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May 26, 2012

My most recent story for Spiegel Online

05/25/2012 05:11 PM

Internet Watchdogs

Parliament Watch Gives Voters Access to Politicians

By Paul Glader in Hamburg

Though they often vote for a party rather than an individual lawmaker, German citizens can question their elected local and federal representatives directly, thanks to a website called Parliament Watch. The founders have expanded to other European countries and have plans for Tunisia and possibly even the United States.

Pacing past computer desks in an office scattered with ferns, Gregor Hackmack explains that he’s on a quest to bring more democracy, direct democracy precisely, to Germany. But he’s also expanding and exporting his findings to other places such as Luxembourg, Slovenia, Ireland, Austria and, soon Tunisia.

Staff members work the phones and volunteers filter in and out of his crowded office flat in a Hamburg walk-up, where he’s involved with several NGOs responsible for doing just that:Abgeordnetenwatch.de (Parliament Watch), kandidatenwatch.de (Candidate Watch) and Mehr Demokratie e.V. (More Democracy).

His primary project, Parliament Watch, has grown into a fixture of the German political and media scene. It’s a forum where citizens can ask direct questions of political candidates and elected officials in Germany and of Germany’s delegation to the European Union.

The forum has proved popular, generating 350,000 unique visitors per month. It has partnerships running with several media organizations including the daily newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, public broadcaster NDR, and SPIEGEL ONLINE, which help draw questions from voters to the site and use some of the answers and data in their reports.

Ninety-Five Percent Participation

Because of the site’s popularity, the lawmakers are essentially forced to answer the questions from constituents, and to maintain a basic profile on the site. Those who want a premium profile with a picture and a platform integrated into Twitter or Facebook must pay an annual fee of €129 ($161).

“That’s how we get politicians to contribute to the project,” Hackmack says. “If there is competition before the election, there is a clear incentive” to buy the premium profile. The rest of the financing for the project comes from donors and partnerships.

Roughly 95 percent of the members of parliament participate on the site, and they answer 80 percent of the 100,000 questions that have poured in from voters. The questions are stored in archives as a public record, which voters can later use to hold politicians accountable. The site also can sort and slice data and responses. For example, it shows graphically how responsive each of the major parties in Germany is to questions.

For example, Carola Reimann, a member of parliament with the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD), has paid for an extended profile and has answered nearly all 77 questions that constituents have asked her, including one about legalizing marijuana.

“I do not see the current rules for the use of cannabis as leading to a dead end,” she said in her answer, noting that cannabis use has declined since 2004. “This trend confirms the effectiveness of a multi-layered approach of prevention, counseling and treatment.”

Plans for Expansion

In Germany’s political system, voters largely elect a party rather than a candidate directly, meaning that many politicians take office because of the will of the party and not necessarily the will of the voters. Many German voters don’t know the politicians very well.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have direct democracy on a national level,” Hackmack says. Parliament Watch is rolling out coverage for all 16 German states and will include 92 community-level governments as well. It recently received funding to expand its platform to Tunisia, Slovenia and Ireland. “All three countries are on course,” he said. “We hired a country manager for Ireland and have a (financial sponsor) commitment for Tunisia.”

Parliament Watch is also mulling a possible expansion to the United States and is considering a program where citizens, stakeholders and investors can question executives at banks and large publicly traded companies. Organizers say it’s just a matter of creating a new version of the same infrastructure Parliament Watch uses and hiring managers to build participation, moderate and maintain a new site.

Influenced by Protest Movements

Hackmack grew up in a middle-class family in a part of Germany that was famous for its nuclear transports each year. As a teenager he observed the anti-nuclear movement. “That’s how I got involved in movement politics,” he says. “I realized how much you can do with a few people.”

He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the London School of Economics (LSE) in the late 1990s, at a time when the globalization movement was picking up steam amid the anti-World Trade Organization (WTO) protests in Seattle in 1999. Hackmack and peers helped organized events at LSE and brought Naomi Klein to some meetings for peace-related gatherings.

He recalls 2 million people marching in Hyde Park to protests wars and points to it as a key moment in his political development. “That doesn’t happen very often,” he said. “Not even in the United Kingdom.”

A week or two later, the British Parliament voted by a landslide majority for war “even though 85 percent of people were against going to war,” he said. “I started thinking, how can it be in a representative democracy that parliament isn’t listening to the people? It’s almost like (the novel) ‘War and Peace.’”

Hackmack says when he moved back to Hamburg after finishing his studies, he didn’t want to become a banker or consultant like many of his friends. So he went to law school in Hamburg and financed himself by doing market research projects and got involved with the Hamburg branch of the 6,000-member grassroots organization More Democracy.

At the University of Hamburg, Hackmack met Boris Hekele, who was living the same kind of life, supporting himself with web design projects, while studying computer science.

In 2004, they organized a student strike against increases in student fees. Hekele built a web platform similar to MeetUp.com in a matter of hours, which helped organize the strike of about 5,000 protestors. At the time, “there was no Twitter, no Facebook or social web,” Hekele says. “It was completely new.”

The university increased its fees anyway, but Hackmack and Hekele realized they had the makings of a good startup team. They wondered how voters, with an opportunity to vote for a broader range of candidates, could compare the options. They came up with a website that lists members of parliament, their voting records and creates a platform where voters can question their politicians and candidates.

“It’s like giving a job interview,” Hackmack says. “You want to see who you are hiring.”

Hackmack dropped out of the law studies program and Hekele quit his computer science program at the university as well. “I came to the conclusion that this is the key to change things in society,” Hackmack says. “To make sure the will of the majority is implemented in the political process.”

In the Hot Seat

The initial abgeordnetenwatch.de won media awards for its work in Hamburg, suggesting they were doing a service that German media and citizens appreciated. So they expanded the site to the national level just in time for the 2005 national elections. Since then, they have put several politicians in the hot seat, including Carl-Eduard von Bismarck, of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), Bundestag member Siegfried Kauder (CDU) and European Parliament member Silvana Koch-Mehrin, of the business-friendly Free Democrats (FDP).

