Justify your existence, contractor

It’s a joyous time of year, that’s right, TAX SEASON.  Those of you close to me (and even some of you not so close) know that I am a huge math geek.  I love me some numbers.  I even got me a purdy degree from a party school to prove it… But I digress.

Tax season is less about numbers for me and more about another passion, organizing things.  Mainly receipts, forms, etc.  My mom was meticulous at organizing her tax recepts and I have picked up that gauntlet to carry on.

This time of year always brings up the 1099 versus w2 conundrum, too.  As an employer, I am super familiar with the difference between the 2.   But as a long time helper of other companies (aka contractor or consultant), I thought I would share my checklist that I make sure that I maintain, so that I am sure I am on the up and up as a 1099 receiver.

- Contract it up – I always make sure I have a contract when I am doing work for someone.  This is my assurance that the talked about terms are in writing, but also a good piece of evidence to legitimacy.

- Business licence or sole proprietor – This is a big one for some companies.  It’s much easier to show someone is a contractor if they have a business license.  You can get one through your state and it comes with your very own Federal ID Number to boot!  I personally go the route of sole proprietor, tax wise, and therefore do not have a FIN.  This just means I have to have cross my t’s and dot i’s in a couple more places to justify my existence.

- Advertising – This could be as explicit as an ad in a trade mag advertising your services or as implicit as listing all the ways people find out about you.  For example, if you want to know about my skill set, you can read this blog, my LinkedIn, see my thoughts in clubs or listservs or see me at a speaking engagement.  Since most of my stuff in the past has been on the side and via word of mouth, it’s important that I maintain these if I ever get contract work.  Having business cards helps too.

- Master of my own schedule – Another big point is scheduling.  If you are scheduled to the hours you work, that leans more in the direction of employee – not a deal breaker, but just more on that side of the list.  If you decide when you work, you are more of a contractor.  Of course, meetings need to be scheduled as we are not in an anarchy (at least I am not).  But with the advent of asynchronous communication (IMs, emails, etc) it’s easier and easier to have less face to face time.

- Expertise included – People want to hire me for my expertise in whatever area.  Many times, we hire people for their instincts and their ability to react how we would in certain scenarios.  Now that doesn’t mean that if they have to know how to use all of the software we use when they start – of course we can train them on that.  But there has to be a baseline of ability expected as a contractor.

And we can also give them feedback if their work isn’t what were thinking about.  Think of a decorator or painter redoing a room in your house.  It’s your house, therefore if they design or paint something that is not to your liking, you don’t have to just accept it.  And if there are special instructions to different areas of the room or previous methods used, you will need to explain that too.  But they are still a contractor for you.

- My precious (tech) – I have all the technology I need, hardware wise.  If I have to buy tablets, apps, software, printer ink, paper, etc – that’s on me.  Incurring expenses is just part of the contract work lifestyle – but you also get to write it all off at the end of the year, so it works out.

There are other areas on the differences sheet, but as each person’s situation is different, it’s all case by case.  And you will probably never have to justify your existence to anyone.  I am just a prepared sort of person, so I like to know I am on the up and up & I am a community person, so I thought I would share. ;)

January 20, 2012 at 11:35 am Leave a comment

COPPA musings

The annual FOSI conference held in DC last week really helped to articulate for me some of the current ambiguity in the COPPA legislation, specifically with it’s intention and it’s enforcement.

Currently, the law is written in such a way that it clearly intends to protect childrens’ personally identifiable information (PII) from being used for nefarious purposes by the websites collecting it or their third party partners.  Some of the changes being proposed (public comments are due by the end of Nov) help to update and articulate this point and make the criteria points a bit more salient with todays tech climate (i.e adding geo-location, behavioral advertising, etc).

One point that is hotly debated is Email Plus.  Currently, sites can use this method (sending notification emails to a parent informing them of a child’s intent to share PII), but the FTC is trying to remove this.  The reason for this being that the sites should, by in large, not be soliciting PII from children in the first place and if they are, they should be complying with the more rigid parental verification models detailed in the law.  As Amy Pritchard from Metaverse Modsquad articulated to me, “Email plus is being eliminated as a way to collect PII and use it internally, as most sites had used it as a best practice parental notification method.  In order to allow sites to continue to do this, the proposed changes allow for sites to collect the parent email address for purposes of notifying the parent that the child has become a member of [or registered for] the site.”

