Author Archives: Suw Charman-Anderson

02.19.09
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BeebCamp: Collaboration and prototyping

Another session on collaboration. It’s interesting that there’s so much curiosity about collaboration here. Talking to Charlie Beckett, we wondered if it’s that collaboration is now almost a given, “We ought to collaborate”, but that it’s not entirely clear what it is or how to do it.

One BBC project is to build applications in collaboration with the University of Aberdeen. Project has been running for a year, started off quite vague, has been interesting and educational. A lot of things they’ve learned is that academia has a very different approach to the way that the BBC works. A bit of a clash of culture.

How do we go about prototyping ideas effectively and efficiently. Finding a real variation in the way people react to the project, some are very enthusiastic, others suspicious of the BBC’s motivations for being in that area.

Nottingham games festival, universities doing prototypes for games.

Why are we not doing more stuff like this?

Prototypes, games-based, interactive narrative. How do you take a story to tell and build a game around it?

Knowledge Connect, act as middle man between universities (professors) and companies, help companies get research done. Grants available for SMEs so that the academics get paid to work on it from the grant.

Frustration with indie developers in games market, they don’t know how to get to work with the BBC. May have a great idea, but don’t know where to go to move it forward. Need to make it easier to understand the commissioning process, give developers an idea of future shows they could get involved in.

Commissioning periods of up to 18 months in some part of the BBC, so there’s plenty of development time. IF your period is 2 months, then that’s too short of a schedule to develop.

Should be in the commissioning process. Advertising has the same problem, web site & app development left til last minute. Need to gather assets. Needs to all be thought about at the commissioning process.

Not had space and time to put as much thought into it as would like.

What is the endgame for Prototype – want to learn what is possible for prototyping, is it valuable for students to work with BBC teams? Also to see if any of the ideas are worth putting more time into it.

Collaboration between HP and Bristol University. Someone at Lancashire (?) also doing interesting mobile games. NESTA do a lot of stuff in Bristol, big new media community there.

Running games and competition to find people to collaborate people. Cancer Research did one “Develop an ARG for Cancer Research”.

Try to break “who do we know” and be more “how to we reach out to more people to get as many as possible involved”.

Still pockets of people at the BBC doing interesting things.

First collaboration is to figure out what you’re doing, what your message is.

Is there a need for “Public Service Gaming”? Difficult climate, and BBC is in a unique position.

How does collaboration work within other areas? Is it just gaming? Have done some things with MTV, Radio London, didn’t work brilliantly, was ok.

How do you work innovation into the rest of the BBC. Project Red Stripe existed in a bubble and ended up going somewhere slightly strange.

It’s easy to forget to tell people what you’re doing, and lose the value of what you’ve learned, even just about what it’s like to work with a university.

Useful to write up what you did, what they said, what it might was like working with students, where did you work physically.

Values. Different values, different setting, so would be interesting to know if the students looked at the BBC as a different thing because of their involvement in the project.

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02.19.09
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BeebCamp: Collaborative storytelling

Russell Davis, got a model house and offered to send one to people so they could decorate it as their house of the future. Had more demand for houses than he could fulfil. People blogged about what they would do with their houses, what things might be like in the future. m2050 tag. Whilst doing this, Hugh Garrick put together a collaborative Spotify playlist about what the tunes of the future might be. Collaborative story.

Five Live do it every day, say “this is our story” and people give them additional information to flesh out the story. Crowdsourcing.

During snow storms, network radio’s traffic and travel news was out of date, audience had better information than the official version.

So many tools out there to use. Spotify is a great example of collaboration.

ARG’s are about building communities, story being told, the people themselves make as much of the story as the people running the ARG. We Tell Stories, work with Penguin, instead of putting a book PDF online, which is not that much fun, ways of telling stories that are native to how you behave on the net. One told through Google Maps, one through Twitter where the characters were telling you their daily lives.

Twitter & GPS, BBC Sport tried that during the Beijing Olympics parade.

How do you highlight the voices? How do you bring those voices forward that don’t loose their editorial line in the process.

Messageboards, where people throw up ideas, and then the writers write the next episode for actors to learn.

TwitPanto, got a bit too much to follow, tools not quote there.

People want to converse and if they have the opportunity then they will. Conversation not the same as storytelling.

Are conversations not stories within themselves? Conversations can create interesting stories, but not always.

