Clever Hamster

Role of Open Source in public sector

Our family made a road trip to west Texas for the Open Source Symposium, held on Saturday April 26 at Angelo State University, in San Angelo. Its mission is to introduce open source to those working in college environments, which was why UT Austin was pleased to have my husband, Adam attend and report back to them. STC Austin's own Janet Swisher presented on how to participate in OS projects.
Adam's "ah-ha" from the symposium was the good fit between open source and the public sector, for this reason: non-salary rewards. Public sector organizations (universities, agencies, etc.) are highly constrained in how they can compensate their technical talent; the way budgeting works, money is far, far harder to free up than staff time.
As a result, open source projects become compelling not only for the promise of freedom from commercial and proprietary solutions but also for the opportunity to commit technical talent to its development. Their participation steers the projects toward your organizational goals (an important sell to management), but also this: it offers your technical elite the chance to experience choice technologies, build their own status and credibility, and work with top-tier team members, across the field and the world. Sounds like a retention strategy and thus a very practical and powerful advantage to me.

STC program: UX futures = Joy of Use

Last night at the STC Austin program, Dr. John Morkes (of Expero, which hosts Free Usability Advice) argued that the next stage in User Experience would be "Joy of Use", which follows [1] Usefulness and [2] Ease of Use. That is, the emotions experienced by use of software or sites become the powerful differentiator among otherwise comparable offerings. Reminding me of Maslo's hierarchy of needs, Morkes ranked UX needs like this, from "must have" to "nice to have":

useful > easy to use > code quality > trust/security > pretty > stimulating > fun
(Me, I'd tweak it a bit: useful > code quality > trust/security > easy to use > pretty > stimulating > fun)

Research: Studies in psychology, marketing, and education clearly nail the benefits of humor, for improving likeability, social glue, trust, cooperation, sociability, and lowering fear and stress. Adding humor did not cost extra time in the completion of tasks. MRI studies of the effects of humor show that it activates the brain's reward centers, exactly as occurs when we see a pretty face, receive money, or take drugs.

Guidelines: [1] Define fun specifically per your audience, such as Sun developers enjoying reading old predictions about technology ("The PC will never catch on.") or Mini Cooper prospects enjoying extreme customization of their virtual cars. [2] Test, test, test! [3] Most importantly, don't go for fun before the lower UX levels are met, such as the IRS did with its humorous site that still frustrated stressed-out visitors; the IRS had to abandon the entire site design. 

Examples: weber.com/q , The Register, humor in graphic, buttons saying "Shhh... Secret sale!"

What about documentation? All of their work to date has made them conclude that there's not much you can do to remediate deep, heavy, intimidating manuals -- they recommend that all effort be put into embedded help (on-screen assistance of any kind), since users consistently report happiness about not having to use the Help, not having to leave the screen to get unblocked.

YouTube for NFPs: UNC Chapel Hill channel for lectures/talks

YouTube is massing and hosting far more educational content than how-tos and demos. The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill now has a dedicated portal for lectures, talks, and interviews: http://www.youtube.com/uncchapelhill.

Videos range from professors giving intimate talks, prominent speakers presenting large lectures, and interviews that probe scholars’ research and teaching. UNC's recordings and some simple metadata are uploaded to YouTube and appear on the UNC “channel.” The volume is impressive: There are now more than 250 videos in different playlists on the UNC channel. I read in a press release (posted to the ASIS list, http://mail.asis.org/mailman/listinfo/asis-l) that the UNC/YouTube relationship proved so successful that channel management is transitioning to the Dept. of University Relations, although colleges will continue to add lectures. The interesting twist to me is the University's generosity with this content: the videos are free and available for use classrooms, home-schooling, research, and more, and the school encourages use and reuse of the materials. Times are a-changing!

SXSWi: Non-profits on the bleeding edge

Anne Gentle and I attended two popular panels devoted to the challenges facing non-profits, and there was urgent talk about how to increase this to a distinct track in future conferences. The attendees seemed evenly split between those working in non-profits and those providing technology and support to those organizations.

The Future of Volunteers: Adapt or Die!

