Date: Thu, 31 May 2007 09:43:14 +0100 From: "Sean B. Palmer" To: "Tav Ino" Subject: The Five Rules of Ineffectual Espianism can you mail me 5 top bullet points of what you think needs to be fixed? hmm, yes... but... they might be quite generic. quite abstract because I think it'll take many, many actual things to fix the problem but I can probably divide it up into five general problem areas... * Lack of Planning. "It was like that when I got here!" The only thing that there should've been at the start of the project is the team. Too many decisions were made too early without a competent team: there should have been no Rich Mix, there should have been no Website, there should have been nothing but least-organised discussion. Projects like this are meant to grow organically according to process tempered intelligence. Instead there was no process, no intelligence, and the growth was forced and misplaced! * Lack of Communication. "Is there anybody out there?" When you host Dorkbot London, the level of communication from Rich Mix should, you'd think, increase. But it decreased! When exciting things happen in real life, both online communicators and posterity get ignored. This is the deepest problem. The information flow is paltry; it is abysmal. You wouldn't get away with having any other project be so poor in the communication department. * Lack of Expertise. "LOL WEAR BUILDING AN INTARWEB!!" This is a meta problem. Why am I the only one releasing PPPs? Why are you the only one programming? There's no communication partly because there's nobody to talk about the architectural issues. This can even be traced to the planning: making everybody the "head" of a department divides us into non-communicating discrete components of a static system. When you're friends with people, it starts to cloud your judgement about their professional ability. This project simply needs many more intelligent people involved; and to drop those that aren't working out. Then these problems could have been prevented. * Lack of Meticulousness. "Has anybody seen my pencil?" There's no attention to detail: another day goes by, Day 14?, but the website still says Day 8. Even though Bruder made two more shows since then. The new website still isn't even up. It's hard to concentrate on the details when you can't get the big things done. And all of these things aren't big; what's big is the kind of architectural decisions I've been pointing to but nobody else has been discussing. They've just been ploughing ahead with the wrong ideas, with (and this is the bad part) no discourse surrounding it. That's either insulting, or gross incompetence. * Lack of Leadership. "Take me to your leader." The people that do have the resources and do have the executive power aren't actually using it. I understand that it's in order to try to distribute the leadership, but it's not working. Really badly not working. The people with the resources need to delegate them; it can't happen automatically. And it's their responsibility to make sure that they're delegated--to chase people up to give them the resources. Someone must also take overall charge for this. Why don't all the experienced espians have root accounts on whatever servers we have? Why can't we upload anything? Why must we always wait for someone *else* to get things done? Why don't we have access to money? Sometimes resources are merely misplaced. Why concentrate so hard on Rich Mix first when so many people can't get to it anyway? Empower the espians, don't embitter them! -- Sean B. Palmer, http://inamidst.com/sbp/