Q: What’s something very few people know about PHP?

It is mind-bogglingly popular for web development. That popularity hasn’t diminished even though conventional wisdom says otherwise…

Over a decade ago, I said about 40% of the top 100 websites use PHP — a number I pulled out of my ass — but nobody (not even the Ruby on Rails developers I pissed off) argued with that spurious claim. In 2009, Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress became curious with my claim and did a survey of Quantcast’s top 100 sites — he got almost exactly 40. Even today, among the 10 most important websites, four use PHP as their language of choice — 40% again.

Overall, almost 80% of the internet is powered by PHP, and that has held steady for years! Newer web languages such as Ruby or NodeJS have only grown at the expense of other languages such as ASP, Java, or Perl.

Just one single application written in PHP, WordPress, is used by over 30% of all websites on the entirety of the internet. That’s more than double the market share since back when I last worked at Automattic/WordPress in 2011! It grew until it saturated its entire market — over 60% of all CMSs. In the CMS market as a whole, PHP-based CMSs occupy positions 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, and 8 in the top 10. The most popular non-PHP-based CMS is both closed source and sitting at only a 2.5% share.

It was estimated back in 2009 that there were 5 million PHP developers worldwide. It’s difficult to make this estimate today, but it’s obvious that that number has also held steady or grown.

These last few years, I’ve been commercially working in Ruby (on Rails), GoLang, NodeJS (for static servers), and Python (Django), but PHP is still also my love in that love/hate relationship.

Come see my talk in February 2019 at SunshinePHP in Florida!

Despite understandable omissions and commissions , what a huge effort that must have been! I continue to be impressed with the dedication of the Wikipedian community.

The other day, a friend and co-worker wondered, “Could you imagine what would it’d be like if we were still there?” I responded, “I don’t since I would have resigned long before.” So I had only enough overlap with the outgoing Executive Director to form some suspicion, but not enough to say anything beyond what I’ve already said.

Instead I want to use this moment to comment on her predecessor, someone I did work long enough under long enough to form an opinion, Sue Gardner. I’ve never met anyone who can read so much about an organizational issue from such a small clue as Sue to the point where I chose intentionally each of my interactions with her. She was extremely thoughtful—as in putting a lot of thought into something—and expected and appreciated the same from others. Sometimes she’d make an observation in an area that I, who was working daily on it, had missed. When you are a chief executive who has less time for anything than anyone else, I learned from her these are essential skills to being a good one.

When she left she spent a number of hours with us to discuss hiring practices. One thing she said then was you should check yourself in a new hire because there will be no time you’ll feel better about your hire than the day you hire them.

That’s something that can be applied directly to replacing someone and indirectly through the ripples created by any hire. Too often people get excited about what a new person brings or might bring instead of wondering what will be lost by people leaving or being displaced. Instead of focusing in what you’ll be gaining with a new hire, ask, “What skills did the outgoing person have that they were great at?” Those are the ones your organization will definitely be losing with the person incoming.

My girlfriend now runs a company of her own, and one difficulty she’s been running into is setting up a compensation plan for her people.

What follows is some observations I’ve made on salary:

1. Compensation is not about motivating, it’s about loss-prevention.

I liked to think that before I when I wasn’t a full-time manager, the twelve years I spent as a individual contributor to six tech startups, I was a pretty decent performer in a creative field (engineering). I wanted to become the manager that I wished I had, so when the tables were turned and I became a manager again, I would learn what motivated me to guide my decisions toward my own people.

One of those observations was that extrinsic motivators are not actually motivators but, at best, a form of loss-prevention. What motivated me as an individual contributor was the challenge of the problems in front of me; what de-motivated me was when I was when I was being treated unfairly.

When I finally picked up my girlfriend’s copy of Drive to read over vacation, imagine my thoughts when I read this passage from a co-founder of Atlassian:

“We’ve always take the position that money is only something you can lose on,” Cannon-Brookes told me. “If you don’t pay enough, you can lose people. But beyond that, money is not a motivator. What matters are these other features.”

This paragraph popped up in passing to serve another purpose in the book, but one weakness I noticed in the book was not in investigating what a simple observation arrived independently by two engineers-turned-managers actually outlines a framework for providing effective compensation for organization.

To restate the above: giving someone more salary, bigger options, or a nice job title won’t actually give you better results, but giving too little will demotivate people and you will lose their productivity (or them entirely).

The philosophy is good compensation is not a fount of positive outcomes but damage control against the negative outcomes that can come forth from it.

2. Salary should not be tied to performance.

One time my manager gave me an annual performance review. Because of the criteria of the review structure, I received a mediocre performance review. This was the same year I took my own initiative in writing a product that saved the company and because of it, I was promised a title change by the VP of Engineering and given a larger pool of options by the CEO. I still can vividly recall the feeling of disgust as I got a change in salary that didn’t outpace the rate of inflation and had to sit there listening to my manager rationalize this steaming turd that was just dumped on me.

The first time I had to give annual performance reviews, I noticed I hated to do it and the part I obviously hated most was being required to follow the review with an announcement for what their salary adjustment would be.

