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Many of my friends consider Caroline Valentine, of Valentine And Associates, the first person to call when they have high-level HR/staffing needs. The last few times we’ve had lunch, I wished I had a recorder with me. Following a recent conversation about insurance, I wrote some of my questions down, and Caroline responded. |
Lynn Bender: Last time we met, you had mentioned several strategies which startups can use to reduce their per employee health insurance premiums. Could you elaborate?
Caroline Valentine: The most common strategy is to provide a plan or plans with higher $ deductibles and copays. For this to work and not result in a mutiny of the current employees on increased out of pocket expenses or higher salary offers to prospective employees to compensate, it must be accompanied by some form of pre-tax savings account – either an FSA (Flexible Savings Account) or HSA (Healthcare Savings Account). There is a third type, HRA, which is not commonly used, so I wont elaborate on it.
The difference is pretty simple. An FSA allows for pre-tax deductions to be used within the calendar for any healthcare related expenses. The catch of course is within the calendar year – it’s a use it or lose it plan. An HSA allows for pre-tax deductions to be used anytime needed. The employer and employee can both make contributions to the account. It grows over time and eventually can be transferred to a mutual money account (from simple savings) and then can operate as a retirement fund, participants are forced to pull money out after a certain age – but not just for healthcare related expenses- check out the links below for additional details on how both plans work -
http://www.ustreas.gov/offices/public-affairs/hsa/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_spending_account
If your company doesn’t already offer one, ask about it – the plans save $ for companies as well so your HR or accounting departments should be happy to hear you are interested.
Bender: Many of my friends work as independent contractors. Some are employed through a headhunter/recruiting firm, and have their insurance included through the firm. However, some firms provide no such coverage. Do you see any trends?
Valentine: As we all know, insurance costs are continuing to escalate upwards. For most firms, the solution is higher deductibles and co-pays, which I discussed in the answer to the previous question. As it becomes more difficult, we might see fewer firms willing to deal with the headache. On the other hand, if more consultants and contractors request (or even demand) access to benefits as a condition, the firms might reconsider. The size of the firm, types of clients and the firm’s financial stability are also factors to consider.
Bender: For IT pros who must seek coverage on their own, what do you suggest? I know that BCBS was offering individual plans, but for individuals over 45, the cost becomes prohibitive. Is it always better to find a group plan?
Valentine: Most of the major/national healthcare providers do offer individual plans – BCBS, Humana, United Healthcare, Assurant, Cigna, and Atena. Additionally, there are local and regional providers including Scott & White. It is important to research all of the available plans in your area and get a quote if you can. The process of determining rates is not an exact science and can varying greatly from provider to provider. It is not always better to find a group plan, but most of the time it is. Many organizations are providing members with access to healthcare plans – IEEE being one of them. There are many more – first step is identifying organizations focused on independent consultants as a core membership and it being a group you are interested in joining.
Bender: The idea of coworking has been getting a lot a press recently. For those starting or participating in a co-working venture, are there any special considerations?
Valentine: Coworking is different from simply renting space in a “business office suite” type of environment with a desk, door, receptionist, and conference room. The underlying intent of co-working is to create and foster community and communication – my advice would be to know that is a guiding principle, know yourself and how much community and communication you are seeking, and know what you want to give to and get from the arrangement.
I know of no one in Austin who knows more about Postgres than Decibel. For quite a while, he has been threatening to start a Postgres user group. He’s finally done it. Here is the scoop:
Event: Austin Postgres User’s Group - First Meeting
Date: Tuesday, May 6th at 6PM-8PM
Location Sun Microsystems (Map)
Building 8 - Longhorn Conference Room
5300 Riata Park Ct
Austin, TX 78727
The rough agenda will be:
6:00 - 6:30 Meet ‘n greet
6:30 - 7:15 Discuss goals for the AustinPUG
7:15 - 7:45 Presentation: What’s new it 8.3?
7:45 - 8:00 Wrap-up
Everyone who is attending will have to register as a visitor; to make this as efficient as possible, please RSVP to austinpug@decibel.org. There will be free Pizza from Mangia’s. When you register, please specify pizza preference: spinach, pepperoni, or Chicago style, etc.
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Cody Marx Bailey and his colleagues in College Station have been executing successful projects and events in rapid succession. While asking Cody if he would consider playing DJ at the upcoming Get Agile event, I took the opportunity to discuss some of the recent projects he has been involved in. |
Lynn Bender: It seems in the last year, Bryan/College Station has really established a reputation as a city with a strong, well-connected, technical community — not just as a place where people talk the talk, but rather where people put plans into action. Bryan/College Station was host to a very successful BarCampTexas II. It’s the location for the first co-working facility in Texas — The Creative Space (thecreativespace.org). You seem to be one of the main instigators. Tell me how this all came about.
Cody Marx Bailey: It really started about a year and a half ago when some friends of mine and I would all carpool to Houston for Refresh. We would leave work at 5, barely make it there on time, and make it back home around 1am. One night, on the way back, we decided that it was about time that we held our own Refresh in Bryan/College Station. We weren’t sure if it would go over, but we figured if we could get a few new faces out we would at least be that far along. We ended up with 40 or so folks coming out to hear Erica O’Grady give a talk on “The Flight of the Creative Class“. A few months later, I was able to schedule Google to come and give a talk. We had over 200 people attend and it was then that we realized that we had a real community in little old Bryan/College Station.
My friends and I were meeting after work at coffee shops, residence, and bars to get work done when it finally occurred to me that we were very close to catalyzing and forming the Creative Space. We opened up in August 2007 with 5 anchor residents that quickly grew to 10 and more recently expanded to 15 with the addition of more space.
