My name is Jevon MacDonald. I write about the impact of Social Business Design.
Malcom Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point, is now blogging. Subscribed.
Updates from February, 2006
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Malcom Gladwell Blog
Jevon
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At IMA in Seattle
Jevon
I am here at the Integrated Media Conference for Public Radio taking place in Seattle. Jeff Hansen and I headed over to his station KUOW on the University of Washington campus (well, pretty close to it) to watch a live airing of Radio OpenSource with Chris Lydon. The taping was great, and I had a chance to talk to Chris as well as Robert Scoble afterwards.
I have always enjoyed Chris Lydon since I met him in a chance encounter at the NextMedia conference in PEI almost 4 years ago.
The conference itself is very much a conference, but the message behind it is an important one for Public Radio, and we are all glad to see the conversation really getting started, what we hate to see is a competition starting at the same time. Competition and conversation don’t work very well together.
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The 2006 Public Broadcasting New Media Conference
Jevon
I will be at the 2006 Public Broadcasting New Media Conference this week (get into Seattle on the 22nd), and it coincides Podcast Hotel Seattle which Will Pate and hoodlums will be at.
The IMA conference is a brain trust of some of the best thinkers we have seen in public broadcasting, and I hope to hear as much as I can from all of them, on panels and in the halls.
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So, what do you do?
Jevon
There’s a fun question. Part of the problem of being 1/2 web app developer, 1/2 “consultant” and 100% secretive is that I have an odd time putting what I do in reasonable language. At least I do when I am put on the spot.
I work as a company, Laudably, inc., Laudably is a face for most of my work and as a company it employs just me and I spend about the same amount on contracting out as I would on 1 fulltime employee. Under Laudably, I develop an app that right now we call “Sandbox”, but there will soon be a public release under the name “Firestoker”. The web-app is an internal tool for organizations.
Right now there are installs that have up to 160 users on them, and as few as 10 people. One of our clients will be moving to close to 400 users soon, so we are doing a lot of work on rebuilding the firestoker app, they have a roadmap that takes them to 800 of their subsidiaries, each of who have an average of 10-15 employees.
Enter the Trinity. Building software that changes an organization is a waste of time, unless you can guide your client through the cultural maze of this new world.
I also work as 1/3 partner of a consulting group called The Renewal Group, and that is made up of Rob Paterson from The Renewal Consulting Group (can you guess where we got the name?), and Kashmir Birk who runs The True North, who do a lot of Change Management consulting among other work.
As this group of three, we work with companies to help build a vision and strategy to break out of where they are, and we help them find a new directions. All of which is our way of helping executives shift decision making and power towards the outside of the organization to both employees and the customer, as we believe that this is where real knowledge and understanding exist.
Who hires us? It is no secret that we now work for NPR and several of it’s affiliate stations. We have also done a lot of work at The Pizza Delight Group and some of Canada’s largest universities and Banks. Of course, there are always a few clients you can’t talk about, and some you shouldn’t yet. The specifics of our work is always a little sensitive too.
What’s does the future hold? As the business of the trinity grows, we are seeing a lot of strength in our arms-length relationship. It is allowing us to focus strongly on what each of us is best at. I am moving more and more back towards building Firestoker, which is going to be a critical link in all of our work. Rob can return to thinking big and developing long-term goals and strategies and Kashmir is able to focus on (what I think are) his real strength: seeing where change needs to happen most, and working behind the lines to jumpstart it.
To be honest, I can’t cover our little world in one blog post, but this is a glimpse. In posts to come, I will talk about how we work together, and the kind of people we will need to work with us in the future (soon!).