We were looking for new things to do over the Christmas break when I came across a leaflet for a new museum in Bilbao, looking at the historical development of the estuary, and we decided to give it a go. My grandmother can walk but gets increasingly tired if on her own pegs for an extended period of time, so these days we try to sort out a wheelchair for airports, museums and similar marathons. There was no information in the leaflet about accessibility. The leaflet had a URL for the museum's website, which proved to be incorrect. I finally tracked the true website address down through Google: this too had no information whatsoever about accessibility. We tried calling by phone quite a few times: nobody ever picked it up. So we finally took the risk, despite the museum being a half-hour train ride away.
The three of us are well-acquainted with the streets of Bilbao, but it proved impossible to find any street signs for the new museum. Nor could any passers-by help, until we finally came across someone who had been to the museum's inauguration. We finally made it to the front door, and yes, the museum is accessible for wheelchair users, and yes, they even had a brand new wheelchair, factory fresh, for the use of visitors. None of the desk staff knew how to get the seat open, so we spent some time fiddling around. Nevermind, we were on our way.
We then spent an hour or two trying to figure out ways of helping my grandmother to 'access' the exhibits from the vantage point of her spanking new wheelchair. While a lift at each end of the building allowed wheelchair users to access each floor, the exhibits themselves were often problematic: large blocks of black text on a dark brown background starting at standing head height or above and reaching up several metres; small objects recessed in enclosed opaque boxes at - adult - head height and tilted towards the ceiling, rendering them completely invisible to all but average height adults; extracts of documents in poorly contrasting colours, once again recessed in enclosures; wheelchair users forced to park in a busy thoroughfare to view a film giving a background to the museum and its exhibits, with visitors constantly passing in front of the screen and so blacking it out.
Unlike many wheelchair users, my grandmother is able to get up and walk, but she would have had to behave like a jack-in-the-box to properly view the exhibits, and it's a performance to constantly get in and out of a wheelchair when you're 87 and not exactly sprightly. This would in any case have defeated the whole purpose of her being in the chair. So we ended up reading out the highlights to her as we moved around, thus disturbing other visitors, as her hearing is none too good.
I know many older museums suffer from similar problems, but the new museum in Bilbao is only a few months old. I wonder whether any of the exhibition designers considered what a museum looks like, feels like, when you're seven years old, or in a wheelchair, or - as most of us are - suffering from deteriorating vision.
"Need to link to a New York Times article from your weblog? Enter your link here, and we'll give you the weblog-safe link".
This is a solution to the NYT problem of disappearing links.
It seems it's all being done with the approval of the NYT. I've endeavour to use it in future, and hope that some UK newspapers will follow suit with a similar facility.
[Professor Jonathan Briggs of Kingston University and The Other Media, right, and Richard Barbrook of the Hypermedia Research Centre, Westminster University, left]
Jonathan Briggs gave a refreshing and invigorating talk at the NMK Christmas Lecture a few days ago. From his Hyper Island project in Sweden - funded by the Swedish government - Jonathan has learned much and has moved the agenda forward to a far more demanding context: Kosovo or Kosova, whichever you prefer.
While Hyper Island aimed to provide a multi-disciplinary environment with an underlying agenda of creating powerful networks between participants - the more far flung, ultimately, the better, according to weak/strong ties theory - IPKosovo, a project based at the central library in Pristina and also backed by the Swedish government, is contributing to the effort to make up for an entire generation of people having missed out on higher education.
The way forward here is seen as being to provide people with project management skills, building confidence, leadership and networking and encouraging an entrepreneurial approach in what is a highly challenging environment. How do you provide e-commerce when nobody has a street address in Pristina (location is based on informal directions), when there are no credit cards, when there is no fulfilment infrastructure? How to trade IP-based material such as music in a country without copyright? Jonathan's first batch of students has had to be inventive.
Jonathan says they have attempted to tap into the 'copy-and-paste' modus operandi so common in southern Europe, and to take advantage of the networking opportunies generated by new media, his 'trojan horse' to get people involved.
He's clear that it's not important if his students go abroad to develop their skills and expertise once they've been through the IPKO Institute: as has already happened in south-east Asia, the long-term tendency is for people to return home and feed their skills into the local economy.
Which is why Jonathan's currently looking for 14-week placements for his first set of graduates, outside of Kosova and probably somewhere in northern Europe. If you can help, contact him at: jonathan at reengage.org.
