Drupal 4.6

My content management software of choice, Drupal, just underwent a major update to 4.6. Naturally I wanted to try it out, so when Lotte had an assignment that required the quick set up of a website, I assisted by installing it and giving it a whirl. A fresh install was painless and rewarding. We spent about an hour sitting in the sun on Saturday morning outside A Minor Place (our favourite cafÈ) configuring the website on their wifi network. It’s much nicer to set up a website when you are being served French toast and coffee.

So today I decided to upgrade eRoleplay.net to 4.6 (from 4.5.2) and met a few hurdles. Quite a few really. The update documentation is less than complete, it seems, and webmaster Joel was kind enough to help me track down the problems. Turns out we had to manually update the database in several places (making me wonder if the update script is really complete) and remove a couple of blocks that I had set up myself. After that Joel stepped back through the update process (there’s a date-selector thingy on the update page) and things started working again. Phew, the database is intact and all my stuff is right where it should be. Now to re-install a few extra modules and we should be away.

If you’re reading this as a content-management novice, Modblog is an example of a type of content management system. Drupal is one of a bunch of freely available systems that you can install on your own server (if you have access to a server). The advantage of this is that you have control over the features and the presentation of your stuff. You also have total control over your own data. Let’s just say Modblog disappeared tomorrow — where would your blogs entries be? The disadvantage is that they do take a bit of technical know how.

AJC Reflections

Dozza and The Crinkulator have provided some interesting insights into competing in the AJC last night. I’m still reflecting on my first AJC as Head Judge. I’ve judged at all 3 AJCs in various events. This was different because I was responsible for the whole judging team. Of course I’ve done similar things with AHP and last year’s Hellz, which is no doubt why I was asked. But it was a different experience to be responsible for the conduct of the judging but not responible for the entire event. In many ways it was a relief. I didn’t have to feel like the criteria, the scoring system, or even the judging and adjudicating processes were down to me. They were provided by the organisers. I simply had the job of applying those things to the competition.

I decided that I wanted to have the judge’s briefing early, so the night started at 6.30pm for me. It was a good decision I reckon, because there was enough time to get things done without feeling like we were under stress. Stress is definitely one of the enemies of a happy judging team.

The most difficult event to judge, the Jack & Jill heats, was first on the program. This is where you have about 9 couples on the floor in each of 4 heats. There are 3 all skates in each heat, with a total of about 3 mins to assess 9 dancers, meaning you have a total of roughly 20 seconds per dancer to make a decision about whether to call them back for the finals. Needless to say, it’s a process of elimination, but you have to spend the greatest time on the toughest decisions. You might take one look at a dancer and realise in the first few seconds that they have no hope of getting through, so you have to move on. All skates are tough to judge, but it’s efficient.

Just about all the events were tough to judge, with a lot of places being very difficult to split. The beginner events were judged on all skates alone, and I found myself again having a hard time getting to see everyone for long enough. The rest of the events had shines, which helps so much. You really get a feeling that you have been able to see how they are performing and whether the partnership is working well.

Today I guess I’m thinking about how things could have been better. The night could have been shorter — two whole beginner events plus an amateur award seems like overkill to me. I’d prefer to see the values of the contest made more explicit so that everyone knows what’s expected of AJC winners, including the judges. More emphasis on the raw energy of lindy hop that inspires people would be more comfortable to me. This probably all sounds a bit like the Hellzapoppin’ ideals, but there’s a good reason for that. A lot of people in the US decided that contests were getting too far away from the ones that were around during the 30s and 40s.

I recognise as much as anyone that AJC should be different from AHP — for one thing it has a connection to US jitterbug contests which are usually associated with the dance scenes in Washington and California as opposed to the roots that AHP traces from the early Harvest Moon Ball contests in New York. This is definitely going to result in a different feel, and the inclusion of Quirky 30s in AJC is a good example of that I think, and one that I really enjoyed. However I still think the particular values that AJC does embody should be clear to everyone. The best example of where this can create confusion continues to be Showcase event, where there is always a fairly liberal interpretation of “swing styles” — mostly because the competitors can choose their own music of course. Is this a swing dance contest or not? If it’s not, why is it in AJC? If it is, should a couple be marked down for including a significant amount of non-swing content? These are tricky questions, of course, but ones that have to be dealt with if people are going to be kept happy.

