An interview with Ada Lovelace

This morning, I went to the Science Museum to talk to Ada Lovelace herself about Charles Babbage, his computing machines, and her vision and brilliance.

Ada was a most fascinating lady, and I hope that because of today, more people will know not just about her, but about all the other amazing women in technology.

I’d like to thank Steph Troeth and Steph Booth for helping me with Ada Lovelace Day. Both of them helped me to figure out what shape the campaign was going to take and were then invaluable in kick-starting it. Without their help and encouragement I’m not sure that Ada Lovelace Day would have happened at all. Thanks also go to Vicky Riddell at the BBC for deciding to run with the story on the BBC News Channel and doing such an amazing job of getting so many smart techie women on the news.

I also need to thank two men, firstly Tony Kennick, who very kindly cobbled together the Ada Lovelace Day Collection mash-up, and who put up with my last-minute-ness with grace and good humour.

And secondly, my wonderful husband Kevin who has provided me with endless support and help over the last three months, who shot the video above, and who came with me to BBC Television Centre this evening and helped me calm my nerves before my interviews.

Thanks are also due to everyone who has taken part. Ada Lovelace Day was a community effort, with everyone playing an important role in making it the success it is.

But it’s not over yet! We have another 15 hours before the day that is Ada Lovelace Day is finally over as midnight arrives in the Baker Islands, and we have a lot more blog posts still to be added to our Collection.

Even then, it’s not over. We have our first event booked at NESTA for 10th June – on which more to come – and I have a few other ideas up my sleeve too. So don’t go away – keep FindingAda.com in your RSS reader, or follow us on Twitter, and keep up-to-date with our news.

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links for 2009-03-20

links for 2009-03-19

links for 2009-03-18

  • Kevin: The Nieman Journalism Lab looks at micro-sponsorships for beat-blogging at the MinnPost. It's very much like day sponsors for NPR stations, where they ask supporters for a small donation for their names to be read out on-air during the day. However, the idea is sound. Allow local fans and local businesses to make small payments of support. It does requirre beat bloggers to build up a sufficient audience, but it's not difficult. And the size of the audience isn't as important as the relevance, which is what we've seen with niche blogging in other areas. Relevance and other qualitative factors are possibly more important than the size of the audience for niche blogs, such as beat blogs.

links for 2009-03-17

  • Kevin: As Alf Hermida writes, the State of the (US) Media report for 2009 is 'bleakest' ever. Alf pulls out this quote from the report: "Journalism, deluded by its profitability and fearful of technology, let others outside the industry steal chance after chance online. By 2008, the industry had finally begun to get serious. Now the global recession has made that harder." The shift of audience to the internet has accelerated, which has resulted in a negative financial impact on news organisations, and the collapsing economy is decimating ad revenues, which is cutting into resources that could be used to develop new revenue sources.
  • Kevin: As newspapers look to change to finally face the disruptive innovation that is the internet, managers might want to look at ways that corporations change and deal with change. "Stanford professor Behnam Tabrizi, who spent 10 years studying corporations that have carried out reorganizations big and small." Among his conclusions: Effective change requires "fast and ruthless execution." But he also recommends creating multi-disciplinary teams that pull from an entire company. He says that it's better than hiring outside consultants and gives employees a stake in the outcome.

Businesses will live to regret their social media ignorance

There’s been a lot of discussion recently about how social media sites are now the more popular than, and even replacing, email. Earlier in March, a Nielsen survey found that 67% of people going online spent time on social networks and blogs. Now a presentation at South by SouthWest has posited how social tools such as Facebook, Yammer, Twitter and Friendfeed are replacing email.

I have no doubt that both reports are true and the wide media coverage of both should be a warning shot across the bows of business and, in particular, their IT departments. If CxOs don’t start to get a grip on the use of social media internally for communication and collaboration they are going to regret it.

Just think about what is actually going on here: Fed up with rubbish corporate email software and wanting to communicate quickly and effectively with their colleagues, people are turning to the tools that suit them the most. Or to put it another way,

People see email as damage and route around it.

This means that corporate communications are being had all over the place. And that means that your communications archives, which you might have to one day rely on in court, are scattered who knows where across the internet. This is something you really do not want to happen.

What’s the answer? Well, you can put your kneejerks away. The answer is not to summarily shut off access to Twitter and Facebook and the like. Remember that bit about routing round damage? People find ways to circumvent stupid IT policies, and you won’t find out until it’s too late. Using Ubuntu on a USB stick to circumvent idiotic IT decisions that prevent people from doing their job effectively and efficiently may be a minority sport at the moment, but it’s going to become a lot more common as it becomes easier and information on how to do it starts to circulate beyond the geek community.

If you want to stop your staff using Twitter to discuss hiring decisions and ensure that your corporate communications information is safe on your own server, where it can be archived and searched, you need to install Web 2.0 services yourself. Now. This is not a time for the Great Race to be Second, this is a time to look very seriously at the ramifications of not enabling your staff to work the way that they want to.

At the very minimum, you need to give your staff these tools:

  • Wiki
  • Instant messanger
  • Twitter-esque microconversation
  • RSS readers

And you need to make sure you know how communications using these tools are going to be logged, archived, and made searchable. Mostly, archiving (or logging) is built in, so it shouldn’t be that difficult. Cross-archive search might be a little bit more interesting, but it’s worth your while because more time is wasted in re-finding information than in finding it in the first place.