In BBC, we love being collaborative so long as it’s us talking. Collaborative storytelling that works more richly, someone at the BBC has to take control of the narrative, terrified of the audience might tell a story we don’t want to here.

Not sure that’s really true. Telling a good story takes into account timing, sequence of events, when you try to hand over too much control to too many people, you have more than one story very quickly. If you structure your story to handle that, that’s great, you have lots going on at once and it can be compelling. But if you want to tell a story.

Someone has to facilitate, else it’s just noise.

But allowing a person to own that editing, terrified we’re not going to get the narrative that’s wanted.

Fanfiction, most successful form of story telling, responses to other people’s storytelling. FanFic has very organised system of proofreaders, (betareaders), challenges, etc. Generally managed well as a community to allow people to find and contribute to stories that they want.

Isn’t there a natural built-in story telling process, so stories edit themselves because the best stories rise to the top.

More about giving people the tools to rate the stories?

Maybe a guest editor system? All these contributors, all these comments, some are better than others, and were thinking “we know what we think are the best”, but for the others that’s not a satisfactory experience for someone who’s taken the time. Room to have a guest editor, or filter. People have the chance to join in, it’s not taking control from the top.

radio Five, comments inform your work, but how do you get to the point where you get that sort of material in, because you look for content that conform to your expectations.

Fuel protest, didn’t see it as a valid protest, took a long while for it to be “allowed” the platform. Digital divide, but an editorial divide.

Media decided what the narrative would be after Diana’s death. Media was behind the curve on the hysteria. None of the media wanted to do it, wanted to run with it.

Important to think about story building, not story telling. Pull out themes, timelines etc.

Google epidemiology, can track colds and flu, tap into the zeitgeist before they know, before the press have told them to think it

Teenagers want to be involved but they lose interest quickly, don’t often have the internet. Stories via text messages, can text back, putting all their replies into a “box”, then reflect the opinion of the teens in the ending of a sub-plot for the TV show. Its a type of multiple choice. Teens use mobile more than watch TV. Was set up as a trial but was very popular, some people reply to every text messages. Sometimes get some very surprising responses, very philosophical. People are getting very involved in it, they’re not being forced to do it.

Story is a closed item, but most successful collaborative storytelling is MMORPGs, where everyone has their own story, but they work together on a larger arc. Not traditional storytelling with a beginning, middle and end, but it’s very successful.

But you don’t play these, necessarily, for the big story. It’s more for the community, the doing stuff with their friends, the collaboration, the sense of belonging.

Story building – Coproducer, a YouGov survey platform project, to make a film and there’s 40k to 50k people co-producing the film. Various different levels of interaction from free-for-all, to voting for one of two things. Decided, at a certain point, they are going to have to employ a professional script writer to tidy it up. Sounds like Swarm of Angels.

Joys of aggregated social interaction. But we are also each individual storytellers. But what about discovering other storytellers? Where the storytellers out there get a chance to be powerful in the way that we are. Kind of thinking of them all in a collective, socialised way.

People putting together their individual story to share with others, and collaborate around a theme, but which is, within that, personal.

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02.19.09
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BeebCamp: Does UGC add anything?

Kevin and I are at BeebCamp today (written yesterday!), a BarCamp gathering at the BBC, out in White City. There are a lot of BBC people here and a few “interesting outsiders”, and a bunch of interesting sessions already on the white boards for the day. The first session that I’m at is being run by Charlie Beckett and is about whether the copious amounts of user generated content (UGC) actually adds anything to existing journalistic content.

First problem wih UGC, is how do you filter it when there’s so much of it? Marvellous for the public to be involved, but that also can be seen as threatening journalism, but having said that it’s marvellous, does it add anything editorially? During the snow, 60k people sent in their pictures, which is nice but why not just stick it on Flickr or YouTube? What made it different to be on the BBC? The nation decided that the BBC was going to be their snow story platform. But what was done with it? Snow isn’t terribly controversial, but what would you do with UGC from Gaza? What systems are in place? Editorially, why does this matter? How does it change things? What are the transaction costs? How does the tech and design enable this to happen, and characterise what you end up getting? Does it add anything?

BBC thinks it ads something, as an organisation has the view since July atacs on London, UGC adds something, almost an industry in its own rights. Moved away from thinking of it as editorial in its own right, but instead see it as supporting. Maybe it’s time took a step back, there’s enough of it, we can just say “comment/content from the audience”, all different applications are useful, but not sure systems in BBC think that way.