Hellz gets around the problem by a) carefully choosing all the music and b) by allowing absolutely anything (avoiding the mess of disqualifcations) while embodying the values that are associated with the most famous lindy clip of all time, from the movie Hellzapoppin’. If anyone ever wanted to know how they should be dancing, they have the prime example right there in the name of the contest. Not having any rules often surpises people, but of all social dances, lindy hop is surely the most permissive of all — you can quite easily make up a move or a sequence nobody else has ever done and call it lindy hop. What’s important is that people realise they are supposed to be doing something that is still identifiably lindy hop. I’ve never seen anyone winn at a Hellz event after busting out a lengthy jazz routine or doing a cha cha or something. Just imagine.

Filed.

When are taxes fun? Only one time that I can think of — when you’ve just finished them, and you’ve been told that you will be getting a healthy return. Yes, finally I’ve done my tax returns for 2002 and 2003. And guess what? Last year’s one is due next month. Anyway the pain of going through an awful lot of records and receipts was worth it.

Lotte the Radio Superstar

How cool. Lotte was interviewed for SBS Dutch radio last November, and today I found the interview online in MP3 and RealPlayer formats. Dutch-speakers might be particularly interested.

Active Learning

Here’s an interesting theory on how to introduce a new element to higher education. Why not have an impromptu Lecture Musical? Oh, and no need to let the lecturer know in advance.

The Wizard of Oz

On Monday night Lotte and I had the pleasure of seeing the kids involved in the Mt Scopus production of The Wizard of Oz perform a number we had choreographed for them while Lotte was on placement as a student-teacher. The kids were really terrific. About 30 of them performed The Jitterbug, which is a song that never appeard in the film. It’s a shame because it’s actually a really swinging number. We did track down some shaky footage of the cast of the film rehearsing it before it was dropped (it’s an extra on one of the DVDs). The challenges in choregraphing it were many: the kids varied greatly in their age and dance experience, and the number was quite long and very high energy. We needed to come up with a way for the stronger students to do some “real LindyHop” stuff without requiring too much of them, and we only had 2 sessions to teach them! Lotte did almost all of the work, of course. I just helped with the planning and choreography. We split them up into smaller groups and gave each group a short sequence. There was a longer sequence that they all did as a chorus, and then the smaller groups trade phrases, stealing the spotlight briefly. The principle actors (pictured) all needed small dance parts of their own that were not too challenging because they were singing at the same time with headmics.

The way it turned out was even better than we’d imagined, dance-wise. The kids completely nailed it, really. Musically it was not so great. Instead of using the recorded track as they had said, they decided to play the music live. That would have been a big ask for an experienced swing band, but for the student band it was a nightmare and they didn’t pull it off. To the kids’ credit they danced it all as though the music was spot on, and they got away with it. Thankfully there was a reprise at the end and one of the two numbers they did was The Jitterbug. It worked better musically the second time through, and it showed. After the show the kids came up to us and told Lotte that they’d seen her watching and dancing away in her seat. They went back to their friends and said “Lotte’s here! Now we really have to dance well!!”. It was so cute.

A Very Good Day

All in all I’ve decided that today was a Very Good Day. For one reason or another I’ve been very productive at work this week and today was no exception. It’s always a good feeling when you know you’re really on top of things at work. Sometimes coming to work can be a drudgery, but this week I seem have quite a lot to do and that motivates me. So I’ve been turning out work by the bucketloads.

Tonight was dedicated as Tax Night, due to the fact that I have an appointment on Friday with my Accountant to put in my (now very overdue) tax returns for the past two years! Whenever I tell people about this I feel really guilty. Accountijng is my least favourite thing to do in the world. But the funny thing is just about everyone says that they get behind on their taxes pretty often too. That always makes me feel a bit better!

Strange that I hate doing accounts but I’m really enjoying the accounting project I’m doing with Business Information Systems. I guess it’s just teaching people how to do accounts, not actually doing it myself. Even better I get to try to think up ways to make it more interesting for them, which has got to be a benefit to society, don’t you think?

So anyway the other good thing about today was that I got my tax done. At least, all I need to do before seeing the Accountant. Yeehar.

