With our new president-elect being heralded by the TV networks, could this mean a drastic shift in the way that technology is used in government?  We are seeing the end of an era:

Nov. 4, 2008, is a historic day because it marks the end of an economic era, a political era and a generational era all at once.

Economically, it marks the end of the Long Boom, which began in 1983. Politically, it probably marks the end of conservative dominance, which began in 1980. Generationally, it marks the end of baby boomer supremacy, which began in 1968. For the past 16 years, baby boomers, who were formed by the tumult of the 1960s, occupied the White House. By Tuesday night, if the polls are to be believed, a member of a new generation will become president-elect.

So today is not only a pivot, but a confluence of pivots.

– David Brooks, “A Date with Scarcity“, New York Times, November 3, 2008

Could this also mark a new beginning in the realization of technology usage in public government?  Obama’s grassroots campaign coordinated using the Internet, and it would be a significant oversight to lose that element of his work.  From Twitter to Facebook to his own web site, he utilized the tools of the 21st century to mobilize a huge following that pushed him to a landslide.

What if that following demanded accountability through social media?  What if Obama continued to tweet on the issue that he was considering, that mattered to the nation?  What if the grassroots movement he started was applied to the White House web site?  What if the change he promised continued to be a grassroots effort, with him taking the role of a peer who considers all angles, rather than one of Commander in Chief, whose decisions are final?  Obama has recognized the power of my generation - the “Net Generation” or the “Digital Generation”, whatever you choose to call us.  What if he continued to leverage that power?

What change could he achieve then?

Orientation Notes

• Infocamp: Power to the people.  Enable the user to use technology (but what’s technology?)
• Disciplines represented: IA, Libraries, HCI, usability, user centered design, technical communication.
• 2 days, 45 minute presentations - we can react to stuff happening NOW (WaMu)

Keynote - Jacob Wobbrock

• Degree in HCI
• dub: University of Washington HCI/design group, stands for “design, use, build” - combines computer sciences, info school, technical communications, school of arts
• Disability: contrast w/ ability.  Contrast standard parking handicapped sign with other graphics
• Accessibility: not just for people in wheelchairs, curb cuts: bikers and strollers assist as well.  Curb cuts if built from the beginning save money.  Anticipating accessibility saves money in the long run.
• Person pushing cart through sliding doors: situationally impaired
• accessible design: talking about everyone, in different circumstances (situational components)
• accessibility is usability for all.  It’s not about disability, it’s about what you can do.
• We have a standard interface for computing that presents challenges to someone with non-standard abilities - we usually adapt the user to the technology, creating specialized technologies.  The assistive technology is a mediator.  But why?  Why not design smarter or adapt existing everyday input devices?
• EdgeWrite: creates a limited input area to assist with drawing letters
• Can leverage the properties of edges for more than just text entry - playing with using different input methods along edges of mobile devices, trying to aim for a specific spot in a screen
• Isn’t the stylus dead due to multitouch?  Weellllll….
• Reading screen with finger is much different than actually using a screen reader
• “Why can’t my computer just do the right thing when I type?” - person with peripheral neuropathy
• Demo TrueKeys: live spell checking as typing occurs.  Challenge: How do you allow someone to not have to verify that a corrected word was done properly?  Is there a way that you can always correct a miscorrected word without feeling pressured?
• Let’s burden the machine: SUPPLE++ - can we automatically generate UI customized to a person’s individual abilities?  Yup.  Issue low-level tasks, model it, then generate an interface that minimize cost and user errors.
• Forgotten input device: the microphone!  It can be used in creative ways.  Person painted with his voice using Dragon NaturallySpeaking and MS Paint!
• Vocal Joystick - voice/vowel map so that vowel sounds force cursor to move in a specific direction.  Can map pitch or loudness.
• Angular deviation for cursors: create larger or smaller targets for clicking as people use the computer.
• Why don’t we see targets that expand as we approach them, gravity wells, “slippery slope” guidance to common targets?
• “The world is a button” - Jake Wobbrock
• “What if the world was a switch?”  Buttons we need to acquire a confined area - switches, not so much - we can overshoot a switch, it doesn’t change the interaction so long as the interaction crosses the plane of the switch.  The world we’ve created is all totally fake when it comes to technology.
• Can we get rid of pointing and use something called “goal crossing”?
• Why do we have to assume desktops are x/y grids?  What about polar coordinates or reels?
• Start from center, when crossing an icon, bring up specific interactions
• “Flipping the burden”/ability-based design - allow software to adapt to people’s ability.  Think about accessibility as a potentially better design for everyone.
• Challenge: it takes a company with developers and infrastructure to really push stuff out!

