by: Mohammad Khan Sial

Our some friends are paying rich tributes to late Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi, His life can be divided into two parts. As well as first part is concerned, their tribute to late G M Jatoi is generally correct but there were some bitter facts about 2nd part of his life.

01. When army dictator Ziaul Haq removed elected Govt of Z. A. Bhutto, there were the persons who immediately met Gen Zia in the darkness of night. They were Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi and Maulana Kausar Niazi..

02.Unfortunately Rais Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi and Abdul Hafiz Pirzada both did nothing to save the life of Shaheed Z. A. Bhutto. When Bhutto Saheb was in Jail and waiting for death, he asked Abdul Hafiz Lakho, advocate of Shaheed Bhutto, if both are unwilling to come forward, please ask them to come in public at least for face saving”. (Reference BBC Urdu interview broadcasted on April 04, 2009. In search you can find the video.

03. In MRD many innocent Sindhi people were brutally killed. Saein G. M. Syed also pointed out this. In those days, Jatoi Saheb and his younger brother Mujtaba Jatoi were leading the movement. They led the movement in a way that many people were killed so that they should be in better position of bargain with Ziaul Haq to become Prime Minister (Jatoi Sc) but Pir Pagaro did not agree and he gave name of Mohammad Khan Junejo.

04. Jang dated 21st Nov 09 , has printed a statement of Zia Abbas – a close associate to G M Jatoi who disclosed that Jatoi was to be appointed as Prime minister and General Ziaul Haq agreed to this. Had Ziaul Haq not killed in air crash, Jatoi Saheb would have become Prime Minister of Pakistan within a few days.

05. After the execution of Shaheed Bhutto, Gen Zia also decided to appoint him as Prime Minister and this was accepted by Mr Jatoi in an interview. But Begum Bhutto issued statement that if any one is appointed as Prime Minister on our strength (PPP), he would be ousted immediately. This statement stopped him to become Prime Minister but now Zia Abbas has disclosed that a few days of his death, Gen Zia again agreed to appoint him as new Prime Minister.

The memory of human beings is very short. I have no personal ill-will with Mr. Jatoi. in personal capacity he was good man but I am writing above lines to keep the record straight.

by Judith Balea, for ABS-CBN NEWS, October 29, 2009.

MANILA – While the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE) has grand visions of playing a role in guiding listed firms into corporate governance stature and aims to pioneer in Asia alistings board that highlights the “blue chips of blue chips,” recent incidents at the bourse show it is having trouble keeping its own house in order.

Key management officials have left the exchange almost one after the other in the past 8 months. Coffee shop talks have been rife that even PSE president and chief executive officer Francis Lim’s supposedly secured tenure is on the line—a persistent rumor that has gone through the cycles and has been growing louder in recent weeks.

It didn’t help that in July, an encounter between a board director and a mid-level executive in a public place fueled an already gloomy disposition of some staff.

Meantime, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the corporate regulator that oversees the PSE, has not been consistent. It stayed back when PSE elevated some exchange- and investor-related concerns, but intervened when there were listed companies that defied PSE’s rules…(continue reading)

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By Tahir Hasan Khan, Karachi, Sindh

Courtesy: The News, Monday, August 31, 2009

Brigadier (Retired) Imtiaz, also known as “Billa” is not new for the people of Sindh. He was Sindh ISI chief when political activist Nazeer Abbasi was murdered and a PIA plane was hijacked in early 80’s. The purpose of the murder of political activist Nazeer Abbasi was to warn political workers and the hijacking incident was to sabotage the MRD (Movement for Restoration of Democracy) action launched against Gen Zia-ul Haq. As a result of his work, Billa was promoted as brigadier in the army.

Predictably, his services were terminated in the first tenure of Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Mian Nawaz Sharif who was the then chief minister of Punjab, however, appointed Billah as his security adviser and later made him IB chief when Sharif became prime minister in 1990.

The disclosure of a secret visit of Imtiaz Billa in Sindh in 1992 was reported in this newspaper and I was very much under pressure when this was published. There was a warning for me not to publish such reports about the IB chief’s secret activities in Sindh.

The purpose of the secret visit was to convince the MQM to withdraw its support to Jam Sadiq Ali, a nominee of then President Ghulan Ishaq Khan. Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was not happy with Jam Sadiq and was in favour of Liaquat Jatoi, a finance minister in Jam Sadiq’s cabinet.

Ironically, Jatoi was dismissed by Jam Sadiq after his activities were disclosed by the intelligence agencies to the CM. It was the cold war between President Ghulam Ishaq Khan and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif which eventually led to the military operation in Sindh. Nawaz Sharif had the backing of Chief of Army Staff Gen Asif Nawaz who launched the operation. Kidnapping for ransom was at its peak at that time and the federal government blamed most of the sitting provincial ministers in Jam Sadiq’s cabinet who were said to provide shelter to dacoits and criminals. The military operation was seen as the only solution against dacoits.

But the operation was diverted and re-launched against the MQM to crush the party. This changed the whole political culture of the Sindh and a politics of hate was generated in the province.

Four democratic governments (two each by Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto) were dismissed due to such operations and General Asif Nawaz and his team were held responsible for this damage. A number of youth were killed in the operation while the law and order situation remained very disturbed in this time. There was also a flight of capital from Sindh to Punjab.

The role of the intelligence agencies is not new neither is it a secret. PPP’s founder chairman Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in the 70s blamed the agencies for funding politicians in the election against him in Sindh and Punjab. Sindh was the main target of the intelligence agencies and the purpose of all plans and conspiracies was against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto and the PPP.

The state sponsored actors were behind the formation of Pakistan National Alliance (PNA) and then the Islami Jamhoori Ittehad (IJI) against Bhutto and Benazir and huge funds were distributed among the politicians. Politics is still hostage in the hand of ‘State Sponsored Actors’. These actors have absolute power and funds. They were free to do whatever they want.

There is no law and restriction for them and they openly and proudly boast of their crimes. There is no punishment for these characters from any quarter.

The disclosures of Brig Imtiaz are not new. Perhaps Pakistan is the only country in the world where the “state sponsored actors’ always act against the popular political forces. Everybody knows the role of all dictators from General Ayub to General Pervez Musharraf and the victims who are popular political forces like the PPP, the MQM and the PML from Muhammad Khan Junejo to Nawaz Sharif.

Conspiracies hatched by General Ayub, General Yahya, General Ziaul Haq, General Aslam Baig, General Asif Nawaz and General Pervez Musharraf against the elected and political leadership are neither secret nor new. The tactics of every dictator was different but they used the intelligence agencies (state sponsored actors) to damage the political leadership and system as well.

A few newspapers published stories about these conspiracies in the past but the majority of the media has avoided to publish these facts because they were very much under pressure from these state sponsored actors.

Now it is time for the electronic media and the disclosure of these state sponsored actors on TV channels is a surprising development, especially for students of political science and political observers. There must of some reason behind the activities and disclosures of state sponsored actors.

Similar tactics was used in the past and dictators derailed the democratic system after launching a character assassination campaign of the political leadership. The purpose of this campaign may be the same. The political leadership must realize and learn from their past mistakes. Nelson Mandela apologized for his mistakes and there will be no damage for our politicians if they apology for their mistakes. The involvement of state sponsored actors in the affairs of the politics is a major mistake of political governments and they must learn from this lesson. Only a judicial commission and punishment of state sponsored actors is the solution to save democracy and the system.

tahir.hasan@thenews.com.pk

—

http://www.thenews.com.pk/print1.asp?id=195836

Abstracción en movimiento que hice para Diseño II. La animación y música fueron hechos por mi con After y FL Studio.

