Interesting article at Nixon Peabody about TEKsystems Inc. v. Hammernick et al.

This is a new lawsuit in Minnesota which says 3 former employees violated the terms of their non-compete, non-solicitation & non-disclosure agreement because they ‘connected’ with previous clients via Linkedin.

There is more than just ‘connecting’ as the article prints an email the former employee sent via Linkedin but I want to concentrate on the ‘connecting’.

It’s now pretty standard to connect online with your co-workers. And if it’s not via Linkedin then there’s connection on Twitter or Facebook or Foursquare or Flickr or Dopplr or whatever other sites will be launching in the future. Is connecting the equivilent to bumping into someone on the street? Is it the same as picking up the phone? Is it a public advertising message? Or an email?

I’m not sure how the act of connecting would equal solicitation but it seems that’s what’s being argued.

More fascinating is… what does this mean if you’re already connected (prior to leaving the company)? Do you need to un-follow? Or rather do you need to tell the person to stop following you (as you don’t always control who follows you)? Will we see new blocking tools? Should you de-friend the folks you worked with or came in contact with during that employment? Is this a new product opportunity for Linkedin (tick the boxes to select which of your contacts are affected and enter the length of your agreement here. We’ll prevent you from talking until then!)

And if you do need to de-friend… what’s that do for your mental state? What happens when the people you’ve become friends with, seen every day, gone to parties with, read tweets & status & look at pix online are suddenly unavailable due to an employment contract. Has anyone seen research in this area? A quick search didn’t find anything. Somehow I suspect (or hope) this would be considered an unfair hardship well beyond the corporation’s rights.

I can only hope the judge & other people involved in deciding cases like these understand social media, are active participants on these sites or have the foresight to bring in their own experts to explain the situation.

BTW, I’m obviously not an employment lawyer so don’t take any of this as advice or a comment on this particular case… it’s a musing on where things could be going.

i’ve been testing out a few products of late to improve my organisation. i have too much scattered about… in my phone, in my email, on a to-do site, in word docs, and on & on. i’d like a easier way to find info from those notes i took in a class 4 years ago that surprise surprise, might be useful now. or find some data from an article that i knew i’d want to refer back to.

my rough criteria:

• mind maps would be great
• the ability to reference/cite (site, book, audio, video, etc) and maybe pull those into a list (for when i decide i need to go back & get a PhD…)
• an easy 1 click way of pulling that cite info into the system (info being author name, title, url, etc)
• some tagging functionality
• note taking (of course)
• good search
• portable – online & offline. computer & phone. able to export into a usable format.
• to-do checklist

my top runners are evernote, zotero & personal brain.

personal brain wins in the visual mind map criteria. or rather visual folder/mind map combination. i’m really digging it. in a lot of ways this is my fav. or maybe i just really want it to be my fav since it’s the only visual tool that seems to work for me. unfortunately it’s pricey, doesn’t have a phone version & i can’t figure out if there’s any citing abilities. you can only export your data if you buy the high end version (holding data captive is pretty shitty brain folks). oh, and their website is fairy horrid.

zotero is focused on the academic referencing and does a good job. there’s 2 things that annoy me… the promise of sucking citation data from a page doesn’t work as well as I’d hope & the UI isn’t as responsive as I’d like. I need to use the mouse A LOT. also, it doesn’t have a phone version. otherwise it’s a great tool. and open source gets bonus points.

i’ve spent the least amount of time with evernote but i think it might take over from zotero since i’m not writing academic papers. Very easy to use, good UI, desktop, tons of phones, web, good sync’ing! and the only one of these 3 that has to-do functionality.

What tools do you use?