So instead, the first year I told my people their adjustment before I gave the review; the second year I ignored the company rules and informed them their adjustment in a separate meeting; the third year, the company policy had aligned to my mode of thinking to allow me to completely decouple the two.

It took the company two years to figure out what I learned so many years ago: even the appearance of salary being tied to performance is wrong. Compensation adjustments and annual reviews occurring around the same time because of budgetary reasons was an error that was never fixed at my last company.

Avoid this mistake.

3. Salary should be set by an overriding sense of fairness.

Your reaction may be, “But if it’s not tied to performance, how is that fair? What should it be tied to?”

The nature of that question actually answers itself. Accepting the first rule and applying it to the second rule creates the indignation in the reaction reflected in the question. The second rule seems to violate our sense of fairness, so let’s make fairness the criteria, not performance.

In the example that influenced me, I just saved the company because without my initiative, they would have run out of money. According to my performance, I did poor because in taking initiative, I didn’t do what I was ordered to do which was the main criteria that an “Engineer – Class 3” is evaluated on. I correctly didn’t get an raise because my salary was tied to that poor performance. But the same exact “poor performance” was what caused the two top people at the company to separately compensate me and spoke to some sort of unfairness. According to “performance” I didn’t deserve a raise; according to “fairness” I certainly did. In fact, this clear violation of fairness standard was so demoralizing to me that I left the company later that same year for someplace else at double my salary.

That’s what I mean about this being about “loss prevention.”

4. Fairness is a shared standard.

People in creative disciplines work with each other and respect each other. People will dislike unfairness whether that means they’re making too little money or too much money relative to their peers. Unfairness is demotivating.

How to implement fairness? While I’m sure there are better ideas, my solution what to do what every mid-level manager is trained to do: I made a spreadsheet.

My spreadsheet had a row for each of my reports (past and present): it had columns for their requisition number, start date, location, job title, and previous years and current salary or hourly wage extrapolated yearly. It also had three other columns. The first was an adjusted effective pay based on formulas for cost of living, contractor/salaried status, etc. The other two contained a log of all possible related special considerations about the person such as recent promotions, promises I made, associated laws that affected them—two simply because the second served as an archive for when the first became so large as to be unreadable.

What I did then was sort the people by their effective salaries and input salary adjustments within HR constraints that would do the most to adjust the sort order based on the simple concept that, “If any of my reports somehow saw this spreadsheet, would they say, ‘Yeah, that’s about what I expected?’” Any area I saw where I’d think one of my people would point and say, “That’s not fair!” I made the largest possible adjustments in order to try to fix.

In this way, I ensured fairness, because fairness is a collective standard.

5. Determining compensation is distasteful work because it crowds out fulfilling work.

I have this long-standing disagreement with a good friend. He’s of the opinion that it’s important to be as open as possible with compensation adjustments like salary and bonuses and options, while I disagree.

Consider:

Why has it been so difficult for my girlfriend to set up a compensation system? Why did I procrastinate on giving annual performance reviews until after they received their compensation adjustment?

Openness is one way of ensuring fairness, but I think it’s a lazy way that causes more strife than it solves. If I were to actually open the spreadsheet I made to my people, it’d be a signal, “this is worthy of your attention.” But the whole purpose of the first rule is to try to say, “compensation is not worthy of your attention, in fact it belittles your importance because it presupposes you are reducible and motivated solely by a number: your salary.”

I eventually gave access to the spreadsheet to the future managers of my teams. My belief in the importance of fairness without openness meant that I didn’t even have an archive of this spreadsheet when I left.

You may be doing the same nominal thing as poor companies that are secretive with compensation, but the reasons for arriving there are quite different. That difference is everything.

6. Do distasteful work

It is my belief that if you want to be a good manager, you should be value your people. This means valuing their time so you don’t waste it with things unworthy of it. This means doing distasteful work so they don’t have to.

Ignoring the impracticality of doing this with 30+ people and still having time to do anything else, many of my colleagues looked down on the fact that I didn’t have biweekly 1-1’s with each of my reports. However there were two 1-1’s I did every year and did for longer both in preparation and action than any other manager though it would take me months to complete it: the first was their annual review, and the second was a compensation discussion. In fact they were the were the only two clear violations of the rule I kept with my people, “You don’t report to me, I report to you. You to call me in for a meeting and I make time for you, not the reverse.”

In the compensation meeting, I didn’t spend much time talking about their actual salary. In fact, I make a point to not know it—the only thing I recall is the days I spent sorting and adjusting it on a spreadsheet. Instead I give them a two page FAQ (included below) and I spend an hour with each of them explaining how I arrived at my way of compensation. There are only three things I want them to get out of this discussion:

1. When it comes to their compensation, fairness is of paramount importance to me.
2. I spent a lot of time agonizing over their salary and I think the whole concept of determining compensation is disgusting.
3. I hope they think I spent too much time agonizing over it, because if I did, then it means they don’t have to.

And isn’t that what you want to do as a manager? Do the things that need to be done so that you enable your people to do greater things than you could ever do.

