I have in the past, made grandiose promises to blog regularly. Only to be mocked by my friends and revealed to be a hollow braggart by history.

So I am going to try a new approach (s).

• I am  a great admirer of Katy Lindeman’s Week Notes. So there’s a template to copy.
• And I find that I often do a bit of structured thinking in emails. So that’s another source.
• And finally I get on certain jags about things and start collecting them in delicious. So I could always look back at that and see if there’s a nascent post lurking.
• And sometimes I give talks and write articles for other people. So surely the elements of that should provide all kinds of blog-posty goodness.

Yes indeed there is no shortage of opportunities to collate a bit of knowledge and experinece and stick it on the internet.

So why don’t I?

Not Enough Bloody Time. Or at least a perception that there is Not Enough Bloody Time.

But that’s a bit like collecting all of the things I need to make a meal, but never actually cooking. Not that blogging is the ultimate output of my reading, thinking and working. Rather structured ideas and increased knowledge are. And there is nothing like structuring a post, thinking through the links and imaging the critique of a few select audience members to sharpen up an idea or approach to something.

I was supposed to be in Paris all of next week for an internal Ogilvy conference and then Le Web. Instead I recently learned that I need to come back for a meeting on Thursday afternoon. The net result being that I have a meeting on Thursday and my diary on Friday is completely empty. As I went to go and fill it with internal meetings and vendor chats and reviews of one thing and another I stopped. I stopped and realised that I had gifted myself a day of free time.

So that day is going to be spent organsing myself so that I can have a regular day of free time.

Tools that I currently have but don’t use properly and guides to using them better.

Info management

Google mail: become a Gmail Ninja

Google Reader: http://www.lifehack.org/articles/technology/get-more-out-of-google-reader.html

Delicious: Specifically using Stacks like this one I made of these links

Evernote: Random things to do with Evernote and a more introductory ‘Getting Started’ post. Oh, and a really basic intro YouTube video with an awesome voice over!

Task Management

Omni focus: http://www.asianefficiency.com/omnifocus/

Network management

Linkedin: From Guy Kawasaki

Facebook: the new features

And finally Twitter, especially lists.

And my One Tool to Rule Them All: Hootsuite

It was not what I would have described as an unqualified success.

Things that went well

• Big old desks with carrels, just like at school
• Quiet. Really. Very quiet.
• Old men in tweed grappling with oversized musty reference tomes

Things that went less well

• Free wi-fi (that ran so slowly that I got out my dongle. Yes, I know its free, but I had my hopes raised, and a woman scorned etc.)
• Not enough power points for plugging in laptops
• A strange smelling man who I am pretty sure didn’t work there busted me working in a closed section of the library and insisted that my desk was not a ‘Designated Laptop Position’ and I should therefore interrupt my life’s work and move. (Yes I was in the wrong, but I needed juice and a woman scorned etc).

So I am not going back. Mainly because of the skeevy man, but also because I want to keep trying new places. They need to have electricity and wi-fi or at least a mobile (dongle) signal. They also need to be quiet so I can think and a bit noisy so I can argue with Oli, Mike, Gabby etc. So herewith a list of alternative work locations that I’d love you to add to;

• On a train to Cornwall. Get out at Penzance, have a swim and come back.
• The Waterloo Suset Room at the Haward Gallery
• In Duncan’s cottage in Wiltshire (added feature: send a second team there sepearately by train with the proviso that they have to finish writing / answering the brief by Tisbury. Pick them up have a slap-up meal at the Beckford Arms, sleep at the cottage and return the next morning.
• In another professional work environment; a room in a hospital, an architect’s office, an artist’s studio, a science lab, an engineering workshop…(volunteers?)
• Walking through The National Gallery as I did the other day with Mark Hancock
• On a ferry down the Thames

I also wondered if using different documentation formats might throw up some interesting things;

• Do all of the brief writing correspondence by posting letters
• Paint the response to the client brief (oils not water colours obviously) Some starters here at SXSWi with each keynote being illustrated / interpreted in real time by a different artist / designer.
• Tweet the brief to the creative team
• Only use photos
• Write it all collaboratively on a wiki

And of course working with different people. When we set up RMM we agreed that the three of us would work in planning pairs. Given the very different planners that we were, by personality; experience and interests, this worked so well that we used to joke that between the three of us we were actually quite a decent planner. The pairs idea is also alive and well at Draftfcb but now I have access to an even wider range of planners to pair with. The next thing I am keen to try is working really closely with a creative team; you know, actually sitting with them, kicking ideas around, sharing sandwiches. I am curious to see how that might work given the swan-like relationships that creative teams have. This is not the post for it, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the growing interest I have in the creative technologist as another useful way of interrupting the creative pairing process.