The informal debates that I heard and participated in at the FOSI conference dealt mostly in the intent of the law.  Most of us agreed that the law should protect a child’s PII from being used for anything other than to make the game play better.  For the most part, the consensus is that, except for specific situations, like contests, DOB and gender are really the only 2 pieces of child PII a site needs to collect, and these are allowed currently under COPPA.

The finer point that I recognized in our sometimes spirited debates was between solicited PII and passively collected PII.   A site should not solicit PII from kids, such as in the registration process, as most of this information is not needed for normal game-play (unless, again, they get verifiable parental consent).   But what if kids give PII freely, such as in chat or on forums/boards?  What, if any, sanctions should be levied unto the site in these scenarios?  The informal consensus was that the site should at least employ means of screening and moderating such content so as to make sure that this PII is not easily given and read on the site – but that this should not be legislated as part of COPPA.

Anne Collier wrote about this recently (http://www.netfamilynews.org/?p=30775) – “The proposed [COPPA] changes respond to the advent of social media (social network sites, virtual worlds, online games, apps, etc.) in that sites can “allow children to participate in interactive communities without parental consent so long as the operators take reasonable measures to delete all or virtually all children’s personal information before it is made public,” and companies will also have to hold third parties such as app providers to the same privacy standards their services are held to.”

I do not think that the intention of the law should be about teaching and protecting kids to be safe with their PII.  While this is an ethical and moral imperative that companies that target this demographic should abide by, I fall pretty firmly on the side that this should not be federally mandated.  Many of us, myself included, believe that the free market, and hopefully vocal parent groups and watchdog organizations, should be more of the gauge as to whether this is being done on individual sites.  In theory, educating and protecting kids from sharing PII in chat is a great idea, but those of use who have to DO that work, realize how difficult and sometimes impossible it is to be 100% effective.  I do not see how the government could keep up with or track down how effectively sites are at keeping up with that.

This was the 5th Annual FOSI conference, and it was very good to see more representation from practitioners, rather than just lobbyists, marketers, safety advocates, researchers and bloggers.  Hopefully, those of us with real-world/front-line experience in implementing these sort of laws can gain influence in the conversations so laws can be amended or written practically the first time, rather than after the fact (or not at all).

November 15, 2011 at 12:51 pm 3 comments

Use your gut, kid

I saw this really great comic that someone drew for their 11 year old niece to help explain the concept of using your gut.  I kinda love it.

(see the whole thing at http://www.thetoryparty.com/comics/2011/06/16/your-guts-and-you/)

September 21, 2011 at 8:42 am Leave a comment

Virtual Worlds Mgmt 101

Izzy Neis and I worked on a primer of kids virtual worlds that we could share with people.  Kind of a what’s good about them, what difficult about them, what they are and are not. Enjoy.

And as I was uploading this one, I saw this fantastically designed on on Slideshare as well.  Guess which one of us has access to graphic designers :P

August 19, 2011 at 7:58 am Leave a comment

Notes from #InPlay11

Speaking on a panel tomorrow at InPlay11 and saw a couple great and inspiring panels today that I wanted to leave notes on here.

Gever Tulley’s Brightworks school

His talk was basically a derivative of this TED talk he did last year, only thing different is that he is actually starting a school with these ideas in SF this fall. :)

My favorite quote from @gever‘s keynote – education is suffering from “atrophy of delight” – there is a vacuum of passion in most teaching that is robbing out kids from those intoxicating “aha!” moments.

Fortune Cookies: Long and Short Term Future of Kids Tech   

Left this talk totally inspired.  The kind of talk that you just nod your head to constantly while feverishly taking notes and jotting down ideas.  Best kind of talk.

- Education needs to focus less on the hardware and more on the content and curriculum

- Dr McEwen working on ipod/ipad work with non-verbal autistic children

- Gesture mapping and gesture guidelines for fine motor skill problems, swipe and drag are not easy – Dexteria is an example of an app like this

- Vygotsky – social interaction and instruction go together – which are 2 areas that are difficult for autistic children

- Need to continue development in sensory feedback – not just visual, but auditory, haptic, smell

edubuzz.org, a collaborative tool where students, teachers and parents share info on school, spikes in traffic at 3pm and 11pm – parents getting invovled

- We need to encourage personal branding from an early age – being aware of personal profile building and owning that – what happens when you are googled…

- Use the tech as a tool, not as end goal – it’s the teaching/inspiration/passion that engages the kids

- Scrollmotion, with Haughton Mifflin, made Fuse – making the textbook more interactive

- I wonder, tho, how many teachers are empowered to fight for alternative teaching methods and how many schools allow that

- Jim Bower asked if the push of processing info in new digital ways might be increasing autism

- McEwen answers that continuity and reducing the amount of “noise” in the app is helpful, from matte finsh to reduce shine, to consstency in the voice used, etc

- Wifi is contenciois as there is research that exposing children to electromagnetcic frequencies may be causing problems

- Segregation of play in education – only in recess and phys ed – “not allowed” elsewhere int eh school day.