Esta abstracción representa la rutina de mucho cada día. Empezando tranquilos y siguiendo con un atareo creciente, hasta el final del día, tranquilo otra vez. La paleta de colores fue escogida con la intención de contrastar y oponer tranquilidad y estrés.

There’s acres and acres of stuff to read and write about the whole National Portrait Gallery legal action threat against Wikimedia contributor Dcoetzee and his addition to the Wikimedia collection. I’m not going to try and add to the noise too much but it would seem apposite to at least comment given my current thread of presentations and posts is all about freedom, openness and MRD.

As always (just like the argument currently brewing about Free), there are two possible dangers in any debate like this. First, we go into too much detail and lose the view of the house because we’re examining the bricks too closely. Second, we polarise the debate.

I’m good at polarising, being a bear of simple brain – particularly when it comes to copyright. Simply, I don’t think it works in many cases, and I think this particular example holds – on many levels – great reasons as to why not. Cross-country, cross-domain, cross-sector, hidden images, non-hidden images, etc etc. This level of complexity doesn’t hold well with users, and they will abuse, either knowingly or unknowingly.

Having said that, there are clearly two sides to this particular debate, and actually I think both sides are being pretty reasonable. NPG have offered medium sized pictures; Wikimedia has been on the case for some years seeking access to these (arguably) public domain images. The discussion over the detail in this particular case will ramble on; the legal threat will be sorted out of court; everyone will ultimately go away at least semi-happy.

The bigger picture is the more important question, and it is this: why are cultural institutions putting collection (images) online? I ask this as an open question, as un-loaded as it can be (given you probably know where I’m coming from on this).

The possible answers are these (none is mutually exclusive, by the way):

• to sell them / variations of them, such as prints, etc
• to increase exposure to them
• to increase exposure to the holding institution
• to increase ticket sales / physical visits to the holding institution

So with these in mind, I think the important questions in this particular debate are not about the devil detail of cross-country copyright or whether Dcoetzee “should” have done what he did. I think they are:

• does the exposure on Wikimedia increase exposure? (Answer: yes)
• does exposure of hi-res pictures stop people from buying them (Answer: unknown, but possibly not)
• does the exposure of the images improve the standing of the institution (as being a place that “has a great collection”) ? (Answer: yes)
• does the exposure of the images increase click-through to the NPG website (and hence, assuming at least some kind of connection between traffic and physical visits) ? (Answer: unknown – I’m about to submit a FOI request to see if we can find out, but probably yes)
• does the threat of legal action make NPG look good? (Answer: not really)

There’s some great questions here, which I’ve been asking our sector to answer for a while. Where is value in a networked age? How does virtual equate to physical? Does exposure increase or decrease physical sales (go ask Anderson or Gladwell this one…).

Just as a closing thought, I wonder if the NPG will be chasing Yahoo! for this YQL query or Google Images for this one? I suspect not.

The week before last (30th June – 1st July 2009), I was at the JISC Digital Content Conference having been asked to take part in one of their parallel sessions.

I thought I’d use the session to talk about something I’m increasingly interested in – the shifting of the message about machine readable data (think API’s, RSS, OpenSearch, Microformats, LinkedData, etc) from the world of geek to the world of non-geek.

My slides are here:

Here’s where I’m at: I think that MRD (That’s Machine Readable Data – I couldn’t seem to find a better term..) is probably about as important as it gets. It underpins an entire approach to content which is flexible, powerful and open. It embodies notions of freely moving data, it encourages innovation and visualisation. It is also not nearly as hard as it appears – or doesn’t have to be.

In the world of the geek (that’s a world I dip into long enough to see the potential before heading back out here into the sun), the proponents of MRD are many and passionate. Find me a Web2.0 application without an API (or one “on the development road-map”) and I’ll find you a pretty unusual company.

These people don’t need preaching at. They’re there, lined up, building apps for Twitter (to the tune of 10x the traffic which visits twitter.com), developing a huge array of services and visualisations, graphs, maps, inputs and outputs.

The problem isn’t the geeks. The problem is that MRD needs to move beyond the realm of the geek and into the realm of the content owner, the budget holder, the strategist, for these technologies to become truly embedded. We need to have copyright holders and funders lined up at the start of the project, prepared for the fact that our content will be delivered through multiple access routes, across unspecified timespans and to unknown devices. We need our specifications to be focused on re-purposing, not on single-point delivery. We need solution providers delivering software with web API’s built in. We need to be prepared for a world in which no-one visits our websites any more, instead picking, choosing and mixing our content from externally syndicated channels.

In short, we now need the relevant people evangelising about the MRD approach.

Geeks have done this well so far, but now they need help. Try searching on “ROI for API’s” (or any combination thereof) and you’ll find almost nothing – very little evidence outlining how much API’s cost to implement, what cost savings you are likely to see from them; how they reduce content development time; few guidelines on how to deal with syndicated content copyright issues.

Partly, this knowledge gap is because many of the technologies we’re talking about are still quite young. But a lot of the problem is about the communication of technology, the divided worlds that Nick Poole (Collections Trust) speaks about. This was the core of my presentation: ten reasons why MRD is important, from the perspective of a non-geek (links go to relevant slides and examples in the slide deck):

1. Content is still king
2. Re-use is not just good, it’s essential
3. “Wouldn’t it be great if…”: Life is easier when everyone can get at your data
4. Content development is cheaper
5. Things get more visual
6. Take content to users, not users to content (“If you build it, they probably won’t come”)
7. It doesn’t have to be hard
8. You can’t hide your content
9. We really is bigger and better than me
10. Traffic

All this is is a starter for ten. Bigger, better and more informed people than me probably have another hundred reasons why MRD is a good idea. I think this knowledge may be there – we just need to surface and collect it so that more (of the right) people can benefit from these approaches.

When I started working full-time with Agile development techniques in 2004 I also had the good fortune to start working with the concepts of Pragmatic product management.  What quickly became apparent to me is that the two approaches in their respective fields were beautifully suited to one another.

By articulating the market problems, the nature of the people who have them, and the circumstances under which they experience those problems, Pragmatic product managers communicate to development teams what is really necessary to build great solutions; context.  We’ve all heard the stories of how the software industry’s predilection for waterfall methodologies from the 1970’s through the 1990’s led to an inordinate amount of ‘failed’ projects.  Early proponents of agile development techniques ascribed those failures to the waterfall process itself, rightly arguing that performing development tasks (specifically testing) in phases and a lack of iterative feedback were the biggest causes of these ‘failures’.  However, I would contend that just as large a reason for those ‘failures’ was product management’s inability to communicate what was actually required for those projects to be successful.  Too much emphasis was placed on building to a specification which had often been created and disseminated without providing sufficient context to the people responsible for providing solutions.  Because of this lack of context there was no framework for negotiation with a customer or stakeholders and therefore much of what was built was not actually required to meet the customer’s needs.  This resulted in unnecessary delays and cost overruns at a minimum and often the creation of ineffective solutions which quite rightly were considered ‘failures’ regardless of whether they met the specification.  Even if the solutions were built iteratively, the focus on the specification, rather than the problems in context, might very well have led to the same ineffective solutions.

