SonSpring

Symphonic Leadership

2009-07-05T22:35:31Z

For an assignment in my last seminary class before I graduate, we had to discuss with other students what key functions are provided by effective leaders. One of my classmates cited a radio interview with Maestro Lorin Maazel, retired conductor of the N.Y. Philharmonic. Now 79 years old, he reflected upon his prestigious career and what it means to be an effective leader of musicians.

I think that a symphony conductor is a great analogy for effective leadership. In keeping with that metaphor, I believe the functions of a leader to be:

[1]. Rebuking / Correcting

A conductor needs to have the gumption to tell others when they’re out of tune. An effective leader can’t be so concerned with being amicable that s/he can’t put people in their place when they step out of line. While it might not make one popular, it does ensure that the group maintains a certain level of quality.

[2]. Exhorting / Encouraging

Likewise, a good conductor doesn’t let good deeds go unnoticed. If someone has shown remarkable improvement in an orchestra, putting in those extra hours of practice or taking the time to fine-tune one’s instrument, that will be self-evident amongst the group. A good conductor will say a few words of encouragement to publicly recognize the hard work of various individuals. So too an effective leader should praise his/her constituents, so all will strive for excellence.

[3]. Instruction / Guidance

A good conductor doesn’t expect the musicians in his/her charge to become amazing overnight. S/he realizes that to hone the necessary talent takes a lifetime of dedication. Therefore, a good conductor / leader is willing to put in the time to teach others how to best use their natural gifts. Some people can master a variety of instruments, others might play only one or two, but do so exceptionally. Both generalists and specialists are needed.

[4]. Scouting / Recruiting

A good conductor realizes that there is inevitable turn-over in any orchestra. Musicians leave to join other ensembles, or occasionally strike off on their own to pursue a solo career. Long-standing members might pass away, and their vacancies need to be filled, lest the symphonic harmony become unbalanced. A good conductor is always on the lookout for new up-and-coming talent, that can be cultivated into the professional musicians of tomorrow. Likewise, a good leader is always thinking about empowering the next generation of spiritual trailblazers. There is no success without a successor.

[X]. First-Chair

Not sure where this fits in my bulleted list, so I’m just calling it out separately. In orchestras, there is the concept of “first-chair.” This is the #1 person in a respective category or instrument. Orchestras sit in a half-circle when performing, which means that only one person per row can be seen directly by the audience. This honor is reserved for the first-chair. This person usually performs solos when called for in a particular song, and acts as a mentor.

Because this position of esteem is highly sought-after, orchestras often have in place a “challenge” system, by which someone in a lower rank can call-out the first-chair to a duel of sorts. After a play-off of a selection of music, and perhaps group consensus, the challenger can potentially claim first-chair. There is usually a time period that someone must wait after challenging unsuccessfully, and a duration of immunity if one has recently become first-chair. This allows for tempers to cool, and for motivation to build to work harder.

While an effective leader runs things according to a process, it is also important to afford opportunities for advancement based on merit, not necessarily seniority. If there is a situation in which there is a long time employee up for a promotion, but that person is less capable than someone who exhibits an obvious knack for performing that particular set of job duties, a leader must choose wisely. Ultimately, the decision has to be in the best interest of the group, not just to do right by a single individual.

As an aside: That’s why non-denominational churches have dynamic leaders who seemingly come out of nowhere, whereas large mainline denominations do business-as-usual, and miss out on their prodigies. I am in no way saying that of myself, but would point to Steven Furtick as an example. He is in his 20’s but leads a large congregation, as the senior pastor of Elevation Church.

Anyway, that summarizes my thoughts. I would love to hear any other analogies and metaphors that you think help to encapsulate what good leadership entails.

Design 4 Drupal

2009-06-17T07:41:53Z

My 5-month old, at D4D

Grid Talk

This past weekend, I had the privilege of speaking in Boston at Design 4 Drupal, an un-conference meet-up graciously hosted by MIT. I co-presented Accelerated Grid Theming alongside Todd Nienkerk, on how to use the NineSixty theme, a port of 960.gs for use in Drupal. I dare say it was quite well received.

I mostly covered the generalities of grid design, and what inspired me to make a prototyping / design / CSS framework in the first place. Todd took it from there, and described all the nuances that go into the actual theme, built expertly by Joon Park, who those in the Drupal community know as dvessel. In all likelihood, I will incorporate back into the framework the extensions he made.

