Making Ice Cream
(Photo by Rachel J)

This weekend, freshly jet-lagged by back-to-back trips to the UK and Switzerland, with a brief stop in between for BarCampBoston 4, I attended the Northeast User Group Leader Summit, sponsored (thanks!) by O’Reilly Media and Microsoft. (Although I don’t technically lead a user group, I play host to BostonPHP at Optaros, volunteer for BarCampBoston, and participate in Boston’s Drupal and WordPress groups, as well as North Shore Web Geeks up in Newburyport.

The event, hosted in the new Microsoft NERD facility, brought together user group leaders from across the technology spectrum, and from New York to Maine. (See a shortlist of user groups represented in the wiki).

Sessions Board (Photo by Rachel J)

It was simultaneously frustrating and reassuring to see that the core issues are so similar across user groups:

• Attracting and retaining members, speakers, volunteers
• Dealing with financing, venues, sponsors
• Keeping members and organizers motivated, active
• Making meetings useful, interesting to a broad audience
• Balancing newbies with ‘experts’

Reassuring because it shows that these problems are well understood – frustrating because no simple easy solutions will make them go away.

Ingredients we used for instant ice cream (my photo)

A few of the interesting sessions I attended, with links to notes which are all accessible from the event’s wiki:

• Care and Feeding of a Large Group / Large Event Financing – a combined session, for which I was the scribe, led by Shimon Rura from BarCampBoston and Darius Kazemi of Boston Post-Mortem
• Managing Event Overload – a more casual session, which the two of us attending turned by popular vote mostly into a discussion about NewB Camp, taking advantage of the time with Sara Streeter, who organized this session and also NewBCamp.
• Moving past the presentation – a very interesting session about the other ways one can manage a user group meeting, beyond just the traditional “talking head” format most folks are familiar with.

In addition to the formal sessions, Jeff Potter delighted all to a reprise of his food hacking demo from FooEast and BarCampBoston 4, making instant ice-cream using liquid nitrogen. This time, I participated, with a group of fellow vegans (and one ‘fellow traveller’).

Making Ice Cream with Liquid Nitrogen (Photo by Rachel J)

(Note for future food hackers: soy milk, at least the Light Vanilla variety we used, required a bit more liquid nitrogen and a bit longer to ‘set up’ – lower volume of liquid in the mixing bowl, longer time to mix in. At first it all just foamed up and spilled over the bowl, but thanks to a patient chef we were able to enjoy banana-coconut-rum soy ice ice cream custom made in a microbatch).

Ultimately, of course, what really makes any community successful is the people. While the problems of open source and commercial software user groups can vary a bit (I heard several Microsoft technology user group folks talk of having too many sponsors and too much schwag from companies to give away – a problem I’ve not seen in any open source based user group) they share an essential component, which is competition for people’s attention. The key to breaking through the noise and consistently getting their attention? Good, relevant content, consistency (of venue, time, and quality), and true community.

(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.

Last night was the third Ignite Boston, at Tommy Doyle’s in Harvard Square. Ignite is an O’Reilly Media sponsored series of events in various cities around the US. Lots of O’Reilly authors, editors, and various Friends Of O’Reilly gather to talk about tech stuff and generally geek out.

Highlights of the evening (for me):

• Juhan Sonin on Interface Design Tenets – looking to create a Strunk & White equivalent pocket reference for interface/interaction designers. (There’s a wiki just getting started)
• Benjamin Mako Hill talking about Selectricity, a free and open source framework for managing elections / polls etc. Also can be used freely as a hosted offering.
• Craig Freifeld talking about Health Map, which is a visual mashup of emerging disease reports – a sort of crowdsourced (though they use mainstream news reports) epidemic tracker.
• Jesse Vincent‘s Web 2.0 is Sharecropping, a quasi-rant about the limitations inherent in not owning your own tools.
• Lucy Mendel talking about Buy It Like You Mean It, which is a non-profit organization aimed at bringing rich information to consumers at the point of purchase about the social impacts of the products they are considering: environmental concerns, labor relationships, etc. They’re starting with the chocolate industry and she mentioned their impending launch party at Taza Chocolate in Somerville next Tuesday.

There were lots of lightning talks – so not being on my highlights list doesn’t mean the others weren’t good, just that they didn’t resonate with me as much.

Lowlights: The “keynote” speakers were excepted from the 5 minute lightning talk rule. I think that’s a mistake – not that what they had to say wasn’t valuable, but both were just too long for the crowd and the environment. Standing in a hot, crowded pub is not conducive to listening to a lengthy talk on a subject which may or may not even be relevant to you.

Also, unfortunately, Fish Fishman’s planned “5 minute mixed reality magic routine using Second Life and the Ignite audience” didn’t materialize. Always difficult to do any kind of live demo requiring connectivity in an unpredictable environment – I was looking forward to that one, if only for the “I’ve not seen that before” aspect.

Thanks are due to Microsoft for the free (as in beer) beer, though I don’t know that one-drink-ticket-per-pre-registered-attendee is exactly what I was expecting from such a large sponsor. I thought the open bars of the bubble-era Internet were back, but I guess folks are being more cautious this time around. O’Reilly also raffled off tons of books, through out shirts, and the like.

Looking forward to more Ignite events in Boston down the road.

The situation is really that the libraries are beginning to recognize the tradeoff Google offers in scanning:

Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.

Libraries that agree to work with Google must agree to a set of terms, which include making the material unavailable to other commercial search services. Microsoft places a similar restriction on the books it converts to electronic form. The Open Content Alliance, by contrast, is making the material available to any search service.

So Google doesn’t charge for scanning the books, which is a huge benefit to libraries (who are not exactly known as the land where money runs free), but in exchange imposes restrictions on what libraries can do with the resulting digital assets.

The Open Content Alliance (founded by Brewster Kahle of Internet Archive fame), on the other hand, charges a fee for digitizing (though that can be supported by grants) but makes the content available to all. (See the principles outlined in their call for participation).

On a serendipitously related note, there’s a Webinar / Live event at the Berkman Center today with Aaron Swartz, who is the tech lead for the Open Library project.

Berkman events are webcast, have an associated IRC channel, can be attended in Second Life, and are archived at Media Berkman, in case (like me) you can’t get to Harvard Square today.