Photo by ehnmark, cc-by license

I’ve submitted two panel proposals this year – each is described below with a voting link.

The first is Who Pays for Content?: Re-evaluating Paywalls. As described in the proposal:

Everyone knows Stewart Brand’s statement that “information wants to be free,”. Less well known is the other half: “information also wants to be expensive.” If no one pays for content, and no one clicks on ads, how will we fund online initiatives, applications, and sites? What could drive users to pay for content? What has, historically, and how can we learn from that?

I think this is a very timely discussion that hits at the core issues for SXSW attendees – what funds the work so many of us do on the web? What models other than advertising and pay-for-content will work in the assembled web?

The other is What’s in it for me? Open Source and Interaction Design. This builds on the video podcast I did as part of last year’s extended content program. As an open source developer and advocate who has also long been a promoter of the value of interaction design, I want to broaden awareness within the interaction design community about why licensing matters. From the proposal:

Open source advocacy has generally focused on the perspective of developers, for whom access to source code is a real need and the opportunity to change or extend functionality is a practical possibility. But what about the interaction design community? In this talk I explore why interaction designers should care about free and open source software.

You’ll have to register to vote, of course. You can also leave comments here or in the panel picker itself.

See you in Austin in March!

Thesis: Open Source and Design are fundamentally philosophically incompatible. Antithesis: Open Source and Design are profoundly similar in core beliefs and approaches. This talk works to articulate a meaningful synthesis between these two positions.

The talk, unfortunately, wasn’t accepted for presentation at the conference, but they suggested that instead I do a shorter, podcast or video podcast version for the Extended Content program.

I did, and that content now has gone live on the SXSW site:

In our first installment of the Extended Content series, John Eckman tells you everything you need to know about open source and design. The differences and similarities, how they benefit each other and why they have trouble getting along.

Extended Content at SXSW Interactive

(Unfortunately they don’t allow embedding, so you’ll have to go there to watch it – and at least on two browsers I tried it on, you’ll have to wait for the whole thing to preload before it starts playing – so go get a cup of coffee or whatever while it loads).

It’s just shy of 20 minutes, and having been created back in February 2009 feels (to me) a bit outdated in spots – mostly the continued evolution of the work Mark Boulton and Leisa Reichelt have been doing with the Drupal community (not just on Drupal.org but also on Drupal 7 itself), which I encourage you to check out if you’re interested in the subject.

Although I think it’s important to draw a distinction between simple, relatively cheap licensing (the Expression Engine model) and Free and Open Source software, I generally agree that

Now, we have really powerful comparatively easy to understand, open source content management systems

And that this shift- from needing a large scale custom development project or an expensive proprietary CMS to now being able to leverage open source platforms – represents a key point in the maturity of web development.

(A brief aside on “writing in the disciplines” or “interdisciplinary writing” programs: Most college composition courses take one of two approaches: the either ask the students to write about literature or they take a topical approach, choosing topics in which they believe the students will be interested. The former approach assumes the students are interested in what the instructor is interested in, as many of these courses are taught by graduate students or professors whose real interest is something literary. The latter creates an environment in which the ostensible topic of the writing is an artificial academic context usually dealt with very superficially, since the real purpose of the course is the writing, not the topic. IWP and programs like it try to solve that by situating the students and the instructor in a real academic context: an existing undergraduate course in another discipline. The students’ writing tasks are situated in an authentic environment, where they are actually trying to understand and enter an ongoing academic discourse.)

I was reminded of the importance of context (and my love for the insights of the social sciences broadly) this weekend as I watched two videos from an event Microsoft Research held at MIT, to celebrate the launch of their new lab in Cambridge:

• danah boyd on socio-technical practices (streaming video)
• Bill Buxton on “Designing Experience” (streaming video)

(Sorry for the mms links – you can rip them via mplayer if you need to watch in offline mode, but I think reposting them here would be considered a copyright violation).

Both really celebrate / argue for what we might call the situatedness of technology design: the ways in which an understanding of the cultural context of technology use needs to be brought back into the design of those technologies and how non-engineering approaches (from the social sciences in danah’s talk and from Design in Buxton’s talk) can help to provide that context.

danah boyd (capitalization hers) has built a (well-deserved) reputation for being a smart ethnographic observer of teen culture as it intersects with what we now call social networking, having spent many years embedding herself in both the online networks and (importantly) the social contexts in which real teens engage with those networks.

In this video, she talks about the situatedness of what the industry calls “Web 2.0″ within a broader social and cultural history which includes moral panic about teens and adult strangers and changing political geographies which eliminated / privatized traditional public spaces.

She outlines several factors which are inflecting teen behavior (ways in which the new technology both has an impact on and is impacted by the behavior):

1. persistence
2. replicability
3. scalability
4. searchability

And some dynamics which result from these factors:

• invisible audiences
• collapsed contexts
• public == private

For me the key in the video is less the specific issues she discusses (which if you’ve followed her work aren’t necessarily new) but the broader context in which she places the work: how technology creation and design needs to take into account the social contexts in which technology use is always necessarily embedded.

In other words, technology designers and makers can’t really hope to be fully successful without engaging the uses to which their technologies are put. Not that they’ll know in advance what all social uses will be (in fact the most interesting ones are generally those least anticipated) but that they need to remain engaged and active in the kinds of understanding on which social sciences have traditionally focused.

Eminent researcher, designer, and teach Bill Buxton‘s talk, which followed danah’s, actually ends up complimenting it well. He basically makes an argument for bringing “design thinking” earlier and more consistently in the design process for technology products. He also makes a compelling case for doing a different kind of “usability testing,” with two key additions:

1. Showing users multiple prototypes/sketches. Users recruited for testing will rarely be critical of a prototype when shown only one solution, but will provide stronger critiques when shown multiple solutions. This is due in part to a reluctance to criticize the team running the tests, who are presumably invested in the solution. When users were shown three alternative approaches they were much more forthcoming in their criticisms, as they recognize the design team haven’t “solved” the problem.
2. Ask users to sketch a solution. It’s long been a truth universally accepted that users don’t provide solutions: they know the problem, but don’t know how to solve it. Buxton shows that by giving users a vocabulary and toolset which enables them to communicate design solutions, they can and will produce more innovations.

