Jared Spool of UIE.com has written an interesting article on how designers might cope with the problem of grounding.

“Next time you have a chance to watch someone reading a map, look for the first thing they do. They’ll likely do the exact same thing everyone else does: find themselves on the map. It doesn’t matter what kind of map it is, whether it’s of their neighborhood or an amusement park. They’ll open the map and find something that is personally meaningful, such as their house or their favorite roller coaster. Psychologists call this ‘grounding’ - the natural behavior of initially finding a known reference point in a foreign information space. Once the person has grounded themselves, they can then use the starting point to understand the rest of the space. While grounding helps people adjust to complex situations, it can be detrimental when it happens during the design process. If, while conjuring up an interface, designers ground themselves in the design, they run the serious risk of creating an interface that only they can use.”

The designers he talks about use personas to roleplay and storyboard other people’s possible interactions with interfaces. I guess there’s more to apply this to than just interface designs. System designs, ontology/taxonomy designs, anything where you’re design has to incorporate someone else’s thought processes. Or mental maps.

Just over a month ago, Clay Shirky wrote a piece called “Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software“. And it’s been given plaudits galore. But - ahem, polite cough - I think it’s a) wrong, and b) steering into very dangerous territory. The focus on group and the eradication of flame wars is a surefire way to kitsch thinking and fluff wars.

Clay’s Argument
Hopefully, this doesn’t oversimplify things, but Clay’s argument seems to run as follows:

• “Much of the current literature and practice of software design … targets the individual user, functioning in isolation.”
• This assumes the user treats computer is a box “while our actual behavior is closer to computer-as-door, treating the device as an entrance to a social space.”.
• Users’ behaviours in these social spaces, though, are complex, more so than “human/computer interaction, and that unpredictability defeats classic user-centric design”. Social roles (such as process Nazi or peacemaker) and social actions (such as social climbing or arguing) highlight the design gap.
• A way to bridge this design gap is to accept that “the user of a piece of social software is not just a collection of individuals, but a group”

Then we have a phase-shift, and the focus turns to flaming.
read on »

December 16th 2004 | Comments(2) | Thoughts on collecting, moderators, originality, policy, relationships software

Madame Tussaud’s, esteemed waxwork maker to the Her Royal Betsy, recently unveiled their Christmas 2004 nativity scene. The cast was as follows:

Joseph - David Beckham
Mary - The Virgin Posh
The Three Wise Men - George “Gold” Bush, Tony “Frankincense” Blair, and Prince “Myrrh” Philip
Shepherds - Samuel L Jackson, Hugh Grant, and Graham Norton
Angel - Kylie Minogue

Anyway, as the BBC reported, some blighter punched Joseph in the face, the Catholic Church took offence, and the exhibit was closed. But the whole thing was more than some publicity gimmick, or misguided Tussaud stunt.

“The celebrities were voted into the roles by 300 people who visited the attraction in October. “

Who were they, and why were they there?
read on »

December 15th 2004 | Comments(1) | Asides on celebrity, Christmas, MadameTussauds religion

I always have a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking.

- Dorothy L Sayers, Have His Carcase, 1932

Oh the irony …

Just a quick thought - wondering how different the grid thinking idea (brain cycles rather than CPU cycles) is to open source.

Over at scale|free, Anu is having a healthy reaction to fluffy bunnys, bloggy goodness and non-quant analysis.

“I think measurement is essential, otherwise all you’ve got is a warm fuzzy story that may actually be completely incorrect. It’s a little like the “New Economy” of the dot.com era, where profits didn’t matter as long as you had a good story to tell. Bzzzzzt. Didn’t work that time, and won’t work this time either.

The question really is what do you measure, and how do you measure it.”

Now, this may not seem relevant at first sight, but bear with me … Yesterday, I was having a chat with a colleague about warehouse staff and logistics, specifically for the retail industry, and the different styles different companies had. What I learnt was is this:

• Those that invest heavily in technology don’t necessarily do particularly well in terms of efficiency
• The best performer is extremely professional in its role allocations: regimented, tightly managed and OK technologically. It does, though, suffer from warehouse staff not turning up
• The second best performer is less professional, but makes up the ground with an abnormally high employee turnup. It manages to do this by focusing on employee engagement

[Let me double check to see if I can say the names and then if yes I’ll fill them in]

Anyway, back to Anu’s point, one metric which is suitably quant but managed through non-quant means is employee engagement. From the above, there is a very basic productivity boost achievable simply by getting people engaged, and I see no reason why this shouldn’t apply to more typical knowledge worker environments.

And as to its measurability, take a look at an article by Steve Crabtree of Gallup. It’s called Getting Personal in the Workplace
Are negative relationships squelching productivity in your company?. Gallup have developed 12 questions that help them assess employee’s levels of engagements.

