scottberkun.com & scottberkun.com/blog are undergoing some changes over the next day - so if things are weird or pages 404, you know why.

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I recently met Jonah Burke, one of the directors of the darfur foundation, to chat about innovation. I came across his project, darfurwall.org, at Ignite Seattle, a local tech-sector meetup.

Months ago I wrote a preechy essay about difference making: well, here’s an example of someone doing the real thing.

Not only is darfurwall.org a clever piece of design and engineering, it serves a purpose: all the money people chip in for lighting up the digital wall goes straight to helping people in need. Like a physical monument, it gives a sense of both the impact of what has happened, but also offers a way to participate. Check it out.

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I remember when I first entered the full time working world, I was clueless about how to best use vacation, and I followed the herd like the good young sheep I was. Here in the U.S. the annual average is a measly 13 days (Compared to Italy’s 42 and France’s 37): a pittance if you include time-off needed for weddings, complicated mid-week errands, parole violations and the odd humdinger of a hangover. Yet somehow more than 1/3rd of Americans don’t use all their vacation each year. Yikes.

Over the years, like a blackjack player timing his double-downs, I learned which vacation days earned the most bang for the buck, and which were stinkers: it’s not rocket science, but hey, I cherish all the nuggets I know. And now that I’m self-employed all that knowledge is going to waste, so here it is.

In a nutshell: The week between Christmas and New Years, is the worst time to use vacation. It’s when everyone else is on holiday, turning even the most stressful workplaces into calm zones of highly indepenent and low interruption work time. Spending your vacation dollars to avoid a paid vacation in the office, is the worst bet in the vacation world: sometimes it’s a forced bet, as family plans force your hand, but it’s still a lousy value.

The ideal time to use vacation is when there is peak value, in your own psychology, for escape (say when you feel creative burnout). This rarely coincides with what everyone else is doing (or in the above case, is the exact opposite of what everyone else is doing), as weekend trips with friends or sports team schedules put heavy emphasis on using Fridays and Mondays, regardless of when it is you need relief.

For awhile I found choosing periodic Wednesdays or Thursdays, every few months, was the best possible value for a spare vacation day: like a happy hour martini, they provided a dose of relief at the peak of a stress, and neatly divide up the working life into more manageable pieces. Catching a matinée, having a late breakfast and wandering my favorite bookstore, going for a short hike, or shopping in the calm of a mid-week crowd, were all low key, super mellow, high value vacation days.

Taken to an extreme, this strategy falls apart: it’d be a mistake to take vacation only at stressful events, or to dodge your responsibilities (”Hey boss, are you ready to present at tomorrow’s BillG review?”, “Oh, didn’t I tell you? I’m off tomorrow: it’s all yours”). The goal isn’t to avoid hard work, it’s to maximize the value of time off so you’re of most use when you are actually there.

Consider these factors:

1. When do you need stress relief the most?
2. Are you, your friends, or your family, driving the use of your vacation days?
3. When are other people at work on vacation or away, calming the workplace?
4. Can you offset your own schedule, arriving at work before/after your coworkers, to make each morning a semi-vacation, free of interruptions or high stress?
5. Can you make part of your daily schedule include time at the gym, the bar, the coffeeshop, or with friends, breaking up every day with some kind of psychological reprieve?
6. If work is really so unpleasant that you don’t have enough vacation to survive, perhaps it’s not the vacation that’s the problem, but the job itself.

So what tips and tricks for maximizing vacation days do you know?

Posted in Management, Uncategorized, lifehack | 17 Comments »

Here’s my notes from the past week’s power outage experience:

