Take all the vacation you want
I recently added a Delicious feed in a sidebar to the right that features links to some of my latest writing. I would have simply added this story to that list, but the Globe And Mail chose not to put the story online. (Shocking!) So, here's my recent Saturday feature about "unlimited vacation" policies in the workplace. Enjoy.
All the vacation you want - paradise or purgatory?
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Craig Silverman
Earlier this week, Steve Swasey returned from a two-week vacation that saw him, his wife and four kids snorkel in Honduras and climb ancient ruins in Guatemala. Most people would have had to check with their employer in order to book a vacation during the peak holiday season, and two weeks would eat up a decent chunk of their vacation time.
Mr. Swasey, however, is an executive with Netflix the U.S. movie-rental company, where there's no such thing as vacation days. The company offers "unlimited vacation" to its roughly 500 salaried employees.
"We have a high-performance culture," says Mr. Swasey, Netflix's vice-president of communications. "You've got to perform and do the job, so we give employees a lot of freedom and responsibility."
Vacation days were once used to judge the relative generosity of a company. Now, organizations like Netflix view the act of awarding time off based on seniority as an outdated practice that harks back to an era of paternalistic, staid corporations like, say, IBM.
Indeed, Big Blue once did enforce office hours and track vacation time. But starting in the 1990s, it began loosening its necktie. Today, the company has a worldwide policy that proscribes the tracking of vacation days. Want time off? Let your manager know. No need to file a formal request or check how many days you've already taken. It's enough to make the Man in The Grey Flannel Suit weep into his after-work gimlet.
"Employees within IBM Canada are given guidelines that they get three weeks of vacation when they start," says Joanne Moore, the company's employee-benefits manager. "That's the guideline. But there is no policing, and employees are empowered to take vacation when they want."
Both Netflix and IBM view their vacation policies as a reflection of company values and culture. The careers section of Netflix's website lists seven reasons to work there: No. 5 is Rules Annoy Us.
"Rules creep into most companies as they try to prevent errors by less-than-stellar employees," the video company says. "But rules also inhibit creativity and entrepreneurship, leading to a lack of innovation. Over time, this drives a company to being less fun and less successful."
IBM Canada views its policy as a way to empower employees. "Allowing employees to decide when or where to work, in addition to when they take their vacation is part of that," Ms. Moore says.
The message seems to be that if you love and value your employees, set them free. Let them work from home, don't demand they keep traditional hours and stop telling them when they can and can't take time off.
This philosophy was outlined in a recent book, Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It, by Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson. Formerly human-resources managers at Best Buy, where they implemented what they call a Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), they now help other companies implement the system. "ROWE means each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, as long as their work gets done," Ms. Thompson says. "That means 8-to-5 holds no meaning any more. I can do my work from wherever I need to, whenever I need to."
Best Buy began adopting ROWE in 2003, and today employees at its U.S. headquarters are free to take time off when needed, as long as they fulfill their duties.
Best Buy Canada implemented parts of the ROWE system, but does not currently offer unlimited paid time off. "I'm not sure that our [program] is quite as sophisticated, and theirs has been in play longer," says Colin Picard, a human-resources adviser for the company. "Right now, our employees are allowed up to two days per week where they can work from home."
The move toward a less-rigid work environment goes with the emergence of technologies that enable workers to untether themselves from a cubicle. (Think of the new Cisco Systems TV ads, featuring Juno star Ellen Page, that celebrate video conferencing.)
Of course, this won't work for every kind of job. Netflix employees who are paid an hourly wage to stuff and mail DVDs to subscribers aren't covered by the unlimited-vacation policy. Nor are the workers putting in shifts at IBM's manufacturing plant in Quebec, or employees at Best Buy's actual retail stores all over the United States.
Ms. Thompson says change is slow in coming because organizations still focus on hours worked, rather than results. She calls vacation "an old benefit," explaining: "It's outdated in a sense that there's a belief that we all need to put in our 40 hours every week and we earn vacation."
She adds, "It's also outdated in terms of the belief that that we all want to separate work from personal time. Today, with people so connected all the time, there's a belief that it's bad to be on vacation and check e-mail."
The view that people shouldn't worry about separating work and personal lives runs counter to the advice of nearly every workplace and stress expert. But Ms. Thompson argues that the issue is control, and the need to give more of it to employees so they can manage life on their terms.
"There is a belief that we need boundaries," she says. "If you think about the old workplace, yeah, we needed them because you were forced to come in every day and stay until 5. ... But when you give people autonomy and control over their lives, that whole idea of separation changes - so that now I decide when I'm going to separate."
