Labour to let

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Driving past the infamous Sonapour labour camp, you can only be struck by the To Let signs up on the accommodation blocks. A closer inspection reveals a large number of the blocks have gaps in the walls where window ACs should be. It's almost quiet on the roads around the camp in the mornings and evenings, where once clouds of dust would be thrown up by manic bus drivers taking shortcuts or slinging their loads of tired workers around the sandy parking spaces around the cluster of blocks that sits north of the big graveyard (the roadsigns used to read 'Labour Camp / Graveyard' until someone finally worked out that this was a form of irony) on the Emirates Road.

We're seeing the occasional 'labourers stranded' story in the local press still, although the worst of these recently, 700 labourers stranded with no money or resources after the Dubai-based construction company's chairman fled, relates to labourers in Sharjah's labour camp, not Sonapour.

A lot of the projects that still went ahead when the recession hit (or, to be more accurate, when Dubai stopped pushing its fingers in its ears and going lalalalala rather than accept a recession had hit) did so because they had gone too far to cancel - it simply made more sense to finish them than kill them off. Those projects are starting to be finished now and as each one does, it is likely that there will be precious little to replace it. So many of the construction workers who got a reprieve over the past couple of years are likely to get laid off and sent home.

That second wave of redundancies will see even more To Let signs up in Sonapour. Let's hope it doesn't lead to another wave of 'workers stranded' stories.

All Change For Authonomy

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Warning - traffic destroying writing post follows...

One of the infamous, shadowy international writers group, the Grey Havens gang, alerted us to a blog post on Harper Collins' Authonomy site which heralds major changes to the site. The post recognises that Authonomy has major structural issues and appears to be a heads-up that changes will be made in the near future that will address these.

Authonomy is a peer-review site for writers to post samples of their work for others to read, criticise and, if they think it is of oustanding, publishable quality, to 'back' it. The most backed books each month are skimmed for a read by Harper Collins' editors. I have written much in the past about authonomy, if you're interested in all the background it's all collected at this here link. Probably the most controversial - and widely read and linked - post is this one, which led to this guest post on Eoin Purcell's blog, apparently so contentious that Eoin froze comments on it. I still think the post I did for Eoin best defines my view on authonomy at that time.

Just to be abundantly clear before I toss my hat once again into the ring of Authonomy debate - I am not sore that my book 'won' but didn't get published. I recognise, more now than ever before, that the book was funny and popular  but very, very badly written. I get that. However, I invested a lot of time, energy and thought into Authonomy and have gained much from my experiences with the site - both personally as a writer and professionally as someone who consults on communications - particularly in the digital/social space. (I have to add this caveat every time, depressingly, as the first response to anything I have to say about Authonomy is so frequently, 'that's just sour grapes cos you didn't get a contract', which isn't the case at all.)

At the time I left authonomy, I wrote:

We've never seen people - even the editors who review the books are anonymous. I'm sure HC thinks its being terribly funky and Web 2.0, but it's not. It's missed the first rule of these types of engagements with a community. Foster a community, be part of a community, engage with the community. HC hasn't, because it doesn't respect that community enough... Many people have had enough of being treated like the carvers in front of Gormenghast - even more so when it's become clear that the Groans don't want any of our carvings.

I liked the Gormenghast analogy so much I used it again in this post on the future of publishing, in which I pointed out that:

With all the energy of a group of kids in a huge playground, we invested a huge amount of time and effort on the site, vying to get to the top and using fair means and foul to do so. At the core of it, though, was a sincere belief in quality – the majority of users adhered to a principle that they’d only ‘back’ books that they would genuinely buy in a bookshop.

The changes that Harper Collins are making to authonomy will refocus the site, the company says, on that idea of rewarding quality rather than the messy cronyism, begging and whoring that has come to characterise the site. As Harper's blog post says:

In recent months, we'll admit that the site has been suffering from a kind of 'vote inflation' where support was given (or traded) very freely and as a result the rank of all books has been somewhat cheapened... We want the charts to mirror more accurately a community consensus, and for the feat of reaching an editor to be based on something other than months of superhuman networking effort. 