The first panel tackled how non-profits must harness the new social web to attract and maintain volunteers and donors. From accepting inspiring user-generated content to high-tech recruiting technology in the classroom, these non-profits shared how they're adapting to today's volunteers and donors.

1. National Geographic: (http://mywonderfulworld.org/) This venerable organization changed its mission in response to the web. No longer seeing itself as a disseminater of geographical information so much as an advocate and educator (for natural world and cultural preservation), it now seeks to be a platform for the world community to publish, share, and vote on authored content. They run camps to educate youth in the photographic and videographic technologies needed to produce original, publication-worthy work, and they're focusing on supporting public school teachers, whose funding and bandwidth for geography and cultural studies has shrunk. They're joining forces with related organizations, such as the National Park Service, especially as government institutions are more constrained in what they can do per advocacy. They're also engaging the public with scientific initiatives, such as allowing public participation in a genome mapping project, by which people can submit cheek swabs and information to the study and receive back a mapping of their ancestral journey across the globe. Facilitating personal engagement, coupled with the emphasis on authentic storytelling about minority culture experiences, seems to be the thrust of their new focus.

2. March of Dimes: (http://www.everybabyhasastory.org/) Storytelling, here, too, is the breakthrough change. The March of Dimes built a special bus with two filming booths inside, which it sends around the country and parks in family-friendly places to capture stories about difficult pregnancies and infancies; the website captures even more of these stories, and the impact on engagement and involvement in their fundraising events has been tremendous.

3. American Cancer Society: (http://www.sharinghope.tv/) Storytelling by survivors has been just as compelling for the ACS; they have built a new portal for story sharing because of its huge impact on participation. The challenges they listed were mostly on the side of the non-profit: fragmentation in volunteer handling, inability to list all opportunities comprehensively, and the lack of a volunteer strategy on the national level. Much of new media awareness they stumbled into, such as through the wildly successful grassroots “frozen pea” (http://frozenpeafund.com/) phenomenon: http://susanreynolds.blogs.com/boobsonice/ .

Specific advice:

• Go micro: “micro-volunteering”, “micro-donations”: Allow people to make very small commitments of time and money, repeated on a regular basis.

• Analytics: Advised to change approach to web analytics: downplay page views and emphasize the time spent on the pages and the resulting engagement you can document.

• Facebook: Advised to build causes, widgets, badges, applications, and let your base do the rest.

• SecondLife: Advised to do the work on weekends if necessary, until you can show success via metrics and establish the project.

Pimp My Non Profit - Real Non-Profits Kicking Ass with Online Technology

The follow-up panel shared stories of how non-profit groups have had huge impact on- and offline by using the latest web technologies - for pennies on the dollar. Participants:

1. World Learning: (http://worldlearning.org/)

2. Tech Soup: (http://techsoup.org/)

3. Beth's Blog: (http://beth.typepad.com/) - specifically, how she used technology to win Parade Magazine's “America's Giving Challenge”, fundraising for impoverished Cambodian children

4. Schipul: (http://www.schipul.com/)

5. Common Knowledge: (http://www.commonknowledge.org)

Successes and sites:

• http://ilovemountains.org/ : interactive tool to show impact of your own power company on mountain-top removal and take follow-up action

• http://processing.org/: open-source platform to program images, animation, and interactions

• IFAW.org, http://www.animalrescueblog.org/ : user-uploaded content; advocacy + donation + community

• Brooklyn Museum: free podcasting of lectures, repurposing of content, FaceBook application to share slideshows of artwork collection

• http://maplight.org/ : rolls up data from multiple other organizations and lets users visually drill down on campaign spending, special interest money, and legislative impact.

• Why student blogs failed at WorldLearning.org: the students didn't know each other before venturing out, they were too busy to blog, and internet connections were often too slow, even in developed areas.

• Networking success 3 R's: Relationship-building + Rewards + Reciprocity

• http://austinprobono.org/ : Helping businesses and organizations hook up

• http://hub.witness.org/ : User-uploaded videos related to human rights crises, organized by region and issue

• Just published: Mobilizing Generation 2.0

SXSWi: Age of Engage, how our websites must change

The Age of Engage: Reinventing Marketing for Today's Connected, Collaborative, and Hyperinteractive Culture, by Denise Shiffman

Marketing is hugely impacted by how the web landscape has changed: the static web has become a real-time, interactive web that's social and user-powered. Marketers must distribute messages but then let go, allowing others to manipulate, add to, and pass them along. To engage, we must fundamentally change our messaging: it's more than merely adding blogs, podcasts, and social networking.  Age of Engage covers both marketing and product planning.

