Tue, Aug 30, 2005
A New Record #
This post marks a new monthly record for blog posts: 21, and I haven't even finished posting my WikiMania and BAR Camp notes. My active August is consistent with my normal blogging pattern. I think much of it has to do with my travel schedule, which typically takes me on the road from April through July and which gives me much fodder to blog. (JQ0)
/personal | Posted at 7:42am
Fri, Aug 26, 2005
Extreme Usability Redux #
Another great FLOSS Usability Sprint is in the books. As usual, great people make for great gatherings, and this event was no exception. But we did have a new goal for this event, and it resulted in some different outcomes, many of which were related to this new notion of ExtremeUsability. (JOS)
I have three overarching goals with all of these sprints: (JOT)
- Improve the usability of the participating projects. (JOU)
- Build greater SharedUnderstanding between the usability and OpenSource communities. (JOV)
- Catalyze community collaboration. (JOW)
Additionally, as an organizer, you also want to "hit a home run," as JeffShults likes to say. You want people to walk away feeling wonderful about themselves and about the group at large. As with baseball, you're not going to hit a home run with every event, but you're constantly hoping for it. (JOX)
I think we hit a triple with our first sprint. We had great camaraderie and positive energy, everyone learned tons, and all of the participating projects made tangible progress. In fact, in the past few weeks, I learned that we made even greater progress with "catalyzing community collaboration" than even I had realized. KieranLal, JanMuehlig, and RashmiSinha have all been developing tools for remote usability testing, a critical prerequisite for OpenSource usability, where projects are usually distributed. (Our next sprint will most likely be a Remote Usability Sprint, tentatively scheduled for late Fall.) MimiYin's experiences at the first sprint helped form the seed for her most recent thinking for Chandler. Mimi's informal discussions with DaveGreenberg at the first sprint influenced the most recent release of CiviCRM, and they worked together more closely this week. Most importantly, the many report-backs generated buzz in the community and helped bring in new talent, like TonyChang and JingWu. There was also room to improve, though, and we incorporated some of that learning into this past sprint. All in all, people walked away feeling good. (JOY)
This week's sprint felt like a double. Once again, our projects made progress, people were buzzing and learning, and I think people had fun overall. Nevertheless, there was a cloud hanging over everybody's head, one that made folks a bit more uncomfortable and the process as a whole more challenging. The cloud was the result of a special goal for this particular event -- defining ExtremeUsability. (JOZ)
An Aside on Event Design (JP0)
We did not define ExtremeUsability prior to the event, largely because none of us knew exactly what it was. I had opinions, based on feedback from the first sprint and my own personal experiences, but I didn't want to dictate the design of the event based on my own biases. One reason for this stemmed from my growing faith in the power of collective wisdom. Another reason was that I didn't want people worrying too much about whether they were "doing it right." My main concern was for the projects to get better. (JP1)
Gathering a large group of folks with diverse backgrounds isn't the most efficient way to develop a methodology. The vast majority of developers knew very little about usability, and only a handful had ever practiced ExtremeProgramming. We had 25 people attend, including users. In contrast, two people -- KentBeck and WardCunningham -- co-conceived ExtremeProgramming, and they had many years of software development experience between them. (JP2)
The other complication, which we downplayed, was that this was not simply an experiment in software development methodology. It was an experiment in OpenSource software development methodology, which introduced its own constraints. ExtremeProgramming isn't rampant in the OpenSource community, primarily because its tenets are difficult to practice in this environment. Who is the customer? How do you pair program? What does a 40-hour work week mean, when you're writing code on the side? (JP3)
Given all of these factors, it seems unrealistic to have expected our participants to have contributed consciously to the creation of a new methodology. Why, then, did we try? Why this format? (JP4)
My framing of ExtremeUsability to the participants provides some insight as to why we chose this event format: (JP5)
- AgileProgramming is an acknowledgement that software development is a collaborative process, and collaboration is hard. Agile methodologies offer a framework for alleviating these difficulties. Iteration and validation, for example, is a way to build SharedUnderstanding. (JP6)
- Methodologies like ExtremeProgramming lack an explicit role for usability practitioners. ExtremeProgramming provides rudimentary methods for developers to collaborate directly with customers, emphasizing "soft" forms of communication rather than requiring rigorous structure. UserCenteredDesign, on the other hand, incorporates into the process a usability specialist who has a range of methods for understanding user behavior. (JP7)
- The theory behind ExtremeUsability is that usability practitioners should be co-collaborators with programmers for the entire lifecycle of the development process. (JP8)
- The biggest roadblocks for developers in this process would be to open up their minds, willingly and sincerely embracing the usability practitioners as codesigners, and accepting the possibility that their assumptions about the users and the design might be wrong. (JP9)
The challenge is developing the framework in which usability practitioners and developers collaborate. This sprint was a laboratory in which we could experiment with this framework. (JPA)
Rather than impose a more rigid process up-front, I wanted to test a general premise about collaboration: Eliminating barriers is generally more empowering than problematic. PairProgramming is a perfect example of this. A lot of programmers (and managers) react negatively to PairProgramming the first time they hear about it, because they assume that programmers need to be isolated to work effectively, and that they will be unable to collaborate effectively without this separate space. Experience has raised serious doubts about that assumption. We see a similar phenomenon with Wikis. Most people still assume that we have to impose structure and authority or our information spaces will devolve into chaos. Wikis obviously challenge this premise. (JPB)
