A recent challenge has made me realize that some things I thought were implicit need to be made explicit.
Yours
If you hire me to do some coaching, training or any other work you can be assured that your name and company name will never appear in my blog, twitter or any other public place. The most I will do is mention your name in private conversation. I will only violate this with your explicit permission i.e. we write an Experience Report for a conference. I will occasionally discuss issues that I see at a specific client in a general fashion, but you should find no specific mentions of your business. If you feel I’ve made a mistake contact me and I will correct it as quickly as possible.
Mine
If I hire you do some work on behalf of me or my business, I expect the same courtesy. I expect that all discussions whether over email, Campfire, IM, … are private and are between the originally agreed on parties. I don’t expect to see our discussions played out on your blog.
In general if we have a discussion privately over email (whether or not we have a business relationship) to be kept in the strictest of confidence.
If I discuss something on this blog or a mailing list, Yahoo/Google/LinkedIn groups then feel free to quote me. If you’re feeling generous please tell (so I can respond) and link to this site.
The only gray area is twitter, while its fun, all the ideas I and anyone else express are context free. 140 chars is cute, but no more. If you want to quote or think my ramblings unclear please take the time to contact me, I will be delighted to clarify.
The Problem
I employed foliovision early this year to help:
- Port my old typepad blog to Wordpress
- Make some small changes to my WooTuits theme two support two domains (the original notesfromatooluser.com and the new agilepainrelief.com)
So far so good. They did that very well and made some other small changes as well. As it happens foliovision is also a design firm and they offered to design a logo for me. Naively I didn’t ask about price up front. Very quickly the price of the logo jumped to be approximately half as much again as the originally quoted price for the job. I asked them to stop work on the logo and on reflection realized that the pill they showed in front of the logo didn’t reflect my ethos. My approach to coaching and consulting isn’t swallow a pill and it isn’t one size fits all. I work in an adaptive, iterative fashion in keeping with the “Inspect and Adapt” principle of Agile. Instead I created my current logo: a person carrying a doctor’s bag because its closer to reflecting me.
I also promised the people at foliovision that I would eventually write a followup post to thank them for time and to recommend them to others. Unfortunately I haven’t gotten around to that.
Imagine my surprise when I noticed a blog post that mentioned me by name, discussed my business choices and denigrated my own logo. I contacted folivision to raise my concerns but they were dismissed. I would quote Alec’s remarks to me in private, but that would violate my promise above. Suffice it to say I can no longer recommend foliovision since you don’t know whether they will treat your discussions with any confidentiality.
To be clear I acknowledge that this site needs some design work, its on my backlog. At the end of the day I put more time and effort into helping clients, personal contact and writing. Less into the site itself.