- Think in developmental stages, not ages

May 17, 2011 at 11:55 pm 1 comment

A million, yeah, Animal Jam passed it

So the big news is finally out!  We reached 1 million players!  It was last month and we are already climbing higher at a fast clip, but still something to celebrate.  :)  Here’s one of the news outlets that picked up the press release:

http://venturebeat.com/2011/05/16/national-geographic-virtual-world-animal-jam-hits-a-million-kids/

Even more fun, our team celebrated at the Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City, our studio’s home town zoo and where we are sponsoring their EdZOOcation program and the coolio Allosaurus:

May 16, 2011 at 12:04 am 1 comment

Dr Brady Barr in Animal Jam!

OMG, I am SO excited about this new addition to National Geographic Animal Jam.  Dr Brady Barr from Dangerous Encounters now has a Gadget lab in Animal Jam!

It’s been live for only a couple hours and the room has been full the whole time.  Dr Brady Barr specialized in cool gadgets that help him get crazy footage of all sorts of animals.  And we are showing some good ones, including Brady getting into a Crocodile getup and tagging Crocodiles, hanging out next to a deer carcass to see wolfpacks at night and pythons and Mystery Swamp Creatures!  ACK!

I love it!  And this is just the first day. Look out for more cool stuff from this awesome-tastic Scientist/Celebrity that we are partnering with.

I find myself  shouting at the videos – get away from there Brady!!!

Woot!

———-

5/12 – UPDATE!  Brady’s answering the player’s animal questions!

Dr Brady Barr now has regular video answers to questions from kids in the game.  So our kids can ask a real scientist their animal puzzlers and potentially have him answer their question.  Love this kind of feedback and recognition.  How exciting!

March 18, 2011 at 11:26 am 3 comments

Stop it, Rihanna

Hi, My name is Joi and I’m a pop culture addict.  I have been one for most of my life.  In fact, I can’t remember a time when pop culture wasn’t important to me.  One of the more embarrassing areas of my addiction is pop music.  I am obsessed with it. I know all the words, the back stories to most songs and much of the gossip that was woven in with the releases.

Tangentially, I consider myself a progressive, probably more so than most.  I really don’t care what you do in your house, your bedroom, etc.  Try not to hurt anyone without their consent. This is, of course, with the caveat that the persons participating are A.) Adults and B.) Capable of granting consent without coercion.   And while I don’t care what you are doing behind closed doors, I would prefer if you just kept it to yourself.  I am happy you are happy being an exhibitionist, just please don’t do it around me.

So, given all of the above, I have a huge problem with many pop artists of late and their disregard for the public space and their audience demographics.  The airwaves, specifically, are supposed to be family friendly space.  Why do we bleep curse words, but not content that talks about abuse?  How does that work?

Some examples?  Eminem talk about tying a girl to a bed and lighting the house on fire.   Rihanna’s new song S&M has tons of explicit descriptions of pain/fetish play, and she has an older song about Russian Roulette.  Bruno Mars has songs about being bored and choosing marriage for the evening, and another that describes multiple ways he would kill himself in order to prevent the object of his affection from leaving.  And just pick randomly from the Brittney Spears catalog lately – threesomes seem to be one of her favorite topics, but who can forget Hit Me Baby and Slave for You, among others.

Eminem is a difficult example, as he would never posit himself as targeting a younger audience.  But Rihanna, Brittney and Bruno Mars – they are clearly targeting the tweenie boppers and their song lyrics are insanely inappropriate.  I don’t expect their music to be all Pollyanna, but you cannot have your cake and eat it too (altho, I DO hate that cliche – why CAN’T you eat your cake that you have?).  You shouldn’t market yourself and stylize yourself for a younger audience, cashing in on their lucrative wallets, and then pretend that your music is not intended for their ears.  Or at least not be flabbergasted when someone calls you out on it.

Yeah yeah, I hear what you are thinking, that innuendo has been part of songs forever.  I agree and I think it is fine.  My problem is that we have left innuendo land and are now knee-deep in explicit description land.  What happened to nuance, metaphor, allusion, subtlety?