Koch-Mehrin was stripped of her doctorate title after a plagiarism scandal in 2011, and was found to have skipped committee meetings for nearly two years. A few politicians, such as Merkel and former German finance minister Peer Steinbrück, are listed on the site but do not respond to citizens’ questions.

Politicians have taken note of how the site has changed the electoral process. Alexander-Martin Sardina, a member of the Hamburg state parliament, wrote in 2008 that Parliament Watch often was a topic of discussion in the CDU parliamentary group meetings: “The mood in the spring and summer of 2005 was that only the party speaker should answer for their respective issues. … There was also a group of representatives that insisted that the only proper forum for debate was parliament, not an independent Internet site.” Sardina writes that staff attorneys for one state parliament even had to advise members if Parliament Watch could be held legally liable for generating bad publicity.

But slowly their opinions changed. Sardina and others suggest that many politicians now enjoy interacting with the public on the site. “It is one of the only chances to get to know the people in my constituency,” said Bundestag representative Rüdiger Kruse. “There are 187,000 people (in my district), and you cannot meet and greet (all of them).”

Drumming Up Donations

In the Hamburg office, a yellow sign with movable numbers lists the number of monthly subscribers to the Parliament Watch newsletter: 1,180. To further boost financing Hackmack attended the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland this year, and is pitching investors to support the expansion of the site. “It would be great to cover more countries and to be an enabler for other organizations,” he says, adding that he would love to one day have a presence in Saudi Arabia or China.

He says it is not the website itself, but people who can topple dictatorial regimes. “We don’t expect to change the world but to provide a piece of the puzzle to help change the world,” he said. “Hopefully we provide tools to allow people to help develop democracy.”

URL:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/german-website-lets-voters-directly-question-politicians-a-834964.html

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May 26, 2012

Here is my most recent post for FastCompany.com

Neo-Nazi Rehab: How Do You Change The Mind Of An Extremist?

By Paul Glader

Judy Korn, who works with violent offenders from Germany’s far-right-wing party, has developed techniques that she says can be used with Muslim fundamentalists and young gang members.

How do you rehabilitate a young Neo-Nazi behind bars?

“You talk with them,” says German social entrepreneur Judy Korn. In the past, German prisons showed films about Hitler and the Holocaust to try to reach such extremists. But Korn says re-integrating the young men happens with personal communication, not by showing them passive media.

And it turns out that helping Neo-Nazis change their ways requires the same five principles (see the sidebar below) that work on Muslim extremist youth and others who end up behind bars for violent or hate-motivated crimes. The chief skill to teach them: empathy.

“If you work with violent people, you can be sure at one point in their biography, they stopped having the ability to feel empathy for other people,” says Korn, who has worked with right extremists since she was a teenager. She said most Neo-Nazis her team of trainers work with in 10 of Germany’s 16 states come from abusive homes with alcoholism and other problems. “If you train people to feel empathy for themselves, you can train them to be and feel empathetic for another person.”

Korn’s organization—Violence Prevention Network—has worked with 500 such cases of incarcerated young skinheads, Neo-Nazis, and Muslim extremists in Germany since 2001. Her records show recidivism rates for the young men they work with is 30%, compared to 80% for all juvenile offenders in Germany. Her team of trainers can work with about 100 young people a year, but she would like to expand to work with more than 300. Other projects like Exit Deutschland also helps shuttle Neo-Nazis out of the scene, offering a witness protection type of program to young people who might fear violent retribution when they quit an extremist movement.

EXTREMISM STILL EXISTS

Germany tries to combat its National Socialist past by funding many nonprofits and government agencies to keep a close eye on far-right groups. It even plants thousands of undercover agents inside the extreme right, 6,000-member NPD political party, which sometimes hosts music and other events that recruit young people into extreme ideology. Political leaders in the country set up various government initiatives to monitor extremist behavior. Roughly 50 million euros from the European Union and German government go to funding prevention and deterrence programs in Germany each year, according to Korn. Other nonprofits such as The Nazi Documentation Center in Cologne present history so that German people, especially school children, know what happened in the past. Last summer, the group Exit Deutschland used a stealth campaign at an extremist rock concert in Thuringia. The group handed out free extremist T-shirts to 250 of the 600 people at the concert. When washed, the T-shirt had a message (“What your T-shirt can do, so can you.”) and gave contact information for Exit Deutschland and encouraged the wearer to leave the group.

But the prevention efforts are not perfect. In November, two young right extremists committed suicide in the city of Zwickau and police found evidence that showed the men were responsible for murdering nine immigrants and a police officer in recent years. In 2010, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, estimated there were roughly 25,000 right-wing extremists living in Germany. That office counted nearly 16,000 politically motivated crimes by the far right that year, including 762 violent crimes. At the same time, Germany struggles to integrate the growing number of Muslim immigrants in Germany, a small percentage of whom turn to extremism. Germany faced a wake-up call after it was discovered that some of the 9/11 terrorists, like Mohammed Atta, had spent time in Germany.

Korn, an Ashoka Fellow in Germany, says some of this prevention and marketing work is good. But she thinks more money and time should be spent talking with Neo-Nazis behind bars, debating Germany’s right-wing NPD political party in public, and confronting the right-wing views on a human-to-human basis. Her organization has created standard training to deal with extremists, and her trainers learn debate-style skills in which they let the young extremists talk and then ask them questions that reveal the lack of knowledge or logic on which their views are based.

For example, she said a young Neo-Nazi recently told his trainer that the global financial crisis was caused by “Jewish bank executives.” The trainer asked the young man to do research and back up that claim with analysis. He poked holes in the homework the young man did, proving his anti-Semitic assertion was unfounded. “We show when they are not well informed,” Korn said. “We keep on asking questions.” Similarly, an imam accompanies trainers in discussions with Muslim extremist youth and, with superior knowledge of Islam and a peaceful interpretation of the Koran, counters their assertions and backward notions.

ENROLLING EXTREMISTS IN REHAB

Young men in German prisons can enroll in the voluntary “anti-violence” personal growth program for five months and meet with a personal coach once a week as well as in groups. They join the program, Korn says, because they are bored in prison and realize they are missing dimensions of self-control in their lives. Countering their extremist political, racial, or religious views is a secondary benefit.

