Archive for the ‘Thoughts’ Category

I recently wrote about Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose Driven Church. Today, I wanted to share some of the ideas that I really identified with in the book, especially with those I can provide examples of here in Leeds. I imagine these ideas are mostly for faith & belief groups such as Humanism and Sunday Assembly, but can also have wider applications to all community groups.

Of course, the central tenant of the book is that a group should do things with purpose. This can be seen to varying degrees in such groups. Leeds Atheist Society always had a clear threefold purpose – to provide education on, fellowship for and open debate about the non-religious. It’s the first thing on our about page.

West Yorkshire Humanists is perhaps less clear, and probably in need of a mission statement. Sunday Assembly is a bit of mixed bag. We have a great slogan: “Live better. Help Often. Wonder more.” However, because we’re not allowed to use the term Humanism, it does not really connect to anything. This has lead to some of our attends describing it as “like playing church without for no reason”, and others as a cult of Sanderson Jones.

Toastmasters is the organisation with the clearest mission of any organisation I am involved in.

We empower individuals to become more effective communicators and leaders.

With a quarter of a million members in 122 countries, I think it is fair to say we are doing pretty well.

Having a clear purpose is critical because then you can then measure everything you do based on that. Everything else is derived from your purpose. That is true of any organisation you will ever be involved in and is probably the most important thing you can learn when it comes to running organisations effectively.

However, I think these points are also interesting…

Do away with committees

Committees decide things, doers do things. Which does your group need? Doers! Sunday Assembly Leeds does not really have a formal committee. We have monthly organisers meetings that are open to all members. There is no election process, you can just turn up and start helping.

Give the power to people implementing the plan. Rather than having committee approval for something, empower people by giving them to decision for the area they are working on. That way you will get much more engaged volunteers.

Provide stability

Warren talks about having a pastor for decades. The best churches are the ones that have the same pastor for a long time.

I am not advocating having the same person lead the group permanently. As secular groups we like to bring in new ideas, new people, have an open democracy. Having a leader-for-life is incompatible with these views. However, we do need to build trust that the organisation people invest their time into, and the friendships that they make, are not suddenly going to disappear.

In my personal life, I often feel more included to people who are more likely to stick around. I would suggest that a community is the same. If you are trying to decide whether to invest a significant amount of time and money into a community, you do so because you think you will get a return out of it over the long term. Therefore are you going to be more predisposed to give to a stable community that looks like it has solid leadership and a strong future, or a community that is constantly scrambling to find new find new leadership?

Write to people

Warren wrote and hand-addressed 15,000 letters to people in the local area. Today, targeted mailings will only get you a response rate of around 1%, untargeted even less. But even if you only get a quarter of one percent, that is still 38 people turning up. Of course, the stamps would now cost you nearly £8,000. This could be a good strategy if you happen to have a postman (we need a British-sounding gender-neutral term for this) in your group.

When I was at GRAM a few years ago, a member of a local Humanist group spoke about how they gathered a group of volunteers and went around posting leaflets through peoples doors. They did thousands of them, and in the end got two members. That does not sound like a lot, but actually for a relatively low-cost exercise, in a group of 20 people, is a 10% growth.

Ask people for a commitment

Saddleback allow people to attend their church every week. But they do not become a member of the church until they make a commitment. This involves taking a membership course, an initiation ceremony, and agreeing the support the church with your time and money. The more he asks them to commit, the more they are willing to do it.

Probably because it offers people real buy in. At Toastmasters, we charge £180 for the first year. There is a £30 sign-up fee and £12.50 per month dues, which by the end of the year adds up. I tend not to mention it when responding to emails about people coming for the first time. I am scared it will put them off. But once they see Toastmasters in action, most of them join. It doesn’t put them off. If anything, it inspires them to turn up to meetings and process through the educational programme.

Research your demographics

Who lives in your local area? Are you in a student town or a retirement community? Young and old, single and married, rich and poor, each of these groups will have different wants and needs and if you want to target your marketing and the content of your group effectively, you need to know who you are targeting.

These days such information is easier than ever before to get hold of. The Census data seems a good start but many local and national authorities, as well as NGOs publish information as well.

Play music as people enter

Warren noticed that the louder he played music when people entered, the more animated people were when talking to each other. People like to be anonymous, especially if they are a guest. Having music on allows them to talk without it being noticed.

In comparison, several times in Skeptics and Toastmasters I will stand at the front a little before we are scheduled to start and everything will go quiet. Getting the conversation restarted for the final two minutes is almost impossible after this. You just end up with two minutes of awkward silence.

