The Adventures of Cindy Li

SXSW 2006: How to convince your company to embrace standards

March 14 , 2006

Kevin Lawver
Arun Ranganathan
Kimberly Blessing
Gringaus
Chipman

Kevin giving his intro/bio
It doesn’t necessarily have to apply to web standards
How to subvert hierarchy :) How to take over the world.. bwahhahahahha.

AOL?

Problem statement
As you can see the quote, we had a public and organizational perception that we didn’t “get” the web, much less web standards.

We had a lot of developers building web applications, but no development community.

Lots and lots of skills, but not a lot of
damn slide changed

Find your soul mates

Start small with a small group of passionate folks
But we found all of these products we want the whole organization to change
We found them and brought them together.

We went up the food chain…

• Give yourselves a name
• Make it dignified
• Make it sound important
• We chose: “The Web standards Advocacy Group” Just unofficial enough that was grassroots but serious enough Unless you turn it into a game

Build an activist spirit:

• imagine yourself as a pirate captain..or a virus… or a guerilla (the nerd)
• Don’t be silent
• Encourage interaction, debate
• Keep it friendly
• and conspiratorial…make it more fun

A quick tale of dragons
The web broke (and it was our fault)
Evangelism was the modus operandi

We had to convince the outside world, inside and outside
Time warner wanted to know why it was important.
We had to start within TW but look outward as well.

Who do you need to continue

Use connections (schmoozing, cold calls, stalking) to find:

• Decision makers
• Influences
• Challenge was reaching those groups both inside and outside the company

AOL was redesigned based on standards.
It was a big deal. Spreading the message was a big deal.

How do you spread your msg?

(Re)Gain developer trust. Do some work for them (devEdge).
Show them the best case scenarios

• performance
• reach. accessibility
• maintainability.
• reuse.
• Oh, and create a love affair with a truly standards complaint platform.

The Evangelism team’s mission lives on

AOL still has occasional web site issues (sigh.. opera)

Even if you can’t get buy in

Those biz folks have the best ideas!(or, the down side of adding a permanent feature to a lingering dinosaur.)
Our server didn’t let us detect what users were using.

Use your work to show the deltas and benefits
the obvious benefits
smaller file size=shorter download
less complex code=faster rendering time
more semantics-improved search-ability
Other obvious benefits…
slide changed

Managers can “just do it” too!

• Roll your own training program
• use small bits of team meeting time to evangelize and instruct.
• Identify experts and believers, and pair them with those who run into issues.
• Even by just changing the seating

Gringaus:  Once you find your target, find out what matters to them

• Listen
• Ask questions

We have about 200 sites. Our goal was to clone the magazines to put them on-line so that we have something as quickly as possible. It soon became obvious to be a web presence and a print presence.

And then.. we met Kevin Lawver…

The problem was identified but not solved…
Initially you have to go to multiple layers Your best skill is listening skills. Listen and find out what matters to them.

Ask questions and find their weakest point STRIKE!

It is your key to success. They want more traffic. :)

Learn to speak their language

You have to learn and use their vocabulary
-You can’t use acronyms and overly technical terms with non-technical people
AJAX.. sayyyyyyyywhat?

This is the time to simplify, not show you’re the smartest person in the room
Don’t attack. Present solutions when you present problems.

Social engineering

Convince the organization that they’re doing what they want to do
Your solution should solve their specific problem
have facts to back you up. Don’t be vague.
Use carrots. Save the stick for emergencies.

Diplomacy

Take victories where you can get to them

Case study: office pirates
www.officepirates.com
launched 33% faster beacuse of standards-based development and a change in process

Give them resources:

Introduce them to places like A list apart and mailing lists like WD and CSS-D
Give them a “Daily Reading” list of blogs that are standards focused.

The web standards project

Molly Molly.com
Roger Johasson
MDC Webwatch
Slayeroffice
Etc—-see slayeroffice.com’s “Read” section for more…

For the executive:

Doing things that cause the standards community to smile casts a positive light

Give them examples:

• CSS Zen Garden is a great start
• Read world examples, as their world, are even better
• Quick recode of a page they’ve done to serve as a side by side example
• Your standards based version will be clearer, smaller and easier to read than their original
• Easily shows them the benefits of semantic markup.
• Show them as asisstive technology

Give them homework

• If they don’t have a personal site, encourage them to get one
• A sandbox for experimentation…
• Have them find a high profile site on the web that doesn’t use standards and recode their main page as exercise, NYTimes

For the executive:

• Let your people have some time to experiment and play w/new technologies
• Give them rules
• Write up code requirements documentation
• Make it part of the QA process. IF the code doesn’t meet A, B and C, it can’t launch. But the help them meet those requirements.

Executive:

Familiarize yourself w/the rules. Check w/your team lead that they are being followed. Knowledge that the paycheck signers are aware of what’s going on is wonderful…

Give yourself rules

Make yourself available for questions. ...You are the expert, and people will have.
In fact, go out of your way to have questions ...

Don’t be silent..

• Speak up, but be constructive
• If you point out a problem, provide a possible solution
• Offer to help

If you have a group…then take turns
The first redesign was a nightmare
See how much faster was better

Give people a place to go

• Wikis
• Drupal http://www.drupal.org (kind of easy to setup)
• Even a flat site that’s maintained properly can work
• Easy participation. Let people sign up based on their willingness.

Learn from your mistakes:

Admit you don’t know all the answers
Be open to criticism and take it gracefully
Change often, constant course corrections are good

Show, don’t just tell and revel in your victories
Semantic markup and fast registration flow
free.aol.com/
AOL.com
I am alpha (iamalpha.com) created a microformat, require valid pages and modules, open development platform

Questions?

You’ve got to have one, even if it’s Steve, what’s up w/your shirt?
If you’re too shy, you can IM me (put in screename tuesday morning)
If you don’t want to do that, you can catch us after-wards