Category Archives: Business

Fireworks, bonfires, and true lagom solutions

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Today is the day I started devel­op­ing what right now is called TLW, which stands for the Lagom model.

Loosely based upon the Swedish model, and “Lagom”, which means “Enough is as good as a feast”, this is an attempt to make it easier to show your grat­i­tude towards the musi­cians (and later movie makers and game cre­ators) who we all love. It’s all about con­tribut­ing in order to sup­port fur­ther creations.

Today means that I will work from home every Wednes­day, Thurs­day and Friday during a lim­ited time.
Tech­ni­cally speak­ing, I will build TLW using the Django frame­work (for order), together with a sprin­kle of jQuery (for magic mat­ters, that is). As my web hosts, I’ve chosen to work with Web­fac­tion which offer good and reli­able sup­port for Django.

In order to setup a tem­po­rary office, I’ve bought a key­board and a mouse.
This is how it looked yesterday:

Before

And this is how it looks today:

After 2

After

Todays work­load con­sisted mostly of set­ting up a proper devel­op­ment envi­ron­ment, such as installing django, post­gresql and django_​openidconsumer and writ­ing a proper busi­ness plan. Tomor­row I will focus more on pure development.

And for all of you who cares: as my OS I use Ubuntu 8.10, Geany as my editor and I run Ubuntu with compiz on normal, just to make up for my now, slow machine (1st gen Dell XPS M1330).

How I came to work with web production

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Two years ago I decided that I wanted to work as a web some­thing. I didn’t really know if design, code, client care or entre­pre­neur­ship was my cup of tea. I really had no idea.

The reason for my inter­est came from the fact that I was unem­ployed and had just moved to Stock­holm. Most of my day went to work­ing on my CV, and han­dling those out to dif­fer­ent stores where I wanted to work. I didn’t get any. “Come back around Christ­mas time” they said. And so I did.

But some­where in between I went to a party, where I over­heard some guy asking another guy if he had any space in his very busy sched­ule. The other guy worked as a free­lance web devel­oper. “No” he replied. I took a shot. Acci­den­tally, one of the only things that I had liked about school was when I had been work­ing with HTML and found out about those web stan­dards. I was attracted to the fact that they were striv­ing towards an acces­si­ble web. “I’ve got some expe­ri­ence with web development” I said to the guy. He answered: “Perfect! Give me your hand.” I reached for him, and then he wrote a tele­phone number in my palm.

After that, and now with a client who wanted me to do work for him, I began to under­stand that this would require me to start my own com­pany. My new life in Stock­holm was form­ing, just a few month after grad­u­a­tion in Klin­te­hamn and I had just turned myself as unem­ployed into a free­lance web devel­oper (or at that time, HTML markup-​er, heh) together with tech wizz kid Petter.

The next week, I started lis­ten­ing to pod­casts about entre­pre­neur­ship, web devel­op­ment and I … took lessons in span­ish (Pim­sleur). I read up on A list apart, 456bereas​treet.com, robert​ny​man.com, adac​tio.com, acces​sify.com, andy​budd.com, Veerle’s blog, Infor­ma­tion Archi­tects, Molly.com and of course StevePavlina.com. A big thank you to all of those who openly shares their dis­cov­er­ies, tech­niques, thoughts and philosophies!

I bought “CSS Mastery”, writ­ten by Andy Budd. It was great. I finally grasped floats, and how to make dif­fer­ent menus. Won­der­ful :) ! Now I could take on my first client. I charged him 4000 SEK (around 410 €) for a com­plete web­site and a full index of pic­tures, taken by my part­ner Petter. It took me two weeks to com­plete that web­site, and in the end we didn’t even get paid as the client didn’t like the design. We quit work­ing with that par­tic­u­lar client, and learned after a while to handle pric­ing, pitch­ing, sup­port and office hours better. That was the hard­est part of the work, no doubt about it.

After a few more clients, and a few more cases, I saw an adver­tise­ment over at web​b​jobb.nu, which is a web niched job and gig board in swedish. I sent them an e-mail show­ing off my/our work and asked them to get back to me. They did, and after a really bumpy start, it all set­tled to be really good. I learned a lot during those first weeks, and still do. The reason as to why I wanted to get employed was that I didn’t know that much about man­ag­ing, pitch­ing, sales, money or even back end work. Now I had an oppor­tu­nity to learn all that. Now, after a year at my cur­rent employ­ment I still think that it was a good choice, I’ve learned so much from all of the bril­liant people that I’ve had the oppor­tu­nity to work with, almost only that makes it worth in itself.

Now, in order to stay alert and fresh I read a lot of arti­cles, try out new meth­ods and tech­niques and do my best to doc­u­ment the results. Most of the time, it’s a blast!

The fol­low­ing month (Novem­ber) I will work less over at my cur­rent work­place in order to get time to work on one of my own projects, which is loosely called The Lagom Model. I’ll doc­u­ment the process either here, or on a sep­a­rate blog which will be announced later.