“In prison, they are at a point where they are vulnerable,” she says. Neo-Nazi leaders are often past the point of reform. But young men age 16 to 18 in the movement often find themselves socially trapped in their gangs and unable to control their violent responses. Korn’s program offers civic education discussions in democracy, human rights, gender, and other topics.

The organization, funded by government grants and private foundations and donors, follows up with them for one year after they leave prison and aims to help them find a high school degree, an apprenticeship, a job and self-confidence. It encourages and aims to help them relocate away from their previous city to avoid the old friends or family influences. Many of the young men have sad life stories. And 80% don’t have a high school diploma she says.

“They talk to you in a very unemotional way about their behavior,” she said. “It’s like talking to a five-year-old boy and training their vocabulary.” One key point for each young man is to talk through the crime that put them in jail, reconstructing the event in minute detail, and discussing their actions in a way that shows them the perspective of the victim, their responsibility for the crime, and the impact it made on society.

APPLICATION BEYOND GERMANY

Would the same principles and approach work for drug-dealers and gang members in America’s juvenile justice system? “Absolutely,” she says. “The reason most people become violent criminals and part of extreme scenes,” is the same she says. “You find young guys who don’t feel like they have any worth, are unable to build relationships, and are at risk of gangs.”

But, she cautions, “To do this kind of work, you have to understand the local culture” of a place. A teacher in Northern Ireland, for example, should know the history and culture of the region. Similarly in Sweden, the former Neo-Nazi Kent Lindahl started a group called Exit that helps extremists there leave the scene.

Rightist movements are on the rise in several European countries at the moment, causing increasing concern by officials. The EU recently created the Radicalization Awareness Network after Norwegian extremist Anders Behring Breivik killed 77 people last summer. It will spend $28 million in the next four years to help prevent extremism in Europe. While Germany has its share of ongoing problems with extremist communities, she worries about the right-leaning rhetoric coming from the political class in some Western European countries.

“In Germany, because of our history, we have a more respected movement against extremism. I don’t see the same in the Netherlands, Denmark, or France,” she said. “In Germany, it’s not common to be educated and to have right wing, extremist opinions as freely as in those other countries.”

Via FastCompany.com

http://www.fastcoexist.com/1679670/neo-nazi-rehab-how-do-you-change-the-mind-of-an-extremist

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March 08, 2012

6 notes

Knight News Challenge: Wabase: A network of education startups, products and innovators

Hi Readers, Here’s a grant proposal some friends and I put together related to a project we are working on. We appreciate any likes, reblogs etc. about this.

Best, Paul

newschallenge:

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

We propose to connect educational startups to customers, by creating a network that focuses on educational products and services.

2. Is anyone doing something like this now and how is your project different? [30 words]

No. We haven’t seen anyone…

(Source: newschallenge1)

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February 27, 2012

126 notes

world-shaker:

Facebook during World War I

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February 27, 2012

To Europeans, America is a puzzling economic giant

By Paul Glader, Published in The Washington Post: February 23

Berlin — In a wood-paneled room in a posh, members-only club near the Brandenburg Gate, dozens of tech entrepreneurs recently gathered to hear a pep talk from a British venture capital firm.

“Venture capital in Europe 10 years ago was underdeveloped. It was like being in no-man’s land,” said Roberto Bonanzinga, a partner at Balderton Capital, as he spoke to the eclectic mix of entrepreneurs, mostly male and young, many wearing sneakers, designer suits and hipster glasses.

But that has changed, Bonanzinga said. He now believes the next Facebook could emerge from Berlin, a magnet for artists, programmers and designers: “We really think there is something unique cooking here.”

Similar gatherings are happening all over Berlin, as well as Stockholm, Paris, Dublin and other European cities, because good old Europe is becoming a hot new place for startups.

The American tech industry is the world dominator, the clear leader in recruiting tech talent, creating wealth and developing products that change the way people live. Markus Witte, CEO of the Berlin-based language-education startup Babble.com, said despite the exploding number of new businesses here, compared to Silicon Valley, Berlin is “still the Third World.”

But Europe, as well as Asia and Latin America, is offering ever stronger competition to the United States, even in its strongest sectors, such as Internet technology, aerospace and pharmaceuticals.

When it comes to manufacturing, workforce education and training and public infrastructure, many Europeans see the United States as downright weak.

In fact, many analysts here are puzzled as to why America is not paying more attention to its manufacturing base and its public infrastructure — roads, rails and airports that are critical to private investment and development.

While the United States has the most extensive freight rail network in the world, its passenger rail system lags behind many European and Asian countries. Along with forgoing the economic development that surrounds European train stations, many American cities have congested highways and roads that cost businesses and commuters time and money.

The World Economic Forum Report on Global Competitiveness for 2011-2012 ranks Switzerland as the most competitive country for its innovation, technological readiness and labor market efficiency. Sweden, Singapore and Finland also rank ahead of the United States, which slipped to fifth place.

The report lauds the United States for its innovation, a university system that collaborates with business for research and development, and a flexible labor market. But the report also points to deepening problems in the United States such as its national debt, mistrust between the business community and government and burdensome regulations that harm business and innovation.

Manufacturing woes

Europeans are impressed by America’s industrial prowess. It has not been forgotten that during World War II, the United States increased production by 96 percent, creating millions of jobs as it churned out bullets, bombs and tanks.

But despite recent gains in manufacturing employment, the overall trend in the past decade has been to increase manufacturing production with fewer workers. In 1961, 28 percent of U.S. jobs were in manufacturing; today, 9 percent are. In the past decade, American factories have lost about 4 million jobs.

American competitiveness has eroded since the 1980s, in conjunction with its slide in manufacturing.

Manufacturers produce more innovations, per capita, than non-manufacturing firms. Business and government officials in Germany, Switzerland, France and elsewhere in Europe see long-term domestic manufacturing as crucial to ongoing innovation.

