Posted on August 25th, 2008 by mitten
Most all the time, being not an employee is a good thing. But there are occasions when it’s not. For one, at least, is when you enter into contracts on a work-for-hire situation. Abusive work-for-hire clauses can leave you without ownership of your own work.
When you’re traditionally employed and enjoying a consistent paycheck and health benefits and vacation time and so on, it’s largely reasonable to expect that the works you create for your employer are the property of your employer. It’s part of the deal. But when you are freelancing or otherwise contracting with a company, who owns the final works is something that must be negotiated.
Realize that the first draft of the contract for the ownership of the work product is just that - a first draft. Be prepared to edit it and send it back. Look for clauses asking for exclusive rights, look for promises not to compete, and look for promises of confidentiality. These are all items which can be the starting points for discussion.
There is an excellent write up of work-for-hire, what it means and why it should be avoided here: Stop Work For Hire Work-for-hire can only legally be applied to a fairly short list of creations, however, if you sign a contract with a work-for-hire clause, even for a creation that is not on the short list, you’ve put yourself in a situation where you would have to fund a legal battle in civil court to protect your rights.
Know the rules, be smart about your contracts and don’t give up ownership of your work without proper compensation.
Posted in NAE Business, Resources | 1 Comment »
Posted on June 28th, 2008 by bkerr
From The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander (1976):
7. The more living patterns there are in a place—a room, a building or a town—the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire which is the quality without a name.
8. And when a building has this fire, then it becomes a part of nature. Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are governed by the endless play of repetition and variety created in the presence of the fact that all things pass. This is the quality itself.
Posted in Resources | 5 Comments »
Posted on May 5th, 2008 by vaguery
What: Ann Arbor Coworking “town hall” meeting
Coworking is any long-term arrangement in which independent professionals can work in the same space, whether full- or part-time. You may have seen mention on CNN.com, in the New York Times, or local media.
We’re trying to gauge interest in developing a permanent dedicated coworking space in downtown Ann Arbor. This might include shared office space, meeting and training space, a private cafe, a “makers’ den” for electronic and other fabrication projects. Any or all of those. The space might be run by a private concern, a nonprofit organization, or an ad hoc collaboration. It might be a membership organization, a business of its own, or a cooperative. Or something else.
Let’s explore what it might be, and why you might want to participate.
Where: Ann Arbor District Library Freespace, 3rd floor, Downtown Ann Arbor library building
When: Monday, May 19, 7-8:30pm
The meeting space is reserved from 5pm through 8:30pm, but we will officially begin proceedings at 7pm. If enough interest is generated, we may run two 90-minute rounds of discussion. Please let us know if you’re coming.
Who: Organized by Not An Employee, LLC
Space in the Library conference room is limited to 32 people. If more want to attend and discuss the prospects for coworking, we will try to arrange a second session, and extend discussion after the meeting at one of the other local meeting venues.
Please let us know if you’d like to attend. You may want to use the free service at Upcoming.org to coordinate.
Posted in NAE News, Serious Business | 3 Comments »
Posted on March 31st, 2008 by mitten
One of the tricks they used to tout for helping tiny babies go to sleep was to play a special cd with quiet, muffled whooshing noises. It was meant to simulate the noises a baby would hear while in the womb (her mother’s blood rushing past, presumably) and thus calm and console her enough to let her sleep.
So now that you’re out of the employment womb (um, maybe that’s not the best visual), do you have trouble working because you miss the sounds of the office? Well, worry no more: the fine folks at Thriving Office have the perfect solution for you. They are offering a ‘Sounds of Success’ cd that should make you feel right at home. It even has busy and very busy tracks so you can vary your experience appropriately. If you’re having trouble making the transition from employee to not an employee, this cd is sure to help you stay productive!
Posted in Serious Business | 2 Comments »
Posted on March 30th, 2008 by Barbara
Something they teach you in business school (and should do in high school) is basic financial accounting. Something else they teach you in business school is managerial accounting. These two topics are related like competitive and social Magic the Gathering. One emphasizes the rules, while the other emphasizes the story, but they’re both based on the same information.
The awesome Cosma Shalizi sent me a link to an article which describes a Wharton professor’s work on accounting and managerial bias. Two reports are profiled: one showing that budgeting and internal reporting can help improve forecasting (provided the management believes it), and the other showing that entrepreneurs have a tendency to be overoptimistic — they start to believe the story they’re telling to their own detriment.
You might be asking why I’m bringing this up. After all, as “Not Employees” we don’t need no stinking accounting. If you believe that you’re not ready to work for yourself. You may not need fancy cost accounting, but you better be sure to have a decent (and reasonable!) forecast. Want to get a loan to advance your business? How about one to fix up your home office? You’ll need to show the bank that you know where your income is coming from and how under control your expenses are. Reasonably-priced credit belongs to the well-accounted. Don’t get caught with stars in your eyes.
Posted in Readings | 2 Comments »
Posted on March 23rd, 2008 by Barbara
One of the themes of Not An Employee is collaboration. Here we’ve created a little website and a small business run by people who have never once sat down and said “Ok, we’re going to start a business and have a website and Laura will design it and Barbara will handle the paperwork and Brian will quote stuff and Bill will do whatever it is that Bill does.” We are lucky(?) that our skills complement each others’. We collaborate, but it came about almost by accident.
Just over the past few months, Not An Employee has raised more questions than it’s answered: Is this serendipity normal? How do we work with others in a way that is more fulfilling than just getting paid? (Pay is awesomely useful, but if that is all that mattered we wouldn’t be doing this.) How do we become “collaborators” where others see “contractors”? Is it possible to contract collaboration?
I certainly don’t have any answers. Together we may be able to generate some ideas, though. You know, through collaboration.
