MICHAEL DOWNEY

Location-based service Echo Echo recently posted the above image to their blog in a (successful) attempt to garner some media attention as the debate around online privacy continues to rage.

As extreme as their“If Mark Zuckerberg Cared About Privacy” example is, it does call attention to the needless complexity of various web service privacy agreements, settings and policies.

In the wake of a $8.5 million lawsuit settlement today, search giant Google made a gesture of good faith in the “caring about privacy” department, assuring users that it was taking steps in order to make the minutae of online privacy easier to understand.

“For example, we’re deleting a sentence that reads, ‘The affiliated sites through which our services are offered may have different privacy practices and we encourage you to read their privacy policies,’ since it seems obvious that sites not owned by Google might have their own privacy policies.”

Perhaps this concerted movement towards being more transparent and simple with regards to privacy would also work well for Facebook which, like Google, is currently involved in various privacy scuffles.

Java gets a bad rap. It's considered old-school. People say that young developers prefer Ruby-on-Rails and other Web-based hot stuff. True - but these are not bad times for Java at all.

James Governor of RedMonk wrote a post that provides several good reasons why Java is really doing quite well.

Elance shows the current demand for people with Google App Engine skills is greater than those knowledgeable about Amazon Web Services. Audrey Watters of ReadWriteCloud saw the news and posted on the topic of IT Jobs as the question for our weekly poll.

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The reason why Google App Engine is doing so well? It's all about the enterprise. VMware's Spring Platform is based upon SpringSource, which has become the dominant platform for launching Java-based apps. It now integrates with Google App Engine, a primary reason for the growing success of the platform.

Governor makes some points that are worth noting:

NoSQL is one of the hottest trends in tech right now. Many of the technologies built on the platform are written in Java. It was born on the Web but will eventually move to the enterprise.

MapReduce? It's what Google and Yahoo! use to get fast responses over large data sets. It is built on Java. Hadoop is based on MapReduce. It has its own ecosystem developing around the technology.

And then there's this from Governor:

Of course we're also seeing innovation from the new hotness - thus Erlang underpins CouchDB and RIAK. But Java is certainly core to the innovation. Lets look at RabbitMQ for example - which though written in Erlang was acquired by SpringSource as a messaging engine to underpin a Java-based programming model.

Governor goes on to provide a number of other examples to make his point.

And we have to agree. Java is not dead. it still has plenty of room for innovation.

Montreal-based entrepreneur and blogger Ben Yoskovitz knows a thing or two about hiring employees at startups. Yoskovitz formerly founded his own company, Standout Jobs - a tool designed to improve hiring and recruiting techniques for small businesses on the Web. Needless to say, the hiring and performance tracking of employees at the SMB level is a topic of interest for Yoskovitz. One of the items he recently wrote about is whether startups should hire workaholics expected to work 80+ hours each week, and some interesting arguments against this doctrine emerged.

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Yoskovitz argues that a startup shouldn't be hiring and measuring their employees based on the number of hours they work. The only thing "hours worked" is a good indicator of is just that - how much time they put into whatever it is they were doing, he says.

"I'm not even sure it's a great measurement of passion (which is an essential quality you need to look for in startup employees.) It could just be that the guy is slow, so he works more hours," writes Yoskovitz. "We need to think about other measurable indicators of an employee's quality and value.

In a post about hiring workaholics at startups, Yoskovitz reiterates this point, stating that passion and work ethic are far more valuable than simply the number of hours the person is willing to commit.

"You have to hire people who are passionate about the business. If they're not passionate, they'll fail you. If they are passionate but lazy they'll fail you," he says. "They need to have a strong work ethic, a sense of responsibility (to you, their peers & the business) and they need to be passionate."

Startups are a unique beast. They are not normal jobs. Anyone applying to work at a startup knows that they will not clock-in and out at the same time each day. That said, it would also behoove startups to look beyond a person's time commitment when evaluating potential and current employees. Just remember that 5 hours of concentrated hard work always trumps 20 hours of lazy work devoid of passion.

How many hours a day do you think employees should be working at a startup? Or do you agree in Yoskovitz's "hours, schmours" argument? What are the best new ways to gauge your employees work performance? Let us know in the comments below!

