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By Krishna, January 31, 2009

Everybody hates micro-managers and a lot has been written about micro-management. Unfortunately, quite often, they are written from the viewpoint of the micro-managed person, and not the micro-manager. Here is what Kathy Sierra had to say about micro-managers. Let’s do a thought experiment and provide a resounding “No” to every question she asks.

1. You are not on top of the projects that you manage, nor do you have a solid grasp of the details of your projects.
2. You cannot perform any of the tasks of your direct reports, leave alone do a better job.
3. You do not communicate frequently with your employees. You do not ask them for detailed status reports or updates.
4. You do not have better knowledge and skills than your employees. You are not better equipped to make decisions.
5. You do not care about things (quality, deadlines, etc.) more than your employees.

You see, when you do that, what you get is a “hands-off manager”, or, as someone once told me, a “glorified coordinator” between the development team and the management sponsors. In a matrix organization, maybe that is what your role is. And if so, good. But in many cases, the team leader or manager is an active part of the team and accountable for project deadlines and quality. And if you are such a person, then chances are that you will err more often on the side of micro-managing than being hands-off, if that is what has to be done.

Some very prominent people are famous for being micro-managers. Apple founder Steve Jobs is particularly notorious. Bob Sutton, in his book “The No-Asshole Rule”, has used him as an example of cases where being a jerk can produce results, even though he goes on to explain the hidden costs and human destruction with such behavior. Linus Torvalds is another technology celebrity with some micro-management issues. A friend forwarded this Linus discussion reply to me:

Quite frankly, I’d rather weed out the people who don’t start being careful early, rather than late. That sounds callous, and by God, it is callous. But it’s not the kind of “if you can’t stand the heat, get out the kitchen” kind of remark that some people take it for. No, it’s something much more deeper: I’d rather not work with people who aren’t careful. It’s Darwinism in software development.

It’s a cold, callous argument that says that there are two kinds of people, and I’d rather not work with the second kind. Live with it.

I’m a bastard. I have absolutely no clue why people can ever think otherwise. Yet they do. People think I’m a nice guy, and the fact is that I’m a scheming, conniving bastard who doesn’t care for any hurt feelings or lost hours of work, if it just results in what I consider to be a better system.

And I’m not just saying that. I’m really not a very nice person. I can say “I don’t care” with a straight face, and really mean it.

So, let’s be clear about this. When something about which a manager cares (career, reputation, money) is on the line, they are very likely to get involved in more “active” managing. Whether it is productive or counter-productive is not the issue. They confuse action and tough talk with results, and use *any* positive results to justify their way of working. And as we see in the above quote, they know that they care most about the product they are making.

Almost very discussion of micro-management ignores the fact that many managers are born from individual contributors who climbed one step higher in the organizational hierarchy. So they sometimes manage developers who have less experience and knowledge, and not a whole lot of business acumen. It is difficult for such managers NOT to think that they have better knowledge, skills or judgment.

Let me come to the point: Your thinking and your actions has to be put in the proper context. For example, hand-holding a junior employee may be better termed as “mentoring” while the exact same time spent with a senior employee can be insulting. Allowing employees to make decisions on their own is the right way to build a self-sufficient team, but you could also face disastrous crises. Many employees may be scared about the outcome of decisions (stalling the process), while others may be too careless. So the situation in which you operate matters a lot.

More than actions, micro-managing is essentially about the working relationship between an employee and a manager. Here are some clues towards understanding the dynamic:

1. Is the relationship based on mutual respect? Does both the manager and employee accept that the other is acting in good faith?
2. Does the manager listen to everything that the employee has to say?
3. Does the manager’s behavior convince the employee that he truly understands their point of view?
4. Does the manager explain the reasons behind his decision, if it is in conflict with the employee’s?
5. Does the manager take responsibility for his decision, especially when he is in disagreement with the employee?
6. Does the manager increase his trust of the employee as the relationship progresses?

The last is very important. Managing an employee should decrease in intensity as trust builds up. For this, each has to take responsibility. The employee has to ensure that their work is in adherence to the quality guidelines. The manager has to set low, initial expectations that will help build the employee’s confidence that they can meet targets.

