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Lunchtime lessons at Academi Xi. Service agreements 101 with Simbisa Law

Posted on by Elle Brooker

Be Legally Covered is a slightly awkward name for the event I’m about to go to.

It’s lunchtime and I’m off to Exhibition Street to get the low down on service level agreements.

It’s week four or five of my tech / data / culture odyssey and I don’t mind admitting that taking on lunchtimes, as well as weeknights (and sometimes more than one event a night, including two tonight) is causing a backlog in the writing department.

I feel like I have a new job.

I remind myself that I do have a new job, but that writing the blog is not it. I am in the process of setting up a website. Remember?

The presentation is not exactly tech or data, but it is broadly ‘cultural’ and this is a ‘need to know’ situation. I’m starting a new business that involves working on site in people’s homes and handling their precious heirlooms, art and collectibles.  And it needs a website.

I only have half a law degree and some experience making and changing laws, so let’s just say there are some knowledge gaps. What is it they say about a small amount of knowledge?

TLDR

  • If you’re in business, it’s wise to have a standard form contract (a Master form) with conditions tailored to your needs and the option to extend it / amend it.
  • Limit your liability to the value of the work to be done, including any work performed (or not performed) by a sub-contractor.
  • There are many kinds of insurances, but they’re not as expensive as you thought they might be.
  • Irrational positivity and avoiding difficult conversations are not a good reasons to not have a contract limiting your liability. Dumbass.

The What

The reminder note I received from the good burghers of Academy Xi (pronounced ex–eye, not zee) outlined what to expect.

The speaker today is co-founder of Simbisa law, Rugare Gomo.

‘Simbisa’ means ’empowerment’ in Zimbabwean. (I would add, that I did not know this. I was told it. I do not speak Zimbabwean. Not fluently anyway…)

I’m greeted at the door by joint co-founder of Simbisa, Luke Gallea, and both co-founders make a point of introducing themselves and learning my name. Gosh. Polite and polished. Someone’s been reading their Dale Carnegie.*

Rugare covers:

  • What is a Service Agreement and when it should be used
  • Whether you should be engaged as a contractor or employee?
  • Protecting yourself with appropriate limitations of liability
  • Who should be responsible for insurance?
  • Ensuring you are protected if your client fails to pay, or pays late
  • Clearly specifying who is responsible for tax obligations to avoid costly mistakes
  • How to use a Master Services Agreement to cover all work orders

The above paragraph was a straight cut and paste. I think it shows…

The Where

I’m at Academy Xi, (pronounced ex-eye) and I’m one of five women in a room of twenty people. Interesting.

This reverses the ratio in the lift five minutes ago, where it was 6:1 women to men until  the first floor gym. I did notice that I was the only person wearing office gear. I don’t mind admitting that I felt slightly resentful of people motivated to go to the gym during their office lunch break. If I’m honest…

Tim Rice –  the organisation’s Events Manager – not the guy who collaborates with Andrew Lloyd Webber, kicks things off and mentions that the group is an education group; That it hosts up to twenty events each week on various subjects.

Wow. My calendar is already quite full.

I’m curious about the difference between a Service Agreement and a Service Level agreement and fortunately for me so is the nice man in the second row.  It turns out, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet and, loosely speaking, both of the above mentioned agreements can be interchanged with one another to some extent.

Rugare is a talented presenter and keeps to time, whilst fielding all of our questions.

I’m concerned the nice man in the second row thinks that if his contract doesn’t contained levels that this means his client is not entitled to expect impossible, 100 percent service levels. I think that could do with being clarified. I would be pissed if my email service was planning to be out more than any of the time so putting in a number would at least set me up to know that technology isn’t failsafe.

I like that Rugare believes that the Tax Office will succeed in its bid to have contractors defined as employees in its suit against an unnamed global platform. It shows the horrible cynicism that pervades Australian corporates, (our banks, restaurants, convenience stores) and puts me off wanting to return to that world isn’t universal.

Next Steps

The conversation covers online platforms that support short term contract work. I wonder whether they do or don’t include conditions that address liability for damages and under performance the way Rugare suggests they might. I cynically think probably not and the answer seems to be some do some don’t.