Already, in fact, many workers in Canada don't use the vacation days they have. A 2009 Harris/Decima survey commissioned by Expedia.ca found that 24 per cent of employed Canadians don't use all of their vacation days. (The average Canadian worker receives 18.7 of them a year.) The survey also found that 30 per cent of Canadians "feel guilty about taking time off work."
"We have a hard enough time taking vacation when it's given," says Beverly Beuermann-King, a stress and wellness expert based in Ontario. "If it's left up to us to decide, then sometimes external pressures and fears may get in the way.
"Especially over last year, people were afraid to take time off because they were worried about layoffs or other issues."
Mr. Swasey of Netflix says he wasn't afraid to head to Central America for his holiday, though he did take his BlackBerry with him. "I checked it two or three times a week and loved it," he says. "I knew exactly what was going on at work, and yet I didn't feel like I was intruded upon in my vacation. I was able to log in on my own time."
But Ms. Beuermann-King argues people should think about the reasons why they're checking in with the office on vacation. "If you feel like you have to check - that you will miss out or that people will think you are slacking off - then that's where there is a real issue," she says. "You're not really taking a vacation. You're just not physically there."
Indeed, one reason companies give for adopting unlimited vacation policies, or the ROWE system, is that they increase productivity. At Best Buy in the U.S., productivity went up by 35 per cent. So does that mean workers take less vacation when given the "unlimited" option?
"I have no idea," Mr. Swasey says. (IBM Canada also doesn't have that data to share.) "There's no tracking, no record, no accounting. Take what you want or what you need. No one abuses the policy because we've got adults doing adult behaviour."
Ms. Thompson and her colleague have spoken with Canadian companies, but as of now there isn't an official ROWE company in the country. If a recent experience is any indication, it may take a while: She and her co-author were booked to speak in Toronto at a recent conference, but their appearance was cancelled.
"When the people that run the conference learned about what ROWE is, they wouldn't let us come and speak because they didn't want their people to start an uprising."
An examination of “arousal procrastination”
I recently discovered that one of the world's leading experts in procrastination is based in Ottawa. His name is Dr. Timothy Pychyl and he runs the Procrastination Research Group at Carleton University. I wrote an article about him for The Globe And Mail, and you can read it below.
This story looks at some of Dr. Pychyl's most recent research. Ever heard of an "arousal procrastinator"?
Procrastination
CRAIG SILVERMAN
Special to The Globe and Mail
February 16, 2009
Timothy Pychyl takes a certain amount of pride in the fact that he recently managed to make a classroom full of students and a group of lawyers squirm in their seats.
Both groups included people who said they delay work to the last minute because it brings out the best in them. Thanks to research he recently completed, Dr. Pychyl, an associate professor of psychology at Carleton University and director of the school's Procrastination Research Group, was ready to call their bluff.
"I told them, 'It's not that you work better under pressure, it's that you only work under pressure.' "
His explanation, which was delivered during a procrastination seminar at an Ontario law firm and during a university class, caused both groups to become visibly uncomfortable. "They hate it when you call them on their excuse," Dr. Pychyl says.
The research, which has been submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, found that people who claim to require the pressure of an impending deadline to produce their best work - called "arousal procrastinators" - are in large part fooling themselves. "It seems to be one of the last socially acceptable defences for procrastination," Dr. Pychyl says.
"They're saying, 'Don't pick on me, this is part of my personality and character.' But our study says we don't see any evidence of that," says Dr. Pychyl, who has spent two decades researching procrastination.
Dr. Pychyl and Kyle Simpson, a recent Carleton masters graduate, asked 311 undergraduate students to complete an online questionnaire that assessed their personality traits and level of procrastination to see if a correlation exists. Research published in the 1990s suggested there is a subtype of procrastinators who are the same people who indulge in sensation-seeking behaviours such as skydiving, or who have extroverted personalities. These so-called arousal procrastinators put things off because they required a higher level of stimulation to perform.
"It seems counterintuitive that someone would consciously wait until the last minute to do something, because most of us know that's quite stressful," Dr. Pychyl says. "These people would say, 'That's why I do it.' "
But in their research, Dr. Pychyl and Mr. Simpson found no correlation between personality type and procrastination. Their resulting research paper, tentatively titled "In search of the arousal procrastinator" concludes that "individuals who claim that they are motivated to procrastinate because they believe they work better under pressure are likely fooling themselves, providing a seemingly believable explanation to excuse their procrastinatory behaviour."
Dr. Pychyl says people cling to the idea of working better under pressure in an attempt to "reduce the dissonance of what they're doing - which is nothing - and what they should be doing - which is working."
