Checklist for webmasters in Pakistan after blocking of youtube.com

In th second week of September, 2012, PTA has blocked access to youtube.com in Pakistan by asking ISPs to block access to the website. It is not clear what procedure is adopted by the ISPs to block Youtube. I think all the ISPs in Pakistan have used their own policy and mechanism to block these services. This has resulted in different kind of blocked reports from different users. e.g many users were reporting that they were able to access the youtube through secure http protocol ( https ). At this time on 23rd September, youtube is not accessible through https on PTCL and others network. ( I can confirm 

The widely used Gmail services have not seen any services interruption yet. However, Google Maps, Google Drive and google plus have been inaccessible most of the times.

This is yet to ascertain how much loss has happened to Google and local business that are using Google services. May be we have some data in near future on this.

One of the services that is inaccessible is Google Analytics. Almost all of the websites embed a java script code that helps the Google analytics software to show website traffic analytics to website admins. The java script code used to be in the footer of the websites, but in the latest version of Google analytics the the recommended way to embed the code was in header. Also, the javascript file is accessed from web address apis.google.com.

As a website visitor when someone goes to the website the browser keep its status transferring until all the page content is loaded. As the Google analytics file is not loading on user's computer the browser keep showing the in-progress status. This means the page load time increases to more than 2 minutes in most of the cases. In addition to long page load times some of the java scripts does not get executed that are required for various interactions on the website.

So, in order to keep the website functional the webmaster need to remove the Google analytics javascript, Google Plus javascript file and any other files that are not being loading at this time.

I have studied various files in BrightSpyre.com that are being loaded from Google servers. We have commented out Google analytics code and now the page load time has come back to normal. Also in some pages jquery code was not executing and that pages have started working smoothly.

We still running Google adsense and Google ads managment software on BrightSpyre.com. However, both of these services use a different web address ( googleadservices.com and googlesyndication.com, googleapis.com) and run smoothly without any page blocking.

Do We Vote Map- Elections Mapping in Pakistan

Cross posting from my blog post at www.pakreport.org/dowevote blog

Higher turnout makes the democratic governments more strong, and at the same time makes Governments more accountable to the people of the country.

In any democratic system voters Turnout is the most common and probably most important component of the individual’s participation in the Political process. Economic, demographic, cultural, natural, technological and institutional factors effect the voters turnout in a country. However, one agreeable fact is that higher voters turnouts provide legitimacy to the elections and Governments

In recent Egypt elections more more than 70% of the voters participated in the first and second stage of the elections. That shows the will of the people to drive change in the country. Today, Pakistan is at a very crucial stage in its very short democratic life span. History has shown that most of the people in Pakistan do not take part in the elections; showing their lack of belief in the change through electoral process. In Pakistan, the highest voters turnout(55%) was observed in 1955 elections.

As maps with the interactive statistics are the right tools to tell story on the Internet today, our team compiled 2008 National assembly data and created the interactive chart to show how many percent of voters take part in elections in 2008 and launched http://www.pakreport.org/dowevote. You can zoom the map to the district level to see how many of us take part in the electoral process from each part of Pakistan.

The map shows the parts of the country where voters turnout ranges from 12.8% (Bajur Agency) to 67.33% (Bhakkar) percent.

Our efforts are to demonstrate that low voters participation is not a path forward to change in our country. Higher participation of the common people in the elections and steps of the Government to make voting easy for every one are the key factors to sustain democracy in Pakistan. DoWeVote map is first effort and we need your involvement and feedback to take this step forward.

We hope we will see more active participation from people of Pakistan in electoral process and higher voter turnouts in next elections!

Unemployment,poverty and opportunities in digital economy

When we talk about available work opportunities in developing countries like Pakistan, we often describe developing world as a land where we have poverty of opportunities. 

The current un-employment rate stands at 5.5 ( ministry of labour stats)  and government seemes quite happy with these numbers while comparing these rates with other south Asian  countries.  However, people living under poverty line shows a very high number. Every 1 of 6th Pakistani (17.2 % population) lives below poverty line. 

There are many ways the governments and regimes think about reducing un-employment rates, but one of the real opportunity to reduce un-employment is through the opportunity of global digital economy. 

There are few important questions that need to be answered and will be explained in detail

1. How to come out of poverty of opportunities; when we have huge opportunities available in the digital economy.

2. How to overcome the skills gap.

3. More importantly, how to mentally prepare a large number of young people to access  and benefit from the employment opportunities in the digital economy?

