Death to Q&A

Here's a simple way to incorporate high-quality audience questions without disrupting your talk or presentation. I wish every panel and presentation did this.

Index cards for audience questions.

See, I hate Question and Answer sessions. I mean, I really HATE them. Whenever an event or a presentation or something wraps up, and the host or the presenter says, "Are there any questions from the audience?" -- that's my cue to make a break for the exit.

I know what's coming, and so do you.

The same five or six questions every presenter gets: How did you get your start doing this thing I totally wish I was doing only I haven't worked up the guts to do it myself? Will you listen to me pitch my idea to you right here in front of all these people, because I don't believe in my idea enough to pursue it myself without your approval? Let me tell you a story that will prove I belong up there with you, and not down here with these other people.

I'd rather pour bleach into both my eyes.

So when I was asked to host a panel at this year's Mesh conference, I knew I had to find a solution. Of course, there ARE great audience questions (man, I had a KILLER question for Jackie Chan when he did a talk at last year's TIFF, but they shut down the mics before I got a turn. Mostly because everyone before me was trying to pitch their ideas to Jackie. Not that I'm bitter), but how could I get those into the discussion without subjecting everyone to the dreaded "open microphone" that kills a presentation stone dead?

A handy trick from the GM's toolkit came to the rescue -- the humble index card.

What I wanted for this panel was a free-flowing, smooth conversation that felt more like a thoughtful salon conversation than a structured panel. I had some questions for the panelists prepared ahead of time, of course, but the last thing I wanted to do was to cut off the conversation in mid-stride, turn to the audience and say, "Okay, now who has some questions?"

So I brandished my index cards at the crowd. Whenever someone wanted to add a question to the discussion, they just caught my eye and I rushed over to give them a card for them to write their question on. When the card was returned, I added it to my stack of questions, and then whenever there was a break in the discussion, I could jump in with a "Here's a question from one of our audience members..."

Often the questions seemed to flow naturally from the ongoing conversation. We never had to interrupt the entire discussion just to surface one person's idea, but anyone who wanted to contribute could.

We got through every single one of the audience questions, and many people commented on how they appreciated the way it was all handled. The questions were (perhaps because people had to really think their question through before handing it in to me) very high-quality -- interesting and taking the conversation in new and thoughtful ways.

I really enjoy hosting panels and facilitating discussions, and this one went really well. And I'll be using my index cards at every one I do from now on.

PAXEast 2013: DINO-PIRATES Sells Out!

Well, the Scratch Factory team (that's me, in case you haven't been keeping score) joined a bunch of other indie game designers at the massive PAXEast convention in Boston last weekend. I was there to sell copies of DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND.

I was a little trepidatious going in, since my model predicted I would only barely break even, and I wasn't sure my model was very reliable.

But away I went. And am I ever glad I did. I had a near-perfect result -- a complete sellout of my game on Sunday afternoon.

How did I do it?

The Number

Remember that I'd chosen to watch a number I called Revenue Per Attendee. At tiny (but fun) little Hammercon, I'd made nearly 50 cents per attendee. At Game Summit, a con ten times the size of Hammercon, my R/A dropped by more than 80% to just 7 cents per attendee. Disappointing, but I don't argue with actual data.

Using that model, and assuming another 80% drop to PAXEast (ten times again the size of Game Summit), it looked like I would see a R/A at PAXEast of less than ONE cent per attendee -- 0.6 cents, actually. That predicted I would sell 15 copies, earning just enough to cover the cost of the trip (with maybe $50 left over). It was a risk, but I figured I'd take it. I also figured I'd take a few more copies of the game than the model predicted. Live in hope and all that.

So I threw 21 copies (I don't count so well is why the funny number) in a box, jumped into a Honda Civic and rode down to Boston.

The Selling

First of all, if you don't know, PAXEast is an AMAZING event. And I say this as someone who neither plays video games nor reads Penny Arcade. People are incredibly friendly, the staff are knowledgeable and there to make your time fantastic. The tabletop area, which is really a sideshow at this thing, is HUGE and utterly packed from morning till night, full of people having a blast.

Second of all, the gang I was part of, the Indie Bazaar, included some of the coolest game designers and people I will ever meet. Epidiah Ravachol, designer of Dread and Vast & Starlight, Emily Boss, designer of Breaking the Ice, Vincent Baker of Dogs in the Vineyard and Apocalypse World, Joshua Newman of Shock and Mobile Frame Zero, Meguay Baker of 1001 Nights, Rob Bohl of Misspent Youth and of course Jason Anarchy of Drinking Quest all had their crazy fantastic games on display, and virtually everything sold like the proverbial hotcakes.

Frankly, if we'd offered FREE HOTCAKES I doubt we could have done better.

The Result

I sold the last copy I had of DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND on Sunday afternoon -- a perfect result. Selling 21 copies instead of 15 produced a Revenue per Attendee of 0.9 cents, which means my predicted number was off by 0.3 cents. I think that's a very respectable margin of error (even if it is nearly 50% of the actuals).

Having my expectations set ahead of time really helped to reduce my anxiety, especially on the first day when Drinking Quest and Mobile Frame Zero were flying off the shelves but it seemed like everyone was turning their noses up at my pulpy baby. But I hung in there and Saturday was much better, just like my model had predicted.

And I learned new things. Games like Drinking Quest and Mobile Frame Zero are so easy to sell: their unique offering is easy to grasp immediately. While people invariably laugh when they hear DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND, they can't so easily engage with the concept, and not everyone is going to sit still and listen while I explain it.

