Thursday, July 31, 2003
BlogPulse
I'm probably way behind the times, but I've just discovered BlogPulse - Automated Trend Discovery for Weblogs, which is apparently in BETA right now.
We know about most popular blogging links, courtesy of other blog monitoring ventures, but here I particularly like the look of the key people and key phrases listings (the latter similar to Daypop Top Word Bursts). Apparently key phrases for today - based on blog mentions - include 'air marshal', 'terrorism futures', 'mobile phone' and 'rose garden'. Bush has recently deposed Harry Potter as top Key Person, but Howard Dean is not far behind. The 'new' clustered key topics defeats me though: just how are 'deaths of saddam hussein' linked to 'gay marriage'...or am I missing some vital information?
Oh, and how did I find out about BlogPulse? Apparently a blog mention of mine of Rory McCarthy (Guardian journalist) on a certain day was part of the evidence for him being a 'key person'. That's between Bob Hope and John Ashcroft, you understand....Oh well
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Wednesday, July 30, 2003
Depicting work
I really enjoyed meeting Carey Young and Anna Fox at the Tate Modern... Both have photographed the workplace, from an artist's perspective. I do so as an ethnographer.
I particularly like Carey's photo of a white board taken in a call centre: white boards are everywhere in this kind of environment, but this one was special. It listed meaningless expressions to fill the telephonic void, while the staff member looked for relevant information or carried out some other task: "I'm just looking for your blah blah blah", "If you can bear with me for one moment..." and so on. Probably just an aide-memoire, but showing that these seemingly top-of-the-head expressions are just as programmed as all the rest of the dialogue. Shocking, in its own way. It's a photo I would have love to have taken myself...
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Tuesday, July 29, 2003
Events...photos
Yo! The events list is proving so popular that I'm now putting it on the main menu...which means changing the whole menu structure...it's happening over the next week, so bear with me...well such is information architecture...
...and meanwhile, there are lots of photos on this website, and some people have found them and others have not....I kind of feel like I should be structuring all of this...
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An online subscription for all occasions?
Continental publications such as Spanish newspaper El Pais started charging for online access a few months ago. More recently, The Guardian in the UK announced a move down the paid-for path. Already, WSJ and others are subscription-only, while access to various newspaper archives is starting to cost. Content may still be king, though increasingly it is not free: online subs to a few publications soon starts to build to a significant sum.
Now Borders founder Louis Borders has launched Keepmedia, an online portal providing access to archives of more than 100 magazines for a monthly fee of about USD5. Brill Media had a similar venture - Contentville - a while back that failed to prosper. Are consumers more willing now to pay for content? Well, I won't be forking out for The Corn & Soybean Digest or Religious Conference Manager anytime soon, but if Borders can get a critical mass of reasonable publications together - hey, Louis, there is this place called Europe with many English-language publications of its own - then we shall see. KeepMedia is currently offering a 7-day free trial with no credit card submission required.
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Monday, July 28, 2003
The real cost of spam?
The New York Times technology section carries an interesting article today about varying estimates of the cost of spam: the figures range from USD49 to USD1400 per worker, with researchers disagreeing about what should be factored into the equation.
But "The most serious cost of spam is also the hardest to figure out: the loss of productivity."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/28/technology/28SPAM.html
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New list for accessibility testing issues
Peter Bosher, who kindly came to speak to us at UK UPA a couple of months back about accessibility issues - despite a busy schedule - mentioned at the time that he was involved in the launch of a discussion list aiming to bring together people with visual impairments interested in acting as testers and website designers concerned with accessibility.
That discussion list is now live, at Yahoo! Groups: uvip-web-test
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eGov usability on the cheap
The Register reports on an eGov Monitor Weekly report this week that civil servants may end up as 'usability testers' for government websites wanting to comply with government requirements for usability work without having to spend any money. Another potential testing group would be students, apparently - also keen to give away their time for little in return these days.
These strategies for usability testing are revealed in the government publication Quality Framework for UK Government Website Design, out this month. (The report from KableNet is much more strait-laced.)
Some concerns: First, will this strategy really help government get accessibility firmly onto the eGov agenda? I'd say that input from a single user with impaired vision would be better than results from 6-8 able-bodied civil servants or students, on this score. And I would also suggest that it is plain common decency to pay such visually impaired users the going rate for taking part, just as sighted and other non-handicapped individuals are normally paid by recruitment agencies for this type of work.