Isolde O'Neill, the president of Getting It Together Personal Organizing in Toronto, frequently encounters clients who claim they do their best work at the last minute.
"I'm seeing it more often now among really high-performing professionals," she says. "They are near the top of their industry or profession and that strategy has worked for them until now."
Ms. O'Neill says she is brought in when a person's organizational habits are failing them - and procrastination is often a factor.
"When you defer and do things in a rush, eventually everything [in your life] becomes a last dash," she says. "It's not just that one project - you'll have the same last-minute system for getting up in the morning. It isn't about thriving, it's about surviving."
In theory, a true arousal procrastinator would thrive under last-minute pressure. But that wasn't supported by the research.
"When people do things at the last minute, what they feel when they accomplish it is not joy but a sense of relief that they pulled it off," Dr. Pychyl says. "That marks a procrastinator."
He says research has found that procrastination has a negative effect on a person's happiness.
"Just getting started on a task is a way to prime the pump to increased happiness and success," he says. "Procrastination actually undermines our well-being."
Because of the research, Dr. Pychyl feels empowered to challenge self-professed arousal procrastinators.
"One of the lawyers came up to me at my talk and told me, 'You've painted me perfectly with this brush,' " he says. "These were intelligent, articulate, argumentative people, and not a soul came up and told me I got them wrong."
He hopes these findings will prevent people from believing they do their best work at the last minute.
"There is little evidence that people work better under pressure," Dr. Pychyl says. "This doesn't mean that there aren't people who procrastinate for arousal reasons, but they are fewer in number than we ever imagined."
However, as Ms. O'Neill can attest, general procrastination remains quite common.
"Whenever somebody calls me for a job I assume it won't happen for a year," she says. "That's how much they put it off."
Surveillance and screen envy in the office
As an editor noted in an email to me yesterday, Monday's Life section in the Globe And Mail was something of a "Silverman Show." I wrote two features in addition my usual Monday Office column for the paper, which means my name was pretty much splashed on every page. Apologies.
The first feature was about the supposed productivity benefits of giving workers a widescreen monitor. It was awarded the lovely headline, "Hold the bonus - give me 24 inches of pure joy." Ahem. You can read the article here. I recommend checking out the comments on the story, as people are sharing their experiences with big screens and multiple monitors. The piece also quotes from a blog post by entrepreneur Jason Calacanis, a big believer in the monitor-productivity link.
The second feature is about surveillance in the workplace. New technologies are offering employers unprecedented options for monitoring or tracking employees, and this story outlines some of the common ways for checking up on workers. It also details a Microsoft patent filing for a rather unbelievable monitoring system. The story is here, and the comments are once again worth a read.
How do these two stories fit together? Well, it's easier to see what someone is working (or not working) on if they have a gigantic screen. Apart from that, I've got nothing. What a silly question.
Enjoy the Silverman Show.
The 2007 Office Awards
It's been about nine months since I started writing The Office column and blog for The Globe And Mail, and my December 31 offering was a look back at the year in workplace stories. It's online here and the full text is below.
The 2007 Office Awards
Looking back at a long year on the job
CRAIG SILVERMAN
December 31, 2007
From gun-toting co-workers to bosses who bring in police dogs and hired thugs, it was a year of the ridiculous and the sublime in the world's workplaces. Here's the best of the best, the best of the worst, and the ones we still can't quite understand.
Worst Workplace: Chinese brick kilns
Office denizens ain't got nothin' on the grievances of workers at Chinese brick kilns. Kiln owners were found to have engaged in “illegal employment practices, abduction, restricting workers' personal freedom, employing child labourers and even murder.” What else? Owners “made use of fierce guard dogs and hired thugs, who bashed labourers, adults or children, at will.” Oh, poor you and your lightless cubicle.
Worse Employee: Drunk ambulance driver
Police pulled over an ambulance driver in West Virginia after they saw him run two red lights. They soon discovered he had a patient in the back and that he thought he had turned on his siren and lights. Then, big surprise, he failed a field sobriety test. Get me 40 ccs of unemployment, stat!
Best Office Time-Waster: Faceball
Two employees at photo-sharing website Flickr this year created Faceball, the latest in office gaming (check it out at Faceball.org). The concept is simple: Two people sit in chairs three metres apart and lob a beach ball at each other's face. A facial hit garners one point. The Faceball slogan? “Your face, our balls.” The lure of said balls? “It's actually enjoyable getting hit in the face by your opponent,” said Dunstan Orchard, one of the creators.
