Another data storm passed over Vancouver last week, causing flooded minds but doing no other damage. There was little illumination in its wake.
The vacant-houses report by Ecotagious, presented to council on March 8th, was an anticlimactic thud, concluding that the percentage of vacant homes had barely budged since 2002. Last Friday, a detailed article in the Globe by Kerry Gold picked holes in the conclusions and was informative about the methodology and its shortcomings. To me, the salient information was the contrasting political reactions of Councillor Kerry Jang and Point Grey MLA David Eby.
Councillor Kerry Jang says the chief concern was to find out if houses were empty for a year at a time. He says the report is proof that foreign buyers are not hiding their money in houses and leaving them to fall into disrepair. He has no issues with a homeowner who only uses a house for a week or two out of the year, or a couple of months.
“It goes back to the fact that they assume an Asian investor is parking his money in Vancouver, leaving their house empty. That’s what I’m taking issue with here. It’s your property. If you want to live in it half the year, that’s your business. Are you to tell me I have to live in my house for eight months of the year? What happens if I don’t? Are you going to take it away from me? That’s the argument.”
Point Grey MLA David Eby, who’s raised the issue of empty houses in the media, says he was shocked at both the survey results, and also the media reaction, which tied the results to proof that foreign investment was a “myth.” He calls the methodology “conservative.”
“We have a shocking number of empty condos and a huge number of underused homes. The people who are trying to sell this [myth] line should spend a little time in Point Grey, in Kerrisdale, and they will see the reality for themselves, in the stores and on the streets. I understand the reasons for underselling this report and saying, ‘Oh, look, the real estate alarmists have been disproven,’ because a lot of people are benefiting from this system, but our community knows the issues. We see them every day.”
This could be one of the old NPA-COPE battles of values from 20 years ago. Eby’s town-hall style meeting, as noted in a previous post, takes place tonight.
Evidently, the question of how many vacant homes – or is it underused homes? – is not going to be solved by data. It will take leadership to craft public policy that will have to be based on community values, not the factoids of one study versus another.
I was really on the side of the Dunbar-West Point Grey-Kerrisdale residents who believed their neighbourhoods were hollowed out, that many houses were vacant and blocks were spooky, and maybe I still am. But a couple of gatherings – what might be called “west side cocktail parties” – around Christmas and thereafter nudged me away from a firm position.
For the first hour, I talked to people who wanted only to speak about the vacancy issue, often with overtones of race and crazy wealth thrown in; having tired of it, people then began to speak about their holidays, the houses they were renting in Palm Springs for the winter, the time-share in Scottsdale, the cabin at the lake, the trips to Europe they’d planned.
How many months of the year were they away, a few weeks here, a few weeks there? Were they engaged in their community when they returned? Is the issue underused homes, one made worse by the affluence of most people in some parts of town? And if it is, what can or should be done about it?
I deleted Facebook off of my iPhone six months ago. I had one simple reason in mind: I thought I would be able to analyze Facebook more accurately and completely by not using it or its companion apps, cold turkey. Purchasing an iPhone 6s Plus at launch gave me the perfect opportunity to begin my experiment. My initial assumption proved true. In just the first eight weeks, I learned more about Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, than the last eight years. I've reached a number of observations over the past six months on Facebook's value and vulnerabilities and a definite answer to what was once a seemingly difficult question: Are Facebook and Apple becoming competitors?
Observations
I had five overarching observations from not using Facebook properties for the past six months:
1) Facebook is a habit, not an addiction. Within a few hours of not using Facebook, it was easy to see how much time I had been dedicating to Facebook. I began grabbing my iPhone but not knowing what exactly to do with it. Typically, I would open the Facebook app and waste a "commercial" amount of time - a minute or two of taking in random content from friends. Instead of downloading a few iOS games to keep my attention, Facebook had become my go-to game. If I was at a doctor's office waiting to be seen, Facebook would serve as that perfect attention filler. I now needed to find something else to occupy my time.
During the first few weeks of my Facebook experiment, I did have an urge to find my old iPhone 5s (which still had the Facebook app installed on it) and take a quick peek at my News Feed. However, this desire never got to the point of interrupting my daily routine, a prerequisite for a form of addiction. Instead, I realized Facebook had become a habit. As time went on, the solution to handling my Facebook habit was simply to find other apps that would fill my time. Those apps turned out to be Apple News and Twitter (and eventually Slack). Each one of those apps would offer different forms of content capable of grabbing my attention.
2) Facebook is no longer a social network. Facebook stopped being a social network years ago. Up until this past September, I had used Facebook daily for more than 10 years. I was among one of the early Facebook users relying on the site to literally see who lived next door. As the years went by, my Facebook wall became a News Feed and with the change, Facebook changed from being about what my friends and I were doing to what my friends thought was interesting around the web. I discovered that those two things produce very different kinds of content. Facebook lost all resemblance of a social network with the presence of brands, ads and algorithms.
3) My core communication was never on Facebook. After I stopped using Facebook Messenger, I wasn't sure if my communication with family and friends would deteriorate. Instead, I discovered that my most important communication channels were never on Facebook properties to begin with. I still used the phone app on my iPhone for most communication while iMessage also continued to play a significant role. For other forms of communication that were indeed found with Facebook, I reverted back to relying on word of mouth. The events and occasions that I needed to know I ended up finding out about, just through a third-person. The type of communication that did suffer by not using Facebook was the email variety, or messages to acquaintances with little real-world connection.
4) I'm less informed of the local world around me. There is no denying that I am less aware of what is going on around me in terms of random daily news and events by removing myself from Facebook. I am still keenly aware of global news thanks to Twitter and apps like Apple News. In fact, I've had more time to follow those kinds of news stories since deleting Facebook. However, I have lost touch with much of the local news likely to impact my daily routine. Facebook had turned into my local paper, all the way down to nearby high school sports scores and recaps. Instead of reporters relaying the information, parents would upload pictures and stories of how their children did at the game. Not having access to that type of news makes me feel a bit more disconnected to the community around me since there is no other app or source capable of recreating that news medium other than a traditional paper or news periodical sent through the postal mail (which is still the only way I know the bare essentials of what is happening around me).
5) Facebook's success is dependent on my time. I used to think that Facebook's success was dependent on me being an active participant by uploading content or sharing links. Instead, Facebook simply needs me to open a Facebook property for the company to remain relevant. With news organizations and other content sites now relying on Facebook for traffic, I turned from an active participant uploading content daily to a passive observer that paid Facebook with my time (and data). Facebook's transformation from a site that required me to spend time and energy to create a profile and engage with others to an app that fed me content from around the web without me needing to do much is why Facebook has become so quintessential to so many people.
Takeaways
After not using Facebook for six months, I was able to clearly see why Facebook is so incredibly popular around the world, the guiding motivation behind Mark Zuckerberg's actions, and where the company is headed tomorrow.
What is Facebook? Facebook is a curated version of the web. Having 1.6 billion people participate in building this new version of the web is ultimately why Facebook had become a habit for me and so many other people using smartphones. There is literally a never-ending stream of information and content to consume. Talk about the advantages of having massive scale. Using the Safari or Chrome app on a smartphone to surf various websites is a pain, not to mention energy-consuming, which explains Facebook's aggressive moves in recent years to bring even more content into the News Feed. If Facebook wants to turn habits into addictions, they need to include the most sticky portions of the web including news, videos, and eventually live sports and make it remarkably easy to consume content. This explains the motivation behind Instant Articles and marketing the feature as accessing and reading news quickly and effortlessly.
There is one very important takeaway from Facebook being a curated version of the web. Some people won't be interested in consuming this version of the web, and as I have shown by having not used Facebook for the past six months, there are other versions of the web available. Creating a non-Facebook version of the web involves more effort and dedication, but it is possible. I have found a handful of apps and websites (Apple News, iMessage, Twitter, Slack) that have contributed to a new curated version of the web. This helps explain why the 50% of the connected world that is not on Facebook can get by just fine without it and probably will not be embracing Facebook's version of the web anytime soon. If there is still any mystery as to why Facebook cares so much about connecting the rest of the world's seven billion people to the internet, look no further than those people representing Facebook's growth engine where additional users leads to a stronger version of the web and consequentially more advertisers.
The reason Instagram has become so incredibly popular is similar to how the News Feed offers a curated version of the web within the traditional Facebook app. Instagram is moving down the same path only with pictures. This opens so many more doors since photos and cameras have played an integral role in the smartphone boom. We now use our smartphones as tools to capture and interpret the world around us. Taking these photographs and then using the massive scale with hundreds of millions of users produces another version of the web that is even easier and more enjoyable to consume than compared to the traditional Facebook News Feed.
Messaging Apps. Once the iOS versus Android war matured to a point where there were no longer the same fierce battles between the two platforms, many tech pundits and analysts turned to messaging as an answer for where consumer tech trends and interest were headed. For Facebook, both Messenger and WhatsApp were positioned as potential threats not only to iOS, but also to Android. Grandiose visions of everything and anything being put into Facebook Messenger and then crowding out competing platforms ended up being the subject of countless blog posts around the web. In reality, this messaging vision has been grossly exaggerated and like much of the tech analysis, void of reality. While 800 million people use Facebook Messenger and a billion people use WhatsApp, we rely on multiple communication channels throughout the day. The simple fact that many (most) young people are addicted to Snapchat shows that there is room for multiple messaging apps since we segment our communication channels according to our social network. And we haven't even discussed the Lines and WeChats of the world.