Finally, the following talk about micro-management is from a private conversation between Obama and the British Conservative Party leader David Cameron, last year, one of those political moments that are quickly overshadowed by the news media’s fixation on silly sensationalism, and petty politicking:

“You should be on the beach,” Cameron told Obama. “You need a break. Well, you need to be able to keep your head together.”
“You’ve got to refresh yourself,” agreed Obama.

“Do you have a break at all?” asked Cameron.
“I have not,” said Obama. “I am going to take a week in August. But I agree with you that somebody, somebody who had worked in the White House who — not Clinton himself, but somebody who had been close to the process — said that, should we be successful, that actually the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking. And the biggest mistake that a lot of these folks make is just feeling as if you have to be – ”

“These guys just chalk your diary up,” said Cameron, referring to a packed schedule.
“Right,” Obama said. “In 15 minute increments …”

“We call it the dentist’s waiting room,” Cameron said. “You have to scrap that because you’ve got to have time.”
“And, well, and you start making mistakes,” Obama said, “or you lose the big picture. Or you lose a sense of, I think you lose a feel—“,

“Your feeling,” interrupted Cameron. “And that is exactly what politics is all about. The judgment you bring to make decisions.”
“That’s exactly right,” Obama said. “And the truth is that we’ve got a bunch of smart people, I think, who know ten times more than we do about the specifics of the topics. And so if what you’re trying to do is micromanage and solve everything then you end up being a dilettante but you have to have enough knowledge to make good judgments about the choices that are presented to you.“

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By Krishna, January 30, 2009

The reason why free markets work is that profit is a powerful motivator for economic activity. Supply and demand in the marketplace drive production, encouraging greater investment in goods demanded more by consumers. This is just as true on the Internet. There is a growing need for online services and information, and suppliers are rushing in to fill the need. Suppliers range from large Fortune 500 companies to small startups to individuals, each claiming a piece of the pie.

Different companies (and individuals) have created business models to generate revenue from the demand. In the case of informational websites and blogs, the business model usually involves making money from paid subscriptions or from advertisements in various forms (text ads, banners, etc.) or, in the case of some, questionable practices such as sharing user information with their marketing partners.

Paid subscriptions are increasingly becoming rare, as most companies find that hiding their content behind walls is not how the web works, and reduces their capability to attract consumers. Short-term border-line methods of generating revenue are simply that, just short-term. As consumers lose trust, they go away and the website dies a deserved death. Other ways to generate revenue like selling stuff (memorabilia, books, etc.), or simply asking for donations are also possibilities, but not every site can use them or will gain much revenue from them.

So we are mostly left with advertisements as the primary means for generating revenue. As I mentioned in a previous post, this has forced the bigger, multi-person blogs to change their layouts to display a lot of ads. Some of them have been able to maintain visual coherence and integrity despite the onslaught of ads. Others haven’t. Unless you are reading them in a blog reader, they are quite ugly looking and, in some cases, embarrassing because of the kind of ads that are displayed.

The popular single-person blogs have been less quick to move to such ad-prevalent designs. One reason is that many such authors are not professional bloggers, and make money elsewhere (running a company, working in a large company, funding companies, etc.) Secondly, of course, their expenses are quite low when compared to a dedicated blogging outfit and do not need to generate the last bit of revenue from them. Most popular bloggers have done a great job of carefully blending ads with the rest of their content to present a very consistent and aesthetic look.

So that is why it is so disappointing when I come across some single-person websites and blogs and find them literally plastered with ads over any available space. Take a look at the image on the right. This is a site which I marked into portions, where yellow stands for ads, blue for useful content and gray for meta-content. As you can see, less than one-fifth of the area is allocated for actual content, which is partly below the fold, because of the advertisements that come at the top.

If these sites were simply spammers trying to make a few easy bucks while serving stolen content, they would simply merit contempt. But these websites were created by people for blogging about their work or for displaying their resume or simply talking about themselves. It is disappointing because while they are creating unique content, they tarnish that legacy by imitating the ad strategies of spammers.