Once the coworking office was established, the community was strong and energized, we decided that it was about time we held a BarCamp. We had attended a few BarCamps as a group so we knew what the expectations were. Our collective goal was to throw on a BarCamp and invite folks from around the state to come in and see what we had been up to. It was sort of our coming out party for our community and we knew we had to pull this off. We made several trips around the state to promote BarCampTexas II and let folks know that it was going to be awesome… and it was.
Bender: Your company, Downtown Cartel (downtowncartel.com), is one of the companies who operate out of The Creative Space. Can you tell me a bit about how The Creative Space functions, the services it provides, and how such a space benefits Downtown Cartel.
Bailey: Downtown Cartel is a direct result of The Creative Space’s opportunities. I was doing freelance work out of the space along with three other guys when it sort of dawned on us that we should work together and form a single entity to get behind. A couple of ruby developers, a python guy, some javascript and a little bit of magic later, we were official — working with some great clients out of both Austin and Houston. There’s a plethora of talented folks in The Creative Space that are all looking out to help one another and are interested in watching everyone grow. It sometimes feels like a family more than a company, but that’s because we’re a bunch of honest, good natured young professionals with tons of passion for doing great things with our customers and community. Downtown Cartel’s first product was hashtags.org, a tagging application for microblogging/twitter.
With respect to how The Creative Space functions, it is a rather loose organization of individuals. The goal is to provide a community space for anyone to come collaborate and innovate in all the creative type occupations. Since office space is never free we have several anchor tenets who have permanent desks in the space. However, anyone is welcome to borrow a spare desk when needed.
Bender: I keep hearing about a company called Fibertown, and how all you folks have fiber to the office. What’s the scoop?
Bailey: Fibertown is the development company that is transforming historic downtown Bryan into a modern technology campus. We’ve been fortunate enough to work with Fibertown to ensure the viability of the space and our businesses. The energy that we bring to downtown has already made a large impression on the professional culture in downtown.
We are situated on a fiber crossroads for five of the world’s nine Tier I internet carriers which gives us some of the best internet connectivity in the United States. We also have access to a brand new Tier IV data center just 300 feet away from our offices. With rent being a fraction of what it is in downtown Austin, Houston, and Dallas we’ve found Bryan/College Station to be a great place to live and work.
Bender: BarCampTexas II was a huge success. You managed to bring a large contingent of folks from Houston, Dallas, and Austin. Can you tell me about the event?
Bailey: Sure thing! We wanted to have a good sized BarCamp in Bryan/College Station and being nearly equi-distant from the big three we felt that it would provide a great place for everyone from around the state to come and geek out together. Folks from The Creative Space all made it out to events like GeekAustin, Houston Startup Happy Hour, RefreshDallas, etc to make sure that those communities saw that we were eager to host them. I think inviting people in person was a big factor in having 180 people show up from out of town.
Honestly, I think the kegs of Shiner may have played a big part in the success. Nothing like good beer, great people, and lots of bandwidth. Good things happen when kindling like that is provided.
Bender: I’ve wanted to go to the TED conference for years. Aside from the fact that it is 10K to attend, you have to be invited — and I am not expecting an invite in the mail. You did something about it and started the BIL conference and attracted a broad list of well-known speakers. You pretty much disproved that someone has to be in a place like Austin or Silicon Valley to put together an event of this caliber. Were there any special considerations or complications organizing the event from College Station?
As part of the Bryan/College Station contingent, we don’t let stuff like that prevent us from doing anything. We think big and execute our ideas. If you listen to every reason why not to do something, you’ll never get anything done. Once we decided we were going to do this, we got to work and reached into our social networks and started working the wiki.
What was originally going to be a few guys hanging out in Monterey became a 250 person unconference across the street from TED. We planned it so that BIL would be hitting it’s stride right when TED finished up. This allowed for about 10% of the attendees from TED to come to BIL and experience a community driven, distributed two-day unconference in the spirit of TED. I’ll admit, it was probably one of the most amazing events I’ve ever experienced. The intelligent minds that gathered that weekend in Monterey, California was nothing short of amazing.
Bender: With the rise of Social Media, there has been considerable talk about the notion of community. You and your colleagues have been able to move beyond talk and motivate each other to action. What advice can you share with folks in other cities.
Bailey: I think that leading by example is the best way to motivate others. Getting people excited about a vision and then leading them through the first couple of times really builds a track record they can trust. At first, there were probably quite a few doubters in the area. They said things like “it’ll never happen”, and “we’re too small to be legitimate”. If you sit around and listen to those people, nothing good ever happens.
The best advice I can give is to ignore the pessimism and focus on making things happen. The power of community and being able to rely on and trust them is priceless.
Cody Marx Bailey will be spinning as DJ SuperPhly at the upcoming GeekAustin Get Agile party.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before….
I am really looking forward to the Get Agile event this month. I went through my big phone book and found about 550 Austin fans of agile technology. Add the core GeekAustin folks (and subtract those that would rather stay home and download their girlfriend) — and we’re looking at a pretty good bash.
The co-host for this month’s event is Agile Austin. These folks are doing great things — sponsoring workshops, providing continuing education for software, project, and management professionals, as well as bringing industry leaders to town for speaking engagements. As far as I can tell, only about half of my friends are aware of them. I hope the rest of you can make it to the party and meet a few of these folks. If you’d like to learn more about agile in an informal environment, while tossing back a few drinks, this is your opportunity.
A note about the venue: There is plenty of room at Union Park. You won’t be standing in line to get in. And when I say that there will be valet parking, I actually call the valet company to send extra drivers. So you want to take advantage of it, you won’t have to wait to get your car parked either. The drinks at Union Park are generous and reasonably priced. For those of you who want to see how agile you are after a couple of drinks, we’ll be in the BoomBoom room.