Felix Oldenburg, the European director of Ashoka, a global network of social entrepreneurs, said that in Germany, the government does much to support engineers and entrepreneurs in public-private training programs. “Nearly every invention in Germany in the last 120 years has been built by government or through platforms built by the government,” he said, noting that the wind and solar power industries grew out of such an alliance.

A focus on quality and people

During the financial crisis, Germany had fewer layoffs and lower total unemployment than the United States. Many attribute that partly to a government and union policy called “Kurzarbeit” – or short-time work week, which allows firms to temporarily reduce working hours while the government funds some of the difference in the income and benefits that workers lose.

Nearly 1.5 million German workers made use of the short-time work program according to the Federal Employment Agency, preventing nearly 400,000 layoffs, and helping to hold national unemployment to 5.5 percent.

Olaf Wortmann, an expert on business cycles at Germany’s association of mechanical engineers, points to the “dual-education” system that has employees work at a company while also attending specialized classes at schools.

There is growing discussion about the need to expand similar programs that have sprung up in the United States and to cluster factories and universities in new innovation zones.

The famed “Mittelstand” companies — small and medium-sized companies in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland that make everything from office cubicles to machine parts — are known for high-quality exports, highly trained workers, and a focus on long-term success. They are the engine of Germany’s economy as much or more than large firms such as Daimler, Siemens and BMW are.

Germans remember that in Britain a century or so ago, the “Made in Germany” label on products was disparaged, emphasized as a way to get British consumers to buy British goods. Today the “Made in Germany” label has become a badge of excellence.

Many business experts here suggest China is on a similar trajectory. They believe the most populous nation in the world will only get more competitive.

The view in Germany is that the winners in manufacturing will have invested in education and workforce training.

President Obama’s recent Jobs Council report notes that the United States ranks 16th internationally for the number of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees. And only 15 percent of U.S. college graduates go into scientific and technical disciplines, compared with 23 percent in the Group of 7 countries and 39 percent in China.

Stuttgart vs. Detroit

Detroit, America’s “Motor City,” is roughly the same size as Stuttgart, Germany’s “Cradle of the Automobile.” But Stuttgart’s unemployment rate, at about 5 percent, is about half that of Detroit.

Stuttgart was bombed during World War II and rebuilt into a thriving metropolis. In Detroit, there is much talk about a renaissance.

When asked about Stuttgart’s strategy and how it might relate to Detroit, Veit Haug, director of the Stuttgart Region Economic Development Corp., said, “Don’t stick to old paradigms. . . .The important thing is to put money in research and generate new ideas.”

Stuttgart diversified its economy into businesses besides autos, with many mid-size, family-owned companies manufacturing products such as electric-powered bikes and power tools. Companies in the Stuttgart region pour the equivalent of 6 percent of gross domestic product back into research and development, higher than the national average.

Haug keeps a locally invented, battery-powered Elmoto electric bike in the garage of his office. He hops on it wearing a suit, zipping around concrete poles and showing off how well it maneuvers. “We try to foster innovation and new business models,” he said, including a special push to create better fuel cells to power electric cars and electric bikes.

Haug and others in Stuttgart are aware of the emphasis in Detroit on ramping up research and development for advanced batteries. The United States aims to make 40 percent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries by 2015, up from 2 percent in 2009, and President Obama has put stimulus funds behind that effort.

Peter Cornelius, an economist with AlpInvest Partners in Amsterdam and former chief economist at the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Program, said the U.S. economy has its problems, but “a key strength is its extremely high innovative capacity.”

Glader, who is based in Berlin, is a frequent contributor to The Post. He is managing editor of the web site www.WiredAcademic.com, which follows education innovation.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/conversations/to-europeans-america-is-a-puzzling-economic-giant/2012/02/19/gIQAlhRXWR_story.html

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February 24, 2012

Wooga, A Case Study In No-Cash Bonus Culture

http://www.fastcompany.com/1816541/wooga-no-cash-bonus-startup-culture

Wooga, A Case Study In No-Cash Bonus Culture

BY PAUL GLADERTue Feb 21, 2012

BERLIN – German social gaming firm Wooga is on a serious roll—and attracting top tech talent—despite flouting the compensation structure you’d expect to find in the competitive industry: It doesn’t pay performance bonuses to its quickly growing staff of 150.

“I don’t believe in them,” says Jens Begemann, the 35-year-old co-founder and chief executive officer of Wooga. “If people are not motivated, you may need bonuses to make sure they work. But I don’t think that’s the right incentive.”

Bonuses would work against Wooga’s culture of openness and collaboration, Begemann says. Since Wooga has several games on Facebook and other platforms, developers work in teams and share knowledge at weekly stand-up meetings. They talk about growth numbers, “what we worked on last week and what we are working on this week,” he says. They aim to share “all learnings and all secrets. That’s this culture of openness. Almost all employees have access to almost all information.”

Begemann says he doesn’t want teams on one game measuring themselves against teams on other games. “That leads people to work a little bit against each other,” he says. “If someone thinks it is beneficial for the company to send users from one game to another…then they should do it. If it’s better for Wooga, they should do it. They should not just think about their own.”

Instead, Wooga motivates its team with initial company shares, which it believes will keep people committed to working for the firm. Additionally, beyond the typical free coffee, beer, and creative work rooms with video game machines one finds at Internet startups, it offers:

Budgets for teams to have group dinners and to set their own office group décor.
Monthly paid dinners for four-person tables from various groups, so the whole company can get to know each other, even people on different teams.
Recognition of employee birthdays with signed cards and thoughtful gifts.
Either an iPhone or iPad for Christmas, for every employee—an appropriate gift as it aims to enter more mobile platforms this year.
An educational budget of 1,500 euros per employee to attend conferences, take a class or lessons related to work.
Company-sponsored off-site parties when the company hits targets.
Hosted internal development classes, such as public speaking and German.
Choose-your-own computer hardware and roomy offices in a former bakery with high ceilings and no dress code.
Recruiting perks for employees who bring someone else into the firm, including flat-screen TVs, cameras, and iPads.