Best Office Exit: Angry auction employee
From a farewell e-mail sent by a Christie's employee to colleagues at the auction house: “I feel it is best to quickly express my fondest appreciation for some of the endearing ideas that I have seen peddled around me: like how everyone seems to be replaceable, thinking outside the box is liken to heresy, favouritism is thicker than water and speaking the truth gets you in trouble.” Anyone for farewell drinks?
Worst Workplace Idea: Police-dog training
A New Zealand grocery distributor upset employees after announcing a plan to let law enforcement officials use its facilities to train police dogs. Included in the announcement was a totally unrelated reminder that the possession of drugs and weapons at work was illegal. “This is a workplace, not a prison,” Laila Harre, a union official, told a local paper. “This is about the training needs of the police and the whim of bosses to scare the living shit out of us.” If all goes well, employees may expect to see SWAT training on the premises next year. Drop that kumquat and kiss the floor, produce punk!
Most Dedicated Employee: Carla Bird
Ms. Bird, an assistant at Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Studios, worked 800 hours of overtime during a 17-week period, which equals roughly 12 or 13 hours a day, seven days a week. But the kicker was that her claim for $32,000 (U.S.) of overtime was paid in full. Maybe it's time to hire the assistant an assistant?
Best Lawsuit Excuse: Massages and sausage
James Bonomo, a former paper-sales manager for Mitsubishi International Corp., sued the company alleging he was subjected to a night of drunken karaoke followed by a forced “non-sexual massage” at a bathhouse while on a business trip to China. While in the bathhouse, he alleges, his supervisor compared his penis to an “Italian sausage” and another colleague snapped a picture of it with a cellphone. Even Dunder Mifflin's paper salesmen would be appalled.
Serves You Right Award: The Texas shooter
An employee at Al Boenker Insurance in Texas shot himself in both legs after bringing a gun to work and placing it in the pocket of his jacket. According to one media report, “The bullet passed through the man's left leg and then his right leg and through the corner of a bookcase before lodging in the wall of a cubicle occupied by a startled female co-worker.”
The local police chief said the man “just felt the need to carry it” that day. Now he'll just feel the need to walk with a cane.
Most Evil Gadget: GZ PC-Sport
The obsession with desk-bound exercise continued unabated this year. The worst piece of office exercise equipment was the GZ PC-Sport, a step machine that connects to your computer and fits under your desk. If you stop stepping, it freezes your keyboard or mouse. As if that doesn't happen enough already.
Best Work Quote: Gregg Adams
Mr. Adams, a professor of veterinary biomedical sciences at the University of Saskatchewan's Western College of Veterinary Medicine, spends his days arm-deep in the rectums of various animals to check if they're pregnant.
When asked about his job, he said, “Have I been pooped on by an elephant and a rhinoceros? Yes. I've been up to my shoulders in it.” Keep reaching for the, er, stars, Gregg!
Outstanding Achievement in Special Effects: IvanAnywhere
Ivan Bowman is a Nova Scotia-based employee of iAnywhere Solutions, based in Waterloo, Ont. In order to make his presence felt in the office that's 1,350 kilometres from his home, the company created IvanAnywhere, a robot stand-in that roams the hallways and attends meetings. Everyone seems to like it, but wait until they realize THE ROBOT ACTUALLY CONTROLS THEM!
Sources: Daily Mail, Kitchener-Waterloo Record, PassiveAggressiveNotes.com,, Manawatu (New Zealand) Standard, The New York Times, Shanghai Daily, Saskatoon StarPhoenix, Fort Worth (Tex.) Star-Telegram, Associated Press.
Too busy organizing to be productive
Below is a feature I wrote for The Globe And Mail (link) about the exploding productivity industry.
Too busy organizing to be productive
The quest to find better ways to manage work and life may slow people down in a flood of paperwork, e-mails, blogs and books
CRAIG SILVERMAN
The Globe and Mail
September 24, 2007
Colin McKay begins most meetings by taking out two of his essential productivity tools: first, his BlackBerry; second, a Moleskine notebook he has divided into sections using coloured tabs.
To anyone in the know, that heavily tagged notebook is a dead giveaway: Mr. McKay is GTD.
"That's the calling card," says Mr. McKay, 38, director of communications for the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada in Ottawa.
GTD stands for Getting Things Done, a personal productivity system created by David Allen, whose bestselling book of the same name was first published in 2001.
Today, Mr. Allen's company employs 32 people and expects to earn $6-million (U.S.) in revenue this year from book sales, public seminars, corporate training sessions and a variety of GTD organizational accessories, including wallets.