Here’s the details:
Get Agile with GeekAustin / Agile Austin
Tuesday April 29th 6PM-9PM
at Union Park 612 w. 6th street (map)
Upcoming: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/433148/
We have a few surprises in store as well — but we’re not going to tell.
To get on the invite list for future GeekAustin events, send email to linearb@gmail.com
Hope to see you there!
-Lynn
After outgrowing the last few venues, it became necessary to find something a bit larger for the upcoming GeekAustin Agile and WordPress events. Michelle had been telling me to check out Union Park, next to Katz’s, telling me what a great place it was. So, next time Jana and I had one of our whiskey and paté nights, we stopped by for a few rounds of Maker’s Mark. The drinks are very reasonably priced, there is a beautiful view from their upstairs patio, and Greg Bodle, the owner, is a great guy. Then we saw the Union Park BoomBoom Room:
It’s decided. Union Park is the place. Hope you can join us at the next event.
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Martin Galway, longtime veteran of the Austin game industry, sent me an note yesterday to let me know that his latest company, Certain Affinity, is seeking a IT manager. I took the opportunity to catch up with Martin on the latest news — including Plunder. |
Lynn Bender: So, how long has CertainAffinity been around? You’re one of the founders, yes?
Martin Galway: I am a co-founder along with the Max Hoberman, the company president. Max is the chap who designed all the multiplayer features of the Halo games. Max is an austin native who, after working in Chicago and Seattle for decade, decided he had to come back. When Max met a few of us ex-Digital Anvil folks, we decided to start a company together.
Bender: Martin, it seems like you’ve been in town since the early Origin days. Are you an Austin native as well?
Galway: A school friend of mine had moved over to Austin and was working at Origin. He recommended me to come over in early 1988 for some freelance audio work. I immediately fell in love with the place - and Origin, who happened to have no audio staff at the time. They liked my work, so we started to talk employment. After some visa wrangling, I finally made it over at the end of 1990, and started Origin’s audio department. In 1996 a group of us left Origin and started Digital Anvil.
Bender: How did Certain Affinity get started?
Galway: In mid 2006, I was picking up the pieces after Microsoft had closed our beloved Digital Anvil studio (what a soap opera!). At a July 4th party, I was introduced to Max Hoberman who, while still on the Bungie payroll and still working on Halo 3, had finagled his return to Austin after ten years in the Bungie wildernesses of Chicago and Seattle. Max said he needed to come back to Austin - understandable! We formed Certain Affinity soon after, with Max as president, and by November we were off and running with nine staff and our first project, a map pack for Halo 2. That came out in April 2007, by which time we’d begun some original IP designs. We got Valve interested in us enough to land XBOX360 co-development work on their upcoming action-horror title Left 4 Dead, but continued work on the original stuff, and you’ll be seeing the fruits of both this year.
Bender: Everyone is talking about your new game, Plunder. What is the scoop?
Galway: That’s one of our original IPs - due out in the middle of this year from Capcom. It’s an easy-to-learn, action strategy title featuring pirates - basically you have to keep the other ships away from your stuff while you build up your empire. There’s tons of cannon fire and sinking ships everywhere, but it’s all viewed from hundreds of feet away so we don’t think of it as a violent game. Plunder is enjoyable for all ages, and we’re working to make sure it has depth enough for hard-core players, while people who don’t think they’re up to a conventional action title can still feel comfortable playing it. As one example of the simplicity - there’s no aiming, and no fire button! You just sail your ship up alongside the enemy, and a thrilling sea-battle automatically ensues. Anything you sail up to that you can fire on, you fire on. Sail away to stop the battle. In our play tests, all the non-gamers love it because they’re able to feel equal to the hardcore gamers.
Bender: I noticed that your games are geared mostly for the xbox. Do you have plans to extend to other platforms?
Galway: We are mostly an XBOX360 company, since that’s our recent background. Plunder will be on XBOX360, Playstation 3 and Windows.
Bender: In your email, you said that Certain Affinity needed an IT person. Can you tell me about the position?
Galway: We’re up over twenty staff now and I’ve been overloaded for some time. We’ve started to hire infrastructure people that make the company tick over in a much more professional way than me trying to do it all myself. The IT person will help solve our communications inside the company as well as with external partners, improve security, backups, and keep all our software and systems in peak condition. If they have other skills closer to development, there are always opportunities to get stuck in and help out. And - play our games of course, that’s important.
Bender: Do you have a jobs page that we can link to?
Galway: Sure. It’s: http://certainaffinity.com/jobs.htm
Bender: Thanks for giving me the latest news. I’ll be calling about that playtest. ;)
To get in the mood for the upcoming interview with Gordon Montgomery of Neudesic, I scanned Google for podcasts dealing with UX. I stumbled on to Gerry Gaffney’s User Experience Podcast (UXpod). This is a real gem. UXpod has over 30 high quality interviews with leading figures in User Experience including Luke Wroblewski, Joel Spolsky, Elizabeth Rosenzweig, Steve Krug and many others.
You might have paid to hear some of these folks speak at conferences. Thanks to UXPod, you can experience them in your car on the way to the office. If one of the lectures isn’t interesting, just fast forward to the next. It’s not like being at a conference where everyone sees you leave the room. You can stop them while you head in to UpperCrust for coffee, and you can make them start all over again if you get distracted by the driver next to you. Not even Tim O’Reilly can do that at a conference.
Happy listening, and see you on Mopac!
