Underemployment opens the floodgates on spare time. Free from the crush of the daily grind, muscians jam, athletes kick balls and bloggers hit their keyboards. But when Roland Tanglao found himself out of work, he never thought his blogging habit would land him his next paid gig.


“When people don’t have jobs and they’re tinkerers —- which most hackers and technical people are —- they start tinkering,” he says. “After I was laid off in 2001, I blogged.”


Tanglao, a Nortel Networks developer through the ‘90s, was laid off during the dot-com bust of the early 2000s. He documented his experiences in a now-defunct technology blog. “That [blog] basically got me to where I am now,” he says. We’re sitting in the sunny Gastown offices of Bryght, Tanglao’s current place of work. Bryght is a Vancouver-based online content and community management firm specializing in open-source systems. It helps clients use the popular Drupal framework, an open-source content management system containing blog engines and web applications.


Bryght has supported the development of local content-rich media like NowPublic.com, UrbanVancouver.com and TheTyee.ca. “People want open source software that they can see, touch and the feel—all aspects of it, even if they’re not technical,” Tanglao says.


Tanglao is one of Bryght’s founders. Tech kindreds Boris Mann and Kris Krug were regular readers of Tanglao’s blog, prompting them to contact him for an in-person meeting.


“You develop a reputation [through blogging],” says Tanglao. “You put yourself out there online, and you have an archive. Over time, you develop an image and a story of yourself.”


Bryght was established in 2004 as a result of their collaboration. Mann is now Bryght’s CEO, and Krug, author of BitTorrent for Dummies, is Bryght’s president.


Tanglao’s title is chief blogging officer. He produces Bryght’s internal and public blogs, and like most small business people, he also “does a bit of everything,” including help with archiving and development projects.


Bryght exploits the increasing viability of open-source and user-driven systems. Blogs, wikis and forums have toppled old information hierarchies that authorities once used to manage public knowledge.


“When you hand down a structure from on high, from a central librarian, it doesn’t work. Knowledge has to be painfully created. And then the librarians come in and organize it later. The working-level knowledge is the important knowledge,” Tanglao says.


In an era where working-level knowledge is king, Tanglao says that online citizen bloggers are now the authorities of their own domains, not the mass media who purport to lord over them.


“The New York Times and the Globe and Mail don’t allow themselves to become authorities on the Web because their archives are closed,” he says. “It’s their own fault for not being full citizens of the Web, for not having something that the search engines can crawl.”


Tanglao believes the collaborative, transparent standard set by open-source platforms bodes well for more fluid information sharing in previously impenetrable boss-worker relations. “The great thing is that the president can change it and so can the workers on the floor,” Tanglao says.


“Maintaining a dynamic, frequently updated, informal, in-tone conversational web presence is going to be part of every company. It’s going to be par for the course.”