Many software development companies do not have the luxury of having real-time access to actual customers.  Nor is the concept of building a product based on a single customer’s requirements necessarily attractive.  Instead these companies rely on their product management organizations to represent the needs of customers within a market.  There is a hierarchy of proxy which is created as a result.  The customer is a proxy for the market and the product manager is a proxy for the market.  If the product manager is too busy performing strategic tasks and does not have time to fulfill his product ownership duties for the team then a proxy of a proxy is incurred with all the risk that entails.

All too often, agile projects rely on an internal ‘product expert’ to act as the team’s Product Owner.  The danger of this is that the product expert understands the existing incarnation of the product very well but may not have the viewpoint of a customer who has issues with the product.  Properly implemented agile development techniques usually provide the transparent and tangible progress necessary to make informed business decisions.  However, without a clear sense of the relative value of the problems to be solved it is difficult for the team to understand and embrace those business decisions.  This is where the value of the MRD resides; providing the context necessary for a Product Owner to make sound decisions throughout the development process on behalf of the product manager.

In the end agile product ownership is a subset of all that a product manager is responsible for.  From a Pragmatic perspective, product ownership entails the ‘Product Planning’ tasks of the product manager: Market Requirements, Road Mapping, User Personae, User Scenarios, and Release Milestones.

The Pragmatic Market Requirements Document (MRD) focuses on market problems, the people who have them, and the situations under which they experience them (scenarios).  It also focuses on valuing/prioritizing those problems, people, and scenarios.  Hmmmm … sounds suspiciously like a good start on a backlog of stories!  A story used in an Agile project usually takes the form of: A <type of user> needs to be able to <perform some action> in order to <get some value>.  This is essentially a statement of the circumstances under which a user experiences a problem.  I suppose technically it is an anti-problem as the real problem is the users inability to get the required value by performing the desired action.  Nonetheless there is a direct correlation between the primary elements of a Pragmatic MRD and a product backlog used in an Agile project.  Each scenario is prioritized using the following additional context: impact, frequency, and criteria.  The value to the persona of solving the scenario, the frequency with which the persona experiences the scenario, and the value to the to the Product Manager /Business of solving the scenario, all provide valuable context necessary for establishing business priority.  Once these scenarios have been prioritized, the product manager has a solid starting point for a product backlog.  Further, the entire team has a solid understanding of what problems they are trying to solve and for whom, and what the relative value of those problems is to both the market and the business.  With this context, the team is much better equipped to be able to produce solutions appropriate for the target personae and any decisions around solution options/modifications can be made in the context of the user and the business value.

Aatish Taseer. [With thanks: Prospect]

My parents met in Delhi in March 1980. My Pakistani father was in India promoting a book he had written on his political mentor, the Pakistani leader, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. My mother, a young Indian journalist, was sent to interview him. Their affair began that evening. My father took my mother’s number, they had dinner at a Chinese restaurant and for a little over a week they disappeared together. My parents met at a time when they had both become politically involved in their respective countries. The state of emergency that Mrs Gandhi declared in 1975 had come and gone—she had returned to power and the terrorism in Punjab that would take her life was about to begin. In Pakistan the year before (the same year as the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan), Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the great hope of Pakistani democracy, had been hanged. And now, General Zia, the military dictator, was settling into the blackest decade Pakistan would know. My father had loved Bhutto. He had heard him speak for the first time as a student in London in the 1960s and was moved to his depths. The events of 1979 then ushered in a time both of uncertainty and possibility. Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir, had entered politics; Zia had to be fought; and for this man of 36, touched by unusual idealism, his biography of Bhutto became his political entry point. My parents’ affair lasted little more than a week before my father left for Lahore, where he already had a wife and three small children. A month later, my mother discovered she was pregnant. For a young woman from an old Sikh family to become pregnant out of marriage by a visiting Pakistani was then (and now) an enormous scandal. During the week when she was considering an abortion, my father called unexpectedly from Dubai. She told him what had happened.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“What do you think I’m going to do?” she replied.

My father asked her what could be done to change her mind. She replied that they would at least have to pretend to be married and so they tentatively agreed to continue their relationship for as long as it was possible.

But by 1982 the relationship was over. My mother had begun work as a political journalist in Delhi and my father was fighting Zia in Pakistan. What I heard of him over the next two decades came only from my mother. We followed his progress across the border, through multiple imprisonments in the 1980s, to the restoration of democracy and Benazir Bhutto’s victory in 1988, to the failed governments of the 1990s, and his eventual switch from politics to business.

In 2002, aged 21, I made a journey to Lahore to seek out my father, Salmaan Taseer. For a few years our relationship flourished, then fell apart. The reason for the latest distance between us was an article I wrote in these pages in 2005, after the London bombings. In response, my father wrote me a letter—the first he’d ever written—in which he accused me of prejudice, of lacking even “superficial knowledge of the Pakistani ethos,” and of blackening his name. That letter was the origin of my book Stranger to History, an account of a journey I made from Istanbul to Pakistan, in the hope of understanding the silence between us. It is a discovery of his faith, his country and the story of our shared but fractured history.

At the end of my journey I was, by chance, together with my father in Lahore on the night Benazir Bhutto was killed. I found to my surprise that the wheels of power in Pakistan had turned once more and my father, who had spent his youth fighting the military, had re-entered politics and was now a minister in General Musharraf’s government. Here was a lesson about life in Pakistan, for the compromises men had to make. But it was not ultimately in the drawing rooms of Lahore or Karachi that I came closest to understanding Pakistani society, but rather in the time I spent with a young feudal landlord, known as the Mango King, in rural Sindh.

***

Pakistan, a land of over 170m people, remains largely rural. People have often said to me, “You will never know the soul of Pakistan till you know feudal Pakistan.” Charged by the desire to see this feudal life, I asked a Pakistani newspaper publisher if he could help. He was a heavy man in a white salwar kameez, with short greying hair and moustache. My mother had put us in touch, and he did for me what I would have liked my father to have done: insist on my connection to Pakistan. By arousing my interest in the cultural bonds that exist between the two countries and in speaking to me of my paternal grandfather, an Urdu poet, the publisher gave me the other side of the romance of an undivided India on which my maternal grandfather and my mother had raised me.

We sat in his grand old Karachi house. He lay on a very high bed, smoking and making phone calls to people who might help me. Boxes and stacks of books lay on the floor. After a few hours of messages left, phone calls returned, lists made, lectures on safety and heat, the publisher looked up at me, scribbling as he spoke. “Can you leave tonight?”

“Yes,” I stammered. “I can leave tonight.”

I packed my bags in the early evening. I was to leave with Hameed Mahesari, the Mango King, and travel to his lands in the Sindh interior. It was well past midnight when a white car, with heavily tinted windows, drew up. As I approached, a passenger door opened, but no one stepped out. Instead, cold, air-conditioned air infused with a faint smell of cigarettes drifted out. I put my head into the car and saw a young man in the back seat, with a black moustache, fair skin and a handsome, slightly puffy face. He peered at me through a dense haze of smoke and gestured to me to get in.

The chauffeur drove off as soon as I shut the door. I turned to the Mango King, who lit another cigarette. He smoked continuously, slowly and deeply, looking out at the deserted streets. I could tell from his eyes and the thickness in his voice that he had been drinking.

“In the city I am a different person,” he said abruptly, “and, you’ll see, in the village I am a different person. One has to adjust. It gets pretty nasty,” he added. “People steal water. Typical vadhera.” A vadhera, or landlord, was what Hameed had become after his father died; his family were among the largest producers of mangoes in the country. “But things won’t change for another 50 years. There will still be feudalism.” I saw that he was drinking from a hip flask.