Every year, poison control centers get more than one million calls for pill identification. Each one of those calls costs nearly $50. Social software is helping biomedical researchers collaborate on better ways of identifying drugs. “Pillbox is a digital platform for communities to solve challenges related to pharmaceutical identification and reference,” says David Hale, the program manager. The National Library of Medicine’s mission is to gather, curate and distribute the world’s biomedical information, said Hale.

Pillbox is an open government initiative from the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Food and Drug Administration that could transform how pharmaceuticals are labeled in the future. The interactive web application currently allows visitors to rapidly identify unknown solid medications, like tablets or capsules, based upon their shape, color and other markings. Pillbox remains a research and development project, so users should not be making clinical decisions just yet. Right now there are over 1,000 images of prescription drugs in the system, with many more to come in the next few months.

Beyond its usefulness, Pillbox is a public health platform that was created in a unique way — by utilizing open source data. Here are four ways the NIH approached this endeavor using the open and social web.

1. Connecting Open Data to Civic Hackers

Pillbox is a “collection of projects focused on a single goal: improving the health of citizens,” said Hale. That goal could be realized through social gaming mechanics, an area that’s familiar to Foursquare users and FarmVille players. “There’s a Facebook game in development based on the Pillbox API,” he said. After Hale attended Sunlight Labs’ Great American Hackathon last December, a developer took him to a D.C. Ruby users meeting. There, the civic hacking community got excited about using Pilllbox data in a game.

To move the game forward, the developers had to build a search interface in Facebook Markup Language (FBML) for Pillbox. “When they’re done, they’ll give the code for the pill ID interface to NLM,” said Hale. The game isn’t live yet, but Hale hopes to see an iteration online by the end of the year. As of the last build of the game, messages are scrambled between players “to protect privacy.” These messages come with a pill image. Players then have to use the Pillbox ID system to identify pills and unscramble message.

2. Sharing Code on GitHub

“When these developers were building [Pillbox], they found it didn’t have any wrappers for the API,” said Hale. “So they wrote them in Ruby, open sourced them and shared them in a Pillbox space on Github, an online open source code sharing community. Now the wrappers are there for anyone to use.”

Subsequently, a Python developer who was at the meeting working on another project at the Hackathon, took it as a challenge to do it in fewer lines of code, said Hale. He also created Python wrappers for Pillbox and posted them.

“That’s the power of open data, ‘coopetition’ and social media,” said Hale. “Consider the development of hundreds of lines of code, Ruby and Python wrappers, and that interface. How much would it have taken to do this otherwise?”

3. Connecting Washington to Innovation

Hale has used social media extensively to collaborate with clinical staff, patients, and developers, empowering and enabling communities to solve health challenges. In particular, Hale is active on Twitter as @LostOnRoute66, where he tweets about patient safety, biomedical informatics, social media strategy, user experience, music, and food. “Social media was the key channel. It was through Twitter that we maintained these relationships and built new ones.”

One of the challenges for the government research community in Washington can be its distance from the technology communities in Silicon Valley, Boston, Texas and Seattle. “Pillbox was built outside with the community,” says Hale. That’s an important shift from the way traditional projects have been approached. “Due to [conferences like] HealthCamp and to connecting in the Valley, we saw a different way of approaching the issue,” said Hale.

Initially, there were just giant institutions called Consolidated Mail Outpatient Pharmacies taking pictures of the pills, said Hale. “We realized it wasn’t just the images — it was the data behind them, and access to that data. When I talked with the community in the Valley, I realized there was more that was possible. We’re not just putting up pictures of pills, we’re putting up a platform, and thereby changing the ways that people work with government. It’s the information that’s important, not the website. It’s about understanding the power of adding an open API to your data.”

Additionally, an increasing number of government agencies and civil service workers are using SlideShare to disseminate presentations. Hale is no exception. His presentation on Pillbox from January 2010 is embedded above.