I doubt I could do much better with this game, no matter how I marketed or sold it. I have a few copies left which I'll take with me to the Calgary Entertainment Expo in April and sell, and then that will be it for the print version of DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND. It's been a great learning experience, and the lessons I've acquired here I'm going to put to good use when the time comes to start selling REFORM SCHOOL NINJA GIRLS.

Who Owns the Owners?

This Audrey Hepburn chocolate bar commercial freaks me out. Not because of the ghastly-but-honestly-impressive effects work. Well done, you hideous ghouls.

No, what freaks me out is the whole idea of owning oneself. I can see where this is going, and it's kind of terrifying.

Owning stuff is a pretty basic idea. A 2-year-old readily divides the world into stuff that is "his" and stuff that isn't and woe betide you should you cross that divide. But the definition of "stuff" is steadily getting less clear.

Who owns a book? The person holding it, presumably -- oh wait, that's just the owner of that copy of that book. The right to make those copies -- the copyright -- is owned by, uh, whoever owns it. Most likely an enormous corporation (hang on to that idea, it's going to go somewhere).

Owning a copyright is a little abstract, to be sure, but it's a defensible idea. This commercial takes the question of what can be owned to an even stranger level.

It is said the ad was created with the approval of her sons, which begs the question of whether or not such approval was or even should be required, and what the implications on either side of that question are.

I know it's Audrey, but it doesn't
LOOK like Audrey

To the left, if approval is required, that implies that a person's appearance -- their face, their style, their presence -- is a thing that like the right to make copies, like a book, can be owned. This is a very strange idea. Your presence -- do you own it? And if you do, then, can you sell it? Can someone buy it? Can someone take it away from you? What do we do with identical twins, or two people who just happen to look very much alike? How alike will be considered "too alike"? What if I create a recognizable caricature of Audrey Hepburn -- does that require permission, too? Can I sue someone for looking too much like me (poor devil)?

When does this sort of ownership expire? Or can I pass the rights to my likeness along to my heirs and let them profit from it for all eternity? And what are the chances that these rights (whatever they are) will end up in the hands of an enormous, soulless corporation that will ruthlessly exploit them until they're worthless?

See, I told you that idea would come back. The answer to that last question is very close to "100%", by the way.

To the right, if approval is not required, then does that mean that anyone can create a photorealistic version of YOU and have it do whatever they desire? What recourse do you have, if they never use your name and the entire scene is completely fictional? How will you prove you DIDN'T do the things you are shown to be doing?

This isn't quite like slander or libel -- perhaps it is if I am made to look like I've done something impugning my reputation, but even showing me do innocuous things that I didn't do seems to tread on my rights, and it's not like tracking down the producers of random YouTube videos is necessarily going to be straightforward.

Both sides appear deeply flawed to me. Both lead to bizarre and unsettling worlds. Either we enter a marketplace of identities, where the battle to maintain ownership over my own appearance is going to be a very lopsided one in favour of massive inhuman entities (those corporations, in case you aren't keeping up), or I abandon any hope of being able to preserve my own reputation.

I'm not trying to say that my appearance is ever going to be as valuable as a movie star's -- that's not the point. But just as the notion of copyright ownership has now become an everyday problem for ordinary people everywhere, this sort of idea of "self" ownership may do likewise.

Who owns me? How is that ownership structured, and what rights to myself do I have within that structure?

Hard Things Are Easier

So I've always wanted to be good at drawing.

I am not THIS good
at drawing.

Since I was a kid, it's something I've wanted. Not so much that I ever picked up a pencil and put in the time to get good at it, but still. I certainly did spend a fair amount of time sitting around feeling sorry for myself because I couldn't draw, so that counts for something, right?

I've been picking up the pencil somewhat over the last few months, just trying to get some skills, and yesterday, something amazing happened: I had an idea for a drawing during the day, and when I got home, I drew something that sort of looked like what I'd pictured in my head.

That has never really happened before.

Most of my drawing efforts began with little or no clear picture of what I was going to produce, and then a lot of pathetic, incomprehensible scribbling. And then of course, frustration, humiliation and self-reproach.

None of which, strangely, ever improved my drawing ability one whit. Drawing remained a mystery to me.

Until recently, and I think I know what's changed: I have started to get a sense of how HARD drawing is.

Strangely, this seems to be encouraging me to work more on my drawing ability, until I've gotten to the point where I can imagine a scene in my head, and produce something that looks like I imagined. It still looks terrible, don't get me wrong. But it's recognizable as what I was TRYING to draw.

Over the past couple of years, I've worked very closely with a couple of very hard-working artists: Claudio Pozas and Dave Knox. Claudio has been the lead artist for DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND, detailing characters and cover images for all the DPoNI products thus far. Dave is the artist for the REFORM SCHOOL NINJA GIRLS comic book, and he and I have collaborated very closely throughout the whole process of putting that book together.

As I've watched them put together amazing illustrations, I've seen first-hand the amount of work involved. Seeing early thumbnails as we figure out composition, and then how those get turned into full-size sketches and finally, after hours and hours of painstaking effort, a fully-rendered image is finished, has been profoundly eye-opening. And strangely comforting.

Maybe it was just getting a more realistic notion of what an early-stage drawing ought to look like. Or improving my ability to visualize what an early-stage drawing is likely to look like. Or maybe my standards for "looks like" have just dropped so far I get excited about anything.

Motivation is a funny thing. You'd think seeing that something is really hard would DIScourage me, but it's the opposite. There's probably some deep and profound truth buried in there.

Anyway, I'm going to go draw something.

Make Your Own Haters

Not the famous poster,
but has Dejah Thoris.

I really wanted Andrew Stanton's John Carter to be good. And it's pretty good. It's not terrible. It deserved better than it got in the market, I think.

