As I sit here thinking about how fast the year has passed, I’m thankful for three choices I made last year.

1. I went on stage for the first time on the 4th of June at Comedy Masala. Since I’ve started performing, I’ve had the chance to become part of an awesome family of folks working on their craft.

2. I joined LifeOpp.

3. I found a great group of folks and started playing football more regularly with them.

From the start of my experience as an audience, I wanted to go up to perform. It took me about one year before I had the courage, albeit dutch courage, to email Umar for a spot on Masala.

Two key moments led to me taking the plunge:

1. My trip to San Francisco. There was something about watching comedy in a foreign city that made me really want to perform in Singapore.

2. Googling my heroes of the local scene Jinx, Fuzz and Rishi. I saw clips of them performing when they first started out and realised how much growth they had experienced over the years. I had to stop giving myself the excuse, “when I’m good I’ll go up”.

None of us are instantly good at what we do, and it is the constant act of doing that will make us better.

I went up onto the Comedy Masala stage on the 4th of June 2013. It has been a crazy crazy journey and every moment of killing and dying on stage has been a learning experience and to be savoured.

do or do not there is no try

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Zen Pencils comic ‘The Man in the Arena’.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Zen Pencils’ Ira Glass ‘Advice for Beginners’.

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.

However, there are two other possible ways the social graph can be used to help an individual get information. The first way requires search – a search engine understands the social graph of a site like Facebook and helps us find the best person to ask the question to. This way is similar to how Google understood the web with structural analysis and PageRank – websites and people are the nodes; profiles are similar to content on the page; relationships and links are the edges.

This way of trying to use the social graph prevents us from seeing that the nodes of a social graph can be interacted with – after all, these nodes represent people. The second way I would suggest the social graph can be used does not need an algorithm to try to figure out who is the best person to ask a question because the nodes in the social graph already know that answer. So why not just ask the nodes?

The second way would be to just ask the people, who you are connected to, in the social graph (i.e. your ‘friends’) most likely to be able to answer your question. This question is the message. Your friends might not know the answer to that question but they probably might know a few people who do. What is needed in this second way is a mechanism to propagate that message easily through the social graph; each node redirecting a question to a few other nodes who might know the answer. The mechanism is able to keep track of the chains forming and finally send the answers back to the originating user and whichever other users along the chain interested in the answer.

I would probably not be too presumptuous to say that this way of using the social graph is already being done by most of us, albeit there isn’t some Web 2.0 site helping us do it. We simply do it by forwarding emails, smsing or calling friends who might know the answer to the query of another friend, or passing the contacts of people who might be able to help to a friend.

Aardvark’s system of message propagation is based primarily on first passing the message to a central location which is then responsible for the algorithmic determination of who will be the next to receive the question. Aardvark as a system facilitates the transmission of messages as well as the intelligent routing of these messages.

* Post from 2009/07/08, please meet Jelly

Some idiot called the firemen and police on them.

1. These young kids were considerate enough to put the candles in holders. No spilling of wax on the pavement.

2. They were bloody quiet for a birthday celebration.

Anyway, these really sweet kids were taking turns being the photographer. Halfway through our stakeout of their celebration, my gf looked at me and said, “you should go down and volunteer to take photos for them so they can all be in the picture at the same time.”

So I changed into my jeans and ran down to volunteer to be their photographer.

It is little things like this that I know I want to spend the rest of my life with this lady.

I’m already down to $500 on the second day.

According to the Department of Statistics, 105,000 families in Singapore are earning on average $1,500 or less per month. This means that life is a daily struggle for some 387,000 Singapore citizens and permanent residents. After paying utilities, schooling, housing rental or loan instalments and medicals, they are left with about $5 a day for food and transport per family member. How do they do it? Can they? How does it feel to be their shoes? Whatever you think or feel, suspend your disbelief or judgement and find out
for yourself!

So it is about $150 a month. Outperforming Dr Vivian Balakrishnan’s ‘290 a month in Singapore‘.