I wanted to watch how developers would work with usability practitioners with no preimposed constraints, hoping that our collective observations and experiences would result in a more useful framework than I could have come up with on my own. (JPC)
The event was successful in this regard, but it came at a cost. We placed a heavy burden on our participants by making this goal collective and explicit. It's hard, even debilitating, to be self-reflexive about process while you're working. This was most evident on our second day. Frustration was palpable among our participants, as they struggled to both work on their projects and think about process. That everybody stayed positive and productive was a testament to everybody's great attitudes, and for that I am grateful. (JPD)
What Is ExtremeUsability? (JPE)
The conclusion among most of our participants, in the end, was that what most of us practiced was not ExtremeUsability. I concur. Nevertheless, it offered some clues as to what ExtremeUsability might be. (JPF)
It may be a misnomer, for one. RashmiSinha suggested that what we were aiming for was actually "Collaborative Usability." I would go further and say that it was "Extreme Design," centering attention on the design rather than the overall development methodology. (JPG)
Other thoughts: (JPH)
- "Customers" are not "users." Once a customer becomes a codesigner, he or she loses value as a user, because he or she becomes subject to major bias from the design process itself. We attempted to include "users" as codesigners, which was wrong. You're either one or the other (and it's okay for a "customer" to be a codesigner), but you can't be both. (JPI)
- Pairing is good. We required each project to bring two developers, and we assigned two usability specialists to each projects. However, we did not mandate pairing, and there were also other people working with each project. By the middle of the second day, each of the projects had figured this out on their own. If we do a second ExtremeUsability sprint, pairing will play a central role in the process. (JPJ)
- ExtremeUsability is not about taking shortcuts. Sprints are. The two should not be conflated. Many participants from our first sprint said that their biggest takeaway was that informal usability was valuable. You don't need to have a high-overhead (i.e. expensive) usability process to develop usable software. I think this week's sprint reinforced that. At the same time, I think it's important not to conflate the sprint format with ExtremeUsability. (JPK)
Usability-Driven Projects (JPL)
We intentionally chose early stage OpenSource projects to participate in this sprint, but in doing so, we were still propagating what seems to be a given with all OpenSource projects: they are started by developers. That naturally tips the power balance towards developers. I would love to do a sprint where the roles were reversed. Usability practitioners could bring project ideas -- perhaps with wireframes or workflows -- and developers would come to help with the design and implementation. (JPM)
In a similar vein, MimiYin had a great idea. There should be an "inverted Sourceforge," a place where usability practitioners -- not developers -- could start OpenSource projects. (JPN)
/blueoxen | Posted at 4:02pm
Thu, Aug 25, 2005
Drive On #
Most folks know RichardGabriel for his WorseIsBetter essays, his work with PatternLanguages, and his involvement with the HillsideGroup, among many other things. I know him as an invaluable and exceptionally generous sounding board for my crazy ideas over the past three years. (JOQ)
Now there's an opportunity to know Richard for one of his greatest passions: poetry. Drive On, a book of lyrical poetry, is now available. (JOR)
/personal | Posted at 4:03pm
Fri, Aug 19, 2005
Extreme Usability #
In preparation for next week's sprint, I've added some thoughts on what ExtremeUsability is. Of interest to many people will be the link to an interview between KentBeck and AlanCooper on whether UserCenteredDesign and ExtremeProgramming can coexist. (JOJ)
/tech/programming | Posted at 8:14am
Thu, Aug 18, 2005
Collaborative Tools Grid #
I spoke at IDRC last June, helping AllenGunn with a workshop on facilitation and giving what's becoming a stock talk on patterns and CollaborativeTools. For those of you who haven't seen me give the talk or heard me run my mouth in person, the fundamental premise is simple: The best way to think about, evaluate, and talk about CollaborativeTools is to understand the patterns they facilitate. (JOF)
The old ways don't work. Feature lists mean very little to the average user. The traditional matrix of asynchronous versus synchronous is also of limited value, because most tools fall under more than one category. (JOG)
GrahamTodd? has put together a very nice decision-making grid to help decide what tools to use for different circumstances. It's fairly general and by no means comprehensive, but it's still useful, and it's in the spirit of how we should start thinking about CollaborativeTools. Context is king. (JOH)
/collaboration/tools | Posted at 7:29pm
Wed, Aug 17, 2005
BAR Camp this Weekend #
ChrisMessina and others are organizing BAR Camp this weekend at SocialText's offices in PaloAlto. It's a grassroots gathering of techies doing cool stuff that's open to all, an open alternative to O'Reilly's invitation-only FOO Camp, which is happening the same weekend in Sebastopol. Even though it was literally organized this week, a lot of cool folks have already signed up, and it looks like it's going to be a blast. Hope to see you there! (JOC)
/events | Posted at 6:25pm
"Architecting Community" Panel Summary #
RonLichty has posted an excellent summary of the "Architecting Community and Collaboration Solutions" SofTECH / SDForum meeting last month. (JOB)
/talks | Posted at 8:39am
FLOSS Usability II: Extreme Usability #
"FLOSS Usability II: Extreme Usability" is happening next week, Monday through Wednesday. Looks like we've got another excellent slate of participants, including many old and new faces. This will be a smaller sprint than the last, as our focus will be slightly different. We're going to explore the notion of ExtremeUsability, which emerged from the last sprint, and we're going to apply the ideas towards some early stage OpenSource projects. Will have more to say on this next week. (JO8)