…

WMF Features Engineering Compensation Discussion Notes 2014

When:

If you received a salary adjustment, it will be effective on 7/1/14. You will see it on your paystub on 7/31/14 with an adjustment reactive to 7/1/14.

Globally: How average salaries are determined?

WMF contracted a study from Radford, the premier tech salary survey. This allowed them to do the following:

• Eliminate gender pay differences
• WMF compensation overall are in the top quartile of non-profits
• WMF compensations are in the 50th percentile of tech companies in the Bay Area not considering incentive plans (bonuses, options, etc).

Philosophy of compensation in Features

People are happiest when salaries are fair. Within some limitations, I control Features comp only, so my goal was to imagine how people would react if everyone saw each others salaries. Would you think it fair, or not fair?

How this affects Features

Salary bands from the Radford study should be “under the hood” and only made available to managers and recruiters. However, at this time, even I don’t have access to the actual Radford data or the bands, so I couldn’t use them.

Instead, I was given guideline target as to a total percentage salary increase across my department. This guideline was 6% overall, but reduced by discounting new hire eligibility.

I made adjustments within guidelines, but because of over budget in Tech, a second pass was made involving COLA adjustments for non-US and a reduction again in recent hires, as well as a class of people who had already received their COLA adjustment.

The overall change in Features ended up being much less than 6%: It ended up being less than 5%.

Process in Features

First, in Features, I created three classes of salary ranges based on position/title:

1. Senior Engineers & Leads (people with title)
2. Engineers
3. Engineers who are junior in nature (recent hires)

These salary ranges have some overlap. Also, there were two issues:

1. Group (1) and (2) were overlapped, and were both toward the bottom of the salary band reserved for them.
2. CA law passed effective Jan 2013, made it so that nearly the entire class of Group 3 salaries were over the minimums for overtime exemption. I opted to just raise the minimum range of Group 3 (their salaries) to compensate, instead of pay them hourly.

The first impact were adjustments related to the ranges. Then, if people belonging to the group, fell outside the minimum of the range, then I opted to use the largest increases to attempt to bring them into the range.

The above are baseline settings/targets. Not everyone was able to get there, but I actually got most in there.

After that, I used increases to try to account for special cases (marriage, children, etc) within a given range. For example, if you recently had a child, then you’re still within your salary band for your group, but you’re more likely to be toward the top end, if I had room to do so.

Finally, I made adjustments within the range, based on your annual review feedback. This would mean that not accounting for the previous, if your contribution was more.

What else went into target setting?

I adjusted 15% for people paid hourly as opposed to salary (this is how HR computes the current benefit difference for contractors). I adjusted based on COLA using the same tables that HR uses to compute contractor salaries: Use state-by-state tables to compare California to your state; Use UN data to compare the United States to your country.

Keep in mind:

• This method will make people move into the appropriate pay range over time. There are larger jumps for promotions and corrections, but it can’t be done all at once.
• Despite different starting salaries, similar performance will converge on the same part of the pay range. If you received a large increase right now, the increases may slow over time.
• Over time, even small differences in pay can create significant differentiation over time (think compound interest).
• Promotion is any move to a higher grade or pay range. Movement (like between Senior Engineer to Lead) is considered a lateral move from a salary/compensation standpoint.

Limitations:

• All of us will take a “hit” relative to industry because of equity (lack of Wikishares ;-)).
• The WMF has a policy of trying to make extra-salary compensations (health benefit, etc.) egalitarian and available to all which affects things.
• I have a maximum I am allowed to increase an individual
• I have a limit that was placed in Features
• I don’t think the COLA adjustments are accurate or fair. I asked that HR if we can standardize on a better set of tables in the future
• After, I set it, some adjustments were made because the rest of Tech was overbudget. Unfortunately, I was not rewarded for this, and some adjustments were made in my targets that threw things off by a little here and there. Luckily, it’s a small amount overall, but I don’t think the adjustment was the most fair.

During Tech budget and resourcing meeting for the 2014-2015 Annual Plan, one of the ideas proposed was possibly sourcing an incubator group to (re)“build Wikipedia or other major project in line with the Vision from the ground up, without prior constraints from existing technology, processes”, or communities. The idea was, even if it didn’t succeeded it would cause the organization “to think differently, to create energy around being BOLD,” and catalyze the movement.

This had some currency from many of the participants¹, even the C-level² involved, that was until a director argued that this was infeasible due to the Innovator’s Dilemma. Ignoring the obvious misreading of the book, he argued that because this might destroy the existing order inside the organization, it couldn’t be done by the organization itself, and thus the proposal died despite never going up for consensus consideration.³

Deciding that it is politically stupid to point out their Readers’ Digest understanding of a deeply-flawed business text, I instead argued that an organization built around vision, rather than profits, does not have the same constraints that allow disruptive technologies to spell their undoing.

That argument didn’t carry weight because people with more experience than me were sure that this initiative would be defunded in the next annual plan and that no one would ever get behind a project that is a direct threat to them. Incubation outside the WMF is only possibility.

…

It’s sad that people don’t bother to know the most basic lived history of their own industries (or have a terribly short memory).