As with boyd’s talk, though, the importance for me of what Buxton’s talking about isn’t a specific set of changes to usability testing, but a broader focus on the kinds of skill sets teams need to encourage, facilitate, and perhaps even require. It’s about what he calls “design thinking” and collaboration among researchers and designers with heterogeneous specialties. He talks specifically about bringing together cognitive psychologists, sociologists, graphic designers, interaction/industrial designers, and software engineers on teams to really cultivate the kind of productive discussion necessary to fundamentally change how technology solutions are imagined.

Although voting by prospective attendees is only “about 30%” of the decision making process, I figured I should promote my submissions here, and hope that readers of this blog might be interested in commenting on them or voting for them in the panel picker. (Although they call it the panel picker – no one can resist alliteration – it includes sessions which are solo speakers or dual speakers as well as more tradition 4-5 person panels).

So here are the sessions I proposed (links go directly to the Panel Picker):

Managing User Generated Content

The age of content being managed only by authorized professionals is over. Users expect to contribute to, rate, review, recommend, filter, tag, and moderate their experiences on the web. What does this mean for designers and content management professionals? How do you encourage appropriate behavior and discourage spam and vandalism, without completely reverting to non-participation?

Open Source and Design: Ideologies Clashing

Thesis: Open Source and Design are fundamentally philosophically incompatible. Antithesis: Open Source and Design are profoundly similar in core beliefs and approaches. This talk works to articulate a meaningful synthesis between these two positions.

Managing Your Online Identity Outside the Walled Garden

(Dual talk with Joshua Porter). This talk will cover 3 basic ideas: 1) What Managing Identity means these days and why it is important 2) Off-the-shelf technologies that help you manage your Identity 3) A DIY (Do-it-yourself) approach to managing your Identity…how you can roll your own identity services using existing pieces

The first is really an updated version of this talk from Web Content 2008, which seemed to go over well.

The second is inspired by r0ml’s series of OSCON talks over the last 3 years: rambling, philosophical, and entertaining in addition to being educational and thought-provoking. I’m sure I’ll fail to live up to his example but have fun in the process. I tried to update the description in the panel picker but failed – here’s what I was trying to add:

The context for me is in trying to articulate why free and open source projects have historically found it difficult to recruit / retain / attract designers as contributors. (Or, depending on your point of view, why open source projects have been so inhospitable to the design-oriented contributors who show up).

Thesis: Open Source and Design are philosophically incompatible.

Open Source is about enabling anyone and everyone to share the same code base. Open source pushes markets toward commodity status, leveling the playing field by making the same technology available to all. Design, by contrast, is about differentiation; standing apart from the crowd and being unique on the basis of creative innovation.

Besides, Open Source projects are ugly, and only engineers can use them. Well designed, beautiful, and easy to use projects have always come from proprietary approaches.

Antithesis: Open Source and design are profoundly similar in core beliefs. Open source and design are both based in solving problems based on known patterns. Good artists copy, great artists steal. Maybe some very small portion of “design” is about differentiation, but design is much broader than that subset. Also, many open source projects differentiate and innovate – sometimes on ease of use.

Besides, many open source projects are now actively pursuing design contributions, running usability studies, encouraging themes/skins, and working to compete with proprietary software on both “eye candy” and ease of use.

Synthesis: How can open source projects benefit more from the talents of the design community (across visual design, interaction design, information architecture, usability, and branding)? How can designers and design communities benefit from the lessons of free and open source software?

The third is a joint talk with Joshua Porter, whose book Designing for the Social Web is a must read. He’ll be talking about some of the “off the shelf” services available to help you manage your online identity (like Chi.mp), and I will be talking about the DIY approach, assembling together from free and open source software an online identity management toolbox.

I had thought about calling it “From Content Management to Community Management” or maybe “Content Management is Dead” but ended up instead with: “Upload, Tag, Share, Discuss: Content Management in the Age of Participation.”

Here are the slides – note that the last slide is full of credits for photos (creative commons via flickr) and links for sites referenced. Can be hard to see in small size so you’ll need to either full-screen it or download the file (which you can do at slideshare).

| View | Upload your own

Seth had some nice things to say about the presentation: Web Content 2008 Notes.

So did Deane at Web Content 2008: Day Two.

Thanks Guys!

It was really a great conference: not heavily vendor driven, no “expo floor” you have to walk through to get to the food, small enough that you could actually mingle with and talk to the attendees. My only wish would have been to have spoken earlier, maybe even Tuesday am, so that people interested in my talk could have known who I was before the conference was basically over. I also would have come in to Chicago Monday night to catch more of the opening keynotes.

Here’s my summer reading list. Tell me what I’m missing.

• The Future of the Internet — And How to Stop It, by Jonathan Zittrain
• Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, by Clay Shirky
• Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World, by Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu
• Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, by Chris Kelty
• Designing For the Social Web: Voices That Matter, by Joshua Porter

It’s a bit heavy, I know, but this is the kind of stuff I find interesting.

What are you reading this summer? What key new text have I left out?

Pecha Kuch is coming up on April 10th, 8pm, at Harvard Graduate School for Design.

I’m hoping to make it over there after Our World Digitized at MIT

The videos from IxDA are being uploaded and will end up on the Interaction08 site, but for now you can preview them in this Brightcove Channel.

Here’s Alan Cooper’s Keynote video, titled “An Insurgency of Quality,” in which he argues we should focus on Best to Market, not First to market.

