Author Archives: Suw Charman-Anderson

09.29.06
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SHiFT: Kevin Cheng – Communicating concepts through comics

Communicating new technologies. We’ve got lots of great tech, but when it comes to talking about the ideas, we need to step back. Communicating using comics. Works at Yahoo Local. Used comic strip to communicate the idea for how the local restaurant search might work.

Started off writing a short script about the story and ideas they wanted to convey. Then put together the flow of the story, then drew it, and put it into Flash. Easy to share. Easy communication. But printing things out better than using Flash, even thought Flash is portable.

Why did they decide to use comics? Why are they interesting and powerful.

Comics are universal, so you can tell that a comic of a dog farting is a dog farting even without any language skills.

Comics need imagination. Comics are abstracted version of person, and are more ‘everyman’ than a photograph (see Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics). Comics give people room to be engaged with the character.

Abstraction can also be used for the user interface. Don’t want to distract people so abstract the UI.

Comics are more expressive. Adding context of images to words changes the meaning of them. Allows you to communicate even body language.

Comics better at telling time and motion. Movie storyboards.

Great for iteration. Quick to draw and redraw.

[Of course, this presentation somewhat depends on images I don’t have here to show you… so ironically you really are only getting half of the story here. How’s that for the point being made for you?]

Who uses comics?
US Postal Service. Comic strip post card about where to buy stamps, but although you throw it out you can absorb it as you glance at it.

Matrix storyboard.

Squid Labs, ‘HowToons’, instructions for kids on how to make projects like air hockey out of a balloon and AOL CD.

Dodgeball. Use comics to explain their service.

Doing comics is not that hard. If you don’t know how to do it, then there are a lot of resources online to help you get started. Look at expressions, changing eyebrows. Wally Wood’s 22 Panels. Trace pictures. Different tools for making comics.

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09.28.06
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SHiFT: Euan Semple – The Quiet Revolution

Here at SHiFT in Lisbon, a two day conference on Social and Human Ideas for Technology. Again, not going to blog every session, just a few here and there. First up, Euan Semple.

Words ‘social’ and ‘media’ and ‘business’ help people make assumptions about what is happening, so they then package and dismiss it. People come up with all sorts of reasons why blogs/wikis/etc won’t work in their business, why it is nothing to do with them.Some people are jumpy about ‘social’ in the workplace.

BBC, implemented social software and had ‘globally distributed, near instant, person to person conversations’. Different from the way organisations usually talk. Most businesses try to manage relationships and information, to control communications. The global nature of the net and the uncontrolled nature of the conversation on the net is intimidating to most people. But the thing that scares people the most is the fact that it’s person-to-person. business has sanitised the personal out of business. You try to act as your job title instead of your as a person, and you’re not encouraged to act as a person, to be yourself, and a lot of businesses actively discourage it.

Way BBC implemented social computing was different too. Usually do months of consultancy and user testing and that doesn’t really work. Companies get fleeced by IT people doing that. Decided didn’t want to do that at BBC, so had own ideas, own technology, and wanted to just get on with it.

Created a forum first. No marketing, all word of mouth. Out of 24k staff, 18k had used the forum at some point or another. Most of it’s mundane, people asking questions. Exposed differences within the different parts of the business, which previously they’d pretended didn’t exist. Smart manager engages with the conversation, even when they are negative or critical. E.g. weather graphics were not liked by people in the BBC, and the manager in charge of that came into the conversation and just talked calmly to everyone.

Euan keen not to own the forum, fought off people branding it, or tell people how to behave. When there were problems he’d go and just ask questions about it, to encourage discussion.

Forum talked about big stuff too. Jerry Springer the Opera. Big discussions. First time that they’d had a pan-BBC discussion about something big.

People think it’s just about the technology, but it’s not. Is naturally disruptive. But organisations don’t have a choice – the MySpace generation will demand this if it’s not there – they’ll either not work for you, or they’ll do it on the web which could be really bad for you.

Then put in a social networking tool, Connect.Gateway. Tools helps people get to find people interested in the same things, and empowered people who would otherwise not have had a way of connecting.

Then added blogs. Euan’s still cautious about blogs in business because they work on the basis of having an opinion and expressing it, and that’s not trivial in an organisation. It’s difficult tot say what you think. It’s paradoxical – in business it’s hard to say what you think and there’s no accountability, whereas in the geek world if you don’t say what you think you don’t exist, and there’s a trail behind you that everyone can follow.

