On January 18, 2012, from 11AM to 4PM, I’m hosting the Washington DC jellyweek 2012 event at TRYST in Adams Morgan.

Jellyweek is a self-organized global gathering, with hundreds of events happening all over the world. The idea is to get together, get some work done, and raise awareness about the global coworking movement. The event will be casual and informal. Just bring your laptop and work. I’m hoping local DC coworking and hackerspace folks will come represent and let us know about all of the options in the metro DC area. Adam Zuckerman already has a great list going, via Foster.ly.

Coworking, libraries, telecentres, hackerspaces, etc. — they’re all innovation grounds, and part of the ongoing movement to create spaces where folks can gather, make connections, create, and innovate. Even The Economist is taking notes.

Join me — or let your DC folks know. In a flurry of excitement, I made awesome jellyweek computer stickers so that we can recognize each other at — and after — the event.

Tweet about it… #jellyweek #jellydc

I often meet resistance when I try to apply one of ET’s recommendations. (But why sidenotes, Christine? We always use footnotes. And why did you take the legend off of my chart?!) I want to do things better. I do. But how? ET complains about software, but at work most of us don’t get to choose the applications we use. What does ET use? What are the alternatives? And what do we tell our clients or colleagues when they demand more PowerPoint and chartjunk?

As I was reviewing my notes (posted below) I overheard two State Department employees discussing this issue. They were frustrated. They complained that they have no access to the tools to they need to produce the good visualizations. One of them looked at ET’s sparklines handout and said: “Great. I want to do this. But how? I only have Word and I can’t download anything else. I want a workshop showing me how to do this.”

Also it’s funny — and sad — to note that, with the exception of Development Seed Rockstar Eric Gundersen’s maps — most presenters’ visualizations had legends and lots and lots of administrative junk. Sigh…

The notes follow now. Live blogging. So messy. [Mixed in some of my comments.]

Sitting in front row, 10ft away from ET. Wow :)

[Intro really similar to the first ET talk I went to in 1999. Yes yes we know PPT sucks. Comparing sports page to average slide. Got it. But try telling your colleagues this. Can’t bitch every time: We need to pick our battles. They feel that they are expected to produce a PPT when they speak. Impossible to get them to give it up. It’s hard enough to convince them that they don’t need a frickin’ logo on each and every slide. A few here and there are switching to Prezi. But no one — no one — gets up and just speaks.]

ET: Go look at major scientific journals (Science, Nature). Go look at what really smart people who are well resourced and are given no space produce (as in space on the page). They are limited to one page when the time comes to show show off.

Technical reports. Big leagues: NYT, Google News. This should be the metaphor. People who do reporting. Use sentences, paragraphs. [Tufte HATES bullet points.]

We find design metaphors — and find out what we can get away with — by looking at successes. ESPN, NYT, etc. Not what folks learn about UI, which is driven by cognitive psychology experiments where they were testing information recall. (Major finding in most-cited paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information” led to the mantra that you should show only seven things. Read Tufte post on this.) But task of user is not short-term memory — it’s finding something they want to read. The NYT puts out 400 stories and relies on the power of the human eye-brain system. And we are able to choose. It works. NYT is “successful in the wild.” No user testing or focus groups or anything like that. This is also Apple’s strategy of design: “We don’t do focus groups.” Consumer research? Jobs: “The job of the customer is not to design the product.” This promotes coherence of design. Focus Groups = Feature-itis.

[Agreed on this. I wonder, though, how this meets user-focused design? Do we throw participatory approaches out the window? I HATE design-by-committee more than anyone. That said, I want to be empathetic to people and their needs and better understand the ways they will use what I’ve been asked to create. That’s why I like Batya’s Envisioning Cards.]

Sparklines. They are part of the text. No separate box or figure or go-see-this-on-the-other-slide. They are an integrated word or number. Immediately contextualized with a vast amount of data. “Let’s see if we can measure up to the sports page.” Pure data: No legend, no manual about how to read it. Zero out the interface. Go straight to the data. Experience should be 100% content. iPhone is an example of this. Clear out the administrative debris (commands, etc.).

[ET now bitching about government websites and tech presentations. Again we get it. We know they often suck. But let’s focus on how to help make them better. Let’s start talking alternatives. Frustrating. There is a context. There is a system we work within. I fight against a series of expectations.]