When I stopped using Facebook, it became clear that iMessage, not Facebook, was the place I kept 100% of my family communication. This trend has only intensified in recent years as additional family members have purchased iPhones. While messaging will indeed continue to advance and be able to handle much more in the way of delivery content and utility, the industry is not a winner-take-all, but rather a handful of winners with the possibility of new start-ups coming in and also becoming a winner in terms of communication (hello Slack).
Facebook vs. Apple. Facebook and Apple are unequivocally not competitors. In fact, Facebook and Apple are partners. Facebook's curated version of the web requires hardware, and Apple is a key player selling smartphones, tablets, and laptops/desktops. Instagram's growth has been fueled by smartphone camera innovation, which Apple has played a major role in. Add in Messenger and WhatsApp, and it's clear that Apple's 640 million iPhone users play a role in Facebook's success (and vice versa as many Apple consumers enjoy using Facebook properties on their iOS devices).
However, it would be incorrect to assume the degree of competitiveness found within this Facebook and Apple relationship has remained static. Upon closer examination, Facebook and Apple are increasingly chasing similar goals. For both companies to remain relevant over time, they will need to occupy a greater share of our time and attention. Up to now, both companies are able to accomplish this goal without harming the other. A user reading an Instant Article in Facebook on his or her iPhone 6s Plus would be considered a win for both Facebook and Apple. However, listen to Mark Zuckerberg's vision for Facebook, and it's not difficult to see Facebook competing more directly with Apple.
At first glance, Mark Zuckerberg's ideas on Facebook and virtual reality (VR) seem far-fetched, but when considering how Facebook is a curated version of the web, wanting to deliver immersive video content to users makes plenty of sense. According to Zuckerberg, instead of using our smartphone or tablet to open the Facebook/Instagram app and scrolling through a timeline of content, we can put on a pair of glasses/goggles to get a much more engaging and encompassing view of the world through VR. In essence, we would be able to see the world through other people's eyes. I still hold an incredible amount of hesitation and doubt that we will be willing to wear computers on our face throughout the day, but there is no denying that Facebook is betting big on a future beyond using Facebook on a smartphone.
The key development in Facebook's virtual reality bet has been its Oculus acquisition. With Oculus, Facebook entered the difficult world of hardware development, placing itself that much closer to taking on Apple as a more direct competitor. Of course, hardware is notoriously difficult, and I am skeptical Facebook's culture meshes well with prerequisites needed to succeed in hardware. While things are extremely early, a world where Facebook-branded VR glasses begin to take up users' time instead of iPhones or iPads would obviously mark a new type of competition. However, Apple isn't standing still and is not only investing in VR, but also showing interest in moving into entirely new categories such as personal transport and jewelry.
While one of Apple's biggest competitors is itself (an iPhone's greatest competition is its year-old sibling), any company that is trying to build an experience out of the combination of software, hardware and services needs to be monitored. Facebook as of today does not meet the criteria for being classified as a formidable Apple competitor. However, a world in which Facebook continues to invest in hardware (much easier said than done) and begins to embrace ideals that go beyond software and hardware would certainly keep Apple executives up a few more nights.
Facebook Success
Mark Zuckerberg didn't position Facebook to replace the web. We don't use Facebook to search for something akin to a traditional Google search. Instead, Zuckerberg was interested in creating a new version of the web based on a different kind of search, one initially powered by our social fabric. For now, Wall Street and Silicon Valley seem to think both Facebook and Google can coexist peacefully despite what seems like obvious overlap in capabilities and ambition. Google's new corporate identity built around Alphabet certainly plays a role in showing that Google is looking for a future beyond search.
The primary takeaway from my Facebook experiment over the past six months is that while Facebook's popularity is unmatched on the web, the company is not invincible. Facebook's success will depend on its ability to deliver a compelling content consumption experience to its 1.6 billion users. As long as Facebook can occupy users' time, the company will do well with advertisers, helping to fund future endeavors. However, there continues to be a world outside of Facebook where billions of people live and enjoy technology with no regrets of not using a Facebook property. This world remains a vibrant place for both innovation and different ideas, leading to startups like Snapchat and Slack which begin to attract a growing amount of time and attention once given to Facebook. All the while, Apple's quest to embrace a new form of luxury will likely cap any potential near-term rivalry between Facebook and Apple.
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Social networks have long been used as a marketing tool for applications. But in China, the WeChat Official Account , born out of Chinese tech behemoth Tencent’s social network WeChat, is redefining the whole landscape.
“WeChat is an app killer in a way,” Alexis Bonhomme, the general manager of Curiosity China, told TechNode. Mr. Bonhomme formerly worked with a joint venture between Groupon and Tencent before co-founding his own WeChat marketing firm.
“There are two different perspectives. People outside of China keep on thinking they need an app to expand in China, [but] in China, companies don’t want to build an app because it costs a lot to build, maintain and promote,” he says.
In one instance, Urbem, a Chinese dining services platform, used a WeChat account instead of an app to run their restaurant recommendation services.
“If you compare the function of an application and the WeChat service accounts, any feature you can perform on the application you can do the same on WeChat.” says Steven Chen, the CEO of Urbem.
“While developing an app, you have the hassle of working on an iOS and Android version, and their backend and frontend separately, and you have to hire corresponding app developers…WeChat service accounts runs seamlessly regardless of operating system,” says Mr. Chen.
By leveraging WeChat’s functions, Urbem added a data analytics feature to their WeChat service account. Its patent-pending Ubot answers user inquiries in real-time and recommends dining offers based on the user’s location, dining occasion, and food category.
The secret to WeChat’s success may not even be just their functionality, but rather the centralization of company apps into one package. “Generally, people download 25 apps, but they only use five or six apps a day. So downloaded apps show 1:4 intensity of use,” says Mr. Bonhomme. “However, it’s easy to move around from account A to B using WeChat service account[s] and it allows users to put many functions within one system.”
WeChat Apps Are Lucrative
Currently, there are more than 12 million corporate WeChat accounts. Two years ago, there were only 500,000, according to Curiosity China. WeChat service accounts are seeing higher growth and higher competition among other WeChat service accounts.
One of the earliest adopters of WeChat service accounts is now monetizing their user base. Founded in May 2014, Chemm (玩车教师), a car purchase guide platform, provides a range of assistance from exclusive car purchasing content to the final car purchase. Chemm has 3 million followers on WeChat. The company raised A round funding, valued at a 600 million yuan ($92.3 million USD).
“WeChat’s advantage is in user stickiness, since a user opens up WeChat at least more than a dozen times a day,” Chemm founder and CEO Yao Junfeng says. “This is very frightening. No app in China has such a high DAU [daily active users].”
(1) Chemm’s content (2) Setting up consulting appointment (3) Q&A bar
Despite the advantages that WeChat service accounts provide, Mr. Yao is also aware of its disadvantages.
“After all, the founders are restricted to using custom functions on the WeChat application. We cannot develop more functions or improve the user experience,” Mr. Yao says. “Also, apart from offering consulting or e-commerce stores using the WeChat service account, it is difficult to see other kinds of applications. “
WeChat Can Complement Other Apps
WeChat service accounts are not only used to replace existing mobile applications – they can be used to promote them. Companies generate traffic through their WeChat account, before leading those users to download their app.
“A WeChat app can be an app promoter. So it’s not that you need to build a new app in China, nor you have to shut down your app in China,” Mr. Bonhomme says.
Urbem is now using their WeChat account to complement another application. The company is currently raising $500,000 USD to add Urbem’s service to the Alipay service window, which lets users run the service through the Alipay payment option.
“We still need [an] application, because there were people who do not rely much on WeChat. We’ll keep all three options, the WeChat public account, Alipay service window and application.” Mr. Steven says.
Brett O'Lognner@logoninternet
Also always helps to remember that immersion is kind of bullshit. You can get immersed in a book too - the VR is in your *mind!*
When a group of people or nations form an alliance, it is called a confederation, allowing each member to govern itself but agreeing to work together for common causes. Perhaps the best-known confederation was the South during the U.S. Civil War.
The noun confederation comes from the early 15th Century, meaning “an agreement.” Confederation is similar to the word “federation,” but with important differences. Whereas a federation has a strong central government, a confederation is more of an agreement between separate bodies to cooperate with each other. The European alliance could be called a confederation, while the United States is a federation.
Philip Gordon, James Dobbins and Jeff Martini recently observed that Syria has devolved as a state into various parts under the control of contending groups. Rather than pushing for a comprehensive resolution of all issues and the reconsolidation of the various territories into a single government, the authors propose a confederation:
Instead of delaying a halt to hostilities while trying to bridge these currently unbridgeable gaps, we advocate a more limited approach, based on a different sequence. The International Syria Support Group should concentrate on securing an immediate cease-fire and arranging for its enforcement, followed by further negotiations on the shape of a reconstituted Syrian state. Even this will be hard to agree on, but it is a more realistic goal for now, and it is hugely preferable to the main alternative: the continuation or even escalation of a devastating war.
Our plan would include maintaining Syria’s unity and territorial integrity, but it would be based on the reality that different parts of the country are already largely controlled by different ethnic groups backed by different outside powers. Those powers and their Syrian clients could agree to provisionally define and accept three corresponding “safe zones” — one controlled by the regime in the west, one controlled mainly by the Kurds in the northeast and one noncontiguous zone in the north and south controlled by the moderate Sunni opposition. A fourth zone would be created in central and eastern Syria in which the Islamic State would be targeted by all. The external powers most closely involved, including Russia, Iran, the United States, Turkey and Jordan, would guarantee adherence to the cease-fire among their respective proxies.