Who gets the value? The fact that someone can have their say is valuable to them, regardless of the value to the BBC.

Third party, the larger group of people who don’t contribute, and aren’t the BBC, does it add value?

Demographics, 30 – 45, sneior managers, so quoting UGC is representative, it’s an error, it can alienate peope, beucase they feel that everyone who has their say isn’t “my kind of people'”. Study from Uni of Cardiff, focused on news.

This area moves quickly so is that study now out of date? Input that you get depends on platform, subject.

Which part of the public engages? Anyone actual act upon the issue of which demographic contributes? People engage in trying to get different people to contribute, language services, different parts of the world. Maybe not as joined up as it could be at the BBC.

But everyone in the BBC who runs a social media service thinks about this.

But is universality good?

What are you trying to achieve? Mass participation? Or trying to uncover information about a story? Much focuses on mass participation. Lots of focus on how to we structure, evaluate it? There’s a lot of opportunities missed, there’s a lot of content out there, call the Internet. If you’re covering a specific story, going on blogs you can find amazing content. During Hurrican Katrina, found someone podcasting as they were evacuating, and got them on air. That’s not mass participation, but it’s valuable. Is it mass partipication or are you looking for new news sources? Crowdsourcing.

That’s an important point. I don’t think we understand how to deal with smaller communities that re very high value, relationship between journalist and sources, 20k is unweildy, 30-40 si manageable. What are we using these communities for. UGC used to be called the ‘phone in’. Fallacy on radio, the more calls you gett the better the programme, important not to fall into that trap. How does UGC help you produce something that matters.

turn that question on its head. What does the BBC add to UGC. Lot more freedom for people on the internet than on BBC.co.uk, can only provide a type of UGC experience for uses, which is often limited and frustrated. What are we achieving by inviting people to post?

BBC often loved, treasured, invested in, because people thought that the BBC would “do something”. What can the BBC do to serve other people.

Katrina example, shining a light on someone’s content that they’re making themselves. If you provide a forum where the value is totally equal, how do you give that person something? How do you find that content?

What about the fiction that the BBC produces? How can the characters and stories be given back to the audience to do things with?

How is the BBC supporting other people’s communities? How can the BBC give their own content back to the audience, who arguably paid for it in the first place.

Not just about how many pictures of snow were sent in, but how many were used?

But should the BBC do anything with all these things? BBC pursues this UGC because it wants exclusivity.

Is it not our job to take that vast amount of UGC to filter out the good stuff and give it back? Look at what we would determine to be a good picture, becaues there’s a lot of stuff that should be filtered out.

Problem with UCG is the vloume, varies in quality, so some sort of tech solution to surface the best stuff. LA Times tried to do tag clouds of comment words, never had a way to sufficiently automatic it. Would get 20k comments on a given topic, make keyword cloud that gave people a sense of what was going on.

Two tensions in BBC, one is BBC as publisher, one is BBC as enabler. Publisher says “‘why publish 60k photos of snow”, and the enabler side says “because it’s a learning experience”.

Challenge is, when we take in 60k photos, and only publish 100, lots of people go away feeling disappointed.

Weather is a good example – why couldn’t they use it in the way that BBC Berkshire did with the floods, create a story about it.

Still struck by opportunity to marry pubisher/enabler. If we show what we know, we may change what people send to us. If we’re sick of sorting through 60k photos, opening up that mechanism may affect what people wanted to share. Might get better, by opening up what we know, it will affect what people think is new and interesting for us to see, more eyeballs on the problem, and more interesting solutions.

Burden of verification not there with snow. Other stories where that’s a real issue, can’t forget about.

Publishing it, we make an editorial statement about it. Different to hosting photos.

Need dialogue. If this is a process around which you might create something, has to have dialogue and that material is discussed, it raises the bar because people understand why a picture isn’t used.

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02.06.09
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How to tell if your social media consultant is a lemon

Dave Fleet has a great blog post about how to pick a social media marketing consultant, after a blog post by Ike Pigott calling into question the knowledge of the new flock of “social media consultants” who seem to have crawled out of the woodwork over the last six months.

[W]e have a glut of people selling their expertise on how you should handle “the Twitter community” who have zero experience using the service the way most people do. They hopped on board the Consultancy Express, went straight to the head of the line, and now want to tell you how to talk to people at all of the stops they skipped.