He makes a strong argument for the importance of “post-industrial craftsmen” in the software industry. (Though I actually liked my Archos Jukebox for many years, I can see that it wasn’t best-to-market, and it has ended up sitting on the shelf while I use the iPod instead).

I love his pointing out the artificial scarcity of time and money, and the way in which culture conflict is what leads to zero sum negotiation.

• Joshua Porter on the Bungee Line Podcast
• Chris Brogan’s Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points
• Forrester Report from Jeremiah Owyang on Online Community Best Practices

Joshua Porter of Bokardo, has a book coming out: Design Social Applications (Voices That Matter). He was also recently interviewed by Alex Barnett and Ted Haeger for The Bungee Line podcast: Social Design with Joshua Porter. It’s a great interview, ~45 minutes, covering many of the themes covered at Bokardo: social software as modeling the real world, personal value before social value, and data driven design. I look forward to the book.

Chris Brogan also recently published Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points, a quick, concise, eBook focused on how companies can get started in the world of social media, especially with the concept of encouraging employees to blog or otherwise connect with online audiences. Key takeway: don’t obsess about “corporate blog policy” – take your corporate email / web terms or policy you already have (don’t reveal corporate or client secrets, don’t post pornography or copyrighted material, etc) and treat your employees as adults.

Finally, Jeremiah Owyang‘s first Forrester Report (Online Community Best Practices) is out and it’s a good sign of things to come. Unfortunately this one isn’t free, unless you have access to a Forrester subscription. (If you do, get the report from the Forrester site). The report doesn’t exactly break new ground – as the “best practices” in the title suggests, it synthesis and summarizes the core ideas enterprises need to hear as they think about creating online communities. As I read it, I found myself nodding vigorously, and recognizing mistakes people make that result directly from skipping some of these best practices.

My favorite part is the section on “A Taxonomy of Detractors” which lists these types:

• Legitimate complainer
• Competitor
• Engaged critic
• Flamer
• Troublemaker

And then describes ways of dealing with those detractors, ranging from “engage rationally” to “remove from community.” I like that it doesn’t oversell the fear of bad actors in a community (which can scare companies away from engaging in social media) but also doesn’t ignore it – just notes that there are clear ways of handling such problems.

I written before about both Dopplr and Tripit but never specifically to compare the two. Both track information about your travel as well as the travel of your friends, in order to let you know when you and your friends will be in the same place at the same time.

Well, next week I’m headed to Chicago for the Forrester Consumer Forum, so I thought I’d take this opportunity to compare the use of the two sites in relation to that trip. All the images below are thumbnails, click on them to see full size.

If you just want the conclusion?: The fight’s not over yet, but Tripit has become more consistently useful to me. Dopplr’s facebook app and existing userbase is all that keeps me there at the moment, and that is an advantage easily lost.

Adding Trips

Dopplr users add trips by just putting in start date, end date, and name of the city they are visiting:

It’s a simple, clean interface, which tries to autocomplete what you type. They use place names drawn from Geonames, and seem to have most major cities covered. (See posts here and here on how that autocomplete has evolved).

Notes are optional, and can help store things like airline confirmation numbers, hotels, etc.

Tripit users add trips by forwarding confirmation emails (from airlines, booking agencies, hotels, etc) to plans@tripit.com from one of their registered addresses. Tripit receives the email, parses out the information, and tries to assign it to an existing itinerary where that makes sense, or creates an “unfiled item” for things it can’t assign to existing trips.

Here’s what Tripit created based on my forwarding of email from the airline and the hotel:

Tripit recognized, since I sent the airline email first, that the Chicago Hotel belonged to my Chicago trip, and automatically added to my itinerary directions from the airport to the hotel, as well as a map centered on the hotel. (I deleted the generic “Map of Chicago” which had been added before I sent the hotel confirmation email).

In detail view, Tripit also retains things like loyalty program numbers, confirmation codes, seats if noted in the confirmations, etc. All of this can also be seen in a print-friendly format for carrying with you – very valuable if you travel alot and can lose things like confirmation numbers. I also like the “Help Us Improve Tripit!” section, which lets you give live feedback on how well their engine parsed the emails you forwarded to it.

Adding Friends

Adding friends in Dopplr can be done by inviting them to join the service (put in name and email and Dopplr will invite them), by allowing Dopplr to look through your gmail contacts, twitter followers/friends, and/or facebook friends. It can also import hCard format data. As Dopplr also has a facebook app, it has access to your friend information. For twitter, it doesn’t even need to log in as you since your followed/following relationships are public once it has your username. For Gmail, you have to provide your username and password, though Dopplr promises never to send messages without your specific approval.

In addition, you can also view “New Travellers on Dopplr” and “People You Might Now” – these use second order connections (people who were invited by people with whom you share trips, people who share trips with other people with whom you also share trips). This creates a nice mix of deliberate invite (I want to share info with a colleague) and synchronicity (I haven’t seen that person since last year’s SXSW but it might be fun to see if we’re ever in the same town).

Dopplr is still in private beta, meaning people do have to be invited, but invites are unlimited for those already in the system. (Want one, just leave a comment below).

On Tripit, which is now open to all users, you add friends simply by putting in email addresses and customizing the message – no links to your address book, facebook, twitter, etc.

What am I sharing?

Dopplr’s model resembles Twitter’s, in the sense that you have a bi-directional relationship (those whose trips you can see, and those who can see your trips – not necessarily the same people). You explicitly choose for each “friend” you’re connected to whether they can see your trips or not, and they control whether you can see theirs.

This is great, from a “not accidentally disclosing more than you want” perspective, but it actually can be a bit confusing – several of my colleagues thought they had shared their trips with me when in fact all they had done was accept being able to see mine – they missed the extra step. (If you browse over to connections this gets much clearer, as they call out who can see your trips versus whose trips you can see, but if you just glance through the setup process you can miss it).