That's great, but I can only hope that my silly little voice (and others like me) got heard to some degree in the hallowed halls of Harper Collins: 


A site like that needs the active participation in the community of the organisation behind it. With sincerity that wins the trust of the community. You cannot run online communities, you have to be part of them. You have to accept the principle that you give up ownership in favour of participation. Putting up a patronising blog post every week or so from an editor, or the occasional forum intervention from an unnamed contributor in response to critical threads is not really what Web 2.0 is about, is it? Even the critiques on Authonomy are from unnamed editors. But then my argument is that it was never about critiques.

(that extract from my post on Eoin's blog)

Part of the problem has been, I am quite sure, 'old world thinking' - it's something we come across professionally pretty much every day these days - companies bring us in to consult on social media, digital and community programmes and want someone to provide the content and populate the profiles/communities for them because their own key staff are doing more important stuff, like talking to clients and partners - but the whole point about this stuff  is that it's not an ad campaign. You can't just book it and walk away from it, it's all about engagement and talking to people using new tools and a new degree of accessibility. Sure, it involves being exposed, taking some responsibility and actually engaging with customers and other stakeholders. But those concepts are core to this stuff, not peripheral. You need to be there yourself - just getting some developers or an agency to do it won't work. And running a community site with faceless camp guards policing it won't work either.

If the changes to Authonomy include Harper Collins' editors actually engaging in the site, being named members and helping authors, influencing debate, mentoring work they believe to be of merit, being kind to work that is fifth rate and telling authors, gently, that this is the case - wouldn't that be wonderful? If real world editors actually were part of the community, if books that rose to the top were taken, for instance, into a manuscript development program similar to the Hachette program that got my pal Phillipa Fioretti into print, wouldn't Authonomy very quickly become THE place for any aspiring author to go? Wouldn't it give Harper first dibs on pretty much every emerging talent in the world today?

Yes it would. 

The one thing Authonomy has ever lacked has been the active community participation of the people that created it. If that's about to change, it could be very big news indeed for publishing. And I would welcome it with open arms - it would become what I believed Authonomy was to start with - a vital, energising response from the publishing industry that embraced and leveraged the powerful democratisation of the Internet. 

Sunshine, you are my Sunshine

Image by higlu via Flickr
Went for a routine checkup recently as I mentioned the other day. One interesting result from this (apart from the news that I am going to live, apparently) was that I have vitamin D deficiency. It's not quite rickets, but the Doktor has given me some vitamin D bombs to bring me levels back up.
Why should I even bother sharing this mundane detail? Because it is apparently widespread here, so much so that health check-ups didn't used to include it as a routine test and now do. I watched others being prescribed the same supplement down at the pharmacy, so that gives us anecdotal evidence that a) there is a genuinely widespread incidence of vitamin D deficiency or, possibly b) there's a company making vitamin D supplements that pays whopping backhanders to doctors that prescribe them. Given the pills weren't hugely expensive, I'm going with a). And yes, I know I'm cynical.
Vitamin D is not, apparently, really a dietary thing. Your main source of the stuff is sunlight - it's synthesised by the skin in unfiltered sunlight and doctors recommend that you be exposed to something like 15 minutes' sunshine a day. Allowing that two minutes in the current heat and humidity would render you a gasping, sweaty heap, it's no surprise to find that we're none of us* getting enough sunlight and so many of us in the UAE and, presumably elsewhere in the GCC, have low vitamin D levels..
Low vitamin D levels won't cause you to break out in blotches or grow extra fingers, but it will over time affect the health of your bones and can lead to osteoporisis and other brittle/weak bone conditions later in life.
When was the last time you had yours checked?