[…]
Immediately following the cease-fire, the United Nations would convene all of the Syrian factions that accepted the plan to begin negotiating on the future of a unified state. Restoring a unified Syria would likely take time, if it is possible at all. The resulting state might be federal or confederal. Reaching an accord would probably involve granting extensive autonomy, including control over security, to local authorities. It might involve some form of sectarian power-sharing and require specific guarantees for minorities within each region. It might involve constitutional reform to redistribute institutional powers and an election in which Assad would not run. These would be issues for the Syrians to work out, under U.N. auspices and with the involvement of the external powers. They would be difficult to resolve, but not as difficult as they are now, as the killing continues.
It seems that the US is – behind the scenes – pushing toward a Kurdish semi-autonomous region of the sort outlined by Gordon, et al., but Turkey is vehemently opposed.
Scanning apps have become a big category on iOS. There are a lot of great options and the quality and diversity of the category creates a healthy competitive atmosphere that means frequent updates and innovations, which are great for customers. Today, Readdle launched version 7 of Scanner Pro, which adds optical character recognition (OCR), distortion correction, and a cool new trick – workflows. With Scanner Pro 7 you can chain multiple actions together and fire them off with just one tap.
Scanner Pro 7 has all the core features I expect to find in any scanning app, plus a few that set it apart from others. You take a picture of a document, make any edits you want, and then share and file the scan. Although Scanner Pro makes it as easy as possible to create multi-page documents, like automatically taking a picture of a page once it is in focus and the edges have been detected, with any iOS scanner, you are better served scanning a few pages than something like a 50-page document. Once scanned, you can adjust things like the page borders and whether the scan is stored in full color, black and white, or grayscale.
What sets Scanner Pro apart are features like distortion correction, which automatically squares your scan if you take a photo at an angle, removes shadows, and makes other adjustments to present a scan that resembles a flat sheet of paper. This also helps you get good OCR results. In my tests taking pictures from books where the text curved in towards the spine, Scanner Pro was not able to fully straighten the text, but it did as well or better than other scanner apps I've used, eliminated all shadows, and squared most lines of text to the page.
Scanner Pro 7 corrects distortion in images from things like books.
OCR is brand new to Scanner Pro,1 and brings it in line with apps like Scanbot and PDFPen Scan+, which already feature OCR. No iOS-based OCR system that I have tried is foolproof. To get the best results, a flat, high-contrast document works best. In my tests Scanner Pro did an excellent job with documents like black and white printouts of web pages. But that's not a lot of fun, so I threw a few harder documents at Scanner Pro too, like books and a newspaper. The results were not perfect, especially where the text of the books curved in towards the spine of the book, and with a low-contrast newspaper article, but overall, the results were some of the best I've seen among iOS scanners.
Newspaper scan comparison of image versus text.
The most innovative feature of the lot is Scanner Pro's implementation of workflows. The share button pops up something that looks a lot like the iOS share sheet, but is entirely custom. There is a toggle at the top to choose between sharing a scan as a PDF or image. Below the toggle are two rows of icons. The first row includes icons for sharing the image or PDF with other apps or services. The second row is composed primarily of cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, and iCloud, but also includes Evernote, OneNote, and WebDAV.
At the bottom of the share sheet is a '+' button that lets you define workflows that chain actions together. I created one that renames my scanned receipts, uploads a copy to Dropbox for my records, and attaches the scan to an email pre-populated with Federico's email address and a pre-defined subject line. If I actually had a MacStories expense account, submitting receipts would be as simple as snapping a picture, tapping the share button and then choosing the workflow.
Workflows in action.
Scanner Pro is a Universal app that works with iOS 9 features like Split View. The 'Edit' and 'Actions' buttons are not available, however, while using Scanner Pro in Split View, which limited me to sharing documents. Split View can make laying out interface elements tricky on smaller iPads, but I hope that Scanner Pro's full feature set, which is accessible on the iPhone, is also made available in Split View on the iPad in a future release.
I am not a heavy user of scanning apps, but I do use one now and then, and I especially like Scanner Pro for a couple of key features. The first is its OCR, which is one of the best OCR systems I've tried on iOS, making it a handy way to capture text on the go. The second, and my favorite feature, is workflows. Once a workflow is set up, it is simple to initiate several actions with just a couple taps. I expect that the addition of workflows alone will make Scanner Pro valuable to many people.
Scanner Pro 7 is available on the App Store for an introductory price of $3.99 at launch, after which it will be $7.99.
It's a lengthy interview, with Cook discussing a variety of issues related to the FBI's requests in the San Bernardino case. Cook comments on his views on encryption in the modern technological landscape, how the US Congress should approach this debate, and why Apple views the FBI's demands as a threat to civil liberties. It's a great read with some fantastic passages.
The thing that is different to me about Messages versus your banking institution is, the part of you doing business with the bank, they need to record what you deposited, what your withdrawals are, what your checks that have cleared. So they need all of this information. That content they need to possess, because they report it back to you.
That’s the business they’re in. Take the message. My business is not reading your messages. I don’t have a business doing that. And it’s against my values to do that. I don’t want to read your private stuff. So I’m just the guy toting your mail over. That’s what I’m doing. So if I’m expected to keep your messages, and everybody else’s, then there should be a law that says, you need to keep all of these.
Now I think that would be really bad. I think it would be really bad because in order for me to keep them, I have to have a way to see them. If I have to have a way to see them and a place to copy them, you can imagine—if you knew where the treasure was buried at, and everybody else did, then it puts a bull’s eye on that target. And in the world of cyber security, the last thing you want is to have a target painted on you.
At Nancy Reagan’s funeral presidential candidate Hillary Clinton told MSNBC that the Reagans “started a national conversation about AIDS.” The response to that obviously false statement was swift and loud. Even Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign (which endorsed Clinton), tweeted “Nancy Reagan was, sadly, no hero in the fight against HIV/AIDS.” Clinton’s apology was posted to Medium the very next day. Picking a platform for a message goes a long way in picking the demographics of your message’s audience. The decision to use Medium for her apology was pitch perfect: older (and statistically more conservative) voters who watch cable news will see her praising the Reagans while younger voters who might turn to Medium to read the definitive take down of Clinton will find her own apology next to their favorite authors. More than just an apology though, the post goes on to give a small history of AIDS-related activism before going on to describe the present challenges facing those infected with HIV. More than an apology Clinton’s Medium post is an example of what I’m calling the “Explainer Candidate.”
We may still be mired in “post-truth politics” but there is an equal but opposite force of (mostly web-based) explainer publications that seek to augment, rebut, and frame a further reaching TV-based media cycle. Vox, FiveThirtyEight, and Slate (among others) have made an industry of starting sentences with “well, actually.” If you look at these publishers’ “advertise with us!” pages, you’ll see that their reader demographics skew towards the young-ish, well-off creative professional which also overwhelmingly votes for progressive candidates. There’s a danger here that is far worse than anything that comes from the right’s concerted effort to divorce facts from political positions: progressives have started mistaking the recitation of political facts for political positions.
To be fair to Clinton she does outline actual policy she would be in favor of, including expanded access to PrEP, getting Republican governors to expand Medicaid, and try to punish drug companies when they price gouge patients. But when you look at the proportions –out of a thirteen paragraph article there is one paragraph devoted to the apology and two for what she will do as president—the vast majority of it is a rehashing of the AIDS Wikipedia page. This is fact but not substance. Of course political leaders should be seen to at least know the facts of a given political controversy but when the announcement of truths outnumbers descriptions of what is to be done about those truths, we start losing sight of what this whole process is even meant to accomplish. Electing someone with good ideas about the future is much different than someone who can recount the past to you and being able to do the latter is only a necessary (not sufficient) condition for the former.
Bernie Sanders is guilty of this as well, in fact perhaps even more so. Every time he responds to a debate question with inequality statistics I cringe ever so slightly. The difference here though, and it is a crucial one, is that Sanders’ policy prescriptions are as radical as the facts that he cites. Clinton follows up a brief history of a radical direct action organization with incremental reform, thereby giving it a radical sheen.
Facts about radical organizations sitting next to hollow phrases like “hold companies accountable” does a disservice to those radical organizations, especially when you have a history of ignoring the role of social movements in securing progressive wins. Writing in TheNew Republic Jeet Heer chronicles how Clinton’s comments about the Reagans and HIV/AIDS is similar to her remarks eight years ago when “she appeared to give greater credit to President Lyndon Johnson for civil rights laws than the movement lead by Martin Luther King.” Jeet also points out that Clinton does not seem to understand the strategic role of contemporary social movements like #BlackLivesMatter. When she condemned the violence at Trump’s Chicago rally she exclusively attributed social progress to victims’ families “melt[ing] hearts” and not the sustained activism of Bree Newsome and others.
This is the important distinction: A candidate is an Explainer Candidate when the recitation of facts about the past or the abstract present replace policies or promised material support for present political struggles. An Explainer Candidate will give you a thorough history of a radical social movement in 800 words but claim all future progress must come from reasonable incremental change. The Explainer Candidate is looking to run out the clock on your own attention: to show that they are with it –that they are on your side– but also hope you don’t read to the end where they under-deliver on supporting the change agents that they acknowledge were necessary to secure those political wins.