I simply don’t get it. These sites seldom attract the volume of visitors that would generate any appreciable amount of revenue. Because Google AdSense is typically used for advertisements (as it is easy to set up), the websites have a poor visual look and fail to attract repeat visitors or incoming links, thus defeating any purpose of using the website as a launching pad for bigger things. What they do instead is reduce (and even destroy) the brand value of the individual and the website in the minds of visitors.

To “paraphrase” a little-known politician speaking in 2002, I am not opposed to all ads. I’m opposed to dumb ads.

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By Krishna, January 29, 2009

Once again, another blogger (Michael Arrington of TechCrunch) is targeted with death threats. This is fast becoming too crazy for comfort:

Something very few people know: last year over the summer an off balance individual threatened to kill me and my family. He wasn’t very stealthy about it – he called our office number, sent me emails and even posted threats on his blog, so it wasn’t hard to determine who he was. The threats were, in the opinion of security experts we consulted, serious. The individual has a felony record and owns a gun. Police in three states became involved and we hired a personal security team to protect me, my family and TechCrunch employees.

At over $2,000 a day we couldn’t keep paying for security indefinitely. And the police were helpful but couldn’t do much based on the threats until he acted. We had the option of getting a restraining order but that just tells the person exactly where you are (the places they can’t go). So for a week I was literally in hiding with my parents at their home. The TechCrunch office was empty, and the police made regular checks to see if things were ok. One evening they almost arrested one of our employees who stopped by the office to pick up something.

Back in 2007, Kathy Sierra stopped blogging after death threats. Then, Jeff Atwood wrote about the recurring pattern of what is happening to successful bloggers:

1. Author starts blog
2. Blog becomes wildly popular
3. Popularity causes problem for author
4. Author stops writing
5. Everyone loses

This year, during the presidential elections, political blogging and micro-blogging has been enormously influential, when compared to past elections. Regular news organizations, especially newspapers, are having a difficult time capturing the attention of news consumers who are moving to better sources of information, sometimes run by a single person. This phenomenon has created backlash in the following forms:

• Politicians are finding it unbelievable that a person sitting at home and posting content can be powerful enough to sway large chunks of voters and raise money for the opposition. This is leading to politicians decrying such activity and even attempting to pass laws in some countries against them.
• Conventional journalists are feeling threatened by bloggers and attempt to belittle the quality of their content. From there to intimidation of bloggers is a short step.

As online activity increases and some bloggers and Twitterers become very popular, they will be faced with all kinds of problems from spamming and hacking to legal bullying to physical threats and attacks. A blogger with more power and followers can create many enemies even with innocuous-looking posts praising a particular product.

It is time that forward-looking politicians look at these challenges to democracy, entrepreneurship and innovation, and create new (or update existing regulation) to adequately protect bloggers and other online activity against such threats. Right now, the law is very vague about all of this.

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By Krishna, January 28, 2009

Yesterday’s post on delegation perhaps requires some additional context about why managers are faced with greater challenges as they delegate more. The missing context is how teams are built and how individuals operate in the team.

In the beginning, you start as a manager for a team of people. Some (or all) of them may know your way of working from past projects, but let’s assume no one does and that eventually all of them will learn. To build a successful team, you have to trust and empower every individual to do their work and make necessary decisions that concerns them. What you don’t want to do is someone who makes their decisions or helps them with every problem, which would make them less self-sufficient and weaken the team.

Now here are the tricky questions: What decisions are team members allowed to make? How should they decide what decision to make? What problems should they attempt to solve by themselves and what should they ask for your help? How much of your time (per day or per week) are they allowed? Are they allowed to interrupt you, or just talk to you in regularly scheduled meetings?

These are tricky, because only you know the answers to these questions. You have to explain these “working rules” to your team, not just at the start of the project, but also in every interaction with them. For example, if one team member is consuming too much of your time, you have to be able to explain that it is an unsustainable situation and get them to change their ways. You will have to teach team members to search and find resources on their own.

But when you do this, you could introduce an entirely new problem. A self-sufficient team member could decide to take on more responsibilities and problems than they were meant to, or that they are capable of handling. This can happen for a variety of reasons. One is that they become over-confident after gaining more experience. But a bigger issue is: They think it is too much trouble coming to you with some problem that you would tell them to take care of on their own.