# Do you know what is expected of you at work?
# Do you have the materials and equipment you need to do your work right?
# At work, do you have the opportunity to do what you do best every day?
# In the last seven days, have you received recognition or praise for doing good work?
# Does your supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about you as a person?
# Is there someone at work who encourages your development?
# At work, do your opinions seem to count?
# Does the mission/purpose of your company make you feel your job is important?
# Are your associates (fellow employees) committed to doing quality work?
# Do you have a best friend at work?
# In the last six months, has someone at work talked to you about your progress?
# In the last year, have you had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

[For more on this, there is another Gallup article called “Feedback for Real” by John Thackray.]If you can make a definite link between engagement and productivity (which I think you probably can) and a definite link between whatever brand of bloggy goodness you’re trying to implement and engagement, then you may well be there in terms of, ahem, ROI.

December 08th 2004 | Comments(4) | Thoughts, Notes on business, engagement, measurement productivity

This is probably me just being daft, but does anyone know how cures propoagate through a network, if they do? There’s a lot of stuff relating information to diseases, viruses and the like, and there’s viral marketing etc. and it all sounds slightly sickly and unpleasant. Does all this apply to cures too?

My guess, based on nada, is that diseases propagate, but different cures emerge at different sections of the network. But, ahem, I do a feeling I’m being daft.

One tea, two sugars and a brain please.

A clever man once said you don’t really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother. Steve Cayzer of HP’s SemanticBlogging.org, understands it. And explains it in 6 pages that grandmothers might be able to understand.

Trust me Have a read of this - Semantic blogging and decentralized knowledge management

December 08th 2004 | Comments(2) | Asides, Notes on blogs, semantic web tools

Martin picks up on a nice comment by Paul Burdick of AES:

“The minute you systematize something, you suck the life out of it… nobody asks questions any more - questions such as ‘why is it done this way?’ ‘Has the world changed in the interim? ‘Can it be done better now?’”

Martin goes on to suggest that

“KM lies in the human practice. It is about finding good ways of doing things. Quality lies in the organizational process. It is about deploying good ways of doing things.”

…and that KM and Quality as a result don’t get along too well.

It reminds me of something various of us talked about briefly at the Personal Knowledge Management Workshop in November, namely that if PKM is personal, then does it make sense to have best practices for it when they are innately impersonal?

There’s a big either-or, law of the excluded middle fallacy floating around in all of this, I think. To use Martin’s terms, I don’t understand how either human or organisational approaches can be sufficient on their own. Deploying rubbish seems to be as half-cocked an approach as finding gold nuggets but not being able to do anything with them.

The excluded middle in all of this I guess is balance. How to foster the finding and the deployment, i.e. balancing the skills of the individual (creativity) with the skills of the organisation (efficiency).

Martin highlights the example of Toyota as a company that seem to have found a balance [from John Seely Brown’s talk at this year’s KM Europe]. Surprise surprise, their production line looks like a ballet: creative, efficient and balanced.

Graceful, even without the tights

The ever-interesting Lee Bryant has found this gem from Yoz Grahame.

Popular Power - the late lamented startup that wanted to sell spare cycles of desktop computers to computationally-hungry customers - was aiming at the wrong resource. Distributed CPU cycles are worthless unless you’re SETI or Pixar. Distributed brain cycles… now that’s a much more intriguing proposition.”

To which Lee comments:

“Distributed brain cycles - imagine the human equivalent of the massive zombie bot nets used by some virus writers - it all sounds like a truly distopian vision (a la Matrix), but maybe we can imagine some positive examples of how this could be used for good. We have always been intrigued by the idea of the circuit riders concept for tech support to non-profits. Could we envisage, for example, the work of a charity being put onto a massive online issue management system that pushed tasks out to specialists (legal, technical, logistics) to be solved during downtime or coffee breaks?”

So, in the diagram below, if the central cluster is the non-profit, solutions might be render-farmed by individuals both the non-profit and in other clusters (the pink dots).

Pretty brilliant if you ask me. What’s nice about grid thinking is that it puts a problem solving focus on many of the things floating around: lazyweb, blogs, SNA, wikis, etc. It got me wondering what sort of building blocks you might need for such a service.

The 4 bits that grid architectures tend to deal with are:

1. Resource management
2. Information Services
3. Security Services
4. Data Movement and Management

[Source - Wikipedia]

… and they seem like a good place to start. One potential hiccup though is that silicon is silicon is silicon, while lawyers aren’t programmers aren’t logistics experts (at least not always), so there’d probably have to be some sort of peer review feature. Anyway, worth some more thought I think.

December 06th 2004 | Comments(4) | Notes on Brains, grid, groups thinking