Benefits and Examples of Sharing Folder Ownership
After you create a new folder you have the option to add other owners to the folder beside yourself. This can be helpful when you might have the initial idea for something but feel others in your network might be more appropriate to generally manage the folder and any content, including who else from your network should be involved.
Some examples of where having multiple folder owners can be helpful:
Initial Setup
If you’re the one initially setting up the network, to help get things started, you’ll probably go ahead and create a dozen folders or so, with appropriate sub-folders, but add others as owners if they’re more directly involved. This could mean just adding the one other person to the folder as an owner, and letting them add others from your network as needed. After you’ve made them an owner, as you yourself are still an owner as well, to hand over full responsibility of the folder, you can change your permissions to an Editor or a Reader.
Project Management
If setting up for a larger project, add sub-folders for the larger sections and add the person that’s the most appropriate or involved, as an owner, or co-owner, for each folder or section. They can take it from there and add others to the folder that they feel are needed for the project.
Freelancing Collaboration
If sharing your network with other freelancers, you can create an initial folder for each of them, or their main activities, and make them the owner to more fully develop the project or activity, including sharing with others whose expertise may be needed.
Sharing Hobbies
If using with a personal network, you can create a folder called Hobbies along with the relevant dozen or so that are most popular with your group. This could be for seasonal, such as summer or winter, or other ongoing interests such as with reading books, playing music, cooking or other creative activities. As you’re probably not the expert for every one of these, add the person that generally is the expert as the owner, they can best decide who else in your network is interested in that hobby.
How to Add Multiple Owners
After you create a folder, click the “Add Owner” link in the folder summary, as shown below:
Or, if you’ve already added the person to the folder as an Editor or Reader, click their name followed by clicking Edit to change to Owner permissions.
A helpful feature for getting things started with others in your network, let us know in the Help Desk if you have any questions or need assistance with getting started.
Matt | Posted on | May 17, 2012 | No Comments
Freelancing Continues Growth, Picking Up Speed, is it Nature, Nurture or Both?
The world of freelancing seems just keep on expanding, some recent articles highlighting the trend:
- Global Online Employment Report, Q1 2012, Elance: General growth across the board, QoQ growth showed Creative skills at 32%, Marketing at 22%, Operations at 22% and IT at 14%, with many specific skill sets ranging from +40% all the way up to 101% (in Creative, Web Design).
- ‘Gigging’ in the New Economy: Is it for You?, Fox Business: Addressing a younger audience, pointing out that 83% of those under 30 see freelancing as a cornerstone to their career strategy.
- The Virtual CFO, Business Today: How the freelance CFO concept is taking off in India, helping new and small businesses better understand new complexities they may find themselves in.
- The Gig Economy’s Answer to the European Debacle, Forbes: As freelancing is growing everywhere else, areas in Europe are no exception.
Yeah, for a whole host of reasons, freelancing is finding to be an appropriate endeavor in all kinds of situations. Whether from just graduating and looking to get your feet wet, get busy with something, or those with more experience but looking for a change and a more independent lifestyle, or others becoming a little bit more of an expert in a few of their creative hobbies and bringing it to the next level. Either of those and many others, the end result being it seems almost everyone you talk to, ok maybe 50% but that’s still a lot, is either already involved or at least has been thinking about it. This could start from hearing someone else doing it, then another, and another, and finally maybe starting to do a little research of their own, look at possible options. Just from going through that exercise, can make you aware of doors that you just hadn’t thought about before. From there could be more questions, more research and next thing you know it’s no longer such a strange idea and you have a somewhat balanced view of what you’re getting into, both positives and negatives.
Maybe similar to a bird hanging out in its’ nest, seeing all these other birds flying around all over the place, peering over the edge of the nest, looking down and gets nervous, crawls back in, sees more birds flying around, tries it again, and so on until it eventually makes the jump, crazily flaps it wings in any and all directions and if not immediately learning how to fly on the first try, at least slows down the descent, not so hard of a crash landing, making it maybe a little easier to try again. Starting from the ground, as not so far to fall, less fear and before you know it, we have lift-off.