So here are the beginnings of a perfect storm. A team member has some problem that he thinks is too tiny to escalate and decides to handle on his own. The problem becomes bigger. But now, the team member has got his hands dirty with the problem and is perhaps partly responsible for the bigger mess. At this point, they know exactly what errors in judgment they made and that they will be blamed in some way for the problem. So, now they are really scared to tell anyone, least of all you.

Finally, the problem balloons to a disaster, which becomes impossible to hide. And that is when you get to know about it. And that is why you get the “uniquely kooky” issues.

So, what do you do? I suppose there are some possible things to do in these situations:

1. This may be more work, but perhaps taking a slower road to delegation and team-building may avoid such scenarios. Use training to improve the skills and decision making of your team, but let them start out by relying on you for help and decision-making. Instead of you “telling” them to be self-sufficient, let them learn it slowly. Continue to keep an open door/phone/email so that you can get any bad news as early as possible.
2. When the really bad stuff hits your desk, do not start post-mortems. Stand with the team member(s) and fight the fire, doing what is necessary. Even after things have calmed down, do not spend time trying to teach people how to do it better next time. The individuals have already learnt their lesson and your sermonizing can only make them feel guiltier, and more ashamed/frightened to bring you problems in the future.

Don’t create an image of yourself where you are perceived to be tough on mistakes and incompetency. The only benefit you would see is that people would never make the same mistake twice. But the team will continue to make new mistakes because they are just scared to bring those problems to your desk.

This is not easy. It is not natural – the natural reaction is to be loudly angry or maybe passive-aggressive, if you don’t like yelling. It calls for a lot of restraint and patience, which can be tough when you are faced with crises that you know could have been prevented. Yet, it seems to be the only way to avoid recurring crises.

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By Krishna, January 27, 2009

Michael Lopp (a.k.a. Rands) explains why managers get to see a disproportionate amount of problems:

There’s a reason you’ll see an inordinate amount of bizarre organizational crap as a manager. See, the individuals can handle — and should handle — the regular stuff. You want a team of people who aren’t bringing you every little thing, but if you successfully build this team, your reward is that what is ends up in your office is uniquely kooky.

New managers spend time being busy, but most of the hours they work is devoted to unnecessary micro-management. They spend time in understanding every detail of the work done, critiquing it, mentoring people and even outright showing them how to do things. As they become more mature, managers learn to trust their team, provide them the right support to get things done, and put in the right processes.

Soon the team is on auto-pilot for their regular work, but when faced with unexpected new obstacles, they will need you to intervene. So ironically, as you become a better manager, you are faced with greater challenges, which you may be unprepared for. These fall into the category of high-class problems, which you will never face if you are a bad manager still struggling with petty problems.

Rands also had some interesting remarks about context-switching with respect to meetings: [redaction of expletive mine]

This is your morning. Six 30-minute 1:1s starting at 9am. This day is unique in that in your 4th 1:1, your architect resigns. The guy who has been designing the heart of your application for 18 months has been poached by a start-up and had piles of money thrown at him, and it sounds like there’s no way of saving him. Sounds grim. What’s harder is that when your sky-is-falling 1:1 is done, you’ve got your next one with your QA Director who has no clue your architect resigned, and she urgently wants to talk bug database, and that’s exactly what you need to do. You need to quietly and confidently forget that you’re ****ed and give this team member your full attention.

Thus it comes about that you are trying to put out more than one fire simultaneously, while at the same time, talking to customers, vendors and partners, who have no idea what is going inside your head, and who demand that you pay attention to their concerns. Everyone who wants your time expects you to treat them as your highest priority, and woe unto you if their grievances are not causing your heart to bleed.

So yes, management means sometimes putting on a mask to hide what you are really thinking, and instead behave with the utmost sincerity, respect and decorum. And then following upon every single commitment that you make.

Nobody said it was easy.