I love my career at the moment and the craft. I love the inter­net, and the pos­si­bil­i­ties that the medium possess.

Den omtalade signalspaningslagen

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För lite mindre än en vecka sedan godkände alltså riks­da­gen den debat­ter­ade sig­nalspan­ingsla­gen.
Tanken med lagen sägs vara att kunna förutspå och förhindra eventuellt kom­mande ter­ro­rat­tacker.
Detta skall man kunna göra genom att avlyssna all dig­i­tal trafik som passerar Sveriges gränser. ALL trafik lämnar Sverige, innan den kommer till­baka. De flesta som kan något om Inter­net vet detta.

Ech­e­lon, USA’s motsvarighet fanns långt innan den 11 Sep­tem­ber 2001, och det lyssnar av hela världens dig­i­tala trafik (Se Wikipedia om Ech­e­lon).
Vissa speku­lanter hävdar att FRA vill kunna avlyssna den ryska dig­i­tala trafik som går igenom Sverige.
Rent instink­tivt så tror jag att ovanstående argu­ment är strunt­prat, mycket dif­fusa anled­ningar som möjligtvis skulle ha gått hem under kalla kriget, men inte idag.

Varför godkändes denna lag?

Några tankar kring det hela:

  1. Idag finns det mycket enkla metoder att använda Inter­net krypterat. Självklart använder alla ter­ror­is­ter detta, och inte ens FRA’s topp­mod­erna teknik kan ta sig igenom sådan krypter­ing, det går prak­tiskt taget inte. I och med den nya lagen så kommer även van­liga Svenssons att börja kryptera sin dig­i­tala aktivitet. Detta innebär mer brus i kanalen, svårare avlyssning och mindre utdel­ning. Tidi­gare så har denna avlyssning skett ÄNDÅ och i det dolda. Det må vara uselt ur integritetssyn­punkt, men långt så mycket effek­ti­vare om man vill få en bra avlyssning. Varför var det ni lagförde detta, nu igen?
  2. I Sveriges riks­dag så finns det 349 ledamöter, varav 67 inte ens kom till röstningen kring detta förslag. Varför?
  3. Detta är inte ett rep­re­sen­ta­tivt beslut. Det upp­skat­tas att bara ca 15 % utav befolknin­gen stödjer lagen. Ända röstade bara en ledamot emot förslaget. Resterande 280 röstade ja. Vissa utav dem hävdade att “..det var ett mycket job­bigt beslut…” och det verkar som om att många har fått piskats utav par­tiet för att rösta pos­i­tivt. Varför?
  4. Många stora inter­na­tionella IT-​bolag vägrar nu att investera i Sverige på grund utav den nya lagen. Bland annat så har företrädare för Google nu jämfört Sverige med Saudi­ara­bien och Kina och lovar att aldrig ställa några servers i Sverige, vilket är mycket oly­ck­ligt. Detta ligger helt emot den poli­tik som den borg­erliga alliansen annars förespråkar. Så min fråga blir återigen: Varför?
  5. SÄPO har bekla­gat sig över detta förslag (som nu är lag), och så även Rik­spolis­styrelsen (Se GP).
  6. Finns det någon kon­troll utav dem som utveck­lar FRA’s mjuk­vara, och kon­troll utav själva mjuk­varan så att ingen infor­ma­tion skickas vidare? Självaste lagen känns som det största säkerhetshotet i sam­man­hanget. Jag kan tänka mig att många kom­mer­siella intressen är beredda att betala många mil­jarder för sådan infor­ma­tion.

Varför, varför och än en gång varför gick denna lag igenom?
Hur jag än vänder och vrider på det så har jag mycket svårt att förstå motiven.
Jag har frågat runt i min omgivn­ing, och ingen ha haft en idé om vad det är som ligger bakom.

Skall ni sälja infor­ma­tio­nen vidare till företag? Bli det nya sven­ska Google? I förlängningen börja använda infor­ma­tio­nen vid speciella åtal? Jag minns fort­farande hur Polisen fick tillgång till biobanken (på olagligt vis) för att kunna bevisa Anna Lindhs mördare skyldig. Nu är det på väg att bli lagligt (i efter­hand) för Polisen att använda sig utav detta, gigan­tiska DNA-​register i sam­man­band med brott (Se Dagens Med­i­cin). Detta var otänkbart innan Anna blev mördad.

Så, frågan är väl när nästa hemska händelse skall ske, så att Polisen först får temporär tillgång till FRA’s sig­nalspan­ing, och sedan en per­ma­nent, lagstadgad sådan?
Ifall det fortsätter i den här takten så lär vi ha ett lik­nande poli­tiskt klimat som i George Orwells ’1984′ lagom till jul!