And second - and of just as much concern - is the seeming assumption that usability is something you do 'afterwards' - or are these cheap students and civil servants-at-a-loose-end to be brought in as part of the requirements process too? (I suspect not).
Paying lip service is never going to give value for money, however little you spend.
Quality Framework for UK Government Website Design (available as MS Word and pdf)
http://www.e-envoy.gov.uk/Resources/WebGuidelines/fs/en
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Saturday, July 26, 2003
Geekdom and users
I recently came across yet another 'geek spectrum' test. That's a bit like an autism spectrum test, but with more computer stuff...
Anyway, this one is a quite amusing - and well thought out - collection of questions that will determine whether you merely have geek tendencies or if the problem is far more serious than that. There's no indication of the scoring mechanism, but what the hell, it's just for fun.
What I would recommend, though, is that anyone scoring high on this stuff should not be allowed near any user interaction design ;-).
Take the Geek Test
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Friday, July 25, 2003
Catching the vote(r) by the bit
James Crabtree, blogging on Voxpolitics, and Bill Thompson, penning his column on the BBC website, are today having a little set-to about the perennial question of e-voting, bless 'em.
While Bill claims e-voting to be a non-starter - an argument finding further support from the report published yesterday by Johns Hopkins University on Diebold's direct electronic recording (DRE) software, widely used in the US - Crabtree talks of acceptable security and the absence of systemic corruption as the fundamental criteria to judge any e-voting system by, going on to state that "most software has holes too." Herein lies the problem.
Crabtree perhaps a little naively believes that open source software development can be some kind of panacea for the ills of software development as practised by firms that have got it wrong to date. Sure, arguing commercial secrecy is not going to help achieve sound software, but poor development is a global ill, and open source development of anything has yet to show itself capable of rising to this particular challenge. Papers have been written about how open source code is by its very nature liable to suffer from poor usability (see for example Nichols and Twidale writing in First Monday last year; also Matthew Thomas in a couple of articles on 'Why free software usability tends to suck' and 'Why free software usability tends to suck even more').
Crabtree points to there being inherent problems in all voting mediums - postal, paper, telephone - and he's quite right: the butterfly ballots scandal in Florida shows us that few systems are foolproof, with paper ones being as subject to bad design as any other. But it has to be said that electronic systems present a particular problem: the peculiar ease with which high volumes of erroneous or corrupt results can be achieved...and also, perhaps, the facility with which problems remain hidden. I somehow doubt that e-voting will be a non-starter: barring a national-scale voting disaster, this government's ambition to appear modern will see to that.
I am perturbed at some of the assumptions and slapdash practices engaged in by those responsible for putting such systems onto the market. To give an example, accounts have been written of US touchscreen voting machines that have been programmed to average inputs, so that when pressure is exerted in an area of the screen that is not valid for voting purposes, the system returns a positive vote for the 'nearest' option. In my opinion, a touchscreen should not accept any input that does not coincide with any valid option, whatever 'helpful' code has been set up by software suppliers. More fundamentally, all possible system assumptions need to be addressed and specifically coded for: in other words, nothing should be assumed where voting is concerned. This certainly points to less secrecy and more open source as a necessary, though not sufficient precondition in the design of such systems.
A further issue, discussed at length over the last three years by people such as Rebecca Mercuri, is the lack of an audit trail for electronic voting systems. This is an area that needs to be addressed by anyone proposing such a system.
Beyond that, we have the issue of why European governments are pursuing e-voting options: generally, it seems to be a frantic attempt to increase turnout, particularly amongst the young. Once again, they have failed to learn that you cannot just change the way everyone behaves by merely introducing a technology. Allowing people to vote online will no more make everyone want to vote than selling lawnmowers online will urge everyone to suddenly mow their lawns.
Postscript: See 4 August post UK e-voting pilots report - dog bites man for more information on slapdash practices.