Session 1: Help Me Turn Data into a New Design (Kristen) - Room 106

• Wanted to learn what problems people were trying to solve using library web site and tried to figure out how to find that out
• Used chat with a librarian feature transcript to get feedback on current layout
• Generated lists of tasks performed and problems people encountered (tasks: locate something vs. searching for something, access a specific database, search for specific piece of information, etc.; problems: people can’t find information, people don’t know what they want, did not understand a policy or service, library doesn’t own resource, etc.)
• Possibilities: tweak search results and training curricula for searching databases, federated search, map out “task paths” for the most common ways of doing certain tasks, overview of resources available, come up with vocabulary based on chat transcripts, make the main page more visual - MORE WHITESPACE!  If people are stuck, give them an “out” - a way to get help.  Create profiles of users so that professors can “target” content to users that they want to see used.

Session 2: Knowledge Management (Room 102)

Topics:

• Research (gleaning new ideas)
• tacit KM - preserving knowledge in the workplace
• expertise location
• knowledge sharing
• knowledge boundaries
• information verification and security
• capture verification
• value page
• Jeff Smith: How track experts and make findable, not just a tool?  How expose what you don’t know that you wish you knew?
• defining wwdk
• data visualization
• personalization - tailoring how people receive or record knowledge

Notes:

• some of the items in the list above could be treated as inputs into the knowledge management process - information verification, security
• what is a knowledge management system?  It may not be a system at all…
• What is a knowledge management system, really? It may not even be a “system” per se - it may be an interaction between elements.
• In fact, knowledge management isn’t systematic - capturing it is, but knowledge management is CULTURAL.
• KMS are now just generic systems trying to model particular things.
• explicit knowledge: universal, tacit knowledge: something that’s inside, can’t be vocalized/translated
• sometimes we need to be able to push knowledge into the background, but it still needs to be accessible and actionable
• KMS: what these systems try to achieve can be done much more efficiently by changing the culture to allow a daily interchange of information
• Knowledge needs context
• “Modern Society is Document Decadent”
• knowledge management talked about in the context of organizational goals
  
• Knowledge Management Maturity Model: http://www.kmmm.org/model.html
• what is the difference between information and knowledge, or do we actually even care?

Session 3: Flat File vs. CMS (Room 106)

• wants something simple and easy to maintain
• plone - cms, has problems with web host providing it
• task: figure out whether to stay with flat files or to move into cms
• what’s the difference between the two methods?
• theory: a lot of people want to be able to create and maintain content - what to do with volunteers?
• “flat”: one HTML page per site
• CMS: more refined management structure
• 10-12 pages
• sections of site may be more dynamic
• 2-3 days reasonable turnaround time on changes
• 3-4 people updating
• consider using templates

Another simplified CMS/Flat file:

• time consuming to maintain and update
• 12 pages not dynamic
• 3-4 people updating
• jobs - HTML templates
• knowledge of HTML
• Seamonkey - HTML Mozilla editor
• richer experience = more admin time
• social media
• users are STC, other orgs
• share resources
• timely info and info update problem - users news and events and jobs
• updates w/o CMS

CMS:

• WYSIWYG editor
• easy to change
• anyone can do updates
• events: time/place fields
• content control and security control
• set permissions correctly
• CMS outlive person or person outlive CMS?
• Instructional overhead/longer learning curve
• CMS doesn’t necessarily imply web 2.0
• content and system lives on
• organizational commitment
• institutional memory/institutional history of docs
• distributed users***
• resource limitations: time, $

Cross-boundary considerations:

• Google Analytics
• Culture of content sharing
• Overall vision
• users have certain expectations
• Free stuff? Open source?
• Do I need this NOW or forever?

Session 4: Structured vs. Unstructured Data (Room 102)

• Goal of product: search through metadata, find metadata in certain systems and create different views of the information out of the system
• Created series of products that allows metadata findability, but doesn’t work for unstructured information
• Structured v. unstructured information definition: structured: database has fields and tables and schemas, the Sematic Web, etc.; unstructured: info that you don’t have access to or that isn’t ordered - photos, video, etc.
• http://www.sapdesignguild.org/editions/edition2/sui_content.asp
• Types of unstructured data: photographs (inc. print), sound files, text, user input, files, logs, video, animation
• Structure has to have meaning to someone; something can be very well structured, but if you can’t make sense of it, it’s useless.  You need to be able to UNDERSTAND information.
• Context makes a big difference on how information ends up being structured.
• Transforming physical unstructured data: requires physical interaction with objects to add structure on top of the physical data
• virtually all user input is unstructured unless you can limit inputs

These are my own notes from the Research Conversation about representing Piers Plowman today, March 7. Presented by Terry Brooks and Miceal Vaughan. (Note (3/11/2008): I went back in and cleaned some of the formatting up on this, since apparently Windows Live Writer is not quite as consistent as I’d like.)