Bullshit gathers where lawyers and human resource people meet. But as Henry Ward, CEO of startup eShares, shows with the company’s offer letters, it doesn’t have to. Using the power of clarity, simplicity, and graphics — eShares is welcoming new hires — and it’s probably getting a lot more of them to say “Yes.” Ward published a sample … Continue reading The eShares offer letter: write like a human, not an HR robot →
Dan Bertolet writes for the Sightline Institute on a certain kind of density infill. We call these “basement suites”, “granny flats” and “laneway houses”.
ADUs are relatively modest apartments or cottages integrated into single-family properties, and they come in two flavors: physically attached to the main house (AADU), or detached in a structure separate from the single-family house on the same lot (DADU). Most fall in the moderate affordability range—$1,200 to $1,800 per month for a one-bedroom unit in Seattle—and offer a housing option in single-family neighborhoods for residents who cannot afford a single-family house.
Known as “granny flats” for a reason, ADUs work well for multigenerational families. And they are particularly well-suited for young children, because they tend to be relatively large (at least for a rental), provide direct access to outdoor yards, and are often located in neighborhoods well served with schools and parks.
And why does Vancouver have lots of these type of dwellings? What does the rest of Cascadia need to do?
Myriad regulatory barriers currently litter the law books of Cascadian cities, clogging the ADU pipeline. Vancouver’s success in building more than 26,000 ADUs has been all about undoing those restrictions. Starting in the late 1980s, the city legalized thousands of existing, but illegal, ADUs. Over time, it eliminated the most counterproductive barriers. Vancouver, unlike many Cascadian cities:
does not require an off-street parking spot for each ADU
does not require the owner to live on site
allows single-family lots to host both an AADU and a DADU
awards additional occupancy limits for each dwelling on a property, and
provides great latitude to property owners in terms of size, height, and placement of each ADU.
10. Don't build to committee If a bunch of people sat around a room and drew out the dashboard on a whiteboard before you've even analyzed the data.... run screaming from the room. This dashboard will end up being an '18 months to deployment product' and I promise you will want to slit your wrists with a spoon at some point, so pretend your hair's on fire and get out now.
9. Don't build to spec This is similar to the Don't above, but usually comes in the format of an e-mail with a list of charts someone wants built to put in their PowerPoint presentation. Example: 1. Pie chart of sales by state, 2. stacked bar chart of profit by state, 3. bubble chart of 10 million customers colored by height... (I'm using the most outrageous examples, but hey, this sh*t happens.). So build the appropriate chart that helps to see the results and if you have to, build the chart they asked for to show the difference.
8. Don't build on Excel pivot tables If you are given a workbook with 18 datasources that are all basically Excel pivot tables, throw it out and ask for access to the original data source. Or pretend your hair's on fire and recommend the assignment be given to an analyst you don't like. Let them try and figure out how to filter across all those sources and automate the updates.
7. Don't build Excel charts If you are given a bunch of Excel charts and colored tables to replicate in Tableau, ignore them. This will only lead to frustration and you may end up missing insight that the data contains, but has gone unnoticed because it hasn't been explored. So ignore these charts, explore the data, build charts that are appropriate and build a real dashboard that helps people seethe results.
6. Don't show off Substance trumps Sparkle. EVERY. TIME. Keep it as simple as you can. That goes for color, fonts, chart types, images, interactivity and hacks. Hacks are great, but if you can't remember how you did it three months later, it's probably too complex. I use the 'If I get hit by a bus' rule (or for you more optimistic types, 'If I win the lottery' rule) and think about the poor analyst who will get handed this complex work when I'm gone. Unless you know and don't like that analyst, in which case, you're just evil.
5. Don't try to use all the data in the universe and then complain about performance. C'mon.
4. Don't title your charts by chart type For example, a trend chart of 12 months of sales should not be titled Line Chart: Sales. Your title should just include the subject and perhaps the time dimension (eg. Monthly Sales) or take the opportunity to use the title to communicate with the user more directly (eg. How have Sales been, blah, blah, blah?).
3. Don't ask too much of a chart Don't try to answer the meaning of life, the universe, and everything with one poor chart. It's why waterfall charts are often a waste of time; people ask for them, but very few seem to understand them or use them. If you've thrown the kitchen sink at a chart - for example, dual axis charts with images, color, and size indicators - you'll probably just confuse people. Even if you can make it look cool.
2. Don't use red and green together It's not Christmas and it's not a traffic light we're building. Here's a question for you: do you know if any of the senior executives are color blind? Because if they are, and they use your dashboard, all they are seeing is a sea of baby poo. Besides, red/green is just so hard to un-ugly; you're whole dashboard can be ruined.
1. Don't heed any of this advice if you don't want to. If you like what you built and it works for you and your users, then bravo. Job well done. Sincerely, and with no snark, I truly mean this. Don't let the rules or other's advice impede your creativity.
“You create this identity for yourself, like your little secret life that interacts with other secret lives, and if that gets manipulated, it can feel disorienting,†said Lacey Noonan, a psychotherapist as Well Counseling in the heart of San Franciscoâ€s tech-centric Potrero Hill. “It happens all the time 
As I mould myself into these platforms, I claw out a sense of control over what is mine – my profile, my feed. Instagram and Twitter encouraged this sense of ownership and agency. The move toward an algorithm that the company curates is a reminder of both whoâ€s in charge and just how much of myself Iâ€ve given to them. My apps have become so blended into my life, to skew one toward the machine is to skew them both.
Internet historian and University of Michigan professor Chuck Severance said it was “nice†I ever thought I had ownership of something like my Twitter account. Severance teaches a popular class online called Internet History, Technology, and Security and goes by @DrChuck to his 14,000 Twitter followers.
“When a company makes your feed algorithmic, itâ€s the moment that youâ€re being squeezed as an asset,†Severance said. “In some way itâ€s worse than a loss of agency. Itâ€s them reminding you that youâ€re not the owner, youâ€re the product. You do know that, right?â€
Steve Ladurantaye@sladurantaye
Metrolinx paid a reputable fashion designer for uniforms instead of using Kijiji/friend's mom/unpaid interns. pic.twitter.com/qYPGWqEt7F
One of the most frustrating things about Open Source software is the lack of traction some genuinely great projects manage to achieve. There are countless examples of individuals deciding to ‘scratch their own itch’, and writing code that would also improve the lives of hundreds/thousands/millions of people. However, the the technical skills required to get it up-and-running, not to mention the security concerns of getting to scale, are often prohibitive.
That’s where Sandstorm.io comes in. I first heard about the project when I was still at Mozilla as the lead developer led a successful crowdfunding campaign that was supported by many readers of Hacker News. Essentially, it’s a incredibly simple, one-click way to install Open Source web apps. They’re deployed in containers called ‘grains’ which makes apps extremely secure and super-fast.
As you can see, I’ve been playing about with all sorts of apps: note-capturing apps similar to Evernote, kanban tools that mimic the functionality of Trello, alternatives to Slack, ways to seamlessly pipe music to co-workers/conspirators, you name it!
There’s already an impressive selection of apps available in Sandstorm.io, with more being converted on a regular basis. Here’s the ones available at the time of writing:
At the moment, I’m just playing around. I can see a time when I decide to use this across devices and collaboratively with other people. Relying on venture capitalist-backed companies to look after my data, privacy, and security on a long-term basis is probably a bad idea.
While there’ll always be a free tier, during the beta all of the plans are free:
As you can see, given that the ‘Power User’ plan is currently free, I’ve decided to make full use of it. The apps are blisteringly fast and, when the beta ends, I’ve got the option of either paying for hosting through Sandstorm.io, or hosting it on my own server (free!)
I’d have a play and see what you find. I think you’ll find something interesting, something to convince you that Open Source done right can be just as good, if not better, than proprietary, closed-source, VC-backed products!
We’ve seen the Samsung latest phone, the Galaxy S7 edge, broken down into its various component parts multipletimes now, but I think it’s fair to say this is the first time someone has used an X-Ray to capture the insides of the device.
The X-rays come courtesy of Reddit user SecretRaindrop, who used an industrial X-ray machine to capture the images you see throughout this post.
A X-ray of the Galaxy S7 edge’s OIS mechanism.
Perhaps the most interesting photo is of the S7’s heat pipe. With the help of the X-ray machine, it’s possible to see the threads that run through the pipe. Another interesting shot shows the small magnets that act as the phone’s optical image stabilization mechanism.
A X-ray of the S7 edge’s heat pipe.
More than anything, the X-rays are a good reminder of just how much engineering effort and talent goes into creating modern smartphones.
This week on News 1130 radio in Vancouver, I spoke about these tech topics for Wired Wednesday with Ben Wilson:
Hero unveils a new home gadget to help you track and dispense pills (source)
A New York City startup called Hero plans to replace those plastic pill organizers with a high-tech home appliance. It’s easy to load your medicines, vitamins and other health supplements into the machine, then indicate the dosage you’ll need and when you’re supposed to take it. Once you’re all set up, the Hero device will automatically alert you when it’s time to take your medication and dispense the pills accordingly.
A Smartphone Can Copy a 3D Model By Just Recording the Sounds of a 3D Printer (source)
With an experiment that’s not going to help alleviate any concerns over 3D printing and piracy, researchers at the University of California Irvine have proven that they can copy a 3D model, with surprising accuracy, by simply recording the sounds that another 3D printer makes while it’s making it. The servos, pumps, and extruders that power a 3D printer produce a symphony of mechanical sounds as it’s printing away. And all those sounds tell a story of how the machine’s printing head is moving around as well as how much plastic filament is being extruded from the nozzle on every pass.