Rebecca Mercuri's website on electronic voting
The Johns Hopkins study: Rubin, A., Stubblefield, A., Kohno, T. & Wallach, D.S. (2003) Analysis of an Electronic Voting System (pdf)
The Diebold 'technical response' to the Johns Hopkins study
A brief e-voting resource list on this website
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Wednesday, July 23, 2003
BA or Business Awareness (not)
A couple of weeks ago, Computer Weekly quoted a doctor on his response the the current flurry of activity - backed by £2.3bn - around the NHS National Programme:
"It scares me that when talking to most IT systems suppliers none of them seem to have given any understanding to the mechanism of how doctores make decisions." (CW, 15 July 2003, p8)
Quite. That, according to one NHS senior developer, is because NHS system suppliers - who are a breed apart, but not that different from other supplier groups in the public and private sectors - do not look at how people work, on site (though they do send along salesmen to convince management of the rightness of their 'solution'.)
Now, British Airways finds itself in the firing line. Many column inches have been written about this face-off with check-in staff, and how much it will cost the company, but one commentary was particularly striking: a BBC News 24 report early one morning a couple of days ago reported in passing that these low-paid women, working in expensive locations SE England at £10-12K FTE, on part-time shifts, and many with young children, had for years informally rearranged their own shifts among themselves, to suit family circumstances. That is, they saw to it that the job got done, regardless of circumstances, and then filled out the paperwork accordingly. [This potential for local, flexible solutions was perhaps one of the few plus points of the job.]
But the imposition of BA's new and formal swipe card system at a stroke - or swipe - took away their collective ability to manage their own work, individually and as a local collective. Which suggests that BA was not aware that its new system failed to cater for local staff arriving at their own solutions: in other words, it knew little about work processes inside the company, before imposing its own 'solution'.
I leave it to you to draw any parallels or make any appropriate generalisations.
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Monday, July 21, 2003
Harvard's Berkman Center Takes Control of RSS
Dave Winer, owner of UserLand and the author of the RSS - Rich Site Summary - specification, has transferred the copyright to Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The move seems to be designed to alleviate concerns that ownership of RSS by a single business would give that company too much control over the development of the syndication specification. The Berkman Center is now hoping to help spread the RSS word.
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/announceRss2
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Amazon plans online non-fiction archive
The NY Times reports that Amazon is in negotiations with several major book publishers to create a large online archive of thousands of non-fiction books. The archive would b searchable but would also set limits on how much of any given book a user can read. The project, called Look Inside the Book II, will undoubtedly raise some interesting copyright issues.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/21/technology/21AMAZ.html
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UK airline websites deemed inaccessible
Ability Net have just launched a survey of UK airline websites. On a five-star scale, Easyjet came top with a rating of two stars, and Virgin Atlantic are apparently 'in talks' after being deemed as having "the most serious issues of accessibility of all those tested". Common problems include lack of tool tips, lack of descriptions on images, reliance on the mouse, and high levels of utilisation of technologies not interpreted by many speech output programs.
As a spokesperson for Ability Net has said, "a computer is a great enabler", so why effectively take away such an enabling device for many of the disabled?
Ability Net press release: http://www.abilitynet.org.uk/content/oneoffs/e-nation.htm
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Sunday, July 20, 2003
The case of Shevaun Pennington
It's difficult to know what to do when teenagers meet the Internet: it's a great tool, but also a difficult place to negotiate sometimes, even for adults.
There's been some subdued discussion in recent days on e-mint, populated by community builders and those interested in online community in the UK. On Monday, the Home Office held an all-dayer entitled Creating Safer Interactive Online Experiences For Children, which a number of industry figures attended. The Home Office seems to be interested in hearing views from the industry, and that has to be a good thing.
For their part, professional chatroom moderators try to uphold high standards and deter undesirables, though one moderator voices the concern that over-moderation may lead kids to bail out to less scrupulous sites. And moderator recruitment is itself a far from exact science.
In the wake of Shevaun Pennington, the message from communities people has been very much that what we need is education rather than legislation - much as we educate kids about not accepting sweets or about getting into cars with strangers. And making sure sites generate an evidence trail - according to industry figure Ian Dickson - is likely to scare off many pedophiles.
Bill Thompson, who comments on technology for the Beeb, has this week advocated keeping teens out of chatrooms. But are we to add to the long list of prohibitions for kids in the modern world (not being allowed out to play etc.)? And anyway, half a million kids are out there building their own chat areas on their own fan sites...It seems to me this kind of pronouncement is like telling kids 'don't take drugs'....
Last night I discussed with a colleague who has three girls of her own - and an above-average house-full of technology - what the options are as far as she can see. She says she follows recommendations, such as Internet access only in a public area where others can see - but it seems those were the guidelines that Shevaun's parents also followed. And even as adults we agreed that we sometimes seem to pick up stalkers on discussion lists and suchlike.