Those of you who know me offline know that I am far from a prude.  But I know how to separate my worlds and how to draw lines for appropriate behavior.  why is it so hard for millionaire pop stars with a gaggle of handlers?

I have been a children’s content producer for years.  We have an ethical responsibility to our audience.  In the online world, we have tons of watchdog organizations making sure we stay on the straight and narrow in the ethics arena.  It is fair for me to bring this up.

Will I change it? – uh, probably not.  Do I sound like a geiser screaming for the kids to get off the lawn? – kinda.  But if you can’t rant on your blog, gosh darn it, where can you!

February 21, 2011 at 12:15 pm Leave a comment

The Social Network… meh

Just a short post to point out a conversation I have had with a bunch of friends about the movie, The Social Network.  After I watched it, I didn’t feel like I had watched a cinematic masterpiece.  I couldn’t see what everyone was freaking out about.  It was a fine couple hours, but really, what’s the big deal?

When I dug a bit deeper, I figured out that it was because I knew that story, really well.  Not just of Facebook, but of tons of late aughts start-ups and silicon valley gossip.  I read those stories in Valley Wag and Tech Crunch and all the other online rags as they happened.  I’ve eaten tacos with Twitter execs while discussing COPPA fines and defended multi-million dollar business plans to tech VCs.  I’ve felt the rush of hope with new bridge funding and the despair of multiple companies closing.  I’ve become jaded of this industry.  Almost bored with it’s dramas.

Maybe that’s why I have turned my focus to projects that have a little more “oompf” in the heart-department.  I want to be proud of my work on a societal level, not just career and/or bank account.  You would think children’s properties would be a fair choice, but oy!  don’t get me started on some of the Television Execs and Licensing people I’ve met. :P

That’s not to say I don’t still pay attention a little.  I grew up a gal in America – I’ve been trained to absorb gossip, whether I like it or not.  At least I am getting better at the KIND of gossip I am absorbing (read: Please brain, less Kardashians!)

December 1, 2010 at 12:09 pm 1 comment

What I’m thankful for

Last year around this time, my life was a bit complicated, so I sat down and thought about what I was thankful for.  Yeah, cliche, but it helped me a great deal.  So I decided to do it again this year.  It’s a shame I only force myself to think about what I am thankful for in an organized fashion once a year.  Kinda like how I formally review my goals at the beginning of the year.  Well at least both happen regularly.  Maybe I will add to my goal list to increase the frequency… Regardless, here are my publicly sharable list of thankful things for right now (feel free to not read, gets a bit sappy):

- My family – they are numerous and crazy, mostly don’t share my world view, don’t appreciate good restaurants and live in the suburbs.  But they are so amazing and I am totally head over heels in love with all of them, so much that I can overlook political, religious, ideological and all other difference (as much as possible).

- My siblings – holy crap, they are great.  I am the oldest of 5, all of us with completely different personalities.  But we are all so close and there for each other through good and bad, no matter what.

- My parents – I love the relationship we have as adults.  They love me as much as I love them and I am so happy.

- My new nephew – OMG, he is amazing.  I understand that others have felt this before and now I understand.  He is so cool and cute and great.  Not sure on the smarts yet, but I am gonna go out on a limb and say he will be brilliant.  I love being an aunt and can’t wait for my siblings to reproduce more.

- My dog – Linus is the best dog.  Many agree with me. I am so glad he travels well, because this gypsy lifestyle would suck without him.

- My friends – As a professional networker by habit, I know a great deal of people.  But the people I choose to call “my friends” are really the cream of the crop.  I have “crews” in the different cities I travel to, some of them vacation buddies, some of the them weekend dinner friends, some of them baby mommas/daddies that I steal time with when our schedules permit.  But I am truly thankful for each and every of them and glad they are in my life.

- My job – I love National Geographic Animal Jam.  I love Smart Bomb.  I love Salt Lake and DC.  I love my team.  I feel very lucky to be able to work with them each day and do the cool work we do.  We rock and the kids are starting to realize that too.

- My industry – I heart all you folks.  You are all so passionate about kids and their happiness and safety.  We fight the good fight (and sometimes the bad fights and nasty fights) but we keep our heads up and focused on the light at the enbd of the tunnel.

- My drive/ambition – Yeah, it’s huge and scares even me.  But it has brought me so much over the years that even though I am getting tired lately, I keep going.

Cool, that’s a happy list.  File it away til next year… :)

November 20, 2010 at 11:55 am Leave a comment

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