I give you the history of Firefox:

The Mozilla Firefox project was created by Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross as an experimental branch of the Mozilla browser.

The Phoenix name was kept until April 14, 2003, when it was changed because of a trademark dispute with the BIOS manufacturer, Phoenix Technologies (which produces a BIOS-based browser called Phoenix FirstWare Connect). The new name, Firebird, met with mixed reactions, particularly as theFirebird database server already carried the name.

The project which became Firefox started as an experimental branch of the Mozilla Suite called m/b (or mozilla/browser). After it had been sufficiently developed, binaries for public testing appeared in September 2002 under the name Phoenix

Hyatt, Ross, Hewitt and Chanial developed their browser to combat the software bloat of the Mozilla Suite (codenamed, internally referred to, and continued by the community as SeaMonkey), which integrated features such as IRC, mail and news, and WYSIWYG HTML editing into one software suite.

Dave Hyatt would leave Netscape⁴ for Apple in 2002 and go on to architect the number one competitor to Firefox, Safari and WebKit (the core of Safari and Google Chrome). Blake Ross would work at Netscape/Mozilla until 2004 and be nominated the next year for Wired magazine’s top Rave Award, Renegade of the Year as all of Mozilla’s resources had were redirected to Firefox, a project started internally by two employees to combat the poor direction of original Mozilla project.

…

So yeah, Fuck you.

…

One Year later

It really is astounding when you think about the level of incompetence that was on display.

There are only two large-scale consumer-facing Internet non-profits: The Wikimedia Foundation and Mozilla Foundation (which owns Mozilla Corporation). Someone makes a statement that everyone accepts and affects the entire annual budget. Meanwhile, the only other company that shares organizational affinity with yours is a living counterfactual to the statement.

I didn’t say anything as I was sitting on my resignation letter and didn’t want to humiliate my colleagues, but the disappointment I had back then was immense. Now that I’m gone, that disappointment has turned into relief.

It be Talk Like A Pirate Day, an’ in (dis)honor of me fav’rite day o the year, I be givin’ meself the black mark, an’ be walkin’ th’ plank off th’ ship o’ the Wikimedia Foundation a fortnight hence, on the 3rd of October.

Th’ scurvy dog Jared demands a parrrrrrrrlay of a photo of each of me sprogs after I shanghai ‘em onto the Foundation. In keeping with that grand pirate tradition (and because I suspect the scallywag hornswoggl’d me cloak of invisibility), I’ll appease thee with a last glimpse of me visage on the crew page before I visit Davy Jones’ Locker. Now maybe ye won’t be confus’d betwix’t me an’ me powder monkey, Howie.

I’ll leave ye buccaneers t’ fight over me booty¹ an’ give no quarter as ye guide the Wikimedia Foundation t’ safe haven. Aye, she be a leaky old hulk, but take the light and liver of any a’ addled bilge-sucking blaggard that try an’ scuttle her!

In the meantime, you c’n read about me plunders on th’ seven seas on me blog. Here be the UarrrrrrrrL: http://terrychay.com/.

So let’s raise the Jolly Roger and drink some grog!

Arrrrrrrrrrrrr!

the dread pirate terry

…

Pirate to English translation: I’m leaving the Wikimedia Foundation. My last day is Friday, October 3. A more official email will follow with background on the logistics surrounding my departure. (I also finally posted a staff photo.) Arrrrrr.

~~

terry chay  최태리
PHPirate
Wikimedia Foundation
“Imagin’ a world in which ev’ry single lad and lass c’n smartly plunder in the sum of all intellectual booty. That’s our commitment.”

i: http://terrychay.com/
w: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Tychay

Brendan Eich, creator of Javascript, resigned as CEO of Mozilla mostly over his unrepenting anti-gay views.

I must admit a brief bit of schadenfreude because I predicted that this change would happen on Prop 8 specifically. The only thing that surprises me from those six-year-old articles is the quickness of the sea change around this issue.

It seems the “I-like-Eich” views center around the following arguments:

1. This violates Freedumb of Speech/libtards are hypocrites
2. Why are liberals such sticklers on this view?
3. “the mob got their man”

To the first: As a private citizen, Eich is fully entitled to having bigoted views, but as a business person he must suffer the consequences of any of those views. The instant he made actual donations was the instant his private views became susceptible to public scrutiny. We are, after all, talking about being the CEO of a corporation that is the wholly-owned subsidiary of the richest open-culture, open-source nonprofit organization in the world. A natural consequence is expect customer backlash when those views are offensive to the majority of your customer base in a business that makes clear distinctions between “free as in beer” and “free as in speech.” They voted with their feet and his hiring and resigning was just the free market at work. The first amendment covers government and government didn’t interfere. No rights were harmed in the process of this fiasco.

To the second: I propose the same thought experiment as I have before. If you change Brendan’s view from anti-gay-marriage to anti-miscegenation, you see why people are in hackles. You are free to have this belief right now, and your grandchildren will be free to be shocked at what a bigot you were. The difference between you now and the segregationists then is your beliefs are part of the public record via Twitter and recorded by Google, so you can’t deny you had this view like your grandparents do. Let me bookmark these, and lets visit them in a few decades. Enjoy being on the wrong side of history.