• Miceal:
  • Work is an electronic edition of the poem aimed towards beginning students
  • 14th century poem in 3 distinct versions - 50+ manuscripts!
  • First version ~1360s - author is uncertain, could be multiple issues
  • Trying to build an archive of all surviving manuscripts of the poem
  • Want to produce the poem so that it’s accessible in different formats (wording/spelling formats)
  • Review of different versions of first four lines - spelling differing from Middle English to modern with different representations of letters: þ (equivalent to “th”), for instance
  • Miceal has been working on this for roughly 15 years.
  • Wants to present clean, uncluttered version so that it can be worked with directly
  • Had HTML version created for students to work with created by people knowledgeable in HTML
• Terry:
  • Problem: Content of the poem is being held hostage by a fixed presentation format. Wants to divorce the format from the content.
  • Given the original HTML version; first had to go into the source and create a parser that parses out content. Has to also deal with inline commenting. Wants to “unfreeze” the content and put it into a general format.
  • XML structure: Section (prologue, passage) made up of many lines. Break the poem down to a word-by-word unit level, which could have separate spellings and spacing requirements and (of course) the value of the word itself. Also has word-by-word footnotes, which have author and line information.
  • Problem with representation in XML: HTML escape characters can’t cooperate well with XML parsers. Solved by HTML post-processing that replaces placeholders with the proper characters.
  • This was initially done so that it would be fixed, but editing was a need - created an XML editor to allow for these attributes to be changed without knowing the XML itself.
• Current XML version focuses on the Knott-Fowler and Vaughan versions of the poem, and encodes line-by-line metadata on each version.
• How does one flag the reader that there’s content hidden behind a particular word? Their tactic: change the icon.
• How does an expert in Middle English want to read more than one text? Side by side, one above and one below? Actually, it turns out that they want two versions of each line presented together rather than side by side.
• Question to audience: How would you build an application so that you can compare two versions (from an information architecture standpoint)?
• Question from audience: How do you make this project expandable beyond Piers Plowman?
  • Some of these strategies may be reusable.
  • Micael: Trying to give access to a variety of versions.
  • Terry: Yes, aiming at a generalized information architecture
• Question from audience: Why not database-driven instead of XML?
  • Terry: Portability.
• Question from audience: How do scholars process and comment upon these works? Does literature exist that researches how this is done?
  • Micael: No - everyone comments on these works differently.
  • Terry: The XML editor spurred the same question - how do people edit these things? Feedback regarding how Micael edits led to editor program changes.
  • Micael: There may be a possibility of redefining how commenting is done via the editor.
• Question: Pedagogically, is this the same as you would have had students do by looking at two versions side by side?
  • Micael: They would have gotten one version. Wants this to be something usable by anyone interested, but also for people to be able to understand the significance of different versions of the same work.
  • Terry: I would ask the same question, different angle: How do people read these poems?
  • UI design: Micael doesn’t want underlining or coloring of words - wants the data behind the document to be transparent
• Micael envisions this project as an archive.
• Audience: Interesting part of this is learning from the juxtaposition of different texts. But you’ve got a grid of future/current technologies and activities to consider.
• Micael: Johns Hopkins not interested in keeping the electronic version of this information, but others might be interested in coordinating this.
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• Audience: This XML structure really doesn’t seem that portable, since it’s dependent on whether other documents use the same attributes.
• Terry: Correct - not sure how generalizable the schema is.
• Audience: This would have huge problems going across languages (French, Spanish, etc.)
• Micael: This representation scheme would work for words, but not for prose.

Zach Hale points out that my RSS feed only publishes post summaries.  Whoops.  I’ve changed it (I hope) so that it properly pushes out entire posts.

For all two of you that might follow this blog using something other than the web site :)

I’ll credit Zach Hale for first making me wonder why the hell Twitter was really even worth thinking about (though I can’t appear to locate my original comment on his blog to that effect). 