Larger U.S. social gaming rival Zynga, by contrast, is known to give top performers lavish gifts such as vacations or $100,000 in vested stock. The New York Times reported last year that Zynga is known for a hard-charging, competitive environment, where the 4,000 employees work in autonomous game teams—such as Farmville, Poker and Cityville—like “a federation of city-states.” Employees work long hours and managers track progress fiercely, demoting or laying off weak links. Zynga also reduced some equity packages through demotions. Some industry veterans predict such management practices could result in a talent exodus for Zynga.

Wooga’s HR chief Gitta Blatt, 46, says the no-cash bonus policy makes sense fiscally because a bonuses are taxed at nearly 50%. “Sometimes, people don’t even realize they received a bonus,” she says. She says giving employees a gift they really wanted has a greater impact. “That is a way we like to treat employees.”

She joined Wooga in November from another German gaming firm called BigPoint, which did pay bonuses to employees. Wooga, she says, is an exception in its no-bonus practice. “This is really unusual,” she says. She says only a few employees have left Wooga and it is largely for personal reasons, such as moving with family to a different city in Germany.

“Bonuses can have a habit of encouraging tunnel vision, focusing more on personal advantage and creating a feeling of competition among colleagues,” says Antti Hattara, a Finn who joined Wooga as Head of Studio in September from Digital Chocolate. “I like the way Wooga tries to steer clear of this.”

So far, the management strategy, along with its game design talent, is working for Wooga. It saw 185% user growth in 2011 to 40 million monthly users, up from 14 million in January 2011. That ranks Wooga as the third-largest social gaming company on Facebook, behind Zynga and Electronic Arts. Dallas-based research firm Parks Associates estimates that social gaming will be a $5 billion market by 2015, up from less than $2 billion in 2011. Roughly half of Facebook’s around 500 million “daily active users” play social games, according to Clipperton Finance in London. Wooga plans to hire 100 more employees this year to its existing staff of 150, largely to focus on mobile games development.

Wooga’s four Venture Capital investors—Highland Capital Partners, Tenaya Capital, Balderton Capital and HV Holtzbrinck Ventures—have put $32 million into Wooga so far. As Facebook plans for an IPO, they hope to see their investment in Wooga grow. As a private company, it does not share revenue and profit numbers.

The no bonus practice and other philosophy “was one of the reasons I invested in Jens,” said Roberto Bonanzinga, a partner at Balderton Capital in London. “I felt in love with this philosophy. He basically does not believe that running competitive teams is the best way to build the company.”

Bonanzinga said bonuses are typically paid in European companies, as frequently as in American firms. But Wooga has a unique no-bonus stance partly because it is an early stage company and partly because its DNA is more about fostering knowledge-sharing and creativity. “He doesn’t believe there is any merit in just having people work harder,” Bonanzinga said. “It is very important people work smarter.”

Wooga is one of the shining stars in the Berlin tech scene. It’s churned out several free Facebook casual game hits including DiamondDash, Bubble Island, and Monster World. They make money by selling gear like magic wands inside the game, and from advertising. The office is set up in a way where teams of 20 designers, programmers, and artists work on a game and share knowledge with other teams to help cross-promote games.

Begemann says the game leads or product leads for each team have the final decision on strategy and development. “It is a very strong sense of ownership,” he said. “They are responsible for the content of the games… If we have difference of opinions, they can overrule me.”

He and other video game executives in Europe say the culture of collaboration on strategy is typical of European startup management as well as European game play, as opposed to a more capitalistic winner-takes-all game style in the United States. “We work very much with each other rather than against each other,” he said. “We believe in competition—but more in competition with competitors, not in competition inside the company.” And he may not be alone in such philosophies.

Markus Witte, chief executive of Berlin-based language startup Babbel.com, says his firm also does not pay cash bonuses. “We don’t think it works so well,” he says. “My experience is that money is not so motivating on its own. It’s more about freedom, being able to do the things you want to do.” He also makes a point to make sure employees go home by 8 p.m. “I don’t want people working long hours. I don’t like 50 hour weeks or more. I think it wears people out and gets them on edge.”

[Image: Flickr user iNFdesu]

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February 23, 2012

Remembering & Celebrating Jeff Zaslow

Today, I added a note to a site that celebrates the legacy of Zazz… Jeff Zaslow… a colleague from The Wall Street Journal and best-selling author who passed away recently in a car accident.

Here’s a link to the tributes: http://rememberingzazz.com/share-a-story/comment-page-4/#comment-135

Here is the note I posted:

Dear Zaslow Family and Friends,

I never met Jeff in person. But he made my day when I was a reporter for the WSJ based in Pittsburgh in 2006. He sent me a nice note after a story I wrote about the lone bagpipes major in America ran in the WSJ. The story was set at his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He and I wrote back and forth a bit about Pittsburgh and CMU. I was surprised to hear from him as I viewed him as a “superstar” of sorts at the paper.

I was in my mid-20s at the time. Frankly, his encouragement and interaction made my day and my week and deepened my respect for a man I already looked up to for his talent and his career. In the U.S. media world, some “superstars” at Jeff’s level (and non-superstars) are less than charitable to colleagues of a lower rank or age. He was never that way. In fact, he seemed to thrive on valuing stories he liked, wherever they came from.

He was passionate about great stories, stories about people. He understood these kinds of stories better than almost anyone. By his example and his interactions, he inspired his colleagues to understand, find and tell these stories. Jeff made time to listen to book ideas from young reporters (including me), to invite us to send and read our proposals or manuscripts, to give his honest feedback. An example from en email from Jeff on March, 2011, after he invited me to send him a proposal I was working on:

“Just read it. Compelling story for sure! You’ll sell the movie rights.

I’ll be interested to talk to you about it.
Cheers,
Jeff”

He was constructive and encouraging even though he thought the proposal and story didn’t have all the right elements for a book. He found what he did like in it and shared his thoughts on how to position the project or what ingredients may be missing.

Jeff never hesitated to encourage or inspire someone rather than to intimidate them with his success. His empathy greatly overshadowed his ego. He was a prince of a person. He continued to send encouraging notes, to build friendships and share ideas. After he wrote major best-sellers, he was never too fixated with himself and his own work to help others. As a person, he was unique.