Utanför dessa kon­spir­a­toriska tankar så står en fråga klar:
Varför, varför och än en gång: VARFÖR?

Riks­da­gens gemen­samma para­noia tycker jag verkar vara det största säkerhetshotet i debat­ten.
De har säkert utmärkta anled­ningar till att göra detta, och förhoppningsvis så har de en mycket genomtänkt plan för att lösa ovanstående prob­lem med eventuella läckage, min­skade investeringar, mer brus (och sämre utdel­ning) vid avlyssning och min­skat förtroende för poli­tiken genom urusel rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Förhoppningsvis så är det inte inkom­pe­tens.
Jag hoppas verk­li­gen det… hoppas…

Democratic work management

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While I was surf­ing around at Dreamhost I found out that they were one of 2008 most demo­c­ra­tic work­places accord­ing to World­Blu.
How can a work­place be demo­c­ra­tic?
Of course there will always be prob­lems that will make sit­u­a­tions more or less demo­c­ra­tic, but yes, demo­c­ra­tic work­places exists, and they exist on the fact that they are more prof­itable and more enjoy­able (when exe­cuted correctly).

Accord­ing to WorldBlu’s model there is 10 core prin­ci­ples that enables democracy:

  1. PUR­POSE AND VISION
    A demo­c­ra­tic orga­ni­za­tion is clear about why it exists (its pur­pose) and where it is headed and what it hopes to achieve (its vision). These act as its true North, offer­ing guid­ance and dis­ci­pline to the organization’s direction.
  2. TRANS­PARENCY
    Say good­bye to the “secret society” men­tal­ity. Demo­c­ra­tic orga­ni­za­tions are trans­par­ent and open with employ­ees about the finan­cial health, strat­egy, and agenda of the organization.
  3. DIA­LOGUE + LIS­TEN­ING
    Instead of the top-​down mono­logue or dys­func­tional silence that char­ac­ter­izes most work­places, demo­c­ra­tic orga­ni­za­tions are com­mit­ted to having con­ver­sa­tions that bring out new levels of mean­ing and connection.
  4. FAIR­NESS + DIG­NITY
    Demo­c­ra­tic orga­ni­za­tions are com­mit­ted to fair­ness and dig­nity, not treat­ing some people like “somebodies” and other people like “nobodies.”
  5. ACCOUNT­ABIL­ITY
    Demo­c­ra­tic orga­ni­za­tions point fin­gers, not in a blam­ing way but in a lib­er­at­ing way! Demo­c­ra­tic orga­ni­za­tions are crys­tal clear about who is account­able and respon­si­ble for what.
  6. INDI­VID­UAL + COL­LEC­TIVE
    In demo­c­ra­tic orga­ni­za­tions, the indi­vid­ual is just as impor­tant as the whole, mean­ing employ­ees are valued for their indi­vid­ual con­tri­bu­tion as well as for what they do to help achieve the col­lec­tive goals of the organization.
  7. CHOICE
    Demo­c­ra­tic orga­ni­za­tions thrive on giving employ­ees mean­ing­ful choices.
  8. INTEGRITY
    Integrity is the name of the game, and demo­c­ra­tic com­pa­nies have a lot of it. They under­stand that free­dom takes dis­ci­pline and also doing what’s morally and eth­i­cally right.
  9. DECEN­TRAL­IZA­TION
    Demo­c­ra­tic orga­ni­za­tions dis­trib­ute lead­er­ship and power across their enterprise.
  10. REFLEC­TION + EVAL­U­A­TION
    Demo­c­ra­tic orga­ni­za­tions are com­mit­ted to look­ing in the mirror and asking, “How can we be better?” — not just quar­terly or annu­ally, but daily.

Fur­ther, they even explain what you can expect as a result. Accord­ing to WorldBlu’s research, the out­come for embrac­ing orga­ni­za­tional democ­racy could include:

  • Increases in pro­duc­tiv­ity, prof­itabil­ity, sales, and efficiency.
  • An increased abil­ity to attract top talent and decreases in vol­un­tary turnover.
  • Increases in employee engagement.
  • Improve­ments in cus­tomer ser­vice ratings.
  • Steady growth rates.
  • Increases in market share.
  • Increases in levels of cre­ativ­ity and innovation.
  • Increases in orga­ni­za­tional align­ment and over­all levels of trust.
  • Increases in an organization’s over­all adapt­abil­ity and agility.
  • A height­ened level of civic engage­ment by employ­ees in the organization’s community.

Wow! Why isn’t every orga­ni­za­tion striv­ing towards becom­ing democratic?

This list is quite com­pre­hen­sive and easy to digest.
Read more about it at their web­site: http://​www.​world​blu.com/
Thank you for making democ­racy easy, World­Blu!
This is exactly what the ParEcon-​model needs, I think.
Imag­ine the day when each employee is treated as a entre­pre­neur, and their ideas are cap­tured and rewarded as if they were one.