At a time when stressed, overwhelmed and unproductive workers are grasping for better ways to manage their work and lives, a whole industry of productivity systems, websites, blogs, newsletters, books and experts has sprung up, focusing on major issues in time and workload management right down to ridiculously minute and basic activities.
"GTD helps me create checklists for myself," Mr. McKay says of the method, which uses tools such as e-mail and paper file folders, index cards and notebooks to organize commitments and workflow. "It has given me that little bit of a sense of order."
But as the productivity-obsessed swap tips online and around the office about filing systems, checklists and time management, advice often moves from the practical to the arcane. And the glut of suggestions and systems can actually cause people to become less productive while trying to master a constant barrage of new methods.
"Some people are system junkies," says Janet Barclay, who runs Organized Assistant, a productivity and organization consultancy in Hamilton.
"They try something and say, 'This is the greatest!' Then next year they spend all their time learning a new system."
On Lifehacker.com, a popular productivity site, a tip about managing e-mail or running a more effective meeting can be followed by a link to "15 awesome uses for aluminum foil." (Hint: You can sharpen scissors with it.)
Gina Trapani, the site's editor, says she's surprised by some of the tricks and tips sent in by productivity-obsessed readers.
"We've run some tips about incredibly mundane everyday activities that people put a lot of thought into speeding up or making easier," she wrote in an e-mail. (Ms. Trapani preferred an e-mail interview because, she wrote, "the telephone can be an inefficient way to communicate.")
One writer for the Productivity501 website is on a mission to achieve the elusive goal of a paperless office.
At 43 Folders, another well-known productivity site, the editor declared a "War on Clutter" around U.S. Independence Day this year after reading It's All Too Much, an anti-clutter book.
Mr. McKay says he follows the productivity websites but "draws the line where people describe in detail how they made a pen holder for their Moleskine and then get into a debate about which pen they use."
Mr. McKay confessed his own moment of system overload on his blog, CanuckFlack.com, when he wrote about "staring at a desk covered in GTD flowcharts, Covey checklists, coloured folders, varying sizes of Moleskine notebooks, and the latest DIYPlanner."
While some find it hard to stick to one system, others profess an almost cult-like devotion to their chosen approach. A dedicated GTD practitioner recently created a series of GTD fan buttons for sale online. One features a picture of Mr. Allen inside a pink heart with the words, "gtd 4-ever."
"David Allen said it, I believe it, that's the end of it," reads the product description. "This is a set of three buttons that celebrate the bliss of being organized."
And it's not just adults getting carried away with the productivity craze. In January, Geoff Ruddock, a 15-year-old student in Grade 10 at St. Andrew's College in Aurora, Ont., teamed up with some friends to launch Gearfire.net, a productivity blog for students. He can now talk the GTD talk with the best of them.
"I wanted to get on the headmaster's honour roll, so I looked for tools and ways to work smarter, not harder," he says.
"I see some people that really try hard but are always run down, and others who have a lot of initiative but don't have the time-management skills. I wanted to do well and wanted to make my time more efficient."
Is this something he picked up from his parents?
"Yeah, they get a lot done," he says.
Canada’s best small business employer
I recently wrote a profile of Teva Neuroscience Canada, a pharmaceutical company located in Montreal that was named the best small company to work for, according to a survey conducted by Queen's Centre for Business Venturing and Hewitt Associates. The story is on The Globe And Mail's website here, and the text is below.
How one firm saw the light on hiring
Teva Neuroscience nurtures a happy and productive work force by sticking to the HR basics and making sure employees strike a chord with its culture, writes CRAIG SILVERMAN
MONTREAL
-- The offices of Teva Neuroscience Canada are almost more remarkable
for what they don't have: You won't find slick furniture, a gourmet
kitchen or foosball table -- the bells and whistles that some companies
have come to believe are essential to employee satisfaction and
productivity.
Rather, people like to work there because they believe they belong
there -- and they're rewarded for their loyalty and commitment.
"Five years ago, I was reading Fast Company [magazine], and they
talked about having chefs to make lunch and playing basketball during
the day," Teva Canada general manager Jon Congleton says in an
interview at the pharmaceutical company's Montreal office. "That's the
fluff -- not the substance that can feed people long-term and sustain a
career."
"We focus on three clarities," he continues. "Clarity of structure:
Where do I fit in with this company? Clarity of direction: Where am I
going? And clarity of measurement: How do I know I did a good job?
"Maybe it's not as sexy as a lot of other things, but it is sustaining and it feels more real, and I think people value that."
Largely because of this fundamental approach to human resources, and
the way the company implements it, Teva has been selected as this
year's best small company to work for, based on a survey conducted by
Queen's Centre for Business Venturing and Hewitt Associates. It beat
out about 120 small companies for the honour.