Thanks to @wipspace for pointing me to this talk by Filip Nilsson from the agency F&B at Cannes last year;

Filip Nilsson speaks at Cannes Lions 2009 from Jimmy Wulff on Vimeo.

In it, Nilsson observes that agency structures haven’t changed since WWII, so he instigated  a few initiatives. While most of these don’t seem that radical.  consider what impact they might have on your agency; No titles. Seated all mixed in together, not by discipline. Collective, public (within the agency) reviews of work. All creatives as of 8AM on Monday are digital. Owned by the staff. And while each of these initiatives or variations has been tried by different agencies e.g. Mother and no account people between creatives and clients. St Lukes and all staff ownership, I’m not aware of anyone bundling them all up and working in this way so successfully.

Your thoughts on the back of a post card to the usual address. (See what I did there?)

It’s an hour and a bit long, and a very enjoyable hour and a bit it is. Freidman is funny, smart and insightful.

In the process of explaining some of the ‘flattening’ influences on the world, Freidman interviews Brian Behlendorf, the father of Apache, the first and most successful Open Source software package; the one IBM adopted instead of developing their own. I was particularly taken by it as I had recently been talking to a senior marketing guy at one of the big FMCGs about the issues of embracing an ‘open source’ approach to working with his marketing team. While he could see all of the benefits of collaboration, innovation, free thought and so on, he still had concerns. This is one of the largest companies in the world; they need consistency and discipline dammnit. Oh, and collaboration, innovation etc.

What Behlendorf says about the way the original Open Source community organsies itself is very telling; that the tension between Open Source and organisational coherence is one of our own construction. Reading the Behlendorf interview it is clear that these guys aren’t anarchists; they’re scientists. So they’re just looking for the most efficient way of using collective skills to produce software (for which we could substitute any collaborative corwdsourced product such as the FMCGs marketing program). And I think its something that is frequently misunderstood; Open Source is not a social experiment; its a science experiment. As such there are all kinds of controls and checks and balances on place to ensure its efficent operation.

I think its important to remind ourselves of this because there is a tendecy amongst social media / technology fan boys to describe Open Source as a kind of magical socialogical phenomena. And as a result, organisations are (rightly) scared off from exploring it. But I believe that’s because they’re being sold something that’s not true to or as elegant as the orgaisational structure of the original Open Source community that coalesced around the Apache server.

“Most software development involves a source code repository and is managed by tools such as the Concurrent Versions System,” he (Behlendorf) explained. “So there is a CVS server out there, and I have a CVS program on my computer. It allows me to connect to the server and pull down a copy of the code, so I can start working with it and making modifications. If I think my patch is something I want to share with others, I run a program called Patch, which allows me to create a new file, a compact collection of all the changes. That is called a patch file, and I can give that file to someone else, and they can apply it to their copy of the code to see what impact that patch has. If I have the right privileges to the server [which is restricted to a tightly controlled oversight board], I can then take my patch and commit it to the repository and it will become part of the source code. The CVS server keeps track of everything and who sent in what… So you might have ‘read access’ to the repository but not ‘commit access’ to change things. When someone makes a commit to the repository, that patch file gets e-mailed out to all the other developers, and so you get this peer review system after the fact, and if there is something wrong, you fix the bug.” (Friedman, The World is Flat“, Penguin: 2006, P102).

Ther are three important parts to this model with I think we can apply more broadly;

i) Hierarchy. While all of the participants in the program are free to create and contribute as they please, there are very specific protocols in place that control the addition of their contributions to the final repository. In other words there is an organisational hierarchy (albeit a pretty flat one) that makes final decisions.

ii) An established base line and process. Open Source starts with a source code repository, which serves much the same purpose as brand guidelines, or other internal strictures. Further even than that Behlendorf’s example includes accessing the code with specific tools and in a particular way.

iii) Responsibilities: Being a part of the community comes with a responsibility beyond just ‘making shit up’. Every piece of code is peer reviewed (so there’s that responsibility) and when a bug is identified, the original creator is required to fix the bug. Surely both disincentives to submit buggy code.

What I took from Behlendorf’s description of how the Apache Open Source community works is that we’d be better served starting with the principles of what makes a community work and then within that what makes an Open Source community successful. But with these in place, organisations can then afford to trust their members and set them free to ‘make shit up’ knowing that it will be done responsibly and that it will adhere to the necessary guidelines and processes that enable it to be  effectively absorbed.