While I no longer have the luxury of an available IT staff, in the past I’ve had a recurring beef with them. An example was a previous attempt to acquire a particular email address. My name’s challenging to spell at best, and having to explain over the phone how to spell ‘brydon’ is frustrating enough. Having to convey how to correctly spell ‘brydon.gilliss’ or ‘bgilliss’ is just a pain in the ass.

“ahh, two s’s.”

“two s’s?”

“Yes, two.”

“At the end?”

“Yes.”

In an attempt to make this process simpler in dealing with clients and cut down on potential missed emails, I requested the email address ‘brydon@’. That request sat for almost a year before the IT guy finally cancelled it with the explanation:

“Firstname@company.com emails are an artifact from the past and violate the current firstname.lastname or FirstInitialLastname standard used by ABC Inc. and the world for email. The only exceptions are made for name combinations that would be rude (Stanley Hitter) or names that are regionally impossible to spell”

If you work in an internal IT department then who are your clients? The people that work within your company. Should they not be working to get their clients what they need? Or am I missing the point? Is it their job to make up standards that must be adhered to regardless of what their clients require and request?

I understand the idea of standards. They create consistency, making it easy for someone to guess my email if they know my name. As well they benefit the IT guy. They’re required to have a workstation in place and operational the day a new person starts. This standard allows for that.

Fine, keep my existing email addresses in place. Just add another line item that directs emails from the additional ‘brydon@’ to my existing inbox as well. Why would I be taken to task on an issue like this?

“This is a classic struggle between the IT manager who wants to be the totally dominant person making all the IT decisions [and the business manager],” he says. “There is a struggle going on out there – I witnessed it just this week – between a business manager and an IT guy. The IT guy was saying, ‘I make the decisions’ and the business guy replied, ‘I want this’.”

Walking the walk with SAS CEO Jim Goodnight

Paul Graham does a great job of breaking down why people spend time doing this blogging crap. When this topic comes up with people out of this loop, ie someone who has no clue what RSS stands for, they are typically surprised by what’s happening. Their first comments usually relate to the blogger’s ego.

“Do they think everyone cares what they think?”

I completely agree that the majority of blogs out there do fall into this category. The medium(blogging), however, isn’t the flaw in those cases. Those people would be ranting about their insular world regardless of the technology at hand.

As always, Paul Graham takes it all to another level, all of which hits home for me. This process of blogging is about discovery, discarding information, looking in your blind spot, and learning. While few people, bloggers or not, are opposed to testing out their 15 minutes of fame, anyone who writes solely for that purpose will only produce boredom among readers.

On one hand I can look at some of my posts like Feeling Business and think someone’s going to view that as being self-centred, here’s what we do, why aren’t you doing it? While I can’t keep anyone from seeing that, what I hope at least a few see is insecurity and curiousity. Here’s what we’re doing, we have no clue if it makes sense, what do you think?

ClearSpace is intended to be a self-managing, self-organizing group of individuals. The goal being to treat everyone like a grown-up along with expecting everyone to act like one. A few specific examples:

• Control over your work environment. We collaborate and come together when needed, however, we all have home offices that allow us to work in a place we designed.
• Paid when the client pays. We have no traditional payroll where our company would front people money until the client pays their invoice.
• Choose your work. Ultimately our people decide whether they want to work on any particular project. No one is assigned to work on projects.

We do our best not to hide or shelter our people. If a client pays late, or doesn’t pay, we all know about it, and feel it. If an individual, or team, drops the ball on a project we all feel it.

Some people will read this and think I’m describing the ultimate workplace while others will run in the opposite direction. It takes a certain individual to want, and succeed in, this model. You will feel the business everyday. Why do this? It stems from a respect for the people, however, it’s even more self-serving than that. It’s a good business decision. Having everyone, not a select few at the ‘top’, in tune with our business puts us in a better position for success. When an opportunity or crisis presents itself we’re in the best possible situation to face it.

Years ago, I assumed everyone would want to work in a model like this and it’s those big, bad companies that prevent us from having access to all this learning. I’ve been fortunate enough to have been involved in a few other experiments like this over the years. I’ve come to understand that a lot of people do NOT want this. Quite the opposite. Looking at it from the other direction, you could say those people are paying their company NOT to tell them about all this. That’s part of the value their company offers them. If a client pays late and it means finances may be stretched next month, fine but don’t tell me, that’s what I’m paying you for.

For me, while it’s stressful and freaks you out somedays, I’d much rather feel the business than not.

Thanks to Chris for the offer, I’ve started a CoworkingGuelph page on the Coworking wiki. Absolutely nothing there yet but please add your name if you’re interested as well as any helpful notes.

To start, I love Flock and I really really want to switch to using it fulltime. I began writing this post in Flock but had to switch back to Firefox as the latest release doesn’t appear to support basic cut and paste.