/blueoxen | Posted at 8:34am
Sat, Aug 13, 2005
Free Identity! #
A suggestion for JimmyWales's list of things that need to be free: Free identity! (JNG)
"Free" in this case has a different meaning than it does than it does with the other items on Jimbo's list. We need to free our digital identities from the organizational silos that currently collect and control information about ourselves. I am not suggesting that all digital identities fall under an open content license; I'm saying that the individual should have the ability to decide who has access to his or her digital identity and what they're allowed to do with it. (JNH)
Why is this important? Privacy is the obvious and most important reason. A secondary reason is that free, or at least mobile identities are a prerequisite for Jimbo's tenth item: Free communities! It's not enough to be able to migrate content from one community to another if you can't also migrate people's identities as well. (JNI)
How can we free identities? Technically, it's not that's hard, and there are already several proposed specs and implementations, all of which support some notion of SingleSignOn and profile sharing with individual control. Personally, I'm partial to the IdentityCommons approach with i-names, where identifiers are globally resolvable, information is distributed, and the notion of contracts built into the data structure. In the end, it doesn't matter. What matters is that we agree on an interoperable technical specification for identity. Fortunately, many of the folks in this space are already working on collaborating, thanks to the efforts of OwenDavis, KimCameron, PaulTrevithick, DocSearls, and many others. These people have taken to calling themselves the "Identity Gang." (JNJ)
The social questions are the hard ones. What does it really mean to control our identities? What should the social and legal agreements between individuals and organizations look like? If I give my business card to someone, what's the implicit contract associated with this action, and what would it mean to make that contract explicit? (JNK)
These questions are hard, but they're solvable. Unfortunately, we're not devoting much energy towards these issues right now. Perhaps a more public exhortation for freeing identities will lead to an effort to address these social questions that equals the current effort to solve the technical ones. (JNL)
/collaboration/idcommons | Posted at 12:44pm
Jimmy Wales on Things That Need To Be Free #
Thoughts on JimmyWales's keynote at WikiMania. Read RossMayfield's post for a more extensive summary: (JN8)
- "1. Free the encyclopedia!" Jimbo considers the English and German Wikipedias "done," and he expects the rest to be complete in about 10 years. His metric is 250,000 pages of content. (JN9)
- "3. Free the curriculum!" Jimbo suggested that professors work collectively on free textbooks, which raises the obvious question: Would this be successful? Incentive structures in academia are heavily weighted towards individual achievements, and a group of professors may not have the diverse makeup necessary for a superior collective outcome. Nevertheless, I think there's some potential there and that it would be a worthwhile experiment, especially for books at the grammar and high school level. (JNA)
- "8. Free the product identifiers!" I found this to be the most original of the 10. The so-called LongTail is creating a market for product identifiers based on open standards. Jimbo calls these LTIN, or "LongTail Identification Numbers." This would be a great, achievable, bottoms-up project for someone smart who wants to make a big impact on the world. The timing seems right. (JNB)
- "10. Free the communities!" Jimbo's basic point was that communities need to own their content, even in for-profit spaces (like his current project, WikiCities). This is the BlueOxenAssociates philosophy and our approach with the BlueOxenCollaboratories. Licensing community content under CreativeCommons is not enough, though. You need freely transportable identities, which leads me to a proposed addition to the list: Free identities! I'll expand on this in a future post. (JNC)
- To Jimbo's credit, the keynote was highly inclusive, even Wiki-like. Folks from the audience freely contributed ideas and critiques (PermissionToParticipate was rampant throughout the conference), and Jimbo modified his list on the fly. When someone in the audience suggested, "Free research!", Jimbo responded, "You're right. I'm going to make that number four." (JND)
- Jimbo on business models and free content: "Everyone tells jokes, but we still have professional comedians." He also noted that this line isn't his, saying, "I steal everything, including my jokes." (JNE)
- The most challenging suggestion was, "Free medical information!" In theory, this sounds wonderful. Someone in the audience (Florian) told an anecdote about a project in Austria to create a fully anonymized knowledge repository where doctors could share misdiagnoses. Jimbo suggested that such a resource should be available to everyone. The flip side of the argument to freeing medical information is that the content literally could be the difference between life and death. There's a tremendous responsibility among the part of the authors and publishers. As Jimbo noted, no one is going to die if there's an inaccuracy on the Thomas Jefferson Wikipedia page. (JNF)
/talks | Posted at 12:38pm
Patterns at WikiMania 2005 #
When I first met ChrisPeterson (now a BlueOxenAssociates advisor), she told me the story about coining "OpenSource." The sign of a good name, she explained, is when people naturally start using it on their own. At a meeting of developers and evangelists in early 1998, rather than argue strongly in favor of the term, she introduced it subtly. Although the response wasn't enthusiastic at the first, everyone in the room found themselves using the term, and by the end of the meeting, they all agreed to evangelize it. (JMS)