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Untold: Gender Branding
Jane Austin will be chairing the next Untold event at the ICA in London on 8 August. This month's speakers are Alessandra Lariu of digital comms consultancy Oyster Partners, talking about research into gender and branding, and Sarah Morris, founder of Skybluepink, discussing research into emotive computing.
For some of the background to Jane's Untold series, read this article in The Guardian.
When: Friday 8 August, 7.30pm
Venue: ICA, The Mall, London SW1
ICA: http://www.ica.org.uk/
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God help ethnographers
I was rather disturbed on Wednesday to find myself face-to-face - at a certain London institution - with someone who called himself a 'consultant' in the area of new media.
What was so disturbing? He seemed to think that ethnography was about asking questions of people in focus groups. In fact, he seemed to think that ethnography was a trendy relabelling of market research. Help! Real ethnographers and anthropologists out there will know that the mere mention of the words 'focus group' will bring forth a reaction not unlike exposing a vampire to sunlight, garlic or a crucifix.
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Saturday, July 19, 2003
To PDF or not to PDF
This week's post from Jakob Neilsen has been causing a few ructions.
He headlined "PDF: Unfit for human consumption", and then went on to state the obvious:
"Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online. PDF is good for printing, but that's it. Don't use it for online presentation."
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030714.html
I think we've known about this stuff for a while, Jakob.....
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Had it up to here with Blogger
I am getting very pissed off with disappearing Blogger posts, and plan to move shortly to Type Pad...as soon as it becomes publicly available.
As I type this, Blogger is trying to post nothing 20 times [clickety-click, clickety-click, six times a minute]...but it has just swallowed the text of the day for the second time. Its FTP process has gone crazy.
A recent post-meet discussion in a London restaurant, chatting amongst the bloggerati, concluded that Blogger had had its day, and I'm not far off agreeing.
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Friday, July 18, 2003
e-gov and compulsion
I've been holding off blogging the Work Foundation's launch of SmartGov [SmartGov: Renewing Electronic Government for Improved Service Delivery] this week, owing to the problems I'm having with the idea of compulsion.
Noah Curthoys - with James Crabtree - has produced an essay that argues for reform of the approach to e-gov, partly based on concentrating on increasing take-up through marketing e-gov to the affluent and able bodied - and then compelling them to use it. He has also highlighted good practice in Liverpool City Council, the Office of Government Commerce and North Wales Police, in the UK.
I think the compulsion agenda leads to some very important user groups been marginalised for the time being - and isn't that the only time that matters ;-). For example, most people who I know that are blind or disabled find the Internet one of their key resources: everything from the weekly shop to the national newspapers becomes available. For many disabled people, the Internet is more important than for sighted or able-bodied individuals - it's quite literally a lifeline, it enables and empowers. So why propose spending entire budgets on marketing to the able-bodied, when these eminently willing users are being marginalised by inaccessible websites? (for example)
Well, the whole idea of compulsion was very contentious at the launch, held on Wednesday eve. And the man from the office of the e-envoy didn't want to adorn that particular event, so other valuable members of the e-gov community were found to stand in his place. And it has to be said, the line-up was good, and far from being some kind of automatic endorsement, there were many conflicting but sensible ideas. Perhaps certain government advisors could do with reading Richard Sennett's recent column in The Guardian.
The evening's proceedings might have been improved by having present (a) some of the people who designed the services described and (b) some of the people who use them.
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Thursday, July 17, 2003
Howard Dean and the blogging world
Since a while back, in fact since I got involved in the whole Barcelona.com stuff back in 1999 - as a director - I've been interested in what's happening in the world of US law digital-wise, and following the online postings of various personages such as Michael Geist (Canada) and Lawrence Lessig (US). I even spent some time getting an amicus brief from some of these people.... Hence my ongoing interest in the Internet-meets-law world.
Now Howard Dean - since 12 July - has been posting to Lawrence Lessig's blog, as a guest blogger.
Those of you following the political agenda in the US will know that Dean is emerging as an alternative but distinctly possible candidate for the Democrats, and is managing to raise significant levels of grassroots activism and funds on the Internet.
Dean is achieving exposure on other unexpected online channels too...but it's interesting that this particular one should have been opened up...