Advice from her presentation:

• Build street credibility at all costs: write whitepapers and e-books that have very useful content, and make them free and easy to download, so they can spread virally.

• Create free quizzes and on-line tools to motivate users to find themselves wanting and seek change (yours).

• Create a living datasource, community-built, that will keep them coming back.

• Offer your users a visionary voice; give them genuine peeks into what's coming next.

• Capture hearts with style as well as emotions (think Apple).

• Consider how controversy can generate buzz (http://comcastmustdie.com/).

• Use tools such as http://www.hubspot.com/ to evaluate your site (enter your URL as well as a competitor's, to grade your site).

• Viral spread seems to work best for content that is very new, very funny, or very relevant.

SXSWi: Facebook's technology future

Sarah Lacy interviewed Facebook’s young founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, at the keynote on Sunday. Started as a college networking tool, the site (valued at $15 billion!) is now used by over 60 million users of all ages, with over 50% using the site every day. With the new Facebook Platform, the site is transforming into a new entity, one in which third-party developers will create a torrent of applications and utilities to serve their own communities and advance their own agendas (such as the Brooklyn Museum's app that lets patrons showcase its art collection on their pages). Facebook's goal is to support super-efficient communication and connection, with semi-public/semi-private information that members post in trust; key in the strategy churn now is how best to monetize it, particularly when their 3-year contract with Microsoft expires.

Zuckerberg admitted that having a single threshold for spam-flagging apps actually worsens the overall experience of “spamminess”, as everyone races to the limit allowed. The critical challenge for the Facebook Platform is how to balance the competing needs for easiness, safety, and personal information control. Numerous complaints came from the floor about the current inadequacies of searching, tagging, and information shielding.

My sense of the Facebook discussion is that the platform – rather than driving the users – is barely keeping up with the demands being put upon it. Users know only too well what shortcuts they want in personal networking, based on years of making do with disconnected software and datasources, of keeping their networks up to date with their photos, news, and information. Now that the tools are matured sufficiently to make virtual networking possible, the pent-up demand of the extroverted majority is driving change to a blur. If not Facebook, it will be something like it, I'm convinced. Pandora's box is opened.

Simplified Technical English: Who needs it?

Last night I attended the STC Austin program "Four Candles - Just What is Simplified Technical English?", presented by Alan Porter of Quadralay and the 4J's Group. (Do watch the Four Candles video if you don't know this famous skit!)

Simplified Technical English is a writing standard created for aerospace/defense maintenance documentation, born of a deadly need for clarity (such as the worker who obediently "cut the power" with loppers and died). It's a controlled language because it restricts grammar, style, and vocabulary. Its goal is to stamp out ambiguity (one word = one meaning) and present technical complexity in the easiest language possible, to support users of diverse ages, abilities, and familiarity with English. If this sounds like the Plain Language movement to you, you're right: there's significant overlap. Boiling it down, Simplified Technical English has two parts:

1. Writing rules for simplified grammar and style (which improves readability scores)
2. Control list (approved words with restricted meanings), plus guidelines for adding to the list and possibly a thesaurus (common terms with suggested alternatives)

The writing rules largely follow Plain Language guidelines and good technical writing practice, much of which can be enforced using Microsoft Word's Grammar Checker (all settings enabled):

• Sentence length (20 or 25 words)
• Paragraph length (6 sentences)
• Noun cluster length (3 words or less)
• Missing articles (based on count and mass distinctions)
• Verbal auxiliaries (passive, progressive, perfect, modals)
• Unnecessary -ing participles
• Multiple commands in a single sentence
• Warning, Caution, and Note errors (should begin with imperative statement)
• Correct vocabulary and part-of-speech usage

Where STE becomes complicated and expen$ive is the control list: generally, paying for a QA tool (such as HyperSTE) to scan documents and ensure compliance with organizational rules and lists (which it can only do after you build an organization-specific dictionary and fully train the staff). Whenever possible, leverage an existing dictionary (Boeing, Kodak, Caterpillar), but relevant lists outside of manufacturing and medicine could be scarce.