As if that wasn’t enough, just an hour or so I got an email from someone who was organising the gradual repayment of a long overdue sum of money — sponsorship money that fell through — for an event in 2003! I’ve been waiting a long time for this to happen and it finally looks like it will. This means we may be able to keep up with uni fees without going a long way into debt after all. Phew.

OK, I have an early start and I should be in bed. I just thought I would post something trivial instead of a huge long super-pretend-seriou s thing about DJing or something. I’ve noticed nobody comments on the long boring blog entries!

Oz iTMS in June?

The Mac rumour sites have carried plenty of stories about it before, but recently the stories about an Australian iTunes Music Store have been coming from other sources as well. I always wonder how these stories get started, because in my experience even Apple employees are kept in the dark until the last minute these days. The tantalising nugget of info in the most recent story that may give a clue is that Apple has supposedly been booking space in music magazines. I suppose someone might be putting 2 and 2 together, but there’s always a chance they are coming up with 5. A mid-June launch would put the Oz iTMS after WWDC, which seems likely to me — but why not announce it at WWDC? Maybe they’d prefer to time it with some local event for maximum coverage. Don’t tell anyone, but I’ve actually been using iTMS since it was announced, with the help of a friend stateside. I pay him $US20 with PayPal and he lets me buy another 20 songs. I realise I’m going to have a problem when it comes to exercising my right to use these tunes into the future (specifically when I register for iTMS Oz) but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. This is another reason why DRM generally sucks — we get told we can’t buy things based on geography because that suits companies, not individuals. Why should we not get the right to use something in different countries — after all even nation-states recognise that people move for legitimate reasons. Multinationals generally don’t have to answer to moral questions, however. There’s no authority big enough to make them.

More on Adair: creativity

The previous entry rabbiting on about Adair’s work on teamwork was getting a bit long and I decided this deserved its own topic. Lately I have been thinking more about the creative process, mostly with respect to CRR. My own thinking on creativity is very much in line with what Adair has to say about creativity as well:

The seven habits of successful creative thinkers are:

1. Thinking outside the apparent confines of the problem/situation
2. Welcoming chance intrusions
3. Listening to your depth mind (the unconscious mind)
4. Suspending judgement
5. Using the stepping stones of analogy
6. Tolerating ambiguity
7. Banking all ideas from all sources

There are number of obstacles which inhibit creativity. The seven main ones are:

1. Negativity
2. Fear of failure
3. Lack of quality thinking time
4. Over-conformance with rules and regulations
5. Making assumptions
6. Applying too much logic
7. Thinking you are not creative

© John Adair

This applies directly to the things we’ve been talking over in our troupe meetings lately — for instance that we feel like we want to expose ourself to new influences and open up our ideas. The one about conformance to rules and regulations is a bugbear of mine — a couple of troupe members insisted recently that we all write up lesson plans prior to our workshops. It resulted in a lot of stress for some people and then after a lot of people reluctantly complied, one of the people who was insisting on written plans didn’t even do one themself. It’s this kind of thing that really gets in the way of building up teams too I think. But it certainly dampened creativity in many ways.

“Tolerating ambiguity” is a really concise way of saying something I have been thinking about. It’s not important to find the right way to do everything. For a dance troupe as much as any other group endeavour, the process is often just as important, if not more important, than the product. Only accepting one way of doing things is tempting fate.

What I’ve learnt about teamwork

Through my involvement in project management in my job, being involved in organising MLX, and in helping to start a dance troupe, I’ve given a fair bit of thought to the area of teamwork. Sometime during 2004 I was exposed to the ideas of the British leadership and management expert John Adair. Now, I am normally downright hostile when someone presents me with a model of management doublspeak. Just about everything I see on the topic makes me feel physically ill. So I was surprised when I started reading his stuff and finding practical tips and ways of seeing things that made life simpler for me. So I thought I would write a little bit about it here.

First of all, the most important idea for me that Adair talks about is summarised in his diagram on the right. Adair says that to have successful teamwork, you need to keep three things in focus at all times: task needs, team needs, and individual needs. These things overlap in various ways, of course, but the important thing is that no one element dominates and none should be left out.

When you start to break these categories down into real items for a given situation, the message is really compelling. I’ll try to give some examples here.