Tripit, on the other hand, distinguishes between friends and collaborators. Friends can see your trips, and you can see theirs – destinations and dates.

Collaborators can view detailed info and can add plans to your trip – this is really designed for people traveling together to add details to the agenda – events, hotels, day trips, raw notes, data imported from the provided TripClipper (basically just a bookmarklet which adds urls to a given trip), and so on.

Feeds, APIs

Both offer various feeds of your own trips and trips you have visibility into.

Dopplr can give you an iCal format or ATOM feed of your own trips, or the trips you have visibility to. (In fact, the Atom feeds are geocoded, so you can do some fun and interesting things with them). You don’t seem to able to subscribe to specific fiends’ feeds, though.

Tripit also lets you get a calendar feed (iCal) of your trips, or specific friends’ trips, but not all your friends trips and yours in one feed. Their feeds are not geocoded.

What’s Missing?

Dopplr supports OpenID; Tripit does not.

Tripit allows for “collaboration” on trips, but Dopplr does not.

Tripit doesn’t get trains. Sending an Amtrak confirmation just results in an error. I know trains are less common, but in the BOS-NY-WA corridor the Acela is a common mode of business transit, and I know many European travellers use trains frequently as well. It’s also easy enough to work around, since you can add details manually. (Dopplr doesn’t care how you get from one place to another, just what cities you are in on what dates, so it avoids this problem).

[Update: Per this blog post, Tripit is working on rail support]

I don’t think either of the sites is really leveraging the value of the historical data well yet – Dopplr lets you get a geocoded feed of all your trips, including past trips, but there isn’t yet any real way to use this data – # of days away from home in last X months, for example.

Tripit, if you forward a travel confirmation in the past, accepts it and creates a trip – but then it doesn’t show up in your “upcoming trips” list (well, it isn’t upcoming). If you view your list of trips in calendar view, you can go into the past and pull up details on an individual trip, but there’s no reporting on the trips you’ve taken in the aggregate or reusing former trips in a new trip.

Open-source software projects tend to be initiated and built exclusively by programmers and their focus usually lies, as it should, with core features and technology. But a project that is exclusively driven by programmers usually won’t have an elegant user interface.

This post started as a comment on his blog, but got too long so I moved it here instead.

Reville proposed fixing this problem, in part, by establishing a “Free Beauty Squadron” which would connect designers and open source projects looking to improve their interfaces:

Here’s how a Free Beauty Squadron might work. A volunteer committee of experts asks projects to apply, explaining why they are a good candidate for an overhaul and what they hope to accomplish. When a project is selected, a paid designer flies out to meet one or more team members in person and begins developing a plan. Over a 6 week period, the designer creates mockups and interfaces flows for a new user experience, all in consultation with the coders. When the designer is done, the project has graphic files, documentation of a new UI, and an implementation plan to quickly or gradually put the new interface in place. The designer reserves 2 weeks for future consultation with the project as issues inevitably arise during implementation. The committee then sends the designer to their next project.

While I’m with Nicholas on the problem, I think this is the wrong direction in which to aim for a solution.

It’s not just that it is difficult to add design to the surface of a fully formed application (while beauty may be skin deep, true usability goes right through to the core), or that the interactions between new designers and existing Open Source projects might be difficult, or that the projects would need to take time to implement the new designs (these are logistical problems which Nicholas admits and offers what he sees as reasosonable workarounds to).

The problem is that it sets up the idea that “design work ” (specifically he seems to be targetting visual design, which is only a subset of a broader set of design skills from which many open source projects could benefit) is so fundamentally different than other kinds of production that it requires a different funding mechanism to get produced.

Put another way, why pay the designers and not the coders? Or, perhaps more accurately, why attract and encourage designers differently than coders?

Is it just that designers don’t need the tools open source produces?

Are the varied and sundry motivations which drive coders to contribute to open source somehow not relevant in the design community?

Many contributors to open source are actually paid employees of large companies using the software in question – don’t any of those patrons have designers?

I would assume many designers might appreciate the opportunity to build their portfolios with design solutions to real world challenges – for which their compensation might be reputation and experience, rather than cash.

Part of the problem must be in the code-centric nature of many open source communities, in which your ability to hack is the (only) measure of your worth – but that has been evolving in many projects to include broader skillsets.

So how does the open source community broadly engage with the designers in our midst, without having to create a separate charity brigade?

There were a few good ones I did get to, though.

First was titled “User Experience: The Next Wave” and was Ray Valdes’ take on the core value of user experience and “usability-centered design.” He had some great general principles for how organizations can take advantage of scientific, measurable approaches to usability to get beyond the “I like the blue one” design process to many still follow.

He also pointed to some of the key fallacies about “usability-centered design” (I still prefer user-centered design as a term):

1. Usability testing (“validation”) has to be expensive
2. User-centered design has to explode the project schedule
3. Users like the system we designed the old way, therefore we don’t need to change
4. Having a customer-focused attitude replaces doing formal design

He closed by talking about some of the new technologies and approaches (social software, new interfaces and input modes), and how really the primary challenge (and answers) remain mostly unchanged: solid strategy, best-practices in design, and a constant feedback loop with actual testing.

The second talk I saw was titled “Strengthen Your Governance Strategies for the Wave of Web 2.0 Technologies” and was by presented by L. Frank Kenny.

He talked about all the new kinds of endpoints into the enterprise which characterize web 2.0 – mashups, rogue service endpoints created to connect to outside services, users consuming outdated versions of corporate web services, etc.

Ultimately he argued that the current generation of mashups and syndication feeds probably don’t necessitate new controlling technologies for most enterprises – they can be governed by existing CMS systems, firewalls, filters, and the like.