Imagine through the eyes of a guest

In software development, you should have a developer and a tester. The developer should test their own code, but it is critical to have another eyes look at the software they have written. Why? Because the developer always uses it from a developer’s perspective! The tester looks at it from a user’s perspective. “It broke when I pushed this button?” “You’re not supposed to push that button.” But somebody might!

When doing anything with your group, you should always keep in mind that as an organiser you are probably a long-established member who knows what is going on. Always take the time to try and imagine how things might also look to a first-time guest who has come to the group to see what it is like. It is clear what is going on? Is it engaging? It is welcoming?

Always use plenty of lighting

Often I will go to a talk, and they will turn the lights off so that you can see the slides. This is the last thing you should be doing! Turn the lights on to as bright as they can be.

Firstly, a bright environment is more friendly and welcoming and keeps people awake. A dimly lit room is intimidating to guests and encourages existing members to take a nap. Keep a buzz in the atmosphere by keeping it bright and upbeat.

Secondly, who cares if people can see the slides? It is not important! People who rely on slides are bad public speakers. I can see slides on the internet. I want to see the speaker actually speak! I want to see their face. Lowering the lights encourages me to look at the slides rather than at the speaker, which is the opposite of what you want to do if you want people to find the talk engaging.

People come for the events, but stay for the friends

Atheist Society runs all year round, including now in summer when the students have gone home and the talks have finished. Why? Because people want to see their friends every week. People come to the group, and stay with the group for different reasons. Or sometimes they come because they have a lack of friends. Either way, social connections are the true glue of a group.

A few months ago we had a discussion about housing. As people who are approaching thirty and thinking about settling down probably tend to do. It got me thinking about how much perception affects your thinking. For example Hugh said he was looking at West Leeds because that has the nicest areas, whereas I would sheer clear of West Leeds because I think the nicest areas are in North and East Leeds.

The Sunday Times is a big North Leeds fan apparently. They named Chapel Allerton and Otley as two of the best places to live. Leeds List suggested Horsforth, Calverley and Ilkley as the places to be, while avoiding Headingley, Beeston and Seacroft.

Anyway, I thought it might be interesting to lay out where I think are the most desirable places to live and compare it to what everyone else thinks. So do post your thoughts. I’ve tried to stop where it becomes it’s own place (Wakefield, Bradford, Ikley, etc) but there is very subjective also so there is no clear cut off point. There is a similar problem with want counts as an area in its own right.

I’m not convinced Morley actually is a desirable place to live, but I didn’t know what else to put in that box.

As I said in the introduction, a lot of this depends on perception. Thus, I think a lot of you will feel differently. This also explains why you should not be offended when I have described your neck-of-the-woods as undesirable. I am sure it is full of lovely people.

Like many football fans, I have an incredibly complex system of national prejustices to work out what football team to support. Take Iran v Argentina for example. Which team am I supposed to support in this match? Iran has a terrible human rights record. However, Argentina was the last country to invade British soil, and worse cheated their way to a World Cup win in 1986.

How is one supposed to decide?

Ideally, someone would come up with a formula for working it all out. Geographic proximity, ancestry in a certain country, what you think of their politics, and how cool you think their flags and shirts are are all potentially important factors in deciding.

Once England are out, Germany are usually my B team (it is an unfortunate reality that being English you have to have a B team for when England get knocked out, but that is also true of all but a handful of countries) as having a Germanic name, it is the closest thing I can trace my ancestry to.

After that it is a question of geographic proximity. I hope France do well for example. Of course, I am supposed to hate the French, but it is very difficult to maintain such levels of casual racism against them in the 21st century. This then expands out in a circle in a “kilometres from me” fashion working out who to support.

It’s not quite that simple however. There are exclusions. I would not support Saudi Arabia for example, at least until they de-classify atheism as terrorism. Nor will I be supporting Qatar until they stop executing gay people.

Then you have to factor in the underdog level as well. We have been conditioned by decades of Hollywood films to support the underdog. In many ways it just glory supporting as if these films have taught me anything, it is that the underdogs always win. Plus it is just nicer when they do. Of course this runs in direct contradiction to the geographic rules as most of the best football teams are in Europe whereas the underdogs are on the “edge of the world” – Australia, Japan, South Korea, USA, Costa Rica, etc.