But I can see now what really holds it back from greatness. And it holds a great lesson for any GM (and plenty of other story-tellers, too). It's a lesson I myself have struggled to remember, time and again.

You just don't hate the bad guys enough.

And for a fantasy adventure story you need bad guys you can really hate. And in a fantasy adventure movie, you need to get to the hating right away. Your audience needs to HATE.

That's the lesson: a great fantasy adventure needs massively hatable bad guys.

Villainous Villains

Why is it especially important to get right to the hating in a movie? Because movies are really short, and they operate visually. Every second your audience spends trying to distinguish characters from each other is a second in which you've lost the opportunity to make them care. Important characters must be immediately distinguishable from others. Visually. We have to understand their relationships and our own feelings about them viscerally, not through explanation.

Let's compare the opening of John Carter with a couple of other films that I think are trying to tell similar sorts of stories, and did so magnificently: Star Wars and The Fellowship of the Ring.

Both of these films, like John Carter, start by setting up a large-scale conflict that will draw in our unsuspecting hero. Over the course of the story the heroes will come to take on the conflict as their own, and prove to be essential in its resolution. What's crucial, then, is that the audience care about the conflict. They need to be emotionally invested in the outcome of the conflict. And this has to happen fast, because, as I mentioned, movies are short. When you've only got a couple of hours to build that emotional investment, every moment of confusion or uncertainty in the audience reduces the potential impact of the story.

Done Right

30 seconds in, and you already know
who to cheer for.

The opening shot of Star Wars is rightfully one of the most classic openings in cinema history. Not only is it a fantastic technical achievement, but it tells the story right away. There's these scrappy little guys in some sort of ramshackle arrangement, and they're getting pushed around by these big bullies in this ENORMOUS HELLO I WILL EAT YOU spaceship. You know right away whose side you're on, of course, and that impression gets steadily reinforced as the opening scene plays out: kindly-faced Rebel soldiers looking worried as they get steadily gunned down by visored unstoppable soldiers, and then DARTH VADER appears all in black with a skull mask, and he murders some guy and then intimidates the plucky princess. Later on he will strangle some dude and BLOW UP A PLANET. And THEN he kills Ben. Jeez Louise.

We understand quickly that he's the bad guy, we hate and fear him immediately, and we are repeatedly shown reasons to continue hating and fearing him. We REALLY want Luke to get rid of this guy, even though it seems totally impossible. And we immediately recognize him later on, and we feel that hatred and fear without having to think about it.

One of the best things Peter Jackson ever did was to understand exactly who the bad guy is in The Lord of the Rings, and the opening of Fellowship makes it very clear. The battle between Isildur and Sauron, Isildur's moment of weakness at Mount Doom, and his subsequent betrayal, all of this tells us right from the get-go who the terrible trouble-maker is: the Ring. The Ring is bad, and we know it five minutes into the movie. We've seen it doing bad things, and we fear and hate it for the rest of the film.

Done Wrong

Basically identical to every
other guy in the movie.

So, compare with John Carter. Much like these movies, it opens with a scene depicting the larger struggle: in this case a battle between nearly-identical bands of flying soldiers. The leader of one group of nearly-identical soldiers is nearly identical to all the other soldiers, and appears no more competent or dangerous or hateful than the rest. Sure, he's killing people, but everyone in the frame is killing people, so...

Sab Than inspires neither fear nor hate. He's not doing anything that obviously needs to be stopped, and stopping him doesn't look any harder than stopping another random guy with a sword in a flying airship on Mars.

"But," you say, "Sab Than's not the real bad guy! This story is all about Matai Shang!"

Okay, so Matai Shang shows up, and yep, he's visually distinctive, at least. And he can apparently fly. And he gives Sab Than a big blue glove and says "This is awesome." So Sab Than tries to blow up Matai Shang with it, and nothing happens.

So that's not very impressive. We're still left with no real reason to hate Sab Than or Matai Shang, and Than's foolishness only makes both of them even less fearsome.

And Matai Shang changes appearance constantly through the movie, which undermines the point of his distinctive appearance. The whole point of giving a primary character a distinctive appearance is so that you can steadily build up an emotional association in your audience. When they see him, they see him doing something awful, and they hate him even more than they did before. They build an association between that feeling of disgust and his appearance.

Every time he appears in some other guise, that association is made less intense. So Shang's constant shape-changing undermines what's already a problem about this film -- our lack of emotional investment in the conflict of which he is a part.

And Shang never appears to do anything all that terrible, anyway. Nor does Sab Than. Oh sure, there's killing guys, but war is hell, right? And there's TALK about vague, terrible things, but we don't SEE any terrible things, so we don't develop any association between these characters and a sense of disgust or hatred. They're not blowing up planets and torturing plucky princesses. They're not corrupting brave warriors or whispering to Ringwraiths. They're not doing much of anything, it seems.

The Lesson

I'm not trying to hate on John Carter. I like the movie. Stanton's takes on both Carter and Thoris are fantastic, and both actors do a great job bringing two of my most beloved characters to life. The action scenes are well-played and the Tharks are other beasts are awesome.

But this is an instructive lesson, I think, for storytellers of all stripes, including GMs. It's hard to create truly memorable villains in an RPG, since so many games are crafted around the idea that the players will win every encounter. That means that upon meeting the bad guy, they will defeat him, and so there's rarely much of a chance to really build up that sense of hate and fear.

But how do you introduce bad guys, get your players to hate and fear them, without making it an immediate fight to the death? How do you delay the action of justice so that it's all the more satisfying when it happens?

One of my most memorable bad guys was an accountant. There's something about accountancy that helps keep players civilized, maybe.