It’s a great browser that will excel at it’s promise, to make it easier to work with social web-based software such as blogs, flickr, del.icio.us, etc. They will nail that and are already close. It’s got me hooked on flickr.

Flock is early release software, I expect bugs and can’t wait until they reach the 1.0 release. As of today the only actual feature keeping me from switching from firefox to flock is the lack of keyword support for bookmarks.

I hate switching from keyboard to mouse and back so I use keywords extensively. “CTRL-L tsn” takes me to tsn.ca, “CTRL-T b” opens a new tab to bloglines. I’m now using del.icio.us and the tag idea is great but it ain’t no bookmarks.

Other than that it’s just bugs that I assume they’ll work out. Scrolling doesn’t work correctly. Keyboard based searching is buggy. They don’t get the timezones right for blog entries. So when I post from flock, the post shows up as having been written 5 hours ago. Oh, and with today’s update I can no longer post blog entries which is a big one.

I’ve been working out of my home office for well over a year now. When people ask how I enjoy it I usually give some reponse along the lines of “it’s ok, there are things I miss about being in an office and there are things I could care less to ever be a part of”.

A few specifics, I don’t miss commuting everyday, office politics, standard office hours, traditional bosses. I do miss long Friday lunches, the social aspect of an office and collaboration in general.

Ultimately I much prefer working in an environment I have absolute control over, ignoring for a minute the fact that my wife and two kids are clearly the ones in charge, and my real issues with working in an office are more attributed to corporate culture than the office itself. Working with ClearSpace, regardless of whether we have an office, means I don’t have to deal with traditional corporate culture issues.

So if I can work towards getting some of the things I miss about an office, ie the good stuff, while still working at home then I’m gold. To that end I am very serious about establishing a coworking house here in Guelph. My plan is to put together something along the lines of the Queen Street Commons in Charlottetown PEI.

The idea would be to purchase a house close to downtown Guelph, renovate it so that it’s broken up into clean simple offices, a common space, a kitchen, a boardroom, and hopefully an outdoor patio. Then offer basic services such as wired and wireless internet, voip phones, printing, etc. It’s a place you can show up to 24/7 and have a private office to work.

Would you pay $35 to $100 a month for something like this in Guelph? If so, please contact me. The more people I know of who are interested, the faster this could actually happen.

Links:

• Coding in Paradise
• Linuxcaffe in Toronto.
• The Office

While I can’t stand bumper sticker marketing terms like web 2.0, I am still planning to attend the Mesh Conference in Toronto.

I started testing Flock late last week and I’ve all but made the complete switch from Firefox. I wrote this post using Flock. They’ve managed to take a series of tasks people commonly perform through a browser such as blogging, mapping, photo sharing, etc and build a browser that makes all that simpler.

"Flock is the free web browser that makes it easier to share and connect with your friends."

This is the direction I’ve long assumed most applications will move. Instead of building a fully functioning web client plus some type of smart client or full GUI, just extend the browser itself. I’d like to play with this idea for a ClearSpace client., any volunteers? Maybe build a flock extension specifically for their application?

Something I hope I’m getting better at over time is how I respond. How we respond can be more important than the content of our actual response. Women understand this far better than men as they have more ‘tact’.

“Sandy told me I look different today, what do you think she meant?”

If you’re this tuned in to these meta-messages, it’s a blessing and a curse. Some people spend their days interpreting messages that don’t even exist.

How do you respond when a team member brings you less than exciting news? Getting specific, let’s say they forgot to include a key file in your software for a customer deliverable. A stereotypical manager response to this could be to treat it as a ‘fire’, get worked up, possibly even angry. The intent being to convey the severity of the situation at hand. In some cases there may be formal punishment on the spot. Or it may take a passive aggressive form by showing up on that person’s next review or your next performance grade. Seems reasonable right?

What’s really important here? The most important part of this exchange is the information brought forward. It’s now available and in the open for the team to address, learn from it, and move forward.

How does that traditional response impact this goal? It may, if you’re lucky, prevent that person from making the same mistake again out of fear of reprisal. They’ll fear being yelled at, humiliated, or having money taken from them due to their resulting low performance or review grade.

What’s guaranteed is you’re less likely to know if they do make the same mistake again. You may have driven that information underground. If you’re lucky that person won’t make that mistake again. They will, however, make new ones. Are your chances of hearing about them more or less likely now? As well, have your chances of hearing about other team members mistakes increased or decreased?

How we respond is very important and often overlooked in relation to our real goals. It reminds me of my kids. When my son drinks alcohol or smokes for the first time, will I want to know about it? Of course I do. If I freak out, ground him, and give him a lecture, will that keep him from drinking again? Maybe, but probably not. Will it make him think twice about ever telling me about a similar event in his life again? Oh ya.

I’m giving FeedBurner a try for serving this site’s feed. If you were using the old feed directly, and you don’t mind, please switch over the new feed.