How do you balance it all? These first world problems just seem to go on and on…

Some people have claimed that the reason cults find it so difficult to get a grip in Britain is because we do not take anything seriously. Any topic, no matter how serious, is turned into a sarcastic joke. For example, here are some people mocking the deaths of tens of millions of people:

I am not suggesting this is in any way a bad thing. It is a very positive force that sheds light on serious issues, as well as being side-splittingly funny.

Similarly, any public house on a weekend will be full of people exchanging jokes about Madeleine McCann, Jimmy Savile and the Irish potato famine. The best ones get them all into the same joke. Americans may have to wait decades for a topic to become funny, but if you are British, I bet the first Michael Jackson joke arrived in your inbox before his body was even cold.

When I was a growing up, I used to read The Onion. You could even get the print version in my local Borders (remember Borders? Back in’t day…). Some of their stories were hit, others were miss. Their headline Microsoft Patents Ones, Zeroes still makes me chuckle.

It still is funny, and usually worth a read.

However, its power simply cannot match that of The Daily Mash. I started reading Mash while I was still working at Buzz, which must have been two or three ago now. That is a long time to be consistently funny. But they manage it. If anything, they are getting funnier.

Far from knocking out a few good headlines a week, The Daily Mash produces five brilliant headlines a day. I despair working out what I should retweet and what I should post on Facebook, because everything is worthy of it. Even its least amusing headline is generally far more worthy of such attention that the current bollocks being put out by BuzzFeed.

Of course satire has long been a British art form. Spitting Image, Private Eye, Monster Raving Loony Party, Mock The Week, Brass Eye and Boris Johnson represent just a tiny handful examples that I could pick out from an ocean of possibilities. John Oliver is currently turning into a US export. Nor is Mash the only people in the game: NewsThumb, NewsBiscuit and others produce excellent headlines as well.

But few have refined the art as well as The Daily Mash. For their contribution, I am grateful.

Recently a new report by Shelter suggested that 80% of homes were unaffordable to most families. Government intervention on this issue has failed us. Perhaps it is time for a free market solution?

Firstly, the government’s “Help to Buy” scheme is not helpful. It allows people to take 95% mortgages by allowing the banks to make less risky mortgages and the government paying the rest. The problem with this is that it allows people to buy homes they can’t afford.

The example of the Help to Buy website shows the government adding in £20,000 to the £5,000 deposit the buyer has, thus allowing them to buy a £200,000 house. But they cannot afford a £200,000 house. Based on the deposit they are putting up they can afford a £40,000 house. However, state intervention then allows everyone to charge £200,000 and have buyers for them, thus house prices go up to way beyond what they should be.

Secondly, the banks are willing to take large risks on mortgages because they know the government will bail them out if they get into trouble. Thus they can take huge risks, get rich when times are good and make the tax payer pay when times are bad. Who wouldn’t do that?

The government should stop doing things to make this huge prices affordable and actually do the opposite – making them unaffordable! Thus the free market would then bring prices down.

This, not propping up unaffordable house prices, is where state intervention would be useful. In order for the free market to function effectively you need to ensure there is liquidity in the market. This can be achieved by making sitting on second homes unaffordable.

Leeds City Council has already taken steps to do this. They have revoked council tax discount on empty properties and after two years you even may a premium of an extra 50% (you pay 150% of the normal council bill) to encourage you to sell it. Similarly, as I wrote about in 2012, you could just ban people from buying second homes.

Ending the state-sponsored propping up of house prices and introducing further measures to add liquidity to the housing market could then allow the free market to bring house prices down to a reasonable level.

Obviously this is a topic that most people will have an opinion on, so I would love to hear why I am wrong (on which I expect there will be some good arguments).

If you watched the Uruguay Italy game this week, you probably saw Luis Suarez take a bite out of one of the Italian players Giorgio Chiellini.

So far, Suarez has not come out and admitted it, but the video evidence and bite marks that can be seen on Chiellini are pretty damning.

I am not in favour of lifetime bans because I think there should always be some element of rehabilitation in a sentence. Indeed, this is probably the most important part. To ban someone permanently removes any opportunity for this to be achieved. I don’t think FIFA have this power anyway, but if they did, they must be left wondering what to do.

This is not the first time Suarez has bitten someone. He received a seven match ban in 2007 for biting Otman Bakkal and a ten match ban last year for biting Branislav Ivanovic. He also received a ban and a fine in 2011 for racially abusing Patrice Evra.

