Vancouver writer Jonathon Narvey
interviewed Raincity’s CEO, Robert Scales and President Kris Krug, and
chatted with some of the Raincity Studios crew, for an article in Business in Vancouver magazine.
He discussed the Raincity Shanghai office including the work/lifestyle, communication processes, team building across oceans and technical challenges and advantages of working with a very multi-cultural team.
Having attended open source software and blogger symposiums in Beijing
and Shanghai, Krug has seen China’s Web 2.0 dynamism up close. With a
team of 13 employees in Shanghai, mostly open-source online publishing
software developers, and their CEO Robert Scales, Raincity now has an
established beachhead in the country.
The article also explored the size of the Internet market in China and the rise of open source software and inpact on innovation.
“Web 2.0 is exploding in China,” said Raincity Studios president Kris
Krug. “The Chinese are totally wired, totally online, using web phones
and all the mobile technology we use here.“There’s a growing middle class wanting to use all these open-source
tools, in part because that means they don’t have to worry about using
proprietary software and pay licensing fees to western companies.”
He also dug deep into the personal expression issues around the Beijing Olympics – a topic we’ve discussed a lot recently in the China, Social Media, Olympics, etc. series and Scales’ article at Now Public.
“Last time I was in Shanghai, the Chinese government announced they
had just hired 100,000 new cyber-police,” Krug said. “That’s on top of
however many they had to begin with.”{snip}
Krug has also learned how easy it can be to run afoul of vigilant Chinese cyber-regulators.
“We were running a bar camp (an informal Web 2.0 drupal tutorial
seminar), and our wiki was totally open. Anyone could register and
write on it.“Within a couple of days, we received a letter [stating] that we had
to change our site in accordance with the rules in China. Users had to
be pre-approved, content had to be moderated and we had to make changes
on the website. We scrambled to make the changes in 24 hours.”
Mr. Narvey also checked in with Olympic pundit Maurice Cardinal of OlyBlog.com for his opinion about the regulations of athletes telling their personal stories online.
But the flip side for all these Chinese Web 2.0 enthusiasts is how
online communities and new media will be allowed to operate when it
comes to the Beijing Olympic Games.
This is a topic i’ve watched closey (see: Blogging, Athletes and web sites – to be continued … and listen to Olympic Outsider Podcast #3 – Coffee talk with Gold Medalist Ross Rebagliati) and I am curious to see where the line between personal and professional is drawn.
The article is available at: “Internet technology to grapple with the Great Firewall of China – Beijing Olympic Games will test the host country’s ability to control information gathering and distribution.” We invite your comments about Narvey’s area of research and findings.
Hat tip: thanks to Jordan Behan for the paper copy.