Recently, I began to think that what we really need are networked organisations after hearing Meng share about matchmaking within an organisation: go to Department A, find someone interesting and then introduce said person to another interesting person in Department B.

Ignore the phrase ‘networked organization’ for a moment; I don’t even know what a networked organization is supposed to be like. But it is interesting how organizations are finding different ways to run.

1. Valve’s Handbook for new employees.

2. Somali Pirate Business

3. Buffer Open Salaries.

* This post sat in my drafts until I learned of Holacracy from the article announcing “Zappos Is Getting Rid Of All Titles And Managers“.

I might answer them as Themistocles answered the Seriphian who was abusing him and saying that he was famous, not for his own merits but because he was an Athenian: ‘If you had been a native of my country or I of yours, neither of us would have been famous.’ And to those who are not rich and are impatient of old age, the same reply may be made; for to the good poor man old age cannot be a light burden, nor can a bad rich man ever have peace with himself.

from “The Republic“

It has been six years since I started being part of the SGE family when it was just a side project started by Gwen and Bernard.

Two years ago, when Terence joined us as our first full time employee, Gwen and I had already started working on changing SGE from a side project into a company.

Now it is time to say farewell to a project that has been a big part of my life as Tech In Asia has acquired SGE.

I won’t be joining Gwen and Terence as they move over to work for TIA.

I wonder if TIA knows how lucky they are to get this team that’s a little bit of Wonder Woman and Clark Kent.

Good beginnings

So much more to write about the experiences over these six years. As I take time to remember the stories, and write them, going to start by remembering the different looks of SGE. I remember the first redesign I did, sharing the new look with Bernard in a bar at Clarke Quay. I think Daniel from Young Upstarts was also there.

the site when I joined:

Side note:

The first article I wrote was “Overused Buzzword: Community”

Looking back, it is fitting that the first article for SGE was about community as it has been the folks I interact with via my work on SGE that has been sustaining me throughout the years.

We hear a lot about how in this phase of the Internet we call Web 2.0 that Community is very important. I believe that the overusing of this buzzword ‘Community’ is very dangerous because it prevents entrepreneurs and companies from thinking further about the actual people who comprise the entity we call a Community. The buzzword prevents us from seeing that communities are not all the same and that there are different groups of people within a particular community. Growing a community isn’t just about attracting lots of people, setting up a forum, allowing them to comment and add friends.

Beyond knowing that Community is important, we need to understand who is the Community and learn how a company can engage this people in the Community.

There are four main groups in any community that come together on a website. In decreasing order of size, they are:

1. Users of the site.
2. Members of the site.
3. Participants on the site.
4. Contributors to the site.

The last group, the contributors could also be called the 1 Percenters because as studies of online communities have shown, usually only 1 percent of the members of a site actively contribute any form of content – this could be by starting a new discussion thread, a new group or answering the questions of other members.

Slightly more people (around 10%) participate in the site. They do this by adding comments, votes and ratings to the content created by the 1 Percenters. It should be noted that these people (i.e. participants and contributors) provide 100% of the utility for any Community.

One of the long term aims of any community organizer when engaging the community should be to move people from being users to members, members to participants and participants to contributors. Each stage down the list increases the involvement and the investment in time, energy and emotions of the individual.

Participating and contributing content can be seen as a hobby for these individuals as they often do it without being paid. Any community organizer should understand the motivations of the people participating and contributing. They could be doing it for altruistic reasons, wanting to contribute to the common good in terms of knowledge. They could be doing it for status as the community has a mechanism for ranking users based on their participation and contributions. They could be doing it because they find the information relevant to themselves and use the site to organize the information they have found.

There are two key groups in any community – Filters and Facilitators (these two terms are part of a group of four coined by Ben Mcconnell and Jackie Huba of ‘Church Of The Customer‘). The Filters are those that collect, select and package information for other people to consume. The Facilitators are those that create communities by encouraging conversation between users, answering questions, helping new users get assimilated into the community and ensuring that users connect in a way that conforms to the community’s standard and practices – they are the support group for a site, company, product or brand.