Goal of Tufte’s work: Make people smarter. Assist reasoning and thinking about information and evidence. Focus on content and on the intellectual acts and activities that users perform on content. Trouble begins with the word “user”… Show comparisons. Show causality, mechanisms, analysis. This suggests a design process. Get content folks together and have them decide what they want to say. The process is always about the surface, not the tool. Supporting the intellectual processes of the users — this is where design starts and ends. About how you reason about content and how to make that quick and effective.

ET asked us to take a look at the Minard map. I didn’t. I have it memorized. Here you can look at it too. I’ve had it in my workspace for close to 15 years now.

• Fundamental intellectual act of thinking about numbers: Make smart comparisons.
• Understand causality. Intervention thinking at its core is causality thinking: mechanism, explanation.
• Show a muti-dimensional problem in 2D “flatland”
• Map shows six dimensions: size or army, location in latitude, location in longitude, direction, temperatures, dates attached to temperatures
• No administrative debris (legend)

When reasoning about causality we look at whatever it takes, our displays should do the same: completely integrate all modes of information. Be indifferent to the mode of production. It does not matter where you are showing what you’ve created. The cognitive/intellectual tasks are forever. UI segregates information by the mode of production. It forces you to go to special rooms (apps) to do different tasks: images, spreadsheet, text, etc. Bad. Users should have no knowledge about operating systems.

[So I’d really like to know which apps ET actually uses. Because seems to me he’s stuck, like the rest of us, switching back and forth between Illustrator and Photoshop and InDesign.]

Credibility. Reputation. Who did the work. Who printed it. Note data sources and difficulties. Idea here is to reduce quibbles over the data so that viewers focus on the message.

Threats to visualization and its credibility:

1. Distancing. On screen is representations of real things. Go to the field and see how the data are measured. So you need to be there. Show up. When you’re at the screen you’re not showing up.
2. One more excellent tool for cherry-picking information. This is the single biggest threat to learning the truth from any evidence. Is what they’re showing the product of information? Or is it the product of the selection of information? Warning signs: Too good to be true; real evidence always has issues. No access to underlying dataset (it’s proprietary, it’s secret, violates privacy, unpublished so we want to wait to release it, etc.). External review by unbiased external observer can fight this.

“Real” science versus social science. Real science can fall back on properties of the physical world. It has a gold standard. Social science much more difficult. Studying human behavior — often looking for associations in order to stop them. Focus on causing something appropriate to happen in the real world.

Best skill you can develop in face of enormous amount of data: Cultivating a sense of what is relevant. (See Washington Post video on this.) Be able to recognize excellence. Be able to look over a complicated problem and identify where you can/can’t intervene. Maintain focus. Identify leverage points worth pursuing. Causal links. Find people who have that. See what they do.

Once you have a point of view all history will back you up. [It’s even a game your mind will play on itself. Selective perception.] To fight against this try to come up with contrary interpretations, keep a list of all of the problems with your evidence. If you don’t you’re brain will just file data points that are consistent with your current point of view.

[This happens to in design. We’re reluctant to throw away a solution that we’ve invested time into. This is why rapid prototyping is important. Need to be able to throw things away the things we love in order to come up with good solutions.]

Wayan Vota (Moderator)
Joel Selanikio, Data Dyne
Oscar Salazar, Citivox
Matt Berg, Millennium Village
Prasanna Lal Das, World Bank.

No analysis here. Just stuff I wanted to remember.

Wayan: There is a huge cost to inputting data. Example of teacher overburdened by participating in research — having to document when students arrive, what they eat, how they performed, etc. — in addition to teaching. How do we get folks motivated and excited to input data on day two? Because it’s boring and there’s a huge incentive to fake the data.

Joel: In global health the data have is a subset of what we need. EpiSurveyor: Mobile data collection on a phone. When people want to collect data they will use whatever is easiest. We have motivated people who don’t have access to data-collection tools. We use the web to get it out as software. Now so many apps we use are online, no longer installed on our computer. But in international development we don’t use this approach as much. Why? EpiSurveyor is easy. People can download it and start using without our help.

Prasanna: At the World Bank we don’t have data gathering challenges. We work with data already collected. We want to get our data out there, we want people to use it (slice and dice!) and give us feedback.