Similarly, my strategy for introducing and identifying patterns of high-performance collaboration is to subversively introduce patterns into various communities and then to listen. If people naturally use a pattern in conversation, the name is probably good and the pattern itself is probably real and repeating. As people become familiar with the concept, they are more likely to identify and name other patterns. Over time, the language shifts your thinking, giving you a cognitive framework for thinking about, talking about, and improving collaboration and collaborative tools. Moreover, the process itself is iterative and collaborative, which is both the right way to develop PatternLanguages and also another application of collaborative patterns. (JMT)
I've been giving some variation of a stock talk on patterns for over a year now, including last week at WikiMania 2005. It usually consists of a quick introduction, a few examples, and an interactive portion where I tease out patterns from the audience. The audience banter is always the best part. It's always different, and it's provided me with entertaining anecdotes, new patterns, and better pattern names. (JMU)
Last week, I mentioned four patterns that Wikis facilitate: PermissionToParticipate, SharedDisplay, VisiblePulse, and WorkingDraft?. TimStarling followed my talk with an overview of MediaWiki development, and when he mentioned their IRC channel, he said, "This is our community's VisiblePulse." I love it when the process works! (JMV)
The discussion teased out other patterns, especially [Celebration]? and [Initiation]?. (LindaRising and MaryLynnManns mentions both of these in their book. They have a better name for the latter, but I don't remember it off-hand.) One person told a great story about both. His team met for the first time in Australia, and before embarking on their project, they brewed beer that they planned on drinking after they finished their project. (JMW)
Other patterns observed and not observed at the conference and within the community: (JMX)
- The [Celebration]? at the end of the conference was great, but the [Initiation]? wasn't particularly remarkable. This isn't unusual for conferences, where [Initiation]? tends to be in the form of a keynote. (JMY)
- One pattern closely related to [Initiation]? is [Introductions]?. At conferences, this generally comes in the form of name badges, which we had at WikiMania. I think there's a huge opportunity for further facilitating this pattern at conferences, which is something BlueOxenAssociates is working on. Hacking Days also would have been significantly more effective if we simply went around the room each day and quickly introduced ourselves. It's one of those patterns that sound obvious when you hear about it, but is often forgotten when actually designing an event. (JMZ)
- Conferences usually do WaterCooler? well, and WikiMania was no exception. We had long lunches, a party on the last night, an IRC channel, and some organized activities in FrankfurtAmMain for stragglers following the conference. In particular, the organizers did two things really well. The HausDerJugend was an excellent choice of venue, because it was an intimate space where social interaction was practically unavoidable. Most of the participants stayed at the hostel, which meant that there was always an interesting conversation to be had by simply going downstairs and hanging out in one of the common rooms. Plus, most of us who stayed there also had roommates, which is not typical for the conferences I attend. The restaurants and bars -- touristy though they were -- were in very close proximity, which made it easy to grab a beer and talk. ([Food]? is a closely related pattern.) Finally, Hacking Days served as an unintentional WaterCooler?, at least for those of us who were not MediaWiki developers. Coming early is something the organizers should encourage more widely next time. (JN0)
- I'm very biased towards highly interactive event design, and it seemed like it would have been especially appropriate for a Wiki conference. That said, the panel format worked better than at most conferences, and I think the Wiki culture of PermissionToParticipate had a lot to do with that. The audience interacted easily with the presenters at all of the talks I attended, and most of the speakers did a nice job of incorporating feedback into their presentations. One thing they did not do well was actively promote and integrate the conference Wiki as a place to take notes and have additional discussions. Again, this seemed surprising for a Wiki conference -- yet another indication that making patterns explicit is a good thing. (JN1)
- Another favorite -- also found in Linda and Mary Lynn's book -- is SpotlightOnOthers. This runs rampant throughout the Wikipedia community, which is wonderful. Tim cited me when mentioning VisiblePulse, and by the next morning, SunirShah had incorporated PermissionToParticipate into his talk on conflict resolution. I found this time and again in people's talks. One reason it occurred so often during the conference is that the organizers used a Wiki to develop the program transparently. People watched other people's talks develop and incorporated their content even before the conference began. (JN2)
- A critical pattern, especially for inter-organizational collaboration, is NeutralSpace. Wikipedia would not have been successful if it did not have an open content license (which facilitates NeutralSpace) and, to some extent, if it were a for-profit company. At the board panel on the last day, several people brought up the question of online ads. On the one hand, ads have the potential of bringing in a tremendous amount of revenue, which could be put to good use for the community. On the other hand, it breaks the NeutralSpace pattern that has served Wikipedia so well. The community was more or less split on this issue. My vote: No ads! (JN3)
One last pattern that I both observed and missed was UsersTalkToDevelopers?, a pattern I first described in, "An Introduction to Open Source Communities." Previously, I criticized the MediaWiki developers for not practicing it enough. With the whole conference finally behind me, I want to both soften and and strengthen my statement. (JN4)
Many of the MediaWiki developers came to the project as Wikipedia contributors. BrionVibber, one of the leaders of the project, probably never would have joined had it not been for the Esperanto Wikipedia, of all things. After having more time to interact and observe the developers, I think that on average, community interaction is more prevalent among the MediaWiki developers than it is with many other projects. (JN5)