To the third: The defense is that these statements are taken out of context. I call bullshit. Brendan Eich was not up for a lifetime achievement award in software design, in fact he had already been co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at the Mozilla Corporation. He was promoted to be the Chief Executive Officer which is a different position entirely. To cast a mirror on myself: I’m an asshole. As such, that makes me okay as a Director of Engineering at the Wikimedia Foundation, but you’d be smoking something if you thought that would make a good Executive Director here. Political sense and understand consequences to actions is a pre-requisite at that level, and perhaps even at mine. (I don’t know because being an asshole is orthogonal to financially supporting a law to hate on gays.)

Understanding Mozilla

Overall, the interesting question is trying to understand how the Mozilla Foundation’s board ended up walking into this fiasco given that Brendan’s views were known before he was appointed as CEO of Mozilla Corporation. I find this incident very revealing.

It tells us that the Mozilla Foundation is in a very bad situation and they are very desperate.

The “bad situation” makes sense because the math is simple. Over 90% of Mozilla’s Foundation’s revenue comes from Mozilla Corporation and the bulk of the latter’s money comes from ad revenue from Google, their #1 competitor (with Chrome) on their #1 product (Firefox browser). Basically, your competitor is paying you to die, and dying you are. Every day, more and more browsing is done on mobile devices where Firefox has zero footprint; every day, as the mobile web grows, Mozilla becomes more and more irrelevant.

(Side note: In 1997, Apple found themselves in a similar situation. They accepted a sour deal from one their long-standing competitor because the gun to their head with the Office monopoly. Microsoft used the deal to force Apple to allow them to parlay a budding new monopoly in the browser space with Explorer. What did Apple do? They introduced Safari to pre-empt an Explorer dependency (which gave us WebKit and Google Chrome). They introduced Keynote and Pages and Numbers to mitigate Office. And, they introduced iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie and the iPod (and later the iPhone and the iPad) to eliminate the dependency of their core computer business on office products. And now the situation is reversed.)

The re-appointing of a former co-founder is a clear sign of desperation no matter where this has occurred: Apple, Starbucks, Enron, etc.

If you need a major change in direction, why not hire aggressively outside for leadership that is not entrenched in existing views? This is the corollary to appointing former cofounders: it shows the desperation, but it also shows the triumphalism of institutional inertia. This makes them desperate enough to bring back a bigoted cofounder who might make a change, but not so much that they’d have the institutional willpower to take an actual risk on someone who might really change them. They probably rationalize it as, “only ‘one of us’ understands us to fix the problem (or knows where the skeletons are buried).”

The reason Mozilla is desperate now is, not in spite of, but because of their great financial position. This has kept them from aggressively parlaying it into something more. Take their demands on Apple to be more open. Why is this laughable? The peering story explains why. This sort of hubris requires you be very disconnected from reality—and, $300 million/year buys a lot of disconnection from reality. Remember when this happened on Chrome? Yeah, me neither. Meanwhile Firefox carried their #1 competitor’s water for them on that issue and lost more market share to them. Good job!

My point is that Mozilla made these mistakes not out of greed, but rather because the removal of a key economic decision point (threat of financial death) that can cause an organization to pivot. Instead institutional inertia and liferism replaced good decision making at all levels of the organization, not just the top, and the problem grows to the point where desperation becomes obvious in actions such as these.

That’s a lesson worth learning, especially if you work at the only non-profit Internet organization in the top 10.

To see that and not feel your organization is not susceptible to the same? Now that would show you are disconnected from reality… or insane.

Addendum

There is a nuance missing in my original article.

It is important to understand that Mozilla’s mission is not to be the #1 browser, but rather to remain relevant. This, they achieved on the desktop with Firefox, but their footprint in mobile is dooming them to irrelevance.

That is what is at stake here.

My answer was…long. I won’t bore you with the details.What I’d like to get out isn’t so much a list of *specific* things we’re doing, or “buy in” on some master plan.

* It seems too “top-down” in a world that despises authoritarian views.
* It’s highly prone to failure and not flexible against setbacks
* It is inherently un-wiki and not egalitarian
* It’s impossible to ever get buy-in on people who can’t for practical reasons participate unless we speak toward universals.

Instead, while I don’t know how we can get there, the best outcome would be for all of usto agree upon a set of ideas: call it vision, principles, habits, frames, patterns… I don’t care. We can use to evaluate all everything we do in the context of this set. These things would be a set that everyone there would agree upon and speak to something that everyone in the movement would agree to. It would be used to:

1. Explain and understand **why** we’re doing each product that we’re doing: No more shrugging your shoulders when someone asks “Why are we doing Article Feedback Tool?” Because a decision to make a product (AFT) would be determined and in-line with these principles. More importantly, even people not participating on a product like could answer this because they have the principles as guidelines.
2. Be used as part of the process of decision-making (**what** we do) within the product. More importantly, while the details may have some variance, on some level they’re the same because we’d all be operating from the same book. In a sense, someone would have **trust** of product because the decisions that were made would be the same ones they’d make if they were given direct control of it.
3. This would, in turn, create a unified front across our our products, but, more importantly, do it in a manner that is both **empowering** and *can be repeated* by others. Why? Because these things speak to things that actually come from the community, they’ll be appealing, but in this way the community will have **ownership** of it, and, if it works, apply it far beyond Tech. A similar application of process/principles/frames/habits could apply in areas we didn’t think to look.