4. Call for Participation Using the Federal Register 2.0

This summer, a team of developers and designers relaunched the FederalRegister.gov, the online presence for the legal newspaper of United States. The Federal Register 2.0 is one of the better recent examples of open government, as it makes the often arcane business of government more transparent and understandable to citizens. Hale says that the NIH will be posting a “Call for Participation” where they ask pharmaceutical companies to send them samples of their tablets and capsules.

If the public-private relationship bears fruit, they’ll take high quality pictures based upon Pillbox’s process, send the images back to the pharmaceutical companies and, if approved, put them into Pillbox. Those images could then be sent to the FDA, where they coud get included on a label.

“That would enable images of drugs based upon a single body of standards, which could then enable identification through smartphones,” said Hale. “The secret sauce isn’t the images when this is done but the background processing. We’re creating tools and services which make open data available to everyone, accessible, and in the public domain.”

More Tech Resources from Mashable:

- 5 Open Data Apps That Are Improving Our Cities
- 5 Ways Government Works Better With Social Media
- How the U.S. Engages the World with Social Media
- How Social Media Can Effect Real Social and Governmental Change
- 6 Ways Law Enforcement Uses Social Media to Fight Crime

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Anykeen

More About: david hale, federal register, github, hackathon, national institutes of health, national library of medicine, nih, NLM, open data, pillbox, Python, Ruby on Rails, slideshare, sunlight labs

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A new study by email software purveyor Xobni confirms what we bloggers know to be true, there’s actually no such thing as a day off in the Internet age (Want more visceral proof than an email study? Check out the timestamp of this post).

Information anxiety has pretty much put the kibosh on “time off” as two out of three Americans and Brits check their email outside of regular business hours (ha) and half of Americans email while on vacation (double ha).

The Xobni study, an online survey of 2,200 British and American adults conducted in August, holds that the traditional 9-5 work day has gone the way of the Dodo, due to the fact that Americans and Brits can’t stop checking their email. Apparently we sneak a peak at our inboxes while on vacation, weekends, sick days and even when we are (gasp!) in bed.

The press release blames this behavior on the down economy and the iPhone, but I blame it on the fact that we now live most of our lives online, and we feel compelled to check our email/Facebook/Twitter because that’s where most of the exciting stuff is happening anyways.

More highlights from the study/the life we have chosen:

* The 9-5 work day has gone the way of the Dodo. 72% of Americans and 68% of Brits say they regularly check their email on vacations, sick days, and at home in bed.

* Yes, IN BED. Conveniently for Xobni, work email in bed is apparently, you know, like a thing, with 1 in 5 Americans checking email as the first thing they do in the morning or the last thing they do at night before falling asleep (Again I can personally vouch for this).

According to Xobni, email has become an addiction, and like most addictions it is fueled by peer pressure:

* 27% check email outside of regular working hours because they feel it is expected.

* 26% of Americans feel they can’t handle/overwhelmed by the number of emails they receive during vacation.

Everyone in the world agrees that managing email has become a challenge to our sanity. And various companies are scrambling towards solutions including Google with its recent Gmail Priority Inbox launch and Xobni, obviously. My favorite low-fi way to deal with the bottleneck is a service called Sentenc.es which makes it clear to your email reader that you are limited to short responses.

Even though I’m not sure how well that will work, in bed.

Video, vaguely related.

Email overload image above: Ario_

A few weeks ago I published a post entitled Some Thoughts on Improving Bugzilla. The post got a fair bit a traction and received a large number of supportive comments. But what was best, about the post, about open source, about Mozilla, is that it drew me into a serious of conversations with people who wanted to make some of it reality.

Specifically, I'd like to thank Guy Pyrzak over at Bugzilla and Clint Talbert at Mozilla both of whom spent hours entertaining and conversing about these ideas with me, problem solving them and, if we are really honest, basically doing all the heavy lifting to transform them from ideas on this blog into real changes.

So in this post I have two things to share. First is an update on progress from the ideas in the last post (which will be this post) as well as some new thoughts about how Mozilla instance of Bugzilla could be further improved (which will be my next post).

So here we go...

Update!

1. Simplifying Menus

First up I made some suggestions around simplifying the bugzilla landing page. These were pretty cosmetic, but they make the landing page a little less intimidating to a new user and, frankly, nicer for everyone. We are presently drafting up the small changes to the code that would require this change and getting ready to submit it as a proposal. Status - Yellow.