Richard Sambrook started to get interested, and wanted to talk directly to a new division of 1500 people and didn’t want to do memos and staff emails and newsletters, so he used a blog instead. Did it well, blogged every day, mix of stuff, allowed comments. Would raise strategic issues and sometimes other senior managers would engage in the conversation in the comments thread. Those conversations would have happened elsewhere, but you wouldn’t have seen them publicly.

His internal blog at one point was being read by 8000 staff, now settled down to 4000 staff. Also humanised him, took him out of the org chart. Has now just started his own public blog. Very challenging for people in an organisation like the BBC. Some of the stuff eh wrote on his internal blog ended up in the press. The edges are getting fuzzier, what can you and can’t you write about.

Then introduced wikis. Adoption curve was steeper, less popular. Firstly, people used it as an easy way to set up a website. Allowed people to publish information that they couldn’t have published any other way, as had no budget for a web designer.

Euan then used the wiki to collaboratively write a policy for employee blogs. Asked 90 BBC bloggers to help work on the policy, using comment son the wiki pages (Confluence). After a couple of weeks it slowed down, as the policy writers reached consensus (with no meetings), and so got given to the management to ratify.

Someone in the forum said that it was frustrating that BBC staff can’t take part in BBC competitions. Set up competition internally, and collaboratively people put together the rules, the criteria, etc, for a photography comp. Now they are using it for organising programmes.

Something about the ownership about it, the self-selection that allows people to really engage with it.

RSS helps. Lots of people talking internally, but need a way to manage all that conversation and RSS does that. Began to see who was interest to who and that showed them who’s interested in what.

Tagging also an important. Tools that replicate delicious inside the organisation.

We have a glimpse of how this works, but when the MySpace generation comes into business, they will expect this, and they will know better how it works, and how to sidestep the red tape that can get in the way of getting things done.

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09.24.06
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EuroOSCON: Mark Shuttleworth – The challenges facing Ubuntu

Has two talks he could give – collaboration, one of the great challenges facing free software community. Have some dam good tools, and produce world class software, but if we’re going to step up to the next level that our grannies can use, and be confident and comfortable using, we’ll have to amp up the collaboration.

Or… can look at some of the mountains that we have to climb. If we want to establish the norm, there are some key challenges.

Crowd voted for challenges.

Free Software Rules
The web rules – Apache is the no 1 web server; free software CMS; applications.

Reverse auction, start with no 13 and work to 1.

13 – Pretty is a feature.
Absolutely true. When I was able to show someone Firefox and it looked so sweet, less interested in the magical underpinnings, or free software, or extensions… than in the fact that it looked reallly good. Need to look at the real pioneers of classy sofware and see how they use their stuff. So Gnome focused very much on distilling the essence of software and making it good. See same meme in KDE environment, who make things look pretty.

To be de facto, needs to look and feel super-polished. Means we need to accept some contraints, and think about human-computer interaction.

12 – Consistent packaging.
When an industry’s in transition it’s a difficult time. People tell me the difficult thing about Linux is that they don’t know how to install software. No installer like InstallShield. Compounded by numbers of distros and packages.

Installing external software is an old way of thinking, happens in the old world.

Eg. Oracle used to take days to install, but OracleExpress takes minutes. Should basically wish for it and it’s there. We can do that in the free software world far better than in paid, because we can create the alliances between software.

But the packaging is the elephant in the room. Used to be an area of real innovation, but now we need convergance. Debian did well early on, so need to think about commonalities. Ideal: common packaging format that’s easy to work with so that developers have something build into their project. It should be trivial.

Indicator of success is when you see propriorty software guys adopting free software packaging, as Oracle has done.

11 – Simplified licencing.
Whatever you think, they started out with a framework for people to decide how they want to their licence. CC have said there’s a specturm, like it or not, and some people are happy with things others won’t like. This is what the universe of people out there looks like. Consistent licences.

In software, we have 150 – 200 licences. So running into some annoying incompatibilities. Need to understand what the CC guys have done well, and then adopt it.

Essence of success is not OS, but free software. Some people want to be somewhere else on the spectrum than me, but better to have a framework for that .