He suggested that organizations should consider taking advantage of some of the new services which monitor social networks, the blogosphere, wikis, and forums – services like brandimensions, cyveillance, and webclipping.com – what he called “Brand Protection” as an emerging market.

—
Last session of the day was the Yochai Benkler keynote about which I wrote earlier.

I missed, unfortunately, the “It’s the Web, Stupid” presentation by David Mitchell Smith and Gene Phifer – based on the presentation slides (which attendees get access to but I can’t share) it looks like I would have enjoyed it. Here’s how they describe the presentation in the agenda:

Although the Web 2.0 name is popular and represents the Web of today, the world seems hungry for 3.0, whatever that is. While Web 2.0 suffered from being perhaps overly broad, the special interests driving 3.0-mania have the opposite problem – they are often too focused. We’ll look at the future of the Web including the semantic Web, the mobile Web, the virtual world Web and other candidates for “3.0.” Regardless of what the next big buzzword is, the Web will remain one of the major catalysts in technology and one of the major sources of innovation.

Anyone reading this who did see that session care to comment on it?

Not sure how valuable the slides will be in the absence of my commentary on them, but here they are:

• Two Steps Forward, One Step Back (4.3MB, in ODP format for OpenOffice)
• Two Steps Forward, One Step Back (3.3MB, in PDF format)

Thanks to those who attended and feel free to contact me with any questions.

Luckily, despite some overlapping sessions, the keynote by Yochai Benkler was shared across summits and I was able to attend.

If you’re not familiar with Prof. Benkler, you should be. His book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is the treatise on /study of commons-based peer production. (It’s available in many formats including free versions under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Attribution Share-Alike License).

He’s also the author of “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” in which he argues that:

while free software is highly visible, it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing is the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment. I call this mode “commons-based peer-production,” to distinguish it from the property- and contract-based models of firms and markets. Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.

What follows are my rough outline notes of his talk. Benkler’s the kind of speaker where the notes or even the slides don’t do justice to seeing him speak – but at least I’ve got some of the highlights and examples down.

Benkler:

We now live in a world in which:

• The most important inputs into the world’s core economic activities are widely distributed (the ability for globally distributed populations to create information and culture)
• Behaviors once on the periphery of economic concern are moving to the core (social relationships, friendships, concerns about decency and fairness)

Example: The Encyclopedia – used to be thousands of dollars to get a 24 volume set of bound encyclopedias. That pressure drove the price of the Brittanica down to $500 in 1989. That was then followed by Encarta for $59.95 in 2000. Finally, wikipedia which is free.

Benkler mentioned the Nature study on the quality of Wikipedia entries, and Britannica’s response (PDF) to it. (Nature‘s since responded to the Britannica objections).

The reality is that most hands on practicing scientists felt both were equally lousy. (Never ask a deep expert to evaluate a paragraph level summary of a complex topic – they always find it lacking). But that this was even a serious question to be tacked – that Wikipedia could be said by a reasonable person as potentially comparable in quality to Brianicca – is Benkler’s point.

“Information Production” is now the critical economic activity – at the same time that our ways of producing information are shifting to commons based production.

Benkler outlined a number of concepts (and drew distinctions between them) related to Commons Based Production:

1. Peer Production
2. Shared Resource Utilization (things like SETI @Home
3. Free/Open Source Software

Examples included (I added links):

• The search for Steve Fossett
• Craters outlined by volunteers for NASA
• The BBC Help Us Make News
• Threadless
• Learning to Love You More
• Kaitura
• Porkbusters and the Secret Holder
• The Sunlight Foundation Earmark Map
• Black Box Voting and the campaign to decertify certain electronic voting machines
• Media Volunteer (as I’m writing this their site seems to be down – asking for authentication for public pages)
• Cambia BioForge

This is really a new kind of production in that it is not market driven and it is not centralized. We’ve had market-driven, decentralized production (standard firms in the US), we’ve had market-driven, centralized production (large corporations), we’ve had non-market, centralized production (governments and NGOs, non-profits). What we have not had is non-market, decentralized production. (This echoes Clary Shirky’s assertions about Perl being an act of love).

Benkler showed a typology of different ways peer production works, in terms of the types of inputs people are asked to make and the types of organizational strategies they use, as well as the kinds of motivations (extrinsic and intrinsic) driving them. The more creativity and knowledge necessary in the types of contributions people are asked to make, the more you have to move to a many to many type collective form of organization. The major examples here are things like Google and Digg, where the effort required by the user is low (making links on the web means helping Google’s algorithm but you don’t think of it that way, digging something is a single click activity); on the other hand Free/Open Source Software requires much more complex structures. (Not sure if he’s overestimating the “volunteer” nature of open source here given the number of developers on may open source projects who are employed and do this contribution as part of their job).

The key question isn’t whether peer production is a fad – it clearly is here to stay – but how it operates and how we can design to encourage the right kinds of collaboration.

Too much of the theories of cooperation has classically depended on “rational self-interest” but newer explorations in a number of fields (sociology, economics, psychology, evolutionary biology) has started to move beyond that.

Benkler’s argument is that people respond in ways which are not always or first self-interested: people resond in ways which are predictably cooperative under certain conditions:

• Communication
• Humanization
• Trust Construction
• Explicit Norm Creation
• Monitoring / Peer Review / Discipline
• Transparency in Governance
• Fairness (in context – concepts of fairness vary widely)
• Self-Selection (as opposed to assignment to tasks)
• Group Identiity and Investment
• Leadership (older sibling style, not parent)

Benkler made a great point about being wary of introducing extrinstic motivators (ie, money) in systems which have been driven by intrinsic motivators. For example, systems which try to introduce shared ad revenue in the user-contributed-video context may alienate existing users who were motivated by other factors. You try to match love with money and some folks end up not wanting the money and no longer wanting to work for love.