Like Dave and Ike, I have reservations about the way that it seems to have suddenly become fashionable to be a “social media consultant”. As Dave says:

I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of seeing people sign up for Twitter, follow ten thousand people (many of whom follow back) to build a substantial following, then start spouting advice as though followers equals expertise. Some of them are experts, for sure. Others, however, seem to have little beyond a big mouth to back their words up.

Almost as annoying, but just as dangerous, are the hordes of traditional practitioners that have realized they need to include social media in their pitches nowadays, but have no experience whatsoever using those tools.

I have been wanting to write a post like this for months now, but had been holding off because I was a bit worried that I’d end up sounding as If I was criticising people simply for being new. We all have to start somewhere, after all, but social media is experiential, which means if you haven’t experienced it then you really don’t know what you’re talking about.

That said, I lost a job to a guy who had giant red flashing text on his blog, and that was two or three years ago. (Funnily, not only did they tell me “he’s a blog expert recommended by one of our directors, they also told me “we’ll get back to you if we ever need any help with social media.” D’oh.) So experience alone doesn’t guarantee that you’re going to get good advice, because there are some people around who have been successfully spouting crap for years.

Dave offers up these questions to help you winnow out the wheat from the chaff when looking for a social media marketing consultant:

1. Can you give me an example of social media work you’ve completed for a client recently?
2. How do you go about pitching bloggers?
3. How do you monitor what people are saying about you?
4. Where can I find you online?
5. Can you (ghost) write my blog for me?
6. How do you measure results?
7. How would you define social media?
8. Can you just pretend to be me online?

Now, some of these work just as well if you’re looking for an expert to help with internal communications and collaboration, but I’d like to offer up my own list.

So, what do you ask a social media business consultant?

How long have you been using social tools? A good consultant will have been using social tools for quite a while, probably a year or two longer than they’ve actually been a consultant. If someone has only been doing this blogging for six months or a year, you might want to look much more closely at their experience, and make a decision as to whether you want to take a risk on them. They may be a natural, but they’re probably winging it.

Equally, do not believe anyone who says they’ve been doing it blogging forever. Blogs themselves are only ten years old. When I started consulting five years ago, I had only a handful of peers, and they are all very well known now. Any unknown who says they’ve been doing it consulting for more than six years is probably fibbing.

[Update: It’s been pointed out that this section was a bit fuzzy, so I’ve clarified what I mean by “doing it”! And yes, I know hand-coded blog-like websites have been around longer than ten years, but what makes blogging different from a website is the lightweight CMS that underpins it, and both LiveJournal and Blogger started in ’99.]

What was the first social tool you used? Most consultants who’ve been doing this for any length of time probably started off with a personal blog, because that was all that was around in those days. If they started off on Facebook, run away very quickly. If they started on Twitter, carefully examine their other experience.

What tools do you use on a regular basis? They should have at least one blog, a Twitter (or similar) account, and some sort of social network account. If they list every damn thing under the sun, it means that either they have no clients and therefore a lot of time to kill, or they are playing buzzword bingo with you. Realistically, it’s hard to go deep on more than three tools and a lot of the really important stuff is learnt only through focused engagement.

What sort of clients do you have? Expect a broad range of clients in many different sectors, and expect company sizes to range from tiny to multinational. Ask what type of engagements they were, and you should get similarly broad descriptions, from one hour presentations on upwards. Any consultant worth their salt has done a lot of work with very unsure clients who don’t want to spend too much money, because that’s just how the market has been (and still is).

Have you ever had a project that didn’t work out the way you anticipated? If the answer to this is not “Yes”, be suspicious. Good consultants have had to experiment because there isn’t a definitive guide to running social software projects. We know a lot more about what sort of things work now than we used to, but every new client has a new culture, and every new culture throws up new and sometimes surprising problems. Rarely do things go as planned, and you want someone who can think on their feet and adapt to changing circumstances.

What presentations have you given? This is a slightly nuanced question to ask, because not all knowledgeable people speak at conferences, but the more experienced someone is, the more likely they are to have done some speaking. Maybe it will be at conferences of their peers, or maybe it will be at small specialist meetings, or maybe it’s even a lunchtime talk for a business. I’m not really sure that barcamps count – they’re a great place for learning how to present, but they don’t necessarily indicate anything other than a desire to stand up in front of people and speak.