“Do you know why Sindhi society is a failure?” Hameed asked, in his abrupt way.

“No.”

“There’s no middle class. There’s us and there’s them. We had a middle class, but they took off when what happened?” I thought it was a rhetorical question and didn’t answer, but the Mango King’s gaze held me, expecting a reply.

“Partition,” I answered obediently.

“Exactly. But, you know, life goes on, one day to the next. My father trained me to be a farmer.” Hameed spoke in broken, disconnected sentences. After a long silence, he said, “Do you know why religion was invented?”

“Why?” I asked.

“A man can deal with everything but death.”

Hameed lit up again, but this time my eyes focused on a new discomfort: an AK-47 was placed between us, and the ribs of its magazine, its barrel, and bulbous sight shone in the yellow streetlight. I asked why the AK-47 was so popular.

“Three things you have to be able to trust,” Hameed answered. “Your lads, your woman and your weapon. It’ll never jam on you. Anyone can fire it and it’ll never jam.”

I don’t know when I fell asleep, but I woke a few hours later when I felt Hameed touch my hand. It was dawn, and we drove down a deserted country road, amid acres and acres of flat, empty fields.

“The estate begins here,” he said. The car swung left. “This, on both sides, is my estate.”

“How big is it?”

“Six thousand acres.” By the subcontinent’s standards, this was a large holding.

Then after a silence, he straightened his posture and, with pregnant solemnity, announced: “This is my territory.”

We passed several acres of a dense, low crop, then just before the house, like some last battalion of a great regiment or a vanishing tribe of horses, were the mango trees. Hameed stared in dull-eyed wonder at the dark green, almost black canopies, heavy with fruit and dropping low in a curtsy against an immense saffron sky.

When we got out of the car, I saw that Hameed was tall and well-built. His cream salwar kameez partially concealed a new paunch and, like the puffiness of his face, it was unattractive on a man of his looks.

Aatish Taseer and Gabrille Windsor

A few men were stooped in greeting. Hameed waved, then stumbled through a doorway. We entered a walled garden of palms, ashoka trees and buoyant rubber plants. Hameed’s fluttering cream figure lurched down a narrow path that led to a low white bungalow. Darkness and a musty stench from thick, beige carpeting hit us as we entered. I couldn’t make out much in the dim light.

Hameed collapsed into a sofa, and stared vacantly at me, as if only now seeing me. I wondered what he thought I wanted with him. Among pictures of the family, and one of Hameed in a yellow tie, there were many books: a Hitler biography, copies of National Geographic, Frederick Forsyth, Jane’s aircraft almanacs, Animals in Camera and dozens on travel. I felt from the books, and the framed posters of impressionist paintings, a longing for other places.

“Did your father read a lot?” I asked.

“Yes,” Hameed replied. “He was the sort of man you could talk to about anything and he would always have the right answer.” The description suggested a nightmare person, but Hameed hadn’t intended it to sound that way. “I used to read,” he added, “but I don’t get the chance any more.” He showed me a book he’d recently bought. It was a guide to being a gentleman. “It says that a gentleman never adjusts his crotch in public.” Hameed chuckled and then we fell into silence. He sat there, looking neither at me nor at his men, but ahead into the gloom, like a man who had just lost all his money. A servant brought him some water and a new AK-47, this time with a drum magazine. He leant it against the leg of his chair, telling me it was Chinese; more than 100 countries produced them now. He asked me if I’d like to fire one.

“Yes,” I said, surprising myself.

“She wreaks havoc when she opens her mouth,” he smiled mirthlessly. He was prone to theatrical utterances and to clichés like “Different strokes for different folks” or “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy,” which he said as if they’d never been said before. The idea of firing the gun was forgotten for now.

My fatigue deepened just as the Mango King had a second wind. He ordered wine and offered me dinner. Wine is unusual in the subcontinent, whisky and soda are more standard, but this, like the cigars and brandy, and the guide to being a gentleman, seemed like a recent feudal affectation. I turned down the suggestion of dinner as it was already dawn.

“Yum, yum,” he said, looking at the feast that was now being laid out before us. There were several kinds of meat, rice, lentils, bread and more wine. Hameed rolled up his sleeves to eat and I saw that there were cigarette burns branded into his arm. The cutlery was Christofle, scattered stylishly among the oven-proof crockery and dinner trays.

***

When I awoke a few hours later, I was lying under a wooden fan. Next to my bed there was a copy of Time magazine and a guide to nightlife in Thailand. The room, despite the air-conditioning, was suffocating. It was about 10am and the house was quiet. I stepped into the drawing room and felt a wave of compressed heat. The room could not have been more badly designed for the fierce temperature beyond its sliding doors. It was low, like a garage, heavy with carpeting and velvety sofas, and without ventilation. I stepped out onto a white tiled courtyard but soon retreated. It was dangerous heat, the worst I’d ever experienced: sharp, unshaded, asphyxiating. It could make you sick if you went unprotected into it. Yet to be back in the room, in its stale air, was hardly better. Outside, buffaloes lay in the shade of trees; I could just make out villages of straw dotted around the Mango King’s lands; and slim, black women, in bright colours, with white bangles all the way up their arms, walked along the edges of mud paths.

After tea, breakfast and a shower, I came into the main room to find that Hameed was up and inspecting weapons. “You can’t get this on licence,” he said cheerfully, as the man brought out an Uzi. Hameed was freshly bathed, his eyes alert, his manner sprightly in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible the night before. The deadened glaze had gone from his eyes and his mind made connections easily. He seemed to sense that I might be a little surprised at the gun parade. “A lot of people in Karachi don’t like farmers,” he said. “They say they’re feudal, but my feeling is that there are good and bad people in every field.”

Still squinting through sights he said, “Can you imagine? Even I was kidnapped… I was 12 and when I came back I was 13. It was from 1984 to 1985, for six months. I was chained for the last two. My father wouldn’t pay the ransom. When they called he started abusing them so they only called once. After that, they dealt with my uncle.” The kidnappers had picked him up outside his school in Hyderabad.

His point, it seemed, was not to emphasise the violence in his life but to make clear that he had paid his dues.
Hameed drank heavily; he had suspicious cigarette burns on his arms; he played with guns; and yet what might have seemed like cause for alarm was presented instead as emblematic of the feudal life. The violence he had experienced, and perhaps inflicted, became like a rite of passage.

“Was it traumatic?”

“Yes,” he replied, “but you get used to anything.”

That evening the Mango King suggested I go with him to Mirpur Khas, a nearby town, to meet a lawyer who was working on a case he was fighting. The sun at last was loosening its grip on the day and the land, stunned and silent for many hours, came to life with the screeching of birds and the movement of animals.

Driving out of the Mango King’s gate, I noticed that under the name of the estate, it said, “Veni Vidi Vici.”

“We used to send mangoes to the Queen of England,” Hameed said proudly.

“You should start again.”

“No,” he smiled, “but we send them to Musharraf.”

In the car, the Mango King and his lieutenant discussed feudal revenge. The lieutenant was a muhajjir or immigrant from India. His family came to Pakistan from Jodhpur in Rajasthan after partition. The feudal life needed men like the lieutenant. He was dark and bald, with the aspect of a grand vizier, and after the Mango King’s father died, he served the son as an adviser. They talked about how another feudal owner had killed the Mango King’s friend in an argument over 350 acres. Hameed said that the other landlords still teased the dead man’s son for having been unable to exact revenge.