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Jason Cohen founded Smart Bear Software on a bet. The bet paid off. Profitable and cash-flow positive since Q4 ‘03, Smart Bear was recently acquired by the software testing firm, Automated QA. During a recent conversation about agile practices, Jason mentioned that Smart Bear was employing agile practices in their marketing strategy. I asked if I could interview him for GeekAustin. |
Lynn Bender: Jason, it seems like only a few years back when GeekAustin saw the first Smart Bear job posting.. Since then, you’ve gone on to win the Jolt award for Code Collaborator. I believe, however, that Code Collaborator wasn’t your first product. Could you tell me about your suite of tools and the market they serve?
Jason Cohen: Yeah, it was just a few years back when GeekAustin ran our first posting. By the way that’s also where I found employee #1!
Code Historian was our first product — a version control system data-mining tool. Version control is used primarily to keep developers from stepping on each others’ toes, but there’s a lot of useful data in there that’s generally hard to get at. We had everything from a “time-line diff” where you could get a diff of a file between any two points in time with one click to a system that transferred version control data to an RDBMS for real reporting.
Code review wasn’t in the original game plan. I stumbled into this hole in the developer tools market because people were abusing Code Historian in order to do reviews. By listening to my customers I made my way into code review.
Sounds agile already doesn’t it? Morphing yourself based stakeholder input rather than sticking to some pre-determined long-term master plan. If I hadn’t done that, we would certainly not have the same success.
Bender: When we last discussed agile methodology, you mentioned that Smart Bear employs agile methods in business and marketing. Could you elaborate on this?
Cohen: The traditional business plan looks out 2-4 years. Marketing — especially in print and events — takes months to plan, expects targets to be met months in the future, and campaigns often run 1-2 years.
These time-lines are as far-sighted and pre-planned as traditional waterfall software development, and at Smart Bear we don’t have them. Our marketing efforts can last 1-2 months, and can be set up in less than a month. We measure the response and adjust accordingly.
Bender: Traditionally, it seems that marketing has been driven by that elusive quality called inspiration. Once found, this is usually followed by pre-launch preparation, and then a massive launch. This is a heavyweight approach. Are there ways to insert agile practices into these steps — or do you simply have to discard this approach entirely?
Cohen: It’s a tricky answer because some things in marketing are beyond your control.
For example, print ads have a 2-3 month lead-time, and often you have to sign up for 6-12 months. Tradeshows can have a 12-month lead-time to get involved and 6 months lead-time for preparation. You can’t change these timelines, so to some extent they exert non-agile control over your efforts. For example, if the new print ad talks about features in v4.0, it’s going to come out 3 months from now and you’d better have released those features by then!
However the majority of our marketing efforts are, in fact, very different from the usual approach you described. We don’t talk about artsy-fuzzy things like ‘inspiration, we start early, and we fail-fast. We throw out the traditional model completely except for these issues of timeline.
Bender: Your book on code review is prominently advertised on the Smart Bear website. How does this fit in to your agile marketing strategy?
Cohen: We give away something of real value — a book about code review. It’s a physical book and and we print and ship it for free. There are sample chapters on-line so you can see that it’s full of genuinely useful information, not a sales pitch. We ask where you heard about us and people tell us. We know they tell the truth because if they came in from a web page we save the referring URL and we can see that the text they type in does match the referring site, so we assume it’s accurate for the other marketing efforts too.
We know books lead to trials because in our live demos the potential customer has always gotten the book. Over 50% of people who get a live demo end up purchasing, so there’s a direct and substantial correlation between getting books and purchasing.
We use the book to determine which marketing efforts work. Sure, it costs money to print and ship books, but what’s the value of not only promoting your product and earning trust in your company, but simultaneously measuring the efficacy of every marketing campaign?
Bender: Programmers have a suite of pre-built tools to drive the development process. Can you tell me a bit about how you manage test-driven marketing? I am guessing that there is nothing like JUnit for marketing.
Cohen: Ha, yeah there’s not.
The idea of test-driven development is to set up the conditions for success, then write code until the conditions are met. It also implies that you continue to measure continuously in the future to make sure you don’t regress.
We approach our marketing the same way. It’s only a question of time and money to get a print ad in 7 magazines, to get a booth at 20 tradeshows, and to spend $10k/month on Google ads. But you don’t have infinite time or money, and you know half those marketing efforts are a complete waste. So you have to measure which ones work and only spend money there.
So first set up the test cases. Maybe it’s “We get an average of 100 leads/month from this ad.” Or “We get 5 sales from that tradeshow.” Then you try it, and measure it (measurement is the hard part). Then it either passes or fails. If passes, we might spend more money but we’ll definitely stay with it. If it fails, we’ve spent a known amount of money, that’s OK.
Then there’s the “continuous testing” part. We’ve found that in marketing it’s often true that an ad can work in a magazine for 2 years and then stop being effective. So there’s the regression bug testing aspect as well.
We just use a single table in a database for book orders. We have a bunch of regex’s that look through user-supplied “how did you hear” (it’s fill-in-the-blank to prevent people from selecting an item at random) and mapping it into a set of 30+ fixed categories. Then we just “group by” that and count the books, usually grouping by date etc.. We use MS Access to generate a few reports.
One of the neat reports is “ROI.” Here we have a little table (updated by hand in Access) with how much money we’ve spent in each campaign, then we link that to the book orders. So it’s “Cost per book” on the advertising side; add in the cost to print and ship times the number of books and you have your total expense.
Bender: Can you tell me a bit more about the test metrics?
Cohen: It’s often difficult to link a sale to a marketing campaign, which is ultimately what you want to know. That is, if I spend X dollars on campaign C, I eventually get Y dollars in revenue. Most people are happy if Y > X, even if Y isn’t much bigger, even with overhead. We’re like that.