He is also a cheat. In 2010 Ghana were about to score the winning goal to become the first ever African nation to reach a World Cup semi-final. That is until Suarez punched the ball off the line. Ghana earned a penalty for what would have been a certain goal but unfortunately missed. You could argue that if Uruguay had any sportsmanship, they wouldn’t have attempted to save it.

Given all of this then, it is hard to make a case that Suarez should receive anything other than a lengthy ban, and possibly criminal prosecution.

Last Saturday we went to Wendy House. It recently celebrated it’s 16th birthday and a message went out from the organisers saying “we hope to be here in another 16 years!”. I am not convinced it will be though.

It was a good night. It went as a group of friends and had a good time. For proof, see this low quality photo of Hugh looking ambivalent.

Wendy House itself though, is a a shadow of its former self.

The rise and fall

I first attended Wendy House eight years ago. It was magic. They had three rooms. Stylus played alternative and 80s, Mine hosted the Mutate room (EBM) and Bat Coda (now Pulse) hosted an indie room. They were all full. Not Fruity full, but pretty full (for context, Fruity is the big Friday night student cheese event).

If my memory serves me correctly, which it probably doesn’t, Mine had a capacity of around 500. Pulse had about 350 and Stylus could hold thousands. Therefore if I was to estimate attendance I would put it at over 2,000.

Slowly, as the years have gone on, this has drained away. First they closed the indie room and moved Mutate into the smaller bar. Then they started closing some of the area in Stylus. Now even Mutate has gone and they are down to a single room. Furthermore they do not even run in the summer any more. For a second year, there will be no event in July, August or September, and they missed March this year too.

It is not hard to see why. Last Saturday was empty. There were maybe 200-300 people there, a tenth of what it might have been at its peak. You could actually get served at the bar and get space on the dance floor.

Worse, it was full of people in casual clothing. I was somewhat dressed up, but I think if I had gone full on dressed up I would have actually felt conspicuous because of the lack of other people in full costume.

What went wrong?

Some people have suggested that the students are to blame. They are not around over the summer, hence why nobody was there. This does not explain the long term decline in attendance though, nor do I think it is a significant contribution.

Firstly, in my experience, a lot of the students that went to Wendy House did not go home for the summer. That is really a first year thing, after that people have a house in Leeds and hang around to see their friends. Secondly, a lot of the patrons are not students. The summer never seemed to have a huge affect on attendance back in the day.

Perhaps a better explanation is the decline of the alternative community. When I was a kid, there was a big crowd of goths outside the Corn Exchange every weekend. Then they renovated the Corn Exchange, kicked all the alternative shops out and told the goth kids to go away. Later their lead tenant went bust. But that is a whole different rant.

The point is, you do not see that as much anymore. Much like the pensions pot crisis, there is a lack of young goths to replace the old retiring goths. Perhaps time has run out.

Bucking the trend

It is also worth nothing that Wendy House has actually done really well to get this far.

Alternative nights have never been popular. When I first started clubbing in Leeds there was Bar Phono and another alternative club. They both closed. Then Subculture opened. And closed. Rock Of Ages used to be based at the Union, now it is upstairs in the Library which, as James points out, is where nights go to die. Halo’s indie night suffered a similar fate. Basically all alternative nights everywhere are unpopular. Even the legendary Jilly’s Rockworld (Manchester) has gone.

The fact that Wendy House has survived this long really is to its credit.

Scaling down

Unfortunately, as it has begun to shrink, it is possible that it has hastened its own decline. Take the music they played in Mutate for example. I just do not want to listen to it. It just is not music. Take a listen to this:

It is just annoying. When they closed Mutate they merged it into the main room. This did not really keep anyone happy. Those that preferred Stylus were suddenly frightened and upset by them actually changing the playlist, while those who had spent their time in Mutate were unlikely to find enough songs on the playlist to keep them interested.

Conclusion

Wendy House is still a night worth visiting. The music is still good. However, on Saturday it felt just like a regular run-of-the-mill alternative night. Not the magic night that it once used to be.

With them taking a break this summer, and the low turn-out this week, who knows if they will return. But here is to hoping.

Here are some old photos to make us all feel better…

I could write about this, but John Oliver can do a much better job of it:

It’s shocking. I knew about a lot of the crap that FIFA do, such as exclusion zones to make sure that no local businesses can earn a living while the international sponsors rake it in. I had heard about issues with workers being mistreated in Qatar. However, the video really puts it all in perspective. And it is not a good perspective. Tax exemptions, enforced drinking, World Cup courts, a coffin a day going back to India, the list goes on.

