Collaboration Chronicles

This weekend I hosted a garden party at my house. Coby, Mei and Pat showed up to help out. Pat and my backyard is half concrete and half earth. Pat helped me finish off the fence by nailing it to the existing posts. Those are going to have to be changed next season. Coby and Mei helped pull out the top half of the compost and cut down ivy and all of the overgrowth on the south side of the garden, which can be used for the now 6 dogs that live in our building. The plan is to clear out the three smaller patches for the dogs, because that one sliver is hardly enough for them to play in.

After that, I sat down and took an account of the state of seeds. I have tons of various seeds hanging out, some I’ve saved from things that have grown, and most others I’ve purchased. Figuring out what to plan and how is the next challenge with planning.

When I first started gardening, I didn’t know what to do really (when, how, where, why?), so I found a recommended gardening book. This has totally saved my garden:

I knew that I wanted to plant the following because of the season:

• Artichoke
• Cabbage
• Cauliflower
• Kale
• Lettuce
• Chard
• Potatos
• Onions
• Leeks
• Garlic
• Beets
• Carrots
• Radish
• Parsnips
• Peas
• Lima Beans
• Strawberry
• Parsley, Rosemary and Oregano
• Tea herbs and other flowers to help with insect control

There were missing seeds, so I made a trip to Flowercraft with Pat. There, we got seeds for onions, leeks and some more kale. We also got seedlings for artichoke, cauliflower, cabbages and rosemary. When we got back, I planted the seedlings in appropriate spots and watered them. They’re all around where Mei had planted her strawberry plant. Then Pat and I started seedlings for Luciano Kale, onions, leeks, two other types of kale and oregano. All of these need at least three and up to 12 weeks indoors before they’re transplanted into spring soil. This seems to work out perfectly for San Francisco’s weather.

Lastly, I put parsnip and parsley seeds in water over night, which I planted the next day. I put all of the parsley into pots and the parsnip out of the way of the bigger plants and perennials, so that I can dig them up when they’re ready. Parsnips need about 3″ of clearance between mature plants, so I planted them in triangles and took up a 2 sq. ft. area, where if all germinate and grow, we’ll have 23 parsnips in a season. I think that’s enough for two people to eat with friends .

Last night was the first return Workshop Wednesday after a long hiatus. My friend, Jeremy, and I ate bread, cheese, shawarma and homemade salsa with chips while we worked together on software for a couple hours at my house.

Jeremy is an mechanical engineer. We share the same day job. He has an iPhone app that is on the iPhone Store, but it’s not doing well mainly due to the plethora of bugs and his unwillingness to update. He’s moved onto better things. Like what we worked on last night. I haven’t spent much time with the iPhone development environment (XCode) or Objective C programming, but the syntax is somewhat familiar. It’s like a cross between ActionScript and C++. Needless to say, I was able to clear up some of the important parts of his code quickly and get what he wanted. The result was a program that echoed back through the speakers whatever came in through the microphone.

We spent more than half of the time talking about the reasons to use threads and how to use them properly. We did this while talking about what we were going to do next on this project. I can’t wait for the next Workshop Wednesday so that we can start writing some real code for the ideas we keep spouting out on paper, and the prototypes we keep making in Flash.

If you have something to work on, but need some inspiration or just people to work around, stop by at our next Workshop Wednesday. This is an incubation program for propagating our ideas and inspiring new ideas.

Collab21 needs a website redesign.

Our current index page

Our path forward is to use Wordpress as a CMS, and redirect all traffic to http://collab21.com, http://collaborationchronicles.com, http://workshopwednesday.com and http://sharksinthepark.com to one site. So we need a theme and layout design for the CMS.

Rather than have one person do it for free, we thought we’d try something new. This will allow us to see how successful we are at collaboration with each other and with readers of this blog. My first task is to spend some time figuring out everything that needs to be created in terms of assets (images, color schemes, logo, etc). I can create the framework for it, and have anyone who wants to submit designs for certain assets following guidelines developed by our user experience team. Guidelines will most likely just be font selection and color palate, but may not even include that.

I got the idea from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk[1] and watching a video of data visualizations shared by a co-worker[2]. I think breaking up the work like this is interesting. However, rather that offering payment, we will have a page of contributors and links to their sites. Collab21’s plan is still to be a collaborative company and the more press we get, the more opportunity there is for sending traffic to your site through us. If you’re interested in participating, please email benhenry AT collab21 DOT com with the subject “Collab21 Mechanical Turk”.

I’ll be focusing this week on getting a list of assets that we need to generate, and will post the available work by the end of the week.