* Apart from the labourers, of course, who are likely getting plenty of the stuff, although precious little else...

People Above The Place

There used to be a sign on the jail by the Dubai Petroleum building in Jumeirah that read something like, 'The Person Above the Place'. It always struck me as a tad odd in that context, a little like putting 'Arbeit Macht Frei' on the front of a concentration camp, although it's nothing like as strange as the heading on Dubai Police's website, 'O, mindly people consider', which has always rather tickled me.

I interviewed prominent Emirati businessman Ali Al Bawardi some years ago and recall being struck at the time by his assertion that all too often, businesses here invested in the place over the people - throwing up world class infrastructure but then bringing in cheap, unqualified and under-empowered people to operate that infrastructure, often with poor management to oversee them. Result: world class infrastructure that doesn't work very well.

It's a thought that came to mind over the weekend as a routine checkup once again brought me into contact with the excellent medical staff, superb facilities and bumbling, plodding administration of the American Hospital in Dubai.

It's an odd type of materialism, this belief in the solidity and value of physical infrastructure rather than human capital. In part, it must be driven by the transience of the human component - you don't invest in people or develop them, you just buy them in when you need them. Because they're only temporary, they're not trusted (and only trusted staff are empowered staff) and so they are forced to conform to rote systems and have no power to deal with any eventuality that falls outside that system.

This is all very fine and dandy, but we're left to deal with the result of this process as it gazes at the screen, drooling and clicking away listlessly, trying to avoid coming to the moment when it has to look up and accept that yes, they've goofed everything up and no, there's nothing that can be done.

Re-intermediation

Image by Daniel Wilder via Flickr
I often speak at conferences, workshops and things and rarely miss the opportunity to laud Emirates Airline, typically using it as an example of advocacy (the fourth step in communication, wake up at the back). I advocate Emirates passionately - it has long been my airline of strong preference.

Perhaps interestingly, EK has my loyalty despite its customer loyalty scheme, Skywards, rather than because of it. For some reason Skywards always manages to make me feel like a beggar. I will never forget my first attempt to redeem airmiles, which resulted in me being thrown out of the business class queue at QAIA in Jordan and told to queue in economy (the upgrade they had confirmed to me wasn't on the system), turning to find one of my clients standing behind me and witness to my seeming pathetic attempt to scab an upgrade I wasn't entitled to. And I will never forgive them for the fact that we should have been checking into Emirates' rather lavish and wonderful Al Maha desert resort this afternoon for Sarah's birthday, but will be going out to dinner instead.

Skywards ticks all the right boxes - it's got a funky website, has lots of 'rewards' and is pleasingly automated - to the point where it's not really a hassle and can even provide the occasional pleasant surprise.Similarly, it can also let you down totally and really screw things up. The latter is a shame, but it's made even worse by the high levels of automation that Skywards employs. When the going gets tough, you get re-intermediated.

I have often wittered on about dis-intermediation, the phenomenon whereby technology removes the middle man and gives us direct access to the stuff we want. It's something I have come to think of as an empowering process - I can research and book my own holiday online, for instance, rather than depending on a travel agent. Similarly, you can buy music online rather than have to go to a shop and buy a CD.

Dis-intermediation is not only empowering for the end user, it also cuts out 'gatekeepers' - the people who sit in the middle and make choices for us - it's the threat hanging over the heads of record companies, publishers and newspaper proprietors. The democratisation of consumer choice, Internet advocates will queue up to tell you, is a positive benefit of technology.

But technology has introduced a new class of intermediary: the call centre. The thinking goes something like this: "Our staff are beings of pure energy who have jobs to do and can't be constantly interrupted by base, carbon based life-forms. Let's outsource talking to our customers and then our people can get on with doing useful things that make us money."

This is why you can't actually speak to anyone who works in your bank's branch anymore, why a call to your London telco routes you to Bangalore and why someone sitting in front of a terminal in Cairo is looking through your credit card statement 'to try and help you resolve this, sir'. These are the re-intermediators, the new middlemen.