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By Krishna, January 26, 2009

Or you are just miserly or into chest-thumping manliness. A few months back, Popular Mechanics published what they called the Ultimate Do-It-Yourself List of the 100 Skills Every Man Should Know. Every man should know things like “run rapids in a canoe”, “grow food”, “use a sewing machine” and familiarize themselves with wood chisels and brick trowels. It is disappointing because Popular Mechanics does have great content on science and technology, and these lists perpetuate stereotypes of male behavior, and ignore how the modern economy works, including basic concepts like specialized labor.

Social, economic and technological changes have transformed the typical roles of men and women, formulated over millenniums of human existence. Some people cannot deal with this and continue to legislate how each gender should live and behave, even though everything that dictated those behaviors has changed. I wonder what Popular Mechanics will come out with when robots start taking over household and construction work. That day is not that far off.

Which brings us to the question, “What should you (male or female) know?” in the Google and smartphone era, where no answer is more than a few keystrokes away. If you don’t even know what a brick trowel is, take a few minutes to read what it is, see what it looks like, and view it in action. There! If you are more interested now in masonry, you can follow the same steps to learn it online (before you spend a cent on bricks and cement).

The explosion of information on any topic makes it much more difficult for anyone to become an expert. Innovation in techniques and equipment make existing knowledge outdated much more quickly. For example, if you have been a programmer for the last 10 years, you would have already learnt several programming languages, frameworks and architectures that you no longer use. A significant part (maybe 50%, maybe even 90%) of your learning is essentially useless, because technology has moved on.

This doesn’t mean that all learning and all experience is futile. Physical skills (painting, ballet dancing, surgery, etc.) need thousands of hours of practice. And, some kinds of knowledge seem more important than ever. For example:

1. Knowing how to locate information: Knowing how to do efficient Internet searches, obviously. But sometimes your information is locked in people’s minds. Having good networking skills (real and virtual) is a vital asset, because you know which people would be able to provide good answers to your questions.
2. Being able to learn faster: Information is useless if you cannot consume it quickly to make a difference. You need the skills to understand the big picture, produce a bare-bones implementation and prioritize what details to master. You should know how to harness past knowledge effectively to learn new skills. In some cases, relating existing concepts to new technology may speed up learning. In other cases, it may hinder it and so you have to be ready to unlearn old ideas.

If you look at the typical hiring process of most organizations, a lot of emphasis is placed on knowing stuff. Even before a person is considered for an interview, they are evaluated on their resume, which is simply a collection of what they did and what they know. An interview answer like “I don’t know, but give me 5 minutes on Google and I can explain everything you want to know about it” may be truthful, but suicidal. The trivia contest nature of interviews is useful only for testing the memory power of candidates, and not their performance under real circumstances. As we understand more about the changing nature of knowledge, perhaps this will become less so.

Educational institutions will also have to adjust to this changing reality. Schools should educate students to take advantage of technology that would be available to them in real life. Stop evaluations that are based on memory power, and start testing them on whether they can find information, learn things faster, be more creative and come up with new ideas. There are some subjects and many details within each subject that are useless to 99.999% of students unless they do a doctorate, in which case, they can easily locate the necessary information. Get rid of such unnecessary trivia and make learning more meaningful and relevant to the present age.

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By Krishna, January 25, 2009

In a recent post, Seth Godin talked about rubber-necking and how it results in taxing the time of other drivers. A few years back, I did some research on traffic patterns, and the reality is that you don’t (necessarily) need anybody rubber-necking to create traffic jams. Even minor changes in traffic patterns can be the cause. See the video below, where there is no accident for anyone to indulge their curiosity. Innocent cautionary driving by some can create bottlenecks for everyone. Here is a more detailed explanation of traffic jams and Wikipedia has more on traffic congestion research and theories.

This is not really a post about traffic research. My point is that like Seth Godin, we are quick to attribute negative actions and motives to others and blame them for our predicament, even though we have no knowledge about what really happened. Like traffic jams, the issue may be complex and nuanced, but we are unaware of the intricacies. Blaming others is easy, but doesn’t advance us in the direction of solving the problem. If there is a problem with the system, asking people to behave better or be more careful doesn’t fix it.