Sure, you could say it’s not so similar, it’s completely natural for birds to fly, they even have wings for it. Well, while one could say that birds have more developed characteristics to fly, those wings (we can still jump however), humans maybe have more developed brains, used for things such as ideas or imagination, capacity for learning or something similar. And with learning, as one learns the most through failure (another unfortunate irony…), it’s probably hard to argue that you could find an activity more ripe for failure/learning than with freelancing.
Nevertheless, as most freelancers find themselves wearing hats of creative, finance, marketing and a hundred other varieties, it’s definitely never what you could call a boring experience and with trying to do so many things at once, it’s no surprise that there isn’t more failures than successes. That said, hopefully learning how to flap the right way will have been done enough times, so at least if not instantly airborne, the landing was eased and ready to try it again, 
.
What do you think, freelancing, nature vs nurture, intuitive vs environment or perhaps a bit of both?
Matt | Posted on | May 16, 2012 | No Comments
How Associations can Benefit from Using a Private Network
A private network can be a useful collaboration tool for associations, from starting off with a group that already is established, you can tailor the network just for you and your group.
Here are 20 benefits you can get from having your own private network:
1. New Members: Have different types of reference information available.
2. Sharing Meeting Minutes: Store in notes, helpful for occasional reference or for 
those unable to attend. Others can add a comment for additional feedback.
3. Plan a Party: Schedule an event, add a note of details, share photos afterwards.
4. Stay Informed: Add blogs or news feeds from the area or others complimentary to your association.
5. Create Sub-Groups: For any activities where everyone in the association isn’t involved, you can create a new folder to only share with whom you feel is appropriate.
6. Maintenance Activities: Add reminders in events or a note for seasonal maintenance duties that should be done.
7. Change Owners of Folders: If management positions rotate year after year, change the owner the folder to reflect the new responsibility.
8. Getting Focus: No ads or other distractions, 
just content focused for your association.
9. Tailor Your Network: Add your own network name, sub-domain and folders customized for your group.
10. Plan a Trip: Create a new folder for the idea of the trip, add a note of the general plan, send it with an email notification to others for confirmation, add any appropriate actions, websites and blogs for reference, and finally schedule an event with an email alert for a little extra preparation. Others can give feedback in comments and you can share photos with others in documents.
11. Add a Professional Folder: For reference, you can add a new folder, call it Professional, where members can add any websites or blogs that they’re more professional involved with.
12. Get Efficient Responses: Anytime you send an email notification, recipients can respond either clicking the link to your network, or by simply clicking Reply from their email provider. From here they can send a response directly to you or include others the email was originally sent to.
13. Scale as Needed: Use different plans to best fit for the size and activity of your group.
14. Projects: Use actions to organize a group project, assign priority, an owner, status and when due. Filter and sorting options are available for further organization.
15. A Secure Network: All the content in your network is password protected and under HTTPS security standards, helping to make sure your private network stays private.
16. Schedule Key Events: Whether monthly, quarterly or annual, add important events or dates into the events application, include an email alert for a little extra notice.
17. Get Quality Support: As you’re the customer, we’re here to support you and your network, whether for questions just getting started or suggestions for new features. There is a Help Desk available to ask a question, track the support ticket and receive an email notification as soon as updated, no later than 24 hours.
18. Store Additional Contact Information: People from your network can add additional contact information in case of an emergency, besides email, can add phone number and location.
19. Operational: Store websites or other external resources that your association uses from time to time. As it’s a secure network, also use as a backup for different types of files.
20. Own Your Content: No worries of any of your content being used for anything but the purposes of your association, helping to make it a more comfortable environment to collaborate with others.
Need more? Visit the solutions page for associations or try it out for yourself and see what you can come up with. Start with the free Spark plan to share with five people. If you like it, affordable plans are available to upgrade to and feel free to ask us a question if you need help getting started.