Benkler closed with some of the political impacts of social production – ways in which social production is changing the political reality of people all over the world and ways in which industries, governments, and corporations threatened by social production have tried to push back – the DCMA, Trusted Systems, etc. (Unfortunately by this point he was trying to wrap up very quickly and I didn’t get a good list from his last few slides).

Because Benkler’s operating at a high level of abstraction – thinking about the impacts of peer production at a global and historical scale – it can be hard sometimes to connect his concepts to what companies are trying to do in the “Web 2.0″ space – but his elaborations should help us understand the real fundamental shifts underlying what otherwise might look like a “fad.”

Unfortunately, no such luck (cue the “No soup for you!” clip from Seinfeld):

Was the problem that I was running Firefox rather then Netscape (Netscape? Really?), or that I was running Linux?

I clicked through, to find:

My SHC Community currently supports the following operating systems and browsers:
Operating Systems:

• Windows 2000
• Windows XP
• Windows Vista

Browsers:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 5.0 and higher
• Netscape 7.0 and higher
• AOL 5.0 and higher
• Firefox 1.0 and higher

If your browser or operating system is not supported by My SHC Community, we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

In this day and age, no Mac support, no Linux support? Why?

Is there some elaborate MS Silverlight functionality in this community? Some kind of Adobe AIR based application to install?

I assume there’s just some overzealous javascript useragent detection at work here, but won’t know until I find time to boot up my Windows virtual machine and check it out on IE on Windows XP. (You can actually click around on the site, but I don’t see anyone to join the community without the right brower user-agent. I suppose it might be faster to just spoof my user-agent, I know I used to have a plugin for firefox which would make it pretend to be on Windows).

Then I’ll likely never go back. Welcome to community!

Two recent videos stood out as worth sharing. Both focus on creative visualization, and are inspiring in terms of how some relatively simply changes in visual display of information can have a tremendous impact.

The first is from TED Talks, and it’s Jonathan Harris talking about “The Web’s Secret Stories“:

You can view We Feel Fine and play with it yourself – but I’ll warn you it is ponderously slow on my Linux machine – much more engaging in Windows or Mac OS.

It’s also open – at least in the “here’s an API, go mash up something cool” sense. (Free as in beer and free as in API but not as in Free software – Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike).

I wish I could spend a week just playing with what this API makes available, maybe using Yahoo! pipes to connect feelings to news stories about locations?

The second is from OSCON, and it’s Ben Fry talking about Processing, a design and prototyping tool:

Click To Play

Processing is Open Source – GPL/LGPL – so you can not only try it out and see what goodness you can make, you can also contribute to its development.

I find it nearly impossible after watching these to go back to standard office docs – but I think that’s a good thing.

Andy Peatling at Blaze New Media posted about a recent project: Chickspeak, a social network for female college students.

In their words, it’s is “an organization for young women created to inspire big dreams, strong values and success in the world”:

Our website exists to be the most entertaining and engaging reflection of women’s life in college, while also providing the support and information necessary to stay healthy, grounded and achieve great heights while in school and well after graduation. We are your voice- your interests and passions, your unique journey and experiences. Updated daily articles are written by women currently in college and cover everything from health and beauty, to relationships, travel, entertainment and much more. We also feature guest writers and columnists who are recognized experts in their fields and who act as advisors to our members. Members can post comments on articles and build relationships with other members and the ChickSpeak Team through forums, personal blogs and private messaging. We are an evolving concept and welcome any woman who’s excited about this to get involved!

What’s most interesting about it for me (not being a femail college student) is how it was built – leveraging WordPress MU as the core, changing the theme to de-emphasize the “blog” functionality and bring member profiles front and center.

From Andy’s blog post:

To achieve the desired change it was down to making a new WordPress theme. The theme would have exactly the same look and feel as the core site – making it look like the new member home page was still part of the core site itself.

Within the theme, I removed the code that usually makes the blog posts front and center, and changed it to the code that outputs the users profile. The blog code was moved to the sidebar so it could still be accessed as the members “journal” feature.

Finally, the code to output the users new private messages was added to the sidebar, as well as some code to output polls, photos and other smaller bits and bobs.

The project also incorporates BBPress for forums / discussions, has links into myspace and flickr, and so on, as you might expect from a social network circa 2007. (The facebook app can’t be far behind, if they don’t have one already.)

Accompanying the beta site, they’ve launched a blog, Behind the Scenes at CNN.com, where they are encouraging discussion of the redesign.

It’s a great concept – specifically highlighting what the team is trying to accomplish in the redesign, and going beyond the constraints of carefully chosen focus groups under NDAs for a far more transparent and open forum.

Not all the comments will be terribly valuable, of course; the first comment on the first post says in its entirety: “It’s too white. Not enough color. print is too small. Make it more colorful like USA Today. com or MSNBC.com.”

But when all the comments are taken together, they will undoubtedly get insights and guidance from their most vocal constituents which will help guide their evolution, and which they would only have received too late (or not at all) under the old “design and build under a cloud of secrecy, then reveal only when it is all complete” approach.

They’re also explicitly working on what Dermot Waters characterizes as “being a good web citizen” by pointing to local news sources and blog posts which are outside CNN’s domain.

The idea, which sounds almost self-evident but isn’t always well understood by online media sites, is that:

. . . by being a good web citizen, we fulfill our core mission by doing whatever it takes to help you get the full story — even if it takes you away from CNN.com. If we do that well, we believe you’ll keep coming back.

It will be interesting to watch the site (and the discussion about its goals and their fulfillment) evolve.

(In the interest of full disclosure, Turner Broadcasting is an Optaros client – but that doesn’t influence what I’ve said above except that I’ve had a chance to meet some of the folks behind the effort and know that they get it and mean what they say.)

Although I am certainly happy to see Adobe moving in the direction of open source, it is good to more closely at the overall picture: what is being open sourced and what is not, which is exactly what Burnette does.