I was surprised / humbled / honored that the event organizers moved our presentation from one of the classrooms to the largest lecture hall at the MIT Stata Center. They also bumped all other sessions to different time slots, essentially giving us the monopoly on attendees. As far as I know, the majority of those present attended our talk. One might argue the cause and effect of that scenario, but I think it was due to the level of interest in our material…

More than one attendee said they thought the sessions here were better than at DrupalCon. With keynotes by Jeff Robbins and Jay Batson and huge sessions like the one on the 960 grid by Nathan Smith, the creator of 960, and Todd Nienkerk it’s hard not to feel this way.
— Matt Farina

I really had a great time, and the session from @nathansmith and @toddross for 960.gs was great, and I think that was obvious by the fact it got moved to the larger lecture hall! It seems like 960.gs is truly set to take over the grid system, and become very well adopted by the Drupal community.
— Jake Strawn

For me, the highlight was hearing the creator of the 960 Grid System, Nathan Smith speak with Todd Nienkerk… There was such a large interest in the presentation that the organizers had to move it to a larger room. I feel as though it is a tribute to the Drupal community to have such a person as Nathan getting excited about Drupal and sharing his thoughts on how to integrate his incredible grid system into Drupal. His authentic interest in understanding what it means to be Drupal, as a developer or designer, is inspiring to say the least.
— Jason Savino

Community

Overall, I learned a lot at the conference – how to wrangle Drupal to output just about any markup imaginable, several theme tips and tricks, and I also saw a demo of a cool new module called Skinr. The one thing that surprised me the most was though people are obviously passionate about their respective roles: designer / developer – ego was not really a big factor. The spirit of amicability and mutual knowledge sharing abounded. Steve Merrill said it best…

On the Bolt Bus back from the Drupal Design Camp in Boston.
Drupal’s great software, but the community is the real secret sauce.

Acquia – Jay Batson

I saw this not only from the attendees, but also from several of the big-name presenters. For instance, I was able to have a great conversation with Acquia co-founder Jay Batson who went out of his way to sit down and pick my brain about my thoughts on Drupal from an outsider perspective. That is, someone who is new to the system but has dealt with designing for other CMS platforms. He asked me to let him know of any pain-points, and to feel free to make suggestions on how to improve things for designers in the future.

Geeks & God

I would be remiss if I did not also mention the guys from Geeks & God. After all, if not for G&G co-host Matt Farina inviting / prodding me to speak at MIT, I probably wouldn’t have experienced this awesome gathering of designers. He and Rob Feature were kind enough to do a 30 minute segment with me, where we talked about Drupal, grid design, and the advancements we’re making at Fellowship Tech stemming from our developer site and RESTful API.

Takeaways

A lot of discussion was had around how to make Drupal increasingly designer friendly, especially with the upcoming release of version 7 and its focus on UX. Jay Batson challenged the attendees to split up into groups and envision what could be done to help the greater Drupal community embrace good design. He even went so far as to volunteer time, money, and bandwidth via design.acquia.com – which appears to already be up and running.

Discussions from the weekend have continued to be fleshed out, around a possible design centered aspect to the main Drupal site itself. Regardless of how that pans out, the cool thing is that design is being given due consideration.

F1 + EE Module

2009-05-14T02:28:08Z

In preparation for our annual Dynamic Church Conferece — For the past month or so, my coworkers and I have been diligently (read: frantically) working on our respective applications that each consume the brand new Fellowship One RESTful API. I was half of a two-man team tasked with creating an EE module, to allow churches to display a list of members within their own site.

We dubbed it Listee (play on the “EE” moniker). Here’s a demo video…

Without going into too much detail, since that will eventually be posted on our forthcoming developer site anyway, let me just cover a few tech points. It requires PHP version 5, because we are parsing a JSON response. For me, this was the format I’m most familiar with, though the API also supports XML.

It was a cool exercise to familiarize myself with the inner workings of EE, and how the various {exp} tags hook into PHP classes and methods. It was also interesting to learn more about OAuth, though most of the hard work was done by a coworker, who built a library that we used for both EE and Facebook.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. The cool thing is, with the lessons learned here, we are going to be able to pass over a good chunk of the PHP code to be used in other content management systems. In fact, there is already an effort underway to integrate Fellowship One with Drupal.

