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.

EuroOSCON06

it just seems wrong to blog about chocolate here, when I have a blog called Chocolate and Vodka, so I’ve put my notes from Tor Nørretranders’s chocolate session there instead of here.

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.

EuroFoo06

Sven Riedel gave us an overview of what the Pirate Party’s up to, and we had a great discussion about what ORG does. My rough and ready notes:

Sprouting all over Europe and US, small topic-based party. Swedish Pirate Bay, server confiscation, media attention, more Pirate Parties springing up.

– Goals – copyrights/patents: e.g. no software patents; limit copyright, e.g. disney copyright on Mickey Mouse, so pressure on congress to extend, Sonny-Bono.
– data privacy: who gets access to what dat, show shares the data, how’s it cross-referenced, anti-terorrism rage – thin veil to gather as much data as possible,
– transparent gov’t: what is gov’t doing, why, what contracts are they giving out under what conditions, e.g. toll autobahn system, mfr couldn’t keep to the deadline but didn’t have to pay a fine, was in contract but gov’t wouldn’t tell anyone.
– Open access: particularly in Germany, scientific community has to publish papers in specific journals and not allowed to publish elsewhere, so scientists have to pay for these journals.

[academic papers, digital journals]

Technical reports. Grants were off the back of the papers you’d publish, but people would also publish a significantly “modified technical report” in order to get round it.

Reputation problem.

Change grants system, to get people to publish openly by forcing it as a condition on the grant. Citations – use those to see which are held in esteem even if they are published in lesser known journals.

We agree open access is a good thing, but why is this a party?

Just a few topics that are agreed upon, and are being publicised. For issues like taxation, the party doesn’t currently have any opinions. Is about getting legislation to counter lobbying etc.

In Germany, Pirate Party has status of Greens in the late 70s.

Current opinion in the party is ‘well cross the taxation bridge when we come to it’.

The name is provocative, it’s unusual.

– should publicly support Open GeoData; INSPIRE
– should Open Source be on there? In transparent gov’t but not a major point. Should be able to debug the gov’s tenders to ensure open standards and open source software.

Do deal with DRM. Line is: DRM sucks.

Goal is to be elected to EU Parliament in 2008 elections. Hoping to get one or two people in there.

Belgium
France
US
Italy
Sweden
Russia
Spain
Austria
Germany

Personally, I’m interested to see how this all goes. I think that the Pirate Party needs to think a bit beyond its own goals in order to get anyone elected. I would also imagine that if they do get anyone elected, it’ll be in a country with proportional representation, so no chance here.

EuroFoo06

I was lucky enough to be invited not just to FOOCamp this year, but also its European counterpart, EuroFOO. Just like FOOCamp, which by the end of the two days had become known as ‘FooFoo’, EuroFOO was a fantastic gathering of really smart people who were happy to just chat about whatever it was that came up. I took more notes at EuroFOO than at FooFoo, and whilst I’m not going to blog all of them, I will give you some highlights.

Matt Jones, with help from Matt Webb and Simon Willison, ran a session on how to build a tricorder specifically for finding out more about your immediate environment, which split us up into three teams – one to work on some Python, one to think about the top-level design/functionality spec, and one to go out into the street and ask locals some questions. The questions were from Kevin Kelly’s ‘Big Here’, including:

1) Point north.
2) What time is sunset today?
3) Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap.
4) When you flush, where do the solids go? What happens to the waste water?
5) How many feet above sea level are you?
6) What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom here?
7) How far do you have to travel before you reach a different watershed? Can you draw the boundaries of yours?
8) Is the soil under your feet, more clay, sand, rock or silt?
9) Before your tribe lived here, what did the previous inhabitants eat and how did they sustain themselves?
10) Name five native edible plants in your neighborhood and the season(s) they are available.

I joined the team working out the top-level spec, and the interesting thing to me was how everyone went off in different directions. I’ve seen this happen elsewhere – unless one or two people are holding the torch and saying ‘Follow me!’ the collaboration disintegrates. There was a lot of meta discussion, but not a huge amount of real collaboration.

