Today I showed Sheila at the Harambee Centre how to turn a Word document into a sensible email questionnaire. We just went for copy and paste from Word into an HTML email, then asking people to reply and fill in their answers.

Outlook 2000 has a nice feature that if you type within a reply to an email beyond the end of lines of the replied-to message, then it marks your text with your name and a special colour. This makes it much easier to read the responses!

Computers are still way too hard to use. There’s no easy way of doing a website questionnaire of this form, without coding. Even if there is, it is almost certainly proprietary rather than using standard document formats and protocols.

It was interesting just watching a normal user try to edit an HTML email. It was frustrating, as she quite reasonably expected it to behave exactly as Word. Quite reasonably from a standards and software engineering point of view, it doesn’t. From a usability point of view this sucks.

Some things, like formatting being different, require better standard word processing file formats to use for sending emails. Other things, such as it not having a Word-like spell checker with squiggly red lines built in, are caused by application-focused software.

Software should be document focussed or action focussed. I want to put Word documents in my Outlook folders. I want to make a bookmark in Mozilla which records an entire set of tab pages, including web sites, open instances of Vim, command lines in certain directories, and a Gnumeric spreadsheet.

I want to be able to forward anything to anyone because everything that everyone uses is an international standard.

Went to the Cambridge Co-operative Development Agency (CCDA) today and had a good long chat with Adrian Ashton there.

I am investigating the possibility of persuading someone to start their new software-related business as a co-operative, rather than a more normally structured sort of company limited by guarantee. But that’s just an excuse, as I want to know about it myself anyway. Maybe I will start an open source charity consultancy, and then I’ll need to know.

A few cool/interesting things:

• All businesses have rules, about who the owners, the directors, the management are. About how profit is spent or allocated. About everything. In UK law there is no special definition for a co-op, it is incorporated just as any other business just with different rules.
• Because of this you can invent any laws you like. This is cool. However, you probably want to use an off-the-shelf set of laws as it is cheaper, and they are more likely to work. A bug in your rules could open your company up to a negative destruction that benefits one party, but is overall bad.
• Up until about 20 members co-ops tend to decide things on one person one vote. After that it is too big, and the membership instead appoints directors. This isn’t any different from the currently more common sort of company, where shareholders appoint the directors who appoint the management. Just different people making decisions.
• New co-operatuve businesses have a higher chance of survival than other business structures.
• People are flattered to join a co-op and they show real commitment, as they are running the company. This is a rational economic structure for many business types. I reckon the only reason that it is not more common is social. Given two existing businesses that are quite old, one should expect the co-operative one to do better as it would attract and retain better staff. Certainly, given the choice of two successful software companies, one a co-operative and one not, the co-op would be a more sensible choice for me on a power and (if it is structured right) a financial basis.
• If only one thing could be said about starting a business, it is this. Decide clearly, on your own, what you want from the business. For example, how much and for what reward you are prepared to work, what your goal for the market that the business is in, what exactly is it trying to achieve? When everyone involved has done that, then decide which set of rules suits your purpose the best.
• Founder syndrome. This is where someone does an excellent job of inventing, promoting, pushing and creating a new business. After a few years it is a successful enterprise. Then they cling to it possessively, it is my business. This stifles things, and is bad for the business. The EasyJet chairman recently gave up management to avoid this happening to him.
• Your members (i.e. directors) can be anyone the rules say they are – workers, customers, investors, or a mixture of them all. Having a major customer as a member is oft a good thing, as it cements the relationship and creates loyalty and trust. You need to definte clear rules as to the conditions for membership.
• CCDA partly serves to do for co-ops what organisations like Business Link do for other businesses. However, recently, Business Link have funding specifically for activity relating to co-ops. CCDA are themselves a co-op whose members are its employees, co-ops in Cambridgeshire and local government representatives.
• You can have trigger laws to force wind-up of the company if there is no choice but to break them. This can stop the company escaping too much from its purpose. These rules will usually redistribute assets to charity or to the co-operative movement. I say that in software, it should make it open source.

ICOM are the folk who can help you incorporate your co-operative enterprise. They sell off the shelf rulesets, and provide other support and services.

Oh yes, and the new domain name has propagated but there is nothing there yet.

Had a really good day at the Harambee centre. Wayne arrived just before 11am with the new computer, and quickly and consummately set it up. Crimson Technology provides proper service. He moved the old computer, set up the new one, installed printer drivers for the printer, and even put in a network card that i had bought along. You try and get Dell to do that.

A little before he left, Phil arrived, and then we spent all afternoon setting up the network between the two machines, with internet connection sharing. I say “we”, but I mainly made tea, wallpaper and looked up Swahili names for the computers. They’re called Hujambo (“Are you fine?”) and Sijambo (“I’m fine!”). Harambee means “Let’s pull together!”.

Phil did a top, professional job, and now we have two virus-checked, defragged, networked, connection sharing, printer sharing, My Documents sharing, multi-email account fetching, all singing, all dancing computers.

They’re perfect.

Of course, I’ve allocated time tomorrow to go in and fix any problems.

Last Thursday I went to an introductory meeting about Re-evaluation Counseling (RC), also known as Co-counseling.

It’s a curious thing. The core is that you sit down with some one, and listen to them talk for 45 minutes. You don’t add anything to the conversation, just nod, be interested, engage, but certainly not ask questions or tell your own story. Then you swap over and they listen to you for 45 minutes.

There’s a bit more to this, the organisation also has quasi-religious and political beliefs. That all people are basically good, and basically much more intelligent than we normally think. That our education system is broken (there seems to be a common leftist view that this is the case), and that as a result we are all broken from our true potential, and this has caused lots of the problems in the world.

Well, this is another belief system quantum leap, like network marketing, Chomskyite politics or absolutist Buddhism. What I mean is you either do or you do not believe the issue at hand. And when you believe it you are stepping outside of your normal society, and into another one. You can’t realistically and honestly stay the same and believe it.

This is one aspect of a cult, and I’m using the word in the most positive way. As long as the organisation isn’t being deceptive about what it tries to do, it isn’t a concern.

Socially, my mind rebels against these things. I find them instinctively scary. That is part of the belief system of the comfort zone that most of us live in most of the time. Strange organisations which function differently are to be avoided, because they might make people think that we’re weird, and you couldn’t have that.

I didn’t like this RC, it didn’t feel right to me. I’m too used to back and forth discussion, and I didn’t like the quasi-religious backdrop. Also it felt marginal, like only specific people with certain sorts of problems would ever get involved in it. Unlike, say, Darwinism, where the beliefs are for their own sake, the RC beliefs felt like conveniences for the therapeutic aspects to work. Darwinistic beliefs have no direct positive consequences for yourself (e.g. as the RC belief leads you to conclude I am good, I am intelligent), so to me the RC beliefs felt self-serving.

One of my more interesting reactions is that the whole thing is that it is marginal. This bothers me because I’m looking for things that can make the whole world better, rather than just please a cluster of people and make them feel they are doing something useful. For example, I believe that co-operative business structures could be accepted by most people, provided the right form is found. However, I don’t feel the same about anarchism.

But then, if I was in Roman times and secretly visited an early Christian sect, I’d have said that was marginal.

It’s a strange sort of loneliness living your life as a free agent. I’m use to some social interaction at the club that is Creature Labs in amongst writing and coding. Yesterday afternoon I went for a run to stop myself going to sleep. If I was working from home for an extended period I’d have to create a system of hour-long afternoon or late lunch time activities to sustain all my needs.

Wayne is arriving at the Harambee centre at 11am with the new computer, and Phil is coming a bit later to help network it.