So when Skywards fails to make the booking at its Al Maha Desert Resort and Spa despite the failure being clearly and wholly on their part, the people responsible for the booking suddenly fail to respond to emails. Your only recourse is to the call centre, which is staffed by people that can't actually do anything, they can only route requests over the system. They can tell you that they're sorry (how awful, to have to be constantly sorry for others' mistakes) but they can't actually let you talk to anyone responsible. They're the new front line troops, the poor saps that have to sit in a soulless room filled with other operators, being abused by irate people while the incompetent buffoons who are screwing things up never even hear the howls of agony from frustrated, unhappy customers and obviously feel completely free to totally ignore any other form of communication.

The technology that is empowering us is also disempowering us, taking away our choices and our right to expect people executing transactions on our behalf to respond to us and for them to take some sort of responsibility for their actions. And while automating customer service is no bad thing 98% of the time, there surely has to be a better way of dealing with the 2% of instances where rote, scripts and process will not do the job. It's one of the reasons why companies using Twitter as a customer service tool are finding they are met with an initial wave of frustrated customers and then a collective sigh of relief followed by cheering. We just need someone to take some sort of responsibility and fix the mess that's making us unhappy.

We're all missing a human to talk to.

Hiked

Image by Qiao-Da-Ye賽門譙大爺 via Flickr
Sharjah taxi fares are on the rise again - today's papers  carry the joyous news that a minimum fare of Dhs10 will now apply for any taxi journey and that the tariff will increase from Dhs1 per 650 metres to Dhs1 per 620 metres. The reason is, apparently, the franchise companies (who always seem to get cited when the fares are raised rather than Sharjah Transport, the body that is responsible for deciding the hikes).

The Dhs10 minimum charge has been in place in Dubai for some time, but it does seem a tad odd that in Sharjah we are now going to pay a minimum of Dhs10 for any journey when, back in the good old days of yore, private taxis were regulated to having to accept Dhs5 for any journey within the emirate. Ah, the good old days of yore, eh?

Sharjah Transport told Gulf News and others that the rises in the petrol price were to blame, which isn't unreasonable given that fuel prices have gone up by something like 25% this year (based on my Dhs80 going up to Dhs100 to fill up da Paj at ADNOC). However, this is the second price hike this year, the tariff used to be Dhs1 per 800 metres - and with drivers' fuel expenditures and empty/fare ratio carefully capped and monitored by the franchise companies, the new price rises should more than offset any fuel price rises.

Interesting, perhaps, that the anecdotal evidence of regular cabbie Mr G is that it's the bus services that are hurting more than the fuel price hikes. With the merry little yellow Brazilian 'Busscar' buses steadily plying their routes all over Sharjah for no more than a handful of coins, many people have been opting for public transport. With these rises, you could only draw the conclusion that more will join them and the drivers are going to get squeezed even harder.

I can't see the normally somewhat lugubrious Mr G being too happy about this one...

Spangles

Image by Johnny Grim via Flickr
The tradition of scattering little pieces of glass all over the roads during Ramadan sadly seems set to continue this year. Driving past a smashed car on the Deira side of Business Bay bridge this morning, the driver apparently alive but nursing a nasty nosebleed, I was only surprised that it was the first major accident I have actually witnessed in the first days of this long, hot fast. I know it won't be the last - in fact, three people have already died on Dubai's roads in the first three days of Ramadan.

This Ramadan is a trial indeed - the Fajr prayer which commences the fast takes place at around 4.30am and Maghrib, the prayer that marks Iftar, the breaking of the fast, takes place at around 6.50pm - so people are fasting for something a little over fourteen hours a day. The fast means that nothing may pass your lips, so we're talking no eating, drinking (no, not even water) or smoking. When the ambient temperature's creeping into the mid forties (that's 110F to Americans), fourteen hours is long, long time. And it's debilitating - as the days pass, the cumulative effect on people's systems is plain to see.

