It's Ada Lovelace Day Today — Participate! [en]

In 2009 and 2010 Ada Lovelace Day took place on March 24th. Not, as many thought, Ada’s birthday, but a random date that just happened to be that one. This year (and the next ones!) Ada Lovelace Day is taking place on October 7th, today, that is.

In 2009 I wrote about Marie Curie, and in 2010 about my friend Suw Charman (both articles are in French). I also seized the occasion to write about women travelers on the ebookers travel blog: Ella Maillart and Sarah Marquis. I’m very honoured that a few people chose to feature me in their Ada Lovelace Day blog posts (our sadly departed Jean-Christophe amongst them).

Ada Lovelace Day is about showcasing women in science and tech (STEM). Girls need same-sex role models more than boys do, and ALD is about making them visible.

Who are you going to write about today? I’m personally not sure who I’m going to write about yet. I know a pile of great women doing great stuff in social media, and it’s hard to choose between them, but I’d like to find somebody to talk about outside my direct industry.

You’ll have the answer as I write my post later on!

 

One a Week? [en]

[fr] Tant d'articles à écrire. Un par semaine, peut-être? Histoire d'avancer dans le tas? Suivez les liens si vous êtes impatient...

Hello there! Another of Steph’s “grappling with blogging” posts. I’m starting to have a pile-up of “posts I need to write about cool stuff” but that I don’t get around to writing because of course, paid work and need for downtime tend to be more of a priority these days.

I need to write about my kindergarten classmate Kris Di Giacomo who does lovely children’s books illustrations. I need to write about Skeeble, my friend Xavier Bertschy‘s “painlessly create your smartphone app” service, which recently got significant local funding. I need to write about Horse Coaching, which I discovered last week thanks to an invitation from Valérie Demont, one of last year’s students from my SAWI social media course. I should probably also talk about the “learn to write for a blog” training day she’s helping me set up for December 3rd (in Lausanne, in French). I have a pile of articles waiting to be written about my trip to Morat (thanks to Fribourg Région). I want to write about what I’m doing to try and make something of my childhood passion for animals and their behaviour, amongst other things by offering to volunteer at Wildlife SOS while I’m in India in a few weeks.

So, I’m thinking that maybe I should be “modest” (ha! ha!) in my ambition and put one of these posts on my to-do list every week. And do it.

LeWeb'11: Open For Official Blogger Applications [en]

[fr] Comme chaque année à cette époque, vous pouvez demander une accréditation "blogueur officiel" pour LeWeb.

Thanks to your recommendations, we’ve started inviting bloggers and podcasters to LeWeb’11 as “Official Bloggers“.

From now on, you can of course also simply apply to be an Official Blogger. Arne and Fred will take care of reviewing applications.

Please read the introduction instructions (those given for recommendations are worth a read too) and fill in the form carefully, as it makes it easier for us to deal with the hundreds of applications we get each year in a timely manner. Thanks in advance!

Applications now closed.

Linkball [en]

[fr] Une pile de liens, encore!

So, here’s another bunch of interesting links I’ve found and read. Again, blame Twitter/Tumblr/Facebook (and falling down the blog-hole), I’ve lost my sources for most of them. So, a big warm thanks to all the people I follow someplace or other — it’s thanks to you collectively.

W.L. Gore: Lessons from a Management Revolutionary (via johntropea): you’ve all heard of Gore-Tex, right? The company behind it, Gore, sounds very much like a “company of the future” when you read about how it is run (“self-run” is a better term).

My Family’s Experiment in Extreme Schooling: off to Russia from the US (and into a Russian-medium school…)

ZOMBIES, RUN! Running game & audio adventure for iOS/Android: on Kickstarter, a game that will make you run in real life to survive the zombie attack inside the game. If you’re trying to back the project and Amazon doesn’t let you — happens with some non-US accounts, this workaround works.

Nobody Asked For A Refrigerator Fee: how fridges and electricity killed Stockholm’s largest employer a century ago. An example of innovation making business models go bankrupt. Sheds interesting historical light on the uproar around the demise of certain industries brought on by the internet.