“Don’t the police ever get involved?”

“Not in these things. The people come to me with their problems and family matters. If you’re the landlord, you’re politician and policeman too. The landowner’s word is law.” Then, pausing for a moment, he said, “In the end, it’s not even about land. It’s about who gets to be head honcho.” He put it well: land at least was stabilising; this was about arbitrary power and Hameed was also vulnerable.

Salman Taseer with Friends

His lieutenant had been back to Jodhpur just once, in 1990, and from the moment he heard I was Indian, he could speak of nothing else. He craned his long neck forward and asked if I saw much difference between India and Pakistan.

“Not much,” I said, meaning to be polite. “There’s more feudalism here.”

“But between human beings, on a human level?”

“No, not really.”

“But there is!” He smiled.

“What?”

“In Pakistan, the clothes people wear are much better. There’s far less poverty. India makes its own things, its own cars, but then you don’t get Land Cruisers. In India, you get Indian needles. In Pakistan, we get Japanese needles!”

In India you now got Japanese needles too. The lieutenant had visited before economic liberalisation, but that was not the point. What struck me was how this man, who would never come close to owning a Land Cruiser, could talk of such things as core human differences. The poverty around him was as bad as anything I had ever seen, yet he spoke of expensive cars. It was as if the mere fact of difference was what he needed. It hardly mattered what the differences meant: that was taken care of by the inbuilt rejection of India. In the confusion about what Pakistan was meant to be—a secular state for Indian Muslims, a religious state, a military dictatorship, a fiefdom—the rejection of India could become more powerful than the assertion of Pakistan.

“What other differences did you see?” he asked.

“It’s hard to say as there’s so much change within India. There are more differences between the north and the south than there are between north India and Pakistan.”

The lieutenant was not to be put down. He wanted to get something off his chest. “The other difference,” he began, “was that while men here wear flat colours, the men there are fond of floral prints, ladies’ clothes.” Hindus weaker, more feminine, and Muslims stronger, manlier: this was the dull little heart of what the lieutenant wanted to say and a great satisfaction came over his face as he spoke. This was the way he reconnected with the glories of the Islamic past when the martial Muslims ruled the “devious Hindu.”

“Were you scared when they kidnapped you?” I asked Hameed, hoping to hear the rest of the story.

“The first 15 minutes were scary, but then it was all right.”

After four months he had tried to steal a kidnapper’s gun and use it on two of them, but just as he picked it up, the third returned and wrested it from his hands. That was when they chained him as punishment.

I thought he wanted to say more, but his lieutenant interrupted: “Tell me,” he said, “why do you wear a kara?” He was referring to the steel bangle on my wrist.

“My grandmother is a Sikh and wanted me to wear it.”

“Your mother’s Sikh and you’re Muslim.”

“No,” I said, not wishing to annoy him, “my mother’s Sikh and my father’s Muslim.”

“Yes, yes, so you’re Muslim.”

“I’m nothing.”

The lieutenant seemed to ask the question in the most basic sense. He could tell I wasn’t a practising Muslim, but he wanted to know if I was Muslim somehow.

“Come on, you’re Muslim. If you’re father’s Pakistani, you’re Muslim.”

“If you say so, but don’t you have to believe certain things to be a Muslim? If I don’t believe, can I still be Muslim?”

He looked at me with fatigue. It was almost as if he wanted to say yes. It was as though, once acquired, this identity based on a testament of faith could not be peeled away, like caste in India. And I felt that if I could know the sanctity of his feeling of difference in relation to non-Muslim India, and the symbolic history that went with it, I would be as Muslim as he was.

“It’s his decision,” the Mango King laughed.

The lieutenant fell into a moody silence. “It’s hotter in India than it is in Pakistan, isn’t it?” he started again.

The Mango King groaned with irritation.

“It’s the same!” I said. “You see too many differences.”

Perhaps sensing that he had created bad feeling with a guest, he said, “Sikhs have a very sweet way of speaking.”

“They speak just like we do!” Hameed snapped, and the lieutenant retreated with a sad, stung expression.

Pakistan’s economic advantage, the manliness of Muslim men, Land Cruisers and Japanese needles, even an imagined better climate: these were the small, daily manifestations that nourished a greater rejection of India, making the idea of Pakistan robust and the lieutenant’s migration worthwhile. Hameed didn’t need the lieutenant’s sense of the Other. He was where his family had always been, sure of himself and, if anything, he felt the lack of the Hindu middle class that had once completed his society.

***

On the way into town, Hameed explained the legal dispute. It was a complex story in which the laws of the country—British law with Islamic accents—came into conflict with feudal family agreements. Hameed’s aunts had inherited a parcel of land, which they wanted him to inherit, but as his cousins (with whom he’d had gun battles) contested this, a spurious sale was organised, by which the land would come indirectly to Hameed.

The section of town we entered in moonlight had old-fashioned whitewashed buildings. Outside the lawyer’s office there was an open drain from which a vast peepal tree grew, its roots threatening the foundation of both street and building. The man inside the pistachio green room was like a caricature of a small-town lawyer. He was squat and smiling, with dimples and greasy hennaed hair. His office contained a glass-topped desk, green metal filing-cabinets and shelves stacked with volumes of Pakistan Legal Decisions.

He had been briefed about the case and, after offering us tea and soft drinks, he began: “You have two options, either of speaking the truth or… I’ve heard, sir,” he said, a smarmy smile lighting his face, “that it is hard for you to tell a lie.”
Hameed looked at him. “No, there’s no such problem.”

“Another situation is that we don’t tell the truth,” the lawyer said, shaking his head mournfully, as though drawing some pleasure from the foreplay of an illegal act.

“Please leave truth and lies aside,” Hameed said. “Let’s just do what favours us.”

The lawyer, bowing from the waist, grinned. “Are both women educated?”

“Yes, a little.”

“English-speaking?”

“Yes.”

The lawyer nodded sadly, feigning gloom.

“What difference does it make?” Hameed barked.

“Because we could say the transaction was a fake,” the lawyer sputtered. “The ladies did not understand what they were doing. We could make the plea that they didn’t know what was in the documents when they signed them.”

“But then wouldn’t I end up looking like a fraud?”

“No,” the lawyer said, “you weren’t present. We can say the ladies never sold the land and received no monies.”

Hameed looked as lost as I was. “Does the judge accept bribes?” he asked. “Can’t we just bribe him?”

“He does in some cases but not others,” the lawyer said, as if delivering an official statement. “But the other party can bribe too so it doesn’t matter.”

“Can’t we give them a little danda?” Hameed said, using the word for “stick” to mean a beating.

The lawyer smiled serenely.

“Can the property be put in my mother’s name?” Hameed asked, then mentioned she was a German national, which created other problems.

“Why don’t you get married?” the lawyer suggested.

“I have to find the right girl,” Hameed laughed. “When I do I’ll get married.”

We stood up to leave and the lawyer rose too, bowing.

Outside, Hameed lit a cigarette. Turning to me, he said bitterly: “Bloody feudal family disputes.” He seemed a little depressed and lonely.

In the car his lieutenant tried to convince him to get married. He said it would strengthen his position.

“If we lose in the court, how soon can they take control of the land?” Hameed asked, thinking aloud.

“We’ll go to a higher court,” the lieutenant said.

“And if we lose there?”

“They can take control of the land, but then we’ll bring it back to the lowest court on some excuse. Whole lifetimes go by and things remain unresolved.”