The first one that springs to mind involves the use of this model in revising the way that the MLX teams were organised. MLX is a national event, but in the early days the organisation of it was fairly ad hoc. I had an idea about how other exchanges were run, and had been to some big Lindy Hop events like Herrang and Lismore, but running one was a different matter. I found a lot of useful stuff from other people who had organised exchanges (notably Lindy Exchanges for Dummies), but almost all of the stuff I found was related to tasks. That is, when to do things, and what to do. But not really how to do them, and certainly nothing much on the successful coordination of teams.

For MLX 2001, I had another obstacle which was that hardly anyone in Australia had ever heard of an exchange, let alone knew how to run one. A very small number of people had run workshops or dances, and most of them had either left the scene entirely or weren’t aware of the growing desire in more experienced dancers for an event that had social events as a primary focus.

All of this meant that I needed to recruit a team, explain the idea of an exchange, as well as plan all of the events that went into it. It was, I realise now, an unrealistic expectation. Naturally enough, I had plenty of friends who were keen to encourage me to do it, including lots of people who enthusiastically volunteered to help organise. That first year turned into an amazingly uplifting experience I think for just about everyone involved. The unexpected success in terms of numbers of attendees seemed to galvanise everyone, and we all just ran on the rising energy of the moment.

Once it was all over, we did an evaluation of the attendees and a fairly reasonable postmortem with the volunteers as well. There was a lot of positive feedback and lots of goodwill. Looking back on it now I realise that there was almost nothing in the way of criticism of the way it was run, and I must have had hundreds of people contact me in person or by email to tell me that we needed to do the same thing next year.

I probably should have realised a couple of things at that point. Firstly, being the main organiser with nodbody else involved in actual management, there was really nobody among the group who was able to see the organisation of the whole thing in perspective. I should also have realised that this could not be maintained if the event expanded.

In 2002, it did just that. I estimated that it almost doubled in terms of attendance that year. As a result, we had to put on a second stream of workshop classes, and we had international dancers to organise all of a sudden. It was logistically much more difficult in 2002. The management structure had not changed significantly, except for the fact that I now had Lotte around as a confidant and a huge help, and I had introduced the idea of certain volunteers taking on responsibility for certain areas. As a result, a significant proportion of the volunteer team (around 30 people as I recall) was in crisis mode for much of the time. For me, things hadn’t changed all that much, because I am mostly in problem-solving mode when organising MLX anyway, but for about 5 or 6 of the volunteers who did a lot of work, their weekend was not fun. Not all of these people were official “managers” — they were just the ones who had decided to jump in when things were not working well and sacrificed their time.

A lot of soul-searching resulted. I got sick. A couple of friendships were bruised, which is still a cause of anguish for me today. Lotte and I spent many months talking about how to improve things for the following year. In the end, Lotte’s input was invaluable. She decided that she would rather help solve the management problems herself than watch me get stressed out and sick again. Together we came up with the idea that we needed to define the new role of Volunteer Manager, and that Lotte would fill it.

The short story is that MLX 2003 was a much happier experience for the volunteers. The areas that we were able to address, I realise now, were related to the two circles in Adair’s diagram that I had neglected to some extent: building and maintaining the team and (moreso) identifying and serving individuals’ needs. There was still too much strain on Lotte and myself, and I got sick after MLX again (quite badly this time). But we had learnt an important lesson about how to manage a fairly large team (around 50 volunteers by this stage).

MLX 2004 is when we came really close to getting the formula right. First of all I had now discovered Adair’s stuff and begun to make use of it in my work, so I was now able to communicate the ideas we’d been discovering by trial and error with some clarity. For the first time, we conducted a training session for our managers, and we used the Adair principles to do it. We told them about what we’d discovered. We also gave them practical advice on how to run an event — putting together running sheets and managing small teams.

MLX 2004 was amazing because it was by far the most ambitious timetable of events we had taken on, mainly because we were taking on two major international events along with it: SwingCity and the Hellzapoppin’ World Championships. But guess what? I didn’t get sick, and I had a really, really, good time. And everyone was happy, including the managers. Friendships were built and strengthened. Volunteers gained valuable experience and skills. It was a very positive endorsement of the model above, I have to say.