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Wednesday, July 16, 2003
The barcelona.com case drags on
Joan Nogueras, who finally won last month - after vast expense - a US appeal court case against the Barcelona City Council in barcelona.com v BCC, is still pondering the future of his once and future domain name. And my, has the whole idea of 'domain name' moved on since he bought this one - in 1995 - and since Barcelona City Council tried to take it off him - March 2000.
"Now....they can still go to US Supreme Court...or sue us in Spain...or....", he writes. But he is hoping to have the name back "sometime this year...but who knows". I suppose it depends just how much more the BCC is willing to spend on international management consultants - and whether they're still into the game of fabricating evidence to make any such expenditure worthwhile.
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Tuesday, July 15, 2003
The latest Pew
Pew has launched a report on Internet health resources, studying the behaviour of 'health seekers':
http://www.pewinternet.org/reports/toc.asp?Report=95
Pew reports are great - the only problem is, all their respondents are Americans. Aside from Pew, there's the regular user survey that's been conducted by Georgia Tech's GVU Center since the year dot - well, since around 1994.
Perhaps one of these days some UK or European not-for-profit will take up the baton and start producing regular data about Internet behaviour in a systematic way. In the meantime, European researchers will continue to quote US stats and trend data in their reports - which may or may not be applicable. For example, I would wager that health seeking behaviour on the Internet is quite different in a country with a completely privatised health system to one dominated by public sector provision.
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Monday, July 14, 2003
UK government consultation on e-learning
The government last week published a consultation paper on e-learning, Towards a Unified e-learning Strategy, available from the DfES website. The closing date for responses is 30 January 2004.
http://www.dfes.gov.uk/consultations2/16/
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Saturday, July 12, 2003
Why bother?
I have recently had several 'why bother?' experiences.
First, the LSE library: a lovely building, almost brand new, just off the Kingsway.
BUT. When I submit an online application form for library membership - designed by the self-same library - nothing. Not in March. Not in April. Not in June. No response. A big zero. I am a University of London graduate, a postgraduate from Elsewhere not a million miles from the M25 consortium, and a researcher with a worthy Charitable Foundation in the self same London not half a mile from the exalted institution, which LSE classifies as among its 'free access' constituency.
But no movement or sign of life of any description can be raised. The site merrily states 'come in in 4-5 working days' with the relevant documents to complete the online application. But no go. When contacted by phone on each occasion, they know not of me or anything related. Black hole? Something like.
In fact, according to the library staff, they "completely ignore all the forms submitted online, as we get thousands every day." They just don't tell anybody. That they completely ignore them, that is...
The only way of doing anything is (a) filling out the online form (b) complaining about it to the LSE staff by telephone (c) getting told what it is you should do in practice, which is to go in to the building in person and (d) turning up, when you will be told to turn up some other time to claim a membership card. That will allow you to turn up in future. Or just miss out all the stuff on the website.
So, one may ask of the LSE, (a) why on earth do they have any online library forms? And (b) couldn't they come up with an automated response that tells people what's going on?
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We may have unusable machines, but you can't take pictures of them
I have still not yet come to terms with the fact that I have been forbidden from photographing certain - public - interfaces in Bilbao.
For many years - too many to remember - I have been a user of the Bilbao rail system (I remember when it was doors open the whole way with wooden planks as seating in third class, and green vinyl in first, and coma-inducing sewage outlets round about Deusto - that was in the early 70s, but I have been using the system for a decade longer than that).
Today things are much improved. Richard Rogers designed what the locals term 'fosteritos' (the little outlets to the surface made out of while plastic and glass), and the trains themselves are first rate. Even vast swathes of new track were cut over a a period of years, avoiding those old sewage outfalls...while these days, they even have train doors that remain closed throughout the journey.
However, the ticket machines are what a usability person would describe as 'interesting'. In fact, men hover alongside them throughout opening hours, trying to help people to use them. I have instructed all visitors requiring a 'bono' (multi-journey ticket) to ask for assistance, because there's no way they are going to figure out how to obtain it themselves.
But the city of Bilbao bye laws state that all photography on the metro is forbidden. So when I wanted to show some students a picture of the bizarre path that needed to be taken through an irrational set of options, and whipped out my lovely little digital camera for the purpose, a station attendant rushed up and stopped me (every station is 'manned' through most opening hours, making it difficult to take unauthorised pictures). I have to "write to the authorities" who may or may not grant me permission. (My fifteen years of prior experience in Spain, with such organisations as Sonar in Barcelona, leads me to believe that unless I want to give them lots of positive and gushing PR, I don't stand a chance.)
