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Was yesterday’s PuneTech article inappropriate?

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Yesterday, on the occasion of Persistent Systems‘ IPO, we ran an unabashedly positive post about Persistent and Anand Deshpande’s contributions to the Pune technology community. This resulted in some eyebrows raised about the appropriateness of the article. There were two concerns:

  • The timing of the article, while an IPO is in progress, could be inappropriate
  • Writing such a positive article about an important/influential personality (especially when we don’t have a history of writing similar articles about other people) might result in a perception that we were trying to suck up.

After asking a few of our friends, we realized that enough people had similar concerns, and we decided that the issue needs to be discussed openly in the interest of transparency.

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At the outset, we’d like to make clear that nobody connected to PuneTech has any direct or indirect financial interest, nor any other kind of vested interest in Persistent or its IPO. None of us has any shares/stocks of Persistent, nor do we have any financial dealings of any kind with Persistent. In line with our stated editorial policy, PuneTech never takes any compensation, monetary or otherwise, for any content on PuneTech.

Still, in discussion with our friends, a number of issues of credibility, objectivity, neutrality, and perception management were raised. (Regular PuneTech readers will remember a similar discussion that happened in response to another such positive post from us.) We have listed below some of the issues that were pointed out to us, followed by our current thinking on each.

  • “Is PuneTech more like a newspaper or is it more like a blog? Deciding that will drive some of these decisions.” Our view: We don’t necessarily want to label PuneTech as one or the other. It is what it is. But, as is clearly stated in the PuneTech editorial policy, we are not ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’. PuneTech articles will reflect the opinions of the authors, and the selection of what topics and articles to publish reflects our editorial judgement.
  • “PuneTech is a blog. It will have opinions. It is not possible to be objective. Why do you care what other people think?” Our view: Although we feel that we are entitled to our opinions, and our opinions have value, we would like to ensure that our readers do not question our motives. We will lose a lot of credibility and readership if people feel that some of our posts are motivated by vested interests. The fact that we publish our editorial policy, our comments policy, posts like these, and we welcome comments that disagree with our views are attempts at bringing some transparency to this process.
  • “PuneTech should reflect the true opinions of the authors – that is in fact one of the reasons why readers read PuneTech. Once you start censoring your opinions by worrying about ‘What will others think’, PuneTech will become bland, and lose a lot of its value.” Our view: we completelly agree with this.
  • “Since PuneTech comes across as largely neutral in most articles, the occasional article that is highly opinionated does result in some raised eyebrows.” Our view: Agreed. At this stage, we think we would rather risk a few raised eyebrows once in a while, than to ‘neutralize’ all our articles.
  • “The timing is suspect. With an IPO in progress, such a one-dimensionally postitive article might be seen as an attempt to curry favor with Persistent or Anand by offering a positive public opinion when it was really needed.” Our view: We stand by the opinions expressed in the article, but we concede that our timing could have been inappropriate. But since this kind of a situation is not likely to recur anytime soon, we are not going to worry too much about trying to formulate a PuneTech policy to govern such things. But we’ll try to be careful in the future.
  • “Why only Anand Deshpande? Would have been much better to have a series of articles on all the people who’ve benefitted the tech community in Pune.” Our view: We think this is a great idea, and we’ll try to do that. However, please note that we’re severely limited in the amount of time we can spend on writing PuneTech articles. PuneTech is neither the primary, nor the secondary activity for any of us, so it might be a while before these articles appear. Please bear with us. Anybody willing to help us out by writing any such article please get in touch with us.

In conclusion, we will continue to write opinionated articles, and every once in a while we will have an article where we are being very positive about some person, or initiative, or company. We ask of our readers that if you ever feel unsure of our motives, please let us know either publicly in the comments, or privately via email (punetech@punetech.com). We’ll start worrying when this happens to often.

If you have strong opinions about this topic, please let us and other PuneTech readers know in the comments. Thanks.

Editorial Policy

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PuneTech is a for-the-community, non-commercial site, with an intention to keep technology professionals in Pune informed of interesting technologies, events, companies, user groups, organizations, mailing lists, and people in, or related to Pune. A lot of the content that is put up on PuneTech actually comes from other sources, and is often a cut-n-paste job, if not a direct copy (with permission). Thus, a lot of the value that PuneTech provides is in the selection of the content, and the editorial opinions and biases that we introduce in the process.

