As I continue designing and marketing myself in the creative industry as an Art Director, I can’t help but wonder whose side all these creative staffing firms are on. In a down economy, with an abundance of mediocre and inexpensive freelance creative talent, I’m feeling less and less like they’re on mine.

Let’s begin a few years back just before our economy was on the verge of collapsing. At the time, agencies throughout the country were hiring at an unprecedented rate. Business was booming and hiring reflected that. Agencies were confident and able to focus on healthy growth that involved a direct hiring and recruiting process. Hopes were high, budgets were high, and agencies generally felt confident in bringing on the talent they needed, directly.

Fast forward to the present. With a down economy and strapped budgets, agencies are relying on staffing firms for short-term, low cost, creative labor. The staffing firms are becoming more aggressive with their prospects and existing clients, desperate for contracts — any contracts. They don’t seem to care about the relationship factor anymore. I’ve been asked to work on some of the most outrageous projects for little or no pay when you add up all the time I wasn’t compensated for dealing with logistics and getting firms to explain very unclear requirements. I recently spoke with a representative from a local staffing firm. As soon as I picked up the phone she said: “I have found the perfect opportunity for you Nick!” “Oh yeah, what is it?!” I responded. “It’s a business card design for a client of ours, it’s a 5 hour opportunity for $14/hr!” I didn’t even have the patience to respond, I simply hung up the phone.

Never before have I seen so many staffing agencies on the prowl, desperate for anything that smells like a candidate. From a mom and pop boutique client to the Arc’s and Ogilvy’s. Today, creative staffing firms are very pushy and desperate in picking up any type of opportunity for creatives. This would be good if the projects they had actually paid well or helped a creative’s long-term growth, but that’s rarely the case. Staffing is a cold, hard, nickel and dime machine and the problems start to leak and spill out, the more you think about it.

At the end of the day, a modern creative staffing firm’s primary objective and mission is to have billable arrangements between an agency and an employee. That’s it. It’s simply a numbers game. Value and quality have been completely removed from the equation.

I believe that agencies are making a huge mistake by assuming that all their talent needs must be channeled through a 3rd party like a staffing firm. It’s resulting in agencies and firms readjusting their priorities and overall goals, and settling for less by bringing on temporary employment and short term contracts. This in turn decreases the amount of full-time opportunities available for those who can’t afford anything less. This is a large point most people aren’t realizing. These small temp and contract opportunities are eating up what a real opportunity should look like between you and a client. Staffing firms are making it more difficult for individuals to find what they are truly seeking, because of the sloppy and choppy aspects of what I’m discussing. However, I’m not naive. I understand that this sort of hiring is necessary when a client has a fixed budget a short-term project, or needs to ramp up resources temporarily to meet a deadline, but it’s starting to become the rule, not the exception.

Due to this priority shif, the sort of direct, one-on-one client relationships that I prefer seem to hold very little value compared to quick, cheap and dirty labor. The creative’s role is becoming more of a vendor to vendor relationship at best, and the old way of personal and meaningful relationship building with your clients seem to less of an importance to a lot of people. This is a damn shame.

Agencies need to wake up and work towards bringing value and quality back to the equation by working to hire creatives directly and internally and not just focusing on the bottom line, chewing and spitting out mediocrity after a few weeks on a project. There are countless, highly talented creatives out here working harder than ever trying to make a mark in an industry that is saturated with cheap, low cost labor from these staffing agencies. The prospect of this changing anytime soon seems bleak with the ubiquity of creative staffing firms constantly pushing for the lowest common denominator.

– Nick Petticrew

Nick is a creative consultant, the principal of Chicago-based design firm Petticrew and Friends and a contributing editor here at Arck. He’s been developing successful communication products all over the country. His past experience includes Nationwide Insurance, AT&T, P&G, Nestle, CLEAR, Newcardio and more.

Overview
As the popularity of Elgg grows, we’re getting more and more questions regarding the optimal hosting environment for large networks. We’ve created this post in response to that. It contains a growing, consolidated list of suggested hosting and hardware requirements for running large (5k+ user) Elgg installations. It’s based on community contributed best practices, Elgg’s documentation and Arck’s experience with the platform over the past two years. It’s intended to be used as a point of reference and makes no claim of being all-inclusive. If you have a suggestion or edit, please include it in a comment and we’ll review it for inclusion in the next version.

Many thanks to the Elgg community for all of the input contributed across Elgg forums and mailing lists.

OS / Software Requirements

• Dedicated LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL 5+, PHP 5.2+) based server
• Apache mod_rewrite module and multibyte string support
• GD for graphics processing
• JSON (included in PHP 5.2+)
• memcached (100-150MB of RAM allocated)

Hardware Requirements

• CPU: Quad 3ghz+
• RAM: 4GB+
• HDD: 1-2TB+ / SSD (Disk space can be estimated by multiplying the amount of space you wish to allocate to each user by the total number of users. This could range between 10MB and 100MB depending on your requirements.)

Optimizations

MySQL

• Convert the following MySQL tables to the InnoDB engine: elggannotation, elggentities, elggentity_relationships, elggmetadata, elggmetastrings, elggusers_sessions.
• Leave all remaining tables as MyISAM for FULLTEXT searching
• Raise the InnoDB buffer size to utilize roughly 50% of your total RAM.
• Add OPTIMIZE queries to a nightly cron for all Elgg tables

PHP

• Increase the total amount of memory allocated to PHP from 8MB in PHP’s configuration file. We recommend at least 16MB.
• Change the maximum uploaded file size in PHP’s configuration to at least 2MB.