I resolve to check.

The Ask

The firm is hosting a ticketed workshop on 12 September covering how to negotiate profitable deals with your clients. This means you’ll learn to tailor your own contracts.

The Sweetener

The firm offers a FREE 30 minute telephone strategy session that you can book online.

Links

https://www.simbisalaw.com.au/

Simbasa 2

Free stuff! Digital coaching with Yarra Libraries

Posted on by Elle Brooker

Multiple dates. Too many for little moi to put in to the calendar.

You do know that there is a calendar?

Link to Yarra Libraries digital coaching dates and times here.

The library also offers help with filling in forms, creating websites with WordPress (ping!) and hobbies ranging from sewing, to writing, to photography and many more besides.

Yarra libraries

‘Spark Your Creativity’ – an evening with Dara Simkin

Posted on by Elle Brooker

 

Quote of the night

“Perfection is procrastination in a sparkly dress” – Dara Simkin, 2018

Tonight I’m at ‘Spark Your Creativity.‘

Our presenter is U.S. citizen Dara Simkin.  Dara’s been in Oz long enough to grasp what ‘yeah nah’ means and have her first exposure to Monty Python –  which makes me feel quite sorry for Americans.

I wonder whether she’s watched Pete and Dud in the art gallery, and I think that if she hasn’t then she should, and so should you, and so here it is.

TLDR

  • Get used to feeling uncomfortable. Being creative requires you to get out of your comfort zone on purpose.
  • Experiment. Practice makes perfect.
  • The future is uncertain and already upon us. Have a think about what you’ll do when the robots take over.

The What

I’m one of 25 people in the audience. It’s Monday and the most difficult night of the week to get people to events.

Melbourne’s weather continues to snap freeze the balls off a brass monkey. I am rugged up under a hat and several layers, including alpaca wool mittens. Brr!

From the get-go everyone declares themselves sufficiently creative, and claimsthey’ve never been told to be more so, ever, which begs the question why are they here then?

We do a few ‘get to know you’ / ‘let’s practice how this works’ exercises. My suspicion that people aren’t always the best judge of their own measure is confirmed during this phase.

Both partners, paired with me, exhibit the rigidity that I described as being a ‘creativity killer’ earlier in the evening.

One of them does what Dara specifically asked us not to do and allows me to take the lead without contributing a thing. It’s a silly handshake for Pete’s sake. I may not be a mason but how hard can it be?

Quite hard as it turns out. We start off easy using the ‘wrong; hand, which is fine, but also a bit sinister and a bit judgy if you’re a south paw. In the absence of any assistance I Monty Python the situation, and add a wink, wink and a tug of the ear, for good measure. This is more physically taxing than you might imagine. It’s on a par with patting your head while rubbing your tummy in terms of degree of difficulty. It succeeds in breaking the ice and making us looks silly, so that’s a win.

My next partner hits almost all of Dara’s buttons without the slightest glimmer of ironic realisation. He fancies himself quite creative but is undone by his:

  1. unimaginative and all too plausible ‘and then’ scenarios; and
  2. semi-public query, issued in self deprecation, (and to no one in particular,) that he “doesn’t understand how a simple trip to Bali resulted in our becoming drug runners.”

Point two is a long story, punctuated at the end with the live equivalent of canned laughter at the above ‘joke’. It involves improv and and two people telling what is meant to be a made up story. His reaction to me having fun, and being ridiculous, is on point.  He personifies the Holy Trilogy, the Triple J – the ‘judge, joke, justify’ that Dara says we tend to use when we fear ridicule from others.

It looks to me as though he’s deeply uncomfortable with being creative, as well as with anybody around him being creative, whatever he might like to wish was true.

Shrug.

As someone half my age might say and get away with: “I got no shame, bro.”

The Where

I’m at General Assembly, William Street in its events room, – a chair-filled space, chopped in half for the night by partitions.

The wifi password is ‘yellowpencil.’ It’s painted on the wall.

The Melbourne office is one of a few dozen G.A. branches scattered globally. This one is close to the Yarra, and to Flinders Street, and the Immigration Museum.

G.A. started life as a co-working venture, before branching out into what you might call ‘knowledge sharing*’ which is why I’m here tonight.