This note lays out our editorial policy to help the community understand what goes up on the site, and why:

  • PuneTech does not accept any payments or favors (monetary or otherwise) from any body, for any reason. All content on PuneTech is there because we feel that it needs to be there, and is in keeping with the purpose and the spirit of the site.
  • PuneTech strives hard to be free of vested interests. With precisely that in mind, right from the first day, we’ve always made it clear that PuneTech is not monetized in any way, and it does not provide any direct revenues, or indeed any direct monetary benefit to anybody associated with PuneTech. (For example, we don’t promote our own companies, and before promoting, or featuring our friends or their companies, we try very hard to ensure that we use the same criteria for judging them as we use for everybody else. And thankfully, our friends all respect this fact.)
  • However, PuneTech is not objective. We believe in evaluating the world around us and making our opinions known. We strongly believe that our opinions have value, and that our readers value our opinions. All PuneTech posts will always reflect the opinions of the authors (at least those opinions that we feel are worth publicizing to the rest of the world).
  • PuneTech often has posts that promote a certain company, event or person. In fact, it can be argued that all the posts on PuneTech are promoting something or someone. When we write about a company, we are essentially promoting it, and implicitly saying that the company is good enough to feature on PuneTech. When we write about an upcoming event, we are promoting the event, and essentially saying that we feel this event will be good, and worth attending. When we interview a person, or otherwise write about him/her, we are promoting that person, and saying here is a person that you should know.
  • We welcome and encourage opposing points of view in the comments. We usually approve all such comments, as long as they are in keeping with the PuneTech comments policy. Occasionally, we do delete comments that violate our policy, so please read the comments policy carefully to get an idea of what is not allowed.

Note: the PuneTech wiki is an open wiki that anybody can add to, and edit. Any content that anybody puts up there will usually be left there, as long as it is relevant to Pune, and relevant to technology, and is not illegal in some way. Note, however, that we, or someone else, might edit the content to make it more useful and usable.

In contrast, all content goes up on the the PuneTech blog (i.e. content which goes up on the front page, and to all PuneTech subscribers) is controlled by the PuneTech editor (currently Navin Kabra, with help from Amit Paranjape, and also some other friends of PuneTech). These are the rough guidelines currently used in determining what is appropriate for the front page:

  • Company profiles for interesting companies. Service companies are boring – unless the service happens to be something unique. Product companies are more interesting, especially if the product is technologically interesting, or has some aspect that is innovative. Or the product or service is itself useful for the tech community Pune.
  • Interviews of interesting tech people. Guidelines here are similar to that for company profiles – the person must be working on something that is technologically interesting, or innovative, or unique in some way, or useful to the tech community in Pune.
  • Events: The event must be in Pune,  and should be related to technology. By and large, we try to focus on events that are free, or have a nominal fee. In general, we will not feature commercial events (i.e. those which have a hefty registration fee), unless we feel that the content is especially interesting, and the price especially reasonable. We usually don’t feature information about paid training programs. These days, there are so many tech events in Pune, that we have started being selective about featuring only the more interesting events on our front page – all other events that fit our criteria are posted on the PuneTech calendar.  Note: the PuneTech calendar, like the PuneTech wiki, is a by-the-community calendar. Anyone is free to add events to the calendar.
  • PuneTech does not post job requirements. We are constantly asked about unpaid or paid job postings, but we feel that having job postings on PuneTech would distract from the primary purpose of the site. Note, however: if somebody writes a long, detailed and interesting article for PuneTech about the technology domain that their company is working in, one that would be of wider general interest to the readers of PuneTech, then, at the end of the article, we allow a short pitch about the company, and that can include a description of the kind of people they’re looking to hire. We feel that is a fair trade-off.

A few things to note:

  • These editorial guidelines have evolved over time, and will continue to evolve. Thus, it is possible that some article that featured on the PuneTech front page in the page violates one of these guidelines. The most likely reason would be that that guideline did not exist a the time the article was posted.
  • It is also possible that we make mistakes and violate our own guidelines. When you feel that such a mistake has happened, please point it out to us publicly (as a comment on the post). That will give us a chance to explain our choice to you and to everyone else, or to apologize, and learn from the mistakes.
  • If you can think of additions/modifications to the guidelines, please let us know.