We thought a bit about potential data sources, where you could get data about the environment and acts of nature. One person made a tangential but interesting point that children waste a lot of brain power on things like Pokemon cards, so why not do a set based on flowers, teaching them to identify native species, invaders, and weeds. Nice idea.

We talked about almanac data, how you map data onto a grid and whether postcode data is useful or GPS better. Talked about layers of data superimposed over the grid, such as a watershed layer which had info about the water table and which direction groundwater flows in.

Then we analysed how the original tricorder had sensors, but ours was not about sensing local conditions but conveying local information gathered asynchronously.

What technology is already out there to solve this problem? We already have a mobile phone, GeoDB, sources of information… so just need a model for interaction.

So the interface could be text based, map based, representative image based (e.g. an image of a landcape with the sunset/sunrise in the sun, tree with local flora information, etc.), or a 3D fly through like Second LIfe with a heads-up display.

At the end of the session, the three groups reported back. The most interesting thing came from the people who’d gone out to do interviews. They discovered that people find out that they are actually intrigued by the questions Kevin Kelly sets, and wanted to know the answers and how well they did. Mainly, they knew where North was, knew when sunset was, knew where the rubbish went, but not much else. Yet once their lack of knowledge was illustrated by their inability to answer these questions, they became curious to find out the real answers.

Interesting session, and it made me think a lot about motivation, education and the separation between man and environment.

EuroFoo06

A bit of a jetlagged and groggy day for me, so not really the best time to be sitting in a darkened room listening to people speak, but over all I enjoyed the day. The lack of power outlets in the auditorium was maddening, and meant I ended up missing two sessions so that I could go and power my MacBook.

Highlights certainly were the two Jeffs, Barr and Veen, whose talks were engaging and insightful. I managed to snag Jeff Barr at a break and have a bit of a chat about the way that people from the Amazon developer community (i.e. not from Amazon) are using their APIs to create things like virtual bookstores in Second Life. As will become apparent over the coming weeks, I am obsessed by Second Life at the moment, so a surefire way to get my attention is to mention words like ‘metaverse’, ‘avatar’, or ‘Linden Lab‘. Jeff is going to ping me some locations when he’s next online, so I’ll blog about them then.

The other Jeff, Mr Veen, gave possibly the most entertaining talk of the conference about user centred design. It was great – hysterically funny and very informative, just like I wish my talks were. More to the point, it made me think about how I work as a social software consultant, and particularly how I evaluate clients’ needs and how I assess project ideas. I shall have to investigate a little further, as I have some half-formed thoughts that need fleshing out.

Also a special mention must be given to Jeremy Keith‘s Joy of API talk, which was also very funny. As soon as he showed the photo of a ZX81, half the room sighed with giddy reminiscence of childhood/youth. My first computer was actually a ZX80, then we went to the ZX81 and then the ZX Spectrum. Ahh, those were the days. Remember those little silver paper printers, the ones that burnt the text onto the paper and smelt like the pit of Hell had opened up at the bottom of the garden?

Anyway, Jeremy’s talk was entertaining and I wish I’d been a bit more alert because I’m very interested in how APIs work, but it takes extra special attention for me to decode programmer speak into non-programmer speak. He was talking about how APIs are really only used by the alpha geeks at the moment and how it would be cool if we could make it easier for non-programmers to play with this stuff. I would certainly be one of those people who would love to play with APIs, but who lack the specific skill-set required to do so.

Someone from the audience asked why non-alpha geeks would care, but I think it’s really vital that some of this stuff gets translated across, because the people who try to help businesses grok APIs aren’t necessarily the same people who create APIs. (The point that you don’t need to spend six months creating an API if you use microformats and RSS was well made, but doesn’t entirely solve the problem.)

Jeremy also mentioned Overplot, a great mash-up of conversations overhead in NY plotted on a Google Maps. The other links he used are on his site.

Overall, a good day, however I’ll reiterate the point for any future conference organisers: fish need water; geeks need power outlets. I know venues like the Corn Exchange are too old to have been wired up with geeks in mind, but electricity is very important, as is wifi. Actually, regarding the wifi I’m not sure what was up with it, but we had to manually specify a DCHP address in order to get a connection. Not ideal, although once we knew that it became easy to get it working.