• For all the fears and whining, I thought often, even when cold and tired, that this experience was a cakewalk as disasters go: 1.7 million without power for a few days is a trifle of suffering compared to any recent tsunami, hurricane, volcano, genocide or revolution. You can switch power back on. Frustrating yes. Devistating, no. It seemed Seattle lost sight of this: we’re babies. This was no New Orleans or Darfur.
• First two days were scary: no gas, no wood, no ice, no stores open. It’s unsettling when the magic trucks that bring sustenance stop coming: it’s a smack in the face reminding us how dependent on distant forces modern lives are. By Saturday stores opened (though wood and gas were gone) - Home Depot proved the best source of firewood, as even if out of bundles, you could buy 2×4s.
• KIRO 710 AM Radio was fantastic - They provided 24 hour coverage for 4 days straight, replacing talk radio with storm reports, live interviews with officials and powerco reps, and call ins with people giving tips and advice on where to find gas, wood, etc. It was an awesome resource, and they provided a great public service: heroes of the experience.
• The worst of people. KIRO reported every 10 minutes on the 100s of thousands of folks without power, but that didn’t stop angry callers from claiming how they had been abandoned - crisis makes some people very small and selfish: it was depressing to listen to - suffering doesn’t require having someone to blame.
• On the other hand, we met many generous neighbors who volunteered time to clear the 100ft tree from our driveway with gas chainsaws, and offer wood and gas.
• My sleep cycle improved. With no electric lights I easily woke at first light, and went to bed earlier than usual. Jill made the connection and it makes sense: all the computer and TVs screens are likely contributors to my periodic insomnia.
• I did not miss TV or e-mail. We charged cell phones in the car and that was as high tech as I got. Later on I’d try to write in coffee shops, but mostly failed.
• It took 2 days to work out the daily chores: starting the morning fire, making breakfast, dousing the fire, walking the dogs, negotiating who would be home by 4pm to start the fire up again (so the room would be warm by 7ish). Once we had the system it wasn’t that hard.
• There is an art to fireplace cooking: it’s harder than camping as there is a shallow roof over the fire, and we didn’t have grills for the fireplace. The secret is you can’t warm the room and cook: if you cook, you want even temp, if you want heat, you want big flames (I know - duh - but it took me 2 days to sort it out). We tried charcoal in the grill and it worked fine, but log ambers worked just as well. Like camping, lots of soups, chilis, and tin foil wrapped knishes made up many meals.
• Food was easier in the cold - first few nights were ~30 degrees, so we could keep food from the fridge on the deck. But it warmed up later and we had to trash much of the food. We tried to make ice one night (for the fridge & freezer), leaving out small water filled containers, but it didn’t quite get cold enough.

Lessons:

1. A pre-storm trip to the store would have done wonders. Refreshing batteries, wood, toping off gas tanks, etc. would have made this much less stressful.
2. Neighbors matter. Oddly we met more neighbors through this experience than in 7 years of living in this neighborhood (little else forces seattle-ites out of their homes). Pooling resources and skills makes life much easier in a near crisis (duh, but I’d forgotten).
3. Gadgets are over-rated. I knew this already but had it proven - all I needed was an AM radio, fire and some books and I was happy. With the extra work I needed less entertainment, not more, and was happy just to sit and listen or read.
4. I have no idea how power works. I spent more time staring at the various electronic bits hanging destroyed from trees and wondered what they all did. What does a transformer do exactly, and why are power lines above ground, not below? I have no clue. I’m trying to find a book on power grids and how they work, suggestions welcome.

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Power came on late yesterday. We called Puget Sound Energy, our power that morning are were told we wouldn’t have power until late Friday night - but Thursday, ~4pm, the answering machine picked up when I called and I raced on home.

Thanks to all who dropped kind and humorous notes of support or mild mockery - definitely helped get through this.

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Today is the first I’ve had access to anything resembling wireless - Day 6 of the Worst windstorm in Seattle in a decade has been less than fun.

Was finally able to get gas (power has been out, meaning gas pumps don’t work) this morning, and the downtown of Redmond, my nearest town, is finally online. My current techno-salvation is Starbucks. Unlike my home on Union Hill, in the woods just past Redmond, where I still can’t see a single house with power.

For fun, here’ s a photo of what I found on my driveway Fri. morning:

If I was supposed to return a phone call / e-mail / or do something for you, but didn’t, now you know why :)

Jill, the dogs, and myself are doing ok - hopefully we’ll have power (and some normality) back soon. If nothing else, experiences like this sure hand you back some perspective on technology and innovation (ha ha!). More later.

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We’re almost there - thanks to many of you the interview count for the innovation book is now nearly 85. But being the lunatic that I am, instead of cashing out on my bets, I’ve doubled down. I now have most of life savings on the line, betting, with your help, I can break 100.

