…a level above which people tend not to be any happier, according to a long but fascinating post at You Are Not So Smart entitled “The Overjustification Effect“.

“The Misconception: There is nothing better in the world than getting paid to do what you love.

The Truth: Getting paid for doing what you already enjoy will sometimes cause your love for the task to wane because you attribute your motivation as coming from the reward, not your internal feelings.”

This applies equally to being paid poorly as is does to being paid well. I remember the frustration I felt spending three years at the bottom end of the music business with little to show for it. This frustration prevented me from feeling fulfilled by work I enjoyed.

One of the comments references Steve Jobs’ exhortation:

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

Note that he didn’t say “do what you love”.

I thought I was going to have to ditch my HTC Wildfire and upgrade expensively to something more powerful, but I found a way to squeeze better performance out of a phone locked by the manufacturer to encourage people to spend more money.

Gadgetphobia

I’m not big on gadgets. I spend most of my time fixing problems caused by technology and my disdain for the arms race the mobile phone marketplace has become means I have only ever owned two mobile phones: one in the ’90s and one in the ’00s (a Panasonic and a Samsung. I couldn’t tell you which models).

So perhaps it was the dawn of a new decade which led me to decide I could no longer live without instant all-day access to e-mail and social computing tools on the move. Having seen the Samsung go through the washing machine, survive and limp on for another 18 months, I’d kept an eye on smartphone developments. The convergence of photography, video and GPS navigation were the main attractions. Vodafone’s Text And Web Freebee meant I could get web access for less than £10 a month – a significant increase on my current use as I’m not a big talker, viewing a phone as a convenience rather than a necessity - and when I saw Phones4U offering the HTC Wildfire for around £120, I picked one up at their Strand shop.

I spent the following weeks getting to know it. With a 600MHz processor, it was slower than the HTC Desires and iPhones sported by friends. The only application, I bought was music player PowerAmp which plays lossless FLAC format music files. Coupled with Last.fm‘s scrobbler, this automatically updates my listening history.

Problems

In the beginning, performance was good. Early problems saw PowerAmp locking up when syncing my Yahoo Mail or if Seesmic attempted to update my Twitter stream, necessitating a reboot. Things worsened over the summer after I installed the huge Google+ client application.

Removing as many applications as I could resulted in some improvements and I found myself wondering why I couldn’t get rid of the unused apps in HTC Sense which I found useless: stock price updates, Quick Office… none of which I used.

The release of version 2.3 of the Android operating system, Gingerbread, in the summer also passed me by. It wasn’t until I was marvelling at the interface sported by a friend’s HTC Sensation that it occurred to me I was missing out. Checking the latest HTC phones, I found Gingerbread wasn’t an option for the Wildfire, now replaced by the Wildfire S, which did have Gingerbread. Likewise the original HTC Desire.

Would I be compelled to upgrade a mere six months on? While I didn’t fancy shelling out £400 for the Sensation, even a Wildfire S would leave me around £100 out of pocket, going by the Wildfire’s current resale value.

CyanogenMod 7

I soldiered on for a couple of months, but some questions kept bothering me. If Android is an open platform, why can’t I upgrade it? And why can’t I remove applications I don’t need?

Several years ago, I improved the user interface of my Archos FM Recorder by replacing the operating system with RockBox. Perhaps something similar is available for Android phones?

Upon investigation I found all these things were possible. There is a thriving community of dedicated modifiers dedicated to improving user experience. One of the most popular is CyanogenMod, the new stable release 7.1 based on Android 2.3.7 had been made available a few days earlier.

The upgrade process was involved, but the steps are well documented. You cannot omit any of them.

The improvement was instantaneous and way beyond my expectations. Navigation responds more quickly, PowerAmp no longer freezes, applications work better. And I’m not the only one surprised by CyanogenMod7‘s effectiveness.

Further improvements are possible. Repartition your SD cards so you can install applications onto them, which stops your phone filling up and slowing down.

There have been some hiccups – it took me over two weeks to get GPS working again by reflashing the radio component - but there is a vast amount of information on-line and a supportive community who answer questions (as long as they haven’t been asked too many times before).