A road full of tired, distracted and physically weakened drivers means that everyone has a huge additional duty of care - not only those fasting, but those who are not but who could give their fellow drivers a little more leeway than usual.

Dubai's Road and Transport Authority has launched an awareness campaign designed to highlight the extra care that drivers should take in Ramadan, which appears to consist of some leaflets (according to this story in Gulf News) and using the traffic information system displays. The need for these huge and no doubt expensive displays have long mystified me, although I'm sure I'm alone in thinking of them as Mostly Pointless. Everyone else no doubt likes the occasional aphorism, national day greeting and, very occasionally, advice that the traffic is slow - usually the only entertainment while waiting in the tailback stretching under the sign.

Today's message reads, in English, "Take care of other's fault" - and yes, I am so small-minded as to complain about the illiterate rendering of the message. Whether you should be exhorted to take care of others' faults or looking to take more care yourself is also worthy of debate.

But a few leaflets and a wonky message are simply not enough. Between the tolls and fees it raises, the RTA must surely have the resources to launch a serious public awareness campaign that could at least have a chance of alleviating this awful and totally avoidable carnage.

One component of it could be a concerted effort to create a strong moral climate condemning the fools putting others' lives at risk when they dash carelessly home for Iftar, seemingly convinced for some reason that they are rendered temporarily immune from the consequences of their selfishness.

The UAE BlackBerry Ban: Barmy

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Why does all the fun happen when I'm away? Woke up today to the news that the UAE is to block BlackBerry Messenger, BlackBerry E-mail and BlackBerry web-browsing following a ruling by telecom regulator the TRA.

Gulf News online reports the story, which WAM broke today as far as I can see from over here. The National's story is here. Etisalat has made a statement which includes the immortal words, "BlackBerry data is immediately exported off-shore, where it is managed by a foreign, commercial organisation."

Oh, the LOLs, from a country where all requests to browse the web are immediately referenced to, errr, foreign, commercial organisations. Unless something's changed since the McAfee acquisition, US security company Secure Computing used to parse all searches to make sure that we weren't being exposed to all the naughtiness and stuff that's out there. We weren't so shy about 'foreign commercial organisations' then, were we folks?

BlackBerry customers were, infamously, not subject to the arbitrary restrictions of the block list. Many will remember the furore that erupted, extensively discussed on this very blog, which appeared to be a muckle-headed attempt on the part of the Telco That Likes To Say Ugh, Etisalat, to cludge security software intended for other purposes into an attempt to introduce surveillance and monitoring capabilities to the otherwise hard to intercept BB.


It's interesting for telecom regulation watchers that the customer is to be harmed extensively as a result of this move by a regulator, a class of organisation that is everywhere in the world tasked with holding the customers interests as one of its primary goals. The Telcos are being forced to breach their compact with their users (The vast majority of people bought BlackBerrys precisely with this very functionality as their primary reason for buying in) and tens of thousands of devices have been rendered basically unfit for purpose overnight.

I look forward to this move being 'clarified'. As it stands, it's yet another attempt to bomb ourselves back into the digital stone age. The madness of it all is that nothing has changed about the BlackBerry or the way in which the device works - and nothing has changed (correct me, please, if I'm wrong) in the 'moral and cultural' environment, or indeed the regulatory environment, since the BB was first introduced to the UAE - it has always worked using the company's own servers which underpinned the very services that CrackBerry users find so very appealing. If you can't live with it now - you shouldn't have sold it to us back then.

Will customers be offered refunds for the now barely functional hunks of black and chrome plastic they hold in their hands? Or will Etisalat and Du be offering free plastic covers that say 'I am browsing happily. Carry on as normal.'???