Seth used his point to rant against trolls and flame wars. Asking readers to resist a desire to participate in such activity is praise-worthy, but is not very useful as a strategy to reduce those problems. If you have a community, you will never have perfect, pure users. Instead, every user will be motivated by different factors (sincere and/or mercenary) to remain and participate in the community. And like real-life communities, virtual communities will need a combination of leadership, positive and negative incentives, and policing (to name a few) to remain pleasant and useful to the community users.

If a virtual community turns ugly, don’t blame the users. Take a hard look at the creators. What did they do to avoid worsening of the community experience? Did they spend effort on putting the right policies into effect? Did they listen to users who complained about problems, and act upon them? Did they step in to protect the weakest members of the community? Or did they encourage spamming and bullying, because it drove up their page views and revenues? I guess you already know the answer.

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By Krishna, January 24, 2009

Blogger and Wordpress are both blog platforms as well as blog hosting services. The latter allows you to write and post blogs on their servers, saving you the effort of setting up your own server. This is useful if you are an individual blogger, less if you happen to be an organization. I have been using Blogger for hosting this blog and Wordpress.com for hosting a more informal sports blog on cricket. Both applications offer similar services, but unfortunately each of them have a few important missing features and some nuisance behavior:

1. Blogger does not support trackbacks (unlike WordPress), which allow you to notify another blogger if you are linking to his/her post. This reduces your ability to influence the conversation around a topic, and reduces traffic to your blog. Instead, Blogger offers backlinks which work only on Blogger blogs and hardly offers the same functionality.
2. WordPress provides its own blog traffic statistics which it gets from Google Analytics code that it inserts automatically into your blog. So far, so good, but instead of sending you to the Analytics website, it offers a few simplistic graphs and reports. This is the height of online paternalism. I can understand them doing this for novice bloggers, but for everyone else, this is very limiting.
3. Blogger only allows you to create blog posts and provides no way to add web pages that are outside the regular flow of blog posts. For example, you may want to add a page containing a summary of statistical information or a calendar of events. This is not possible. Moreover, Blogger republishes posts that have been re-categorized, so re-organization of your site can cause a deluge of posts to your readers’ Inbox or blog reader. Again, I clamor for an integration between Blogger and Google Sites, which may be coming soon. (Google Page Creator has silently died.)
4. Wordpress.com does do the static page thingy, but like the traffic analysis, they don’t allow you to decide what to do with them. As far as I could see, there is no way to organize your static pages, such as deciding their hierarchical order. My current theme displays every static page as a separate tab. Because of this, I have an ongoing integration issue with Google Webmasters that requires me to repeatedly hide and unhide a static page. Blogger does not have this problem because you can directly edit the HTML of the page.
5. There is no effort on Blogger’s part to monetize blogs. Google got rid of the paid version, Blogger Pro, when they acquired Blogger. Not only does this make the long-term future of Blogger uncertain, it surely means that Google is not investing as much as it could on Blogger’s development. As Google faces pressure to make money off its properties, this could change. Wordpress, on the other hand, earns money on upgrades to storage space, number of users and so on. In addition, Wordpress is open source software with contributions from hundreds of developers.

Both services are capable of handling the needs of most bloggers, so if you are looking for a quick solution, either is fine. On the other hand, if you are looking for more advanced features from them, take note of what is missing before making a decision.

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By Krishna, January 23, 2009

The White House website looks like it had a major overhaul. In addition to the striking new visual design, it also has a blog, video address and slideshows, and there is a promise to expand the website to increase the ability of ordinary citizens to interact with the website. This is obviously a carry-over from the new President’s campaign website. Barack Obama and his campaign team have fundamentally changed the rules of how political campaigns are run, and it looks like they will be doing the same to how government is run.