Matt: Data is the incentive. Healthcare workers want to know. Data collection can’t be a burden. Can’t ask people to repeat data collection processes. Data must be actionable (people won’t report that the well is broken if they know it will never get fixed). Data has to be your own. Have to give the information back in a way that’s understandable and valuable to the community. This creates incentives to use systems.

Data input process has to be easier than paper — and should give something of value back.

Joel: Making something easier than paper is done. We can do it on mobile phones. Not difficult at all.

[Note: Not difficult with closed-ended questions with numerical responses. So depends on the research design.]

Multiple levels: I put in data. It gets analyzed. I review that analysis and add to it. I share my analysis with broader community, then they build on that, etc. Take, digest, bring to next level.

Joel: Affordable distance communications has revolutionized healthcare. Most stock outages are reported orally. We want to help engineer your process with structured information exchange.

Matt: Calling [voice] is great. But informatics comes into play when you’re talking about scale. Often just giving back information along with context of what is normal [so folks have something to compare their results to] improves outcomes.

Sadly, I can’t be there because I’m in Seattle (trying to work, but actually recovering…). But I’m really looking forward to hearing how it goes. Read more on the Artefatica website.

I spoke about our proposed approach to communications and knowledge sharing. You can read about that and download the presentation on the Global Impact Study website. It’s been tough to work out how to do open research — specifically how much to share about process and learning. (So yes my definition of open research includes working transparently, not just sharing findings, instruments, and datasets at the end.) Also it is anxiety-provoking to stop doing the work and write about doing the work. Like I’m doing now!

All of that by way of an excuse… I’m finally sharing this workshop report (download PDF, 4MB). It’s a personal account for those who were not able to attend. I’ve tried to give a sense of the flavor of the meeting and the range of topics and issues that came up. This is a large and complex project, presenting many challenges — from the methodological to the administrative. I did my best not to air dirty laundry, but also not to sanitize what I heard. I hope this document is useful for others as they work on similar projects or in similar domains.

IDRC is one of the funders of the Global Impact Study. When I worked there, I was lucky enough to get sent to training on Outcome Mapping. The training was led by Terry Smutylo. He pulled out his guitar and sang this song: the Output Outcome Downstream Impact Blues. (During a training at a GOVERNMENT development agency — think about that for a minute…) Listen and you’ll see why I think IDRC and Terry are the coolest coolest folks ever. See? They even put the song on their server! Ooops… looks like it’s been removed… good thing I took a screenshot so y’all believe me.

There’s also a powerpoint of the lyrics to Impact Blues.

Contribution, not attribution! After listening you’ll also understand why I find the naming of our study kinda ironic. Chalk one up to diverse opinions within organizations. Amen to that ;)

Of course social reporters can use add the #PCamp09 tag to their tweets, which are aggregated on front page of their website.

Great use of social media and attention to virtual participants: livestreaming video, twitter, skype. And of course great topic:

Democracy is a game in which we all make the rules. How do we make this serious game more inclusive, more fair, and more fun? Participation Camp will provide the spark for an explosion of sharing, experimentation, and collaboration around this question. Participants may attend a wide range of physical and virtual presentations (or deliver one themselves), compete in a conference-wide participation game, or roll up their sleeves in a hands-on workshop.

• 7:00-16:30 — What works? What sucked? Learning so far
• 22:00 -28:00 — Summary of Montreal events (+me ranting a bit, sorry video folks)
• 42:30-45:42 — Monthly meetings in Germany, how they get folks from design, theatre, medicine (this part was especially cool for me because Patrick is in Berlin this month and he spoke about Station C at the monthly OpenEverything meetup)

My takeaways:

• A mix of pre-planned and open sessions is best. Generates more interest. Start online with a wiki ahead of time so people can propose topics and sessions and you can start to see trends. Choose themes.
• Take the time to curate — to seed events with knowledgeable folks.
• Make sure you get diverse takes on “open” — reach out to those who don’t even know they need to be there and give them an opportunity to go onstage (example: give them a speed geek session).
• Three-day offsite retreat very hard. Would not repeat. One-day events best, capturing local energy important.
• Figure out the venue first.
• Don’t make it too long, scares folks off. Even if you start at 9AM most people will only show up at around 11AM.
• Take time to explain unconference practices. Put them online first. Take the best learning from BarCamp (see Crystal Williams, Ten Steps to Organizing a Barcamp).
• Need to develop a template for future organizers.
• Documentation (photo, video, blog) needs to be a job. Someone needs to own it. Commit to packaging the outcome afterward. (For ideas on this see Social Reporting.)
• WEAK: Post-event summaries and followup.
• BEST PRACTICE: Only video the speed geeks and the report-out/synthesis pieces. That way you don’t need to edit; video can go directly online (this is what they did in Toronto).

