rotting away, you see that they also apply to other problems of the type "I really know I should be doing foo but haven't gotten around to it."

I also added notes from my lightning talk on Thoughtcrime Experiments, in which I inadvertently invented a new social media marketing technique.

---

# (1) 10 May 2010, 10:29AM: GNOME & Conference Planning & Writing: I'm back in New York City. Big priorities this week include:

• Preparing to move to a bigger apartment here in Astoria
• Getting the GNOME 3.0 launch marketing machine up and running
• Organizing the late May release of GNOME Journal
• Preparing my Open Source Bridge talk, The Second Step: HOWTO encourage open source work at for-profits.Even at pro-FLOSS businesses, logistical obstacles and incentive problems get in the way of giving back. I show you how to fix that. (Business track, date & time TBA)
• WisCon prep. I'm helping with food for the vid party and I'm speaking on four panels:
  1. Let's Create an Online Business Model That Works. I'm moderating this one: Sat, 10:30-11:45 pm with Jennifer K. Stevenson and an anonymous participant. What makes Facebook games very, very profitable, while online SF/F magazines are usually struggling? If the money from subscribers and from advertisers isn't enough, then where does the money come from? Is the word "magazine" holding some of these ventures back? Let's put our collective knowledge of fandom, web 2.0 and visions of the future together and see if we can't come up with something great.
  2. Must Pleasures Be Guilty?, Sun, 10:00-11:15 am with Vito Excalibur, Lesley Hall, Sumana Harihareswara, John O'Neill, and Sonya Taaffe. Why are we ashamed of the books we love? Critical acclaim recognizes some SF/F as serious literature, works one might recommend to a non-genre reader who thought it was all talking squid and ray-guns in space, to demonstrate what the genre can do. But are these the books you love and reread over and over again, especially when feeling low? And if not, why not? What is the difference between love and admiration? And why is pleasure so often constructed as "guilty" or embarrassing to admit?
  3. Once Upon a Time, Sun, 1:00-2:15 pm with Vylar Kaftan, Terry Bisson, Richard Chwedyk, Sumana Harihareswara, and Ellen Klages. Pro writers use the card game "Once Upon a Time" to tell half-baked fairy tales for laughs. Find out what happens when four panelists play tug-of-war on a story, trying to bend it towards wildly different endings.
  4. Facebook and Its Discontents, Sun, 4:00-5:15 pm with Cat T. Rambo, Kater Cheek, Sumana Harihareswara, Penny Hill, and Alena McNamara. Have your friends abandoned their blogs and LiveJournals for Facebook? How does writing on our friends' walls differ from commenting on their posts? How do you navigate privacy on a system that forbids anonymity? Is "liking" someone's update the same as commenting "This!"
• Submitting a couple OSSPAC talks
• Figuring out other GNOME stuff like GUADEC attendance and applying for Foundation membership
• Wouldn't it be nice if I finished blogging the marketing hackfest and QuahogCon sometime this week? It would.

---

# (2) 05 Feb 2010, 11:48PM: Another Change: I'm no longer working with Collabora Ltd.

In the first several months after I joined Collabora in April 2009, I served as lead project manager, got the new website up, and started putting some new project management processes into place, especially in research and development. Then I shifted to personnel management, and created and began implementing a performance assessment system. All the while I gardened the wiki, aggregated and edited weekly internal reports to keep the company on the same page, blogged about our work, and generally gave people the information and the nagging they needed to make informed decisions. (In retrospect, I played facilitator, historian, and journalist a lot, plus mentor to 50+ Collaborans.)

Collabora's a different place than it was ten months ago; I helped move them from a startup to an enterprise footing. Management structures change as needs and capabilities become apparent, so the directors and new hires (including the awesome Martin Barrett) will carry this work forward, and I offer them my best wishes. I'm happy to talk more in detail about what I did at Collabora, especially if you're interested in what I can do for your organization.

In the near future, I'm taking some time to relax and take care of existing obligations before I incur new ones. Then, starting in late February or early March, I'll be volunteering fulltime on some open source/free culture projects for several months. I haven't yet decided which ones, or in what capacity, so feel free to recruit me.