To engage the community that is on your site or those that have risen online with your company, brand or product as the focal point, it is important to help the Filters and Facilitators engage in their hobby. For Filters, information and the tools to organize the information are the two most important aspects you can help them with. The company, brand manager and product manager should identify these Filters and provide them additional information that are usually inaccessible to them. Allow them access so that they can repackage this information for other users who will most likely be interested in the information chosen by similar users.

Another way to engage such Filters is to discover the tools they find useful when processing information relevant to the site, company, brand or product and provide or enhance those tools. For example, Filters may use a disparate set of tools like del.icio.us or Google Bookmarks to keep track of the information they have found on other websites. Allowing these Filters to easily bring all these external information into your site is one form of engagement.

Facilitators are like volunteer managers. They help watch out for new users and deal with trolls. For your own site, the best tool that can be given to them is to establish at the beginning of the site a set of standards and practices that guide how users can connect and communicate with each other. Working with the Facilitators to nurture a culture for the community is an important step in engaging the community. Trusting the culture that is established is the next step – getting too involved by trying to censor or lay down the law could be detrimental to the efforts to engage the community and subsequently negatively affect how people feel about the site, company, brand or product.

Facilitators tend to be the people that help answer questions of other users. While you can be directly involved in constantly answering the questions from the community that has been built on your site and around your company, brand or product (and you should!), also engage the community by providing these Facilitators the information that can better help them answer questions. You already have a group of people who want to help so why not empower them! These Facilitators also tend to start discussions about topics they are passionate about. Engaging them means listening to them and learning about how they feel and think about your site, company, brand or product – the gems that could be found just by listening might just save your site, company, brand or product. If you think women want someone who listens, customers want that even more. Remember though, it is listen. Not hear. It is to converse. Not talk.

Everything in this post is not meant to be an exhaustive list of what you need to think about when thinking of the buzzword ‘Community’. Hopefully, it has served its purpose to spark further thinking about what ‘Community’ and ‘engaging Community’ actually means. There are lots of resources online and books you can read to further enhance your understanding of this area – the book ‘Citizen Marketers‘ and the blog by Ben Mcconnell and Jackie Huba are good places to start.
Remember, Community is important. More important though is the people in the community and the things the community says and does.

Even now, as a practical atheist, I’m following this case with particular sadness.

Year ago, when my best friend shared with me his discomfort about the crossover project, I fiercely opposed his views and was upset with the naysayers. I remember sharing two points about the naysayers:

1. The ‘older’ and more ‘traditional’ Christians are more concern about The Crossover project failing than the supposed ‘right’ way of reaching out to non-believers.

2. The naysayers want the project to fail because they want to be able to indulge in smug self-righteousness, confident in the comfortable old ways and be able to say, ‘told you so’.

Here is the thing… if you are a Christian, then you must in some way believe in the power of prayer and spiritual warfare.

I’ve always felt that the older and more traditional Christians opposed The Crossover project with the wrong perspective.

Wrong perspective:

“God, please let Pastor Kong see the error of his ways and stop the crossover project before more are led astray.”

A more useful perspective:

“God, Kong and his church is trying something new to win souls for you. Please guide and protect him and the church as they find their way.”

From my interactions with the naysayers, it was always more of the former, not enough of the latter. And if you believe in the power of prayer and spiritual warfare and the devil wanting to corrupt all that is good, then, the current state of affairs isn’t that surprising. To me, the older and more traditional Christians wanted this to happen.

Pastor Kong and his team are still responsible for their actions. But, like I said, if you believe in spiritual warfare, the devil, and the power of prayer, then those Christians who currently delight in this failure and had hoped for it, well, gave the evil one more power to nudge matters along in the spiritual plane.