I guess it’s really just a question of “getting it” relative to others. The Flash player is still a closed platform, but at least it is available for Linux, unlike Silverlight.

</update>
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Adobe seems increasingly to “get it” when it comes to enabling the modern web application environment, leveraging the strengths of the Flash player on all those dekstops, and allowing enough openness for creativity to flourish.

The latest example of which is the announcement this morning that they have open sourced the Flex SDK – compiler, libraries, and all. (Everything but the Eclipse-based IDE, which remains under a commercial license).

In the following video from the PodTech network, Ely Greenfield and David Wadhwani discuss the announcement with Robert Scoble:

Related links:

• Adobe to Open Source Flex (Adobe Labs)
• Adobe to Open Source Flex (press release at Yahoo! Finance)
• Adobe to Open Source Flex (at John Newton’s Content Log)

or ?

Adobe wants you to believe that the name Apollo is a reference to the Apollo project, the series of NASA missions aimed at landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth, a goal set by JFK that’s the point of the Apollo icon, with it’s orbital circle.

But I’ve decided the codename “Apollo” (Kevin Lynch has said that there will be a real release name which is different) is a disguised swipe at Ajax.

Ajax, in Greek mythology, was not a god, but a human hero and King. Interestingly, in the Illiad, he is the only major warrior who receives no assistance from the gods, suggesting “the virtues of hard work and perseverance.”

Microsoft called their Ajax platform (now more prosaicly known as ASP.NET AJAX) Atlas – a Titan and brother to Prometheus who held heaven and earth on his shoulders as a punishment from Zeus for leading the Titans in a revolt against the gods.

(Side note: This is the same Atlas who retrieved the Golden Apples of the Hesperides for Hercules, who tricked Atlas into taking back up the burden of the world on his shoulders).

So why does Adobe choose Apollo? Well, the god Apollo unites art and reason, and is the god of beauty, the sun, music, light, truth – the ideal of beauty. Perhaps Apollo plays in both senses here – rather than holding up the earth (like Atlas) Adobe’s Apollo is taking us to the moon and back, and providing beauty. Ajax was merely human, Apollo divine. Atlas tried to usurp the gods and was punished; Apollo brought order, music, and poetry.

Perhaps it’s time for an open source web/desktop framework named after Dionysus? (See Apollonian and Dionysian)

p.s. The Microsoft codename for what is now called Windows Presentation Foundation was Avalon. Why does Avalon sound familiar? It’s a mythic island associated with King Arthur – where Excalibur was forged, and where Arthur’s body rests. It’s also, though, famous for its beautiful apples. Microsoft admitting to the inspiration for their focus on improved graphics capability?

Wright mixed together a demo of Spore  with some reflections on the intersections of interactive media (specifically game design) and film, in the spirit of SXSWi and SXSWf.

He basically described how films are organized around empathy, and create in essence a single causal thread out of all the potential possible causal threads. The director has in essence complete control – knowing in advance how the story ends, the film experience is a manipulative one designed to elicit the appropriate emotional pattern in the viewer. (In this way films are a bit like the classic novel – and just as more modern films learned to break those sequences so did more experimental fiction).

In gaming, on the other hand, the organizing principle is agency – I as the user get to control the causal chain. The problem is that the emotional path rises, but hits dead ends, as the player gets killed and has to restart a level, etc. Games try to create the illusion of unlimited possibility but in most cases there are a limited number of possible paths, and typically a number of different gates (like levels, or episodes).

He basically talked about we should be able to create a better experience than this “choose which door to enter” type approach which takes a fixed set of outcomes and tries to make them look like they are endless – this is really what all of his games have been about.

Then he showed SPORE, which blew everybody away. Taking an organism from a single cell all the way up to and beyond space travel and galactic exploration. With ability to edit creatures, landscapes, create building types. All of it apparently shared – so you might run into my “species” on your planets, etc.

Anyway, go listen to the podcast if you weren’t there.

The slides are available from his blog.

As a big fan of Venturi, Brown, and Izenour’s Learning from Las Vegas, I was worried at first that the presentation would be either:

• Just a cute title with no substance, by (worst case) someone who’d never even read the original but a blurb on what it was about, or
• Just a simple summary of Venturi et al with the notion that “we can learn from this as well”

Neither of these worries was well founded. Saffer clearly is familiar with Venturi’s work (and the historical / social / cultural context in which it appeared, which helps underline its meaning), and he did walk through examples of how to apply Venturi et al’s “lessons” but did so in a way that avoided oversimplifying interaction design or architecture.

Although the slides don’t really replicate the experience (a podcast should be forthcoming from SXSW) they’re still worth browsing through.

The session made me want to go reread Pierre Bourdieu on Distinction – and the connections between aesthetic taste and class.

Will “web 2.0″ and the architectures of participation lead to changes in what we consider “appropriate” design for web applications, as they are democratized?

Listen to the podcast audio of the session  and you’ll get most of what she’s talking about, though you’ll have to imagine the faces of frustration, anguish, and WTF that she used to illustrate those points.

There’s also some video available in quicktime (640×480) or  MPEG-4 (320×240) over at the Video Blog. (Haven’t looked yet to see if this is complete or just samples – I would assume samples).

She makes an excellent point – that application help is fundamentally not helping users, and that what we need sometimes is a WFT! button.

I’m not sure, though, how useful such a button could be. There’s an excercise in absurdity to be had in how far back you potentially go – what if the user isn’t even in the right application, and they are hitting your WTF button for someone else’s app?

Definitely we all want to focus on helping users not suck, and not feel like they can’t use applications we develop, but until computers start interpreting actual physical gestures, tone of voice, and facial expression (which one imagines is only a matter of time, albeit perhaps a long time), the WTF! button seems like just another hack which might marginally improve things.