That said, it's still not nearly what it can and should be. During the sessions on politics and developing countries, several panelists complained that the tools had a way to go to meet their needs, and yet, none of the developers were attending their sessions. HosseinDerakhshan? noted that techies are generally not interested in issues outside of their sphere. (JN6)
Not all the blame falls on developers, however. As great as it would have been to see more developers abandoning the technical sessions in favor of the more social ones, it would have been fantastic to see more Wikipedia contributors attend some of the technical sesssions. Both communities need to learn and respect each other's language if they truly want to engage collaboratively. [Bridges]? are critical to make this work. Note that this applies not only to MediaWiki, but to all OpenSource projects. (JN7)
/collaboration/patterns | Posted at 12:07pm
Ross Gets Down #
Sunday evening, August 7, 2005: (JMQ)
Me: I took an incriminating photo of RossMayfield at Brotfabrik last night. Should I post it on my blog? (JMO)
Sorry, Ross. Sunir made me do it. (JMR)
/personal | Posted at 11:39am
WikiMania 2005 Redux #
[I originally wrote this two days after the conference, but because of limited Internet access the past few days, I couldn't post it until today. -EEK] (JME)
WikiMania is over. What a whirlwind three days. I'm so glad I came early for Hacking Days, because it gave me a chance to meet key members of the community in a relaxed environment, the calm before the storm as it were. That I was able to blog my impressions each day is proof of that. (JMF)
Blogging during the conference itself turned out to be impossible. I had no time to get away and gather my thoughts, at least on my computer. RossMayfield mentioned a PeterKaminski maxim during my talk: Face-to-face time is too precious to waste working. Well, I embodied that philosophy this past weekend. I met people from roughly twenty different countries and managed to spend quality time with most of them. (According to FlorenceDevouard, there were 52 countries represented among the 300 participants and speakers.) (JMG)
Right now, my body is complaining about the cumulative effects of repeated late night sessions over too much beer and apfelwein, but my mind and spirit are refreshed. Each day, a different group of us shared stories, laughed, and argued about international politics, Wikis, Fleischbutter, and our compatriots, families, friends, and selves. (JMH)
Now, I find myself both moved and troubled. This is not the first time I've walked away from a great event like this and felt this way. In many ways, this gathering embodied what communities and collaboration should be about. The danger is that we might view it as the way things are. They're not. Many of us will return to our banal lives, bracing ourselves for the inevitable stack of work that accumulated in our absence. Some of us will return to homes that practice rampant censorship, to populations with miniscule literacy rates and significant poverty. All of us return to a world that is dangerously volatile, where tensions between our respective countries are taut and frayed. (JMI)
Did our little gathering make the world a better place? Sure. It will take years for our new and strengthened ties and our newly broadened perspectives to noticeably change the world, but the effects are real and will reverberate and grow over time. However, these changes are also barely apparent now, and the work that we must continue to do is daunting. (JMJ)
In the end, I walk away from this conference a little wiser and a little scared, with a lot of hope and a renewed sense of purpose. More importantly, I look forward to the new partnerships that will inevitably emerge, and I wait excitedly to see my new friends once again. (JMK)
I'll have more to say about the conference itself, but not this week. This week, I'm in Berlin, exploring a great city that has changed so much in only fifteen years and spending time with old friends and new. (JML)
[Berlin was fantastic! I'll blog extensively about it next week after I post the rest of my WikiMania thoughts. -EEK] (JMM)
/events | Posted at 11:33am
Thu, Aug 04, 2005
WikiMania Hackfest Day 4 #
Bits and tids: (JM7)
- I didn't plan my Hacking Days schedule very well. I missed most of the first day, when the MediaWiki developers apparently made progress on a new metadata design. Days 2 and 3, from which I based most of my criticism, focused on servers and reliability, an area to which I really couldn't contribute, not because I'm ignorant, but because I'm powerless. This morning, they discussed SingleSignOn and usability, two areas that I do know something about. Sadly, I missed these sessions, because I was too busy spouting on and on about how we really can save the world. OwenDavis, FenLabalme, KaliyaHamlin, and the rest of the gang will undoubtedly kick my butt when they read this. In my defense, I managed to talk a bit about IdentityCommons later in the day. I also plugged the FLOSS Usability Sprint, and met ZenoGantner, who's done some usability studies on MediaWiki. (JM8)
- I was one of the featured participants for the afternoon "Wiki developers informal discussion," along with WardCunningham, SvenDowideit, ChristopheDucamp, and BrionVibber. DomasMituzas, WikimediaFoundation's head of operations, asked Ward, "Why CamelCase??" I won't go into the explanation here -- I have a long interview with Ward, to be published eventually, that explains this in detail -- but you should know that hating CamelCase? is a running joke among this community. I laughed along with everyone else, but when Sven mentioned his desire to remove CamelCase? from TWiki, I felt compelled to pipe up. I gave a balanced defense, describing CamelCase?'s advantages over free links, but also acknowledging the appropriateness of free links in Wikipedia. Then I got a very amusing introduction to ErikMoeller, one of MediaWiki's core contributors and the WikimediaFoundation's chief research officer. Erik had a strongly worded response. It got a bit heated, but never overly so, and I closed by saying that we were in violent agreement. We laughed about it over dinner, but then we got serious again. We also talked about PurpleNumbers. I've explained many times why I may seem like a poor evangelist, but I think Erik was one of the few people who appreciated my perspective. He was clearly not a big fan of PurpleNumbers -- as it turns out, he was somewhat familiar with my work -- but after hearing my explanation, he responded, "Only intelligent people are going to understand what you just said." Fair enough. Fortunately, regular folks don't need to get GranularAddressability for GranularAddressability to become ubiquitous. (JM9)