The business case for implementing STE is the usual suspects:

• Scary translation costs
• Scary liability costs
• Scary customer support costs

With none of these in play, is it worth it? No and yes: No to the formalized control list, but yes to the writing rules that yield readability improvements and consistency - which benefit every user, move content toward internationalization, and make any future translation projects less risky.

Program notes: Accessibility, Bottlenecks, and Control

Last night, Dr. Clay Spinuzzi, Director of UT's Computer Writing and Research Lab, entertained STC Austin with tales of the journey by which they brought CWRL's website out of the 20th century. The site, a knowledge repository holding decades worth of white papers and instructional content, was bottlenecked, unmaintainable, and inaccessible. What to do?

His solution (implemented over several years) took this form:

1. Stuff the content into a content management system. (They chose Drupal.)
2. Grow distributed authorship and expertise through bribery and self-interest: give graduate students their own Drupal sites to showcase their portfolios and to use in their classes. (Brilliant bit of psychology, that! Resulted in wide adoption plus great depth of expertise to draw on at little cost.)
3. Only then, use tools (WebXM) to crawl the whole mess for accessibility problems, and remediate them bit by bit. (They started with over 4000 errors and got down to none.)

Tips:

• Bottleneck cure: Implement a ticketing system for the CMS, so that site visitors who have problems and questions can easily submit them and admins can track and assign the issues to responsible parties.
• With open source, be wary of implementing slick plug-ins: this can cause tremendous pain when it's time to upgrade, and -- worse -- can cause rework of content that used the old plug-in.
• Plan for scalability and guard resources carefully: Other groups may ask you to host a "prototype" site for free, but their wild success could overload your system.

"Head First": Revolution in instructional authoring

By revisiting the work of Kathy Sierra, of Creating Passionate Users fame, I followed the breadcrumb trail to the new O'Reilly book series she helped to shape: Head First. The Head First Labs blog reveals some of the research and approach employed in these "brain-friendly guides"; I'll try to summarize their strategy as it's presented in the book I purchased, Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML.

To be clear, these are learning guides: it's not enough to get it -- they seek to make us retain it. First, they employ several strategies that will be familiar to those who've been trained in instructional design:

• Use 80/20: Cover the 80% that learners need -- don't attempt 100% coverage, as documentation does.
• Use multiple learning styles (e.g., steps + big picture + code examples), which dovetails into...
• Use redundancy: say same thing in different ways, with different media, with different senses, to give the content better odds of penetrating and sticking.
• Use activities, because brains are tuned to learn by doing. Keep to the sweet spot, of quickly doable but not trivially easy.
• Use challenges (puzzles, questions, exercises), so that active mental effort reinforces the learning (unlike the effort expended staying awake through difficult prose).

Very good practice, but that's only half of the strategy -- the other half is where the fun begins. Head First deliberately employs strategies that take advantage of how our social, adaptive, and creative primate brains work:

• Use people: literally, photos of people; particularly, photos of faces. Our brains pay great attention to those.
• Use pictures, because our brains are optimized for processing them; embedding text into the pictures is easiest for us to process.
• Use stories, and present multiple points of view. Our brains learn deeply when forced to evaluate and judge.
• Use conversations. Our brains pay close attention to keeping up with our side of a conversation, even when it's happening on paper!
• Use both right/left brain appeals; this engagement helps prolong focus, and alternating right (holistic, visual) and left (analytical, verbal) gives each side a rest.
• Use the unexpected: surprise, humor, emotion, interest-grabbers. These things help us feel, and feeling is a powerful channel into long-term memory.

It strikes me that many of these ideas have already been exploited to great advantage by Wiley's "Dummies" series, so I'll be looking at and comparing the two series. All in all, I find these learner-friendly approaches very compelling and worth studying!

New photo location: Picasa

Ah, I'm such a Google junkie! the mail, calendar, doc/spreadsheet, and now the Picasa apps have me giddy. Here's where the new photos are posted:

Family photo albums