Samsung Galaxy S7 Launch
Listen to the clip below for the highlights of the new (now waterproof) smartphone (yes, that’s it in the fishbowl), the bundled VR headset accessory (modeled by Steve Dotto) and the forthcoming 360 degree camera and the included migration adapter all shown in these photos:
In Grandview, a rapidly gentrifying “streetcar suburb” from the Vancouver of a century ago, I have a neighbour who’s an obstetrician – evidence of gentrification in itself, I suppose. She made the comment one day that she could deliver all of ‘her’ babies to their parents on her way home from BC Women’s on Oak Street on the edge of Shaughnessy.
I imagine her driving north and east, dropping off babies in Mount Pleasant, Cedar Cottage and Grandview. For readers unfamiliar with Vancouver’s geography, these are mixed areas with some apartments, but are mainly old wooden houses – many pre-World War I examples are large enough to be divided into suites. The majority have basement suites, at the very least. They are medium density neighbourhoods, I suppose, with very diverse populations; they’re the kind of Edwardian-era districts that a respondent on PriceTags yesterday suggested I had ‘sentimentalized’ in books like Vanishing Vancouver.
My question is, what kind of neighbourhood do parents look for when they’re starting or expanding families? I am witnessing stroller gridlock on the sidewalks here, and notice it in Mount Pleasant and Strathcona, as I used to see it several years ago in Kitsilano before the infants aged out of their prams. Obviously this requires financial horsepower, whether it’s their own cash from condos they’ve sold elsewhere, their own significant incomes, and El Banco de Los Parentos. But it’s totally changing the demographic here.
You see it on The Drive, too. When bong and bead shops close, chances are they will be replaced by a tidy shopfront selling children’s clothes and toys.
Is any reader clever enough to find data about the age of children in different neighbourhoods?
In my opinion, you could learn a lot about (young) peoples’ vision of an ideal neighbourbood by analyzing where they want to raise their families; it is a period of life when you’re both fragile yet optimistic and hopeful. The evidence, based on the pram count, is that Vancouver’s old neighbourhoods, close to shops like Main Street and The Drive, not too crowded, are as close to utopia as they can get.
One of the fun parts of my job is getting to talk to architects when they are really excited about a project. That was the case when I went down to see Mark Whitehead and Mark Thompson explain the plans they’ve developed for the old Canada Post building.
They clearly loved solving the puzzle of how to re-use such a huge building (115,000 square feet per floor) and how it could be re-designed to make it a people-activity generator. One of their ideas: create a set of steps along the sloped front of the building on Georgia Street and turn it into the kind of hangout place that has developed on the south-facing steps of the central library, but with even more attractions – some wooden seats built into the steps, plantings, a water feature.
It was also kind of relief to hear about a project where the owner is planning for almost three-quarters of the units to be rentals, without city incentives. Just because pension funds like rental buildings for the income stream.
City council has taken a lot of flak for negotiating deals with developers to do all-rental buildings but letting them charge market, i.e. going-rate rents.
Now, with this new Concert Properties building going up next to the Olympic Village, the city has negotiated a deal that means it gets 135 units in the 600-unit development and it will ensure that at least 40 per cent of the units are below market. Story here.
I asked the city’s housing officer, Mukhtar Latif, why the city can’t do that in the Rental 100 buildings. He said that there isn’t the same kind of land lift in those developments. The city can get an agreement that they’ll be rental by reducing fees and parking requirements and adding some density. But not an agreement to hold the rents to below market.
I’m told the rents for the 40 per cent segment will be $915 for a studio and $1,480 for a three-bedroom for people with qualifying incomes, i.e. below $56,000. (I know those numbers are different from others reported out of a news conference but that’s what was in the chart sent to me later.)
Then the other units will be held to rates for the average in the area, so $900 to $2,000 in the same spread. One of my Twitter commenters expressed disbelief that anyone could find any three-bedroom in the city for $2,000, but that’s what they told me, folks. We’ll see when the building is finished in mid-2018 — just in the for the election campaign!!
A library consists of a relatively similar collection of books you can access through any terminal. There are some variations, but you know what to expect. Which is why most of us don’t go to libraries anymore.
A museum consists of a unique collection of artefacts not available anywhere else in the world. Museums surprise us with new information and new knowledge. They collect, present, and store information in unique ways. They care about the environment.
Don’t let employees treat an internal community as a repository of information that can be found anywhere else. If you become a dumping ground for yesterday’s information, you’ll be an empty library tomorrow. Don’t become a repository.
Strive to be the museum. Collect reports, data, insights, and documents that haven’t been seen before. Solicit the unique experiences and present each as a valuable artefact. If it doesn’t make the grade, don’t show it.
People should be surprised by an internal community, not bored.
To help make the update process as painless as possible, Microsoft has also launched a special upgrade advisor, available starting today on the Windows Store. Much like the upgrade advisor Microsoft launched on PCs and tablets ahead of the release of Windows 10, the app will inform users when their upgrade is ready — some carriers still need to sign off on the update.
Once the update is installed, expect to see redesigned Office and Outlook apps, as well a Cortana that more closely adheres to her desktop counterpart. More importantly, Windows 10 Mobile adds access to Universal Apps, which Microsoft hopes will address the shortage of compelling apps found on Windows Phone 8.1.
Press Release from The Wilderness Committee and Fraser Voices
Open letter urges government to review project and consider alternatives
RICHMOND, BC – Community and national organizations are calling on the federal government to launch an environmental review of the proposed Massey Tunnel Replacement Project and to withhold federal infrastructure funding from the project.
Resident group Fraser Voices, the Wilderness Committee, Council of Canadians and five other organizations representing over 160,000 members and supporters have sent an open letter urging the federal government to use the money it has promised for infrastructure to fund transit projects in Metro Vancouver instead of the new 10-lane highway bridge.
“This federal money gives Canadians an opportunity to correct the mistakes of the past and build a greener future,” said De Whalen, one of the founding members of Fraser Voices. “But the Massey Bridge is imposing the same old car culture from the 1950s.”
The federal government has said it will fund environmental and social infrastructure with its $10 billion per year stimulus money. Extra vehicles resulting from the Massey Bridge and will add about seven million tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere over 50 years.
“It is irresponsible to be building new highways during a climate crisis, especially when they do nothing to ease congestion,” said Peter McCartney, Climate Campaigner for the Wilderness Committee. “Even the mayor of Houston, Texas – with its 26-lane freeway – agrees it’s time to stop building highways and build transit instead.”
Community groups are hoping the federal budget next week will include funding for the Broadway Skytrain project and Surrey LRT instead. Along Highway 99, rapid bus service could ease congestion for a fraction of the $3.5 billion price tag of the proposed Massey Bridge.
The Kettle-Boffo assisted-living/condo proposal at Venables and Adanac in Vancouver’s Grandview neighbourhood flamed brightly a couple of weeks ago, with a number of news articles and radio reports. NIMBY, the schoolyard-quality taunt which is the default put-down of any critic of a nearby development, featured largely in the ensuing debate.
First, an observation. As a species, we are hard-wired to defend turf, and the only thing that trumps that reaction is economic gain. Follow the money – NIMBYs reverse direction and become pro-change when they get the economic incentive to move away (viz. Vancouver west-side homeowners, perhaps?); anti-NIMBYs are almost universally in the property industry, whether as developers, planners, or architects, or they’re theorists who don’t live in the affected area and have no dog in the fight. Ask any wealthy person: “have you had an increased desire to pack yourself in with a pile of strangers?” Of course the answer will be no – wealth buys turf. The people who don’t have the money to buy turf generally defend what little they have.
Here’s the image, as imagined by a seagull flying to the poultry-rendering plant a few blocks away. A 5-storey streetwall with what looks like very tall floor-to-floor heights, ground-level retail, the condo block on the right hand side flatiron where The Drive meets Commercial, 30 units and program space for the Kettle’s mental-health/homeless clients, and 200 market condos. It’s all just a proposal at the moment.
Is it possible to criticize Édifice Kettle-Boffo as a project without getting sandbagged? I’ll try.
• Here’s a comparable, at least one that fits into the West End landscape – a screenshot from the blog Changing City.
Note the composition of it: 28 non-market and 63 condo (mainly 2-bedroom), versus 30 non-market and 200 condos in Kettle-Boffo, which is proposing to use “free land” from the Kettle itself and possibly from the city, which owns the parking lot on the northern portion of the site.
Can somebody please do the math and explain why 1177 Jervis, regardless of its design, seems so much more balanced than Kettle-Boffo?
• Where’s the rental in Kettle-Boffo? This part of Grandview is very heavily occupied with low-rent apartments, with the largest proportion of Aboriginals of any ‘hood in the city, apparently. Wouldn’t a rental proposal help justify the size they’re asking for?
• The streetwall: both Venables and The Drive are narrow, unlike, say, Kingsway and Knight, whose multi-use building has been claimed as a comparison. Five or six tall storeys straight up off the sidewalk will be a gloomy prospect for much of the year for much of the day. Why can’t it be cut in at 3 storeys better to match the nearby buildings?
• The proposed FSR, at 6+, is wildly higher than anything in the neighbourhood. Much has been made of the “precedent” set in the 1970s by the Lions Club Adanac midrise building kitty-corner from the proposed condo midrise, but its FSR can’t be more than 2. It is set back so far from Adanac that a row of mature trees, with 2-foot-diameter trunks, sits comfortably between the building and the sidewalk, and the setback is even deeper on the Commercial Drive side.