### An example: The Editor and Reader divide

For example, Consider two competing “frames” of interpreting the editor/reader in [the vision statement](http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Vision):

* The vision statement bifurcates the reader and the editor as co-equal: “sum of all knowledge” (created by the editor) “freely share” (among the reader)
* The vision statement doesn’t explicitly call out a reader or editor because it imputes that they are one and the same: “every single human being can…”

I don’t care **which** vision statement was agreed to, but that one or the other is agreed to. (I personally feel that they are equally valid interpretations). Let’s apply this to the Visual Editor (product) and a decision of whether or not to load HTML+RDFa to the read-only output as opposed to an AJAX call when the user clicks the “Edit” button.

Let’s take the first frame:

1. Historically, the Wikimedia Foundation has focused on the reader experience. The VisualEditor marks the first (alpha) interaction in the transition from the reader experience to the editor one, and thus should be worked on because of the neglect of the editor and the need to restore that balance. In addition, the new editor, in particular, would only understand an affordance that represents the web in this manner (GoogleDoc, Word, TinyMCE, etc.)
2. HTML+RDFa to the read-only output is not needed by the reader. It should not be done unless it its impact is negligible since 99.9% of readers will never be editors.
3. An explanation for the decision to build the VisualEditor can be seen from the “sum of all knowledge” in our Vision Statement: we need to more adequately build that “sum.” The decision to HTML+RDFa as the HTML output (and default) will be guided by minimal impact to the reading experience.

Let’s take the second frame:

1. The Wikimedia Foundation should do the VisualEditor because it makes the reading and writing experience identical (WRESIWERG: What the reader/editor sees is what the editor/reader gets). The purpose of the vision statement is not to create an arbitrary bar for editing (learning to work with wikitext and templating), but for making sure “every single human being” can participate in the process of both reading and creating.
2. HTML+RDFa to the reader *must be done* because the reader is the editor. Furthermore, we should encourage the use of HTML+RDFa as the canonical description of content markup with wikitext being a vestigial necessity in the short term.
3. An explanation for the decision to build the VisualEditor can be seen from “every single human being” in our Vision statement: we need everyone to participate not just in access, but also in the creation of the sum, including people who may be experts in their fields but do not have the time to something arbitrary like wikitext in order to contribute. The decision to move toward HTML+RDFa will be emphasized because of the need of every single human being being able to “freely share” **and** create the “sums of all knowledge.”

### The Power of Habit

I hope the notes I took on the Power of Habit make sense in this light.

> It was Thursday, December 1, 1555, in Montgomery, Alabama and she has just finished a long day at Montgomery Fair, the department store where she worked as a seamstress. The bus was crowded and, by law, the first four rows were reserved for white passengers. The area where blacks were allowed to sit, in the back, was already full and so the woman—**Rosa Parks**— sat in a center row, right behind the white section, where either race could claim a seat (p.215)

The process of social movements (p.217) requires convergence of 3 parts:

1. Start: Social habits of friendships, and strong ties between close acquaintances
2. Growth: Habits of community, and the weak ties that hold neighborhoods and clans together.
3. Endures: Movement leaders give participants new habits that create fresh sense of identity and feeling of ownership

### Start: Habits of Friendships and Strong Ties (1)

Rosa Parks wasn’t the first:

* Geneva Johnson (1946) for talking back over seating
* Viola White, Katie Wingfield, and two black children ere arrested (1949)
* two black teenagers from NJ jailed (1949)
* Montgomery policeman shot and killed black man arguing with bus driver (1942)
* Claudette Colvin arrested (1955)
* Mary Louise Smith arrested (1955).

> “There weren’t many real activists in Montgomery at the time,” **Taylor Branch**, the Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian, told me. “People didn’t mount protests or marches. Activism was something that happened in courts. It wasn’t something average people did.”… “Montgomery was a pretty nasty place,” Branch said.” Racism was set in its ways there.” (p.219-19)

Difference:

1. political climate was shifting: ex. Brown v. Board of Education (1954) & Brown II (1955)
2. Rosa Parks was unique: deeply respected and embedded within community => trigger for social habit of friendship.

Roles Rosa Parks had:

* secretary of local NAACP
* attended Methodist church
* oversee youth org at Lutheran Church
* weekends volunteering at shelter
* botanical club
* wednesday nights women’s group that knit blankets for hospital
* volunteer dressmaking to poor families
* last-minute gown alterations for wealthy white debutants

**”Strong ties”**: firsthand relationships that spanned a diverse group of social and economic hierarchies (p220)

* called wife of *E.D. Nixon*: former head of Montgomery NAACP
* E.D. Nixon called *Clifford Durr* who knew Parks because she hemmed dresses for his 3 daughters [both waiting for a case to challenge bus segregations]
* *Jo Ann Robinson* president of schoolteachers and friend of Park’s suggested boycott and mimeographed fluers

> Studies show that people have no problem ignoring strangers’ injuries, but when a friend is insulted, our sense of outrage is enough to overcome the inertia that usually makes protests hard to organize.