A Jobs Plan for the Post-Cubicle Economy: how the work world is changing, and how our migration from office to freelancing is similar to migration from farm to factory.

SEO for Non-dicks: couldn’t have said it better. Read this if you’re concerned about search result placement.

Facebook Scare: Uncheck Comments and Likes: have been trying to fight the epidemic of “please uncheck comments and likes” copy-paste madness on Facebook by spreading this article. Scoop: your comments and likes have always been visible. They depend on the visibility of the status you’re commenting or liking. Only now, you actually get to see if the status is public or not (before, you had to guess). Don’t panic. Go and review your privacy settings instead. And get ready for Timeline, which is going to turn Facebook upside-down for you, whether you want it or not. (God save us all. I can already see the wave of panic, rumors, protests and bunched-up panties that is going to hit us.)

It’s the end of the web as we know it: I keep seeing articles that remind us of the importance of owning our data. Have you noticed how you’re reading this on Climb to the Stars, on my own domain, hosted on my own server, run with my own WordPress installation? Yup.

What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? Excellent article on schools and education. Failure, we needs it. Parents who feel compelled to shield their progeny from all the ills of the world, read this fast — you might be depriving them of valuable opportunities to learn critical coping skills. (This is not to say you should be a hard-hearted bastard. Find the right balance.)

Interesting Articles You Should Read [en]

[fr] De la lecture. (Il y a un article en français. Sisi.)

A little link-dump, I’m sure you don’t all follow me on Twitter or read Digital Crumble. I stumbled upon a few really interesting articles lately (or less lately). Here they are. (Don’t have sufficient energy to comment, but not doing perfect should never be an excuse for not doing at all! Oh, and of course 90% of the time I don’t have the faintest idea how I found them — thanks to all the people I follow on Twitter, Facebook, G+, and the random encounters of hanging out online.)

Enjoy!

Bloggers: an Opportunity to Contribute to the paper.li Community Blog [en]

[fr] Paper.li développe son blog communautaire et cherche des contributeurs!

Bloggers and freelance writers, this is for you! I’m working with paper.li (you know them, right?) and we’re plotting an expansion/development of their community blog. In short, this means:

  • more interviews of interesting members of the paper.li community (similar to what Kelly has done until now)
  • thematic articles (either original content, commentary on stuff published elsewhere, bundles of commented links…) around “curation”, personal online publishing and editing — and where it’s going, basically: how we’re dealing with the wealth of information online (I guess you can see why this is a relevant topic for paper.li)
  • …and I’ll be editing/managing publication.

We already have a few people lined up to conduct interviews of paper.li community members (we’re open to more if it’s the kind of thing you’d love doing) and we are looking for bloggers or other online writers who are interested in writing some articles with us.

Maybe you would just like to do a one-off guest post, or you think you’d like to contribute regularly, because you have lots to say or want to help us assemble, organise and comment the related articles and links we’re collecting.

If you want to be part of this, we want to hear from you! Please use the following form to get in touch.

The form is now closed. If you’d like to get in touch, head over to the Contribute page on the community blog.

A few organisational/context notes to help you understand what we’re doing:

  • we’re aiming to publish about 10 articles a month (so, pretty low amount of publications — we want quality first)
  • published posts will receive a (modest) financial compensation, but this isn’t Demand Media where you can churn out 50 posts a week to make a living out of it — so we assume you also have other motivations to participate (passion, another audience, visibility, intellectual curiosity…)
  • we ask for a week of exclusivity for the content you publish with us — after that, you’re free to republish on your blog or anywhere else
  • posts will of course link back to your blog if you want
  • we’re pretty open editorially (and still defining the borders or our topics), so feel free to submit stuff even if it seems slightly off-topic!

We’re waiting to hear from you, and don’t hesitate to get in touch or use the comments if you have questions or want more information.