I looked at websites of other governments (using the English version of the available websites)

1. United Kingdom: The various websites (Parliament, Monarchy, Prime Minister) are well designed, each in their own way. The Prime Minister’s site has many Web 2.0 elements and links to YouTube and Twitter channels. It wouldn’t do any harm to the White House website designers to take a look at it while they are adding new features.
2. France: The websites of the Prime Minister and the President are very stark and look very outdated. The PM’s site is about delivering news while the President’s website is about history and tradition.
3. Germany: This is a much more pleasant site than the French one. Although it doesn’t seem to have a lot of information, the site is organized well and provides links to other federal agencies.
4. China: The authorities have thrown the kitchen sink at the website. The home page is filled with information, news and items of interest. I don’t think they left out any government body. If you cannot find what you are looking for on the first page, it probably doesn’t exist.
5. Japan: The opposite of the Chinese website, this one is mostly about the Japanese prime minister: his photo, his messages, his speeches – you get the picture. What is really strange about the site are the “mini-banner ads” on the right hand side, which on closer inspection, are links to other government services.
6. India: The Indian government websites (Government, Prime Minister) are a disappointment in terms of design. But unlike the Chinese folks, the designers haven’t dumped everything on the home page, and they have made an honest effort to entice visitors to stay longer and look at more information. In fact, the official websites even has electronic greeting cards!

Also take a look at other countries: Australia, South Africa, Canada, Italy, Russia, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Indonesia, New Zealand. [If you want to add another country, add the link in the comments section.]

Back to the White House, as the website is getting a revamp, the real brick-and-mortar White House is still ages behind the technology curve.

Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy yesterday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software, and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.

What does that mean in 21st-century terms? No Facebook to communicate with supporters. No outside e-mail log-ins. No instant messaging. Hard adjustments for a staff that helped sweep Obama to power through, among other things, relentless online social networking.

People in power are already in a cocoon. And then, you take away even the technology that lets them be in touch with real people. The law has to change to enable government executives and officials to take advantage of technology innovation. Otherwise, it is ironic that the government calls for greater business innovation, but does not itself consume its fruits.

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By Krishna, January 22, 2009

I have previously written about Creative Commons and taking advantage of free resources. Something that I didn’t clearly express was the availability of public domain resources, which do not have any copyright as opposed to copyleft or Creative Commons licenses. Public domain materials are not owned or controlled by any person or entity, and can be used by anyone to use for any function.

Project Gutenberg contains texts that are in the public domain (for the most part). So, in addition to being a passive consumer, you can re-distribute the information, as-is or in a different format. Project Gutenberg also contains images from published books whose copyright has expired. My previous post uses both the text and the image from a Mark Twain book.

Wikimedia has many public domain photos, illustrations, sound clips and videos. While many of these are historic items that have lost copyright protections, others are more recent and have been uploaded by users deliberately placing them in the public domain. Unfortunately, a few users have uploaded media content using Creative Commons and, in some cases, the origin of the media item is unclear. So you may have to read the copyright information carefully instead of using the media file blindly.

Barring some exceptions, most work done by United States government is in the public domain. This includes some excellent resources such as The World Factbook, by the Central Intelligence Agency: This is not just an online resource. The CIA provides a downloadable file. Also take a look at photos and videos of planets, stars, space shuttles and much more by the NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration). There are also many good resources on the Library of Congress website, but they do a terrible job of providing the copyright information.

Wikipedia has an exhaustive list of US and other public domain resources. USA.gov has another list of potential public domain content here.

So take advantage of these resources. Although I like using Creative-Commons-licensed photos (from Flickr and elsewhere), you still have to worry about attribution, sharing and whether you are allowed to modify the images (like I did here) and use them commercially. Public domain resources have none of those restrictions.

It is a tragedy that current copyright law makes automatic public domain for copyrighted works virtually impossible. The first US copyright law only allowed for 14 years of copyright with the ability to renew for another 14 years. Today, it is 75 years from publication or 50 years after the death of the author. This law benefits only a very small fraction of the population. Most published works bring few monetary benefits to the author or creator. Unfortunately, they will remain in obscurity because no one can use their content.

I think it would be a much better state of affairs if copyright expires if the creator has not made any money off the work for 5 years, or has not renewed the copyright on the work. So, if some corporations want to make money off Mickey Mouse, let them. But why apply the same principle to every single work out there? Publishers should also encourage more copyright holders to release their obscure, non-selling works, which could arouse greater interest in the creator and perhaps actually generate more profits for the author and the publisher.

That is the future. Who will get there first?