Everyone knows that FIFA is rife with bribery and corruption. Every year there is a new story, usually several times a year.

As Oliver points out, it is too hot to play football in Qatar! It’s actually impossible to do the World Cup there! When the Daily Mash ran the headline “Qatar to host Winter Olympics“, it was only marginally more ridiculous. Who would rationally vote for that? Even FIFA know it, which is why they are talking about moving the whole tournament to the winter.

It’s all very well Greg Dyke telling him he probably should step down, but surely it is time to take some actual action. If UEFA told them they wouldn’t stand for Blatter continuing as FIFA’s head, what would they do? They would be fucked. Most of the top teams in the world are from Europe, FIFA would have to listen.

I am going to watch the World Cup. Because as an individual there is basically nothing I can do about these state of affairs. However, surely given the latest round of allegations, supported by a mountain of evidence, it is time for those with the power to act.

I was recently passed an article by The Priory Group entitled “Anxiety – are you taking it serious?”

It talks about how common anxiety is and how people do not take it seriously. It then shows twenty photos of people holding up signs with messages such as “don’t be such a drama queen” and “it must be horrible being you!”.

Powerful stuff. But is it accurate? Because if it isn’t, we could be unnecessarily worrying people from being open about their issues.

It is easy to pick out a couple of anecdotes that reflect badly on a certain situation. Doing so proves nothing more than that you are entirely qualified to become a journalist for the Huffington Post. However, if you want to make an important point, I think you need to back it up with some actual statistics. How many people were surveyed? What percentage of people report a negative experience?

The reason I ask is that I do not believe the percentage would be high. I have usually found the experience of being open about anxiety a positive one. So have many people. Indeed an overwhelming majority of people who attend Anxiety Leeds have. Of course I am working of anecdotal evidence as well, but the least we can say is that do not know either way whether most people have a positive or negative experience.

How about the control group?

Further, I would argue that you need to factor in a control group.

Yes, some people might make negative comments about anxiety. However, people make negative comments about a variety of conditions. Have you tried having flu as a man? Nobody has any sympathy for you. “Oh, man flu again, poor you.” It’s horrible. I have never experienced anything like that regarding anxiety.

Okay, but why is it important?

Selecting anecdotes without publishing evidence to back it up is harmful because you cannot substantiate the claims you making. Which means they might not be true. But people might believe them anyway.

This is primarily harmful to people suffering from anxiety. Mental health is the new gay and we need people to come out about it. Publishing articles that suggest that anyone who does will be subject to ridicule and abuse will only encourage people to keep their problems suppressed.

This is bad for them and bad for society. If we want to encourage people to be open about mental health difficulties they are facing, we need to reassure them coming out is a good move.

WordPress is a super piece of software. It has made it easier and quicker to get a website up and running than any other content management system out there. It has a great range of plugins and themes, and is reasonably easy to add your own too.

That said, there are a couple of issues that I think make it a questionable choice for using on an important website.

It works fine if you deploy it to one location and just build everything there. However, often I will have a development version, a staging version and a production version. This allows me to pass a website through each stage while making sure it is working.

With WordPress, this is difficult.

You need to put the site URL into two different places in the config. This means that you have to update these values every time you deploy content to another server. So for example a typical use case would be to copy all your production data over to staging so you can perform major testing, and then potentially copy it back again. Or you want to develop the site locally and then push everything up to your server.

Unfortunately WordPress uses these URLs for the login process, so you cannot just log in and change them in the admin panel because you will not be able to get in. You have to do it via a script or by editing the database directly.

Secondly, it uses absolute URLs everywhere. Every time you upload a piece of media, or a post, it will store a URL for it in the database with the hostname included in it. When you insert the media into the post, it puts a absolute URL and SRC in there too.

This means that you have to do two things. Firstly, take our all the hostnames from the SRC and URL HTML content that WordPress generates every time it inserts a piece of media for you.

You also have to update the database to change all the URLs in there too. There does not seem to be any support to do this at all. I had to write a little plugin to change these. Arguably, you could use this plugin as well.

I am not sure why it does this. There does not seem to be any compelling argument to use absolute URLs. I had a look around for one, and the closest article was by Joost de Valk, none of which I think really stand up (certainly not in comparison to “is your site probably tested?”).

As pointed out here, if you really need to use absolute URLs, you could implement a short code to allow it to remain dynamic.

WordPress is a super piece of software, and indeed runs my blog. But I think it has it’s place in a certain set of use-cases and large production systems do not seem to be one of them.