But tying the X dollars to the Y dollars is a lot of steps. When they got from your ad / booth / mailer / phone call to your web site / sales rep, did you record that fact? When others in the same group try out your software, do you link that to the original guy who found you? When you get the purchase order from accounts payable, can you link that as well?
Often even the first step is hard. Print advertising is notoriously difficult. You can try a fancy URL, but techie people know that’s unnecessary. Print-ad sales reps tell you you’re buying a brand, but that’s not my experience.
Bender: Putting the stakeholders first is considered to be one of the core agile values. Can you tell me a bit how this works in marketing / business development?
Cohen: It’s tautological to say that marketing should be driven by customers’ desires, behaviors, pains, etc., but so often it just isn’t.
Take IBM WebSphere (http://www-306.ibm.com/software/websphere/). It’s almost impossible to get any real information from the site. Tons of links to nebulous places, empty text like “Extend access to business processes, applications and information to anyone anywhere.” Was this site designed to serve a potential customer, or just a hierarchical dumping ground for a mountain of information?
Contrast with Safari (http://www.apple.com/safari/). In 5 seconds I can see what it is. I can download with one click, or I can get screenshots and brief, tantalizing descriptions of what it does. Isn’t that what you want from a software web page 90% of the time? This is designed with the curious, time-strapped user in mind.
We’re always in our customers’ heads. Everything we make — print ads, website, product screens — we ask ourselves questions like: What is the use-case? Is this really what I want to see, or is this just what we’re trying to push down their throats? Is this serving a specific purpose or is it fluff? Are we communicating something useful with every phrase or are we speaking in generalities? Are we really solving a specific problem for the customer?
If you don’t ask these questions, you’re not treating your potential customer (the ultimate stakeholder) as the most important thing.
Bender: Do you ever think we will hear marketing people talk about SCRUM and sprints?
Cohen: I doubt it. Although it would be nice to get iterations, 2-week deadlines usually not important in fact.
The “meetings” part of scrum is to get everyone the same page, but in marketing a lot of times either the projects don’t intersect at all (tradeshow planning versus print ads; once the copy and art is done there’s nothing else to interact on) or everyone works together almost continuously anyway, checking things out many times per day — sometimes even like “pair programming. The “release SOMETHING INTERESTING regularly” is probably a useful technique.
Bender: Will you be in town for the Get Agile with Geek Austin party this month?
Cohen: You bet! GeekAustin parties are always a blast.
Bender: I’ll see you then. Jason, thanks for taking the time.
I am more fortunate than many. I only spend about 20 mins a day on Mopac. Thanks to IT Conversations mp3s, Mopac has become my IT classroom. Leading up to this month’s GeekAustin Agile Happy Hour, I decided to fish around for agile podcasts and conference proceedings. Here are two of my finds:
Agile Toolkit Podcast. There are a lot of great interviews here — enough to keep you busy for a few months. In particular:
Team Agile Interviews. Includes interviews with Kent Beck and Johanna Rothman.
With all these resources, we’ll all be scrum masters in no time. Just don’t forget to stop for gas.
-Linear
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I first became acquainted with David Neff, the local director of Web, film and interactive strategies for the American Cancer Society, through the his participation in the Social Media Club of Austin. David has both a background in programming and public relations. At SXSW08, David a panel called The Future of Volunteers: Adapt or Die. Now that the dust has settled from SXSW08, I caught up with David to find out about his latest project: |
Lynn Bender: Tell us about SharingHope.TV
David Neff: SharingHope.TV is one of the first User Gernerated Content Communities built by a non-profit. On the community anyone can share video, audio, photos and artwork about their cancer experience.
Bender: The first? That is surprising. CMSs have been around for almost a decade.
Neff: Ahh but not one’s around User Generated Content — at least not video, photos and artwork.
Bender: Did you build the system from the ground up, or did you start with an existing framework — like drupal or jive? How many developers were involved, and how long did it take to complete the project?
Neff: We had 3 developers involved and they were all local Austin talent. The site was completed in around 6 months which was a record turnaround for us!
Bender: I find it hard to believe that the site was the work of three guys. It’s an incredible site.
Neff: The entire site was built in PHP5 on the ZenD framework while our entire registration system was built on Ruby. The API for the flash encoding and player as well as other calls was purchased off the shelf from a company called VMIX. Ian Mouton was the php programmer and Tom Brown our OpenID and Ruby expert. If you need a Rails person here in town check out Tom Brown. Our web designer was Nicole DeZalia who works for us here at the American Cancer Society, I was just the brainchild and project manager. We are running SharingHope.TV on Slicehost and on Ubuntu Gusty. Slicehost has been an amazing provider.
Bender: Did you start with more or less a complete set of specifications, or did you modify the specs as you were building out the site?
Neff: Oh we modified the heck out of it. We knew we wanted certain things such as categories to group media, openID support, Creative Common licensing of materials, etc but it was very fluid. We are totally in love with OpenID.
BenderCan you tell me a bit about the pros and cons of OpenID? I’ve heard mostly praise, but a little grumbling as well. It seems that adoption by service provider is growing much faster than adoption by the user base.
Neff: Although I am not an OpenID expert I know that the average user is really tired of signing up for u/p u/p u/p again and again. Even here at the American Cancer Society you had to have diff logins for all our Web properties. From one message board to another, etc. OpenID really helps us solve that problem for the avg user. Now it’s up to us to educate them. We plan to implement it on all our Web properties in the next year and half.
Bender: If you had to start the project again from scratch, is there anything you would have done differently? What advice do you have for folks considering similar projects?