People who were on the web in the mid-90s were producing the web and so understood it. Now, most people who use the web don’t create websites so they don’t understand the technical issues and have very little interest in decoding interfaces that don’t meet their expectations.

When people can’t find information, they blame themselves and don’t think that it might not be their fault. Lots of companies have data that they are willing to tell customers, but which customers can’t actually access via the web. Yet customers assume that if they can’t find something, that they must be looking in the wrong place.

Venn diagram:
1. Viability: is there a business case for having this website?
2. Feasibility: is it even possible to build it?
3. Desirability: do people want it?

Napster was example of site with tremendous desirability; had the technology; but financially was a nightmare. These three things not in balance with Napster.

But the iPod is. Tech is right, business is right, desirability is right.

How can we use this on the web?

Usability is a balance between following the rules and ignoring the rules. Some sites break all the usability rules (such as those created by Jacob Nilsen), but are still successful. But simply following rules without understanding them just gives the illusion of competence.

We have many best practices, but too early to have a solid rule set for web design. There is no ‘One True Way’ or ‘Four Step Process’. Twelve years is a drop in the bucket and we should avoid the arrogance of ‘we know all this now’.

User centred design is about experience, not about making pages pretty. Doesn’t matter what it is that you’re trying to achieve.

Experience is based on users trying to accomplish goals and our stuff (whatever it is) getting in the way. So we need to enable that cycle of people getting stuff done. Solve that by looking for the patterns in our stuff that enable people to get stuff done.

Get a pile of stuff, look for the patterns which turn stuff into an experience, which through labelling turns into navigation that is intuitive to users.

But not all users have the same goal. A good designer lets all users access all stuff in any way that makes sense to them. But this is not easy.

Classifications differ, the way people classify the world is different.

Globalisation – needs to be in several languages, hard if you have no budget. And it’s not just internationalisation but localisation, so content specific to the region.

Accessibility issues are big.

Design suffers from jargon. Marketing often come up with weird jargon, and whilst there is no reasons for people to use identical nomenclature, unnecessary jargon gets in the way.

Politics get in the way, when the site reflects the internal org chart. Companies end up with silos, with no communication between, but that makes it into the website so that the sections have no cross-fertilisation, and a different user experience in each section. Does a disservice to the users.

Extensible. Amazon added a tab at the top of the page every time they added a new business area, but that is not scalable. They had to find another way to do navigation in order for their site to remain usable.

We don’t know what else is going on in the user’s life. We make assumptions about their experience which are usually wrong. People multitask and get distracted. So you have to have a sense of overall context, so have to do user research.

There is the top-down, understanding what people are trying to do;
– interview or observer users
– develop mental models
– match goals to features

And bottom-up:
– inventory what you have
– evaluate content and features
– organise with librarianship
– let users participate

Hard to figure out what people want unless we talk to them.

At Google Analytics, what do people do to figure out how successful their website is? Interviewed some people, had it transcribed, and then tried to figure out what people would do. Would write each bit on a post-it and try to group it, and tried to match stuff that people were saying with the stuff that Google had. Derived an architecture from that, and hopefully provide users with an intuitive experience.

Mental model. Try to work out what was going on in people’s minds when they do their work, (tasks), and then what the software does, (features).

Mind the gaps. Where isn’t there stuff? Look for tasks that don’t map to features you have, or tasks with no features. Good prioritisation plan.

Why? Helps you eliminate a lot of possibilities for your design early. Helps you narrow down the design so that it is what people want. Early on, easy to change your mind, later on the cost of changing your mind rises dramatically. This helps to convince people that, up front, they need to spend money to talk to people.

Jeff‘s presentation is up online.

Like an idiot, I left my MacBook charger at the Corn Exchange in Brighton yesterday at d.Construct. If anyone picked it up, can you please email me?

UPDATE: I’ve been told that my charger was indeed found, and handed in. I shall ring the Corn Exchange tomorrow to see what I need to do next. Thanks for your help, everyone!

d.construct 2006, dconstruct06, idiot