### Growth: Habits of community and Weak Ties (2)

Growth is sustained by converting Strong ties => **”The Power of weak ties”: aka social peer pressure. (p.222)

> In the late 1960s, a Harvard PhD student named **Mark Granoveter** set out to answer the question [of job referral network] by studying how 282 men had found their current employment…Most surprising, however, was how often job hunters also received help from casual acquaintances—friends of friends—people who were neither strangers nor close pals. Granovetter called those connections “weak ties,” because they represented the links that connect people who have acquaintances in common, who share membership in social networks, but aren’t directly connected by the strong ties of friendship themselves. In fact, in landing a job, Granovetter discovered, weak-tie acquaintances were often *more* important that strong-tie friends because weak ties give us access to social networks where we don’t otherwise belong…which makes sense because we talk to our closest friends all the time, or work alongside them…On the other hand, our weak-tie acquaintances—the people we bump into every six months—are the ones who tell us about jobs we would otherwise never hear about.

> “…the problem is, without weak ties, any momentum generated in [through direct recruitment within a clique] does not spread *beyond* the clique. As a result, most of the population will be untouched.”

*Peer pressure* (p225): “In adult life, it’s how business gets done and communities self-organize.”

* the social habits that encourage people to conform to group expectations
* = dozens of individual habits
* often spread through weak ties
* gain authority through communal expectations (the risk of loss of social standing) [ex. “don’t give a caller looking for a job a helping hand, he might complain to his tennis partner, who might mention those grumblings to someone in the locker room who youw ere hoping to attack as a client.”

Ex. Mississippi Summer Project @ northern universities (1964) studied by *Doug McAdam* (p.226): Difference among applicants between ~300 that stayed home vs. participants:

* No difference between self-interested and object-oriented motivations
* No correlations for opportunity costs (girlfriends, jobs, etc.)
* Participants hard close friends *and* casual acquaintances expected them to get on the bus. (mixed participation for those who mentioned religious orientation as motivator. But 100% among motivation *and* belonging to religious organization)

> “Now it’s six months later and departure day is almost here. All the magazines are predicting violence in Mississippe. You called your parents, and they told you to stay at home.…Then you’re walking across campus and you see a bunch of people from your church group, and they say, ‘We’re coordinating rides—when should we pick you up?’ These people aren’t your closest friends…They all know you’ve been accepted to Freedom Summer, and that you’ve said you wanted to go. Good luck pulling out at that point.”

E.D. Nixon calls *Martin Luther King, Jr.* (p.229-30) with mixed results and reaches out to *Ralph D. Abernathy* (one of King’s closest friends). Then second call to King causes him to relent. Organizes King to meet with 18 other people.

> The boycott and impromptu rally at the courthouse were the most significant black political activism in Montgomery’s history, and it had all come together in five days. It had started among Park’s closest friends, but it drew its powers, King and other participants later said, because of a sense of obligation among the community—the social habits of weak ties. The community was pressured toe rand together for fear that anyone who didn’t participate wasn’t someone you wanted to be friends with in the first place. (p.232)

### Sustaining a movement: Creating of new habits and sense of identity and ownership (3)

> Then those worries [about sustaining movement] would evaporate. King, like thousands of other movement leaders, would shift the struggle’s guidance from his hands onto the shoulders of his followers, in large part by handing them new habits. He would activate the third part of the movement formula, and the boycott would become a self-perpetuating force. (p.232)

*Rick Warren*, Baptist pastor, mosses to Saddleback Valley in Orange County, CA (1979) because it is fastest-growing region in fastest-growing county of one of the fastest-growing states.

Influenced by *Donald McGavran* who felt missionaries should move into unchurched areas and imitate tactics of other successful movements—including the civil rights campaign—by appealing to people’s social habits.
Third Stage, Rick Warren (p.232)

> “We’ve thought long and hard about habitulizing faith, breaking it down into pieces,” Warren told me. “If you try to scare people into following Christ’s example, it’s not going to work for too long. The only way you get people to take responsibility for their spiritual maturity is to teach them *habits* of faith. Once that happens,t hey become self-feeders. People follow Christ not because you’ve led them there, but because it’s who they are.” (p.234-235)

1. started by interviewing people why they didn’t go to charge (boring, bad music, non-useful sermons, child care needs, dress requirements, uncomfortable pews)
2. address complaints (wear shorts and Hawaiian shirts, added electric guitar, practical topics for sermons: “How to Raise Healthy Families” “How to Survive Under Stress.”
3. 18 hours/day work caused him to faint: anxiety attack recovery vowed make running church less work
4. asked church members host Bible study classes in home (worked well because they got to meet neighbors)
5. Problem: people talked about families. So created a curriculum to teach new habits.