10 – Pervasive presence
Linux desktop can start to be a genuine thought leader, a genuine innovator, and presence is going to be there. So need a universal addressbook, knowing the channels through which you communicate, give an idea to the user an idea of who’s out there.

meshnet. bunch of laptops in this room, so how hard would it be to figure out who is around? There is work going on, but if we could treat this as a common infrastructure, so that we enable collaboration platforms.

9 – Pervasive support
Or the perception of. People say that ‘Its’ lovely but it’s not supported’, but there are numbers that you can call, but people don’t think it’s supported. So transform support into perception of pervasive support. Cafe guy has a guy who has a phone no. for people to ring. The knowledge is there, so hard to find grads with no Linux experience. Need to get people to tell others.

8 – Govaritye Ra Russki
Translation. If you look at how well software is translated, it’s easy to think we’re doing well. 347 languages who have more than 1 million speakers. So we have to invest in the translation effort. Build the platforms to support the needs of translators. Need to be translated upstream, so it’s easiest to distribute. A lot of effort in building bridges. Need to help the documentation guys, but the infrastructure is written for the Linux people, not the developers.

007 – Great gadgets
Interested in Troll Tech. The gadget world is going to be one fo the next major frontiers for free software adoption. Linux has gone from 0 – 20% market share in 2 years. Palm, Symbian, Windows, but Linux has grown massively in the last two years. But it’s fragmented, large numbers of small manufacturers, who need an OS at low/no cost. So not the sort of momentum.

As a community we could change that. Lot of value in having the same OS for your desktop, phone and other devices. Need a Gadgubuntu.

6 – Sensory immersion
In the audience there was one person who plays World of Warcraft (which was Jim Purbrick… from Second Life). Ten people in Second Life.

Joi Ito has a room in his house for playing WoW, with screens up and he can have as full an immersion as possible.

Need to extend sensory interaction with web and the real world. Make this a goal of free software, and be pioneering ahead of the proprietory world. Need to feed people information, and sensory immersion is going to be an aread where free software can pull ahead.

5 – Getting it together
Collaboration. Think of the things we do as free software developers. We track bugs, exchange translation, project management but it’s ad hoc and organic. If we want to stand up and compete with Redmond we need to elevate that to a higher level. When we do a release it’s backward looking, because we look at what’s lready been done. We can’t get data fro the future… so there’s lag, there’s innefficiency. So we don’t know that Firefox is going to release something at a future date.

I belive that it’s possible to release software predictively, and collaborate across software. Lots of layers in a stack, but don’t have good tools for coordinating work across layers. Would like to see a sort of Basecamp HQ. Build infrastructure to help plan and manage projects. So if OpenOffice release is going to slip, then we can work more efficiently.

Need to think about knock-on consequences when one product’s release date slips.

(4 – Seems to have got a bit intermingled with 5.)

3 – Extra Dimension
Vista. Everyone’s trying to learn how to invent new interface metaphors. Things haven’t changed for 15-20 years. We’re going to see a radical innovation soon. Office 12 is really interesting work, and we need to be equally brave and bold. Because of the shift to a world where windows are transparent and really part of a 3D infrastructure, we can have all sort of new opportunities.

iTunes 7 – that kind of innovation. Were not moving to a true 3D world. bue we do have 2.5D. Right kind of place to have large ammounts of innovation.

Look at FireFox’s extensions. LIke to see same thing in Free Software. Need to expose that extra 0.5D.

2. Granny’s new Camera
Impossible to predict what sort of things people want to connect to, and can’t priedict what is going to be invented. Kernal community really need to hear this message. Got the world’s fastest USB stack, but there are many didfferent stacks, so it’s hard to think of a consistent platform that the next generation USB drivers will work on.

The ability to ship software today and connect it to software in 3 years time is essential.

Start to create interfaces that are stable. Maleability, flexibility, etc. But also standard interfaces for device mfrs.

Can’t expect to have perfect interoperability, but can improve a lot.

1- Keeping it free
Microsoft is experimenting with shared-source, but that’s not enough to see the source. It’s about harnessing the source the way you want to. But as free software gets more pervasive and more powerful there’ll be more temptation to subvert it and send it in different diretions. GPLv3 is important, the discussions are are important; anti-patent groups are important, DRM also and tricky interpretations of licencing are the most dangerous things facing us.

09.24.06
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EuroOSCON: Jim Purbrick – Second Life (again)

Jim actually gave two presentations, and this was the first one, which I probably should have blogged before I blogged the second one, but meh, it’s all too late now.