How do you measure success and recognise failure? The correct answer isn’t a stream of jargon about statistics and metrics, but instead should cover understanding the situation as it is before the new software is installed, having clear project goals, and critically examining what can be measured and what it might mean. There is no simple answer to this question, and if they suggest complicated metrics like “edits per page view per person”, then they’re not really thinking things through enough.

Of course, you should thoroughly Google any consultant before you contact them. You should easily be able to find:

  • A professional site or LinkedIn/Xing (etc.) profile
  • A blog, professional or personal
  • A Twitter or other micro-conversation account
  • Articles and blog posts that quote them
  • Their name on conference speaker rosters
  • Audio and/or video of talks they’ve given

Take the time to read through what other people say about them. Do they seem to be respected by their peers? Are they personable online? Can you build a sense of how much experience they have? What do they reveal about themselves as a person?

I wouldn’t worry about the age-old “Have they done work similar to the project I have in mind?” question, because to be honest, every project is a little bit different and what works perfectly for one company might not work in another, for cultural reasons.

Equally, don’t worry if they haven’t worked in your sector – social tools are cross-sector, and good consultants can work successful in any industry. I hate to say it, but your industry is unlikely to be so different that it genuinely takes specialist knowledge to work in. After all, we’re talking mainly about human qualities, such as openness, trust, or transparency, and these exist everywhere. (Also, anyone who tries to flog you sector-specific tools is probably talking out of their arse.)

Red flags
There are some thing that should make you immediately wary, however they are couched.

Promising the earth. Social media projects are neither fast nor easy, because they are centred not around technology but around behavioural change, and that takes time. Any consultant who promises a ‘quick win’ is promising something they can’t deliver.

‘Facebookitis’. Consultants whose only focus is Facebook are to be avoided. Facebook is great at what it does, which is help people organise their social lives and throw virtual sheep at each other. Internal business social networks are most useful tools only when they are designed to fulfil the needs of the user, which are likely to be different to those of the average Facebook user.

Too much focus on technology. Having the right tools is important, but it’s only 20% of the solution. The rest is about understanding and communicating with people about how these tools will make genuine improvements to their work life. If all the consultant talks about is tech, they’re not right for you.

Too much focus on launch. We are (or should be) long past the idea that all the hard work is done prior to a project launch, but this is especially true with social media projects. Getting things up and running is only the beginning – the hard work comes when you start focusing on adoption and long-term usage.

Hard questions to ask yourself
Before you start looking for help, there are some questions you should be asking yourself. If you can’t say “Yes” to these questions, perhaps you’re not ready to get a consultant of any sort in yet.

Are you in it for the long haul? As I’ve said, social media projects take time, and there’s no such thing as a quick win. If you’re not really interested in ongoing change, don’t run the project.

Are you capable of accepting hard truths? A good consultant won’t shy away from hard truths. They may have to tell you that your wonderful idea won’t work. Are you ready to hear that?

Are you willing to spend money on your people? I’ll say it again. Tech is only 20% of the problem – the rest is people. If you’re not willing to spend significant time and money working on understanding your people’s individual needs and helping them learn how these tools will help, don’t go ahead with the project. You can’t just throw mud against the wall and see what sticks – we know that doesn’t work, so don’t pretend it will.

Are you willing to eat your own dogfood? You want to get other people to use these tools, but do you?

It’s turned into a bit of a long post, and I hope that it’s been useful. Personally, I relish the idea that maybe one day I’ll turn up to a first meeting with a client, and they’ll have printed this post out and proceed to ask me what I’m proposing you ask your consultant. Am I willing to eat my own dogfood? Oh yes!!

01.14.09
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Enterprise RSS must not die

Marshall Kirkpatrick over at ReadWriteWeb has said that enterprise RSS is dead. Brad Feld, an investor in Newsgator, disagrees and thinks that RSS is alive and well. There’s a spirited discussion in both posts’ comments that’s worth a scan.

I was talking about enterprise RSS only yesterday, and my experience with it has been that it’s nigh on impossible to get RSS readers rolled out in my clients’ companies (except the really small ones, and they tend to go for Google Reader or something else that’s free, not enterprise). Only two clients over the last four years have actually piloted an RSS reader internally.