Neff: yes I hope we can at least get our employees and volunteers on board to help that adoption. I would say that if you have to invest in one form of “Web 2.0″ technology (and I do hate that term) it should be user generated content. Listening to your constituents and what they have to say is one of the most important things any non-profit for for-profit can do. We have built a community for people to share their cancer experiences in digital form and that will give other hope.
Bender: A couple of questions regarding non-profits. Several houston-based social media experts, like Erica O’Grady and Ed Schipel, say that Austin is a huge center for non-profit activity. Do you find this to be the case as well, and if so, to what do you attribute that?
Neff: I would say that would be true to an extent. I think it has to do a lot with our “Social Good” attitude in Austin. We are a very caring and friendly city. Also being near the capital has a lot of advocacy benefits when it comes to influencing laws. I do wish more people came to the 501 Tech Club here in town. Imagine Geeks and Non-profits folks (I’m both) meeting and sharing ideas.
Bender: Tell me more about the 501 club in Austin. Is that similar to NetSquared?
Neff: yes very similar except I think we have livlier discussions.
Bender: A few of my friends who do fund raising often tell me that it is easier to ask for $10,000 than $100. However, looking at the campaigns of Barack Obama and Ron Paul, I’m not sure that is still the case. With respect to cancer research, organizations like the Susan Komen Foundation seem to be proving that to be no longer the case as well. Are the new tools we have at our disposal changing the non-profits in fundamental ways?
Neff: Oh yeah we totally see the rise the the micro-donation and the micro-volunteer. We have people donating in Linden Dollars in Second Life. So, yes we see the rise of the micro-donation to be very important. In fact every video on SharingHope.TV has donations tied into it. We think that is a first to tie online video into donations. Will it work only time will tell?
Bender: Can you tell me something about the role of the Creative Commons in sharinghope.tv? You seem to have given it prominent mention.
Neff: Yes we really really want to honor the wishes of the media creators on www.sharinghope.tv. — meaning that we give them 4 options to license their materials. We also found a bunch of local bands and bands from San Diego that have licenesed their music for people to use in their videos on the site. The options we give people are listed here: http://www.sharinghope.tv/creative-commons and the music we offer them to use (so we don’t get sued like YouTube) is can be found here: http://www.sharinghope.tv/music.php.
Bender: What kind of opportunities are their for folks who may not have money to donate, but would be willing to code for a good cause? I remember that the League of Technical Voters codeathon attracted over 50 coders who devoted a weekend.
Neff: I know I was very jealous! We have a host of “Dream projects” that we need help on from updating old asp pages to helping us implement new API’s on SharingHope.TV
Bender: Do you have any specs online for these unfinished projects?
Neff: no but I could do that or have people contact me if they are interested. There is a views API and a plays API that we need to put on SharingHope.TV but would love to find a coder to volunteer to do that. We are also looking for someone to just help us make minor php tweaks
Bender: Well, if you put up a specs page, I’m sure that quite a few of us would be happy to link to it.
Neff: Consider that done. I know the VMIX API has a dev wiki as well. Also I am just looking for coders to blog about it in general for publicity and to let people know about the site — to show off all our tech….non profits can do cutting edge technical work as well!
Bender: you mentioned that you were the project manager. I’m finding more and more that the key skills to have are no longer having a knowledge of data structures and algorithms but rather a knowledge of scoping and managing projects. How does this compare with your experience?
Neff: What you are saying is very true. I can’t code PHP worh a crap but I can read it and help people stay on track. Scoping is a skill all int itself today. Currently I am the Director of Web, Film and Interactive Strategy. So I come from a Web Development and Communications background. Which is nice to be able to understand and write code and talk about it.
Bender: You spoke at SXSWi this year. How was your panel experience at SXSW?
Neff: Oh I love SXSW. Hugh and the folks do such a good job. We did a panel on the Future of Volunteers and where we need to be in 5 years to recruit them and keep them interested. As you might imagine that will involve a ton of digital outreach. Check out the video here: http://www.fispace.org/home/2008/03/adapt-or-die-th.html
Bender: Our audience is pretty geeky. Any new projects in the works that you can tell us about?
Neff: Oh I know your audience is geeky! That’s why I read it and I love the happy hours. I recommend them and 501 tech club all the time. As far as new things we are swamped right now coding out all the specs on SharingHope.tv and just telling people about it. If you know anyone with cancer please point them our way. We are here to help!
Bender: David. Thanks for your time.
Courtesy of Omar: The Statesman just reported that Dell Inc. will close its Topfer Manufacturing Center in North Austin by Jan. 1, cutting 800 to 900 jobs. The Statesman goes on to say that the “move would be company’s largest area layoffs since 2001“. Largest since 2001? Anyone care to dispute that?
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GeekAustin: Well, the big news is that Refresh is moving to Buffalo Billiards. I think a lot of folks would prefer a beer or whiskey to an espresso in the evening. I was happy to hear of the change.
Alex Jones: Definitely, we’ve made it a habit to go out for a beer or coffee after each meeting, so this makes it that much easier. A special thanks goes to Leesa who did all of the legwork to find us the new venue
GA: What new things will you be looking to do in this new location? What will moving to Buffalo enable you to do?
Jones: The most important thing will be the ability to fit everyone into the space comfortably. Texpresso, our old venue was a great place to start, but the last few meetings required folks to pack in a little closer than was comfortable. We also hope that it will lead to more post-meeting conversations as we won’t be forced to go to a new venue after 9:00.
GA: Do you know if Buffalo has food as well? pub grub?
Jones: Not only do they have food, but as our meetings are on Tuesday’s we’ll be able to take advantage of half price appetizers and drink specials.