130 million gmae players in the US alone
20 million MMO players
Age of gamer increasing by one year per year, i.e. people start playing games as children and don’t stop.

Tremendous value is being generated online.

Worldwide digital good strade of US$1-2 billion per year – this is paying for items or characters in MMOs, i.e. to take shortcuts.

Typical game is a subscription per month. That means the games tend to be designed so you have to put a lot of time in to playing in order to progress. Can take months to progress and do everything. Money-rich and time-poor people are willing to pay in order to save time. Trade across the boundary.

In-world trade 10 or 20 x the real-world exchange.

$30 billion USD traded internally and across the boundaries, which is twice the size of the games industry itself.

Second Life, is a 3D virtual world.
It is persistant – what you create stays created.
It is massively multi-user – it’s one world, rather than WoW which is a virtual theme park, and after 3000 people the world is full, so they copy the themepark multiple times. SL is a seamless world, so rather than make a copy, just add bits round the edges.
Resident built – compare to other games that are created by the maker. People build, texture, script, animate and *own* what they build. If you sell swords in most games it is illegal. In SL, you can build and sell stuff legally. Can sell for Linden Dollars, and exchange currency. Can records stuff in Second Life, and can sell machinima as video.
Linden Sells land and services, rather than subscriptions. so if you want to make something, you need to buy land so that it persists. If you then want to advertise it, you can stick it in the classifieds.

So this is “not a game”
– no game fiction
– no artificial conflict
– no winning condition

User creation is the big thing. Create objects on the floor out of nothing, like boxes or cones or spheres, etc. Then you colour and texture them and add them together to make things.

A tale of two pianos.

Ultima Online, you could build houses and could fill it full of stuff. But the stuff you could fill it with was the stuff that the games company had build. So you can play with it but they build it. So someone realised that if you took a box and put a chess board on it, then a box, and some t-shirts and then some bear skins, you could create something that looked like a piano… it wasn’t a piano but it looked like a piano. In SL you make a piano out of boxes, but then you create a script so that you make it play like a piano.

140,000 hours of use per day
25% of time is spent creating
140,000 hours * 2000 hours/year = 17.5 user-years a day

To create that sort of development, they’d need 6500 people costing $650 m per year.

That’s what Blizzard and EAA can do, because they have that kind of budget. But Linden Labs could not afford this, which is why it’s all user created.

Can also write code. It’s like C code – well, ‘sub-C code’ – but in a 7 day period, 5000 residents have written origanal scripts – 15% of people. and these people are not programmers.

12,000 distinct scripts written in 7 days, which is
3 million lines of script code

So people get others to help them, or copy other scripts.

Unanticipated consequences
So early on, people decided to be aliens, created a spaceship, abudcted people, probed them, and then gave them a t-shirt saying ‘I got abducted by aliens’. The aliens did this about monthly… and people found it kind of fun.

In WoW or UO that would be scary, but LL love it.

Traditionally ‘hard’ problems:
– making 3D objects – 100 million
– making humans – 10 million
– programming – 30 million

Compare to other user created content

Over 60% of people contribute to the platform. Which is a big deal compared to most others that produce less than 10%… or 0%.

Lots of the stuff people make is just experimenting, making something simple and then deleting it. There are huge sandboxes, but every 3 or 6 hours they get wiped.

Because land is valuable, that reduces the amount of crap that’s lying around. Land is a column – you buy a footprint and it goes up as high as you like (well until your avatar melts).

You also get a ration of prims (i.e. you can only create so many primitive objects such as cubes or spheres), so if you want to make a castle then you need to buy a lot of land so that you can get enough prims together.

People make games. Golf, for example, or Tringo – combination of bingo and Tetris, and instead of numbers, shapes get pulled out, so try to line up the shapes on the grid to make continuous blocks of colour. Social game, lots of fun, but it’s licenced in the real world games company, and to TV.

Beyond games, simulations, so for example FEMA simulating distribution of aid.

Massive experimentation, e.g. AI virtual fish. Serena (??) was an amateur, experimented, and now has started working with professors on the same issues.

Good for mixing up amateurs and professional.

Lots of charitable giving in SL. Sponsored walk in SL, people sold items in SL. Made US$40,000 on last walk.