Hameed fell silent.

“You just get married quickly,” the lieutenant said, trying to arrest the gloom that grew in his master, “and then you’ll have a wife and an heir and at least they won’t be able to say ‘he’s all on his own.’ Your strength will improve greatly.” Strength was the right word: it was all that could make sense of the landscape around the Mango King. In the absence of a credible state, crude power, loose and available, was all there was. “Find a good relationship and get married. Aren’t I right?” the lieutenant asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

“People are scared of my house,” Hameed replied. “Girls run away from it.”

“Why?”

“You know my pool in Karachi, right?”

“Yes,” I said, half expecting him to say it was having its water changed.

“Well, I had a party,” he said, “and a guy drowned in it. And my cousins said that I paid money to the police and to the guy’s family. Can you imagine? You have a party and a guy dies in your pool. It’s terrible. And they say it’s because I’m feudal. I think the guy was on drugs or something.”

***

That night I sat with the Mango King on his veranda drinking whisky-sodas and talking. Though occasionally I felt his pain, I didn’t understand his world; I didn’t think it was a world that could be made understandable to someone who wasn’t obliged to work by its arbitrary laws; its brutalities were its own.

It was India’s middle class, its growth and energy, more than anything else that set the two countries apart. The power of the middle class in India dismantled the old feudal structures. In Sindh, the cost of realising the purity of the Muslim state was the departure of the Hindu middle class. The muhajjir population that arrived in its place had not been able to replace its social function; the bonds that had held together the diverse society of Muslims and Hindus had not arisen among the co-religionists. And, without its middle class, Sindh was not merely unchanged from 1947, not merely feudal: it was lawless, divided within itself; town and country were divorced from each other; and even men like the Mango King knew insecurity; the society was dismembered.

The lieutenant, who had been sitting quietly on the edge of the veranda, now whispered slyly to me that he was a Rajput. This was another reference to the Hindu caste system, in this case a high caste. But the lieutenant didn’t know he spoke of caste. When I said to him that Islam, with its strong ideas of equality, forbade notions of caste, he became defensive and said that this was a matter of good and bad families.

“If you can have Rajputs, then you can have choodas,” I said, using the derogatory word for “low caste.”

“Of course you can have choodas,” the lieutenant replied.

“Would you let your daughter marry one?”

“Never.”

“Even if he was Muslim?”

“Even if he was Muslim.”

On the one hand, there was the rejection of India that made Pakistan possible, and on the other, India was overwhelmingly at play in the deepest affiliations of Pakistanis, sometimes without their knowing it. It made Pakistan a place in which everything just existed because it did, eroded haphazardly by inevitable change. The country’s roots, like some fearsome plumbing network, could never be examined to explain why something was the way it was, why the lieutenant, perhaps centuries after conversion, still thought of himself as a Rajput. And though I, with deep connections on both sides, could see the commonalities, they were not to be celebrated: we spoke instead of difference.

Before I went to bed, Hameed came to the end of the story of his kidnapping. Finally, after six months, the kidnappers gave him a bus ticket and released him in the Sindhi town of Sukkur from where he made his way back to his father’s house in Hyderabad. His hair had grown longer and when he got home, the watchman didn’t recognise him. Hameed said no ransom was ever paid.

When he was released they danced in the village. He went to get a passport photo taken, and the man in the shop had baked a cake for him. These were the details that remained with him after two decades. The whisky worked on Hameed, at once deadening his eyes and bringing up unprocessed emotion. He’d gone to get a passport picture because he was going to Germany to see his mother for the first time in 14 years. His separation from her was another secret in the life of the Mango King; I had a feeling it was related to the father who always had the right answer for everything.

The next morning I left the Mango King’s lands for Hyderabad. He was still asleep when I walked out and even at that early hour, the small, musty house was filling with heat.

Olá, estamos novamente desponibilizando zines do nosso acervo para download em pdf. Vamos divulgando o imenso mundo dos zines e publicações enquanto nossos próprios não ficam prontos.
Hoje estamos com um menu bastante diversificado, esperamos que gostem. Sintam-se à vontade para se servirem.

MENINAS VICIADAS
Este zine era originalmente do Eder, mas um dia ele me emprestou e depois disse que eu podia ficar. É um zine de quadrinhos, um bom zine de quadrinhos por sinal, feito em Araguari, Minas Gerais. Meninas Viciadas é uma publicação da MRD Editora. Segue uma prévia:

BAIXE AQUI MENINAS VICIADAS

DESTRÓI ZINE
Zines sobre arte de rua. Teve várias edições, mas eu só tenho duas. Encontrei o Valério, editor do zine, numa exposição que aconteceu no campus da floresta da federal. Lá conversamos um pouco e trocamos uns zines. Seguem as duas edições que tenho.

BAIXE AQUI DESTRÓI E LIXO CONTÍNUO EDIÇÃO ESPECIAL

BAIXE AQUI DESTRÓI EDIÇÃO ESPECIAL CURITIBA

ROBERT DOISNEAU
Este livretinho eu ganhei dos meus vizinhos. Quando eles foram para os Estados Unidos eles me deixaram várias coisas de que não precisavam mais, entre elas estava este que foi publicado no mês intrenacional da fotografia, em São Paulo, no ano de 1993. É sobre Robert Doisneau, um fotógrafo francês, e tem como conteúdo um trecho de um livro dele e algumas fotos.

BAIXE AQUI ROBERT DOISNEAU

BENDITA ZINE
Este zine eu arranjei num show de hardcore eu acho. Ou na casa da ponte? Bem, eu não me lembro, mas ele é bastante incomum e pesado. Tem como tema o abuso sexual contra mulheres.

BAIXE AQUI BENDITA ZINE

HOMOXIDAL 500 #2
Zine homossexual de Buenos Aires. É enorme, o pdf ficou um pouco pesado, mas vale a pena. Ganhamos de presente do Ema (Valeu Ema!). Dêem uma olhada:

BAIXE AUI HOMOXIDAL 500

by v000nix

Nach dem 7 Tagen Countdown ist es endlich soweit – TrackMania eXchange feiert sein 5. Jubiläum mit vielen Preisen!

Die Aktionen im Überblick:

->Lasst den Leuten einen Geburtstagsgruß da

->Nehmt an der Zahlenlotterie teil

->Denkt euch einen neuen TMX-Slogan aus!

->Fahrt die offizielle TMX-Geburtstagsstrecke vom MTC März

->Fahrt die erste Strecke, die jemals auf TMX hochgeladen wurde, in einer neuen Version

->Gebt euch einen Usertitel für das Forum

->Schaut nach, wer alles eure Strecken heruntergeladen hat (Trackpage)

Auch das TManiacs Blog Team wünscht TMX einen schönen Geburtstag!

by Manzoor Chandio, Karachi, Sindh
The writer works in daily dawn Karachi and he can be reached at catalyst2pk@yahoo.com
Blog: http://manzoorchandio.blogspot.com/
Justice Chaudhry took his oath from military dictator Musharraf. Justice Dogar took his oath from military dictator Musharraf. What’s the difference?.. As far as Justice Chaudhry’s performance is concerned, I think Justice Dogar is second to none.
Justice Chaudhry worked his entire tenure under an unconstitutional military regime. Justice Dogar worked most of his tenure under a constitutional government.
Justice Dogar took hundreds of suo moto actions, including eight after reading Kawish. These cases related to the violation of human rights, abuses of women and children.
Late BB, the PPP and we all supported the reinstatement of judges not the removal of judges. The PML-N kept demanding the removal of judges which is against the Constitution.
There is a provision in the Constitution that judges can be appointed but judges can’t be removed.
We’ve always deliberated that all problems are created by military regimes which continue spiraling affecting democratic governments for years. The judges’ issue was created by a military government which has domino effects till today and it will continue for years. What is dangerous now that the PML-N are not ready to look forward to make a fresh start?
Yes Punjab and PML-N have right to protest. And there should not be police and army to stop them. For the last 63 years, establishment turned the green of Bengal into red, they raped thousands of women, they killed and maimed thousands of Sindhis during the MRD for demanding democracy and they killed and bombed the Baloch for demanding freedom.
Even during the lawyers’ movement, we saw bodies of Sindhis lying on Shahra Faisal. Hundreds of people were killed and hundred others were injured. But guns were silent in Punjab on the same day. Even lathis were not used. Why this difference?

