I finally had a chance to read the Creative DC Action Agenda. The report, commissioned by DC Office of Planning in partnership with the Washington, DC Economic Partnership, does a really good job at highlighting the role that the creative industries have in making DC a vibrant and fascinating city.  There’s some really interesting tidbits contained in the report, such as:

• Creative jobs amount to more than 10 percent of the city’s employment base and generate $5 billion in income.
• There are more than 75,000 creative jobs in the city, including 16,000 federal government positions.
• With 69 theaters producing 8,723 performances in 2008, DC is now among the top tier of theater cities in the U.S.
• DC was ranked fourth in the nation for the concentration of artistic talent, behind Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco.
• The average wage for creative occupations in DC is $33.73 per hour.

The definition of creative occupations is fairly broad, and includes people in the culinary arts and even libraries.  However, DC has a fairly high concentration of writers and visual artists, as well.  This creative community adds to the city’s tax coffers and attracts newcomers to Washington.

Washington has come a long way since the municipal dysfunction of the 1990s. But there’s much that the city can do to empower the artistic community in DC, including:

• Identify vacant spaces for theater and work spaces.
• Increase visitor awareness of the creative arts beyond the Mall.
• Improve access to funding for filmmakers.
• Cut the red tape that makes DC unfriendly to small business.

As a member of the “creative occupations” myself, it’s really interesting to see the big picture.  What do I think should be done?  The last point on cutting red tape really resonates with me. DC should cut regulations that inhibit small businesses and artists in the city.  There are so many confusing city rules about running a business from home that I’m not sure what’s legal.  And everyone I know who tries to create some sort of festival or event encounters a thicket of regulations and forms, requiring countless trips to city offices.  It seems crazy in 2010 that dealing with the city requires filling out reports by hand and collecting stamps and signatures.  Eliminating this old-fashioned paperwork (or at least putting it online) would further encourage the ongoing creative renaissance of this city.

DC should capitalize on the creative talent drawn here by reducing the burden of regulation. As demonstrated in the Creative DC Action Agenda, a liberated “artist-entrepreneur” community would deliver economic benefits citywide.

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I am not the Joe Flood who wrote The Fires, a new book on 1970s-style arson in the Bronx.

Why do I mention this? Because I’ve gotten a couple emails from editors of well-known magazines asking for information about my book.

But they think I’m the author of The Fires. I’m not. And a quick look at my site (like in the about me section) would reveal that. While I’m a writer, I primarily write fiction.

I’m surprised by a couple things:

1. So, nobody reads web pages carefully? Not even editors? They just skim until they find what they’re looking for? I imagine these editors did a search on my name, my site popped up, and they emailed me, assuming that this must be the right person.
2. Everyone blindly trusts Google to know their wishes? Search engines can’t read your mind. You can type in “Joe Flood” but it might not be the right “Joe Flood.”

Ironic, this lack of reading comprehension and digital literacy from people who work with words on a daily basis.

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Highly subjective, of course, but what’s the best content management system that you’ve used? I think that the best CMS is the one that gets out of the way, that allows anyone to easily write content for the web site. Someone should not have to learn HTML, or how servers operate, or spend days in training just to add a press release.

I’ve had the fortune/misfortune to work in multiple CMSes. Here are my impressions:

WordPress – Maybe not technically a CMS but so simple to use. WYSIWYG window, you click publish, that’s about it. I use it for my personal site, joeflood.com and also used it for a blog while I was at NOAA. I literally trained people in how to add content to the blog in fifteen minutes. My favorite. This is ideal for people looking for a simple platform to blog.

Google Sites – Again, maybe not exactly a CMS. Limited functionality but perfect for groups that just want to publish content. It’s very dumbed-down but it’s simplicity and lack of features makes it ideal for a no-fuss intranet.

Zope – I used this at the Nature Conservancy. At the time, I wasn’t a huge fan but, after exposure to much more complicated CMSes, it was better than I thought. Almost as easy as WordPress but key functions were locked down. Also, developers were needed for any design changes or to periodically reset it when it broke.

Plone – I’ve experimented with this and I like it. A lot of universities seem to use it.