PS: In a move that appears to highlight that this move is being prompted by security concerns more than anything else, WAM has published an odd document that purports to 'compare the existing telecom regulations of the US, UK and UAE' but which is actually something of a 'dossier' that appears intended to justify the idea that a regulator can just turn around and delete a service being accessed by tens of thousands of consumers. It's a long read, but it's here.

Right. I'm going back on holiday...

Queen

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It was my parents' 60th wedding anniversary yesterday - the reason we went on leave unseasonably early was to attend. We had contacted the relevant types to arrange a message from the Queen, which you qualify for with a diamond wedding or by passing 100 years of age.

The process is remarkably analogue - there are no online forms or stuff, you give your details over the phone and then they arrange a search of the Register of Births, Weddings and Deaths, forward the data to the Palace, who send you a note confirming that yes, you do qualify for a message and also confirming the details.

Saturday morning the postman came with an extra duty - he has to announce that he has a message from the Palace (and, incidentally, the relevant Post Office has to confirm it will make delivery prior 9.30am on the day in question or an Inquiry would be mounted by the Palace. I kid you not.). Inside the blue covering envelope is a beige one with a crest printed across it. And inside that is a card with a photo of HM, together with a congratulatory message signed by Elizabeth R. And some gold tassels. The gold tassels are an important element. The back of the envelope, rather cutely, says 'If Undelivered, Return to Buckingham Palace'.

My mum was over the moon, dancing about all over the place and just generally as delighted as someone who has found a million pounds worth of Roman coins in their garden. Brenda was popped onto the centre of the fireplace - from where I have to tell you her eyes follow you around the room - and the story of the whole thing was generally dined out on over the subsequent festivities.

It's nice that something daft like that can make people so very happy. Nice one, Buck Palace!

Sweaty Sharjah

Image by jainaj via Flickr

According to the car (which knows these things), the temperature has been getting as high as 48C over the past couple of weeks. Gulf News tells us that the average noon temperature right now is 41C - and the humidity is knocking 70% at night. It's certainly hot, sticky and damp at the moment, as many of you will well know.

So the rolling power cuts that are currently sweeping across Sharjah are pretty unpopular. They come without warning, for anything up to eight hours at a time - GN reports some areas have been without power for 30 hour - and have affected many built-up housing areas in the emirate, as well as its industrial zone.

The government body responsible for the whole mess, the Sharjah Electricity and Water Authority (SEWA), has remained regally silent, refusing to answer journalist's questions. As I pointed out on the Dubai Today radio programme yesterday, this is hardly surprising. It's difficult to raise more than a simian grunting noise out of them as a customer, let alone a cogent response to media enquiries.

This, of course, has got the media's goat, particularly Gulf News which has reported the whole fiasco extensively today, giving a nice chunk of front page as well as all of page three to reporting on residents' misery - and there's plenty of it to report on, I can tell you. People are having to drive around in their cars at night to keep their kids cool, workers are being forced to sleep outside and a wide range of businesses are fighting to keep going in the face of the highly unpredictable outages.

It just goes to show, hell hath no fury like a journalist scorned. Except the force of that fury is tempered with a good deal of timorousness. Gulf News' swingeing attack on the ever-silent SEWA in its editorial reads more like a schoolgirl's essay than it does a righteous polemic. The last line of this towering tirade sums up the fury that GN brings to excoriate the opaque authors of Sharjah's power vacuum: "Children are among the first to be distressed thanks to the excessive heat."


Mind you, at least Gulf News is trying - it's not alone, either. 7Days and Khaleej Times both have extensive coverage (KT pointing out that a worker has died of heatstroke and 30 others have been admittted to hospital in the midst of the cuts).

Sharjah's very own Gulf Today, as pointless a newspaper as you're likely to find, totally ignores the entire issue in what can only be described as a craven display.  Mind you, it neatly demonstrates rule one of journalism in the UAE. If you're going to make a mess, do it next door or mummy will be upset.