Google's (free) Staff Cafe

Cafe
Originally uploaded by Mal Booth

My thoughts on Google's staff cafe. Open up the image in Flickr to read more.

I will be lobbying for something like this in our new Library for UTS, but already I can hear the nay-sayers.

Green Travel Planning

Today a work colleague sent me something that pointed to some research by our (UTS) Institute for Sustainable Futures on Green Travel Planning. They are looking for support and potential participants for projects they are developing: one on car-sharing in multi-residential developments and the other is a course on travel planning for professionals engaged in planning relevant new developments for 2011.

They say the initiative to plan travel for workplaces can result in substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and reduced traffic congestion for workplaces like university campuses, industrial parks, hospitals, office precincts and multi-residential developments. That, however, doesn't mean we shouldn't at least try to do something along the same lines in smaller institutions like libraries. We should certainly incorporate a green travel plan as a design consideration for our Library of the Future which is in its very early planning stages. Maybe we could also make a realistic contribution now just by setting an example for others to follow.

Perhaps it is too late in an existing institution to incorporate much that involves substantial investment in facilities or even additional construction, but there might be other steps we can take that could make a realistic, if small scale contribution. We could for example:

• raise awareness among our staff and encourage the use of alternative forms of transport that are more environmentally friendly (public transport, cycling and walking where feasible);
• encourage and perhaps facilitate car sharing or pooling arrangements;
• lobby for cycling or public transport subsidies instead of salary packaging for cars;
• improve and encourage the use of end-of-trip cycling and running amenities like showers and lockers;
• seek funds and/or equipment to improve video or online-conferencing facilities in our workplaces (vice long-distance air travel);
• arrange bike maintenance classes for staff and provide basic shared repair facilities at work;
• look more closely at flexible work arrangements that encourage working from home where appropriate or travel during non-peak periods;
  
• highlight and profile those of our colleagues who make the effort to use more sustainable forms of transport as examples for others to follow;
• run and celebrate regular voluntary Car Free days; and
  
• try some schemes that offer incentives to car poolers, bikers, runners, walkers or public transport users.

The implementation of some sustainability initiatives in our library is now on our strategic plan for the coming year after it was suggested by staff at our planning days. Maybe working up our own Green Travel Plan is a good start. What are you doing in your workplace?

The image is one of my bikes in my office at work.

A quick presentation on using Twitter

I gave this quick presentation on using Twitter to my university's Teach & Learning Committee yesterday. Our Deputy Vice Chancellor (for Teaching, Learning and Equity), Shirley Alexander thought it was worth giving Twitter a try as a way of extending our reach and exposing the work of the committee. So here it is on SlideShare, below.
Oh, and one tool I used yesterday that isn't linked in the presentation is TwitBlock - a great help in ridding your followers of spammers.

Twitter: an introduction (for UTS Teach & Learning Committee)

View more documents from Mal Booth.

Of course hyperlinks still don't upload that well on SlideShare, so here they are, slide-by-slide:

SLIDE #1 https://twitter.com/signup http://delicious.com/malbooth/twitter www.slideshare.net/malbooth

SLIDE #3 http://twitter.com/ http://twitter.com/stephenfry http://search.twitter.com/

SLIDE #4 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar’s_number

SLIDE #5 http://tweetdeck.com/beta/download/ http://echofon.com/ http://www.atebits.com/tweetie-iphone/ http://bit.ly/ http://cotweet.com/

SLIDE #7 http://twitter.com/KevinRuddPM http://twitter.com/BarackObama http://twitter.com/SAlexander_UTS http://twitter.com/AnneBB http://twitter.com/search/users?q=UTS&category=people&source=find_on_twitter http://twitter.com/Twitter_Tips http://twitter.com/timoreilly

Gratuitous advice for job applicants

In various roles I’ve been employing people for the last 20 years. This has mostly been via some really dull public service processes that are designed to do the following:

• frighten the life out of prospective job applicants (or bore them to death);


• waste as much time and paper as possible;


• encourage the hopeless to apply and even protest decisions in the interests of fairness; and


• generate unproductive work for people with nothing better to do.

In most cases applicants need to be assessed in terms of a too-long list of badly written selection criteria. I know that everyone is going to say that this is really my own fault, but usually it is easier and quicker to just leave what is already there alone because the process of re-writing them adds another year to a very long process depending on what language is currently in vogue with the HR crowd. But really, in my experience the selection criteria don't matter anyway. There are several things that do matter and they are the things that make you want to hire someone if you are lucky enough to get someone who has all or most of these traits applying. So, for what they are worth, here they are:

• A decent tertiary or other relevant qualification (which in most cases just indicates an ability to learn)


• An ability to communicate in various ways – writing, online and in person


• A real or genuine and engaging personality


• An obvious enthusiasm or passion for whatever field it is you want to work in


• Some original ideas and a creative spirit


• Some evidence of the application of your skills

Regardless of the long lists of selection criteria we all have to deal with in interviews, in my experience, those are the real things I’ve looked for when hiring people and when you find someone with all of those traits, you throw the selection criteria out of the window.