It only happens in Pakistan where there are orders to kill Sindhi protesters for demanding their constitutional rights and while agencies, police and military facilitated PML-N protesters to dislodge a constitutional government which has mandate to rule for five years.
Establishment dislodged Bhutto’s government and finally hanged him, two governments of BB (finally killed her), and now they are demanding President Zardari’s head…!!!

A Saturday in late Midwest Winter – what to do? Rent a movie? Go out to dinner with friends? Or drive to  Madison with 20 friends to eat mexican food, dress up in ridiculous costumes, drink, and head to the ‘Mad Rollin’ Dolls Flat Track Roller Derby Bout to cheer on the ‘Unholy Rollers’? Huh?

Mad Rollin Dolls Bout Poster 3_2009

Perhaps this is all a bit strange; Let us begin at page 3 of the Mad Rollin’ Dolls official souvenir -complete-with-autograph-page program:

“LISTEN UP: Derby can be dangerous. Please pay attention to the following and keep yourself and your loved ones safe while you enjoy the bout! TRACKSIDE SEATING AT YOUR OWN RISK – MIND YOUR CHILDREN – LOOK OUT FOR SKATERS – DESIGNATE A DRIVER.”

…..now those statements really tell both in plain english and rather more subtle ways what ‘the derby’ is all about, but just in case, here’s the actual mission statement – or something like it:

“Mad Rollin’ Dolls is a flat-track derby league based in Madison, WI, run by the skaters, staff, & volunteers. Flat-track derby is a hard-core sport played by independent, strong, modern women. Mad Rollin’ Dolls provides an outlet for female aggresion and self-expression. We encourage and organize women to participate in service to the community; we get fit, have fun, and throw killer parties.”

(above: Vaudeville Vixins vs. Holy Rollers, 3/7/09 Madison, WI)

(photo of Tammy Faye Undertaker by svheartphotography.com)

It would be enough fun to take in this sport as a harmless bystander, but in fact, Decorah native ‘Tammy Faye Undertaker’  (#700) skates as a blocker with the Unholy Rollers team. This Iowan gone Wisco-kid is not to be reckoned with while on 4 wheels. “TFU” as she is known to her fans, has only been skating for a couple years and had never skated to any extent until her interest in the Mad Rollin Dolls was peaked. Now her family, friends, and fans cheer her and the ‘Unholy Rollers’ on with rabid enthusiasm.

Roller Derby itself is a slightly complicated sport to follow. The basics are such:

“Roller derby takes place on a circuit track. It is somewhat unusual among competitive sports in that offense and defense are played simultaneously. The two teams playing send five players each onto the track — three blockers (defense), one pivot (last line of defense) and one jammer (scorer).”  To understand how points are scored by the various positions, follow up with this comprehensive Wikipedia article.

But the real deal with modern day Roller Derby is not the competitive sport itself; the heart & soul Derby resides in an almost rugby-like family association between the competitors and teams. Most matches are held in the Alliant Center Exhibition Hall in Madison with local vendors offering micro-brews, fruit smoothies, gourmet coffee, and pizza slices. All bouts not only raise funds for powerful causes, but are finished with fantastic parties in local bars with teams and fans mixing, drinking, re-hashing the highlights – the injuries, and the bouts to come. Roller Derby is not the television sport it once was – it is a female driven community that promotes fun, competition, and activity – it’s a way of life!

Find out more about Madison’s ‘Mad Rollin Dolls upcoming bouts by visiting www.madrollindolls.com

Upcoming bouts are on March 21, April 5 & 25, and May 16. See you there!

]]> http://market-by-numbers.com/2009/03/11/low-burn-start-up-week-2-3/ Thu, 12 Mar 2009 04:14:14 +0000 Brant Cooper http://market-by-numbers.com/2009/03/11/low-burn-start-up-week-2-3/ http://allproductmanagement.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/swot-analysis-workflow/ Wed, 18 Feb 2009 02:03:54 +0000 Mark Officer http://allproductmanagement.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/swot-analysis-workflow/

A SWOT Analysis is a planning tool used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) of a product.  While it is a very common analysis technique, it is also one that is frequently underutilized.  Most Product Managers associate SWOT with the four-quadrant diagram visually showing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.  Unfortunately, most SWOT analyzes begin and end with this diagram which is a huge disservice considering all that a complete SWOT analysis can offer.

In this article, I will describe the workflow for a detailed SWOT Analysis, starting with a situational analysis of the internal and external factors that feed into the SWOT Profile, which in turn provides the basis for a set of objectives or recommendations for a Marketing Requirements Document (MRD) or product roadmap.

To conduct a SWOT analysis, it starts with an evaluation of the current situation.  As the diagram illustrates, there are two input types; external and internal.  Internal factors are the strengths and weaknesses from within (or internal to) the company.  A healthy amount of engineering resources or tight fiscal pressure on the operating budget is examples of internal factors.  Next, the opportunities and threats from the outside world (external factors) are evaluated from the perspective of the company and product, and then at a macro-environmental level.  Company-level external factors are an honest evaluation of your customers and partners, such as renewal rates for a subscription-based pricing model or a survey indicating the level of satisfaction with customer support. Moreover, the opportunities and threats from the competition and market trends specific to your product are evaluated.  For the macro-environmental analysis, a PEST model – Political, Economic, Social, Technology – is used (this is sometimes rearranged as STEP).  For example, the deepening global recession is one macro-environmental factor.  Potential new regulations for financial services firms as a result from the fiscal meltdown in the fall of 2008 are another good example.

Next, the SWOT profile is generated, which is a roll-up or summary view of the situational analysis where the internal strengths and weaknesses are displayed alongside the external opportunities and threats in a four-quadrant chart. A well done SWOT profile provides an excellent visual assessment of the good and bad, but more importantly it takes the assets and liabilities as a baseline for deriving objectives moving forward.  Thus, you can now see how the SWOT profile can in turn be used to match internal strengths and weaknesses to external threats and opportunities resulting in four classes of strategic recommendations:

• Strength-Opportunity (S-O) strategies pursue opportunities that are a good fit to the company’s strengths
• Weaknesses-Opportunities (W-O) strategies overcome weaknesses to pursue opportunities
• Strength-Threats (S-T) strategies identify ways to use our strengths to reduce vulnerability to external threats
• Weaknesses-Threats (W-T) strategies establish a defensive plan to prevent weaknesses from making it susceptible to external threats

There are two primary vehicles for the SWOT analysis.  One is the Market Requirements Document (MRD) or Marketing Plan.  A very good example is the Strategic Marketing Plan for the OpenOffice.org Marketing Project.  This document starts with a detailed, bottom-up review of the external and internal factors, and then rolls them up into the SWOT Profile and specific list of objectives.

