If you want better communication, clarify the following:

• Who is the single person who has decision making authority for decision X
• Who should have input into that decision
• Who should be informed when the decision has been made

This sets everyone’s expectations for who needs to know what.  It reduces endless forwarding of fyi material on the hopes someone might need it.

Scott Berkun, “How to stop overcommunication“, Jan 21, 2010

The best of 252,029 bloggers, 223,676 new posts, 327,799 comments, & 54,240,782 words today on WordPress.com.

Those numbers get me far more excited than page views and other “monetization” stats, because these right now front page stats reminds me blogging works.

These stats are about people expressing themselves (writing words) and connecting with other people (commenting).

These are the numbers I look to when I need inspiration.

“Yourself, plus two others. With only two, each person needs to be aware of all the details in case the other person needs to take a break / gets run over by a bus / whatever. With three, the load is spread a bit more easily.”

Boris Mann, thoughts on Passion and Frustration, October 5th, 2009

"Three lemurs eating" by Tambako the Jaguar. CC by-nd. Flickr Hosted.

From starting a company with Boris and Co’s Bootup Labs to being the area experts for your company, you want three of you.

3 is a magic number.

I’ve always just gone with having one backup, but reflecting on it now, I should have two backups in each area.

At first it seems like an incredible amount of redundancy, but someone’s own focuses and work doesn’t go away when they have to fill in for you. You need two backups, two people who can step in to carry your load — each carrying some of your load.

This extends beyond backing you up. This creates a mesh of collaboration,. Having different collaborators (back ups) in different areas leaves no weak links.

Disagreeing about something with your backup? With three there is always a moderator / negotiator / tie breaker.

Google Summer of Code has wrapped up, and while I plan to write about my experience, and the awesome work of the WordPress participants, the greatest part of it for me was experiencing a little bit of what Leslie does.

Leslie’s title is “Program Manager – Open Source” for Google. Leslie is the first contact for all the people participating in Google Summer of Code, and I mean all 2500 of us. All of us with our diverse backgrounds, experiences and expectations. She answers all of our questions fairly and thoroughly, and ensures that items get done and the students get paid.

There is no way I can explain how involved a job that is, or how wonderfully she does it, but I’m sure everyone that participated in GSoC shares my admiration.

“Tasks” that she achieves include: “building communities, creating space for creativity and connection to manifest, [and] taking care of mundane and arcane details so that others can focus on executing to a grander vision”.

She really does! She makes it sound easy and look easy, but it isn’t. This is the heart of any successful enterprise, and the inability to be successful at these is the disease that kills many of them. She writes it beautifully:

I find myself spending time with individuals from many open source projects with wildly divergent aims and methodologies, but without exception the healthiest ones are those who place a high value on contribution of any kind, not just in the creation of code. Among these folks, I find my efforts are accorded the highest of respect and I am treated as an equal, if not as a goddess, for the simple things I do each day: bringing people together, providing structure and organization, understanding pragmatic but often overlooked details, communicating effectively with people from diverse backgrounds and helping them to work most effectively with one another. Some may call that mothering. I’d call it social engineering.

With WordPress, Flock, IBM, and every software development company or community that I’ve participated in, a significant number of the members seem to only understand the value of the code created. The irony is that amazing code alone has never sold a product or influenced society.

Leslie has the skill, energy and patience to herd the geeks to make the products more than the code.

Why does she do it? The same question that I ask myself regularly, and her answer is generally the same as mine, “an effort to be the change I wish to see in the world”.

I asked her if you could elaborate on this a little for me, she replied:

I do this job for love. For the love of getting things done, for the love of helping others, and the love of helping others create things that will be of widest benefit and greatest use. I do it because I constantly see that the people in the open source community that I interact with are working towards higher goals, be it serving of personal creativity through scratching one’s own itch or creating useful tools that others can enjoy freely. I do it because it’s the right thing to do.

She definitely should be proud to be known as “Google’s geek herder”. Thank you Leslie for inspiring me!

PS. Be sure to read the rest of her excellent essay (one more link to it) and the others in the O’Reilly’s Women in Technology series.

I actually own a Google shirt and enjoy wearing it. I admire the people of Google.

While at Flock I had the tedious, but very important task of reading (and responding) to all of the emails sent to feedback@flock.com — this was one more task in my 14 hr+ day and there was a lot of spam both automated and hand written, but I digress.

Sometime in the first few months of 2006, a friend told me that the following was on their internal forums:

Change the default search to Google.

With the response from Lloyd Budd of Flock:

It takes two clicks to change… your loss.

Dang, I thought, I must have been in a really bad mood to have written such an inappropriate response. So at the time, using gmail ironically, I quickly found the discussion. Dec. 4, 2005 the feedback read:

Change the default search to Google.

Why on Earth is it Yahoo!? I’m not going to use Flock based on this alone for now.

Now, my response is still poor, but it makes a little more sense in that I was responding to a hostile email. I definitely should not have responded if I wasn’t able to respond politely.

I’m not going to share who that feedback was from, but I did email them letting them know that it hurt hearing that they had misrepresented the conversation.

Its good to know that if you ever write or say anything about Google it may end up on their internal forums, maybe not the way you said it. It’s highly searchable.