2. Gather more information about our users (and, while I'm at it, some more simplifying)

Second, I outlined some ideas for streamlining the process of joining bugzilla and on the data we collect about users.

On the first part, which is about the steamlined pages (designed to help ensure that true bug submitters end up in bugzilla and not those seeking support) here too we will be submitting some new proposed pages shortly. Status - Yellow

On the second part I suggested that we ask users if they English is their second language and that we mark new bugzilla accounts with a "new" symbol. Guy is coding up an extension to Bugzilla that will both of these. Once done, I'll suggest to Mozilla that they include this extension in their instance. Status - Green.

3. Make Life Easier for Users and the Triage Guys

I thought we could make life more efficient for triage and users if we added a status where bugs could be declared "RESOLVED-SUPPORT." There's been some reception to this idea. However, the second part of this idea is that once a bug is tagged as such a script automatically should scan the support database, find articles with a strong word correlation to the bug description and email the bug submitter links to those pages. Once again, Guy has stepped forward to develop such an extension which hopefully will be working in the not to distant future. Status - Green.

4. Make Bugzilla Celebrate, enhance our brand and build community

But probably the most exciting part is the final suggestion. That we send (at least non-developers) much nicer emails celebrating that the bug they submitted has been patched. It turns out (hardly surprising) that I wasn't the first person to think that Bugzilla should be able to send HTML emails. Indeed, that feature request was first made back in 2001 and, when I blogged about this the other week, had not be updated since 2006. Once again, Guy has proven to be unbelievably helpful. It turns out that due to some changes to bugzilla many of the blocks to patching this had disappeared and so he has been working on the code. Status - Green.

Lots here for many people to be proud of. Hopefully some of these ideas will go live in the not too distant future. That said, still many hurdles to clear and if you are a decision maker on any of these and would like to talk about these ideas, please do not hesitate to contact me.

TUAWNotre Dame embarks on a paperless course with iPads originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

A few days ago, we noted that Diaspora was three weeks away from unveiling their open-source Facebook alternative. But a small update today clarifies one important point. On September 15, Diaspora will release the open source code for the project. But it won’t be until October that the first consumer-facing alpha is available.

This isn’t a major hiccup, it’s just an update to make sure people aren’t expecting to be able to use Diaspora on September 15. Instead, at that time, developers will have a chance to tinker around with what the team has come up with in these past several weeks — with the $200,000 they raised from 6,500 people through Kickstarter back in June.

But the October alpha could end up being the more important time for the project. While all the open sourcing and distributed network stuff sounds great, it sounds great to a group of a few thousand developers and uber-nerds. If Diaspora really wants to get any traction, they’re going to need a killer front-end that gives people an actual reason to use it instead of Facebook. (Or they’ll need someone else to make that based on their code — but that will obviously be months away, at the earliest.)

Luckily, it sounds like the team is saying the right things in this regard. Here’s the key part of their update from a few days ago:

We are spending a good chunk of time concentrating on building clear, contextual sharing. That means an intuitive way for users to decide, and not notice deciding, what content goes to their coworkers and what goes to their drinking buddies. We know that’s a hard UI problem and we take it seriously. The publicity and money that you have given us has let us work with great designers like Janice Frasier, through her new program LUXr, whose constant reminders that we are not the user have kept us honest and focused. Pivotal Labs has also helped us prioritize, and we have pushed back more technical features like plugins and APIs in favor of simple and high value features. Our original goals remain the same, and these features are still in our timeline.

I personally can’t wait to see what they have come up with.

Here’s their full update today:

Addendum (8/30): To clarify, September 15 will be our open-source developer release. At that time, we will open up our github repository, publish our roadmap, and shift our development style to be more community oriented. We intend on launching a consumer facing alpha in October. Join our mailing listto get an invite.

A very nice US currency redesign by Dowling Duncan.

When we researched how notes are used we realized people tend to handle and deal with money vertically rather than horizontally. You tend to hold a wallet or purse vertically when searching for notes. The majority of people hand over notes vertically when making purchases. All machines accept notes vertically. Therefore a vertical note makes more sense.