- A group of us broke out into a small group to discuss a WikiInterchangeFormat?, knowing full well that this is an issue that's been discussed many times before (Wiki:WikiInterchangeFormat, MeatBall:WikiInterchangeFormat). Nevertheless, I think our discussion was not only constructive, it has a high chance of succeeding. See my summary. (JMA)
- MagnusManske, the original creator of MediaWiki, participated in our WikiInterchangeFormat? discussion. He also mentioned a clever idea: a "shopping cart" where people could aggregate and possibly export Wiki pages they were interested in. (JMB)
- SvenDowideit demonstrated the prototype WYSIWYG editor for TWiki, based on Kupu. He also showed a WikiText editor with real-time preview, which was pretty slick. Also, RossMayfield showed me a prototype editor for KWiki in response to my previous post. Very good to see these things. (JMC)
- So many people have come to this gathering to learn from others with different experiences. Granted, all of these experiences center around Wikipedia, but I'm still envious. My neverending quest is for folks interested in collaboration to look beyond their own narrow domains for deeper insights. (JMD)
/events | Posted at 1:44pm
Celebrating German Culture #
Enjoying a brew at Restaurant "Haus Wertheym" in FrankfurtAmMain. Photo is courtesy of JohnBreslin, who rescued me from tourism hell by recommending this restaurant for lunch. Also see John's picture and comments of a group of us (me not pictured) at our prelunch discussion. I accidentally came out of the closet and revealed myself as an idealist, much to the amusement of WardCunningham. Countries represented in that picture: Canada (Ray), China / France (Feng), the Netherlands (Andre), U.S. (Ward). (JM6)
/personal | Posted at 12:20pm
Wed, Aug 03, 2005
WikiMania Hackfest Day 3 #
Today's tidbits: (JLI)
- WardCunningham arrived this morning and gamely participated in the afternoon session, despite the long flight. At one point, he asked the MediaWiki developers what the consequences of a wrong architectural decision would be. The answers were revealing. These guys are faced with a tough problem thanks to scaling issues. By necessity, they have to optimize their architecture based on user behavior. However, this severely restricts their flexibility, because if their predictions about user behavior are wrong, it is extremely expensive to rearchitect, reimplement, and reconfigure. Moreover, MediaWiki really can't develop agilely, at least not where new user features are concerned, for the same reasons. If they were part of a large company with plentiful IT resources (e.g. Google), then it would be a different story, but they're not. This also makes ExtremeUsability somewhat of a pipe dream. (JLJ)
- Funny observation from a MediaWiki developer (Mark) on downtime: They're the only site that profits from downtime. When Wikipedia goes down, folks assume it's short on resources and tries to donate stuff. (JLK)
- At the FLOSS Usability Sprint last February, we framed the following conflict between OpenSource developers and usability practitioners: With usability, the mantra is, "You are not your user." With OpenSource, the mantra is ScratchYourOwnItch. Those two philosophies seem contradictory. However, it's not so simple. Many new features in OpenSource projects are user-driven, although the degree to which this happens largely varies. My impression with MediaWiki from watching the developers work and from talking to various members of the community -- developers and users -- is that the developers are open to feature suggestions, but are not particularly enthusiastic about user-driven design. Developers will implement suggestions, provided they are posted to Bugzilla. That's a poor way of doing things, in my opinion. I'm picking on MediaWiki, but it's a very common attitude in the OpenSource world -- it came up several times at the usability sprint -- and really, in the entire software development community. With MediaWiki, I'm particularly disappointed, because they've got this huge, wonderful user community. As I said yesterday, the purely technical problems MediaWiki faces are fascinating in and of themselves. However, the opportunity to evolve some really cool user features should be just as fascinating. (JLL)
- Then again, perhaps MediaWiki just isn't the place for this to happen. As I said above, doing ExtremeUsability would be especially hard, because the high overhead imposed by the architecture makes it difficult to develop agilely. Maybe the place to experiment is with smaller communities, and MediaWiki can steal features accordingly. That, after all, is one of the goals behind the BlueOxenCollaboratories -- explore cool ideas in real communities and teams, and then propagate them so they are stolen far and wide. The only problem with this is that it's almost impossible to duplicate the social effects of scale seen on Wikipedia. (JLM)
- I mentioned a "MySQL guy" yesterday. His name is JanKneschke, and while he works for MySQL, he's really here to help MediaWiki with performance issues. One way he's doing that is by advising them on migrating to his high-performance web server, lighttpd (pronounced "lighty"). lighttpd is a relatively new implementation of an old idea: rather than prefork or thread a web server, as Apache does, use a single event loop, which saves you tons of memory and CPU, especially at scale. It's got some other cool performance tweaks as well. Jan is very sharp, and lighttpd seems to be taking off. Another high-profile site that uses it is RubyOnRails. One thing I find amusing is that FastCGI, which has been around forever, seems to be making a big comeback. RubyOnRails, PHP, Sympa, and many other high-profile tools use it. It's amazing how old things can fly under the radar forever, then suddenly find new life. (JLN)
- Over and over again, I see that proficiency in one area doesn't necessarily translate into others, even if they seem like they should. Folks in the Wikipedia community are incredibly knowledgable about online, emergent communities. However, judging from the conference design, they know very little about facilitating similar emergent patterns at face-to-face gatherings. Again, I'm picking on them, only because I'm here, but this is a widespread problem, and it further validates what BlueOxenAssociates is trying to achieve. Two things that the organizers here have done very, very right: Bring together great people and establish a wonderful culture of openness. (JLO)