The 62-employee company borders on obsessive when it comes to living
its values. It strives to hire the right people, keep staff
well-informed, gather feedback from them and ensure that employees know
how they fit in with the organization, Mr. Congleton says.
Teva stands out because it creates the activities, programs and
environment that make those goals a reality for all employees. And it
acknowledges their contributions with 18 different awards and other
forms of recognition, such as reward trips for meeting corporate
objectives, trophies and cash bonuses.
LibriVox and the power of distributed communities
I recently published a feature article in the Montreal Gazette about LibriVox.org and its remarkable growth. (I wrote a related piece for the New York Times in late August.) The paper decided not to put the story up online, so here is the full text of the piece, with three sidebars at the end.
Montreal Gazette
Saturday, October 7, 2006
CRAIG SILVERMAN
Hugh McGuire went online about a year ago to look for a free audio book recording. His surfing took him to Project Gutenberg, a free online repository of books and other works in the public domain - but he came up empty-handed.
"I went through the Gutenberg catalogue and found they had very little audio, which was a surprise," he says.
McGuire was searching for a recording of a Joseph Conrad novel whose copyright had expired, meaning anyone was free to make a recording of it. But no one had, and so McGuire, 32, a computer programmer and writer in Montreal, decided to fill the void.
He set up a blog to gather volunteers to record free audio books of works whose copyright had expired. McGuire called his project LibriVox and he then "emailed a bunch of friends and people doing literature podcasts and blogs to ask if they were interested in joining in," he recalls during the first of two meetings at a St. Laurent Blvd. cafe.
Within a few hours, McGuire had enough volunteers to produce a recording of the book.
McGuire, a soft-spoken man with glasses and a light beard, then picks up his coffee and casually delivers a massive understatement, "It was clear to me very early on that this was a very interesting project."
Though McGuire is loath to brag about it, LibriVox.org has in one year grown to become the single largest repository of free audio books on the Internet. Its roughly 2,000 volunteers have recorded over 150 books and more than 200 recordings of short stories, plays, speeches, poems and documents like the Magna Carta and the U.S. Declaration of Independence. LibriVox offers works in French, German, Japanese, Hebrew, Finnish, Latin, Italian and Russian, with recordings currently under way in Arabic, Spanish, Swedish and Chinese. (English is by far the dominant language.)
Every LibriVox recording is offered free for anyone to download, listen to, copy and share as they please. About 25,000 LibriVox books have been downloaded over the past year, McGuire says.
LibriVox's success is a study in how blogs and other collaborative Internet technologies are enabling large groups of people from all over the world to come together and build not just a community but also something tangible, a product or service.
In the case of LibriVox, they created a library of free audio books. A similar but much larger project, Wikipedia.org, is a massive free online encyclopedia with 3.8 million articles in more than 100 languages written and maintained by 48,000 volunteers.
McGuire doesn't hesitate when asked to pinpoint the moment he saw the potential for LibriVox to grow and create something special like Wikipedia.
"When we got BoingBoinged," he says. "That was the big thing that changed everything, that really blew it up."
People all over the world aspire to get "BoingBoinged."
That means you or your website/book/article etc. have been mentioned on and linked to from BoingBoing.net, a website ranked as the most linked-to blog on the Internet. The site is run by five well-connected, tech-savvy writers and businesspeople who post links or articles about interesting things or ideas they discover, or that have been sent in by their legions of loyal readers. BoingBoing's tag line is "A Directory of Wonderful Things."
And the site's stamp of approval means a ton of Internet traffic is coming your way.
On Sept. 12, 2005, LibriVox got BoingBoinged.
That day, Cory Doctorow, an author and BoingBoing contributor, posted a link to LibriVox, noting, "I love audio books, and the store-bought varieties are viciously expensive - an audio version of the Gutenberg Project would be a gigantic mitzvah."
The same day, McGuire says, "We had 10,000 visitors ... to the site."
LibriVox instantly went from a few volunteers to hundreds, and it kept growing. People began planning and producing recordings on their own or in large or small groups. (Some recordings are divided up by having a different person record each chapter.) The LibriVox message boards - where members organize recordings, answer questions and otherwise hang out - began filling up. Some volunteers started spending several hours per week helping with the website, moderating the boards, and working to integrate new volunteers.
What began with a simple idea, a blog and a few emails had, in the span of a few weeks, become a global community with dedicated volunteers and a growing reputation.
"The principles of the project are to be totally noncommercial, totally ad-free, totally volunteer and totally public domain," McGuire says.