One client tried Newsgator, but didn’t like it. I wasn’t privy to that conversation, so all I know is that the feature set wasn’t adequate for the money. That was a couple of years ago, so that doesn’t tell us much about the situation now. The other client also tried Newsgator and the jury was still out at the time my engagement finished, but given that their budget was subsequently slashed to £0, I’m guessing that they too didn’t end up with an enterprise-wide installation.

Of the others, we often didn’t get as far as discussions about cost or features, because the response from IT was a flat “No”. There just was no political will within the company to even investigate the possibility, let along start assessing possible tools. I’ve also had reports of companies saying “Yes, we’ll think about it, but a code review might take upwards of a year”, which is so close to “No” that you couldn’t get a piece of paper between them.

So what’s going on? Certainly it’s not that RSS is a difficult concept to explain. I explain it all the time, and whilst it helps to be able to draw diagrams for people, when you say “Instead of you going round to all those websites you check on a daily basis, the content just comes to you” most people understand. And I don’t believe the people who complain about RSS being a three letter acronym either – I just don’t think people are that stupid.

The Web 2.0 evangelists within enterprise that I’ve known have all been really smart people who totally understand the usefulness of RSS, but often they don’t have the political capital to get things done properly. Often they are working with no budget, and have a hard enough time protecting basic tools such as blogs and wikis from senior managers who’d prefer everything to be in SharePoint instead. They don’t necessarily have the heft to get a new tool rolled out company-wide.

Often, RSS readers are seen as a tool that might benefit a minority of people (the evangelists themselves) and the wider uses across the business are either not discussed or not recognised. This gives IT, or other sections of management, the excuse they need to shut down any sort of RSS reader project. Of course, RSS is not just for edge cases, but a useful tool for anyone who has to deal with lots of incoming information, from marketing to competitive intelligence to research to development… the list goes on and on. Yet if it can be characterised as just for a minority, it can be side-lined and binned.

The Catch-22 attitude – if a technology isn’t used by the majority then it’s not going to be rolled out company-wide, meaning that only a minority can ever use it – is endemic in IT these days. I know that’s a comment likely to bring the IT defenders out of the woodwork, but so often I see IT departments whose only mission is to keep the network secure. Obviously that’s important, but IT is also suppose to be about enabling business, and when IT starts to get in the way of important advances in business technology, hard questions should be asked.

But we can’t lay the blame entirely at IT’s door – it’s more complex than that. It’s partly to do with the immaturity of social tools in business, and the propensity for evangelists to fight on alone instead of seeking external expert advice to bring in an ally. It’s also partly to do with the anti-technology culture that I see rife in some British businesses. It’s partly to do with management’s reluctance to see social tools as a suite, preferring to look for a “quick fix”, which of course doesn’t exist, or engaging in tech tokenism: “Oh, we have a blog, we get 2.0.”

Yet I am also rather worried by the fact that Newsgator seems to be the only kid on the block these days. There are a number of different blogging platforms, with WordPress and Movable Type being the main contenders. Several wiki platforms, including Socialtext, ThoughtFarmer, Confluence. So why aren’t there more RSS aggregators pitching for the enterprise market? Where’s the competition? Newsgator might be doing fine, but it should be only one of a number of companies providing enterprise RSS solutions, which, as far as I can tell, isn’t the case.

Of course, there are no easy answers, because this really isn’t about the tech as much as it’s about people. It’s about demonstrating the benefits, communicating use cases, reaching and persuading decision makers, and supporting evangelists. None of that can be done easily, quickly, or simply. Can we really expect Newsgator to turn around the attitudes of the tens of thousands of people needed to create a genuine sea change? Enterprise RSS readers can help companies organise and filter information, which is a critical business function in a range of industries. But with Newsgator the last company standing, will they be able to prove RSS’ worth before it’s too late.

01.12.09
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Ada Lovelace Day needs you

We are just 95 signatories off reaching our target of 1000 people, all promising to blog about a woman they admire on 24 March 2009. I had originally been a bit worried that we wouldn’t see 13 people per day sign up, but the reaction to the pledge has been just awe inspiring. Now my aim is to get 1000 people within the first seven days – which means that we have to reach our target by 10pm tonight, GMT.

If you haven’t signed the pledge, please do. If you haven’t blogged about it or Twittered about it yet, please do. We have less than twelve hours to hit the target!