I’m really excited about our first collaborative project. I’ve got a few more ideas that should benefit all parties involved that can happen once we get a workshop, but until then we’re doing what we can to get off the ground.

[1] Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
[2] Aaron Koblin’s amazing data visualizations (sometimes) using Mechanical Turk

An invitation for your thoughts.

In the past, discussing Collab21 plans has brought up the issue of sharing personal business with collaborators who could become competitors. Have you ever been burned?

There are ways to try reducing risk (at least, in principle… ) such as non-disclosure and non-compete agreements. I was surprised when Ben, C21 president, told me that non-compete agreements aren’t valid in California. My very simple understanding is that the tech business is too interconnected to have those, without sort of unfairly “indenturing” workers.

Collaborating with confidence can take a familial level of trust.

Sometimes, relying on trust makes a tendancy towards cronyism. Have you ever felt shut out of “the club”?

Certain kinds of knowledge have traditionally been protected with guilds and apprenticeship. Personally, as a freelance animator, I find it frustrating that it’s hard to practice old school quality craft, partly because of pressure to produce fast and cheap, and partly because animation workplace apprenticeship has faded from existence. Outsourcing has been a big factor. The only ground floor workplace learning that seems to exist any more is company internships. To get one, you have to pay a school, and basically pay to work free for a company. According to gossip, exclusive internships come with paying $100k+ to go to an elite school… then there’s gossip about the club of producers with MBA’s and zero art experience… nothing specific, just the kind of frustrations that can happen with any business.

There’s a need among artists to share craft without doing “pay to play”. Collaboration could fill this need. It can also bring out the competitive tendancies.

Here’s a more specific case. Some freelance artists want to keep project files when assembling graphics in Photoshop. Delivery would a flat graphic that’s only editable by the artist. It’s a way to get a tiny advantage for securing future work. Dave, C21’s member with most business experience, believes the opposite- that openness would encourage clients to come to you.

Secure work is always a worry when competition is fierce. Freelancing brings very few benefits beyond choosing your schedule, as I found out when I had a 2-month drought after the best streak in my short experience. I recently broke the drought by negotiating work on a Flash animation web series. Many of the issues in this post came up while negotiating with an experienced producer and marketing guy who wanted artists to contribute cheaply in hopes of potential growth.

It was easy to have no freelance work for 2 months because of my other dealer business.
Today, on a dealer’s forum, I came across this hilarious post I wanted to share. It gives a nice picture of an experienced self-employed person playing with their competition:

———–

“How do estate auctions work?”

“The more experienced you get and the more the auctioneers get to know you, the less obvious your bidding becomes. I am the master of hidden bidding. I hide behind giant men, potted plants , round corners and bid with the merest nod of my head . Why such insanity you ask ? A = Because when people know you and know that you know your business they pay attention to what you are bidding on and will bid on an item just because they see me bidding on it.

So wherever possible I never let anybody see me bid and I have even had beards do my bidding for me so nobody knows I am bidding on a lot.

Don’t try this unless the auctioneer knows you and knows to look for you when certain lots come up.

I did this just yesterday and the other bidder was going beserk trying to discover who was bidding against him.”

———–

Getting freelance art jobs involves bidding, too. I can tell you it pays to scout your competition.

Can you share any experiences?

This last weekend was another episode of Stirfry Startups.  I believe it was episode 3.  I showed up late on Saturday and Sunday but was still able to get a lot of work done.

Stirfry Startups has had a specific focus at each weekend it was hosted.  This weekend it was design.  We each took turns sitting in the “hot seat” while everyone else lambasted our website design.  In my case, I presented this site and Collab21.com, which I’m working on merging.  I finally have a plan, now I just need to execute on it.

But to get to that plan was a lot of falling on my face.  “Change the sub-heading text”, “use reflexive verbs”, “the colors on CollaborationChronicles.com suck ass, fix them”.   The best advice was from Sean.  He asked me a few questions and then said “You need to put what you just told me in writing.  I have no idea what your company is about by looking at your site for 6 seconds.  You need to explain it so that people who may be interested will stay for more than 6 seconds.”  This was paraphrased, but you get the idea.

Well, I hadn’t given it that much thought.  Now I have, and that’s important.

Since I wasn’t the only person who sat in the hot seat, Sean came up with a term to describe this process.  It’s called “group strapping”.  He ruminated on the idea overnight, and on Sunday described it to us this way: “normally you pull yourself up by the bootstraps when you start a company.  ‘Group strapping’ is everyone pulling up each other’s bootstraps.”

Once we get good at this and can prove it, we’ll be in a position to offer it as a service to other groups.

Beth was asked today by her coworker about the possibility of having some of us at Fog City Gardens to help with planning and implementing a vegetable garden at her father’s house while he’s away on vacation.

Anders in Fog City's 'LakeShore' Garden

While the six of us currently involved are not experts, we have had some success with planting.  I’m seriously looking forward to helping someone in the community plant more veggies (I asked for fruits, flowers and shrubs for bees, too).

Our goals at Fog City Gardens is to promote community through garden planning, implementation, seed sharing and other things related to gardening.  Secondary to this is giving back to the community is another way.  Ideas we have are to provide a personal CSA, give extras to the community or schools or to host a frequent dinner party with things we’ve grown.  I like the last one best, because it gives everyone in the community a chance to see what their neighbors are up to “back there”.

If I pull off this bee hive thing, there will be some community honey to share with people that I’m really looking forward to.  I may have to stick with beer, cheese and veggies for now.

I met with some friends on the tail end of their once a month three day long Stirfry Startups and gleened a couple things from following and following through with collaboration here.

1. Send invitations.  People you think have similar goals as you (e.g. Build a successful business, raise bees, etc).
2. When working together, you have to have a plan.  This weekend was planned.  There was time to cook, time to review/reflect, time to work.   Things to review and work on were already described before anyone showed up.
3. Provide food, plugs for computers, music, drinks and open communication.  These are all important things that you find in any successful office, too.
4. Mutual benefit of people involved.  The ultimate goal of collaboration, like most activities, is for personal advancement.  By helping other people, you’re helping yourself.  You’re learning, growing, making connections, building relationships and generating potential traffic for collaborators.

The Goal of our Workshop Wednesday is to provide this same environment for people in our community.  There are three artists and three programmers in Collab21, but everyone is a mix of both.  There are gardeners, movie buffs, music maniacs, minimalists and people into Dungeons and Dragons.  The one thing we know we have in common is that we’re working to build a business.  The cool thing is, everyone is invited.

[Note: Walter Yu co-authored this post.]

A couple of good friends of mine, Walter Yu and Sean Neprud share my interest in developing passive income streams. We’re all smart, hard-working and ambitious, but making the transition from active income (work-by-the-hour) to passive income (log in, count your money) isn’t as easy as we think it ought to be. Then again, if it were easy, everyone would be doing it!

In any case, in late December, we were tossing ideas around on Twitter and decided we should hang out for a whole weekend and get some work done instead of just talking about it. We felt we needed to gather in the same physical space for an extended amount of time to hash out features and conceptualize our various projects (hence the name “incubation”). We picked the first weekend in January, from Friday Jan 2 to Sunday Jan 4, and met at Dos Palmas (that’s my place!)

Stirfry Startups is born!

Our first-ever “weekend intensive” work session focused on affiliate work to monetize our websites. Attendees included Dave Doolin, Walter Yu, Sean Neprud, Rowena Ip and Joshua Hurst.

1/2-1/4/09: Websites affiliate “Incubation”

Walter was the first to arrive, on Friday afternoon around 5 pm, laden with huge bags of produce and groceries from 99 Ranch.

I stir fried gai choy Friday evening, a great excuse to break into a jar of fermented bean curd.

Friday night focused on Adsense affiliates, which we tackled from a practical, implementation point of view. We set-up our Google documents to take down info, and the Stir-fry Google Group (http://groups.google.com/group/stir-fry-start-ups) went live the following week.

Walter stayed over Friday evening, and we got right to work Saturday morning, after a big breakfast of bacon, scrambled eggs, and humongous mugs of coffee laced with heavy (whipping) cream.

Saturday was devoted to Amazon affiliates, which we again implemented rather quickly after working as a team and grinding out the details. We got our widgets setup with reading lists, and Walter also added a Pandora widget to http://walteryu.com.

By mid-day Saturday there were 5 of us: Sean, Rowena, Josh, Walter and myself. Sean worked on content for several of his many blogging ventures. Rowena learned some Wordpress configuration and set up email for a new domain. Joshua outlined a documentary film project.

Then, more gai choy, coffee, and lots of hot spicy tea. I have a several sizes of stovetop espresso makers, a French press and coffee cone. Everyone gets it how they like it!

Sunday consisted of broader topic research, mainly web marketing. Walter and David stormed the El Cerrito Plaza Barnes & Noble with notepads in hand to jot down relevant sources and ideas.

Highlights of Stirfry #1

• Items implemented: Google Adsense banners, Amazon Affiliate widgets
• Items refined: Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, WP plug-ins
• Grub: Peet’s espresso w/heavy whip cream, gai choy stir-fry, chicken-curry noodles, eggs/bacon/oatmeal breakfast
• Tunes: Lots of electronica and related: Ben Watt, Bassnectar, Chilled C’quence, Tripswitch. Good stuff for cranking out work!