GA: I first heard about Refresh Austin at one of the BarCampAustin parties GeekAustin hosted in 2006. Now days, it seems hardly a day goes by without Refresh coming up in a conversation. I had lunch with someone from Valentine Associates on Tuesday, and Refresh even came up in that conversation. How has the growth of the group been over the last year?
Jones: Tremendous. A lot of good folks have put in a lot of effort to transform Refresh Austin from a loosely-organized collection of events into a smooth running group for Web professionals. We made some decisions early on that have made it easier for people to join and participate, and in that time we’ve more than doubled the amount of people on our mailing list and attendance at our meetings.
GA: There appears to be a core team who manages Refresh Austin. You mentioned Leesa. I’ve met a few of them. Who are the others?
Jones: Leesa, Justin Perkins (who founded the group), Grant Hutchins, Ryan Joy, Paul Menard, Pat Ramsey, Andrew Dupont and Alex Bilstein. These great folks spend a lot of their time moderating the lists, spreading the word, welcoming new members. and ensuring everyone has interesting ideas to talk about.
GA: Most people don’t know that Alex Bilstein ran the Goodwill Computer Museum. I’ve been wanting to interview him.
You mentioned the online list. It seems that the online conversations in the Refresh Austin Google Group cover the gamut: everything from css/javascript to ajax, hosting providers, specking jobs, and how to choose clients. Are you ever concerned that the conversation gets too broad, too general?
Jones: We encourage the broad discussions, as long as they fall somewhere in the realm of Web professionals. Our goal is to foster conversations and ideas across the various areas of interest. Designers benefit when they know more about development, developers gain knowledge when speaking to business folks and business folks will be better at their job if they understand the designers, and of course there are many variants. Ultimately we all participate because we like to share and want to improve. That said, every so often we have to curb conversations that go off topic, which everyone understands and seems to appreciate. Luckily that’s rare.
GA: Many folks don’t know that Refresh is an national…should I say movement? or organization? What kind of interaction does Austin have with other chapters?
Jones: Organization, affiliation or group…they all apply. Every city runs their own group and decides how to go forward. There is a international discussion list, but it tends to be quiet, used to share organizational ideas and questions. Every so often as people move from one city to another, they’re able to migrate between refresh groups, which I think is pretty cool - they’re new to the city, but they already have a foundation of like-minded, friendly colleagues.
For SXSW Interactive 08, Refresh Austin organized a lunch to make it easy for Refreshers from around the world to meet up. It was a great opportunity to meet folks in person and share ideas. Most groups seem to have formed in the same way and discovered the same solutions to the common pitfalls.
Jones: Those interested in learning more about Refreshing Cities, the international glue so to speak, should check out http://refreshingcities.org/
GA: speaking of SXSW, you co-hosted the PhizzPop party with microsoft. How did that work for you? What did you think of the idea of such a design competition? Are you considering similar events for the next SXSW?
Jones: It was a great event for us. We didn’t have anywhere near the resources to throw a bash for SXSW Interactive, much less rent out a place the size of Maggie Mae’s, but we really wanted to get the word out so people could join us if they were interested. Microsoft wanted some local help spreading the word, and were very welcoming. A good time all around. We are definitely planning to do an event next year. We haven’t set any plans yet, but we will.
Jones: I love the idea of a design competition and would love to see more of them pop-up, not just with Silverlight, but other platforms and concepts would be amazing.
GA: Did you catch much flack for co-hosting with Microsoft?
Jones: All of our members were quite happy with the opportunity that Microsoft provided us, and while I caught a bit of flack for teaming up with them, it was from people who aren’t local, who felt we somehow ’sold out’. Our members are varied in their platforms and programs of choice, so we stay balanced. Consequently, we’d be very happy to have Apple and Adobe invite us to co-host parties as well..
GA: Well, I’ll send you the contact info for the Adobe guys. I saw them at PhizzPop. However, they seemed mostly focused on locating the MS guys and talking to them about employment opportunities
GA: Tell me more about SXSW. Compared to previous years, how was SXSW for you this year? Anything you would like to see changed for next year?
Jones: Great question! In fact, that’ll be part of our next meeting, half of which will be a group discussion of this year’s South By. People should come join that conversation instead of reading my thoughts here
GA: Speaking of the April meeting, I see that you have Annette Priest speaking on usability. Is that correct? Can you tell a bit about Annette and what her presentation will cover?
Jones: Indeed we do! Annette brings a great amount of experience workign and managing user experience teams responsible for large Web sites (Dell, IBM Tivoli, SBC and the like) in addition her consulting background. She’ll be sharing practical methods to use analytics and metrics to gain insight into the usability of a Web site.
GA: That sounds really useful. I particularly enjoyed hearing Gordon Montgomery of Neudesic speak about metrics last month, and left his presentation wanting more.
GA: Speaking of usability and related topics, in the last year, we’re seeing UX crop up everywhere. UX UX UX — sort of like U2 but with a little X as well. Can you tell me something about the growth of UX
Jones: UX (User eXperience) isn’t a new concept by any means, but it has certainly been gaining in popularity in our industry. Different people attach slightly different meanings to it, but it comes down to focusing on how the person using your work interacts with it, how he or she can find what they are looking for, and the impression they have of the system. Often times it is attached to designers, but a good experience must be thought about throughout the entire creation process from the business folks through the developers and designers
GA: Usability has certainly been in our minds since the early Apple days. I remember stocking many of the Apple user/interface guidelines in my store in the early 90s. It just seems recently that usability and experience has almost become a cult much in the same way the the concept of social media is becoming a cult.
Jones: Like many parts of the Web, interesting ideas gain notice really quickly. The good practices become ingrained (Web Standards for example) and become a part of our muscle memory.