As a journalist, he was also unique. He carved out a “beat” of incredible importance in an area that others in media might consider soft or touchy-feely. He knew how to walk all the tricky tightropes of making this realm of emotionally-difficult journalism some of the most powerful journalism around. I think his life and work demonstrates that there is a huge market for voices like Jeff that help people think about values, family, place and the most important things in life. Some people call it “solution-oriented journalism” or “constructive journalism”. I don’t know what Jeff calls it. But we need more of it! I do hope his legacy and vision is somehow preserved – at journalism schools, creative writing programs, in the publishing industry or at journalistic publications – for future writers and reporters to learn from and to operate with his sentiment and sensibility.

Sincerely,
Paul Glader

A former colleague at The Wall Street Journal and currently a Bosch Fellow in Germany.

(Source: http)

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February 06, 2012

Greece Turns to Energy as its Economic Savior

12/22/2011 12:12 PM

‘Key Driving Sector’

Greece Turns to Energy as its Economic Savior

By Paul Glader in Athens

Greece’s economy is in ruins, crushed by the country’s vast debt load. But government officials say that energy may offer a way out of the mess. And the country isn’t picky. Athens is looking to develop renewable energy sources at the same time as it explores for oil.

In Greek mythology, the sun God Helios, son of Hyperion, drove his chariot across the sky from east to west each day.

Now, energy officials in the financially beleaguered nation are naming a major solar project after Helios and banking on energy more broadly as a possible way out of the financial crisis. That means exploring Poseidon’s domain of the sea by expediting plans for oil exploration, offshore wind energy production and, possibly, as a future natural gas hub. It also means completing oil and gas pipelines and privatizing state-owned oil, gas and power concerns.

“Energy is one of the key driving sectors of the economy, much more today than it has been in the past,” George Papaconstantinou, Greece’s minister for the environment, energy and climate change, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. If you exclude traditional sectors such as tourism, he said, energy “is probably the most dynamic sector, at the moment, in Greece. And it’s the one that will be driving investment in 2012 and beyond.”

The potential upside for the economy is direly needed. The country of roughly 12 million borrowed its way to near oblivion in recent years, amassing €204 billion ($267 billion) in debt by 2006 and running large budget deficits. Greece’s public debt rose to 160 percent of gross domestic product in 2010, putting it at the forefront of the world’s most indebted economies. The European Union and its member states created two massive loan packages totalling roughly €220 billion in the past year and forced creditors to accept a 50 percent debt haircut, aiming at helping Greece reduce its debt to GDP ratio to 120 percent by 2020. But amid cost cuts and privatizations, the country must also create growth that raises revenue and reduces unemployment, which topped 16 percent this year.

In a September report called “Greece 10 Years Ahead,” the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. suggests that the energy sector could provide some relief. Jobs in the sector should rise to 360,000 by 2021, up from 240,000 in 2010, the study forecast. It also said that energy would be the second largest growth opportunity behind tourism in a scenario which foresees the country adding $59 billion worth of annual GDP to its economy by 2021. Such development, the report notes, won’t make Greece an energy behemoth but it would still go “a long way towards curbing the large deficits currently crippling the economy.”

The Key to Greece’s Future

Solar power represents a significant element of plans to develop the energy sector. Greek officials say their country, with 300 days of sunshine per year, is perfectly suited to produce and export clean solar power to northern European countries such as Germany. While Germany is a major manufacturer of solar equipment and has a huge appetite for renewable energy, it gets 50 percent less sun radiation than Greece.

Helios would involve a €20 billion investment with expectations of up to €100 billion of revenues over the next 20 years, a percentage of which would go to paying down Greece’s debt. Papaconstantinou says it would also create up to 60,000 new jobs in Greece.

While EU members have supported the project, first presented in September, plenty of details remain to be ironed out, including feed-in tariffs, transmission, and financing. The project would eventually provide up to 10 gigawatts of solar energy, while the current grid only can transmit two gigawatts. “So it has to plug into the European plan for updating energy grids,” Papaconstantinou said. He hopes a framework agreement can be completed soon.

Siemens AG Greece CEO Panagiotis Xynis, whose company is engaged in major solar undertakings globally, said Helios project estimates may be “overoptimistic, at least given the current investment environment.” But he agrees several large solar projects in Greece are pushing the industry forward. International consulting firm Ernst & Young rated Greece 11th out of 40 countries for solar energy attractiveness in a recent study. Germany had 17 gigawatts of solar power capacity in 2010, compared to just 206 megawatts in Greece.

The project’s timing isn’t just auspicious in view of Greece’s massive debt problems. Papaconstantinou said Helios would help Europe meet the ambitious renewable energy targets it has pledged to reach by 2020. In addition, Germany this spring elected to decommission its 17 nuclear power plants by 2022 in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan. Importing clean power from Greece would provide an environmentally friendly method to help plug the resulting gap.

Harnessing the Wind

And it could also help the German economy. Germany’s large solar manufacturing industry has been struggling to keep up with lower production costs in China. Papaconstantinou said the Helios project would involve Greece buying solar panels and other equipment from Germany.

But Greece is not just focusing on solar. While there are an increasing number of land-based wind turbines going up, it is the country’s offshore potential which has attracted the most attention. “The Aegean is a very interesting and attractive sea for coastal and offshore wind farms because the winds are fairly significant and the waves are not nearly as large as they are in the Atlantic,” said Dr. Paul D. Sclavounos, a professor of mechanical engineering and naval architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

Exploiting that potential will not be easy, however. The water surrounding Greece and its islands is deep, Sclavounos points out, requiring special equipment that allows wind turbines to float rather than embedding them onto the ocean floor. Plus, Germany’s Siemens AG, a leader in offshore wind turbines, notes that wind projects are extremely capital intensive. “The ability to move forward on big projects and commit capital,” is the key ingredient, says Nicos Tsafos, senior manager at PFC Energy in Washington D.C. “That has been impaired.”