---

# 22 Nov 2009, 10:29PM: Career Analysis Stuff: You might be interested in my analysis of my career history in a longish Crooked Timber comment.

I'm very glad that I had so many different work experiences before making irrevocable choices, and that I delayed grad school till I had a specific purpose.

Tonight I thought a little about loyalty to one's workplace in a comment on Venkatesh Rao's thought-provoking business management post.

Loyalty to an organization? Identifying with an organization? For a fairly smart hard worker, who actually believes in the stated goals of the organization, it's fairly seductive, especially if they conflate their specific subcommunity with the institution as a whole.

I learned via Mel Chua that Gerald Weinberg, whose work has influenced my industry and my career profoundly, is very ill. My thoughts are with him.

---

# (1) 25 Sep 2009, 08:49AM: We Already Know The Title Of His Management Tips Book: I used to watch Project Runway identifying with the contestants. Now I watch and think, "Tim Gunn is really good at phrasing criticism in a way that's likely to get across to the designer. I want to be that kind of manager."

---

# (1) 12 Sep 2009, 06:25PM: Wintour Guide: I watched and enjoyed The September Issue with Elisa (who pseudoblogs as The Mad Fashionista and with whom I watch Project Runway). Some brief thoughts:

The September Issue is an office comedy ("comedy" in the sense that no one dies and the issue successfully comes out). And it's a portrait of a power couple. Editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and creative director Grace Coddington have worked together for decades, each admiring the other's talents but fairly relentless in the battle to pursue her own artistic vision. The creative tension between forward-looking Wintour and history-mining Coddington drives Vogue and the film. This film passes the Bechdel Test by leaps and bounds. It's lovely to watch unapologetically powerful women and learn how they use their power.

Coddington is marvelously resourceful in using any leverage or opportunities she finds. She gives lots of forthright-seeming interviews to the documentarians, so she gets to appear quite a lot in the film (contrast Wintour, whose famous reserve only goes away when she's at home with her daughter). Coddington asks Wintour for a larger budget for a project in front of the camera crew, and later grins that Wintour is more lenient on funds when she's on camera. And, most mischieviously, she gets the cameraman to appear in an inventive photo shoot for Vogue, and explicitly tells us that capturing and using him on film is a bit of revenge. Subverting their gaze and getting a witty, pretty spread is a nice twofer.

The film chronicles the development of the 2007 September issue of Vogue, which explains why everyone in the film is acting like the economy's fine. But even two years ago, was Vogue setting trends and making waves? Coddington credits Wintour with integrating celebrity culture into fashion culture faster than other mags did, but seventy years ago film stars' fashion choices got copycatted all over. Current events in fashion don't get discussed much, either; The September Issue doesn't mention blogs, or Project Runway, or Lucky, or counterfeit goods.

But there is a historical subtext in the film, a subtext that comes closest to the surface when Coddington stands motionless before elaborate Versailles gardens. The gardens are expensive and elaborate and required not just a wealthy patron but an entire edifice to support them (Si Newhouse is to Wintour as Wintour is to Coddington). Each photo shoot that Coddington orchestrates is as beautiful as a blossom. But any individual fashion that Coddington captures in her Vogue spreads is as ephemeral as a blossom. The gardens are still there, and still magnificent, and what are you doing that will last centuries?

Sherwood Anderson writes in Winesburg, Ohio of thoughts of mortality: "He knows that in spite of all the stout talk of his fellows he must live and die in uncertainty, a thing blown by the winds, a thing destined like corn to wilt in the sun." I reread bits of Winesburg the other day, and remembered that the really scary thing about that last image is the sun's betrayal.

Coddington calls herself a romantic. She loves old gardens and 1920s styles. And she remembers what got shot for a previous issue but didn't run, and notices when Wintour cuts a few spreads from the coming issue that represent USD$50,000 worth of work. She must know that she works for an enormous, ridiculous edifice. She must know that it's unsustainable, that her art form requires resources that only monarchies and this historically anomalous corporate media system can bring to bear. Anna and Coddington and Condé Nast are in a symbiosis to perpetuate a grand, dying art.

"High fashion" is a niche, like opera, regimented gardens, country dancing, &c., and getting niche-ier. Wintour says fashion is about what's next; does she know? The September Issue doesn't say.

---