Drupal – I write occasionally for a blog that uses it. I’m not sure about this one – seems slow but that may be just the way the site is set up. Drupal is the hot open-source CMS that everyone wants.

Vignette - Steep learning curve, whole new set of metaphors to learn, puzzling interface. Difficult for even experienced web folks to figure out.

No CMS – After using many CMSes, the simplicity of just HTML is really appealing. I managed NOAA Ocean Explorer which was all done in Dreamweaver. Thought this was crazy at the time. Now, not so sure. If you don’t like rules and don’t mind code, then No CMS is the choice for you.

Like I wrote yesterday, there is no perfect CMS. Consider your needs and choose wisely.

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You do not need to take a class with a “rock star” to be creative. This faith in the magical ability of experts to transform lives is ironic in our secular  society. Gurus, rock stars, life coaches, Oprah – they can make you change. Most people don’t go to a priest for career advice yet believe that taking the workshop of a famous person will cure their creative funk.

I was thinking about this after reading comments by a talented photographer friend of mine, Mary Kate McKenna. She was writing about “rock star” wedding photographers and their high-priced workshops:

REALLY tired of newbie photogs (I still consider myself a newbie in the industry!) doing workshops for other professionals, charging a lot of money, with no real business skills and embellishing the amount of money they make in the industry. Before attending a “rockstar” workshop, do your research.

Take a class with them and, the promise goes, you can be as successful and creative as they are. You can be a rock star, too, as long as you copy their methods and approach. They’re selling a dream, one that you can buy into just by plonking down your Visa card.

Taking a class is easy. It’s certainly much easier and safer than actually trying to be a rock star on your own. That path is risky and dangerous. By taking a class, you indulge in your dream but just a little bit. You go off for a weekend, absorb the lessons of the master, and then return to your life.

And I suspect that’s where it ends for a lot of people.

I see the same thing in screenwriting. There are many, many famous screenwriting gurus that you can take classes with. They have their own trademarked systems, reducing drama to quadrants with required steps. Storytelling is broken down, like diagramming a sentence.

So easy, your screenplay will just write itself, right? No. The screenwriting biz is another big industry selling a dream, the fantasy that a screenplay will make you rich and famous.

I wrote a screenplay, Mount Pleasant, that won the Film DC Screenwriting Competition. I did not become rich and famous but it was a tremendously rewarding experience, one that led to interesting opportunities like working with the DC Shorts Film Festival. But the rewarding part for me was writing the script.

For winning the competition, the DC Film Office sent me office sent me to LA to visit the set of the West Wing, during the final season. That was a great experience but, when I wrote Mount Pleasant, I had no idea that this was in the future. I wrote the script because it was a story I had in my head. I wrote it without any idea of where it would lead.

The problem with rock stars is twofold:

1. The focus on the reward. Workshops focus on an illusory dream of creative life. You will be rich and glamorous. The wedding photogs I know love their jobs but work awfully hard. They spend their weekends crawling around on ballroom floors, trying to get the perfect shot. And a workshop on writing would, if I had it my way, stress the solitary nature of the craft. Writers spend most of their day alone, in front of a computer.

2. Ceding authority to experts. Creativity is an act of rebellion. Aren’t all the millions of books, films and photos already in existence enough for you? What makes you think you have anything to add? The first step in your rebellion should not be slavishly following the teachings of some maharishi.

I wrote Mount Pleasant with the barest of screenwriting education. I had written short stories before and originally thought of the story as a novel. The screenplay format had always puzzled me but, after trying out Final Draft, I got it. I read books on screenwriting and started writing the script. I got stuck a few times but, after putting the script down for a few months, kept at it. I wanted to see it done.

My advice is simple. Do it yourself. After all the classes, once the guru has moved on to another city, it’s going to be just you. For some people, that’s inspiring. For many, it’s terrifying.

To write that screenplay, take that picture, or create that sculpture, you do not need to take a class with a rock star. You just need to get started. Invest your time and money in yourself, rather than some high-priced guru.