10 Years Ago [en]

[fr] Il y a dix ans, le 9 septembre 2011.

10 years ago I was in Rishikesh with other Hindi students. The internet connection was really bad, and I saw a post on Dave Linabury’s blog about the attacks. I didn’t know whether to believe it or not.

I went down to the hotel rooms, a bit shaken, to see if the woman from our party with a radio could tell me anything. She was thinking it was a horrible hoax when I arrived, and it took us less than 10 words between the two of us to realize it was for real.

It was the evening in India. We huddled in a hotel room with a TV to follow the news. I remember thinking very hard (it would have been praying if I prayed) “I hope Bush doesn’t do something really stupid like invade Afghanistan”.

Structured vs. Freeform Work [en]

Thanks to the endless “how we work” discussions my friend Steph and I have, I’ve understood that more than simply hanging out online less, one of the things I’ve done since I started trying to be more productive and focused with my work (through Paymo and the Pomodoro Technique) is turn everything I do for work into “must do” tasks.

I’m somebody who has impulses to do things — I’ve mentioned it in passing about blogging, but it’s valid for other things. I suddenly feel it’s important to prepare this or that document, or get back to such-and-such, or clean my desk. And — this is the important bit — I think I enjoy doing things more when they are born of an impulse or an urge rather than because they are on the list of things I must do today.

I’ve learned (with my failed experiment at having readers vote on what they wanted me to write about) that I can turn something I really want to do into something I really don’t want to do by simply putting it on a to-do list or planning a time to do it. It sucks, and in an ideal world I would function differently, but that’s obviously how it works for me. I can kill my enthusiasm by turning something into a task.

So, what to do?

I’d like to make it quite clear I don’t blame Paymo or the Pomodoro Technique. If anything, what has happened to me shows how useful these two tools are at focusing on stuff that must get done.

The problem is that I have reduced my work to “stuff that must get done”. I need to find a balance. Balance! I keep saying that. My big quest of the year seems to be balance.

Paymo is really useful for me to know where my time goes, but its negative side-effect is that it prevents me from freely drifting from one thing to another, and just following my impulse of the moment. What I’ve done for the moment is created another “client” in my list (“various”) which only has one project (“freeform”).

This allows me to put myself in “freeform work mode”, set the timer so I still have an idea of how many work hours I put in each week/day/month, but not have to worry about what I’m doing. I’m going to lose track to some extent of how much time I spend doing certain things, but at this stage I think it’s more important that I find more pleasure in work again.

The Pomodoro Technique is great for knocking down tasks, or making sure I do “maintenance work” on long-term projects where nothing is urgent right now, so I don’t fall behind. It’s great for fighting procrastination. It’s great of doing what really has to be done. But it’s too structured for me to spend my whole work time using it.

So what I’m going to try doing is work freeform in the morning — do what I feel like doing, without obsessing about productivity — and do tomatoes in the afternoon to make sure the important stuff does get done.

I’ll try to remember to report back after a few days.

Do you have any experiences or thoughts to share on working in a structured vs. freeform way? Do you need both, or favour one style? I’m interested in hearing from you about this.

Hanging out Online: Why it's Important for me [en]

[fr] Aux abonnés absents: le temps passé à trainer en ligne sans but précis. La faute à trop de travail, peut-être, à trop de structure dans mon travail, et à une fuite de l'ordinateur lorsque je cherche à me détendre. Il y a un équilibre à retrouver -- parce que trainer en ligne, c'est quand même fun, et c'est ce qui m'a amené à faire le métier que je fais!

One thing I realized shortly after writing my article on downtime is that I have stopped “hanging out online”. And I think that “downtime” activity plays a more important role in my life balance than I’d realized until now.

I think two or three things led to this.

First, I’ve had lots of work this spring (nothing new, but I like to keep repeating it). I managed to preserve most of my “off the computer” downtime, and I realize now that what I sacrificed was the aimless tinkering-chatting-reading-writing-hanging-out online.