Drupal 6 Themes

2009-05-04T04:54:36Z

I recently read Drupal 6 Themes, by Ric Shreves – a partner at design and development firm Water&Stone. I found the book to be a great resource.

Lately I have been digging further into Drupal, an open source content management platform that describes itself lightheartedly as “community plumbing.” These tubes have been used to power many high profile sites, which all have their own distinct look and feel. It appeals to me because it’s more powerful than simple blogging software, but with that comes a bit of complexity. Thankfully, it is actually quite intuitive once one makes sense of how it works.

This allows for a great deal of flexibility in terms of design. Looking at sites that use Drupal reads like a veritable who’s-who of technology / innovation…

While some have criticized Drupal in the past as being difficult for designers to customize, and that was probably a valid concern (at the time), the latest version is quite designer friendly – made so via the PHPTemplate engine that is built into the system. While it is “just” PHP, it is quite a bit simpler in terms of building templates than writing out raw code long-hand. So one could say, it is as designer friendly as other systems that rely on PHP for templating.

Shreves did a great job covering all that is possible within Drupal, from a design standpoint. He begins by explaining how the inner workings of the system fit together, and how this allows for a designer to override and tweak everything. He then shows how to take an existing theme and build a sub-theme.

Of course, this is all just a precursor to chapter 7 and beyond, where Shreves really shines, showing you how to build your own fully customized themes. That’s not to downplay the importance of the foundational material, as the earlier chapters build well upon each other. I am simply saying I found the chapters on doing your own design from scratch especially inspiring.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book to any code savvy web designers who are looking to take their skills to the next level with a full-fledged content management system. With newly acquired skills, you will be able to confidently tackle enterprise scale projects, building upon the versatility of Drupal.

Podcasts

For me, a great way to learn about Drupal is to passively digest the information via listening to a podcast or watching a video. Here are some resources I’ve found. If you have suggestions, feel free to leave a comment on this post.

Lullabot Podcast – Largely considered to be the Voice of Drupal.
Acquia Podcast – The company of Drupal creator Dries Buytaert.
Got Drupal – Screencasts that range from beginner to advanced.
Geeks & God – Christian podcast that frequently shares Drupal tips.
Mustardseed Media – Video tutorials about Drupal. Co-host of G&G.
Drupal Speakeasy – A promising new podcast by LevelTen Design.

Keeping Digg Honest

2009-04-06T00:35:11Z

For those of you who know me, you also know that I have a love / hate relationship with Digg. They seem to love linking to my content, and I generally don’t care for the negativity their readership brings both via comments on my site and Digg itself. In the past, I was simply deflecting all Digg traffic.

However, friends convinced me the embargo really just hurt end-users, by not allowing them to get at the content they were seeking. Fair enough. Plus, it wasn’t really Digg’s fault that the majority of their readers act as they do.

Today though, via Mint I noticed something that most definitely does smack of suspicious activity. Namely, a clever form of content misappropriation. It’s basically an iframe that includes your site, with a DiggBar at the top.

At first glance, this does not seem like a big deal, but it creates a twofold problem. First, it allows Digg to cross link various unrelated sites, all the while keeping their bar (potential advertisements) in front of users – making a mini browser. Second and more importantly, it associates their brand with my site, and Digg is a brand I’d rather distance myself from, given the choice.

That’s the crux of my blog post. You, as a site owner and content creator, do have a choice. You can let Digg do whatever they want with your content, or you can add this simple bit of JavaScript to the head of your document.

Note: To see this in action, check out this would-be DiggBar link.

<script type="text/javascript">
/* <![CDATA[ */
if (window.location !== window.top.location) {
    window.top.location = window.location;
}
/* ]]> */
</script>

Last I checked, large respected news sites such as NYTimes.com use this method to keep scrapers from passing off NYT content as their own.

Basically, it asks the browser: Is this page being viewed in the uppermost window? If not, then you know it’s in an iframe in which case it redirects the entire browser to view the original page on your site, sans DiggBar.

The nice thing is – Not only does this work for Digg, but it also will free your writing from the clutches of any other content leeches as well. I must admit, part of me feels bad. Used on a wide scale, this will take “the wind out of the sails” for a company that is desperately trying to find a business model.

Update: Faruk Ates and John Gruber have also posted their respective solutions to dealing with the lame-ness of the DiggBar. Gruber’s is particularly brutal. Popular tech news site Engadget (of Weblogs, Inc) is blocking it as well.