I’m looking forward to future improvements. After all, the Wildfire has a lot to live up to if it’s going to make it to 2020′s.

…after a third attack, so I’m joining Neville Hobson in running a default theme for a bit.

Good heavens… only half an hour to sort out this time.  It seems there’s was another Base64 section in functions.php in this free theme – and the Antivirus plugin didn’t pick it up. I have now checked the whole theme by hand and removed the offending code.

The final Intranetters of 2011 is full to bursting, with plenty of new faces. Our last visit to The Crown Estate was excellent though we’re not here to see their intranet today. Instead Romec and Field Fisher Waterhouse are taking to the stage and James Robertson has dropped in to talk about the 2011 Intranet Innovation Awards.

Romec

Nigel Williams‘s presentation was cut short last time, so he returns to demonstrate Romec’s Interact-based intranet.

Romec was established in 1989 to provide facilities management services to Royal Mail. It has a distributed workforce which is highly unionised. The intranet serves 4,500 users, 25% of whom use laptops, though 45% have nothing.

Interact has been around for the last decade and is a modular tool – if you want something, there’s usually a module available. This makes Interact intranets fell nicely integrated, with the activity streams showing not just social updates, but notifications about which documents people have updated.

A feature Romec are experimenting with allows people to tag others with actions. While this could result in “another” inbox, the transparency it demands is useful and a useful step in the direction of online task management.

I hear advertising on the intranet being discussed from time to time. Romec have taken a different approach to simply adding banners to certain pages. The site directory shows advertisements for local taxis, hotels and restaurants, all of which offer preferential rates. The information is maintained by secretaries as part of their KPIs.

Contract Briefs are central to Romec’s business process and Romec have used the intranet to replace a system of ad hoc spreadsheets with a centralised tool. Crucially, the business likes it and have become advocates for the new system. Another success has seen the Romec Management System, which stores forms, policies and manuals, being signed off by auditors DNV.

Field Fisher Waterhouse

There was an extended networking break as James Mullan and The Crown Estate’s technical team wrestled with gremlins, but eventually we got underway.

James is bravely following in the footsteps of Maria Cesa and Rod McLean (twice), admitting that FFW’s intranet is due a revamp and presumably looking for ideas and feedback. Judging by the Twitter stream during the presentation, he got what he was looking for! As James explains, the intranet is three years old and he inherited it when the Knowledge Management team took it over. As well as purely technical challenges, like many law firms – and indeed organisations with any history – FFW faces the challenge of changing a culture of “private documents”.

FFW’s intranet allows some personalisation of feeds and information sources, but I wondered why these weren’t aggregated in one place or an RSS reader. Many pages feature communications in a kitchen sink approach to getting the message out there – wherever there’s space.

Navigation is organisation-based, so most people use the “A-Z of the intranet” to find what they’re looking for – a strong indicator that the navigation must be improved.

Intranet Innovation Awards 2011

We were happy that James Robertson of Step Two Designs was able to grace Intranetters with his presence once again, having stepped off a plane from Australia at about 6:00am.

This time, not only is he presenting a review of the very recently announced results of the 2011 Intranet Innovation Awards, but three of the winners are with us to receive their trophies.

Sharon O’Dea collects an award for UK Parliament’s mobile intranet, demonstrated at the last Intranetters session at The Crown Estate, Alex Jackson for placing Framestore‘s core business of visual effects and computer animation at the heart of their intranet, Adam Pope for Arup‘s effort at engaging employees in fundraising for Sports Aid with the Amazing Race.

James’s summary of this year’s awards was peppered with common sense advice. On the need for intranets to evolve as systems: “Redesigns achieve little – the real value is in (continuous) incremental change.”

This was best exemplified by Framestore. Having already won an award last year, their latest innovation uses pictures of individual animation frames to help animators  visually understand their progress. Framestore are already planning a version which includes video, so we may well be applauding their third consecutive success in 2012.

I just liked the name of Framestore’s internal microblogging tool: “Fritter”.

James’s parting advice for all intranet teams was simple – make a list: “What are the six things you are going to improve in the next six months?”

(Update: James Mullan has written up this event on his blog.)