I often outright tell my players to not try fighting a bad guy out of their weight class. My reasoning is that the characters are receiving far more non-verbal information than I can give the players, and so they have access to an understanding the players do not. So if I say, "You're very sure this guy will beat you all to a pulp if you look at him sideways," that's just their characters understanding some cues that are hard to express through the sort of narration available to a GM. Once the players are willing to let the scene play out, I find it much easier to build up bad guys they can really hate.

But are there better ways to do this? Do some games handle this better than others?

Okay, So I'm Not Crazy

This writer for Xark is contemplating opening up the setting of his unpublished novel. (thanks to @profpope for the link)

He's largely talking about doing what I'm planning with DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND, only around a novel rather than a game. The idea of setting up a foundation to support the open setting is interesting, though, along with the proposed requirement that folks who make money off the setting be required to contribute some portion of that money to support it.

It's an idea.

Copyright is getting munged in all sorts of ways. As maybe some of you know, I'm in favour of lighter, leaner definitions of copyright and what it protects or doesn't protect. I got into a discussion with Ed the Sock a couple of months back about use of one's intellectual property. Ed's point was that if folks get to re-use your work, they can make it look like you said something you didn't. I argued that this isn't a copyright issue, it's a slander/libel issue. I remember when Raincoast Press used copyright to silence people who had received the new Harry Potter book early (because of Raincoast's error) -- as though the right to control the copying and distribution of a work granted the right to muzzle people who have received it legally!

Of course, I've probably mis-represented Ed's views here and will get a copyright lawsuit slapped on me. Great.

Anyway, my point with Ed (and I failed to convince him, and he's pretty smart, so keep that in mind) was that copyright is best handled as a purely economic law -- controlling the right to profit from distribution of an artistic work. Not a generalized control over the work and its presentation.

Well, so anyway, the idea with DINO-PIRATES is that the creation of the setting is open to all, and anyone who cares to can profit from the setting if they can come up with a marketable product based on it. It would please me immensely if somebody got rich off this. I ain't greedy that way.

In other news, some really dedicated fellow (Christopher was his name) sent me a whole list of dead links on the DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND site but email server hijinks deleted his emails. Christopher, if you're reading this, can you send those again? Or at least know I really appreciated your efforts...

The Convo Mark 2: The Online Community

It's time for the second round of what came to be known as "the convo". The last one led to all sorts of larger conversations and community efforts, but ground needs re-plowing. Seeds need replanting. This time around, I thought we'd target a more narrow topic than last time: What are the characteristics of successful online communities?

Most of us are involved in multiple communities whose primary medium of social exchange is online -- whether that be a Twitter group, a discussion board, email list, or whatever. When positive, these communities can turn into massively productive sources of energy and transformation. Some online communities thrive while others never get off the ground. Some prosper vibrantly for a short time and then wither and die for some reason. More interestingly, some communities (all healthy ones) appear to reach beyond the online sphere and into "real-world" connection and influence.

Are there characteristics shared by successful online communities? What are they? Are any of them necessary qualities? Are any of them sufficient qualities? Can any of them be fostered or nurtured constructively, intentionally? Can they be DESIGNED?

And, perhaps more importantly, what is the purpose or output of these communities? How is economic value generated? In a sense, where does the marketplace begin and end -- to put it bluntly, under what terms can we authentically go after money and seek economic reward in this community without (as RT so delicately put it) being douchebags?

Sign up on the wiki -- we're planning to hold this on the morning of the 23rd, location TBD. Stay tuned and hang out in the comments!

Photo credit: Ivan Avramov.

The Self, Extended

Being a DM is a pretty strange activity most of the time, but there are times when the strangeness intensifies even beyond what seems "normal" for an activity that largely involves making up imaginary stuff so that imaginary people can pretend to interact with it. And doing a fair amount of probabilistic math.

Sometimes the imaginary stuff you (or at any rate, I, and if I'm going to go through this, why shouldn't you?) come up with seems to be generated less by a process of making stuff up and more by a process of discovery, as though the stuff had existed all along, and it only took you opening up the right door or turning on the right light switch to find it. Artists of all sorts have talked about this experience -- Alexandre Dumas famously wept as he wrote one of his beloved character's death scenes (no, I won't tell you which one. Read his damn books!), and Robert E. Howard wrote repeatedly of how Conan simply appeared, fully-formed, and in a sense dictated his adventures to Howard for the Texan to write.

The characters we create are inventions; they don't exist in the meaningful way that I (the guy typing these words) or you (the person reading them) do. Obviously. And yet, that doesn't mean they don't exist AT ALL. That doesn't mean they aren't REAL in some sense.

Anyone who cried at the end of Old Yeller proves that characters have a real existence and influence on the world. Even if that's only in our imagination.

Our imagination is what gives fictional characters their power of us. It's also where they come from. And while we may like to think that we actively "make up" things, the truth is far more complicated than that. Our imagination, after all, makes US up, too. Our whole identity is constructed by our imagination out of the endless stream of sensory input our brains manage. So if our imagination invents us, who invents our imaginations?

My Barsoom campaign was a sprawling unwieldy tale (as are most lengthy campaigns) that lasted over five years and went through more twists and turns than I can readily relate (or recall, to tell the truth). Many and varied were the characters that emerged from that lovely mess, and many of the folks I invented over the course of the tale stick with me still, easily remembered even though many of the details of who did what to whom have fallen by the wayside.

Exasperated Kimiko Torokan, trying to do the right thing but feeling more and more trapped between equally evil alternatives. Arrogant and cruel Matai Shang (see? Barsoom!). Affable Phelan. Angry and suffering Zuleika.