Perhaps the real, and most powerful message, is just to check the assumptions about help copy, FAQs, and the like. They assume way too much familiarity with terminology used by the system, get too co-opted by marketing as an opportunity to sell, and very rarely provide any meaningful assistance to the user in the process of using the app.

Writing “help” content like real human beings – the way we’d actually say it to someone sitting across the table – rather than in some bizarre, depersonalized, corporate speak – would go a long way toward making help more user-friendly.

There’s going to be coding contest, and the prize (thanks to Philip Greenspun) will be helicopter rides via Boston Helicopter Tours.

Print out the poster and put it up at your place of employ: BarCamp Boston 2 Flyer

Her presentation at the Public Media 2007 / Integrated Media conference this morning – “Why Content Must Suck” managed to draw a full crowd, despite being at 8am.

The concept, once you get passed the deliberately provocative title, is that rather than pushing users around, or forcing them through content in which they are disinterested, your content ought to pull users in, by virtue of its interestingness and applicability to their concerns.

(How many times have you heard discussion of making sites sticky, or driving traffic to a given page, or pushing users toward specific content?)

Creating content that sucks means focusing on satisfying user needs first, and then building the platform in such a way that it allows users to find the content which will satisfy their needs.

Perfetti also talked about the scent of information – the notion that well designed sites give off a scent which suggests to users that they content they seek is nearby. Sites that are poorly designed are scentless – they give no suggestion to the users about where their content might be found.

A few of the insights she shared:

• Search is scentless. Even users who consider themselves “search dominant” actually scan the page first looking for clues or scents – and fall back to search only when they find none. (The exception is places like Amazon, where what you are looking for (a book title, for example) is likely to result in a narrow set of focused results that would be hard to get to any other way – navigating down through categories would take a long time if you know precisely what you are after).
• Sitemaps are the refuge of the scentless. If users are hitting your sitemap a lot, that is a sign that something is fundamentally wrong with your design. (Why don’t more sites blow up their home page and replace it with the sitemap?)
• “Cute Links” block scent. Just because you spent marketing dollars to come up with a “unique” name for a content category doesn’t mean users have that name as a trigger word for their scent trail. In fact, the more unique it is the more opaque it is likely to be to your users.
• Longer links give more scent. In UIE’s research, 7-12 words is the optimum link length. 1-2 words doesn’t give enough context to give high degrees of confidence that the target will contain the content sought. (Those 1-2 word tier one navigation categories will always lead to further categories – they are too broad to be full of scent).
• Perceived download speed is what matters – not actual download speed. Perceived download speed is very dependent on how easily users find what they need. (The more cruft you put between users and their goals the more slowly they will perceive your site as loading).

Throughout her presentation I was struck by the recurring theme of providing interesting content and then connecting users to it: be interesting, and get out of the way.

True “stickyness” comes from meeting user needs. If you start from the point of view of trying to force users into being interested in something they don’t want, you will fail.

The distinction between closed approaches and open approaches is clearly demonstrated by an article in Fast Company about the Los Angeles public transit system, and the recent announcement by Architecture for Humanity, a “charitable organization founded in 1999 to promote architectural and design solutions to global, social and humanitarian crises,” that they will be launching the Open Architecture Network.

[The Network] will be a gathering place for community designers and all those interested in improving the built environment. Here designers of all persuasions can post their projects, browse projects posted by others, comment and review projects, discuss relevant topics, contribute to shared resources, collaborate with each other and access project management tools to support their work.

We imagine a site that not only helps create, support and implement ideas, but also a place that fosters sustainable, replicable, adaptable and scalable design solutions. The network has a simple mission: to generate design opportunities that will improve living standards for all.

The network will open March 8th 2007 – I look forward to seeing it and wish them success

The Fact Company article, “L.A. Goes Public,” is a lauditory piece about the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transite Authority and their “countywide campaign . . . to shift public perception” through design:

Now working closely with manufacturers, Metro has pushed for the same extreme customization at all consumer touch points, creating a shiny new identity completely unique to Los Angeles. Metro’s creative director, Michael Lejeune, says the transformation was necessary, but not just to get Angelenos out of their BMWs. “Our goal is to employ design to attract discretionary riders–those who have a choice–by giving Metro a distinct style,” he says. “At the same time, we’re giving those who are transit-dependent–those who don’t have a choice–a system they can be proud of.”

You should check out the full article, with photos – it is a great example of how design and marketing can have an impact and improve environmental conditions rather than just contribute to more consumption.

The part which gives me pause, though, is in the captions to several of the photos (and the ones I’m pointing to here are not in the online version). First, there’s a caption on a photo of a set of bicycle lockers:

Metro’s designers collaborated with manufacturers to create bays of private bike lockers for commuters. The design was so successful that the firm wanted to offer it to other transit companies. Metro said no, keep it unique to Los Angeles.

Another caption at the bottom of the same page describes the machines which sell Metro tickets:

To avoid a generic “off the shelf” feel, Metro designers customized the ticket machines, even using the systemwide typefaces Scala and Din. Again, the manufacturers wanted to market the design elsewhere–and were denied.

Metro said no?

Deliberately witholding from other markets – which don’t, in any normal sense of the word, compete with Metro – a design innovation which might encourage a broader set of people to use public transit? I’m all for using design to differentiate, but to prevent sharing of innovation (on a publicly funded project nonetheless) seems borderline criminal.

Now, it’s entirely possible that the only “design” covered in both cases is the look & feel – typefaces, colors, icons. But what would the harm be in allowing other transit companies to leverage the fundamental design, perhaps with some caveats about required changes?

I can understand the need to prohibit look & feel copying in competitive markets – Apple’s desire to protect the iPod, designers’ needs to limit the impact of knock-offs, etc. But in an arena in which the other players are more accurately seen as colleagues attempting to improve transit in other markets (with geographically distinct coverage areas) why be closed by design?