We decided to explore holding OpenEverything in many cities worldwide on September 26, 2009. This way we build momentum and can support each other as we organize. If you want to help out with the Montreal event you can get on the MontrealOuvert mailing list, hosted by our dear friends at Koumbit.

Ushahidi (“testimony” in Swahili) is an experimental web platform that crowdsources crisis information. People can submit reports via text messaging using a mobile phone, email, or the web. Looks like it can be deployed (sorry, geek speak) for a specific crisis. It was most recently use to track events in Gaza and was also used in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Users can submit or track by category: riot, looting, sexual assault… (reads like humanity’s list of shame). The results are aggregated onto a map. They can also upload photos and post links to videos and news stories.

The project is free and open source, with developers from Kenya, Ghana, South Africa, Malawi, Netherlands, and the United States. If you’re a developer and would like to participate you can join here.

And on top of everything, the design of their site rocks ;)

Related: Blogging for Good Governance

1. Collaboratively create a first draft using a wiki. The city of Melbourne, one participant pointed out, uses a wiki for Future Melboure, the community of Melbourne’s long-term plan for the future direction of all aspects of city life. (Broader endeavor, but nice example.)
2. Use the tag “planqc” when writing or researching so we can aggregate. (I imagine we’ll have to figure out a way to aggregate and synthesize all of this tagged content. Stay tuned.)

My job was to go ask folks at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) for resources on this. I also asked Jennifer Bell, from VisibleGovernment. Jennifer suggested we look at

• The Obama campaign technology platform, especially the section on that deals with opening up government to citizens (section 2).
• The OpenGovData manifesto
• The Obama CTO priorities site — it uses a tool called UserVoice to collect opinions, build consensus, and track implementation (maybe a good model for our project)
• OMB Watch’s Moving Toward a 21st Century Right-to-Know Agenda: Recommendations to President-elect Obama and Congress

Jennifer also said the digital plan should include something about re-writing government software procurement laws to favour open-source solutions.

As for IDRC, so far I’ve received a list of websites and initiatives: Pan Asia Networking project websites, LIRNEAsia, LIRNE, DIRSI, ICANN, ORBICOM, ITU, LACNIC, ARIN, CANARIE. Too many! Where to start? If anyone knows the top five please let me know.

If you recall, we were talking about conversations and community.

A community has to have:
1. une memoire / a memory
2. des sujets communs / shared topics

I relate to the idea of a shared memory. I met a fellow Franco-Ontarian this summer and was surprised to hear from him the same stories and perceptions that I had passed down to me in my family. Things given to you and taken in without thought, like milk. (Lots of it, unfortunately, I define now as a victim mentality. Topic for another post.) We had a shared narrative of the past and a clear sense of “the issues” — immediately understood. But as to whether or not a community has to have these things. Well, I’ll have to think on that. Certainly it needs boundaries, even permeable ones. Isn’t that the task of a facilitator? To moderate and maintain the boundaries of a discussion so that together we can achieve something or get somewhere?

Then talk switched to the overload of conversation. And to whether or not we are just building ourselves bigger echo chambers. There’s a need to organize. For better filters to handle the overload. As the number of books became overwhelming we developed the dewey decimal system. What will it be now?

Mitch (I think) said the next big trend is that each blog is its own social network. There was agreement that people are less interested in “me” blogs and more interested in content that is about community. Beyond the self. Blogs are becoming magazines. (My vision for this blog was always that it would have a number of contributors writing about how to change the world. Damn! And I thought I was running with my own idea. But, once more, simply being carried along by a wave that is bigger than me.)