/events | Posted at 4:45pm
Tue, Aug 02, 2005
WikiMania Hacking Day 2 #
Tidbits from the day: (JLA)
- There's now a conference blog. (JLB)
- The main order of business was Wikipedia's servers. As expected, they deal with some wild challenges. One amusing exchange occurred between BrionVibber, one of MediaWiki's core developers, and a guy from MySQL. Brion asked if MySQL will ever support four-byte characters. The MySQL guy just sort of looked at him, stunned, said no, then asked why they needed it. Apparently, they do. There really are all types of folks using Wikipedia. (JLC)
- We digressed for a bit this morning to talk about WikiSpam. I'm going to try and coordinate a deeper discussions with some Wiki developers here to collaborate on a shared blacklist. (JLD)
- Speaking of "all types of folks," here's yet another reason why I'm loving this conference. Sixteen of us went out to dinner tonight, representing 11 countries: the Netherlands, France, Germany, Venezuela, Chile, Brazil, China, UK, South Africa, Australia, and the U.S. By the way, this morning I mentioned DelphineMenard's trilingualism. Try fluency in six languages. I was surrounded by multilingual folks today; another fellow was fluent in something like nine languages. It was both fun and humbling. (JLE)
- The conference is expecting over 300 attendees and lots of press, most of whom will start converging on this sleepy hostel tomorrow. Wikipedia is a very big deal in Germany. (JLF)
/events | Posted at 4:44pm
Where's Chris? #
Here's a funny cartoon from SocialText's recent retreat, courtesy of RossMayfield: (JL3)
Can you guess which one is ChrisDent? (JL5)
I spotted SunirShah immediately, even though I have yet to meet him in person. And no, it had nothing to do with ethnicity. Sunir, looking forward to meeting this week at WikiMania. (JL6)
/tech/purple | Posted at 3:07pm
The Unjoy of Panels #
I'm a veteran panel moderator. I've been doing it since high school, and I think I'm pretty good at it. But I'm thinking about retiring from the business. (JKL)
Last week, I moderated the SofTECH / SDForum July meeting on "Architecting Community and Collaboration Solutions." TonyChristopher had suggested me to RonLichty, the meeting producer. Ron and I, as it turned out, had met a few years earlier at a GivingSpace workshop. Ron explained to me his goals for the panel, told me who the panelists would be, and I said, "Sign me up!" (JKM)
The panel went well. The panelists -- TonyChristopher, ZackRosen, SylviaMarino, and ScottWilder -- were great. Everyone told lots of great stories, but also respected the other panelists, and no one tried to dominate the floor, which made my job incredibly easy. More importantly, the audience was engaged with the topic and the panelists. Ron was great also. He had done a masterful job of organizing the event and preengaging the panel. (JKN)
The problem was that the panel format was wrong. Panels work best when they emerge as entertaining and informative roundtable discussions. As good as our panelists were, that was not going to happen, because the format did not optimally align with our goal -- educating the audience. A panel format can achieve this goal -- and ours did -- but only in a broadcast model, which does not maximize group potential. (JKO)
It was clear from an informal poll I took at the beginning of the panel and the number of faces I recognized that we had a lot of expertise in the audience itself. It would have been far more engaging and educational for all involved had we done a more interactive format, where we spent an hour in break-outs, possibly followed by a moderated plenary discussion. The panelists, in this scenario, would have been co-participants with the rest of the audience. (JKP)
I moderated two panels and gave a talk at last June's Collaborative Technologies Conference. One panel was in a traditional format for reasons largely out of my control, but I decided to play with the other two formats. In both of those cases, I turned the tables on the audience, rearranging the stage format into a circle, and basically played discussion moderator rather than panel moderator. Several people had already camped out in the back with their laptops open -- almost assuredly planning to check email rather than listen to the talk -- and a look of fear and shock came over their eyes when I told them to join me in the circle. (JKQ)
Several people approached me afterwards and praised the format. (My favorite moment was one night at dinner, when I introduced myself to StoweBoyd, who wrote a great essay on panels. Upon hearing my name, Stowe said, "I want to thank you." I was completely baffled by this, as we had never met, and Stowe had not attended any of my talks. Apparently, he had heard about my panels -- probably from ArieannaFoley -- and he was grateful that someone had tried something different.) These folks were clearly suffering from panel fatigue, and just the fact that we were doing something different and engaging improved the experience wildly for them. I guarantee that the circle format was also more informative for the audience as a whole, because it addressed their specific concerns and it introduced a set of viewpoints far more rich than just mine or a panel's. (JKR)
As much as people respond to these more interactive formats, they are mere baby steps. Kindergarteners get in circles, for pete's sake. Pre-school can be fun, but once you've been in kindergarten, you don't want to go back. Facilitation techniques like ConversationCafe? and OpenSpace are at the first grade level, AspirationTech is at second grade, and MGTaylor is at third. The latter techniques augmented with cutting edge collaborative tools is at least the fourth grade level, and we've only scratched the surface as to what's possible. It's just sad that the vast majority of conferences are at the pre-school level. (JKS)
There are situations where panels work well as a format, but they are vastly overdone. In any case, don't let this post prevent you from inviting me to moderate a panel. Just expect me to make some strong demands concerning format. (JKT)
(See also MaryHodder's excellent panel diatribe.) (JKU)