01.06.09
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Join me on Ada Lovelace Day

I’ve mainly stayed away from the discussion of gender issues in technology. I didn’t think that I had any real expertise to share. But over the last six months, after many conversations, it has become clear that many of my female friends in tech really do feel disempowered. They feel invisible, lacking in confidence, and unsure how to compete for attention with the men around them.

Then I see the stupid puerile misogynistic manner with which some of the more powerful voices in the tech community – some of them repeat offenders – treat women, and it makes me very cross indeed. The objectification of women is bad enough when it’s done by the media, but when it’s done by a conference organiser or tech commentator or famous tech publication, what message does it send? Nothing but “You will never be taken seriously, but we might take notice of you if you’re hot.”

But what to do? Well, let’s pull back from the anger a little, and start to look instead at why it might be that women feel less secure in their abilities than most men, and what might help change that. Undoubtedly it’s a complex issue, but recent research may shed some light: Psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones.

Well, that’s a relatively simple problem to begin to address. If women need female role models, let’s come together to highlight the women in technology that we look up to. Let’s create new role models and make sure that whenever the question “Who are the leading women in tech?” is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues.

Thus was born Ada Lovelace Day, and this pledge:

“I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same.”

— Suw Charman-Anderson (contact)

Deadline to sign up by: 24th March 2009

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

It doesn’t matter how new or old your blog is, what gender you are, what language you blog in, or what you normally blog about – everyone is invited to take part. All you need to do is sign up to this pledge and then publish your blog post any time on Tuesday 24th March 2009. If you’re going to be away that day, feel free to write your post in advance and set your blogging system to publish it that day.

You’ll notice that I’ve asked for 1,000 people to sign the pledge, which is an ambitious number. Indeed, PledgeBank makes a pretty strong point during the pledge creation process of asking people to limit their requests to 20 people, but I am sure that over the next 77 days we’ll be able to find another 989 people to join us!

What can you do?
Obviously, and most importantly, please sign the pledge. If you already have a blog, then it will be easy for you to take part. If you don’t have a blog, this might be a great reason to start one! It’ll take you about five minutes to get yourself set up on WordPress and then you’ll be up and running!

Please also consider putting a pledge badge on your blog now or writing a short post about the project to help spread the word. You can also use the “Share This” link on the pledge itself to send the pledge to your favourite social bookmarking or news site, or to email it to a friend. The more people who send this link to Delicious or Digg and the like, the more likely we are to hit our target!

Also, if you’re on Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, Identi.ca or any other microconversation tool, please ping a message to all your friends about Ada Lovelace Day, and don’t forget the link! If you’re on LinkedIn, you could also add it as your temporary status for a while.

It is going to be a challenge to hit 1,000 people – we’ll need an average of 13 people signing each day – but if we all tell our friends about it, I think we can do it!

Keep up with Ada Lovelace Day news
I’ve got a Twitter account, mailing list and blog set up, so feel free to follow, subscribe and add to your RSS reader, as you wish!

What will happen next?
If Ada Lovelace Day is a success I’d like to make it an annual event. And, once the economy is in a better position, I’d like to put together a one day conference called Finding Ada. We would cover presentation skills and would introduce women to tech conference organisers, with the aim of getting more women up on stage at tech conferences. At the moment, I’m short of money to get Finding Ada moving, so if you’d like to be a sponsor please get in touch and I’ll tell you more about it.

Finally, who was Ada?
Ada Lovelace was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programmes for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built.

01.05.09
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A new web discipline: Social Functionality Design

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what makes a website social, and how different types of social functionality could fit together to create a satisfying experience for the people who use the website. Partly this is because I’m working closely with a Canadian publishing start-up called Book Oven to do just that – design their social functionality. We are still at the very early stages of website development, with a very small pre-alpha test going on at the moment which should lead into a fuller-featured alpha in the next few months.

What is interesting and, to my mind admirable too, is that they started thinking holistically about the social aspects of the site from the very beginning, so that sociability is built right into its fabric, rather than being treated as a bolt-on afterwards. So often I see otherwise promising sites fail to reach their potential because they’ve simply tacked on some forums, and maybe a half-baked messaging system, and leave their social functionality at that. Communities will still form, but they miss out on lots of interaction that could otherwise really enrich the user’s experience.