There's been a couple of threads on lists I belong to following an article in the New York Times today, 'PowerPoint Makes You Dumb'. Well, it's not unexpected for Edward Tufte to lay into the product....but someone else came up with this fun PP of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.
I had a quick chat a few months back with Isobelle Falque-Pierrotin, head of the French Internet Rights Forum, about what on earth the World Summit was about. We didn't reach a conclusion.
Two who have been over in Geneva to contribute to the debate are Bill Thompson and Nico MacDonald. You can catch up with their views at The Register and on the BBC's website in the case of Bill, and on a Summit blog in the case of Nico. There's also a collective blog at Daily Summit, which is backed by the British Council and a report in The Guardian.
iSociety's last event of the year was a breakfast panel this morning to celebrate ten years of the Mosaic browser, with Andy Hobsbawm (MD, Agency.com Europe), Derek Wyatt MP (Chair, All-Party Internet Group), Fru Hazlitt (MD, Yahoo! UK&Ireland) and James Crabtree of iSociety on the panel.
Panelists were agreed that gurus and forecasters have not been particularly good at predicting the future in the last ten years, so weren't keen to make any predictions about the next ten.
Most entertaining was Fru's verbatim delivery of the introduction from a speech given by Bob Geldof about the Internet: around 40% the F-word with a few others such as 'Internet', 'e-mail', 'I' and 'my children' and 'hate' providing the context.
Most thoughtful was Derek Wyatt, who has worn many technology-related hats over the years and who had few good words to say about government and ICTs. In Wyatt's view, a Chamber-ful of old codgers together with a silo-based civil service have made any kind of great leap forward in public sector use of the Internet next to impossible. But is this such a bad thing?: do we really want joined-up government if that implies joined-up personal information on each and every one of us, that might be used against our interests?
The Electoral Commission has today announced that there will not be any e-voting pilots in 2004:
"We are clear that there is much still to be learnt about electronic voting."
"3.20 The Commission is not able to recommend that any region is suitable to undertake an e-enabled pilot scheme, as we believe that no region is ready for such innovation at this stage in the development of the electoral modernisation programme."
What is of concern is that the Commission is still promoting the idea of remote Internet voting - in future years: this is a channel largely rejected by the US Federal Election Commission (FEC) in its Voting Systems Standards report. I quote:
"Internet voting: A recent report conducted by the Internet Policy Institute and sponsored by the National Science Foundation in cooperation with the University of Maryland stated: 'Remote Internet voting systems pose a significant risk to the integrity of the voting process and should not be fielded for use in public elections until substantial technical and social science issues hve been addressed. The security risk associated with these systems are both numerous and pervasive and, in many cases, cannot be resolved using even today's most sophisticated technology'.
"The findings of this and other studies on Internet voting have led the FEC and NASED to conclude that controls cannot be developed at the present time to make remote Internet voting sufficiently risk-resistent to be confidently used by election officials and the voting public."
Note that the objections are not purely on technical grounds, but based also on the social and behavioural aspects of voting, such as the power given to householders over family votes. It has to be said that we understand little about this field, and to date governments have failed to fund research into the social aspects of voting (excepting the recently launched US multi-disciplinary research project led by Peter Francia at the University of Maryland in the US).
An article concerning the disappearance of the secret ballot, written by John Morrison and appearing in the December issue of Prospect (subscription required), highlights this issue: "But unless the Commission abandons focus groups and opinion polling for real empirical research on how voters behave, the evidence will never be found".
I've just come across Election Central, a new blog devoted to elections from Warren Slocum, Chief Elections Officer for San Mateo County, California. Slocum is a supporter of Verified Voting, much discussed on this blog.
Also in the States, James Crabtree is roving the east coast right now, and provides a quick roundup on Voxpolitics of recent developments concerning voting machine vendor Diebold.
Urban Tapestries is a project aiming to "understand the social, cultural, economic and political implications of pervasive location-based mobile and wireless systems".
There's a public trial of its system taking place in Bloomsbury (London) until Sunday 14 December. They hand over a wireless device, give you a bit of training, and let you loose on the streets of Bloomsbury (near the British Museum) to engage in an experiment in public authoring. There are still a few places left on various days: booking info on their website.