/collaboration | Posted at 7:12am
On Conversations and Collaboration #
SebPaquet and I were chatting on the phone last Friday, and the conversation turned to OldBoyNetworks?. In particular, Seb noted that it wasn't enough to eliminate barriers to conversation or collaboration. You need to catalyze it. The oft-noted EchoChamber? nature of the blogosphere is Exhibit A in this regard. Despite the lack of technical barriers, people tend not to interact with people of different background and views. (JJM)
This issue became the theme of the day for me. Later that afternoon, I met NancyWhite for the first time, who was in town for Blogher. She was ecstatic about the expected turnout, explaining that the conference had attracted all sorts of new faces, traditionally invisible folks -- mostly women, of course -- on the ground doing great stuff and writing great things. Nancy, MaryHodder, and others have been vocal about the sameness of attendees and speakers on the conference circuit, and Blogher was in many ways a reaction to that. I'm sorrry I missed it. What began as a casual conversation between Nancy, BeverlyTrayner, and myself grew quite large and energetic, as random folks -- Mary, DanahBoyd, ElanaCentor, and several others -- saw us at our table and joined the discussion. It killed me to break up that conversation, but we all had other meetings we had to go to. (JJN)
I ended my day in Campbell for SocialWave's one-year anniversary celebration. SheldonChang, SocialWave's driving force, has evolved the business in much the same way that I've evolved BlueOxenAssociates -- learning by doing and refining the strategy over time. What began as a general desire to counter the BowlingAlone effect in regional communities is now focused more on bringing community back to city downtowns. I really like this strategy, and I really like how effective SocialWave has been with its flagship community, Campbell. The party was a manifestation of that. Several local stores sponsored the party, which was held in Campbell's beautiful downtown in conjunction with the weekly summer outdoor movie series (which has its own wonderful grassroots origins). Of course, SocialWave members -- who span the entire demographic -- were out in force, both as volunteers and as party-goers. (JJO)
I congratulated Sheldon on what he had accomplished so far, and -- as it had throughout the day -- the discussion turned to catalyzing conversations and collaboration. In a small downtown, the barriers to interaction are low in theory. People are physically near each other, and there seems to be big incentives to collaborate with each other, as all of these stores share goals and concerns. But in reality, it doesn't always happen on its own. Campbell, like many of the downtowns here in the BayArea, has had its share of economic troubles, and yet, most people have dealt with those in isolation. Sheldon noted that several store owners weren't even aware of what stores were around the corner. (JJP)
In reality, collaboration rarely just happens. Someone has to catalyze it. This can happen from both the top and the bottom, but it almost always happens. This holds triply true when it comes to collaboration between diverse groups. If we truly want to work with people different from ourselves, we have to work proactively to bring those people together. This doesn't happen often enough. It's hard, but the benefits are significant. (JJQ)
/collaboration | Posted at 4:03am
WikiMania Hackfest #
I'm in FrankfurtAmMain, Germany this week for WikiMania. The conference itself starts on Friday, and I'll be speaking on the history of collaborative tools on Saturday. With the encouragement of fellow alumnus SamuelKlein, I decided to come a few days early to participate in Hacking Days. It's been an excellent opportunity to immerse myself with the MediaWiki developers, as well as a way to get to know some of the more active members of the Wikipedia community before the throngs arrive later this week. (JJD)
It's been over 15 years since my last trip to Europe, and this is my first work trip here. Frankfurt is as good a place as any to cushion folks like me from culture shock. While I'm nowhere near fluency, English is a Germanic language, and I took two years of high school German, so I recognize vocabulary here and there. Plus, most people speak English, especially here in Frankfurt, which is a European travel hub. (JJE)
The conference itself is at the HausDerJugend, a large YouthHostel in the center of the city. Most of the participants and speakers are staying here at the hostel, which makes things very collegial. I'm rooming with KurtJansson, the president of the German chapter of WikimediaFoundation, and JuanDavidRuiz (Chile) and AscanderSuarez (Venezuela), core members of the Spanish chapter. It's given me both an international take on Wiki culture and a bird's eye view on the inner workings of the Wikipedia community. (JJF)
I love the international flavor of the community and the conference itself. I had a great conversation with DelphineMenard, a French woman who handled the event's logistics. She's lived all over the world and speaks three languages fluently. As I gushed about the importance of being around a diverse group and about experiencing the feeling of being an outsider, she observed that based on her experiences, in the end, people are more or less the same, regardless of background. True, true. Everybody is people. When you interact with others who are different from yourself, you realize that we all share some very human values. You can't truly reach that conclusion without experiencing diversity first-hand. (JJG)
Watching the developers work was interesting. It was very much like watching a face-to-face IRC discussion. Folks sat around a table with their laptops open and participated in multiple conversations -- both face-to-face and over IRC -- and activities simultaneously. I've been playing ethnographer and collecting observations, which I'll bring to people's attention more formally on Thursday. (JJH)
Samuel and I talked a bit about Wikiness and the aversion that hard core Wiki developers seem to have over WYSIWYG editing. WikiText is not essential to the Wikiness of Wikis. WardCunningham himself has stated on record that GUI editing is the next big step in the evolution of Wikis. (JJI)
I'm in Frankfurt through Monday and in Berlin after that, so if you're in town, let me know. (JJJ)
/events | Posted at 3:56am