Matt | Posted on | May 15, 2012 | No Comments
Paint it Black: New Website Background and Other Tweaks
In response to some helpful feedback over the last week, more tweaks and changes have been made, including for the Odysen website, the initial login and sharing your network with others. Here’s a brief overview of changes made:
New Website Background
Nothing like adding a little contrast to better highlight or give something a little extra focus. For what it’s worth, you’ll now see a black background throughout the external website pages (ie, this blog). This is especially helpful as most of the website is fairly straightforward, with descriptions of the features, examples and just a few extra graphics and colors for minor enhancements. With the black background, the subtleness of the minimalistic style comes through a little bit more, but never too much or too overpowering.
Sections Highlighted
These are the section headers such as Tour, Plans, Solutions, Blog, Support and Login at the top of the page. Made a little more prominent with a single line underneath, versus the previous large blue bar going across the page.
Tagline Tweak
This is going from “Simple to Create, Easy to Share” to “Secure Private Networks” to now “Hassle Free Networks”. You could say transitioning from at first being too soft, too generic, to next being too hard, too corporate to hopefully now being just right, appropriate for people looking for a simple network for communication and collaboration.
Initial Sign-Up
This includes both moving the “Get Started Today” button to above the rest of the page as well as the actual signup page, now including a brief description of the free Spark network. Helpful for people seeing the page for the first time, give a better idea of what’s included.
Login for New Users
When you add others to your network and send them an email notification about a new folder or application item, when they get to the login page, there is now a very clear notification for first time visitors, for setting up their initial login name and password.
Or, people can always just click the Forgot Password link and enter their email address to get a reset.
That’s it for the changes update. While change can always be difficult as it’s sort of also implying that something before (that you thought was a good idea at some time or another), maybe now isn’t so much. But, after you swallow a bit of that pride, washed down with new awareness, you’re usually grateful you did and ready to share the new meal or creation with others. See if it tastes as good for them as you thought it did for you.
With that, what do you think, like the changes, maybe outstanding, great, good, ok, bad, or simply another step for some type of ongoing work in progress?
Matt | Posted on | May 14, 2012 | No Comments
Tags: Adding Users > Ease of Use > Minimalistic > Sharing with Others
Five Benefits of Keeping Things Simple
One of the overriding themes of an Odysen network is the ongoing focus and understanding of making things simplified. While seemingly obvious, most of the time easier said than done.
It usually starts off as something very complex trying to tie so many things together, then after much polish, reviews, more polish, re-arrangements, tweaks, always making easier to use while at the same time trying to continually add new features and more complexity. That said, there’s reasons that it always makes sense and is something to strive for, here’s a few:
1. Move Faster
If things are simplified, you can move forward more quickly. On your network, this is spending more time creating and sharing your content, less with trying to organize or manage your content.
2. Less Distractions
Distractions can be like unwanted detours when trying to get something done. Some are a needed pit or rest stop, most are not. With your own network, you can make sure distractions are kept to a minimum and focus is on the present.
3. Easy to Share with Others
Having things simplified makes it easier for others to understand, and likewise for them to pass it on as appropriate, some could call it the 100 monkey rule. Whether true or not, it seems to make sense and as with many other philosophical/psychological teachings or examples, just because they may seem old or primitive, doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Aesop’s Fables could be another example of the impact of making things simplified.
4. Easier to Believe
Or accept, whatever you wish to call it. If things are simple, from being easier to understand, can accept it and move on. If too complex, the process itself will be the hurdle, not any actual problem or project being worked on. Similar maybe to cruising down a road and all of a suddenly reaching a crossroads of a dozen different directions, good luck.
5. Better for Interactions
If simplified, you don’t feel like an idiot for every question as the questions can be very focused. This versus something more complex, the difference can be too great and you don’t where to begin.
Yeah, keeping things simple is definitely the way to go if you can pull it off. What do you think, other benefits and advantages from going the simplified route?
Matt | Posted on | May 11, 2012 | No Comments
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