The Salient Points

Dara is a delight. Her style is authentic, her enthusiasm is right-sized and her evidence-based approach is persuasive, and logical.

Anyone who advocates a modicum of caution when you’re stepping out of your comfort zone and who comes with a lot less ‘woo’ than I’m used to seeing and hearing from entrepreneurs gets my vote.

oznor

A slice of one of Dara’s slides…

‘Creativity’ has morphed into a ‘hero word‘.

By this I take it Dara means that people like to think they have desirable attributes in spades, as long as others hold that attribute in some esteem. In other words, being creative has developed cachet. 

It’s OK to play

Dara advocates play and humour in the workplace, in the right proportions, and gosh knows the number of people I’ve met who thought I wasn’t taking my job seriously because I had a sense of humour.

Preach!

Practice makes perfect

Dara cites Nita Leland, (whom she admits she hasn’t read) but likes Nita’s idea of paying ‘relaxed attention’ to your surroundings and your feelings, meaning, literally stopping to smell the roses, be present in the moment and take a breather once in a while.

To assist you, try leaving your phone at home, once in a while, and put your phone down and time how long that lasts.

The Ask

General Assembly’s free events are designed to get you interested in their paid courses, workshops and conferences and tonight is no exception.

Fortunately, the pitch is never a hard sell, which I like, because it means I’m more open to the hearing the bait and making the switch than I otherwise would be.

I would actually consider going to Project Play because:

  1. it’s less than $100, which is very reasonable for this type of event;
  2. I get a discount for having attended tonight, and you can too, if you attend Spark Your Creativity II on 20 August; and
  3. the line up features an expert in divergent thinking and members of the IDEO group, who codified design thinking, or claim they did, which I find interesting.

Dara is also a life coach and has a more in-depth creativity seminar she’ll be hosting at G.A. that you might like to attend.

Dara Creativity

Links

http://www.darasimkin.com/

http://projectplay.work/

https://generalassemb.ly/education/spark-your-creativity

Footnotes

* I hesitate to call knowledge sharing ‘education‘ as I’ve formed the opinion that both sets of providers would strongly object to the label and for wildly, different reasons.

Reading in real life

Posted on by Elle Brooker

“Give yourself unto reading.
The man who never reads will never be read;
he who never quotes will never be quoted.
He who will not use the thoughts of other men’s brains,
proves that he has no brains of his own.
You need to read.”
– Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Recently I set myself a goal of reading more and writing more. Today I found a tool to help me put with both of these things.

It’s called Good Reads.

I wish that I was being paid to endorse it, but no.

It’s a site that seems to be able to help me get something done, that I wanted to get done, in a simple way. So here I am, writing about it after posting my first review, and installing their service as a widget on the site (a double whammy).

I previously considered using a Google form and even went to the trouble of drafting one something that would:

  • track my progress,
  • list books that I want to read; and
  • share book recommendations with my friends,

but the Good Reads site has the added bonus that machines will one day be able to tell me what I want to read, based on my likes and dislikes (and, of course, the assumptions and cultural biases built into the machines by their designers and the data that they’re harvesting about me, which is contaminated due to me routinely posting wrong information about myself to confuse actual people.

I am curious to know if a machine made by a code crunching, tech head with a different social standing to my own* will come without assumptions that I don’t radically disagree with and the ability to see through my ruse.

Time will tell.

*probably an overweight, awkward, introvert who wears t-shirts to work because we all make assumptions don’t we and generalisations are the basis of most initial thinking in the app world.

cof

As can be seen from the opening quote, this isn’t an exercise in simple self-improvement. It’s a direct response to the persistent urging of Tony Wilson in ‘24 Hour Party People’ to read more, about everything from Boethius to the Durruti Column; to the meaning of a ‘benelux’ and Andrea del Sarto.

Not bad for a novelisation. The “lowest form of art.”

I think the word I’m fishing for vis a vis Herr Wilson, is “wanker,” although Wilson himself seems to prefer to be called “pretentious” and/or “git”.

Cum ci, cum ca.

Some day, after I re-read Theodore Adorno and Louis Althusser, I am going to write about ideology…