The note imagery relates to the value of each note:

$1 - The first African American president
$5 - The five biggest native American tribes
$10 - The bill of rights, the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution
$20 - 20th Century America
$50 - The 50 States of America
$100 - The first 100 days of President Franklin Roosevelt.

Needs more guilloche but other than that: fire up the presses.

Mac OS X is a popular platform for developers and designers of all stripes. Apple has always had strength in the graphic design market, but even before Apple’s shift to Intel processors in 2006, developers started migrating to Mac OS X.

Mac OS X is a popular choice because it combines the power of BSD and other UNIX and UNIX-like systems with an elegant user interface. Mac OS X comes with Apache, PHP, Python, Ruby, and Subversion already installed, which makes it easy to turn a factory-fresh Mac into a local test server.

There is also a really robust and talented community of developers for Mac OS X, making some of the best apps around for designers and developers alike. Apps like Coda, CSSEdit, TextMate, Acorn, Pixelmator and LittleSnapper are just some of the many apps we love to use when designing or developing projects for the web.

As the end of summer approaches, we wanted to highlight six more Mac apps that have been released in the last few month for developers and designers.

1. Flux 3 – ₤69.99 for new users, ₤34.99 for upgrades

Indie shop The Escapers just released version 3.0 of its fantastic website design program, Flux. I like to think of Flux 3 as Dreamweaver reimagined.

It offers a visual and code-based approach to page design, along with support for plugins and code snippets, support for HTML5 and HTML5 video, ePub, WebKit transforms and other effects, and the Google Font API.

All of this power comes in an app that is easy to visually navigate or to edit as raw code. There is a learning curve, but once you’ve spent some time with the app, it’s easy to use to create and manage projects.

2. Gitbox – Free

One of the great things about the version control system Git is that it is super simple and super lightweight. Git was designed for the terminal, and oftentimes, the terminal is the fastest way to commit or merge changes.

Sometimes, however, it can be faster or more comfortable to add a visual element to the process. This can be especially useful if you are changing folder or file names or frequently switching between different places on your desktop.

Gitbox is a lightweight, single-window client for Git that makes it easy to see branches, commit, pull, merge and push all with a single click. It also supports diff viewing in either FileMerge.app or Kaleidoscope.

3. Kaleidoscope – €29

Kaleidoscope is from Made By Sofa and it’s a file comparison application that goes above and beyond a simple diff viewer.

Not only can you compare text files or code blocks, you can also compare images. If you’re working on a web coding or design project and you need to quickly view the changes between two versions of the same file, Kaleidoscope might just be your go-to tool.

It supports multiple layouts, syntax highlighting and searching, and multiple image formats. It can integrate with version control systems like Subversion, Git, Mercurial and others via the command-line or drag-and-drop, and the app is super fast.

4. Xmplify – Free while in beta

If you work with a lot of XML, you might want to give Xmplify a closer look. It’s a new app that is still in beta that makes editing XML and XSLT (XSL transformations) files really easy.

On the XSLT side, the program includes a Web Preview feature that shows a live look at the XHTML document created by the XSLTs.

You can also search using both XPath and by using regular expressions.

5. Loremify – Free

Loremify is a Dashboard Widget that can quickly and painlessly generate Lorem Impsum style text in the length and style that you specify.

This can be really useful when needing text blocks for filler content while creating a design. You can specify how many words and how many characters for a paragraph, header or list. You can also choose to automatically insert HTML tags into the generator, which makes the tool that much easier for using when designing in a browser or in a text editor.

6. Slammer – $20

More and more web designers are using grids, either of their own creation or something like the 960 Grid System, to create really flexible and great-looking layouts.

Slammer is a tool for applying and modifying grids to your designs or to existing content anywhere on your Mac. The app is an overlay that you can use on documents, web pages, images, previews, and the list goes on.

You can then customize the grid, get a feel for dimensions and pixel placements, and alter the layout of the grid to see how your content aligns.

You can then export your own templates as a JSON file that you can integrate with your designs or use pre-made templates for certain grid systems to use with future projects.