Still, it is traditional fossil fuel which is generating the most significant levels of expectancy in the country. This autumn, Greece approved plans for oil exploration in western Greece and southern Crete. It has also invited oil companies to conduct seismic tests in the region — from the Gulf of Patra to Ioannina and Katakolo — in search of oil. Some estimate Greece has reserves of 300 billion or more barrels of crude oil, the exploitation of which could bring in up to €25 billion in the next two decades.

Such revenues, however, are far from secure. Many believe that the oil fantasy could be just that, and that they will end just as earlier quests for black gold did in the mid-1990s. “There is a lot of mythology around it,” said Anthony Levanious, CEO of EnergyStream CMG in Frankfurt, a former energy executive and advisor in Greece. He points out that higher oil prices would be required to pay for deep water drilling.

A Strong Push for Gas

“Look. We are not Saudi Arabia,” said Papaconstantinou in response to such concerns. “However, we have been pumping oil for the last 20 years. … And we are the country in the region with the least exploration at the moment.”

Beyond oil, however, Greece is hoping to become a major natural gas hub in coming years. There are currently several oil and gas pipelines in the works that would traverse southern Europe from the Caspian Basin and western Asia to consumers in Europe. Such lines would bring transit fee revenues to Greece, maintenance contracts, cheaper oil and gas prices, while also improving the country’s energy security. “We are making a very strong push to make Greece a hub for gas,” said Papaconstantinou.

As different pipeline projects jockey for position, Greece is aligning itself with the ITGI (Interconnector Turkey-Greece-Italy) gas pipeline that would move roughly 11 billion cubic meters of largely Azerbaijani gas to southern Europe as early as 2013. It already moves about 750 million cubic meters of gas from Turkey to Greece. New pipelines, storage facilities and natural gas shipping will expand the infrastructure to transport gas to and through Greece.

Furthermore, many believe the country could also build on its expertise in shipping and its geographic center as a regional port between Europe, Africa and the Middle-East, re-inventing itself as an energy transit hub. Greece has a Liquefied Natural Gas terminal operating from the Revithousa Island, 45 kilometers west of Athens, which is currently being upgraded and expanded. Compressed Natural Gas, which involves transporting gas by ship rather than by pipeline, may also have a future in Greece say analysts.

“The gas infrastructure for Greece is quite good,” said Levanious of EnergyStream CMG. “You have Russian gas and Caspian gas coming in the form of pipeline gas and liquefied natural gas. Gas is the number one potential for Greece’s future.”

URL:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,805173,00.html

Photoset

January 15, 2012

So I read The Catcher In The Rye for the first time recently. While I enjoyed the language and style of J.D. Salinger’s famous work, I was also struck by a possible error in his research/knowledge of the sport of wrestling in this section (page 30 of the book I read in Chapter 4) as the protagonist Holden Caulfield narrates:

All of a sudden - for no good reason, really, except that I was sort of in the mood for horsing around - I felt like jumping off the washbowl and getting old Stradlater in a half nelson. That’s a wrestling hold, in case you don’t know, where you get the other guy around the neck and choke him to death, if you feel like it. So I did it. I landed on him like a goddamn panther.

“Cut it out Holden, for Chrissake!” Stradlater said. He didn’t feel like horsing around…

The problems as I see it with this description:

1) With the half nelson, you really don’t hold someone “around the neck” but, rather, under the arm and behind the neck.

2) The half nelson is not really used to “choke someone to death” or cut off air circulation to create submission as much as it used as a leverage device to turn a person over from their stomach to their back… or used in combination with another hold to restrain, turn or pin someone.

3) I believe Salinger meant to describe a full nelson, which is pictured above where you hold your arms under both your opponents arms and behind their head, creating a more uncomfortable hold that is more difficult to break out of. This move is actually illegal in many forms of amateur wrestling.

4) Holden’s character is prone to exaggeration or ADHD-style confusion at times … so perhaps this is an instance where he is displaying such schizoid descriptions. Since Salinger died in 2010, perhaps we will never know?

Link

January 05, 2012

The Battle for Bauhaus: How A Movement Failed to Protect Its Name

01/05/2012 03:53 PM

The Battle for Bauhaus

How A Movement Failed to Protect Its Name

By Paul Glader in Berlin

Germany’s famous Bauhaus school from 1919 to 1933 forged new boundaries in the art and design world and remains highly influential today. But its brand and legacy has been under threat for five decades from a large German-Swiss home goods retailer that took the title and trademark “Bauhaus” in 1960 and now has 190 stores around Europe.

Architect Walter Gropius and his group of communal craftsmen put a radical stamp on architecture, design and art education during Germany’s Weimar Period between the two world wars. He even claims he coined the term “Bauhaus” as the name for his atypical art school.

Along the way, though, he forgot an important thing: to protect the name.

As a result, up to 40 companies in Germany and myriad others abroad have taken the word “Bauhaus” as a brand or title. The imitators include a furniture label in the United States, a rumored bordello in Japan, a chocolate variety that touts its form and function, a real estate company and the early British gothic band led by Peter Murphy.

“Bauhaus sells,” says Dr. Annemarie Jaeggi, director of the Bauhaus Archive Museum in Berlin. “That’s the point.” When someone is copying you or your name in a corporate context, she says, “then you see that you really have a brand.”

But the greatest squatter of the moniker is a do-it-yourself retailer based in Mannheim, which trademarked the Bauhaus during postwar divided Germany. It happened before Gropius and others moved to established archives and museums — in Dessau and Weimar (in the former east) and Berlin — to explain and protect the historical Bauhaus and its legacy. Now, it’s causing confusion to the general public and frustration to Bauhaus design aficionados.

The Bauhaus Archive vs. Bauhaus AG

Heinz G. Baus started with a 600-square-meter lumber and home improvement store in Mannheim, calling it “Bauhaus” in 1960. Sources at the company say he picked up the retailing idea in the US and brought it back to Germany. A reclusive owner, Mr. Baus avoids public attention and declines most interview requests, including one from SPIEGEL ONLINE.

His Bauhaus stores are becoming more and more ubiquitous around Europe. The Swiss-registered Bauhaus AG now has 190 stores in 15 countries around Europe, expanding as far north as Scandinavia and as far south as Spain and Turkey. It’s planning new stores in Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia.