Spaceport Alpha, every single rocket that’s ever been designed and launched, including ones taht exploded. They did it for a laugh, but it’s a great educational resource now.

Education, real world universities do real world learning in SL, loads of stuff.

Virtual Book signing, Cory Doctorow. Virtual book that could get signed.

Beyond Broadcast, someone in the real conference and the SL version of the conference with a dalek. Everything’s Better With Daleks.

People also make money, someone made US$150,000 from land terraforms and zones real estate.

Who’s in SL.

650,000 residents, 10% increase monthly

Demographics
older and more gender balance, 50/50
32
women and older residents demonstrate better skills conversion into second life.

256×256 areas run on Debian servers
3000 CPUs
Area is three times size of Manhattan.
Add 300 servers a month.

Yet more stats… shitloads of stuff is happening, basically.

Why now?

People have been trying to do this for a while.
Broadband, the whole things comes down the wires all the time.
Routing capacity/low pings
Consumer 3d acceleration

But also…

Open Source
Lots of different OS libraries, cross-platform, so clients on Win, Mac, Linux

OS infrastructure. Almost al of it is OS, all the servers, are debian, mySQL, Apache…

Only PayPal, credit card processing and MySQL hot backup and Jira are closed source.

Made contributions to OS projects too.

Integrating Mozilla, any web place on a prim which will mean that you’ll be able to do any web page which can interact with Second Life. Hard to stick Mozilla on a 3D object. Interim result ubrowser.com.

OS projects in SL.

Such as OS Lightsaber construction kits.
Animation overrider, can upload animation for a golf swing, but some animations that avatars use by default, and they’re a bit rubbish, so some have done the overrider so people could bundle it with shoes, so the shoes actually change the way you walk.
Last Sound System, can stream radio stations into land in SL.
Lots of Creative Commons too, audio, graphics etc. Even a CC machine – touch the object which generates a licensing tag for objects.

libsecondlife
Reimplemenation in SL, reverse engineering, people want to modify platform as well as world. www.libsecondlife.org
– joystick control
– SL teledilconics

Moving towards OS SL platform.
Still some closed source libraries getting in the way.
Duty to residences – it’s not just an app, it has people working in it, so need to make sure it’s not possibly to destroy it.

Everyone owns the IP of what they make.

09.24.06
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EuroOSCON: Adrian Holovaty – Journalism via computer programming

Journalism right now is broken. Several ways – celebrity focus, political bias, circulation declining consistently, stock prices dropping, craisglist taking away classifieds market.

But that’s not the issue. The issues is that newspapers throw away data.

So if there was a burglary, you have the address, the person, the stuff nicked, roughly the time. has key value pairs. But all the journalist does is write an article and throw away most of the data.

News orgs have huge infrastructure, with reporters on the street, specialised. Infrastructure to collect and edit information, verify it. Not every media organisation does that, that they’re not taking advantage of. Have infrastructure to get info out to people, i.e. a printing press originally. Also have the attention of people.

But can’t take advantage of data because they are just creating big blobs – stories.

So contrast to
Google Base, (which is just infrastructure with no data).
Wikipedia
Craigslist

All great frameworks desperate for data. Journalists have great data desperate for a framework.

Why is structured data important – because if it’s structured a computer can do cool stuff with it.

Journalism via computer programming.

News people write an article, or create a video. A programmer makes a web app that makes it easy to look at the data.

WaPo, Iraq war, huge issue. Most recent deaths page, total fatalities, in Operation Iraqi Freedom, or Operation Enduring Freedom. Collect data on everyone who’s died, but can’t do a story on everyone, but can make that data available.

Faces of the Fallen – get own page, bio, map of home town. Depressing but important. Breakdown of age of deaths, most are 21, look by age, photos, breakdown of state, see all the people from the state and their town. Googlemaps. RSS Feed for every state. Sounds depressing and gory, but people are interested and they are then making their own sites, using for political activism.

Another example:
ChicagoCrime.org

Type of crime, street, by block, brows by day, by hour, and latest crime RSS feed

Votes Database, representatives in congress, their votes, breakdowns of late night votes, votes missed, get RSS out there. So people can get more interested in government: did you know your representative voted this way today?

Telling a story via an application not words. Being smart about data, dealing with raw data. Badger journalists to get the raw data so we can do cool stuff. End game is not creating an article, but getting data in one place to do cool stuff.

Cultural similarities to this and open source code.