So, the last couple of times I have tried to take photographs (for example last March), a man jumped in front of the camera and no picture. At least I still have the camera. Last time I was there (June), I was otherwise engaged with visitors and other stuff, so didn't get around to it. It will happen, and not as a result of writing begging letters, I suspect. Sometimes I wonder what drives the motors of these tiny minds. According to one station attendant who prevented me from taking photos recently, they are afraid others will copy their interface designs. Go figure.
Meanwhile, institutions such as La Caixa - Spain's largest saving's bank, with tens of thousands of ticket-buying machines across the nation - advertise for HCI experts from northern Europe with no qualifications in HCI....
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House of Commons - blogging seminar - last-minute change
Dan Jellinek reports a last-minute change of room "has been necessitated by
the requisitioning of our previous room by a Parliamentary committee. Well, it is their room I suppose . . "
But..."Luckily we have now ended up in the best committee room of all - the Grand Committee Room, and at the slightly later time of 7pm-9pm, which I hope will make it easier for many to get there after work."
Contact Voxpolitics to reserve your place and get entry details. blogrule@voxpolitics.com
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Getting in Touch - a national conference
A one day conference exploring the current connections between technology, disability and the arts.
Date: 28 July 2003
Time: 9.30am 4.30pm
Place: Sallis Benney Theatre, University of Brighton, Grand Parade, Brighton
A national conference that will:
- Showcase innovative digital arts projects produced by disabled artists.
- Explore some key issues which need to be addressed by arts organisations beginning to work with disabled people.
- Highlight the state of current practice through case studies and other research initiatives.
- Outline the DDA and various changes that will come into effect next year.
- Include a presentation on assistive technology
- Feature a discussion on maximizing participation.
Speakers and participants include:
· Michael Craven, Director of Visual Arts, Arts Council England, South East
· Evelyn Wilson, Director, Lighthouse
· Dave Everitt, ACE, Commissioned Research
· Christine Lenehan, Deputy Director, Council for Disabled Children
· Sarah Pickthall, Development Officer Disability, Arts Council England, South East
· Brian Morgan , Southdowns NHS Trust
· Kate Adams, Artworks
· Ruth Marchant, Co-director of Triangle Services
· Chris Hammond, Artistic Director, Full Circle Arts
· Alan McLean, West Midlands Disability Arts Forum
· Barbara Lisicki, Disability Trainer and Consultant, ACE Centre, Oxford
· Reps form Drake Music and Chailey Digital Arts Project
To register for the conference visit: http://www.gettingintouch.org.uk
5:44 PM|
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Haywards Heath, actually....
I do not believe it!
I may be a sometime resident of Brighton - otherwise known as "the graveyard of ambition", a title apparently shared with Swansea - and I may admit to still having a friend or two in locations such as Hove, Lewes, Seaford, Haywards Heath and Burgess Hill...but....even so, this is a bit special.
Take a look at http://www.thisishaywardsheath.com/ (for those who don't live in Sussex, East or West: the 'This Is.....' is a banner for many towns is owned by a UK newspaper publisher and used by the terrifying Brighton Argus to propagate local misinformation, so there's a certain ironic thread here - this is not one of their sites).
As soon as you get to the home page, you are greeted by: "The town of tomorrow where everyone thinks it's yesterday". Wild. "We recommend non-English speaking or illiterate guests take the pictorial tour". "We've had literally tens of e-mails asking when we are going to update the site." Ha. If only others believed in so much truth-telling. The Celebrity Connections page is a wonder to behold. Check out the HEATHcam, the pay-and-display car parks and all the rest. As the site sez, "the most important thing to remember about Haywards Heath is that you won't be able to see and do it all in one day." Quite.
Thanks to Peter Mason at SCIP for this one.
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Thursday, July 10, 2003
So why have I been away from the coal face?
Well, a broken foot is part of the answer (and oh, have I got tales to tell about various doctors in various parts of the health system...drugs that were not legally prescribed but handed over - by a doctor, mind - in a napkin, and all that).
Foot is still technically in air...though it is pretty difficult to function on this basis...
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Bobbitt at The Work Foundation
This morning, I spent breakfast with Philip Chase Bobbitt - author of "The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History" - who was speaking at The Work Foundation for the benefit of those who managed to get to Peter Runge House by 8a.m.