PuneTech Comment Policy

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PuneTech is a for-the-community, by-the-community site, and comments by our readers play an important part of the content. However, to ensure that the discussion always stays healthy, constructive and safe, we occasionally have to delete some of the comments. This note lays out our comments policy to help the community understand what kinds of comments we delete, and why.

PuneTech comment policy – Short version

  if (the comment is not relevant to the article)
     We will delete it;
       /* take your irrelevant rambling elsewhere */

  else if (the comment is a personal attack)
     we will delete it;
       /* rude people not welcome here */

  else if (the comment has abusive language)
     we will delete it;
       /* we are trying to have a civil discussion here */

  else if (the comment exposes PuneTech to legal liability)
     we will delete it;
       /* we don't want to get sued
          that distracts from the purpose of this website
          more details below */

  else
     your comment is welcome;

In select cases, we might allow a comment in spite of violating one of the above rules, if it has other redeeming qualities. Also, if we delete a comment, and you really, really want your voice heard, we suggest a workaround that will allow the world to still see the comment.

PuneTech comment policy – Long version

Relevance

Our primary objective is to provide PuneTech readers with focused, relevant articles and discussions. Anything that distracts from this reduces the value of PuneTech for our readers. Hence, any comment that has nothing to do with the article (and trust me, we get a bunch of these), will be deleted (unless we find it very interesting in its own right). If you want a job, please post your resume on naukri.com – don’t post a comment here. If you find yourself compelled to beg for jobs on PuneTech, seriously consider changing careers.

Personal Attacks

We are trying to build a community here, not poison it. Something about the internet makes people more rude than they would be in real life. Please resist the temptation. We love a good argument, we are after all argumentative Indians. But please argue the issues. You might be surprised to discover that it can be done without attacking the character of the other person.

Abusive Language

If it is worth saying, it can be said in polite language. If you have abusive language in a boring comment, we’ll delete it. If you have abusive language in an interesting comment, we will, at our discretion, remove the offending words, or sentences. If you don’t want your comment mangled like this by us, use polite language.

Defamation

PuneTech is a non-commercial website that is run by us on a part-time basis. We make no money from PuneTech. Which means that we have neither the time, nor the money to get involved in legal issues. We cannot afford to retain lawyers to get accurate legal advice. In the absense of that, we have to make a guess based on our understanding of the law. And anything that we think exposes us to legal liability, will be deleted.

Here is our limited understanding of the law:

If something can hurt the reputation of another person or company, legally, we can publish it if and only if it is true.  This is tricky because we need to be sure of the truth before we feel safe. Just because it is on wikipedia, does not make it true. Just because Times of India published it, does not make it necessarily true. And we can be sued even if we are simply relaying info published by someone else.

Even if the damaging statements are contained in a comment made by a third-party commenter (i.e. somebody other than us) we are still obligated to remove the comment. Otherwise PuneTech can be held liable.

So it boils down to this: if we cannot verify the truth of a damaging claim in a comment, we will delete the comment.

Please note, just because it is true, does not necessarily mean that we will allow a comment. The earlier filters of relevance, rudeness, etc. still apply. If we are unsure about the “public good” of a true but damaging statement, we will delete the comment.

Other Objectionable Content

Other reasons why comments might fall afoul of the laws are: obscenity; hurting religious sentiments; promoting violence; against security of the state; or infringing of someone’s right to privacy. In most cases, these will get deleted for violating one of our earlier policies (e.g. irrelevance, personal attack, etc.) . In the rare case that the comment somehow manages to not violate any of the earlier policies, it can still get deleted for being against the law.

Workaround

When we delete one of your comments, we are not really preventing you from expressing yourself. Please feel free to go ahead and post it on your own blog. If for some reason, you are ashamed of putting your own comment on your own blog, go ahead and create a brand new blog on blogger.com just for holding this one comment. It’s easy, it’s free, and anybody can do it. Then post a link in the comments on PuneTech. If it is relevant to the post, we’ll probably allow the link to remain.

Suggestions

If you have any feedback for us, please leave a comment below, or send us an email. The comment is subject to the same policies (ha! ha!) unless we decide to change the policy based on your suggestion. In any case, we promise to read everything, even if we delete it.