For most people the threat of hacking is simply a threat. It’s a risk anyone with a website lives with, but until it happens, most of us give it little thought.

So I was surprised to notice on my way to bed last night that the front page of my blog had been replaced with this screen which reads “Hacked by Amin Safi”:

How could this have happened? Had my passwords been discovered through a brute force attack? Would the blog I’d recently migrated have to be recreated from scratch? Was my entire material wealth currently being sucked from my grasp by some enormous virtual vacuum cleaner?

When I’d calmed down, I set about finding out how to repair the damage and prevent it happening again. Naturally there is a lot of information available on-line.

First, it’s not an uncommon experience: this cyber crime site lists a number of similar violations. And there are no teams of pale, dark-eyed teenagers. It’s mostly done by code which exploits vulnerabilities in WordPress, WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.

The damage was relatively minor: I couldn’t log in to WordPress, so first I had to go in via CPanel and reset the user passwords. This allowed me to enter the dashboard and select the default WordPress theme, which restored my blog to functionality, if not to its former glory.

How did that happen?

The following day I returned to understand more fully how my blog had been compromised.

I deleted the hacked index.php file, then reinstalled the theme I had been using, Stripe, which I had found on the web.

I then installed Antivirus and scanned the theme. Antivirus pointed out the footer was encoded in Base64 and decoding the characters in the footer, I found some code which displays an advertisement for acne medication.

I also installed Exploit Scanner, but there doesn’t seem to be anything else to worry about, so having removed the dubious code and replaced the Base64 encoded section with regular, the theme is up and running again.

The following pages all helped me:

• How to backup and restore a MySQL database
• How to fix a hacked WordPress blog
• Backing up your database
• Pre-hacked WordPress themes
• How to completely clean your WordPress installation
• WordPress’s own advice on what to do when your site is hacked
• Improving your WordPress blog’s security

Imagine: you’ve been waiting for months to pitch a new, streamlined intranet design to a business leader.

You finally sit down to talk and your heart sinks as they start to outline how scrolling marquees are going to revolutionise their business function.

What if you could point to an example which explains why perhaps their suggestion isn’t such a great idea?

Why Intranet Management is so difficult

I sympathised with Luke Oatham as I read his excellent blog post on “The horrors of devolved publishing”, but it was the throwaway comment at the end which caught my eye:

“I’ll never forget in the early days, the proud publisher who posted an animated gif of his revolving head…”

I’ve seen a lot of intranets. Most are good. Some are excellent. And they’re all managed by highly-skilled, professional people who understand the field to a depth which few others appreciate.

Responsible for a complex, constantly evolving set of tools which touch every area of an organisation, they’re expected to be a step ahead – identifying future technology to fulfil the organisation’s strategy, while tactically supporting its day-to-day work with the existing intranet tools.

And yet, they’re repeatedly forced to listen patiently as members of their organisation line up to explain why their site can’t follow the design standards, why it must work “like Google and the iPod”, have a four minute Flash intro which can’t be skipped and picture of the regional director on the homepage smiling with his thumbs in the air.

The perfect intranet site.

How we learn from experience

It’s just over four years since we started Intranetters – a community of practice for intranet managers – and I first spoke at a conference, the Melcrum Social Media Forum. More conferences followed – J. Boye, Ark Group, KMUK, Econique Business Masters to name just a few – and more Intranetters events and I’ve met many, many people who work with intranets.

I’ve enjoyed all these events, but they all have one thing in common. When the doors close, the stories start. The clients with their ridiculous requests, the misapprehensions, the misconceptions and above all the failure to understand the people, the tools and just what the purpose of an intranet is.

If I sat down one evening to redesign my car, then popped in to the local garage the following morning with my drawing on an envelope and asked them to make a few “tweaks”. Because everyone uses the internet, they believe they understand what makes a great user experience. Unfortunately, this often means Flash intros, mystery meat navigation and animated gifs. As James Robertson of Step Two Designs told Intranetters in 2010, if people aren’t listening to the advice of intranet managers, they’re undervaluing their expertise.