Scripts

• Minify all JS and CSS
• Serve JS and CSS from separate sub-domains (i.e. css.yourhost.com and js.yourhost.com)

Plugin Execution Order

• Plugins are loaded in the order they appear on the plugin administration page. The theme plugin should be loaded near the bottom of the list, as it applies styles to other plugins.

Load Testing
The hu_skawa_genusers Elgg plugin can be used to simulate any number of concurrent users on an Elgg site. We recommend volume testing using this plugin in combination with http_load, or any other load testing tool.

Load Balancing
For large Elgg sites, it is critical to isolate the database(s) from the web server. In a load-balanced configuration (see typical example below) the web servers are horizontally scalable. The load balancing technology could be an appliance from a known vendor like Cisco, Big IP, etc or simply a Linux host implementing the Linux-HA project.

At the database layer the simplest solution is an active passive approach with enough hardware horsepower to handle the expected query load. Load and volume testing is required in order to determine that is needed in your own environment. Additionally, a true active/active database cluster could be implemented at a higher cost using a commercial clustering solution from MySQL.

elgg load balanced configuration

We’re ecstatic to announce the start of our very first pro bono project: a global social Intranet for our favorite non-profit organization, The Homeless World Cup. We’ll be using the popular open-source social platform, Elgg, to create a hybrid content management system/social network that will be used to connect the organization’s 70 global partners. The network will enable central communication and allow the organization to share best practices, files, photos and other media to help develop internal projects across the globe.

For those who are unfamiliar with the event, The Homeless World Cup is an annual, international football tournament, uniting teams of people who are homeless and excluded to take a once in a lifetime opportunity to represent their country and change their lives forever. It has triggered and supports grass roots football projects in over 70 nations working with over 30,000 homeless and excluded people throughout the year.

Arck provides a full-range of custom design and development services for Elgg and offer options for either hosting your social network with us, or on your own server. You can view a fill list of our Elgg services and case studies for social networks we’ve developed with Elgg on our web site.

Please register for a free account and play in our sandbox. If you have any questions, or feedback, click the little Feedback tab on the left side of the web page and we’ll get back to you soon!

By the way, kyoutsuu means community or commonality in Japanese.

That said, I’d like to share our latest Elgg development effort, a faculty network for John Wiley & Sons, that we developed in cooperation with Garfield Group Interactive.

The Wiley Faculty Network is a global community of faculty, connected by a passion for teaching and a drive to learn, share, and collaborate. Members connect to collaborate with colleagues, join professional and peer groups, find mentors, attend virtual and live events, and view a wealth of resources all designed to help them grow as educators.

Site functionality included: one-click login integration with Wiley’s existing faculty system ProfVal; role-based access with custom profiles; intelligent dashboard widgets that suggest content to users based on their professional and personal interests; a custom content management system plugin allowing Wiley to deliver context and discipline specific content to users; a complete events management system; custom file/resource (documents, videos, audio) sharing; granular analytics and reporting; blogs, user groups and forums.

You can read the complete case-study on the Arck Interactive site, here:

• http://www.arckinteractive.com/work/wiley-elgg-development/index.php.

The live Wiley Faculty Network web site is available here:

• http://wfn.wiley.com/home

Check out the page here: http://www.arckinteractive.com/services/elgg-development.php.

Kudos to the ElggExchange team!

On Tuesday 17th November I am going to be speaking at the Learn Trends Online Conference. My presentation is entitled Building a Social Learning Environment. Here's a sneak preview of what I#39;ll be saying ...

• I am going to talk about organisational concerns of using public social media tools for their social learning initiatives
• I am going to describe a solution to address these concerns: the open source social engine, Elgg
• I am going to explain how I've implemented my own social learning environment at SoLEARN
• I am going to feature two case studies of organisations I have worked with to implement an Elgg-powered social learning environment
• I am then going to finish by mentioning some of the lessons learned along the way
• Finally, there will be plenty of time for discussion around building a social learning environment

If you want to hear the presentation and be part of the discussion, you will need to sign up for Learn Trends http://www.arckinteractive.com/blog/2009/11/15/building-a-social-learning-environment-using-elgg/feed/ 0 http://www.arckinteractive.com/blog/2009/11/02/launched-enterprise-class-social-network-wiley-sons-publishing/ http://www.arckinteractive.com/blog/2009/11/02/launched-enterprise-class-social-network-wiley-sons-publishing/#comments Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:43:32 +0000 Paul http://arckinteractive.com/blog/?p=62

Working for Garfield Group Interactive over a period of 6 months, we developed a scalable social network based on Elgg. Functionality included: one-click login integration with Wiley’s existing faculty system ProfVal; role-based access with custom profiles; intelligent dashboard widgets that suggest content to users based on their professional and personal interests; a custom content management system plugin allowing Wiley to deliver context and discipline specific content to users; a complete events management system; custom file/resource (documents, videos, audio) sharing; granular analytics and reporting; blogs, user groups and forums.

Check out the case study here.