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The music industry had its Disintermediation Moment with the advent of Napster. Once consumers discovered the power of acquiring individual songs, rather than whole albums, the days of the $16.99 album CD were doomed. Lawyers shut down Napster but could never put the genie back in the bottle. The music business, where “thieves and pimps run free,” according to Hunter S. Thompson, was forced to cut a deal with another rebel, Steve Jobs. An industry that once condemned the idea of “ripping” songs from CDs to computers has turned to iTunes to save their sliding profits.

Newspapers were early adopters of the web, launching some of the first web sites and online services, such as the Washington Post’s Digital Ink in 1994. Early efforts made the mistaken assumption that people would pay for content – despite being surrounded by a sea of free information. For more than a decade, newspapers have tried to use the web to support a business model (money from classified ads goes for reporters, buildings, paper, trucks) that’s been undercut by Craigslist and others. It would be better if they adapted to the medium like the Huffington Post or Politico.

Back in the 1980s, movie studios tried to stop the development of the VCR, arguing that the devices enable copyright infringement. Though they lost, they continued their efforts, athwart the flow of history, as they sued DVR makers, as if they had learned nothing. Meanwhile, consumers have moved on, and watch clips and whole movies online.

And now it’s the turn of the book industry.

I’ve been reading a lot about e-books and the Nook, both as an avid reader and an author. I wrote a book, Murder in Ocean Hall, have an agent and am looking for publisher.

However, I also work on web sites for a living so the slow print publishing world seems really outdated to me. Why does it take a year for a book to go from an author to a bookstore? I could publish my book on Lulu and start selling it immediately.

Why are there so many gatekeepers involved? Why do writers get such a small (10%) royalty on their titles? Why do so many writers have to do their own marketing, despite the fact that publishers claim that’s what they’re for?

The argument seems to be that this is the way we’ve always done it. The book publishing world seems little changed, a Mad Men environment of stacks of manuscripts, Manhattan offices and boozy lunches. I would love a noontime martini but like the manual typewriters and flirtatious secretaries of Sterling Cooper, that world is long gone.

The price of e-books today is subsidized by Amazon and others. Publishers would like to charge much, much more than the standard $9.99 for e-books, arguing that they have high costs. This makes no sense – when you have perfect, unlimited digital copies of something, the price has to come down, as anyone who’s bought an album or song on iTunes knows. Consumers are saying that e-books should be comparable in price to paperbacks. That’s what its worth to them and book publishers need to adapt if they’re going to survive.

The fact that the publishing industry takes such a big chunk of the price of a book really seems like an argument against it. If so much of the cost of a title pays for execs and marketing campaigns, then why have a publishing industry at all? How is this model any different from the music, film and newspaper industries – all middlemen and gatekeepers have been rendered irrelevant by the Internet.

Without such high costs, books would be cheaper for readers and writers would make more money. My thoughts were really crystallized by this wonderful blog post by Joe Konrath. In it, he breaks down the amount of money he makes off e-books he sells through his publisher and those he sells on his own. He gets more money from titles he sells himself. And readers get more works to chose from and at a cheaper price. Konrath is meeting the demand of the market and making a better living than he would if he used a book publisher.

What value do book publishers add then? Are they not just standing in the way of more books at lower prices for more readers?

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There’s got to be another way! And there is. It’s the job site for the Congressional Budget Office. The site is a model of simplicity and common sense, where you can apply for a job in minutes, rather than hours. Let me spell out the differences between the CBO site and USAJOBS:

• It’s all one site.You’re not bounced to a separate organizational site to complete a whole other application, like you would if you applied for a job with Agriculture from USAJOBS.
• An easy password. You don’t need a complicated ten character password with upper and lower case letters plus numbers.
• Upload or copy and paste your documents. Choose which is easier for you – either upload a Word doc or copy and paste your resume. You don’t have to enter information job by job. Supporting docs can also be uploaded.
• No KSAs.
• Job descriptions less than a page long, in plain language.
• No confusing instructions to fax or snail mail in additional information. It’s 100% online.
• It’s well-designed. The site makes excellent use of white space and provides strong visual cues for users, such as making the “Submit Application” button blue and placing it at the bottom of the right-hand menu.