Basically Slammer is an interactive virtual blueprint maker that you can use for your web designs. You can try the app for 30 hours with no restrictions.

Bonus: Courier

Courier from Realmac Software won’t be available for another week or so, but as you can see from the awesome teaser video (above), it’s a utility that will likely appeal to many developers and designers.

Realmac is the same team behind RapidWeaver, LittleSnapper and Socialite, and they know how to deliver a Mac app that’s feature-packed and easy on the eyes.

I’ve been beta-testing Courier and really love the app. Keep your eyes peeled for this one!

Your Thoughts?

What are some of your favorite Mac apps for design and development? Let us know!

Rackspace is the better way to do hosting. No more worrying about web hosting uptime. No more spending your time, energy and resources trying to stay on top of things like patching, updating, monitoring, backing up data and the like. Learn why.

More Dev & Design Resources from Mashable:

- HOW TO: Implement Google Font API on Your Website
- Top 10 Accessories for Typography Nuts [PICS]
- 40+ Web Design and Development Resources for Beginners
- 10 Tools for Getting Web Design Feedback
- 10 Free Wireframing Tools for Designers

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, David Benkovic

More About: courier, Flux, gitbox, kaleidoscope, loremify, mac, mac apps, slammer, software, web design, Web Development, web development series, xmplify

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In a cloud world, source code is almost irrelevant. Tim O’Reilly was among the first to point this out in 2008  when he said, “Architecture trumps licensing any time,” but the meme has gone mainstream in the past year. It’s also increasingly germane to mobile business models. Those still fixated on open source qua licensing are missing the point that originally inspired its creation, not to mention big revenue opportunities.

There’s a lot of money to be made with open source, but first we need to stop fetishing antiquated notions of open source. Open-source licensing never deserved the single-minded devotion so many of us paid to it. It’s a starting point — a means — but not the end goal.

As Java founder James Gosling noted recently, freedom doesn’t start or end with source code (or its license):

Sun got a lot of heat for not going full open source early on (and there’s a lot of disagreement over what “full open source” would mean… GPL? Apache?). But freedom is a funny concept. It’s often a function of point of view: freedom for one could restrict the freedom of another. The freedom we were most concerned about was the freedom of software developers to run their applications on whatever OS or hardware they wanted. In opposition to that, the platform providers wanted the freedom to make their platforms as sticky as possible…. When Google came to us with their thoughts on cellphones, one of their core principles was making the platform free to handset providers. They had very weak notions of interoperability, which, given our history, we strongly objected to. Android has pretty much played out the way that we feared: there is enough fragmentation among Android handsets to significantly restrict the freedom of software developers.

Android is, of course, open source. However, as Gosling argues, it doesn’t matter: hardware fragmentation can significantly undermine developer freedom that no open-source license can resolve.

Actually, it gets worse. As Jason Hiner writes, Android’s permissive openness is actually helping carriers perpetuate closed models:

[W]e now have a situation where the U.S. telecoms are reconsolidating their power and putting customers at a disadvantage. And, their empowering factor is Android. The carriers and handset makers can do anything they want with it. Unfortunately, that now includes loading lots of their own crapware onto these Android devices, using marketing schemes that confuse buyers…, and nickle-and-diming customers with added fees to run certain apps such as tethering, GPS navigation, and mobile video…. [T]he consequence of not putting any walls around your product is that both the good guys and the bad guys can do anything they want with it. And for Android, that means that it’s being manipulated, modified, and maimed by companies that care more about preserving their old business models than empowering people with the next great wave of computing devices.

Open-source licensing is no help in the Android example. It’s the enabling force driving the problem. Sure, it may not look like a problem today: More Android equals more profitable mobile search traffic for Google.

However, the more control carriers, not Google, have over Android, the less Google can control its destiny. So what to do to fix the problem?

First, we need widespread recognition that there is a problem. It needs to start with the Open Source Initiative, which has recently acknowledged the need to evolve our understanding of open source in order to preserve its relevance.

That understanding needs to include open data, open APIs, open source, Gosling’s interoperability principles mentioned above, and more.