Weak ties => Strong Ties => Habits => Self-propelled/directed

> “The congregation and the small groups are like a one-two punch. You have this big crowd to remind you why you’re doing this in the first place, and a small group of close friends to help you focus on how to be faithful. Together, they’re like glue. We have over five thousand small groups now. It’s the only thing that makes a church this size manageable.”

Start with Weak Ties (sense of community) => Strong Ties of small groups compel participation where their faith becomes an aspect of their social experience and daily lives.

> one of Saddleback’s course manuals reads. “All of us are simply a bunch of habits … Our goal is to help you replace some bad habits with some good habits that will help you grow in Christ’s likeness.” Every Saddleback member is asked to sign a “maturity covenant card” promising to adhere to three habits: daily quiet time for reflection and prayer, tithing 10 percent of their income, and membership in a small group. Giving everyone new habits has become a focus of the church. (p.238)

> “We’ve given you a recipe,” Warren told me. “We don’t have to guide you, because you’re guiding yourself. These habits become a new self-identity, and, at that point, we just need to support you and get out of your way.”…Warren needed to teach people habits that caused them to live faithfully not because of their ties, but because it’s who they are. This is the third aspect of how social habits drive movements: For an idea to grow beyond a community, it must become self-propelling. And the surest way to achieve that is to give people new habits that help them figure out where to go on their own. (p238-9)

Back to Civil Rights: nonviolence as a lens, self-directed units (p.240-41)

> It was the message of nonviolence that King had been preaching for weeks. Its themes, which drew not he writings of Gandhi and Jesus’s sermons, was in many ways an argument listeners [people about to riot in front of King’s house after bomb explosion] hadn’t heard in this context before, a plea for nonviolent activism, overwhelming love and forgiveness of their attackers, and a promos that it would bring victory. For years, the civil rights movement had been kept alive by couching itself in the language of battles and struggles…King gave people **a new lens**. THis wasn’t a war, he said. It was an embrace.
>
> Equally important, King cast the boycott in a new and different light. This was not just about equality on buses, King said; it was part of God’s plan, the same destiny that had ended British colonialism in India and slavery in the United States, and that had caused Christ to die on the cross so that he could take away our sins. It was the newest stage in a movement that had started centuries earlier. And as such, it required new responses, different strategies, and behaviors. It needed participants to offer the other cheek. People could show their allegiance by adopting the new habits King was evangelizing about.

Speech resulting in less phone calls to King, people self-organized and took leadership of boycott. When more bombs, the same pattern was repeated. ==> **Self-directed unity**.

> “They took Christian teachings and made them political,” Taylor Branch told me. “A movement is a saga. For it to work, everyone’s identity has to change. People in Montgomery had to learn a new way to act.”

(a la AA: power form group meetings where addicts learn new habits and start to believe by watching others demonstrate their faith)

> “People went to see how other people were handling it,” said Branch. “You start to see yourself as part of a vast social enterprise, and after a while, you really believe you are.”

> When ninety people were indicted by a grand jury, almost all of them rushed to the courthouse to present themselves for arrest. Some people went to the sheriff’s office to see if their names were on the list and were “disappointed when they were not,” King later wrote. “A once fear-ridden people had been transformed.” … “Instead of stopping the movement, the opposition’s tactics had only served to give it greater momentum, and to draw us closer together,” King wrote.

> Embedded within King’s philosophy was a *new set of behaviors that converted participants from followers into self-directing leaders.* These are not habits as we congenitally think about them. However, when King recast Montgomery’s struggle by giving protesters a new sense of self-identity, the protest became a movement field by people who were acting because they had *taken ownership* of a historic event. And that social pattern, over time, *became automatic and expanded to other places and groups of students and protestors* whom King never met, but who could take on leadership of the movement *simply by watching how its participants habitually behaved.* (p.243)

* new set of behaviors
* convert participants into self-directed leaders
* create sense of self-identity to take ownership
* becomes automatic and expands to other places
* others learn by watching how participants behaved

> When President **Lyndon Johnson** signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which outlawed all forms of segregation as well as discrimination against minorities and women—he equated the civil rights activists to the nation’s founders, a comparison that, a decade earlier, would have been political suicide. “One hundred and eighty-eight years ago this week, a small band of valiant men began a long struggle for freedom,” he told television cameras. “How our generation of Americans has been called to continue the unending search for justice within our own borders.” (p.244)

On this beautiful Friday, as a way of getting myself unstuckavoiding work, I am trying out [Unstuck][]…

It asks me if I’m using Wikipedia as a way of avoiding work. (I am using Unstuck app a way of avoiding work I should be doing at [Wikimedia Foundation][wmf].)

The irony is thick with that one.

…

Update: It appears that the app is useful if you are only stuck creatively, not if you’re just procrastinating. Helping me be more creative? That’s the exact opposite of what I need.

[Unstuck]: http://www.unstuck.com “Unstuck iPad app: How to live better every day”
[wmf]: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Home “Wikimedia Foundation”