Another output to the strategies is the Product roadmap.  I am a firm believer that a roadmap should be more than just a list of features mapped out into a set of timed or themed releases.  A roadmap should contain the “why” of a product direction.  This is where the SWOT diagram belongs, providing the proper situational analysis was done and fed into the profile.  The other slide that belongs in the roadmap is the list of objectives or strategies that come from the SWOT profile.  With these two slides, the roadmap has “the beef” to justify the product direction.  It is also an excellent way to communicate the information and corresponding objectives from the SWOT Analysis to upper management and cross-functional groups.

]]> http://getedgewise.wordpress.com/2008/11/06/we-are-the-littles/ Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:02:55 +0000 the edges http://getedgewise.wordpress.com/2008/11/06/we-are-the-littles/

and the bigs won’t let us ask myriad for a cuddle or go to them to cuddle.  i think they are afraid of the halls.  they are so stupid!!!  and we misss myriad and want a cuddle but bigs say it is bad to ask for that don’t do that they say be good but we ARE good and they are STUPID.  bigs say no gotta be in control all the time gotta be in control and wes just want be little and be held.

this is what we sounded like *yes*-terday:

secretsecret*scret* is we sih myriads would come down here and hug us but we know that is BAD bigs say it is passive AGGRESSIVE and we tries not be we is just little you know we can’t *help* it

ferillia says means not love us, but they is always like that, gettin mad and talkin bout how nobody cares. that’s just how they are.  but that’s not really what we’s think but then they say it and we don’t know we get scared worry must be true like alone on the basement floor or something

who knows and we know we is bad to write it but we is kids what else we psed to?  we try be good but we is kids not fair hold us like we is adults we is NOT adults stupid!  not fair!  we is kids and we is good!  we is kkids and we is good!  we is kids and we is good!  we is kids and we is good!  we is kids and we is good!

we get to write what WE think too!!  so there w e do too!  we is still good even if we wants too much we is still good *may*-be and we can still talk about it and we is honestly not tryin get nothin we is just sayin what we is thinkin we not tryin be manipulative ferillia says we is or somthin THEY is

stupid

but we is kids here.  we is kids talkin here

fell good soft strong solid say bigs or adults

who is ellen?  that is one of our catagories or rather tags.  who is ellen? (shakes head) wierd.  huh, it does feel lighter or something.  we never really let the kids talk like that, we think it is de facto manipulative.  but that was nice.  i don’t know.  i guess we’ll see.

the built-in trigger delay makes everything more interesting.

and bigs want wait not publish now cuz we don’t have audio yet but too bad we want publish NOW we don’t care we can say what we want WHEN we want and we is important too JUST as important yeah yeah yeah!!!  yeah yeah just as important!!

we win you lose the end

when they were over here we’re all like boohoo you don’t love us and making them cuddle us when they have work to do and i just know they want to look at their watch.  well maybe not i mean they are just stressed and have stuff to do and sometimes we need to go and it doesn’t mean we don’t love them.

we are so stupid and they will have a whole other life and not love us anymore.  they will not love us anymore anymore anymore anymore anymore anymore anymore anymore anymore anymore anymore anymore anymore anymore

we have to do this paperwork.  goddammit we feel like we are going insane.  holy shit.  we really have to do this paperwork.  goddammit.  goddammit.

and it was cool and we is bad to say it but she is very cool and impressive.  she says like what we feel sometimes about how you not be a waste if someone don’t have sex with you or wanta.  and we kids some of us is like that we don’t understand any other way of bein good and bein worth people’s time cuz otherwise we leave and wonder whether we is a waste.

(secret secret)  sometimes we feel that way even with *m*r*-**d.  like if we didn’t have sex then what would they want with us?  unless we is bein super supportive or somthin but that is diferent.  like we worry they will stop loving us or have already.  also, how else can we know they like us?  that is the only real way is if we can make them happy in bed that is the only way we know.

and it’s also like if m*r**d doesn’t see us in a sexual way, even us littles sometimes, then we must be pretty unattractive and worthless.  like if we wasn’t they would want us, right?  cuz that is the only real way to want us and connect with us.

nymph said this thing like otherwise there is nothing to hold on to and we feel like that too.  like that is all we have to offer!  if they don’t want it they don’t want us if we can’t make them happy they won’t love us and we are worthless.

stupid bitchgirl.

m*r**d said like how nymph hurt the system alot and we see that but we still like her.  she is just nymph, she thinks how she thinks and we get thinking how she does.  she does what she can to make her safe and i don’t know we just think that makes sense.  but also she is not in our system so we don’t have to deal with the consequences so it’s easier for us.

i don’t know.  we is impressed cuz nymph says stuff we is afrad to say.  we can’t even admits we think that way like she does.  i don’t know.  we is so stupid.

i guess it just felt like a friend.  even tho she don’t really know us and we wasn’t out.  she is like a far-away friend who you see but doesn’t know you really but you have a friendship in your mind.

we’re thinking that *this* time, if we can just say the right thing, just do the right thing, they will love us and make everything all better.  i don’t know.  bad girl.  we just want so much for them to love us and we just know they don’t or are falling out of it we can tell and it makes us so sad we want to cry and/or hurt ourselves.

feeling like everything in our life is crashing around us.  the money, there is so much money stuff to handle.  tuition forfeiture, loans, it makes us want to cry.  we feel so hopeless. and alone.  so alone.  we just don’t trust anyone besides m*r**d really, and eva for some things.  and i guess if we’re not right in our reading, we don’t really trust them to assess how they feel about us.  but why should we?  we convinced ourselves we were still in love with *t*f long after it stopped.

our life just seems so empty.  and pointless.  i swear we don’t have anything we can count on.  i don’t know what to do.  it’s crushing.

m*r**d’s place w/o crying.  it feels like college, it feels like high school.  it feels like when you’re in a relationship and the other person is on their way to losing interest in you and it makes us so scared we almost go crazy and there is nothing else nothing else to make it okay.  there is nothing else in our life.  nothing else but this person.

and it reminds me so much of high school. with sarah. sitting quietly just hoping for some bit of affection or assurance that she loved us.  like with erin.  and we can’t see anything else or think anything else and there are 2 modes:

-  crying about how he is stopping loving us we can tell and how we are going to die

-  a surface layer that is much more distant (obviously), thick walls because at all costs are we to keep the crying inside

we are not interacting *really* – listening *really. we are just thinking love me love me love me why don’t you love me? and we know that all this just drives him further away we know.  but what the fuck are we supposed to do?  maybe we should just excuse ourselves when we get like that because clearly it isn’t actually fixable by him or something we should expect him to fix.  

it is AWFUL having such particualr and personal feelings.  i can’t even explain how pathetical i feel.  i feel like i am *t*f, watching as my girl/boyfriend moves on, has moved on already.  while i am still not over them.  i can see them moving on to their new life without me.  

i swear to god they even look different to us.  it reminds us of changes we saw with erin.

i don’t know what to do with these parts.  i don’t freaking know what to do.  and all they want is for him to make it better and they don’t see anything else.  it is awful  it is awful.

it’s like i can just see him drifting away, leaving us.  i can see it happening and there’s nothing i can do but try not to cry.  i spend more and more time doing that.  we have to keep so much distance to do it.  but there’s no other way.