Anyone have any other criticisms, or is this all just peachy?
For the neighbourhood, Kettle-Boffo would be an extreme example of spot-zoning, albeit with a laudable aim to partner for a mental-health facility; wasn’t spot-zoning something that Council was going to stop doing by way of adopting orderly planning and listening to neighbourhoods?
The city is putting itself in the position, vis-à-vis all the local apartment-block landowners, of being in a room full of gorillas and having only one banana. If it gives the banana to Boffo, what will it say to the others?
If you’re in Silicon Valley, you might have missed the trend, but the percentage of American workers working for big companies has been increasing, even as corporate bureaucracy is getting more stifling. Strangely, this has been happening even as the companies issue press releases about being more flexible and adaptive, to compete with startups, as Paul Graham argues in his recent controversial essay on Refragmentation. But flexible seems to mean layoffs and reorgs into ever more complex and, yes, fragmented corporate structures. They aren’t slimming down into flexible startups.
Worse, startups scale into big companies, and transform into bureaucracies when they do. Harvard Business Review just came out with some advice on how to stop being a startup. Even startups can’t stay startups. Github, the catalyst for distributed software companies everywhere, is itself restructuring. As the author of this post on Github’s restructuring puts it, “Out with flat org structure based purely on meritocracy, in with supervisors and middle managers.” But why?
My basic argument is this: the legibility that lets companies scale is at odds with the flexible way typical startups operate. I see two extremes, with flexibility and legibility on opposite sides — but transitions only happens in one direction. Small companies give up flexibility and illegibility in exchange for growth. Large companies with legible structure and inflexibility, on the other hand, are not typically interested in giving up size and profitability. Meritocracy, a rallying cry for the Silicon Valley startup mindset, only works when merit can be seen and rewarded by management. Merit can only be obvious to everyone when groups are small enough. Once Github passed Dunbar’s Number, there was going to be no way for people to work as one coherent culture — though they grew so fast they reached double that number before the VCs put in someone to bureaucratize and let them scale.
To understand why management does this, we need to see them how they see themselves. And how does the management of an organization represent structure? Org charts.
Databases and org charts
Management structure is its own little world — and the map of management structure is the org chart. These charts used to be a big deal, but by the ’80s, they had shrunk to simple tree structures. Before I explain why these are trees, specifically, I’ll try to explain why the organization is getting simplified, and what the structure of the organization actually looks like.
The pace of change is one explanation, but I think a simpler one suffices: databases now store org charts. If you store the org chart in a database, the database becomes the org chart. And while databases can store arbitrary data like images, they store graph relationships really easily — which means that the storage technology, databases, actually dictates the structure of the company.
In other words, the medium is the message!
But the relationships stored in these databases need not only be relationships between people. Big bureaucratic companies connect employees to managers in an org chart, but also have big contracts with SAP, or other enterprise resource planning (ERP) software vendors. The ERP databases do a lot more than just store org charts, they map the entire system. Good supply chain managers have maps representing each input, source, and vulnerability for their business processes.
Maps are great at increasing legibility, but once they dictate the territory, you have the ‘Authoritarian High-Modernist Recipe for Failure.’ Unlike social systems, managing a business is a case where imposing structure is probably a good idea. If managers don’t dictate structure, they are trying to manage a system that they haven’t made legible, even to themselves!
It’s much easier to manage this map with ERP systems, which store both HR data, and connect products to business lines, workers to the products they make and sell, and so on. These SQL databases, with their structured indexes and ids, allow managers to generate the reports they need — on profit per vendor, revenue per employee, or almost any other metric they might use.
When companies need to change, there are predefined stored procedures in the database for hiring, firing, or even reorganizing — as long as the database structure itself doesn’t change too much. It is true that the pace of change makes the exact details of the chart less stable, but, like the beautiful org charts of old, these structures are legible — they can lend insight to management, because the structure of the database is clear. Sure, switching from simple management to region-based matrix management to job-type matrix management requires some heavy lifting, but still fits within the structure — SAP has you covered. And that’s what matters — a system legible enough to let your ERP optimize your business process. Walmart need to be really efficient at doing its single job, selling products that it buys cheaply, at scale. Adapting might be hard, but the efficiency of having clear reports and being able to optimize revenue per employee is worth it.
Some “Big Data” startups offer services extracting insight from other companies’ data, but odds are good they don’t collect their own. The big companies have legible, normalized datasets. And the legible data needs analysis once it gets larger than a person can fit inside their tiny 7+/- 2 item brains.
When I think back
on all the crap I learned in B-School,
it’s a wonder
I run startups at all.
And the lack of legibility
hasn’t hurt me none,
’cause I scribble diagrams on the wall.
Startups can’t afford contracts with ERP vendors. That’s good! They need to be much less structured. Rigid structure doesn’t allow for rapid pivoting, but scribbling on the wall does. The pivoting that startups go through lets them find a niche and build a culture that demands investment into new, risky, and possibly profitable ideas. They thrive on the flexibility that illegible structures permit.
So how do they manage to manage? I suppose startups could use agile NoSQL data stores, which can fit their arbitrary changes pretty easily, but to be honest, only an old-school MBA would want them to write down their org chart at all. If data describing the organization is small enough, it doesn’t need to be legible to be understood — and companies start tiny. Github is big and impressive. Logical Awesome was tiny and quirky. The founders probably sat in the same garage. Want three managers for your first employee, and none for the second? Not a problem! Silicon Valley is fine with polygamanagement, to coin a malamanteau. But at some point, they stop pivoting. The “flat org structure based purely on meritocracy” at github wasn’t just a design, it was also a default. It’s a natural default, well-suited to startups, because the flexibility of illegibility is fantastic.
Flexible meritocracy is easy when you can shift people around as soon as you see they are ready without needing to rely on metrics identifying top performers, or wait for yearly performance reviews and promotion cycles. But this changes as a company grows — probably around the time that management notices it doesn’t know who everyone is. This is inevitable even when they say they are “acting like a startup”. If all an employee needs to do in a “large and complex organization” to be recognized is “ show up and do your job,” as the CEO of American Airlines claims, then management is admitting they value legibility over flexibility.
It is possible to have illegible relationships throughout large companies, but then the companies are harder to manage, no more flexible, and impossible to optimize. Big businesses can’t be unstructured. If they try, they end up neither legible nor flexible. How do you store the org chart data if the relationships are unclear? NoSQL is excellent if you’re a graph theorist working with large datasets, grateful for a structure you can work with — but a manager at a big firm would recoil in horror if they were told that there was no way to find billed-hours-to-product-sales for their division. They need that legibility to decide which division to lay off, so they can be more flexible!
Culture and Social Graphs
So far, I’ve been explaining organizational structure as if though all that matters is that it is the territory of management. In fact, the true structure of a large company exists on three intertwined but conceptually distinct levels, and all of them matter.
First, and most legible, are official chains of command, which are the territories corresponding to org charts (well, they would be if the latter were kept updated), and are what we’ve been implicitly discussing so far. These exist in legible databases with clear, 1-to-many manager-to-employee relationships, allowing no ambiguity or complexity. They are trees, and if you keep them pruned and streamlined, they slowly grow and bear reliable crops, in the form of steady ROE.
Second are the business processes, which rely on less formal networks. These can also be stored in a database as business process diagrams. Even if codified, they are much less legible, simply because the processes that exist in a business are not always linear, and most people are part of various different processes. If we have the process structure in a database, even if it’s up to date, it wouldn’t be obvious how to normalize it cleanly. Still, these maps can be captured, and probably shift only at clearly defined times. It’s a messy graph at best — not a tree but a rapidly growing thicket full of independent vines, bushes, and weeds. On the other hand, this thicket is where the real work gets done, organically. If the work isn’t easily defined, these networks need to be more flexible than the org chart. That means that, outside of a few slowly changing sectors, like insurance, shipping, or retail, companies won’t even be able to follow the advice to manage along these rapidly shifting, illegible lines.
Third is the culture, built of personal relationships, reflecting the social graph connecting employees themselves. Unlike the first two, it is not an imposed structure, or a response to business needs, but an emergent network, and a loosely defined culture — and this is much less legible, and definitely isn’t captured anywhere. It’s dynamic, messy, and doesn’t allow for clear structure. While the chain of command reflects patterns of responsibility, and informal networks reflect processes, social graphs reflect moods and chance encounters. They also include weak ties, which means that the structure of the social graph can shift over time in unpredictable ways.
No one other than a researcher would even consider trying to represent the constantly shifting culture — and even researchers would be better off extracting it from employees’ texting and social media relationships than asking the company about it. Instead of passively illegible like a business process, personal relationships can be actively cryptic — specifically not public, or weak enough to fail under the stress of definition.
Despite their impermanence and illegibility, cultures matter. Good ones make companies more resilient, more sociable, and increase retention and satisfaction. If the gods of “Company Culture” are appeased with the right mix of bonuses and flextime, they may even magically help with things shareholders care about, like worker productivity and profits. But this happens only because the first two levels exist as well, providing a habitat. Culture is co-extensive with the ecosystem created by the first two levels of the organization structure — the chain of command and business processes. But rather than being part of the structure of the ecosystem, it is better understood as the activity within it.
Iain M. Banks’ “Culture” series, in part, explores a society without the first two levels. There is no central anything, and everyone does whatever they want. But in such a culture work is voluntary, and rare.