Job Descriptions- Skills or Personality

Boston Hiring Blog that covers all about Hiring in Boston has discussed in a post that hiring for personality is way more important to sustained employment than skills-based hiring. 

This makes perfect sense for job descriptions to be

• First explain about your company,values and culture. Treat it as a "Personality of your company"
• Mention the qualities that you want to have before skills
• Then continue towards the skill sections.

Who is writing job descriptions in your organization ?

Do the people who are writing job descriptions in your organization, follow these guidelines.

1. The job description is a text required to fill in the job advertisements space.
2. Job description is a set of few requirements prepared by HR to just fill a vacant position.
3. Job descriptions are what written by the manager, given to the HR department, who modifies them and publish them.
4. Job descriptions does include some (25%) of the stuff that employees perform in 40 hours of the week's time.
5. The job descriptions are to let candidates know, what are the requirements of the position we wanted to fill in.
6. The job descriptions go in the offer letter and then you bury them. Those are never discussed later, during the employment period and during performance appraisals.

If this is what happening in your organization then you are at serious risk.

Here are a few rules to fix this mess

1. The core of the job descriptions of the key positions in the organizations need to be written by higher Management.

2. Most of the job descriptions need to need to be written by Respective Managers, HR, the staff who is already working in the organization. However, these job descriptions must be simply validated by some of the senior people in the organizations. Whenever, higher management is going to run diagnostic check, they will start from the job descriptions of the people. So, it is better to spend time on the job descriptions early than late, when you are in big troubles.

One of the organization's, I worked with, wanted to achieve a specific (Security) certification in the next coming year. But, surprisingly they never mentioned it when they were hiring people, never mentioned it in openly, never discussed it in performance appraisals, and management was still thinking they will be able to achieve it.

Another, on-line web company's success was dependent on the user experience of their Product. They never mentioned it in the job descriptions of the development managers, project managers, programmers and other staff. Still, they were put a high number for users acquisition in their plans.

what happened in above cases. Organizations did not achieved their goals. Who is responsible and who should fix it. The answer higher management, managers, HR, people already working all should contribute to job descriptions.

Following is the detail who should contribute.

3. What each one in the team contributes.

- Higher management makes sure that the job descriptions are aligned with the core values, competencies of the organization.They should make sure what are the competencies required to achieve their current year plan. make sure those skills and competencies are in the job descriptions, if you want to achieve them.
- Managers should make sure that they include 99% of the work in needed to be one in the job description. It should put emphasis on the 20% of the core work that generates 80% of the output in the organization. Managers should never miss the core work that the employees need to put in, to stop bad hires in the team.
- HR make sure that the job descriptions are complete enough to pursue right candidates and retain them. HR should make sure, Job descriptions are presentable,so that best candidates get attracted towards the organization.
- People who are already working in the organization will put the nifty,gritty details in the job descriptions. Ask from them what need to be improved in terms of the core skills. Involving them will reduce the rick to ignore any skill in the job description, that is absolutely essential for you current and future plans.


Once, you have involved all the key people in writing and validating the right job descriptions, your first step to hiring great people in your organization is on your way..

New serices of posts. Path to Successful Organizations

I am starting to write a series of posts to improve an organization's fundamental strengths. Almost every organization try to do it best with its resources, but fixing the fundamentals early, asap is one of the important step.

The organization in my mind are the startups, counting companies like google as startup, keeping in mind that any organization that wanted to succeed need to be working in a startup style with a quick agile delivery model

The first few topics are improving the core strength i.e. people. From hiring people to getting people deliver up to the expectations.

TED fellows program magic explained in 6 minutes.

Esther K. Chae, Juliana Machado Ferreira , Kyra Gaunt, Sheila Ochugboju , Taghi Amirani, Yatin Sethi, 6 of the 40 TED 2009 fellows, explaining the magic of TED Fellows Program in 6 minutes.

This short video conveys the intense, potentially life-changing experience of becoming a TED Fellow, through interviews with some of the TED2009 Long Beach Fellows and with TED's Community Director, Tom Rielly.
For more information about how individuals may apply for a TEDIndia Fellowship, please visit http://www.ted.com/fellows/apply. TED Fellows may apply or be nominated by another individual. To nominate a candidate, email the full name of the candidate and their contact information to fellows@ted.com.

Last date to apply for TED Fellowship is 15th June,2009.