What more can we do?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Dave Snowden and his KM principles, it’s that “tolerated failure imprints learning better than success.”
There are excellent resources on the web which highlight good intranet design and poor internet webpage design…

• The Nielsen Norman Group’s Design Annual recognises good design and Jakob Nielsen writes about web usability
• Step Two Designs’ Intranet Innovations Awards recognise innovative and emerging ideas for increasing productivity
• Vincent Flanders’ Webpages That Suck highlights poor design and usability on the internet

…but I’ve yet to see anything specifically directed at bad intranet design.

So why not create one?

What are the worst ideas you’ve heard and seen? The pointless animations guaranteed to increase “hits”, the awful styles, the unusable navigation…

Send me stories, pictures, wireframes, screenshots… tell me why these ideas were supposed to work. Did you implement them? Or were you able to dissuade the client from a career-limiting mistake.

You can submit anonymously, remove logos… email intranetdisasters@gmail.com and I’ll include the best ones at Intranet Disasters.

Daniel Tammet uses examples linked to his experience of synesthesia to explain how our perception creates knowledge: ”Aesthetic judgements rather than abstract reasoning guide and shape the process by which we all come to know what we know.”

Useful new short film from Red Sky Vision featuring Neville Hobson, David Ferrabee and Richard Dennison, among others:

“There is disconnect between how immersed and digitally connected employees are outside of the workplace, and how their internal communications are being delivered. On the ground, employees are still posting printed communications on the water cooler when they can be engaged, led and informed via the latest digital channel.”

Social Media @ Work from Red Sky Vision on Vimeo.

Being just around the corner from The London School of Economics, I signed up quickly when this event popped up in David Gurteen’s events feed.

Hosted by Prof. Eve Mitleton-Kelly who founded the LSE’s complexity Research programme, the afternoon featured presentations from Prof. Sue Richards and Lynne Sedgemore. I’d expected to see more familiar faces, though I recognised Ed Rosen from South Bank University from Gurteen Knowledge Cafés.

Prof. Richards spoke about her experiences of UK public administration, the changing relationships between central and local government. The UK ”tightened up the mechanism of the central state” since 1979, but is now experiencing diminishing returns and needs “leaders… to work more effectively in complex adaptive systems.” This, she said, could result from greater diversity in Whitehall, the “burning platform of public expenditure…” and supported by the experience of the Civil Service which helped set up the Coalition.

Prof. Richards’ final slide was a summary of the traits she felt were required of modern leaders:

• Acknowledge complexity – governance, policy and management approaches
• Government as one actor among many, but with a pivotal role in influencing
• Embrace the power of self-organization but set-out the parameters
• Harness the power of small changes that can produce large results, but  course correction will be required;
• Both competition and collaboration will be part of the dynamic of any complex endeavour;
• Connect with a wide array of other actors – gain knowledge and relationships
• Learn to reframe public issues in affirmative ways that build on strengths, dissolves tensions and leads to action;
• Embrace diversity as it provides new energy for innovation
• Build capacities for both “exploration” and “exploitation” and maintain an appropriate balance;
• Explore the potential of multi-level governance arrangements in (i) managing the cross-scale interactions that characterize complex public issues and (ii) to buffer the negative effects of surprises, tipping points and cascading crisis

Lynne Sedgemore of 157 group then took to the floor, every inch the modern leader. A self-confessed “personal development addict”, she talked about herself and shared her passion for leadership and learning. The scope of her passion is broad – even spiral dynamics was name-checked - and testament to the need for constant experimentation.

I spoke briefly to Prof. Richards about the challenges of helping leaders educated better understand complexity during the refreshment break, after which the group reconvened to discuss the same point. Vinay Gupta‘s comment stuck in my mind as he recommended Cynefin, then suggested the four (five, I think!) domains needed to be simplified or renamed (!!) to aid understanding.

I didn’t stay afterwards, so look forward to the next session on 29th June: “Inner Complexity – an introduction to the Landscape of the Mind”; I’ll be keeping mine open as Lynne Hopkinson shows excerpts from a film about the development tool she has created: ”Interviews with individuals talking about their experiences of using LoM are complemented by the results of an fMRI brain scanning study.”

(Slides and audio available here.)