Larry Lessig will be back in London next month, and speaking a the Royal Society of Arts on 14 January. See the RSA website for event information and booking (free entry). Lessig will be discussing "how 20th century models of copyright will defeat the creative potential of digital technology and how a different set of ideas are needed soon" with Emily Bell of The Guardian. I saw Lessig in action at the Oxford Internet Institute's Politics of Code conference and he's an impressive speaker.
I missed this morning's broadcast of In Our Time, this week on the topic of Wittgenstein and linguistics- working breakfast at Victoria station, would you believe - so I'll be listening to tonight's re-broadcast. A few years ago I read Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein - he's one of the guests - and found it riveting, a wonderful meshing of Wittgie's life and ideas.
The programme's also on the roster of the BBC's Listen Again archive.
The December issue is just out and packed with interesting stuff, including 'The digital divide: Why the "don't-want-tos" won't compute', a topic that cropped up in post-seminar pub chat yesterday.
The question: which pile of -oh-my-god-I've-got-to-read does this go in? (possibles: bedtime reading, bathtime reading, travel reading, breakfast reading...)
I've just uploaded my Selling Social Software presentation from last night. [PDF, 421 KB]. This probably makes most sense if you've seen the event, and/or if you look at William's first (see post ealier today), Lee's next and mine last (the running order last night).
How time flies. I can just about remember sending files modem to modem (the person receiving the file had to be expecting it at that precise moment), with some weird third-party-bought-by-Microsoft-DOS-based - and unsupported - add-on, but the memories are fading fast.
David Rowan argues this week in The Times that the UK should learn lessons from the US experience when it comes to making decisions about e-voting. As he says, 'it will take just one security breach to undermine public confidence irreparably'.
Rowan recently covered the launch of Verified Voting in the UK (Times article posted on Mindfully).
Meanwhile over at Kablenet, there's a confused article about whether the 2004 e-voting pilots will or won't go ahead, largely based on input from one of the 'losers', from what I can make out.
The UK Electoral Commission is expected to announce its plans for the 2004 regional e-voting pilot on 8 December.
With Blair's Big Conversation getting into its stride, commentators are split on whether this is a real attempt at creating a dialogue with the community, or just another stage in the Labour Party's spin cycle (think washing machine).
Press coverage includes a quick round of some of the cynical responses from The Register, while The Times leader writer argues that it can't do any harm, so why not? Over at The Guardian today, Catherine Bennett takes a look at just what conversation the early contributors are generating: she's not altogether impressed that anti New Labour posts somehow seem to fail to make it onto the website. Elsewhere in the Grauniad, Jackie Ashley wonders whether the launch of new, improved, listening Blair may just be too late.
Richard Allen MP feels 'distinctly underwhelmed' by the website, which also comes in for criticism from Jonathan Briggs - 'simply a few indicators of the number of people who have visited, posted or commented would be excellent - we all do it on our blogs!' - and Voxpolitics.
David Wilcox has blogged last night's Selling Social Software event at New Media Knowledge over on the Designing for Civil Society blog. Will Davies has made his presentation available via the iSociety blog. I'll post my own presentation when I get a moment.
Meanwhile, other things have flowed from this, including Gideon Mitchell pointing me in the direction of the document Twelve Principles.... from Cynthia Typaldos in the US.
Postscript: the presentation is now online [PDF of PowerPoint, around 380 KB] and Lee has also blogged.
Overcrowded GCHQ reduced to hotdesking made the UK news today. As Britain's eavesdropping HQ and so the centre of the 'war on terror', GCHQ is taking on more spies than it has seats for in its shiny new building. Apparently they're sharing computers: quite how you can hotdesk without sufficient computers is beyond me.
Sir David Omand, permanent secretary and security and intelligence co-ordinator at the Cabinet Office, "claimed civil servants had not realised in 1996 that personal computers would develop in such a big way. Nor did he realise that corporations and government would be able to set up their intranets to allow data sharing."
Lynn Truss has a great new book on punctuation, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, which has somehow managed to get to the top of Amazon's top 100. In today's Guardian, Lynn speculates about the Internet as the perfect excuse for many people to give up punctuating correctly. But it has to be said that the Web is also a perfect way of selling plenty more books, so it can't all be bad news for Lynn. By the way, the title of the book refers to a story about a panda and a misplaced comma.
On a similar note, here's a little cartoon explanation of the difference between its and it's.