The smaller a company is, the less they need to formalize anything, and the less the three levels — chain of command, business process, and culture — differ. At small scale, you don’t want to formalize. Founders hold the whole thing in their head, and manage everything. If hierarchy exists at all, clear lines of reporting are secondary to the business process. The cryptic social network is obvious to everyone involved, since everyone is already well connected. When a startup is still exploring how it will make money, it can (and must) pivot occasionally, changing the business completely. The loose structure allows it to do so without reorganizing any explicit structures, and the illegible social graph adapts without noticing. Flat unstructured meritocracy works!
Unfortunately, as I noted earlier, this doesn’t scale. If we tried, it would look, at best, like a high school’s social scene. You’d see cliques, relationships that form and dissolve rapidly, and little if any productive work being done, at least by the majority of the students. Startups can hobble along for a while, growing increasingly illegible and messy, especially if given the prospect of a huge payout. You just have to hope that the chaotic emergent social patterns are stable enough so the cheerleaders can keep the football team away from the basketball team long enough for each to play their big games this weekend.
To extend the brief digression into what a startup would look like if we scaled it without adding structure, let’s explore the high school metaphor a bit more deeply.
High Schools, Sex, and Database Design
As noted earlier, only a researcher would try to map a social graph.
A research team interested in the spread of STDs went around a high school and managed to interview 83% of the students, then graphed all the admitted sexual partners that the 573 sexually active students (confidentially) claimed to have with other students (40% of the total number of claimed sexual relationships) over 18 months. They published a paper with the observed social network graphs; .
The graphs show a single aspect of the messy social network of adolescents. As with all attempts to map our dynamic third level, it’s incomplete. For example, I’m guessing not everyone was honest. And other than two seemingly bisexual girls, (can you find them on the chart?) no one at the school is admitting to a homosexual relationship — and that’s probably something you’d care about when studying AIDS. The territory is very different than the map as initially imagined, or even than the one discovered by this study. And the map was supposed to be used for modeling and predicting the spread of STDs.
Epidemiologists like the simplicity of compartmental models — they are fantastic as long as the populations modeled are homogenous in the right ways. But the dynamics of STDs among homosexuals, sex workers, and the social graph of these high school students didn’t simplify the way that models assume. (For epidemiology geeks and graph theorists, the mixing graph is probably closer to Barabási–Albert than Erdős–Rényi.) But why was their mental model wrong? As a first guess, they were used to legible patterns that they and their peers form, not the incoherent and unstable ones that emerge from, say, letting adolescents loose in a high school.
I’ll use database structures to illustrate what assumptions went wrong, and then we can try to use the insight to improve our understanding of social and corporate structure — though the example is much more widely interesting, as well.
Most people, I suspect, have an implicit, mental model that considers a relationship an attribute of a person; Person A has attributes height, weight, interests, job, salary, gender, partner status, etc. This model is sufficient for some purposes, but not for representing relationships. Here, I’ll use the insight of someone much more skilled at building database structure, stealing / adapting the well-constructed example that www.twitter.com/qntm wrote about how a database administrator (DBA) reconstructs a database to include gay marriage — brilliantly labeled the Y2Gay problem. This will refactor the mental map of the territory indirectly, by looking at how to refactor the database structure used to store the map.
To start, we have separate tables to store men and women, with links to the corresponding entry in the other table to represent relationships. This means the “partner” entry is restricted to referencing someone of the opposite gender. (“Gender” obviously used to be considered a binary variable, too — but that’s not our point here.) the partner entry might be flagged as either “dating” or “married.” Sometime, probably in the mid-20th century, people shifted mental models. They kept everyone in a single table, with both men and women listed, and a gender.
Relationships are no longer a link between two different tables, with different categories of humans — it’s just a link by each person to another. If we want to preserve “traditional marriage,” (as The Mythical Man Monthexplains,) it requires having male people marry female people. How do we do that? Instead of requiring a “partner” entry in the opposite gender table, it requires the partner from the people table be restricted to the opposite gender. When gay marriage began to be discussed, the model could simply remove the restriction that the partner needs to be of the opposite gender. At first, they required a flag for “civil union” instead of “married,” but it’s a crude hack, and people moved on. Voilà, we have gay marriage! (Interestingly, in many ways, accepting more fluid gender identities, and gay marriage, is partly a consequence of changing mental models to treat women as people.)
Our change so far is a minor refactoring. Sure, it tells us that marriage can be conceptualized as between two people, instead of a man and a wife. It even helps clarifying that women are people too. (Yes, they can even have attributes like those men have, like jobs, or ambition!) This is a more or less acceptable database structure for representing most people, and most long term relationships — because they are pretty legible already. It’s still not enough to help our epidemiologists, or enough to explain the problems with startups scaling. High schoolers, like those in our study, are more complicated. Obviously we need a more flexible, less legible structure to let us represent and understand their relationships.
For a simple example of why our current structure is incomplete, how do we represent ex-partners? Obviously, it matters for a high schooler — sleeping with your friend’s ex is creating an ex-friend. Who you used to sleep with is an even more critical part of the picture for an STD epidemiologist. To track this, do we need a column for relationship 1..n, each of which has a partner, and a start/end date? A DBA will quickly notice that this doesn’t scale well, and keeping these entries updated and consistent is a nightmare; you could have unconsummated marriages, or accidental polygamy, where, because of a badly performed marriage registry update, multiple people are married to the same person. (And how to we decide who pays child support?)
Instead, we can be more radical in refactoring our mental model, and the equivalent, better normalized database model: we can treat a relationship as independent of the people, and use a new table with attributes that include which people are in it. The new table has two entries for each relationship, one for each participant, as well as a start date, an end date, and a type — so we can include fiancés, marriages, and even one-night flings using the same structure. We now only enforce a simple rule to limit people to one relationship at a time.
But why stop there? Now that we replaced the 1–1 relationship of males <-> females with a decently normalized table structure, why wouldn’t we go all the way to letting relationships have arbitrary structures? If you’re interested in STD transmission, you need to be able to represent what happens; a still-limited database structure is hardly a reason to object. How do we fix it?
We remove the requirement that each relationship be exclusive, or limited to two people. The new, more expansive model works well for showing the high school network, easier to use and keep updated, and much better than the planar graphs of a small slice of time that the researchers created. As the original Y2Gay essay concludes, the new model extends all the way to graph-theory, with arbitrarily complex directed nodes. Any graph, in the mathematical sense, can be represented. This allows a much better model of how people actually have cohabited, and not just in high schools; group marriages, Heinlein-esque line marriages, and the vast panoply of similar structures from history.
Putting all these changes together, we can specify a legible database — but we end up able to represent illegible social networks. It can represent any type of actual relationship, but it can represent arbitrarily complex, implausible structures just as easily. I’m sure there’s someone in the polyamory subculture of Silicon Valley with a PhD in network theory who’s mapping out cool untried graphical structures, since the number of graphs explodes pretty quickly, but the central question isn’t about the graph — it’s what people want, or do, and how adaptive these structures are. What I’ll call pivot culture, which exists in high schools and colleges, doesn’t want or need legibility. But if you’re a lawyer, you need to know who inherits, who pays child support, and who gets hospital visitation rights. Tradeoffs exist between legibility and the freedom of arbitrary structure — so it’s a good thing for lawyers that as people grow up, they decide on more legible relationships.
As an aside, a question that initially bothered me about polyamory was: why isn’t polyamory more widespread, especially among people who aren’t religious or traditional? Yes, there are some scale limits. At the very least, there is a tradeoff between the frequency you can see someone and the number of people involved, but I’m sure there are people who would be happy to juggle 5 or 10 partners. Why isn’t it more common? Why don’t adults keep pivoting, and why is polygamy now relatively rare? Traditional marriage was a good tradeoff for social designers who wanted legible structures, but it’s less obvious why it’s useful for the people. Given that, it’s confusing why so many people nowadays think there is a single “correct” family structure.
I’ll leave that as a question for now, because it should answer itself later, once we figure out why companies don’t stay agile as they scale. The parallel to companies, though, is clear; what social structures work, for what purposes, and why? In order to answer this question, we can refactor companies the way we refactored relationships. Seeing where this works, or doesn’t work, will finally address the question of why org charts are trees instead of some other structure, and answer the original question of why startups need to go corporate or go home.
Legibility happens
Startups typically find a useful business model by starting with an idea, raising cash, then pivoting until they succeed, or fail. If a startup is successful, it starts generating some free cash flow, then gathers enough profit or bamboozles a high enough valuation to buy Time Warner — or get bought by them. Either way, it forms a small part of the Silicon Valley circle of life. I’d call it the standard Silicon Valley model — but as you’re anticipating, it’s a bit self-defeating; once you succeed, you no longer need to pivot.
Observers will notice that any company successful enough to buy or be bought either has gone corporate, or starts tripping over its unmanageable structure, and needs to fix it, or they might as well go home. For these less well-run, less ambitious, or less lucky companies, they fizzle and stay small, or go bankrupt, and the circle of life continues. In either direction, it leads a bit further towards consolidation, not decentralization.
Flat meritocracies are awesome. Can’t an emergent startup culture, full of collaboration and creativity, allow companies to succeed without turning into corporate bureaucracies? To phrase this differently, Peter Pan has more fun, and startups don’t want to grow up. Can’t kids stay kids, and be successful too?