Those principles are a major contributor to LibriVox's growth. They're why BoingBoing took notice, and why the project has managed to dwarf other older free audio-book projects.
One such project, Telltale Weekly, sells recordings for 25 cents to $8, but makes them available at no charge through its Spoken Alexandria Project after five years or 100,000 downloads, whichever comes first. Alex Wilson, a writer and actor in Chapel Hill, N.C., who founded the project, reads the vast majority of the works himself.
Another service, LiteralSystems, raises funds for its free recordings and hires professional-quality voice talent to read them.
Both projects predate LibriVox, yet because of their centralized structure and need for funding or revenue, they both have significantly fewer recordings available.
By contrast, LibriVox is an entirely open, volunteer system that requires no financial support. It's considered part of the world of Web 2.0 - a term used to describe new projects and technologies that enable people to create, share and collaborate in new ways online.
Jon Udell, a technology writer and the lead analyst and "blogger-in-chief" for InfoWorld magazine, says Web 2.0 projects like LibriVox and Wikipedia are helping realize the true goal of the World Wide Web.
"From my perspective, the key value of this is in changing people's expectations about the relationship between being a consumer and being a producer," he says. "For several generations we've been trained to be consumers ... the option to be a producer in a variety of ways doesn't even occur to people."
He continues, "The entire bunch of awkward terminology you hear like 'Web 2.0' is expressing what the original purpose of the WWW was. It was designed to be a two-way medium where there was symmetry between readers and writers and producers."
The concept is also expressed in how McGuire responds to those who say they don't like a particular LibriVox recording: "If you think a recording is done badly, then please do one and we'll post it as well."
They often take him up on the offer, and thus the growth of LibriVox continues.
One of LibriVox's most dedicated volunteers and prolific readers is Kara Shallenberg, a married mother of one in Oceanside, Calif. She has read more than 200 individual chapters and six novels for LibriVox, in addition to shorter works. Shallenberg joined LibriVox after she had already been making home recording of books for her audio book fan son, Henry.
"Everything I read to Henry was copyrighted," she says, adding that she was frustrated she couldn't share those works. "The idea of creating audio books that other people could enjoy was exciting."
She has since turned Henry, 10, from an audio book lover to a budding voice talent who has recorded some of Aesop's fables.
"I would be surprised if he didn't keep doing recordings, because he loves audio books," she says. "When you love something that much, you want to get involved."
Another LibriVox volunteer, Gord Mackenzie, is a Canadian working in Detroit. He was drawn by a more philosophical reason. Mackenzie says he is concerned about the "dearth of material from the 20th century entering the public domain."
For him, LibriVox is a way to make the statement that works in the public domain can be used to benefit society. (In Canada, copyright applies for the author's life plus 50 years after their death, at which point the work enters the public domain. In the U.S., where LibriVox is hosted and administered, the general rule is that works published or registered for copyright before 1923 are now in the public domain.)
Both Shallenberg and Mackenzie came to LibriVox via BoingBoing. McGuire estimates that there are only "10 or 15" Montrealers involved in the project, most of whom are friends he contacted in the early days.
"LibriVox went global before it went Montreal," he explains.
Robert Foster, a 59 year-old semi-retired technical writer in Senneville, started recording for LibriVox this past spring and has completed one full solo recording of Aristotle's Poetics, along with three individual chapters of other recordings.
Like many LibriVoxers, he uses a basic microphone that plugs into his computer in conjunction with affordable sound recording and editing software. Recording software is also available for free on the Internet.
"It's a way to volunteer and do it from your home," he says, "I'm trying to get my son to do it as well. I think it's also good for voice training."
LibriVox's volunteers are restricted in their material only to previously published works in the public domain in the United States. McGuire says this open policy has let the personal preferences of volunteers shine through.
"If someone turned up with a smut book from 1850, we would do it," he says. "We did Fanny Hill, which is an early erotic Victorian book. Everyone was laughing in the discussion forums about having to keep quiet while recording so their kids wouldn't hear them."
Other LibriVoxers have proposed reading the Koran (some have already read chapters of the Bible), recording Supreme Court decisions and reciting pi to an unknown, but you can assume lengthy, number of digits. A multilingual recording of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights is under way, as is a full cast recording of The Pirates of Penzance.
Still, there's no lack of notable authors in the LibriVox catalogue. Some of the most recorded include Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Jack London, L. Frank Baum, Lewis Carroll, William Shakespeare and Lucy Maud Montgomery.