Open source:
– making code available.
– understanding through transparency: can download stuff and look at it.
– encourages derivative work, although depends on licence.

Journalism via code:
– make the data available.
– encourages understanding through transparency: better to look at the data than someone’s opinion.
– encourages derivative work, can take the data from the RSS feed and do stuff with it yourself.

Call to action
Done talks at journalism conferences, and people grumble that this ‘isn’t journalism’, but that’s kinda depressing that the industry thinks that way. It’s not full of passionate people who want to do cool things with technology but full more of people more interested in the ends than the means. So if people are interested, then go out there and do it.

09.24.06
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EuroOSCON: Jim Purbrick – Second Life

User Creation. Very big thing. User creation tends to be quite low: Less than 10% of people that read the web create content for it. As difficulty of user creation goes up, so participation goes down.

More people in Second Life contribute than any other platform, but small numbers in absolute terms. Users growing 10% per month, and level of 60% participation is constant.

But just geeks? Community is older, ave age 32. Gender neutral by hours of use. Women and older residents demonstrate greater skills conversion than 18 yr old boys.

Just doing it for money? No, a lot of people do it just because they can.

Nearly all trivial? Yes, but you have to start somewhere.

Nearly all bad? Sturgeon’s Law Applies – 90% of stuff is crap. But ok, stuff isn’t always good, but it might be useful to that person. Creation is an end in itself. People just like to make stuff.

Why participate?
Instant Gratification? If you want to get people to participate they want to get results quickly, see the results, get rid of furstration. SL is not completely free of frustration, but you can make stuff pretty quickly. To make complex or pretty stuff takes time, but easy to hack simple stuff.

Always On Creation. There’s no ‘edit mode’, it’s always on. You can make stuff all the time. People are at parties they are still tinkering at the same time.

Collaborative creation. Can use sandboxes to make stuff, 24/7/365 Maker Fair. You can go and see what people are doing, ask them about it.

Culture of teaching. Ivory Tower of Primatives – how to make stuff. Easy to share and distribute. Unlike with some systems you have to build and then make a conscious effort to distribute it, but there’s little friction because if you mark something freely copiable, then people can just take a copy of it.

Creation engine. Used to think it’s like a bulldozer, but it’s more about the people – being able to communicate, hang out, and be able to participate. That’s what’s important, not the tools.

Another interesting thing – we are potentially coming to a turning point. People have created this vibrant world, so real world companies and organisations are coming into Second Life, e.g. American Apparel. Can buy t-shirts for your avatar and for your real life person. Also Creative Commons are in there.

So what will happen? Will the commercial companies come in and ruin it? Or will it maintain an open scouce feel? Probably will be a mixture. But everything in SL can be open sourced in the way that real things can’t, e.g. you can’t copy a real chair, but you can do that with a SL chair.

09.24.06
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EuroOSCON: Tom Steinberg – Hackers guide to democracy

After EuroFOO cam EuroOSCON, the open source convention organised by O’Reilly. I didn’t take notes at all the sessions I went to, but did for a few. Here’s Tom Steinbergs.

Tips for anyone trying to replicate MySociety‘s work in other

– Scrape and structure public data that’s already out there, e.g. Hansard. If you can make stuff more readable and searchable, you can make public information more valuable and encourage people to come to your site to experience that information.

– Out-Google them. If the public data is shite, and you tidy it up and republish it in a nicely structured way, you’ll get more people from Google, so people will find your stuff who aren’t looking for it.

For example, Fax Your MP used to be no 1 in Google for ‘MP’. Have never spent any money on marketing the MySociety brand because it’s more important that people who want to do something stumble upon their sites when they really need them.

When you have structured data, the temptation is to pretty it up and make it usable, and put it on the web and leave it there. But email alerts are more important than even syndication. People rely on email and it’s really valuable. Even though email is old-fashioned, if you want people to visit once, get hooked, and return in the future then email alerts are the way to do it alongside RSS.

– Aggregate. The sum of all the data is more valuable than the individual parts. If you have a large mass of data, try to dig into it and look at what’s important to separate out. Create feedback mechanisms when relevant, e.g. ask if users got a response from their MP and whether they had written to an MP ever before.