It's a strange business, as I say, this DMing gig, and it never gets more strange than in the delicate balancing act required to create (or discover) compelling characters and yet keep the story's focus squarely on the PCs. As a DM, your characters have to be supporting roles, and yet, for them to be compelling and engaging for your players, they have to be complete, with stories of their own that you need to be invested in.

But not too invested. The trouble comes in that of course, the characters you discover (or create) come out of youself, and so reflect truths about you. There's no avoiding that, and it can get downright uncomfortable to realise it, especially when you look back over some of the characters you've created. Or discovered.

You can read too much into that, of course, but the truth is this question of creating or discovering is kind of at the heart not only of the DMing process, not only of the artistic process, but of the process of self-discovery.

Or self-creation.

We're all story-tellers, no matter how inarticulate we may be. Human beings are story-telling creatures and we understand the world and ourselves primarily through the stories we tell. We know ourselves as the stories we tell about ourselves, and those stories are both discovered and created as we go through our lives. We recognize a trend in our behaviour, or we invent one; it's all the same. It all becomes part of the story of who we are.

Artistic creation, and for a DM, the creation of characters, is part of this circular process, both creating newness and discovering what was already there. My characters, the great ones that is, the ones who seemed to have ALWAYS been there, and who even now must be carrying on with their imaginary lives, those characters both revealed truths about me to myself, and allowed me to create truths about myself. The legendary beauty Yuek Man Chong, born of a margin note scribbled without thought, nearly took over my campaign, had to be destroyed, and yet filled up pages of notes and thoughts and speculation. I don't recall ever inventing anything about her -- it was always as though I was learning more and more about who she was, who she had been and who she might yet become. She was bigger than me, as strange as that seems to say. But the process of discovering her was really a process of discovering me, and realising that I, too, am bigger than myself, because I always hold the ability to go beyond what I am now, what I understand myself to be.

When I make up imaginary people, I'm really creating new possibilities for myself, or discovering new terrain within the familiar landscape of myself. Which is a pretty cool thing to do while pretending to kill orcs.

Picture by James Ryman

The First Celebrity Child

Ada Lovelace Day is being established, and I think it's a lovely holiday to observe. I wrote a brief post on the FreshBooks blog for it, as hundreds if not thousands of people read that blog, and I think perhaps three people read this one, so it seemed the right choice.

But Ada and I go back a ways.

See, Ada Lovelace is not only the First Lady of Computing (if you didn't know that, then you probably didn't know about Ada Lovelace day in the first place, so that's TWO things you've learned today. No, no, just doing my job, here), she's also the only legitimate daughter of the infamous Lord Byron, the original rock star. Byron pretty much invented the whole idea of celebrity — of being famous primarily for being famous.

Of course, Byron is a great writer, one of the best for my money, and his great work, Don Juan, is a masterpiece of rhyme and meter, but to be honest, in the early 1800's, when EVERYONE in Europe knew who he was, and ladies were fainting when he walked into salons, most of the people who knew him probably hadn't read much of his poetry. He was famous for being LORD BYRON.

Now I'm an open and ardent admirer of Byron's. So much so that when I went off to Japan, I took with me Steph's going-away-but-soon-to-be-reunited present: Byron's letters (well, a good few hundred of them, anyway), in a massive volume that offered them as a sort of autobiography. Many of them are hilariously delightful, as much for what he DOESN'T say as for what he does. So I've invested in my Byronophilia. I'm no expert, but I get by. I do get a charge out of software developers sending me his verses — FreshBooks has a clause in its software developer job posting saying that anyone who includes a verse of ottava rima with their application will get it reviewed by me personally. Entirely true, by the way, and since Byron is easily the dominant practitioner of the form in English, I get several verses of his poetry every week.

Usually the same verses, but what can you do? It's still funny stuff.

So ANYWAY, poor Ada grew up in her infamous father's shadow, though she never met him as an adult. But she certainly lived up to his celebrity fame — not with any real celebrity of her own, but with full-on accomplishment. 165 years ago Ada Lovelace wrote the very first computer program in history. She's the Queen of the Nerds. Mother Geek. The Ur-BOFH.

And yet, until 1953, she'd been pretty much entirely forgotten. The sad fate of celebrity kids, I guess — all anyone wants to know about you is what you know about dear old Dad, and since Ada had nothing to say about her notorious sire, I guess she vanished from history.

Until somebody published her translation of an Italian article on Charles Babbage's mad scheme to build an Analytical Engine, and it turned out that in her notes (which are considerably longer than the article itself) she wrote out the instructions of how one would set up the non-existent Engine so as to calculate the set of Bernoulli numbers. She also wrote some fantastically perceptive comments on what Babbage's invention really meant:

In enabling mechanism to combine together general symbols in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science. A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible. Thus not only the mental and the material, but the theoretical and the practical in the mathematical world, are brought into more intimate and effective connexion with each other.

Obviously, these are the days before Twitter.

But she's seeing that the software/hardware divide (which in 1843 was pretty much human brains on one side, and the rest of the universe on the other) was closing. She was looking down a very very long road and seeing, dimly perhaps, but still, seeing where it led.

We may consider the engine as the material and mechanical representative of analysis, and that our actual working powers in this department of human study will be enabled more effectually than heretofore to keep pace with our theoretical knowledge of its principles and laws, through the complete control which the engine gives us over the executive manipulation of algebraical and numerical symbols.

Keeping pace with our theoretical knowledge — I find this a fascinating way to look at the Information Revolution. We are nearing the point at which one person needs only to imagine something for it to be brought into being. The big problems nowadays in software seem to be largely design problems — which are problems with refining the idea, rather than manufacturing its "material and mechanical representative".