Moderation

Comments on PuneTech are moderated. Which means that one of us might have to take a look and approve the comment before it appears on the site. Sometimes, it takes us a while to get around to doing this. Please be patient. Don’t post the comment multiple times. If you are unsure of whether your comment has reached our moderation queue, send us an email.

Further Reading

What I’ve learned from Hacker News by Paul Graham. A good introduction to the issues to be considered when deciding why and how to moderate comments on a site.

Free to blog but accountable you are. The Supreme Court of India weighs in on blogging and online expression. – Dhananjay Nene

Of blogs, bloggers and freedom of expression – Mutiny.in

Bloggers Legal Guide from EFF – Note this applies to US law, but still worth reading, as it does a great job of explaining the issues.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Dhananjay Nene, Rohit Srivastwa, Amit Kumar Singh, Unmesh Mayekar, Manas Garg, Rohas Nagpal, and Debasis Nayak for discussions that helped us clarify our thinking and craft this policy. Note: this comment policy does not necessarily reflect the views of these people – it is just that they helped us while we were struggling to figure out what the comment policy should be.

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Company Profile: Amberpoint

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Company profile of AmberPoint from the Punetech wiki

AmberPoint is a provider of middleware for governing the runtime of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) applications. Utilizing a policy-based approach to managing the health and well-being of SOA-based applications, AmberPoint’s software offers comprehensive capabilities for visibility into and control of loosely coupled systems.

Contents

[edit] Main Features

[edit] Application Discovery

Automatically figure out what all SOA applications exist in an environment and determine their capabilities. Upload this information to a central repository. Keep the repository updated as applications come and go and their capabilities change. Track dependencies between various applications.

Knowing what applications are deployed, and the dependencies between them is the first step towards managing the applications properly.

[edit] Policies

Once applications have been discovered and cataloged AmberPoint allows administrators to specify policies which need to be enforced against the applications. And enforce them. Also, architects can define approved policies and make them available to their SOA developers. Developers can select the policies they need to implement and attach them to their services on the fly, without any additional coding effort.

[edit] Monitoring

Reports: Monitor the various components of the SOA in real time. Produce reports about things like: throughput, availability, response times, and errors/faults. This is achieved without requiring any modifications to existing services (no code changes), or any extra development time. And with low overhead.

Composite service monitoring: In addition to monitoring a single component, you also want to be able to monitor the same parameters for a composite service created using these components.

SLAs: The ultimate aim of this monitoring is to ensure that Service Level Agreements are being met.

Visualization: Show pretty pictures to get an idea of who is using what. And how much. And the dependencies between various components. And the flow of data.

Early warnings: Based on information about the existing SLAs and how the applications are composed of sub-components, it is possible to figure out which SLAs are likely to get violated based on the predicted trends for some of the low-level measurements taken at one or more of the components. This can help in catching problems before they become problems. Also, using the same basic information, traffic spikes can be prevented by throttling can be applied at the appropriate places at the apropriate times.

[edit] Exception Handling and Root Cause Analysis

Provide an integrated view of message flows that occur across the various components of the system. Thus allow a single interface where administrators can search for errors/issues by message type, content, client credentials, and even tie the low level messages to higher-level business transactions. This eliminates the need to manually piece together a message flow by searching multiple log files.

Also, allow for rule-based routing of exceptions to various exception handlers. It integrates with existing exception-handling resources such as in-house exception-management frameworks as well as exception-handling workflows and process-management systems.

[edit] Testing

When one component changes, it is possible that the composite service might break. And testing for this is difficult because of the distributedness and loose-coupling that is inherent in a service oriented architecture. Using AmberPoint, administrators can automatically verify the performance and functionality of a changed service against applications that consume it and the services on which it is dependent. Additionally, they can perform “what-if” runs to see the potential impact of management policies (especially security) as they change within the runtime environment. AmberPoint also allows simulation of services for testing purposes using actual production traffic and realistic performance characteristics.

[edit] Regulatory Compliance

AmberPoint provides pieces needed for complying with regulations in the financial industry, health industry, credit card industry and the SOX regulations. Examples include multi-factor authentication, role based access control, etc..

Website: http://www.amberpoint.com/

(Editor’s note: Occassionally I will be posting such quick’n’dirty profiles of Pune-based companies. These will essentially be information collected from the company website. This is not intended to be an in-depth look at the technology. It is more directed towards people how might not know about the existence of the company, or not know what it does.)