– Ratings. If you can give them ranks, e.g. where they rank in terms of turning up for votes. Politicians like ranks, and they will respond so they will rearrange how they do things like handle mail so that they get a better response rate on WriteToThem. The negative accusations are that politicians will then do things like table written questions even when they aren’t interested in the answer just so that they look good on TheyWorkForYou. So be careful what you do and think about what the repercussions are.

– Reject cool over useful. Focus on building technologies that are ‘training free’. Ask what can you create that doesn’t require any training to use it. Try and tap into the tech that people already have. FaxYourMP and WriteToThem have something in common – a message from someone. Didn’t matter that faxes are non-internet, low-tech, it still works because the process has been made easy by bolting on an interface. Fax evolved to email naturally in business, so MySociety moved from fax to email naturally then.

– Create new forms of pressure. Politicians are almost immune to pressure, because they deal with it all the time. So if you put ‘normal’ pressure on a politician then it might not work because they’re used to it. But putting new pressure on them works, e.g. putting a rank on them was a new pressure they didn’t have before. E.g. HearFromYourMP, which allows you to sign up to get an email from your MP and discuss it with other local people. So the service looks then for a threshold, e.g. 25 people in one constituents, then it mails the MP and says that these people want to hear from *you*. So it encourages the MP to then hit reply and engage. If they ignore it, then when the list is 50 people, it sends another email. Eventually they will give in because it becomes untenable to ignore it.

People are not used to being given platforms to discuss things with their constituents. But it’s also peer pressure because the system shows them who in their peer group is already doing this. One in five MPs asked has already used the system.

Been rebuilt in Germany, but the code is open source so can be reused.

But more general lesson is what pressure can you put on people that they are not used to.

– Be prepared for effects. Think when you put things up about what will happen if you’re wildly successful? Or what happens if people start gaming the system. Having a debate in parliament about how the tools can change so that they are more effective and don’t waste any public time/money.

If you design your site to look like a boxing ring, people will fight; if you design it to encourage constructive discussion, that’s what they’ll tend to do. But do use cunning filters etc. to try and pre-empt spam etc.

09.24.06
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EuroFOO: Working a four day week

This session was lead by Ryan Carson, and it was one I was particularly interested in. My aim for the next few years is to work part-time on the stuff that pays the bills, and spend the rest of my time writing books and stuff like that. I’ve thought a lot about this issues, and it’s one I want to write more on in future. But certainly this was one of the most enlightening sessions of EuroFOO, partly because I didn’t realise that there were other people who were challenging the tyranny of the over-developed work ethic.

Anyway…. to my notes:

We don’t need to work five days – there’s no rule that we have to work five days. It’s just a matter of choosing. We [Ryan and his wife Gillian] have total control, so why not choose to work less and that will give us more time to experience things outside work.

It wasn’t because work is bad, we love what we do, but it was more that if you work in the web industry it can be all consuming and can take over your life completely. And you end up checking email, and post on blogs, and it’s Monday and it’s time to work again.

We decided to work Monday – Thursday, 9-6, and have two employees, and pay them a full salary but they also only work 4 days a week, and they get 30 days holiday a week. And the idea is that people tend to work 5 days because they spread their work out over five days instead of thinking ‘gotta get stuff done because I’ve only got 4 days’.

In the run up to the Future of Web Apps, they didn’t abide by that rule but the rest of the time they do.

Martin: Law firm, 17 employees, had a discussion that the best thing would be prolong the weekend with an extra Monday or Friday, but not everyone takes the same day.

Ryan: Good thing is that everyone else is working on a Friday, and it’s quiet to be out and about. Very empowering.

Part of this is that we have products instead of clients, so if you have a client you can’t tell them not to call on Fridays.

Protestant work ethic, Lutherian, divorced from religion now, but people are almost perversely proud to be working 16 hours a day. In many non-western countries people are a lot less about working, they are happy to avoid work. In the west, particularly UK and US, this work ethic has become rampant.

Company cultures, top-down, decide what’s important, and what the holiday culture is. So Carson can decide how to live, and then let their employees live like that two. If you’re at a company and your boss isn’t going to do a four day week, then you aren’t going to be able to.

Have to realise that it makes sense to give people more time off. Why is it that Scandinavian societies are more productive with shorter working weeks? When you measure productivity in America, or between Denmark and Sweden, those with more time off are more efficient.

Yet also need to allow for downtime, for chatting, and getting to know people and what’s going on. Having 4 days to work really focuses you and you cut out what’s not important. If it’s not important it doesn’t get done, but that doesn’t matter because it wasn’t important.