GA: I hope you don’t mind me going down this path…Have you noticed many new ideas with respect to user experience, or simply a greater interest in the subject matter?
Jones: Both. There are a lot of paths being explored and many experiments. One example is how to best solve the problem of presenting long lists of information. Traditionally on the Web these lists are split over a number of pages, but now people are playing with the concept of appending the next batch of results as the user scrolls to the end of the first batch. So instead of waiting for another page to load, or waiting for a really big page to load initially, you see the results quickly and the keep scrolling to see more.
GA: Thanks for taking the time, Alex. Beyond the April meeting, what’s on the Refresh dance card for this year?
Jones: Big plans for the next year. We look forward to working with other local groups like Geek Austin, the Adobe Users Group, the WordPress group and others.
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GA: Looking forward to it. I’ll be seeing you at the next Refresh meeting.
After the Mark Zuckerberg incident, the number two story last weekend was the battlebot that ran amok at BarCampAustin III. For those of you who sent me notes saying that you’re glad I wasn’t hurt, that is not me in the video, but none other than Josh Holmes of Microsoft. Apparently, the battlebot was unaware of Josh’s advocacy of open source.
The air conditioner did not fare so well. It was no match for the Class A battlebot. To help offset the cost of recovery, please help whurley with a digg
From whurley
All went well save one small incident involving a 340lbs BattleBot malfunctioning and then taking off as fast as it could for the closet Microsoft employees. Thankfully no one was hurt or injured and they were amazingly good sports afterwards:
Many thanks to the folks at Viewzi.tv for the amazing editing job. And, yes we still love Brady and TeamDX! Good luck in the new season on ESPN guys!
whurley present to receive city proclamation of March 8th as BarCampAustin Day.
BarCampAustin III will be held at GSD&M |Idea City.
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Although he used to come to my bookstore, I didn’t meet Christopher St. John until a few years ago. Because he lives in Dallas, we usually only connect in person during conferences. You can follow Christopher’s blog at artofsystems.blogspot.com. |
Lynn Bender: Chris, good to catch up with you. I heard the word Semantics, and got exited. Tell me about what you will be presenting at BarCampAustin III.
Christopher St. John: I’m getting together with Taylor Cowan (from Sabre/Travelocity) and Dan Connolly (from the w3c) to do some outreach for some big-S semantic web technology. Mainly RDFa (a clean way to annotate HTML with semantic data), but probably also GRDDL (a way to extract all sorts of semantic markup, not just RDFa, from web pages). Assuming he survives the bike trip down, Jay Fichialos (also from Sabre/Travelocity) will be helping, too.
Bender: when I first read about RDF I was thinking people were referring to pre-RSS type feeds. (I was still running rdf on GeekAustin until last week).
ckstjohn: Strangely, RDF really was the basis for one branch of the RSS technology tree.
Bender: so we’re talking about the same rdf? I’m just a few generations back?
ckstjohn: The RDF for feeds was one application of the underlying RDF technology.
Bender: Tell me more about GRDDL.
ckstjohn: GRDDL is a way to attach an XSLT stylesheet to a page. Instead of making the page all pretty for presentation, the stylesheet parses out all the semantic markup and formats it for automated processing. It’s sort of a stylesheet for the computer instead of for the user. There are GRDDL stylesheets for the “official” microformats, for RDFa, or you can write your own. It’s a cool technology that helps unify the big-S and little-s semantic web efforts.
Bender: What kind of users will benefit from these semantic efforts?
ckstjohn: The hope is that all of them will, but, the focus of the presentations at BarCampAustinIII is going to be on practical uses for real, working web designers and developers. The goal is to present techniques and tools you can use right away, without having to become an expert in formal logic.
Bender: It looks like that there will be quite a bit of discussion on microformats this year at BCAIII. Can you tell me anything about the other discussions?
ckstjohn: Well, a little hard to tell from the sessions page, but my suspicion is that techniques like microformats for adding semantic data to the web are moving from being novel to being just an accepted part of any new development. At least I hope so. RDFa and the surrounding technologies like GRDDL are more arrows that should be in any good web developer’s quiver.
Bender: What sort of tools are there for embedding semantic data to web docs? And are we all going to have to become ontologists?
ckstjohn: I sure hope not, but to some extent, any good developer already is an ontologist. The normal sort of stuff you do in information architecture (or less formally for any web site) is exactly the sort of thing you do in putting together an ontology. The nomenclature might be different, but the basic work is the same: understanding user needs and the problem domain.
I suspect there will be pre-canned semantics (like microformats) for many common tasks, but one of the points of the we’re going to try to make in the BarCamp session is that RDFa comes with a whole set of tools that make it (relatively) easy for any group of people to put together a shared vocabulary and deploy it to the web. Even if you haven’t got a problem domain amenable to official formalization, you can still get the advantages of semantic markup and data sharing.
Bender: Is there something peculiar to the BarCamp format that helps facilitate these type of presentations/discussions/workshops/ .
ckstjohn: In this case I think the informality and wide mix of people are a big help. Normal conferences tend to attract certain specific sorts of people who show up with a pretty specific focus (SXSWi for web designers and developers, something like Semantic Technology 2008 for the big-S semantic web geeks). BarCampAustin gives both groups a chance to sit down together.
I’m glad Taylor Cowan and Dan Connelly are going to be there. Taylor has spoken before on these topics, and of course Dan is a W3C heavyweight. It ought to be a great session.
Bender: Chris, I really appreciate the time you took giving me some info on this. I will probably be there most of the day soaking it in.
ckstjohn: Cool. Thanks for the opportunity to share, looking forward to it.