(other tools i looked at include SciPlore, Buzan’s mind mapping, several web2.0 mindmaps, some other referencing software that i can’t think of the name)

over at harvard business blogs, gina trapani of lifehacker gives her best practice tips for not being in the office – in Master the Art of Working Remotely.

her tips include:

• get better at using email
• using IM so you are ‘present’ in the office for those quick off the cuff conversations
• use online tools that fit the client & the project (like shared calendars & docs or wikis)
• have regular voice/webcam chats

i agree with all 4 of those but want to put extra emphasis on the last item. i recommend organising regular (1-2x a week) voice communication from the very first day of the team or remote working relationship. depending on the stage of the project, increase the frequency (launching in 4 weeks? testing and need quick turn arounds? schedule a phone SCRUM for everyday).

it’s also a good idea to prepare and encourage folks to pick up the phone or use skype IMPROMPTU just as they would if the person was at the other end of the same building. perhaps it’s a hangover of thinking how much this long distance call will cost but email seems to be more popular.

having any sort of real time conversation takes more planning. check a time zone calculator! no one wants to wake someone up at 3am. make sure there’s at least an hour overlap in both people’s schedules and rotate the pain of the 10pm phone call if that’s required.

i have seen situations where emails went back & forth for a week or more with no resolution and only increasing frustration on both sides until a phone call clarified the situation (and then everyone realised the problem was small and easy to fix). This continued frustration hurts the relationship & trust and damages the ability of the team to continue working together.

making sure you have ‘f2f’ time is important. if you’re lucky enough to have overlapping time zones, make sure you use IM and other collaborative tools. being able to look at the same document/picture/video/etc in real time and discuss or mark up the object will save hours of work and cut down on mis-understanding.

a new study has shown there’s a link between living overseas and creativity.

using a multi-method approach, 5 studies explored the relationship btwn creativity and living abroad. it seems the act of adapting to a different culture and how much you adapt is the key to improved creativity. and it seems just traveling overseas doesn’t have the same link.

“It may be that those critical months or years of turning cultural bewilderment into concrete understanding may instill not only the ability to ‘think outside the box’ but also the capacity to realise that the box is more than a simple square, more than its simple form, but also a repository of many creative possibilities.”

the authors state this is just the beginning of the research needed but i think they are onto something. living overseas exposes you to different ideas, ways of doing things, mindsets, cultures, etc. you may be exposed to these same things when traveling but it’s not until you need to do those mundane daily things like ordering a coffee or leasing an apartment that the brain needs to kick some creativity into the process and re-learn.

one research question i’d love to see further developed by folks going into this stream is – is your creativity enhanced by the degree of foreignness of the country you choose to live in? for example, an american in japan vs an american in the UK. i think this study was european & americans but i’m not sure what countries the cultural experiences were in (i haven’t read the full article).

hmmm…. had i moved to a country that didn’t speak english and didn’t use the same characters, would my creativity be enhanced more than it is now (having lived in 3 english speaking countries)? maybe i should head to tokyo to find out…

Maddux, W., & Galinsky, A. (2009). Cultural borders and mental barriers: The relationship between living abroad and creativity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96 (5), 1047-1061

summary on BPS

today is Ada Lovelace day.

this day has been organised to celebrate and draw attention to women who excel in technology. you can find out more about ada or other women in tech on the ada lovelace day collection and their twitter account

i wanted to highlight a woman who has been instrumental to the internet industry – particularly in the early days. perhaps someone who worked with tim berners-lee in developing hypertext. someone at BBN or USC/ISI who helped develop the domain name system (DNS). but all the internet history sites, like this one from the computer history museum, talk about the men – vint cerf, bob kahn, tim berners-lee, ray tomlinson, etc.

i tried to think of other internet women and came up with a few… esther dyson, kim polese, meg whitman, and even carly fiorina.

but it was really hard to find the names of any women who worked on standards, protocols, etc. do i need to search thru RFCs to find them? academic journals? they must exist!

so after spending a good chunk of time this afternoon searching, here’s 2 women i’d like to highlight:

Joan Margaret Winters
while i could barely find any information about her – it seems she was an early advocate for what we now call ‘user experience’ but then ‘human factors’. She worked with/at IBM from the mid-1979s on both software & hardware human factors projects.

slightly more info here.

Judith Estrin
Judith has co-founded 2 networking companies – Bridge which merged with 3Com and Precept which was acquired by Cisco. She has been on Fortune mag’s list of the most powerful women (3 times!) and was inducted to the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 2002. Last September, she wrote the book: Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy .