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I’m moving to another organization with a more entrepreneurial and startup orientation to activism. Been thinking a lot about how this will change my job focus and have been really impressed with Eric Ries and the five things he thinks startups CTOs need to focus on and his canonical, “The CTO’s primary job is to make sure the company’s technology strategy serves its business strategy.”

• Platform selection and technical design
• Seeing the big picture (in graphic detail)
• Provide options
• Find the 80/20 (understand the objective and then give it for 20% of the cost)
• Grow technical leaders (and technical skills of the organization)
• Own the development methodology (it decides what we can do and what we need to do)

Those of you who know something of my checkered backstory know I actually started off University in astrophysics. I still carry that sense of wonder about the universe and its secrets with me and am always floored about what we learn about the world beyond our backyard. Hubble’s 3D model of the red shifted data from the Hubble Ultra Deep field:

Personally, just waiting for warp drive and transporters myself… and that big screen TV on the bridge.

mySociety , the force behind such excellent online pro-democracy tools in the UK as TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow are calling for proposals for the next amazing online tool they need to build.

Got a great idea, but lack the development muscle to make it happen ? Here’s your chance to create something with clear social, civic or democratic value and make the UK a better place (and it needs it).

Seth’s most recent post perfectly outlines one current predicament I’ve seen a lot lately: Pretty tactics; absolutely no strategy.

New media creates a blizzard of tactical opportunities for marketers, and many of them cost nothing but time, which means you don’t need as much approval and support to launch them.

As a result, marketers are like kids at Rita’s candy shoppe, gazing at all the pretty opportunities.

Most of us are afraid of strategy, because we don’t feel confident outlining one unless we’re sure it’s going to work. And the ‘work’ part is all tactical, so we focus on that. (Tactics are easy to outline, because we say, ‘I’m going to post this.’ If we post it, we succeed. Strategy is scary to outline, because we describe results, not actions, and that means opportunity for failure.)

Fantastic post from the insightful guys over at 37Signals:

Hire a ton of people rapidly and a ‘strangers at a cocktail party’ problem is exactly what you end up with. There are always new faces around so everyone is unfailingly polite. Everyone tries to avoid any conflict or drama. No one says, ‘This idea sucks.’ People appease instead of challenge.

And that appeasement is what gets companies into trouble. You need to be able to tell people when they’re full of crap. If that doesn’t happen, you start churning out something that doesn’t offend anyone but also doesn’t make anyone fall in love.

Gene Kranz was Flight Director during the Apollo missions and the guy immortalized as the get it done person who helped get the Apollo 13 astronauts home when everyone else thought they were done for and famously attributed to the quotation “Failure is not an option.” This is what he said after the death of three astronauts in a training exercise in 1967 which became known as the Kranz Dictum:

Bless the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Always doing some awesome work, they’ve put out a great piece on digital self defence.

6 Ideas For Those Needing Defensive Technology to Protect Free Speech from Authoritarian Regimes and 4 Ways the Rest of Us Can Help

Of course, authoritarian regimes can be widely interpreted here. Personally, I think the UK has gone off the deep end with both the way its using laws and its over-zealous database creation. And let’s face it, any country thinking of putting internet filters on your information is not that much further away (yes, I’m looking at you Australia and NZ) to say nothing of unapologetic offenders like China, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Great post on Startup CTO mistakes I’d rather not repeat…

1. Not getting involved in “the business”
2. Keeping the technology vision in your head
3. Adopting bleeding-edge technology
4. Giving up control of the development process
5. Staying too hands-on and not getting hands-on enough

I actually found it interesting how these were still applicable to my current non-startup role.

The bleeding edge technology one is one I’ve managed to avoid (though my team would argue any open source and anything but java is bleeding edge), but I think more poignant is the one about giving up control of development since it makes it impossible to execute on a technology vision. And yeah, could probably be accused of keeping too much of the tech vision in my head (or not communicating it well enough). Sometimes what seems obvious and transparent when you’ve thought it up is pretty murky to other people (so add communicating it better as well).

It’s a bit sad I predate the moon landing, but this is kinda cool. In a few scant days, we’ll be celebrating the 40th anniversary of the moon landing which is a symbolic milestone that all humanity can be proud of despite what we’ve done in space since then.

I should point out I often use Kennedy’s example of this as a clear BHAG (Big, Hairy Audacious Goal), when talking about strategy planning because it has a clear, measurable, unambiguous achievement within a time limit.

Personally, I think there is nothing like poking fun at the stupidity of certain initiatives to illustrates how flimsy and foolish they are. Laughter, IMHO, is the greatest weapon in the activist’s arsenal.

Great little ad from Australia’s GetUp on the plans of the Rudd government for internet filtering throughout the whole country (yes, shockingly for a democracy like Australia, the same sort of thing you’d expect from China, Iran and some other sadly misguided repressive regimes).