After much resistance, I’ve finally set up my Twitter account (you can find it on my Profiles menu on this site’s navigation bar).  Why?  This series of articles had a lot to do with it, but I also decided that I’d take a page from the book of one of my co-workers, Martin Criminale, and at least try throwing my hat in the ring.  And, of course, Zach had a bit to do with it.

Now if they only had an import option that allowed me to upload contacts without sending out invitations (the Gmail contact import doesn’t appear to be working for me at this point).  I’m also curious about whether it might be possible to integrate my blog posts and my Twitter posts in such a way that they all appear in a continuous stream on this page (without necessarily being an entry in my WordPress RSS feed).  It’s probably doable, just a question of figuring out how.  Tweets, as they call Twitter entries, would have to be indicated, but that’s not overly hard.  Perhaps a combination of SimplePie and my standard WordPress template code?

A discussion in IMT 530 reminded me of tautologies - essentially, logical assertions based on variables.  Using tautologies, you can construct what are called truth tables - tables that show when a particular condition holds.  Thus, if I treat two variables - A and B as boolean values (true/false), then ask what happens when we apply the AND operation and OR operation to these two variables separately, you end up with a table that looks like this:

This skips the formal notation.  You can go further - there are inference notations, NOT notations (an inversion), and I believe there may also be NOR and NAND (not or and not and), though these operations may simply be a combination of the AND/NOT or OR/NOT formulations rather than formal expressions.

As some of you are probably aware, Sean Rees and I are both co-founders of Energy Soapbox, a web site dedicated to promoting sustainability and environmental awareness. This blog features posts that focus on diverse issues from the meaning of sustainability to sheepwalking (though I have slowly become the sole contributor as late).

With Dennis McDonald’s post on creating blog-based microcommunities, I actually wonder if we might have approached the Energy Soapbox project the wrong way. In a nutshell, McDonald has been working with another blogger to have a shared conversation posted on both their blogs. They then combine their RSS feeds on the topic and present them as a single page (with each blogger having his own copy of that page on their web site).  Would this have been a better approach for Sean and I to use - establish a common tag or category that would synthesize all of our posts together?  That’s not to say we couldn’t also use the Energy Soapbox domain for its current purpose of displaying a running record of the conversation, but the sort of split McDonald describes would denote the ownership of the ideas better and empathize that Energy Soapbox is merely an additional platform (or - ahem - an additional soapbox).

That said, there is still an important question here - when is it better to “spin off” these sorts of projects into their own space, rather than attempting to combine disparate resources to represent a conversation?  There aren’t any real criteria that answer this question, and that may well be for the best, but this still seems like an important conversation to have overall.

Hmm, if it weren’t in the middle of the second or third week of Spring, this would be freaking awesome. Registration would be fairly cheap, since I happen to have recently become a student member of The Information Architecture Institute.

I found these tips on speeding up Firefox here, and it does seem to speed it up significantly even on broadband. However, a couple of the flags (I suspect) refer to older Firefox versions than what I’m currently running (2.0.0.12). Here are the ones I set in the “about:config” screen:

• network.http.max-connections: 48
• network.http.max-connections-per-server: 16
• network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-proxy: 8
• network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server: 4
• network.http.pipelining: true
• network.http.pipelining.maxrequests: 100
• network.http.proxy.pipelining: true
• Creating a new integer value:

  nglayout.initialpaint.delay: 0

I guess my only question at this point is (a) how much these settings increase the load on web servers and (b) whether these are changes that should really be made. It seems like most of the boost same from the last new integer value, if anything at all sped it up, since painting is now nearly instantaneous. All the other flags do is increase the number of connections the browser is allowed to make (and how it’s allowed to make them, if I’m understanding the pipelining setting properly). Is there any documentation on about:config values?

I’ve been thinking I needed printer ink for the last several weeks, since my printer is reporting that several of the cartridges are getting quite low. I had intended to order some tonight, and nearly did until I opened my filing cabinet and found refills for every single ink cartridge I have.

Well, at least I found the cartridges before I ordered new ones…

Note - I use a business-level printer that does duplexing and provides an insane amount of paper storage capacity (and it’s got a wireless connection built in to boot) - why do I use something with that much power? Home-use printers seem to fall a bit short in the areas of networking and duplexing, thus I went to business models. This is an HP OfficeJet Pro K550dwtn (actually, it’s a K550dtwn), and thus far has served me quite well. It helps that I keep my need for ink down by forcing all printouts to only use black ink and to use the “Fast/Economical Printing” setting (which is essentially draft printing). There is no visually appreciable difference between draft printing and normal printing speeds, except that draft printing uses a lot less ink.