More importantly, I started using Paymo in April to give myself an idea of how much time I’ve been spending on what — and how many hours of actual work I was doing. It’s been really useful and has helped me gather precious info on my work, but it has had a side effect: I have started thinking more about what I spend my time on, and being more “monotask” in the way I work.

When I know I have the timer running on preparing my SAWI course, for example, or working on LeWeb blogger accreditations, I don’t feel free to drift off into something else, or read an article or check out Tumblr while I’m working. This is kind of twisted, because the only person who cares how much time I spend on something in this case is me.

So, I’ve changed the way I work, and I’m not sure it’s entirely a good thing. I think I’ve lost my balance.

Using the Pomodoro Technique has made it “worse”. I mean, it has accentuated this trend. It’s been really good for my productivity, it’s been really good to help me be less stressed, and it’s been really good to help me beat my procrastinative tendancies. But I think it hasn’t been good for my overall satisfaction about my work. Something is missing — that’s what I’ve been telling people all these last months. Everything is fine with my work, I have enough of it (more than enough!), it’s interesting, but something is not quite right.

And I think that part of this “not quite right” is that I’ve become too focused on just getting the “work work” done (the one that pays), and I’ve neglected the fun part of work, which is my interest for the online world and the people who inhabit it. I also suspect this can have something to do with my lack of blogging — there hasn’t been much to feed that part of me recently.

So, maybe I have to come back in part to how I was working before. Find a balance. This is not a new preoccupation of mine: for a few years now I’ve been lamenting the fact that I’m not managing to set aside enough time to tinker online, write, do research. But I think it’s become more extreme since I started focusing more exclusively on my client work.

Maybe what I need to do is do tomatoes in the morning, and work more “loosely” in the afternoon (or the opposite). Tinker, get stuff done, write, whatever I feel like doing (including dealing with emergencies or “too much work” if I feel the daily rythm of morning tomatoes isn’t cutting it). Maybe I need to have “tomato days” and “non-tomato days”. Maybe I need to watch less TV (haha!) in the evening and spend more time hanging out online on Google+. Maybe I need to find a way to allow myself to multitask more (!) when I’m working. I’m not sure what the answer is yet.

What hanging out online does for me is the following, as far as I can make out:

  • gives my brain time to wander around (cf. Downtime post)
  • allows me to keep in touch with what’s going on in the social media world, and the people who are part of it
  • gives me food for thought a something to do with those thoughts (if all I do is work and consume fiction, chances are I won’t have much to blog about, right?)
  • it’s a space to tinker with tech and new toys (something I like doing per se)

And more importantly (this is something I think I’ve already written about somewhere regarding blogging and its relation to my work), “online” is a space I enjoy. I like being there. It’s part of the reason I made my job about it. So, just as it is a warning light if my job prevents me from blogging, it’s a warning light if the way I organize my work life prevents me from hanging out online.

Now, as I’ve already said: it’s all a question of balance. Spending my whole life tinkering online and working does not work either.

But these last months (and maybe years), the balance has been off. And right now, I think I’m starting to get unstuck, and am on my way to finding (building?) more balance.

Lift12: décidez d'y aller avant fin octobre [fr]

[en] Decide to attend Lift conference in Geneva before end October -- prices go up after that!

La conférence Lift, c’est génial, il ne faut pas rater (si vous n’y êtes pas encore allés c’est le moment de le faire), et c’est à Genève.

Chaque année, je motive des gens à y aller, et souvent, on me dit “mais c’est cher”. Ça, c’est parce qu’il faut s’y prendre à l’avance. (En passant, les gens qui y vont sont super contents et reviennent l’année suivante…)

Jusqu’au 31 octobre, les 3 jours de Lift sont à 650 CHF. Après, les prix grimpent. Décidez-vous donc maintenant (et décidez d’y aller, surtout).

Quelques articles que j’ai écrits à ce sujet au cours des années:

Chômeurs, étudiants: si vous vous décidez maintenant, vous pouvez avoir un billet à 150 CHF…