Then we went back to this idea of limiting, filtering, and defining communities. The best communities, someone said, limit the number of participants. They set rules or at least find a way to put in filters so that people with similar interests can find each other.

Sylvain mentioned that his kids are not at all in email. They go where their friends are: to msn, facebook.

Then my mind started wandering and I started thinking about serendipity. Wondering can you define it as openness to the unexpected, for what we’re were not looking for.

Ohhhh. There’s more. About Quebec’s Digital Plan. But Steve just called and we’re going out to supper now so I’m gonna have to tell you the rest later. Part 3 here we come!

Rules
1. When you first arrive start by listening
2. Write the topics that interest you on a sticky
3. If someone has already suggested the same topic put a heart on it [stickers were made available]
4. Enter into the conversation by following the flow

Non-Rules
1. We discuss ideas, not business
2. Everyone has the right to express their opinion and to disagree politely
3. The moderator is the prince, not the king
4. Follow the flow!

Warning: I have a spotty attention span. So what follows is a list of the shiny stuff.

We discussed the face-to-face versus online communication and communities. The points that stuck with me are what you’d expect.

Face-to-face

• so much more bandwidth
• million times richer
• get instant feedback via non-verbal cues, animal instincts
• silence means something
• synchronous: can move together faster
• can build a common territory quickly
• allows serendipity
• enriches subsequent online connections

Online

• can create communities not bounded by geography
• reduced inhibitions can facilitate self-expression and connecting with others
• easier then to follow up f2f
• negative side: always in your bubble of people who think like you
• online: packets with beginnings and endings

Mike: It’s all one community. No distinction between online and offline. Increasingly people have a foot in both.

Sylvain: Une augmentation qui nous diminue. Increased dependence on technology can diminish us. It may be that online does not augment does not augment each other. People are less with you when they’ve got their laptop open. Not totally focused.

Twitter as ambient intimacy. Later I was talking to Mitch that sometimes I feel badly about reading people’s tweets, like I’m stalking them. He mentioned that he wrote a post a while back where he called it “permission-based stalking”) see his recent post and the original post.

Mitch: Loss of serendipity. Not much of a conversation anymore. Each blog posts destroys the previous one and ends the prior conversation. Twitter is only PR. There’s just content and more content. Serendipity is important because allows you to find wonderful things you were not looking for. To expand your circle.

I disagreed with Mitch on loss of conversation and using comments as a metric. That’s only one way to tell. Conversations are the sharing and exchange of ideas and opinions, which can happen in many ways and over time. Just because I don’t leave a comment on your blog doesn’t mean that what you wrote did not touch me or that I won’t respond later. Also I may read something you wrote and then share or discuss it with someone else. It’s like trying to document the result of events. You can try but you’ll always miss a lot unless folks report back to you. Bringing people together matters and it’s critical and you’ll just never know if a year or ten later a connection made at the event you through resulted in wondrous change.

Stay tuned for Part 2…

I learned about the film on Véro’s blog a few weeks ago and really wanted to see it. Lately I’ve been thinking more and more about things open, creative commons, and remix (read/write) culture. So my Friday evening is off to a great start. Will let you know how it goes.

I first learned about Lunch from Angry Women, a book I bought in the early 1990s. In it, Vicky Vale and Andrea Juno (the editors), introduced me to Diamanda Galas, Avital Ronell, Annie Sprinkle, Sapphire, and Susie Bright, among others, who opened to me whole new world of ideas and expanded my sense of what is possible. The book included critiques of mainstream American culture and writing about women’s sexuality. Who we (can/cannot/decide to) have sex with, when, and how. The answers to these question define, in large part, the culture we live in. It’s one of my special books, and I should probably go back and read it, now that I’m older and have more to bring to it.

Lydia Lunch, photo by Bart D. Frescura

I had a hard time with watching her at first. I also thought it would be a lecture, but it was a performance combining spoken word, music, photography, and video. The texts often described violent and self-destructive behavior: drinking, drugs, offing lovers, burning oneself with cigarettes. Death and despair. And yeah, she’s angry. And loud. Think banshee. But as the performance went on I warmed up to her. She reflects our manytimes mad and violent world. Her screaming and defiance is appealing. Hopeful, even, in its enthusiasm and energy. I like her total refusal to give up or to give in. To keep fighting.