No. This is where the social graph becomes critical. The number of possible social graphs explodes very quickly; 7 people have only 156 possible configurations, 10 have over a quarter million, and by the time you get to 15 people, the quadrillions of possible structures is clearly unmanageable. This means that decision makers can’t understand the impacts of their decisions. Hiring people becomes a mess, since the only way to scale anything is to disrupt this chaotic network. Firing people, or even reassigning them, is worse — it may be removing a key piece of some process a manager, or even the employee, doesn’t notice.
What is the alternative? Simple, legible org charts. (Preferably trees, which are really simple — and I’ll explain why trees are so simple soon.) Simple structures means that decision makers understand the impacts of their decisions.
Refactoring Bureaucracy
We now have laid out some extremes, and pointed out why startup companies inevitably move towards illegibility when they stay organic. If they succeed, it’s because they manage to move from less legible, organic towards corporate. On the other hand, they can fail in many ways; they can fail to become legible when they try to go corporate, and wreck the business doing so, or they can stay organic by failing to impose enough order to enable growth.
Successful startups generally move from organic and legible towards organic an illegible as they grow, but if they don’t halt the process and impose legibility, they fail. How is this done? The recent piece at HBR that I mentioned at the outset does a great job outlining some strategies. If you’re only interested in scaling a startup, the article is a great place to start, but we can think a bit more about the theory, and how this occurs. There is some more theory I think we can expose here, and I will finally explain why org charts need to be trees.
Graph Theory and Org Charts
The company types in our earlier 2×2 correspond to certain types of org charts — or, in the mathematical sense, graphs. To consider the theoretical possibilities for structuring a company, we can look at what graph structures are possible, and what they correspond to in terms of companies. Here’s a picture to get us started, which uses different, albeit related, axes:
If you don’t know the terminology, don’t worry. The things we care about are mostly visible in the chart, or are about size. The only other thing that matters for us is sparsity, which is just a fancy way of saying a graph has relatively few links between nodes.
We can put many of the types of graphs from the zoo into an analogue of our 2×2, then step through and explain which are useful for companies.
In the top-right quadrant, we start with very small graphs. These are somewhat legible no matter what the structure is — as we mentioned above, early stage startups don’t have structural constraints. Sparse, scale-free networks are also organic and legible even at a somewhat larger size. A healthy startup turns into one as it begins to grow, on the way to getting larger and less sparse. This continues to work at a larger size, up to around Dunbar’s Number, when the company’s organization is sparse — employees don’t need to communicate much across areas. Making org structures less sparse helps with communication as size increase, but it overloads people with too much communication and management responsibility.
Next, in the bottom-right quadrant, we have larger scale-free networks. (“SF-like” in the earlier image). These have legible structure but are organic instead of imposed. I suspect this is the structure of many open source projects. We already mentioned that communication overload makes this stop working if not sparse. If they are sparse enough to allow people to work, they would be interesting as organizational structures, but not as management structures, because they don’t allow central control. This failing makes them anti-corporate, and also probably makes them hard to optimize when you need profitability.
Moving to the bottom-left quadrant, other types of large sparse graphs, ones that are connected artificially, like modular ER-Graphs, are unhelpful for all the previously applicable reasons: communication is hard, there is no coherent leadership, and optimization isn’t possible — you’d only consider them if you care more about network resiliency than efficiency. They might be useful for terrorist cells, but that’s about it.
In the top-left quadrant, before we arrive at trees, we do have another legible, imposed structure. Fully connected graphs are fantastic for communication — everyone talks to everyone else. Unfortunately they are not sparse enough for sanity; everyone needs to be aware of everything else. We already mentioned that it can’t scale as a management paradigm, due to cognitive overload on the part of managers, and Dunbar’s number. (Modern communications allows us to get some of the benefits of connection without the overload, at the social network level. Nowadays, anyone can email the CEO, and it probably isn’t even filtered by their secretary. Despite this, we don’t expect management to happen this way, even if it does make the social graph potentially well connected.)
As we stated earlier, most big companies use tree structures. Now we can suggest a first reason why — most alternatives are unappealing. Slight variations on the theme, however, might be a bit more helpful. We’ll mention them, after a more mathematical detour that further explains why trees are so great.
Computational Complexity of Organizations
This gets even more technical, and you can skip this section, but if you have some familiarity with computational complexity theory…
What’s the computational complexity of most operations on a tree? In computer science terms, it’s O(Log n) — or in lay terms, ‘not too bad’. Your system still gets slower with scale, but it’s logarithmic, so it can grow without grinding to a halt. Other structures (like lists) might be faster for insertion and deletion, but searching is slower, and we need to do communicate a lot more than we need to change the org structure. Communication can be loglinear with the size of a system, at least as long as your network is a tree.
Why? Legibility is related to ease of communication: if something is legible, you can see where to go and what to do. Every time you need to ask about item X for product Y, you need to find the person in charge of it. But on an arbitrary graph, that’s O(n) or worse. When you need to look at incidence matrices, to know who works with the person you need, since, say, they are out of the office, it’s really bad, O(n · v) — so the less legible the organization is, the harder it is to be resilient. And if you need to optimize, forget it — it’s tree-searches versus traveling salesman problems.
Legibility for Large Structures
We know large bureaucracies are almost always essentially tree-like. They can alter their structure slightly, but not radically simplify. Given this, we would still like to know which variations of treelike structures are useful. Using the theory developed, I’ll describe two of them, and note the graphs that describe them. Of course, both of these are relatively legible and treelike primary structures, and they are never going to allow for unlimited flexibility — they only change the trade-off between robustness and ease of optimization.
First, matrix management lays a slightly less legible layer higher up in the tree. The trade-off allows a bit more flexibility at the top, at the cost of a bit of legibility there. This moves a bit closer to a hierarchical modular structure at the top, trading legibility for those lower down for more connected structure, so that the organization is more fully connected at the upper levels. This means senior managers can all work together as a team, even while those lower down are still stovepiped.
Second, they can create modularity (which is found in social systems) throughout the tree, making it more connected within each area. This trade-off allows a bit more robustness in exchange for a loss in legibility for senior managers. This allows some flexibility in the internal management structures lower down, even if it decreases legibility, making it harder for other parts of the business to work with them.
Legibility for Growth
OK, big organizations will be more efficient if they are tree-like. This limits the endpoints, but there are still many possibilities for getting there. It’s worthwhile to explain how scaling might happen well or badly, and review the process we’ve been discussing from the beginning using the new terminology.
Startups are illegible, with essentially random graphs. This is good for flexibility, and allows meritocracy. The nodes will not be interchangeable, but they are dictated by contingent needs, not structure. You can’t fire the receptionist, he’s the only one who knows how to keep the email server running. Also, no-one else knows how payroll works. The company is flexible, but not scalable. Then the company grows anyways, and that is good for investors, but it is bad for management, which starts imposing structure, or losing control.
As a company scales up a bit, if it wants to be efficient, jobs and responsibilities are shifted around and rationalized. Now the company is partially structured by task or goal, but with a sparse, scale free graph with a high degree of connection and interdependencies between business units. These are not legible, but that’s not too big a deal until the company continues growing. You need someone managing different parts of the company, since it’s now too big to have a single omniscient CEO.
If growth continues without a full overhaul, managers will end up with unclear areas of responsibility, and no way to evaluate or understand the tasks of employees. And you can’t have a meritocracy if you can’t evaluate merit. The company needs to increase legibility.
We’ve explained that a tree is a fairly unique structure for legibility at scale, given our problem constraints. That’s why we see typical corporate structures, instead of varieties, and why startups all face similar scaling problems. Companies will find that other structures, say, for business processes, face a different set of tradeoffs. Not using trees can make more sense when legibility is less critical. That doesn’t mean trees are always optimal even for organizational structure, but it’s at least a good default — and defaults are always more legible, if only because of their familiarity. (This also finally answers the questions about polyamory; typical structures are comfortable, and the simplest structure that allows for a relationship is a dyad.)
Variations on a Theme
Growing startups probably would prefer to modify the emergent structure instead of allowing it to grow unmanageably, or completely replacing it. There are better and worse ways to do this.
A seemingly plausible but bad strategy is worth dismissing; simply actively limiting connections between various areas of a business. This will succeed in reducing connectivity, by leaving only small, emergent subgraphs that are unstructured. This solves one problem, because the company stays sparsely connected overall, and local legibility stays high by making each segment small enough not to need much structure. That helps keep things a bit clearer for management, and it’s known as stove-piping: it makes companies especially inflexible, and everyone despises it.
What is the alternative to stovepiping? A switch to a typical bureaucratic tree-building mode. And that’s what we saw with Github. As the earlier article explained, “Out with flat org structure based purely on meritocracy, in with supervisors and middle managers.” And this is exactly what the HBR article advises; “firms must… add management structures to accommodate increased head count while maintaining informal ties across the organization.”
Conclusion
So now I can repeat myself a bit more, and answer my original question succinctly why don’t companies stay flexible? It’s a necessary result of scaling up and the need for legibility to optimize large systems. We’d love to have flexibility, but the cost is scale, integration, and profitability. For a startup to succeed, it needs to get past the phase where it can be fluid. This isn’t, of course, an iron law — but it’s a reason that we’re not seeing tech visionaries extrapolations borne out in the wider economy. The math of complexity isn’t changing, and humans have cognitive limits. That means we need to accept that growth of companies post-startup phase will not be exponential, nor even linear, but logarithmic — scaling along with the legibility of a tree.
s tech-centric Potrero Hill. “It happens all the time 
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