Why is it that American professors of a certain age manage to dress so well...and European ones dress so crap?
I haven't read the book yet, but the Opendemocracy article was good. As a thinker, Bobbitt may not replace Fukuyama and co., but as a cross-disciplinary person, he certainly is worth listening to. Apart from having a seriously interesting set of views on a whole range of topics from law versus strategy, via ideas concerning the 'market state', to the resurgence of nationalism and the inevitability of war, Bobbitt is a believer in the 'representative will be replaced by other forms of democracy' school of thinking. Polls, online stuff, referenda, what you will. We won't be going out on the street to throw out votes in the polling station too much more, he reckons.
Increasingly, what he calls 'market states' will be indifferent to cultures, sympathetic to multi-culturalism and immigrants ... but just as interested in self-preservation as the old nation-state. The EU - a market-oriented organisation, if ever there was one - will win out over the UN and similar law-based organisations, says Bobbitt. But I'm not totally convinced - if the market-state is indifference to culture (the raison-d'etre for nation), how come it is still so interested in self-preservation?
See Voxpolitics for more postings on this event (thanks James).
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Bloggers Storm the Corridors of Power
Well, not quite. But certainly quite a few bloggers will be hitting the Hooses of Parliament on Monday eve (or at least Portcullis House, which is also a very nice building, and houses 'a host of golden MPs...'), where VoxPolitics is holding an event aiming to raise the profile of blogging as a tool for doing stuff for democracy. Now that everybody's stopped voting. Pretty much.
Speakers include:
Steven Clift, 'e-democracy expert' (my italics: http://www.publicus.net/; check out the website - judging by the various 'flag translations' he provides, Steven has not yet been appraised of the limitations of automated translations)
Stephen Pollard, 'blogging journalist' (isn't that a contradiction in terms?: http://www.stephenpollard.net/)
Pernille Rudlin, 'mobile expert' (my italics - based on information gleaned from website)
Tom Watson MP, Blogging MP (check-it-out!: http://www.tom-watson.co.uk/)
James Crabtree, chair (The Work Foundation, iSociety project; Vox Politics)
(Whot! No Baghdad Blogger, I hear you exclaim.)
Can Weblogs Change Politics?: A VoxPolitics Discussion
Monday 14th July, 5:30 - 7.00pm
Portcullis House, Houses of Parliament (RSVP to find out location)
Drinks and Food Provided
RSVP compulsory: they now have a new room with increased capacity, but you still need to RSVP (blogrule@voxpolitics.com) or you won't be allowed in....
1:32 PM|
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Monday, July 07, 2003
A new conference?
Saturday's exploratory meeting about setting up a new cross-disciplinary conference in London got a great turnout, with eighteen of us - including James Crabtree, Ann Light, Tom Coates, Tom Dolan, Hugh Look, Jamie Wilson, Gavin Bell, Matt Webb, John Knight, Nancy, David Wilcox, Cal Henderson, several more Toms (Steinberg, Morris...) Paul Hammond of that fish site ;-), Neil M of the Grauniad Online supplement.....- and apologies received from a host of others who couldn't make the meet but who also wish to be involved, such as Dave Green of NTK (others whom I saw later the same day - such as Jane Austin - with her dad in tow!). We just about took over the Photographers' Gallery cafe for the afternoon...
I was trying to - trying being the operative word - to chair, so didn't take comprehensive notes myself, but here are a few notes scribbled both at the meeting, at the post-meet meal, and at the eminently civilised post-food club (thanks Tom D!)
What's it about?: The idea is to address the area of people (not 'users') and tech, with a particular emphasis on 'what people can do for themselves'. The failing of so many 'tech' conferences - newspaper supplements etc. - is that they address the 'what it is', while failing to assess the 'what it means' (except in terms of naive futurology). We'd like to exploit that failure and address it. But we're also interested in 'where disciplines meet', the idea of 'crossover', a getting away from increasingly narrow 'disciplines'.
Ann Light came along with some Norbert Wiener quotes she mentioned to me a few weeks ago and seem apposite: 'the greatest breakthroughs in human understanding were likely to come from the intellectual no-man's land between academics and specialisms'; 'boundary regions...are areas where the traditional methods simply don't work'; 'when faced with a big intellectual puzzle, scientific disciplines tend to do two things: throw lots of man-hours at it; and divide up the task...' and more.