The imagination at work here is fearsome. In another part of the article she imagined that such devices could be programmed to create music! In 1843! No wonder Babbage called her the "Enchantress of Numbers". She was even able to foresee the immense value present in software development:

We have undoubtedly to lay out a certain capital of analytical labour in one particular line; but this is in order that the engine may bring us in a much larger return in another line.

I've been in the software business for over a decade now, and this is a pretty good summation of exactly what this nutty business is all about. Reading Ada's writing, I find it easy to imagine that she would see the necessary progression from the punch cards and rotating drums of Babbage's mad machine to agile methodologies, web frameworks and object-oriented design. She was 28 years old when she wrote that article, and dead less than ten years later, largely unheralded and forgotten until a hundred years later when her article was republished.

How strange that, given my long-standing infatuation with Lord Byron, I find myself spending years in the field created and defined by his daughter. My thanks to the Finding Ada project for bringing all this to my awareness. I think it's quite appropriate to have a day celebrating the birth of the Information Revolution. All we need now are some Hallmark cards.

march

So spring has come,
Oh Jesus,
not again.
The cold has sunk too deep; too frozen now
the furrows of my heart; for any plow
would splinter here;
this chill-swept, dark terrain.
No, not for me;
this year, let me abstain.
Let wither further, wither all, allow
cold, stiff corrosion to gnaw at every vow.
Numb every oath, let nothing pure remain.
The only purity
is purity of ice,
for spring's encroachment on the land
brings but a new,
capricious tyranny.
Each year this joke gets harder to withstand:
that leaves sprout new, that swallows come on wing,
that mourners laugh, that winter
melts to
spring.

I still think this is the best thing I've ever written. Originally published in the Filling station calendar way back in, uh, '96 or so, I think. There is one defective line metrically (though I think it's a defensible variation) in the poem: a year's subscription FOR FREE to anyone who can point it out.

Photo by He and Fi.

Expanding the Parameters

Expanding my horizons and
Expanding my parameters,
Expanding the rhymes of
Sucker MC amateurs

There's things I need to do more of, things I hope to do less of. Habits I need to acquire, habits I need to break. My life has been a steady (if not always directed) process of transformation, and yet so many of the things I do every day are things I have done since I was child. Habits learned long ago and trusted now despite all evidence to suggest they are neither healthy nor helpful.

I guess that's one of the things I like about swordfighting. It is entirely about learning new habits and letting go of old ones, and offers the hope that if we can change our habits in this odd little sphere, perhaps there's the possibility of changing them in other, wider spheres. The lesson of Katori practice, however, is that the process of changing one's habits is slow, frustrating and resistant to logic. You can't argue yourself out of your habits. You can't just decide to take on new ones. You have to PRACTICE.

Well, I do, anyway. And practice and practice and practice and then practice some more, realize I've been practicing the wrong thing and have to change all the stuff I've learned up till now anyway, practice, practice practice, watch myself and discover I'm STILL doing that dumb thing with my foot that Sensei pointed out on like my SECOND class, practice, practice, practice...

Art works the same way. I write and I write, and I hope to god I'm getting better, but I'm not sure I am. I came across a story I'd written back in, oh, probably Grade Three or so. It read pretty much the same as how I write today. Same turns of phrase, same sentence structure, same obsessions I have now. Same rip-offs of the same writers I'm still ripping off today. Writing is a habit. Practice, practice, practice.

It turns out management is likewise a habit-based discipline. Becoming a better manager is all about acquiring the right sorts of habits so that you end up having the right conversations at the right time, and I AM pretty sure I'm a better manager than I used to be.

What about leading, though? Is being a leader a question of the right habits? I THINK so. I think being an effective leader (and there are as many ways to do that as there are to be a great manager, writer or swordsman, I'd say) is about acquiring the habits of taking action. Seeing a gap and dreaming of what might fill it. Putting aside that fear of doing the WRONG thing and replacing it with the fear of doing NOTHING.

I need to expand my horizons. Indeed, my parameters. It seems like I'm always doing that, but I guess I am, so I guess it should seem so. Otherwise I guess I just remain a sucker MC amateur. Practice, practice, practice.

Photo: colinjcampbell

Sustainable Silliness

On the left there is a picture from the now-legendary HoHoTO party. It's been on TV, it's been in the papers and all around the blogosphere and back again. A group of near-strangers came together and poured their energy into creating a charitable party. Nobody was in charge. Nobody gave orders. Nobody did anything they didn't want to do. And in a matter of days we raised $25,000.

$25,000.

What you're seeing there on the left is the DJ setup on stage (yes, the DJ is dressed as a Santa elf -- and yes, nobody did anything they didn't want to do -- you can figure out what that means), hundreds of people boogieing their faces off, and up on the wall an enormous screen displays live incoming Twitter messages tagged "#hohoto". Folks are making DJ requests via Twitter, and if you go to Flickr right now and search on "hohoto" you will see hundreds of photos people have posted of the beautiful craziness that ensued.

This is pretty awesome. I blogged before about how the future is looking pretty silly, and I think this is another part of the ongoing sillization of human society. And this is a GOOD thing.

Because while there's boogieing and Twittering and elf-dress-up-as-ing, there's also people having hard times, and current economic conditions aren't making that any better. But when people can come together in joy and silliness, and contribute to helping lessen those hard times, I say the world is getting better. I mean, we don't have flying cars yet, it's true -- but maybe there's more important work we ought to be doing besides flying around in cars. Because as cool as that would be, I'd rather there were less hungry people in the world than more flying cars.