Posted in Philosophy | No Comments »
Posted on March 22nd, 2008 by mitten
Paul Graham has posted an essay on the idea that human beings were not meant to have bosses. He argues that we, as a species, are simply not meant to be organized into very large groups. It goes against our evolution.
Watching employees get transformed into founders makes it clear that the difference between the two is due mostly to environment—and in particular that the environment in big companies is toxic to programmers. In the first couple weeks of working on their own startup they seem to come to life, because finally they’re working the way people are meant to.
The full essay is well worth reading and supports our feeling that we’re better without bosses.
Posted in Philosophy | 2 Comments »
Posted on March 22nd, 2008 by vaguery
From The Federalist No. 10: The Utility of the Union as a Safeguard Against Domestic Faction and Insurrection (continued), appearing in the Daily Advertiser of Thursday, November 22, 1787:
Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.
Posted in Resources | No Comments »
Posted on March 20th, 2008 by vaguery
A gentleman of my passing acquaintance, who is a prominent local businessman, mentioned today that he was “happy to see another talent collective” in our town.
I went to substantial lengths to correct him. Which leads me to jot a few notes, and to share them with you.
Sure, yes, there’s Not An Employee, LLC, a company we formed to sell stickers. But that’s a piece of legal chaff for PayPal accounts and to give us a shared ontological framework to use as an interface with banks and Chambers of Commerce and suchlike.
No. Whatever it is, maybe an institution or collective or organization or movement—whatever we finally call it—this thing “Not An Employee” is not a consultancy, headhunting agency, subcontracting network, social club, networking infrastructure.
Not a “talent collective” or a union. Not a cooperative.
Not a coworking facility, and not coworking itself.
Not boosterism, not economic development, not merely a scam to sell stickers or present hack poetry or invoke the ancient Titans of yore. Not a cult, not a jape, not a sorry-ass quixotic windmill-tilters association.
Not even a way to change the world.
It’s a tag. That’s all it is. A tag. A complex adjective. A thing used to describe. A nonexclusive classifier.
So you are asked, What are you? And you say: I’m Not An Employee.
Tell that to me, and having thought long and hard about it I promise that I won’t assume I understand the details of what you mean. But I will suspect some of what it implies.
What are you? Not an employee. What do you do? This.
I think I’m starting to understand.
When we founded Not An Employee, we decided that we would build a new Founders’ Myth with every telling; that every face-to-face version would be measurably different. That still applies; ask any of the others around here what this thing is, what it’s for, and you’ll get a variation. Some overlaps, some differences. Some realistic but stereotyped details thrown in to make it more feasible, make it sound like it’s a general-purpose answer other folks would give as well.
They’re all different, but every one of them is the truth.
So when you tell me you’re Not An Employee, I hear you. After several months, and years before that, I think I’m starting finally to get it. A lot of people I meet every day, people with Prometheus stickers on their computers and “Better Without Bosses” badges on their lapels, I bet they’re starting to understand too.
Tell that to any of us, and we’ll suspect that you have a truly marvelous life which this margin is too narrow to contain. That you’re there, you’re in there behind your eyes, somebody watching back. Rare bird. You’re saying something important about your work, life, that it’s all complex and contingent and varies from time to time in unexpected ways.
We’ll know, more than anything, that you’ve spent a little time thinking, and have decided that the standard glib explanations just don’t work.
What do you do? What do you want? Where do you work?
Does being not an employee prohibit you from being anything else? Does it keep you from having any other tags? From being a programmer or a maid or an inventor or a mom, a gardener or a golfer or a Spaniard or a soprano?
Don’t be stupid. You are also everything else you are. It’s just a tag. A phrase that describes you. One of many.
Being a thing does not keep you from being other things. Being Not An Employee, having that tag, presenting yourself with that label, it doesn’t even keep you from being an actual employee.
If you ask me, it’s risky to assume the world is as simple as you’ve been told. Even the simple white lies you tell yourself? They’re still lies.
Every time you accept a simple explanation, you open yourself up as a tool to be used to others’ advantage. You become of use.
Now you may want to be of use. That’s a life of service, and it is admirable and honest work of its own. Many of the most blessed among us, they’ve served.
By choice. Remember that the blessed ones, they lead their lives with their eyes open. They lead regarded lives. They pay attention, and I would wager that their assumption-to-consideration ratio is really kinda low.
Not all of us choose lives of service. I haven’t, not really. And so like me you may find yourself telling somebody it’s more complicated than that; it’s not what you assume.
The more you do that, the more likely it is you’re Not An Employee.
Among other things.
Posted in Philosophy | 8 Comments »
Posted on March 17th, 2008 by bkerr
From Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0 by Trebor Scholz in First Monday Vol. 13 No. 3:
The language of Web 2.0 is a placeholder for several agendas. It burns the torches of 1960s–style rebellion, a “business revolution” of self–declared anarchists who frown upon authority and control as bad and deem openness as always good. But the fire is held by business elites who are trying to mobilize novelty as marketing ploy. There is some resemblance to the dotcom boom that captured the late ’90s (too much, too fast).
Posted in Resources | No Comments »
Posted on March 14th, 2008 by bkerr
From The Man Who Was Thursday by that ancient asshole G.K. Chesterton:
“Do you see this lantern?” cried Syme in a terrible voice. “Do you see the cross carved on it, and the flame inside? You did not make it. You did not light it. Better men than you, men who could believe and obey, twisted the entrails of iron and preserved the legend of fire. There is not a street you walk on, there is not a thread you wear, that was not made as this lantern was, by denying your philosophy of dirt and rats. You can make nothing. You can only destroy. You will destroy mankind; you will destroy the world. Let that suffice you. Yet this one old Christian lantern you shall not destroy. It shall go where your empire of apes will never have the wit to find it.
Posted in Resources | No Comments »