Up for grabs are:

• a $150 gift certificate
• A subscription to O’Reilly’s Make Magazine
• A selection of O’Reilly books
• A $50 gift certificate
• The good mojo that comes with helping a writer write a book

If you miss the deadline, I’d still love your interview. I just can’t give you any prizes (other than the mojo of course).
So please, if you have opinions on innovation, take a moment and help me out.

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No CS degree can hold up against the dark powers of an aging mind and the ocassional typo.

The contact form on my main site, normally a reliable way to contact me about speaking gigs, interviews or feedback on stuff I’ve written, has quietly been sending all of it’s little missives into never never land. Instead of forwarding to @scott…, it was forwarding to @scptt…, which is about as good as dev / null or the nearest black hole.

Now I’m sure someone out there has the unfortunate circumstance of their parents naming them Scptt, but I dodged that particular bullet.

So if you’ve been wondering why I’m such a jerk for not answering your questions or responding about speaking at your conference, company or backyard BBQ, now you know why. Apologies all around. Please try again and all will be well.

(Hanging head in shame)

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Holidays are important to me, so much so that I invented my own awhile ago. But today I had a strange experience that makes me think in the U.S. we’ve lost the idea completely.

Today is July 4th, Independence day and we’re supposed to be doing fun things to celebrate the birth of the United States (and hopefully remembering times when the world thought better of us).

But surprise, surprise. My local supermarket is open all day. As is the neighboring video rental store, Thai resteraunt and various other stores. And the biggest surprise was how good business was: it was hard to find parking.

What’s going on? Are holidays only holidays for some now?

Hypocracy disclaimer: my wife is sick today and on a lark I called the video place. Since they were open I drove over and picked up some food and a movie for her. But I had the strangest feeling the whole time that things would be better off if all those stores were closed.

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Working out the final details with the fine folks at  Step two designs to teach my workshop on Leading UX teams. More details to follow but tentative dates are:

Sydney, Sept 1st
Canberra, Sept 5th
Melbourne, Sept 8th

The one day workshop will be a crossover between project management and UX design, hiting all the sweet spots folks leading UI efforts often struggle with (including highlights from the ux-clinic list).

If anyone wants to try to meet up for drinks or a bite, leave a comment and I’ll follow up.

Posted in On Tour, Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

In thinking over my experiences at various unconferences, I’ve noticed one consistent problem: The people who get to run sessions aren’t the smartest or most interesting people. Instead it’s those who chose seats closest to the session boards, run faster than everybody else, or are pushier at grabbing fistfulls of whiteboard pens.

Of course this is by design - unconferences intentionally give up on hierarchy, beilieving that all things being equal, the good stuff will rise to the surface. However if there are only 8 slots at an event, and the 9th person in line happens to Bono or Einstein, everyone is out of luck. And worse, since rooms are self-selected, you may end up with 500 people trying to fit into a closet to listen to Bono, while the three sprintly organziers for the talk on “COBOL - the future” sit quietly with the crickets in the empty 500 person theatre.

This is a design problem with philosophical constraints: how do you introduce some controls or weights for who gets a slot, without violating the purity of the unconference vibe?

Here’s some ideas:

• Hot talk reserved slots. Every pre-unconference wiki has requests for someone to talk about topic X. If these are popular, organizers could reserve a room for a topic but without a speaker. So the topic is assigned, but the speaker, or speakers, aren’t. If organizers want to seed the sessions with more diverse or highly requested topics, this does that without killing the unconference vibe. One hot talk per hour. If no one signs up, the hot talk is killed.
• Priority for previous speakers. Can you say hierarchy? Much like how first class passengers get to board early, previous speakers at the event (or previous speakers who earned good feedback), can get first crack at the session board. Not a huge fan of this, but it’d be easy to do.
• Put the sign up list online. Why not put the session sign up board online before the event. It’s dynamic and open, but since it’s days or weeks ahead, there’s the chance for organizers to join or split sessions, help popular sessions find bigger rooms, etc. It’s still open, but with a guiding hand. The footspeed effect is nullified, and the rush is spread out over a couple of days before the conference.
• Filter the session board. Once the session board is filled, an organizer goes through the board, and tries to match talk popularity with size, swapping rooms or even talk times. I’ve yet to see an unconference board that didn’t have obvious overlaps and avoidable confusions, and it wouldn’t take much for someone to clean things up for everyone’s advantage.
• Rules of order. It’s stupid stuff, but people rarely put their name in their session. This makes it impossible for someone in a conflicting or related session to track you down before hand to either join, split or generally get your shit together (or ping you afterwards if they missed it). And of course there are always people who put a session on the board, but then forget to show up and run their own session. A big X through your session saves everyone else some time, and opens the room to Bono or Eintsein, if they’re still around.

Are there downsides to all this? Sure. Unconferences feed on the belief that you are witnessing real time conference creation - so any sort of structuring might kill that energy. But then again, unconferences do have registration, mailing lists, wiki’s and other organizing tools - perhaps a few small, well crafted additions can make unconferences even better.

Any other ideas for improving unconferences? (See also, how to improve unconference sessions)

Posted in Teaching/Training, Uncategorized | 10 Comments »

Seattle Mindcamp 2.0, a local self-organizing conference, took place two weekends ago - I arrived at 1:30pm and was surprised to find the entire matrix of session slots filled. It’s a self-organizing conference, so you can’t t argue with first come first serve - fortunately Bryan Zug grabbed a slot for he and I to run his Good thing rapid discovery slam.

The thing I noticed most was how different the vibe of a conference is depending on the physical space it’s in. Mindcamp 1.0 was in a big empty floor of an office building. 2.0 was in a community center, basically a small school. The energy was very different - it was harder to get around, and even though the number of people was 20% larger, it felt much more crowded. The area by the session list, a narrow hallway, was jammed tight between sessions. At 1.0, it seemed easier to meet people as folks were always sitting around at tables in the main area, but here standing was the rule. The main lounging area was pretty small and crowded.

Highlights:

1. Bryan Zug’s idea for a slam, where people can talk briefly about any cool inspiring thing, was tons of fun. People read from books, showed gadgets, told personal tales of woe or connection, and I had no idea, as one of the organizers, what I’d see next. (But we totally blew the post event coverage: we have no record of all of the cool stuff people showed - mea culpa).
2. Ario brought a trunkload of gaming gear, and I got to play Warlords 2600, in full four player glory, for the first time in a decade. A bunch of us spent a couple of hours in some poor woman’s tiny little office, eating pringles and having a great time.
3. Donte’s ancient video of animinations for computer search algorithms. It was shown as a bizzare, kitchy early geek thing, but I’d actually seen it before, somehow, somewhere in my fading CS education. It’s a noble effort, but oddly sad and annoying by modern standards - however it’s hard not to be drawn in once you start watching, even now.
4. The Billmonk talk: I had no idea who these guys were nor what to expect, but they ran the best session of the day. They talked about their start-up without falling victim to all the annoyances talks by start-up founders do: they were honest, they were funny, I believed what they said, and they were trying to be of use (and not self-serving). The Q&A session was highlighted by excellent commentary from another local start-up veteran standing at the front (I spoke with him later, but alas, didn’t get a card).

Only one lowlight:

• Lack of diversity of sessions and attendies. This might be entirely unfair, as most people seemed pretty happy. But despite the overflowing session board, I struggled to find sessions of personal interest. A large percentage were “Do something cool with technology X”, which is right for this hacker-ish audience, but not my kind of thing. Someone called the event geekcamp, not mindcamp, and that might be a more accurate, if less flattering, name, given the dominant Amazon, Microsoft, 20-40, geek, male, demographic. The result is a gadget, geek, tech-centric notion of what minds are capable of.

On most counts the event was run better than last time - There were some reasonable complaints about the venue (parking, some of the room sizes) but given the low cost of this event, that would be entirely unfair. Most complaints about v1 (wi-fi, pre-event info) were solved, and for a volunteer run event they did a great job and deserve kudos: well done!

(Photo above by Chadm)

Posted in On Tour, Uncategorized | 4 Comments »