Bauhaus AG has expanded from selling lumber and other building materials, like America’s Home Depot, and into the territory of Walmart with some home goods. Its brand logo uses the color red and block letters to spell Bauhaus, echoing the black and red graphics ubiquitous in the historical design movement. The store brand’s slogan: “Wenn’s gut werden muss,” or “When it has to be good,” is repeated over loud speakers in the company’s large, concrete store spaces.

On a recent day at a Bauhaus franchise in Berlin’s Neukölln neighborhood, dozens of shoppers file through the massive store space with 30-foot high ceilings and massive, floor-to-ceiling metal shelves holding everything from saws to screws to light bulbs. “I don’t think this has something to do with Gropius,” says Harmut Niemke, 59, who was buying coal for his home stove. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

Robert Köhler, a spokesman with Bauhaus AG, says Gropius’ Bauhaus school has some things in common with the store franchises. “We offer products that are very helpful for your house and garden,” he says. “The story of Bauhaus in Dessau and Weimar is very similar to that. It’s very functional and for the people.”

But Bauhaus Archive’s Jaeggi offers an altogether different take. “If you look at their products,” she says, “you can see it has absolutely nothing to do with what (the original) Bauhaus wanted to do.”

Disbanded & Dispersed

Gropius started the original Bauhaus — a “house of construction” or “school of building” — in Weimar in 1919 as a school that combined crafts and fine arts. The school attracted and developed myriad talents and would have a major influence on art, architecture, design and typography for decades to come.

“Little in our lives has not been influenced by it, from what we read and wear to how we live,” wrote American art historian Elaine S. Hochman in her 1997 book”Bauhaus: Crucible of Modernism.” Items from the Bauhaus are included in the collections of some of the world’s leading museums, such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).

As the National Socialists rose to power in Weimar Germany, authorities grew wary of the free-natured, left-leaning and collectivist Bauhaus School, viewing it as subversive to both the Nazi aesthetic and their political goals.

The school moved to the eastern German town of Dessau in 1925, but it moved to Berlin in 1932 under the leadership of architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. But it closed a year later due to pressure from the Gestapo. Many famous Bauhaus faculty and alumni, such as Gropius, Marcel Breuer and painter Paul Klee, moved to new posts in the United Kingdom, France and the US.

Meanwhile, the Bauhaus Archive formed in the 1960s, first in Darmstadt. In 1972, it moved to Berlin, with most of its budget funded by the city’s government. From very early on, the design community was wary of impostors who attempted to take the Bauhaus name.

“The director of the archives and even Walter Gropius were not that pleased that there was another institution using the name,” Jaeggi says during an interview.

Letters between Gropius and architect Mies van der Rohe in 1967 indicate the two had noticed the name being used by other institutions. “I want it today,” Mies van der Rohe wrote to Gropius in 1967.

‘Bauhaus’ Goes to Court

One of the first actions by the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin was to sue the Bauhaus company at the District Court of Mannheim over the naming rights in 1972. It asked the court to ban the company from using the moniker, to delete it from the commercial register in Mannheim and to give up the trademark at the German patent office.

Some argue DIY chain owner Baus opportunistically grabbed the “Bauhaus” name at a politically chaotic time, when Gropius and others were dispersed abroad and no one thought to protect the name. Others say the word “Bauhaus” was similar to Mr. Baus’ own name or that combination of Bau and Haus, German words meaning building and house respectively, was just too common an expression to warrant any protection. They argued anyone should be allowed to use it.

Ultimately, the court ruled in favor of the company, dismissing the Bauhaus Archive’s claim and ordering it to bear the costs of litigation. The term Bauhaus can “no longer be attributed to a specific person, but has become a style concept that is part of the public domain,” the judge determined. He wrote that the Bauhaus school had closed, its name had never been protected and the idea of granting the exclusive naming right to museums years after the fact “contradicts principles of commercial law.”

It’s nose bloody from the defeat, the Bauhaus Archive has largely avoided entanglement with the home goods company and other apparent brand infringers ever since. “We are looking ahead rather than back into these past experiences,” says Jaeggi. “We just have to accept reality and continue with what we’re doing.”

Long-Term Consequences

At the moment, Germany’s three Bauhaus museums are busy enough. They are working together more frequently, with a joint Internet portal and with exhibitions, such as one scheduled to coincide with the 2012 London Summer Olympics called “Bauhaus: Art As Life” at the Barbican Art Gallery. The Weimar organization plans to open a new €22 million ($28 million) museum in 2015. The Bauhaus Archive in Berlin also has plans to expand its exhibition space because only 30 percent of its collection is currently on display.

Arthur Cohen, a founder of New York-based brand consultant LaPlaca Cohen, says the failure to protect the name means less revenue from license fees for the museums, which receive federal and private support as nonprofit entities. “Had there been agreements early on that are strong and enforceable, not only would there be an ability to protect and enforce what the Bauhaus legacy is, but there also would be revenue streams,” he says.

“It’s particularly challenging for members of the public who didn’t grow up knowing about the Bauhaus tradition and ideals to identify or understand what it is now,” Cohen says. “It has been diluted to a different category and an everyday aesthetic.”

The Bauhaus Archive in Berlin has rouhgly 20 employees and another 30 contractors at the small museum and library, which has more than 100,000 visitors each year. By contrast, Bauhaus AG has 18,000 employees now and is focusing on opening massive, 20,000 square-foot stores in cities, such as Leipzig, Bremen and Cologne.

“It’s a source of much confusion, even for us,” says Andreas Kühnlein, a spokesman for the Bauhaus Foundation in Dessau. He took a trip to Sweden and Finland, recently, which have Bauhaus do-it-yourself stores. When he told people he worked for Bauhaus, “they all thought I was standing by the saws or something.” He says his office regularly receives call from people asking where to buy wood or other building materials.

“In 50 or 100 years, no one will know there is a difference,” between the historic school of Gropius and the home goods company, says Bauhaus AG spokesman Köhler. “Perhaps in Germany (people will know the difference). But not in other countries.”