HoHoTO was a tremendous success. It proves (if further proof were needed) that self-organizing groups can accomplish great things. I'm not sure it's a model for social change, but hopefully it will help to serve as an inspiration. The Toronto Twittersphere is all abuzz with ideas and movements and the notion of change and growth, and I truly believe that we're just opening the door to what's possible as the internets begin to realise the next stage of their potential. Somebody in there (might have been remarkk) mentioned the idea of "cells" like Resistance groups organized themselves in: each one self-sufficient and no more than distantly connected to the others, but sharing enough ideals and practices that they can work together to effect enormous change.

We don't need grand schemes anymore. We need tiny ones, but ones that infect others and replicate themselves. And silliness, as YouTube shows us, is pretty damn infectious. And as HoHoTO has shown us, it can deliver actual value to society.

Not sure I need to dress as an elf, however.

Sustainable Communities

The very nice folks at Sustainability Camp 2008 have asked if I would be able to speak at their event on Sunday.

Well, to be honest, they asked my boss. And he said, "No." And they said, "Oh, pooh. We're maybe short a space." And then he said, "Hey Corey, what are you doing Sunday afternoon?"

But after SO MUCH FUN talking at ProductCamp just a few short weeks ago (and I should really write a piece on that, there's a good idea), and of course considering that there are few things in this universe I love more than the sound of my own voice (the sound of Julie Andrews' voice, for instance), it was pretty much a done deal.

So it's not yet 100% clear if I'll be speaking there or not, but my topic if I am will be Sustainability in Communities. I'm fascinated by the problem of building self-sustaining communities -- sustaining from a SOCIAL rather than an economic point of view. How do you create a community that will last? What makes long-lasting self-organizing groups different from those that collapse?

Lots of possibilities there, I think. New-style companies like Ricardo Semler runs (or that Chris and I are talking about), online hobby-based communities, and grass-roots political organizations.

Any thoughts from out and beyond? Any experiences with communities that persisted beyond expectations?

The Five Stages of Refactoring

1. Disbelief

"Who wrote this!?"

2. Anger

"I'm not cleaning this up!"

3. Bargaining

"Okay, we'll fix up this module if you promise we'll just rewrite everything else."

4. Depression

"This is never going to get any better."

5. Acceptance

"I'll just create a wrapper..."

Caravaggio's The Incredulity of St. Thomas, there.

ProductCampToronto!

So along with a couple of other FreshBookers I'll be attending next month's ProductCamp here in Toronto Nov 2. I've proposed a session on the Big List so we'll see if folks are excited in hearing about that. If they are I'll make sure to post notes and so on here. For those who don't know, "the Big List" is kind of a cool system we've built at FreshBooks to manage our product management.

This is my first BarCamp event so I'm pretty excited!

If you're attending, let me know and let's try and cross paths.

FreshBooks is also sponsoring the after-Camp reception and we've got a fun challenge for product managers to show off their skills -- make sure you stop by and get your entry form.

Anyone But Harper

You've probably seen this already, or something like it, but it's important enough to keep passing around:

Anyone But Harper

That is all.

The New Big Problem

At a table during last week's Business of Software conference, I met a fellow whose name escapes me now. Hardly a new occurrence for me, but I do recall the topic we were discussing.

His company does big data migrations for big government agencies. So for example if you're in charge of running the standardized health insurance across Ohio, you need data from every hospital in the state. And of course, each of these hospitals has been storing their data in some insane scheme that was cobbled together by the Pascal programmer who wrote the original record-keeping software back in 1975. It probably wasn't insane, actually. It probably made perfect sense. At the time.

The real problem isn't that this particular Pascal programmer was insane. The problem is that there was more than one Pascal programmer in Ohio in 1975 (I'm guessing, here, but give me a pass on that one). And so the solution that Pascal Programmer A chose for Hospital I was different (perhaps very different, perhaps a little different, doesn't matter) than the solution that Pascal Programmer B chose for Hospital II. Even if the SAME PATIENT was recorded in both hospitals, the data would look subtly different. Pascal Programmer A recorded First_Name and Last_Name as separate columns in a Patient_Data table, while Programmer B made sure NameF and NameL were stored as columns in a Personal_Info table. That's a trivial problem to solve, of course, if you're only worrying about these two databases. It gets more substantial if you're dealing with thousands of databases.

And not all problems in this space are trivial. The same data (or same types of data) can be stored in literally an infinite number of ways, and given the oft-frustrating creativity and ingenuity of people, you can bet that there will be as many variations as there were people involved in the varying.

So this gentleman I met obviously has his work cut out for him, and from what I could tell appears to be doing a roaring business handling this sort of thing. Because if you do want this sort of work done, there's really no solution other than to get a bunch of people to go through all your varied databases and manually map one set of data to the other, then perform whatever complicated trickery is required to do whatever conversion you've decided to implement so that at the end of the whole process, you have ONE dataset that includes everything all the originating databases contained.

And I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be amazing if somebody figured out how to automate this process? If all the data in the world could just be connected to all the other data in the world? You'd never have to transfer information around, you wouldn't have to keep track of things in various places and forget to update it here after you've updated it there. It would be a transformative thing for the world, if every piece of information we had could talk to every other piece."

I used to think the big problem right now was latency. That the next big innovation was going to appear as some way to accelerate our ability to transfer information from one place to the next. But data normalization on a global scale is BIGGER.

I don't know how it can be done. Just thinking about it, it seems like the most tedious manual process of trivial decision-making imaginable, and yet, how can you derive a process that can look through the masses of databases around the world and understand how they connect to each other? But once you'd done it, well, that would be a world-sized oyster facing you, right there.

I wish I were smarter.