We want to address the other stuff, the jigsaw building, the stuff that is not addressed by the carvers-up and the task-dividers, getting people out of the groups they have formed already, bringing together people from parallel, overlapping worlds.
But we recognise that someone who is an expert in one field may be a beginner in another - and we are interested in both, so any conference programme needs to be explicit and clear about labelling strands in terms of audience/level.
When asked what they would like to see, the list of priorities was by no means dominated by ideas around blogging, though they were certainly present. As one blogger said, "most bloggers want to go and talk about other stuff" or words to that effect.
putting people in control of tech
use, access, control
online communities
blogging
user experience
experience design
social software for individuals and business
social software learning from human-computer interaction etc
personal publishing
adaptive personal technology
eccentricity, DIY approach to products
technical intercommunication aspects of blogging (linking sites, trackback, following discussions, RSS)
user moderation
social side of sites like K5
solving the reading problem
self-organising systems
blogging in context
distributed conversations
media creation and distribution > IP and the art of the possible
ethnographic techniques (mentioned several times)
evaluating systems
the subtleties of tech
past stuff eg social history of the Net
and future stuff, inc ubiquitous computing
broad range of other stuff such as mapping, Perl
geocoding, mobile, location isues, portable stuff
wireless networking
people moving around and using information > ethnography
creativity tools
how organisations innovate in this area - war stories
multi-media games meets drama theory
deviant behaviour, devance (several votes)
real-world benefits (of all this stuff)
political emphasis, use of tools for political/democratic ends, how blogs can involve people in politics
grassroots enabling stuff such as the Beeb's ICAN
tech for campaigning and similar
using tech to reverse the brain drain
social aspects of tech (several votes)
sociology meets social software
selling this stuff to the sceptics (plus the presence of some sceptics to listen)
addressing the area of "people are not buying a lot of this stuff") ie injecting a note of realism to the ever-positive tech commentators
separating out 'what it does' and 'what it means'
technorealism, technoscepticism
really long-term thinking: 5-10 year models, trends (not tools)
utopian and dystopain views
think-tank-y
for it to have created something
fun - silly - entertaining things too
a range of groups, including business and children
and who we want to hear - ideas included:
mavericks, visionaries, pioneers
hearing from people who have made things, rather than those who have written about them
Panels and tutorials got many votes, while 'bringing people together to see what happens' was also popular. The idea of a seminar of seminars (to quickly find out what's been happenening everywhere else - 'cos we can't all go to all the conferences) also proved popular. Beehive approach (lots of different cells, in the same location, organised by different groups? - this would reduce workload on the centre). Or idea of core activity with lots of fringe stuff organised by others - or is this 'fringe as centre'?
The meeting noted that stuff presented at places like ETcon is not necessarily original/new at all at the time of presentation - talks are often recycled from smaller events. We should therefore not be frit of bringing recent stuff out of specialised groups for a more mainstream/public audience - as well as a sprinkling of the more up-to-the-minute.
In terms of size, format, the consensus seemsed to be to aim for a 1-day event with perhaps three rooms to start. Success could then be built on by expansion.
There were many ideas about venues: the idea of a "music school" arrangement, with multiple practice rooms, or small rooms with a large atrium area or syndicate rooms, got many votes. We appreaciated that it is important to be able to mingle - this is the main value that many people report getting out of conferences. We'd also like to be able to have a central location, with lots of chairs and desks, local food and pubs, and preferrably wi-fi enabled. "I quite like the idea of slightly scruffy" said one. That seems to include LSE/KCL/Birkbeck etc.
And what about dates? February or spring as a target date seemed to be agreeable to most.
While people at the meeting and the post meeting discussions came up with a number of ideas on the sponsorship front, suggestions for potential sponsorship targets are welcome.
We might also consider learning form past conference experiences, such as last year's XCom, which took place in London (Dave Green/NTK), Beyond the Backlash (James Crabtree), Virtual Communities conference (Hugh Look; next year in The Hague), and maybe CSCW (http://www.acm.org/cscw2002/), Door of Perception http://www.doorsofperception.com and Reboot (Copenhagen).
As the idea of 'deviant' seemed popular, I've given the working title of SODIT or Society and Deveiant Technologies to the interim Yahoo Group set up to continue these discussions:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/sodit/
12:48 AM|
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