Can easily create an unreal pressure to work more. But that pressure is in your head, it’s not always real.

What’s interesting from working 4 days a week is that they have to leave the laptops at work over the weekend else they just log in to email and then that turns into work.

Me: I need to turn laptop off at 10pm so that my brain has time to wind down before bed. But there’s a real blurring between work and play, so you end up feeling you’re ‘faffing’ all day.

Ryan: Important to challenge our perceptions of how much we are supposed to work. If you enjoy playing scrabble on your laptop, then that’s cool, but we decided that it’s best for us to force ourselves to do that. But that sort of constraints are not for everyone.

Realised that by being on the computer all the time, we weren’t experiencing very much.

Martin: Question of focusing and being more aware of instead of trying to process a lot of information. Trying to powernap. Programme that generates power-naps. Does a power-nap at 1pm and 7pm.

Paula: Expectation management. People don’t care how much you work, they care that the thing that they care about gets addressed. It’s important to set expectations with people right from the beginning. Felt so passionate about it, didn’t think about setting limits. But energy levels aren’t sustainable if you don’t.

Me: Also need to set expectations for yourself, and realise that other people’s expectations may not be what you think they are. Email is the biggest stressor. Have had to set ‘away’ messages saying ‘I have too much email’.

Paula: Have to set boundaries early on. Have to also give yourself permission to think of every moment away from home as a ‘work’ moment, when you travel.

Ryan: Martyrdom pride in the tech industry, and ‘oh we’re launching a product and working 7 day weeks’ but that actually means that you’re doing it wrong.

If you can, get a PA. Getting rid of phones for some people. Email – can react later – doesn’t have to be immediate.

Paula: Ask more. Interrogates requests, asks for more info, when do people need things? To what depth? Because assumptions are: immediate; to the greatest depth.

Martin: and people like being asked those questions.

Paula: Teaching people to give info in the first place. Starting to get more qualified requests which helps her to prioritise.

09.23.06
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EuroFOO: Future Spy

Fiona Romeo is looking for ideas for an exhibition on the future of spying at the Science Museum, called SPYMAKER: The Science of Spying. Again, some very rough notes:

The exhibition is for 8 – 12 year olds, and is about speculative spy technologies. Most people come in family or school groups, rarely individuals. Everything has to be accessible, including for people with visual/hearing impairments, so aim for multisensory.

The idea of people in the same public space is rare. Put attention back on the people that are there. 20 objects in a room. Science, and soft sciences, so can include psychology etc. Consider learning outcomes. Trying to cover a range of different ways to think about things. Future focus. Surveillance/counter-surveillance product of the next 20 years. Exhibition will run for five years.

Only restriction is that you shouldn’t break the laws of physics that are currently seen as true.

Small budget. Limited moving parts. Models. Has to work wihtout actually having to work. Must communicate within 30 seconds – 1 minute. Has to appeal to 5 – 75 year olds.

Don’t only mean espionage. Spying has become more ‘democratised’. Tech gives more hi-tech seeing powers. Big Brother, Big Sister – your mother, local council, etc.

Directions – things so small they are hard to detech. Remote spying. Body odour signature. Harder to detect, less visible. Denial of access based on computer analysis. RFID is of the moment. Increased computing power. Processing huge volume of information, e.g. to process all telephone calls.

Everything will be done under a Creative Commons attribution licence. Has to relate to the every day life of an 8 year old. Take beyond where technology has been perfected, and go to where they become baroque. Once things are really accepted, they becomes the customisable.

So… we split into groups at this point and had a think about it. My idea, which others expanded, was about DNA espionage, suits that stop you shedding skin and hair for DNA harvesting, and which you peel off at the end of the day… or a suit that has someone else’s DNA impregnated in it…

Already a DNA spray of 100 or so people that thieves spray around.

Other ideas…
Gait recognition from video, which allows them to recognise individual. Also allows them to recognise suicide. Predict criminals and arrest.

Car and phone tracking… can already track cars via automatic numberplate recognition. So what about tracking people via jewellery, engagement rings.

Games that tell you when people are close to you.

God bots in 3D digital worlds, watching what people are doing. Are we going to be allowed to protect ourselves from that sort of surveillance.

This was a fun session, actually. I’m just sorry my notes are so random and rough.