Why can’t the rest of government do this? The site is not complicated, in fact it looks like it was designed in the late 1990s. But it’s simple and easy for visitors. It’s oriented around their top tasks, as good government sites are supposed to.

Looking at this site, USAJOBS makes even less sense to me.

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Most large-scale web sites use some sort of content management system (CMS) to publish and organize their web sites. Even small-scale web sites (like this one) use a CMS for their work. This site runs on WordPress, for example. I don’t need to know code to update my site; I just have to type into a box on a web page.

Why does this matter? Who cares if some government sites hand-code web pages? Hand coding means that you need people who know how to code HTML in order to update your web site. Using a CMS means that anyone can update the site. This is only one of many advantages (templates, editorial workflow, security) that a CMS has over hand-coding.

The lack of up to date tools means that many in government use off the shelf tools like Blogger, Flickr and Google Docs to get their work done. This is admirable and creative – smart people will always develop solutions to problems – but does not come without cost, as Kostin underlines:

The reliance on the cheap and the intuitive rather than the quality and the researched supports the lack of a cohesive government-wide approach to using technology to improve government.

The poor folks stuck hand-coding web sites would certainly welcome such an approach, especially if it resulted in a content management system designed to make their jobs easier. It would also make government sites – and government workers – much more productive and efficient. This is type type of Web 1.0 activity that government should be working on.

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Seeing how the world is rushing to adapt to the web, I had a practical question. Why doesn’t the government use the web to more efficiently accomplish its work? For example:

1. Why is there no actual Facebook for feds? Govloop (a social network for government employees) is a brilliant idea, a way for federal employees, contractors and other interested parties to communicate and collaborate. Why didn’t the federal government provide this tool (just a Ning social network) to its employees years ago? Think what a tremendous aid this would be to organizing and working together.

Why isn’t there, at the very least, a government-wide directory showing photos, titles and contact information?

Some have argued that there are legitimate privacy reasons for not providing this information to the public though it is the public that pays the salary of these civil servants. There’s a great call for transparency in government. Yet, like with taxes, it’s always transparency for someone else’s program – not yours!

2. Why isn’t there an online project management tool? So much of government work is managing projects – people, inputs, resources, deadlines, deliverables and so on. I’ve seen people use spreadsheets, Word docs, MS Project, Sharepoint, wikis and even crossed-out to do lists. Why doesn’t government adopt a tool like Basecamp (my fav), a web-based project management tool?

The objection to this is that big government likes to put things behind firewalls. A service, like Basecamp, that exists outside of the secure government environment is almost impossible to get approved.

3. Why is so much of government work done on paper? Reimbursements, training requests and purchases so often require the walking around of paper forms and the collection of signatures. Think how much more efficient government would be if these forms were made electronic.

The argument against this is that government regulations require the keeping of records on paper. These rules need to be updated; we’re no longer using typewriters.

4. Why doesn’t government publish all of its photos on Flickr? Shirky lists Flickr as a great example of crowd-sourcing, where amateurs post and tag exponentially more photos than a newspaper or magazine would publish. What if you could visit a National Park Service page and see countless NPS and amateur photos of Yellowstone, all carefully geotagged?

This is an area where the federal government is experimenting. EPA has an Earth Day photo contest in Flickr and the Library of Congress has its own Flickr photostream.

5. Why can’t I just click once to apply for a government job, like I can do on Monster? USAJOBS, with its complicated password requirements, lengthy disclaimers, pages of explanations to wade through, laborious KSAs to complete and endless duplication, is a usability nightmare. And this is how potential employees are introduced to government.

It’s not just the technology. The job descriptions are the very antithesis of the plain language that government aims to promote. Here’s the first line from a recent job announcement for a Program Analyst: 

At the full performance GS-13 level, establishes and administers assigned administrative programs in accordance with Department requirements and other related directives.

Umm, this is a little vague.

For the most part, the ideas I listed above are not revolutionary. This is not Web 2.0. Online directories, web-based forms, improved usability, one-click applications – this is Web 1.0, from the 1990s. Investing in these common-sense processes would make government more efficient, effective and creative.

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