Yes, there was stir fry!

What We Learned

The weekend intensive was a great success. Here are the lessons we learned:

1. Clear agendas: setting work session agendas very clearly before it starts, then holding to that structure during the weekend.
2. Documentation: getting all our notes on the collaborative work we’re doing during and post-session
3. Follow-up items: following up the agenda with action items to do in our areas of work after the weekend.

1/9/09: Mind-mapping Friday Night Incubation

Walter and I followed up the next weekend Friday evening 10 Jan to brainstorm some new website projects. We hashed out ideas and implementation using Freemind, which is a mind-mapping software with potential use on our various projects. Walter gained familiarity with the program as I plotted out some website structure. We discussed additional ideas for our upcoming “Stir-fry Seminar”, which is in the works.

I also learned that the Thai dish Larb is ridiculously easy to make, provided you have the fish (or shrimp) sauce and some limes. I also roasted some leeks, something I learned from FOAF Simone Fung at her recent BBQ & oyster roast. (Lightly brush olive oil and herbs on leeks. Cook at 350 for 30 minutes, then broil for 5 minutes.)

I’m Pat, and I’m guest posting about Saturday’s event, Sharks in the Park. It was to promote our company, Collab21, by giving out snow cones in Delores Park in the Mission (coinciding with the incredibly busy dyke march.)

It was a fannnn-tastic time and place to be for promotion. (Some years ago, I spent a lot of time doing business as a book dealer, and it gave me ideas about which events were worth going back to. The student-run gamer convention was golden… the shady broken-down flea market, not so much.) For our thing on saturday, giving out spiked snow cones was an awesome idea. Hardly anyone who’s attention we caught said no. We made the cost back from donations without even pointing out the money jar.

The people who gave us attention were probably 1/10th of the potential. We didn’t have a sign. Most people didn’t even make eye contact, because we looked like people having a party among ourselves. We can measure the notice by looking at new mailing list sign-ups. Here’s some preparation ideas that could use the potential better next time:

-For presentation- bring a big, nice-looking sign, good to re-use any time there’s an event. Not a little piece of ripped-off cardboard with a note on it like we had. (That was nobody’s fault- it was our first time public event. I’ll help make a sign next time.)
-Stacks of flyers, not a little pocket full.
-I wonder if there’s a way to custom print snow cone sleeves? Maybe not a good idea because they’re guaranteed to go in the trash. Dual purpose small napkins with our info could be better.
-Once you get people’s attention, you have a short minute to give them a reason to care. If you don’t give them a reason, the flyer probably goes in the trash when they get home. Flyers don’t do much by themselves- I flyered a city once for a film fest I promoted, with a couple hundred at 11×17. You’re lucky to get 1 interested body for every 100 flyers you put out. To get people to care, just start with some random conversation. They will say “oh really, that reminds me of — I want to do —” and you say “well here’s the service/thing we do that can help…” I used to sell 4 times as many books by just talking to people about science fiction I used to read, as a fan myself, not a salesman. Then they would buy on my recommendation.

When people did give us a minute to talk about what we were doing, it could have helped to show, not tell, that we’re a group of creative people. We were just hanging out. Beth mentioned we could have been doing sidewalk chalk drawing (well, if it was a regular day, not a parade)… or drawing up a real sign… or caricature art. We originally planned to have poker games. We stopped those because of wind, and it’s kind of hard to get a random passer-by into that (but it’s a start.)

Being fun is important- the people next to us had it down. They put a satirical initiative on the ballot to rename the city sewage plant in honor of George W. Bush and were collecting signatures. They had a megaphone, patriotic music, and uncle sam costumes. If we had some unifying clothes, it could help show we’re not random people having a party. Of course, it’s best not to look like salesmen, more like people having a party… for a cause.

It could have been a great opportunity to fund raise. A lady selling veggie sausages for $5 was raking it in hand over fist. She must have made a few grand. Beth mentioned doing vegan baking to sell, another great idea. I was pretty sad that I didn’t have a chance to put out all my crates of leftover stock from my book dealer business. At $1 apiece, I probably could have made a day’s pay just sitting there.

Weather probably affected people’s interest in snow cones. It was slightly grey and not very warm (still OK for t-shirts). A hot day would have increased the interest a lot. Even so, we went through an entire 50 lb’s of ice in 3 hours.

I think doing snow cones is such a good idea that we should do it again this summer, at least once.