At its worst, a free LibriVox audio book can sound like a teenager reading aloud in high-school English class. At its best, it can offer excellent sound quality and skilled narration infused with a passion for the text. In between is a world of competent readings, sometimes spiced with affected accents, mumbled words and distant car horns and reflecting all manner of literary interpretations.
Udell, who has downloaded from LibriVox, says the range of recording and reading quality only adds to the appeal.
"The advantage is that when I listen to a LibriVox recording I know the person who made it did so purely for the love of the work and for the desire to share that work," he says, adding the recording quality will continue to improve as LibriVox grows and volunteers gain more experience.
Shallenberg says her pet parakeet often makes unscripted contributions to her recordings, and she's happy to leave him in.
"We're just regular people, we're all volunteers," she says. "If his were a for-profit situation (requiring rigid quality control), the fun would be gone really fast."
As would Shallenberg, her son, and her parakeet, no doubt.
SIDEBARS
A growing appetite for audio books
The audience for audio books - both free and paid - is growing as more people download works to their digital music players and listen to CDs in their cars.
The North American audio book industry, which typically sells recordings for $15 to $30,
released 3,430 titles, taking in $832 million U.S. in 2004, the last year for which figures are available. By comparison, Hugh McGuire says, over the past year roughly 25,000 LibriVox audio books have been downloaded.
"Readers are increasingly turning to audio books as a way to supplement their reading time, and publishers say it's now expected that an audio book will account for 10 to 15 per cent of a book's overall sale," according to a report from the Audio Publishers Association, a trade group.
Downloadable audio books are especially on the rise. Audible.com, a major seller of downloadable audio books, had sales of $5.1 million U.S. in 2001; by 2003 its sales totalled close to $18.5 million.
According to a 2001 APA survey, 76 per cent of American audio-book listeners are female and 24 per cent are male. For women, the average listening age is 45. For men, it's 47.
LibriVox Top 5
Here are the five titles most frequently downloaded by visitors to
LibriVox.org
1. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen.
2. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, by Mark Twain.
3. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson.
4. Call of the Wild, by Jack London.
5. Anne of Green Gables, by Lucy Maud Montgomery.
On the web
Audio books
librivox.org
literalsystems.org
spokenalex.org
Article in NY Times: Giving a voice to the public domain
I have an article and accompanying sidebar in today's New York Times about three projects that are creating free audiobooks of works in the public domain. Needless to say, I'm very pleased to be published in the Times. You can go to the Times website (story and sidebar) to read the pieces, and I've pasted an excerpt below the full article text below.
A profile of Demetri Martin; this week’s Explainer
It has been a busy time for me at Hour.
First there was my Jazz Festival coverage, and now it's time for another Just For Laughs article. (Read the first two here.) I wrote this week's cover story on Demetri Martin, a very talented and funny comedian/writer/painter/musician etc. who is bringing his one man show to town. Martin is perhaps best known as the trendspotting youth reporter on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. But he has a ton of other things going on. He was very generous with his time during our interview, especially considering all the projects he has on the go. Really nice guy.
Also, this week's Explainer column looks at the Jacques Cartier Bridge, which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary. I love the fact that the Prime Minister at the time couldn't be at the inauguration in person and instead "delivered a speech by telephone from Ottawa and then pressed a button to remotely unveil a plaque commemorating the occasion." That's hilarious.
JFL: Craig Ferguson and Ryan Belleville come to town
I have two stories in this week's Hour (aside form my usual Explainer column), both of which are interviews with performers coming to town for the Just For Laughs comedy festival.
I gave Craig Ferguson a little Craig-on-Craig action in this article. And I also interviewed Canadian comedian/actor Ryan Belleville. Both were good to talk to. Ferguson's stint as the host of the Late Late Show is steadily bringing in new viewers. And Belleville continues to tour as a stand-up and take part in pilot season from his base in LA.
Then there's this week's Explainer, which is about Doctors Without Borders. As always, the Explainer archives are here.
Welcome
Hey there. Thanks for stopping by. I'm a freelance journalist and author in Montreal, Canada. I serve as an associate editor for PBS MediaShift, a website that reports on trends in new media and journalism. I edit RegretTheError.com and wrote a book of the same name. I'm also the co-author, with Michael Calce, of Mafiaboy: How I Cracked The Internet and Why It's Still Broken. Both books are listed to the right.
I write weekly columns for Hour and Columbia Journalism Review online, and am a former columnist and blogger for The Globe And Mail. Read my bio by clicking on the "About Me" link above, or check out the "Writing Samples" page to read some of my work. If you're interested in speaking with me about an assignment or project, email me at the address listed below.
Recent Writing/Work