As developers embrace a more holistic conceptualization of open source, they’ll discover it has real power to drive revenue, both out of competitors’ business models and onto one’s own balance sheet. Venture capitalist Brad Feld offers one clue as to how to accomplish this in a data-as-a-service world:

[I]t seems painfully obvious to me…that the best way to popularize “data as a service” is to start with an API (which creates the revenue model dynamic) and build a bunch of open source examples on top of it. Your goal should be to make it as simple as possible for a developer to immediately start using your API in ways relevant to them. By open sourcing the starting point, you both save an enormous amount of time and give the developers a much more interactive way to learn rather than forcing them to start from scratch and figure out how the API works.

Open source is more relevant than ever, but it means so much more than a simple OSI-approved license. Or it should. The savvy developers and companies will be those with a more complete game plan, one that may include open-source licensed software, but also includes federated services, open data, etc.

Will this work for you? That depends, but one thing I can guarantee: a simplistic “open source is a matter of licensing” strategy leads nowhere.

Privately held Trader Joe's is highly secretive and doesn't do interviews, so Fortune did some digging around to see what makes the retail chain such a success.

A ringing bell instead of an intercom signals that more help is needed at the registers. Registers don't have conveyor belts or scales, and perishables are sold by unit instead of weight, speeding up checkout. Crew members aren't told the margins on products, so placement decisions are made based not on profits but on what's best for the shopper. Every employee works all aspects of the store, and if you ask where the roasted chestnuts are he'll walk you over instead of just saying "aisle five." Want to know what they taste like? He can probably tell you, and he might even open the bag on the spot for you to try.

Customer service, pay people well, and trust them to do good work. That and be clever about what you sell and to whom.

IT job satisfaction is at an all time low, and has been since January according to a CEB survey cited by ComputerWorld. We recently reported that about 1/3 of IT workers are ready to leave for another company. What can your organization do to boost morale and retain staff?

Sponsor

Cut Back the Hours

By far the biggest drag on tech workers is the number of hours worked - ComputerWorld puts the average workweek at 71 hours for IT staff. IT staff are often expected to work late into the night to fix problems, and still show up at 8:00 AM the next morning. Also, tech workers are frequently contacted at home and on vacation. At my first IT job after college, my boss told me "Forty hours a week is part-time."

ComputerWorld article asked why women leave careers in IT. The real question should be why anyone actually stays in the profession under these conditions.

Cutting hours for IT staff may sound like an impossible task, but it may actually lead to more productivity in addition to better morale. As the 37 Signals Book Rework points out: "Working more doesn't mean you care more or get
more done." According to a recent survey by Microsoft, the average worker is only productive for about 30 hours of their 46 hour work week.

From Rework:

If all you do is work, you're unlikely to have sound judgments. Your values and decision making wind up skewed. You stop being able to decide what's worth extra effort and what's not. And you wind up just plain tired. No one makes sharp decisions when tired.

Mangers will need to take a hard look at what is truly mission critical and what an acceptable amount of downtime will be, and set more generous timelines for deploying new systems. Managers may also need to take initiative in limiting staff's hours and ensuring employees take vacation time and are not contacted while on vacation unless absolutely necessary.

Managers can start by creating explicit policies regarding overtime, critical services and emergencies.

The move to cloud services and adoption of mashups and point and click app creation may take some of the burden off of IT as well.

Provide Paid Training

Time spent on self-training accounts for much of that 71 hour work week for IT staff. IT workers are expected to keep up with the latest technology, but all too often organizations don't support staff in their training and education.

Providing more paid training to staff - including contractors - could be a huge advantage to organizations. There's a mismatch between IT workers available and skills required. Managers should think of training as an investment.

Provide a Road Map for Career Growth

According to ComputerWorld "For many women, the career path is all very mysterious because they don't have mentors or sponsors or folks looking out for them." This is also true for men. It can be difficult to see where and how to move-up, especially as more and more business skills are required in IT departments. This is particularly problematic for contractors, who are often treated as disposable labor and have little to know prospects for advancement within a company.

In addition to providing training, organizations should mentor employees - male and female, contract and permanent - and make career opportunities and paths of advancement clear.