You also need to understand how these tools can be used to best effect, what their strengths and weaknesses are, how to communicate about them to your staff, and how to encourage adoption. How do they fit together as a suite? How can you encourage people to use them instead of the publicly available tools? What are the benefits? What do you do if someone, despite everything, does something silly publicly? Don’t guess at this stuff – do it properly. You’ve probably got expertise internally, somewhere. If not, hire it in. Carefully.

This discussion is no longer about things like return on investment, improving efficiency and productivity or encouraging corporate culture change. Whilst those are still important, I think we’ve crossed a threshold where installing social tools is actually the risk averse action to take, the safer route, the thing that helps prevent monumentally stupid communications fuck-ups.

Many IT departments, taking their network security responsibilities seriously, have secured their networks so tightly that they are no longer functional for the very people who need to use them. And those people now have options – they can go elsewhere, and they are going elsewhere. Let me put it another way:

People see IT restrictions as damage and route around them.

Routing around damage is getting easier and easier, so easy it will soon be mainstream. You cannot ignore this anymore. You can’t bury your head in the sand and say that Web 2.0 is for other people. You can’t blindly carry on using bloated corporate tools that drive your users to madness. Your users are smarter than that now, and they have been enabled. You either get to grips with the tools that people actually want to use to communicate, you provide them with what they need to do their jobs, you transform your IT department into an enabling force for good, or…

Can you actually afford to risk finding out what “or” might mean? Peter Horrocks accidentally Tweeted BBC promotions. What if it had been firings? What if his entire direct message archive was accidentally made public by a third party tool? What if one of the external tools your staff are using suddenly changes the way that it works, thus revealing things that were assumed to be hidden?

Trust me on this, if nothing else. You aren’t going to like “or” very much at all, and you’ll be much better off if you take social software seriously.

Future of journalism: Uncertain but not hopeless

As a journalist who I am sure has been (and possibly still is) considered ‘barking mad’ by some of my colleagues in the industry, quite a bit of what Clay Shirky wrote in his post about newspapers thinking the unthinkable resonated with me. I’m still digesting it because I think the main thrust of what he said was that the industry is entering a period of great uncertainty. I saw this day coming in August of 1993 when I saw Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, in a student computer lab at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana. As I wrote in my first post here on Strange Attractor, I knew that the web would fundamentally change journalism.

It took longer than I thought it would. After I left university and went to Washington DC for my first jobs, it was like taking a step backwards into internet history compared to where the University of Illinois was in 1994. Did I know where it was all headed in 1994? Absolutely not. But I’d say it’s a lot easier to see where the internet is heading now than where we’re heading in journalism.

I’m still digesting what Clay has written, but it seemed to me that he was attempting to move beyond the self-denial that the industry has exhibited for much of the past 15 years.

It isn’t that newspapers didn’t see the internet coming. The problem was that newspaper companies and, to be honest, most print journalists tried to adapt the internet to newspapers rather than adapt the news business to the internet. If most (not all by any means) print journalists were honest with ourselves, we would stop trying to lay the blame entirely at the feet of management and avaricious owners and own up to our own resistance to the internet. Too few of us went running boldly to the embrace the future. There’s still time, and it’s better to move towards the future on your own steam than be pushed as many of us are now.

Clay was trying to turn a page and say we’re in the midst of revolution and have been for a while not. Get over it.

The internet is a disruptive technology, not something that politely challenges that existing order. Now that the revolution has met the worst recession in at least 60 years, we’re entering extremely uncertain times.

As Clay wrote:

So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it.

But let’s not confuse uncertainty with hopelessness. Journalists are not in a hopeless situation. Any journalist can now become a publisher, and from my own experience, regaining your voice is liberating, empowering and also professionally beneficial. Not only is the cost of publishing approaching zero, the cost of experimentation is too. We don’t have to pay for presses. We don’t even have to pay for desk-top publishing. You can do broadcast-quality interviews with a person on the other side of the world for free with Skype. Technology can threaten our business model but it can be liberating for our journalism. We just have to do what we always done, great journalism, and build a great community around it. Honestly, since I started blogging and doing social media journalism five years ago, it’s been some of the most gratifying journalism of my career.

As Steve Yelvington wrote recently, “We don’t have a clue where this is going … and that’s OK.” Steve was writing about the launch of the Guardian’s Open Platform (the Guardian being my job). Steve would love to have the resources we have at the Guardian or those of the BBC or the New York Times to launch a platform, but he doesn’t need them. He’s building his sites on the open-source platform, Drupal, and it’s army of users and developers around the world are constantly working to extend it. You don’t need expensive technology to innovate.

We’re entering a post-industrial era in journalism. It’s scary. It’s uncertain for journalists, but just remember, it’s not hopeless.

links for 2009-03-13

links for 2009-03-12

links for 2009-03-10

  • Kevin: UK public data hackday shows how much that can be done with publicly available data in the UK in just eight hours. The (r)evolution will be fueled by beer and pizza.
  • Kevin: The New York Times calls on the US Senate to join the House of Representatives and the presidential candidates in submitting "timely electronic filing of donations". President Barack Obama is on the hunt for cost-savings by improving the efficiency in government. Here's a way to save the US taxpayer some dough. Instead of filing the donation information electronically like other parts of the US government, the Senate's "own computerized information is first printed out onto paper, which is then sent in sheaves to clerks to be re-entered ever so slowly into a different computer system." Democracy and government efficiency FAIL.