And that's hardly a new occurrence for me, either.

Photo: "network spheres" by gerard79.

Upwards Accountability

Khai Pad Kraphao is pretty much the best lunch around the FreshBooks offices. Though I do admit I pick out the chilies -- once I took what I thought was going to be a tasty bite of crisp green bean and found I'd chomped into an entire green chili.

I like the taste, but that was a little much. Not to gross anyone out, but I could tell exactly where that chili was in my digestive tract for the rest of the day. Oog.

But Rich and I were talking over our Thai food today, and in particular talking about the ideas of that crazy Brasilian, Ricardo Semler, and in particular particular, the notion of "public" salaries, and we decided that one of the things we liked best about that idea was how it enforced what we called "upwards accountability".

See, if everyone in the company knows when you give someone else in the company a raise, you'd better have good reasons for that raise or else you're going to have trouble answering their questions. Which forces you to actually THINK about how and why you give out raises, and to have a policy that's defensible in place. It makes you accountable to your employees, and it seemed to us, as aromas of basil, chili, and lemongrass came curling up from our plates, that such accountability is actually a good thing.

Because that accountability forces you to be active and organized, and to maintain your focus on the things that, as a leader, you should actually be focusing on. Defining your POLICY on raises is a more powerful action, a more important action, than deciding exactly how much one individual raise ought to be.

Of course, it's harder. Much easier to focus in on a narrower scope, a single relationship, than to try and design an organization. And yet, organizational design is, in my mind, the real job of a leader.

So policies that encourage or even enforce "upwards accountability" are the sorts of policies that a leader ought to seek out and pursue. We identified public salaries as such a policy. And I think public performance reviews are probably another.

I wonder if there are others?

That's the gas cap of an Aston Martin up there. Photo by Jeffrey van Bijleveld

Management Thoughts, By Me

I noticed that I've started building up a certain body of thought on management. It's entirely ripped off from other, much smarter (though possibly not quite as intensely good-looking) people, but isn't that part of the beauty of the Internet? The ability to shamelessly rip others off while aggrandizing ourselves. Yes, sir. Anyway, here's a quick round-up of some of the more management-y posts I've made over the past couple of years:

Approach 3: The Path to Hiring Great Talent

The best strategy for finding awesome people is to spend your time making yourself more and more awesome.

Couch Time

They took the couch away, of course, and projects started falling over. Way it goes.

The Zero-Tolerance Inbox

Not doing any work is key to getting lots done. Be lazy!

The 501 Method

See, the receipts in the pocket isn't the clever bit. The CLEVER bit is that when I get home, I take everything in my pockets out of my pockets, and pile it up.

Ding Ding Ding

Every single document that isn't used is organizational noise.

Everything I Needed to Know About Management I Learned From Satan

You stop arguing when you see someone so ready to commit. Logic isn't what motivates and excites teams. Commitment in the face of risk is what gets that ball rolling.

The Secret of the Whiteboard

It's interesting to note how some technologies are so fundamental that they're almost impervious to design improvement.

Art != Guitar

All of us need new information presented to us in the context of what we already understand, or else we just keep forcing the conversation back into our context.

A Purpose Worthy of Commitment

What's drawn me to management, I realise now, is my lifelong conviction that honesty, courage, humility and compassion really ARE the best ways to get things done and to make the world a better place.

Approach 3: the path to hiring great talent

A big part of my role right now at FreshBooks is hiring software developers. We’re trying to grow this team, to be able to meet the challenges of our expanding business, and that means hiring hiring hiring.

I’ve talked before about the importance of finding great people. But I wanted to talk here about a potential strategy for doing so. I call it “Approach Three”.

Steve Yegge has an interesting take on the problem, and identifies two basic approaches to finding superhero-level developers:

Approach 1: Get Lucky

Approach 2: Ask Everyone in the Whole World

He recommends #1, reasonably enough. I agree that it’s far more likely to yield positive results. Desperate attempts to network are doomed to backfire since anyone can see through that sort of self-centered socializing.

I think there’s a third approach.

Approach 3: Be Awesome

Great people can recognize not-great people really well — that’s one of the skills you need to acquire if you want to be truly great at anything. If you want to be an awesome tennis player, you need to learn how to evaluate other tennis players so that you don’t spend your time playing against crappy players who can’t teach you anything.

So you need to be awesome. The best strategy for finding awesome people is to spend your time making yourself more and more awesome. The great thing about Approach 3 is that even if you don’t find anyone at all, you’re more awesome than you were. Which makes it even easier to attract even AWESOMER people.

Getting Awesome

Start with recognizing that software developers are not factory workers — software isn’t something you assemble, it’s something you design. The energy that generates it is creative, not mechanical.

Here at FreshBooks we’re focusing on a few key things to increase the awesomeness of our team. We’re making sure our developers get chances to work on stuff they think is important. We’re making it easier and faster to deploy safely and reliably. We’re now managing business priorities separate from day-to-day task management. We’re making sure our developers get to spend the majority of their time solving problems in code, rather than sitting in meetings or filling out forms. Or waiting.

It’s working out. Increasingly we get resumes from people who say, “I’ve heard fantastic things about your company — it sounds like the sort of place where I want to work.”

And there’s a very clear correlation between people who say that and people who seem pretty awesome.

Down the road, what we need to do is to focus externally as well — not just being more awesome, but finding better ways to broadcast that awesomeness. But that can’t take away from our basic need to be awesome. Without that, our broadcasting is just phony PR, and the truly awesome ones will see right through it.

In other news, FreshBooks is hiring. If you’re awesome, click here.

Sunir kicked ass editing this. The original post is over at the FreshBooks blog.