What Else?

What do you wish your organization would do to improve your morale at work?

Photo by The Trial

Skype is one of the most important work and social tools I use. It’s nearly perfect. Except that you people are using it to drive me crazy.

It’s made my list of “can’t live without” products for the last five years, and more recently the screen sharing feature has made Skype even more important as a productivity tool.

What I like about Skype is that you can use it for chat, or audio, or video. It’s an extremely versatile tool and most people in the startup world use it as their primary instant messenger application. It’s nowhere near as popular as Windows Live Messenger with 303 million worldwide monthly users, or Yahoo with 79 million. But it’s in a solid fourth place with 18 million users per month, according to Comscore (just the IM feature). The real number is probably far higher than that.

A lot of people know I like to use Skype for communicating, and I get a lot of inbound messages. And I’m starting to go a little crazy from the way people are using it. So it’s time for a friendly primer on appropriate Skype etiquette. Most of these helpful hints will also be useful for people using different IM applications.

It’s not a conversation until both sides are engaged. Just because I haven’t blocked you on Skype doesn’t mean that you have an open door into my brain. The best way to start a Skype conversation is to message something like “are you free?” If I respond then we’re all set. If not, don’t take it personally. And don’t start firing off whatever you want to say anyway. Too many of my Skype interactions look like this:

You: Hey Mike
You: Mike!
You: Are you
You: there?
You: Ok well I really want to talk to you about
You: [long message follows]
You: Hey! r u there?
You: hellooooooooo
You: yo!
You: Whatever. Thanks for ignoring me. Jerk.
Me (an hour later): Um, ok.

Instand messaging is both synchronous and asynchronous. Sometimes a conversation is both. I don’t take offense if someone bails out of a conversation on IM without warning only to reengage an hour or a day later. Neither should you.

Just start a conversation politely, and wait for the other person to say something before jumping in. If they don’t respond, say something like “Looks like you’re not online, I’ll send an email.” And then send an email.

Don’t abuse the Enter button. I know – your message is extremely time sensitive. So instead of typing full sentences you just
hit return in the middle of a sent
ence. Or a word.
That way the reader can know what you’re saying in the beginning of a sentence before you’re even done typing the end!

The default Skype settings are lots of notification messages all the time. Every time you hit enter it beeps my computer. That’s really annoying. Get whole sentences, paragraphs even, down in the box before you hit enter. People will appreciate it.

This is the number one thing that drives me crazy on Skype, as shown in the video above. Full screen it to watch the fun.

Don’t just jump right into a phone call. It’s polite to send a chat message first saying “online? time for a quick Skype call?” It’s annoying when the Skype phone starts ringing randomly. Sometimes in a rush to hit don’t accept I accidentally accept and then there’s some person talking full volume at me, most likely with their video going and demanding that I turn on video too. And all I wanted was a little bit of quiet.

Video calls are not a God given right. Just because you want to do video right now doesn’t mean I want to. I may be in my underwear, for example, which is when I do my best blogging. Feel free to hit video if you want. And if I want to I’ll hit video. If I don’t, why bring it up?

If you do turn on video, note that you have just become part of my informal psychology test. The default is for you to see yourself in the bottom left of the Skype app. Most people constantly check themselves and then change position slightly or whatever. I won’t mention it, but I do find it funny to see what percentage of the call you spend looking at yourself.

Don’t assume confidentiality. The worst thing I ever did was Skype message someone, in a rush, to confirm a story. And it turns out that poor person was using his laptop to give a presentation to a group of co-workers. And my skype message popped up on the screen for everyone to see. Bad stuff followed. Since then I always start off with something benign and wait for them to engage before jumping into anything sensitive. Other people are often looking at my computer screen, too. So be careful with throwing confidential information around until you know who’s reading it.

For more tips on human communication with touchy bloggers, read my post Greetings! And interesting side note, my favorite secret Skype emoticon is (mooning).

From Bill Rankin's excellent Radical Cartography, maps of the world's population graphed by latitude and longitude. Here's the latitude map:

You can almost see the Guns, Germs, and Steel in there.