So what sort of things are we thinking through when we’re considering social functionality design? My first focus was to think about the social objects around which people might want to communicate, and what implications that would have for different modes of communication. Obviously, members’ activities (and I’m being deliberately vague about what they are for now!) are one set of social objects, but so are the members themselves, so the tools have to allow people to aggregate conversations around each object separately – I don’t just want one big bucket with all the conversations in, but will need to have multiple ways to slice and dice the conversation so that it makes sense for me at that moment, in that context.

I have also been considering the way in which people develop relationships with each other, and the effect that the architecture of the site may have on the way people build trust. This is all intimately related to privacy gradients, understanding the way that people can move through a site, and what access to different areas of the site signifies. People have different ways of forming relationships online. Some like to watch and learn what someone is like from observation, others jump straight into conversation, and yet others will plunge into intimate relationships at what might seem like an alarming speed! How does the site design facilitate (or hinder) these behaviour patterns?

And what about people’s motivations for using the site? Why will they visit us? What will they want to do there? How will they do it? Understanding the different ways that people may wish to interact with the site and each other is essential to understanding how to structure it, and it’s not just about traditional information architecture or user experience, but also about understanding the possible influences of human cognitive biases.

Once we start looking more deeply at people’s motivations, the dark side of human nature reveals itself, and we have to consider conflict resolution. The community can do a lot to self-police, if you give them the tools to do so, but there is always a need to understand what the worst case scenario might be. What you could do to prevent your site or tool being used by one user as a big stick to beat another user with? My personal feeling here is that the site should remain as neutral as possible, and let users sort out their problems off-site, but there are design and functionality implications even in that solution that should not be ignored.

And then there’s reputation management. Hierarchies emerge in all communities – it’s human nature to rank oneself against one’s peers, and to rank them against each other. How explicit does one make reputational tools? How could the reputation system be gamed? And how do you keep people honest? After all, whenever there is a reputation system, us humans do so love to game it.

I think there’s a new web discipline here, that of Social Functionality Design, that should sit alongside User Experience, Accessibility, and Information Architecture as key issues that website and application designers need to understand and apply. People are getting much more sophisticated in the way that they use the internet and their expectations of the social experience of being online are getting more and more nuanced. It’s just not enough anymore to only have forums or a messaging system.

When I look at the web, I am constantly disappointed that sites I love and use regularly seem to have put so little thought into just how their members are going to interact. Supporting sociability isn’t optional anymore. Sites need to think very hard about what they are doing and how, and they need to crack this nut sooner rather than later, because otherwise they are leaving their lunch out for someone else to eat.

12.15.08
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20 signs you don’t want that internal social media project

I just nearly burst my appendix laughing at Chris Applegate’s 20 signs you don’t want that social media project. I am thus inspired to write my own list of tips that, perhaps, one doesn’t really want that internal social media project after all.

  1. Client wants to code their own blog/wiki software because “we want total control”.
  2. Client insists that only the management be allowed to have internal blogs.
  3. The PR department wants to write the CEO’s internal blog posts.
  4. IT won’t allow anyone to install an RSS reader until it’s been through a code review. Which could take upwards of a year. And that’s not including reviewing updates…
  5. Client insists on using Lotus Notes as their blogging platform.
  6. When you ask how much experience staff have of social media, IT replies, “Oh, we block all those sites.”
  7. The client wants Facebook.
  8. “Why don’t we just throw some mud at the walls and see what sticks?”
  9. IT disables all RSS feeds because of “a potential exploit we read about on Slashdot”.
  10. Client insists on using Sharepoint as their wiki.
  11. User surveys show some staff have more than 50,000 unread messages in their inbox, yet management insist, “We really don’t have a problem with email here.”
  12. Management refuse to learn new terminology, resulting in statements like “I just posted a new blog to our wiki.”
  13. Apparently, IM is “just for kids.”
  14. Client decides that only “management-approved labels” can be used as tags in the social bookmarking app.
  15. Client’s wiki is called CompanyPedia, is already out of date and is never used for actual collaboration.
  16. IT eschew open source software because “Who would provide support?”
  17. There are regular discussions as to which is the best Web 2.0 application: Lotus Notes or Sharepoint?
  18. “Why don’t we just install some forums?”
  19. Client thinks that “adoption” means everyone is going to end up looking after a small orphaned child.
  20. The CIO still has his secretary print out all his emails.

UPDATE: The above list has now been translated into French by the lovely Frédéric de Villamil!