electronic museum

The problem with process

February 3, 2009 · 11 Comments

This blog post has been lurking as an idea in my drafts folder for a long time, waiting for me to write something about the issues of “enterprise” and “lightweight”. 

If you haven’t gathered it already you’re either new here or have been seriously thick skinned when I’ve ranted on about why I think IT is crap and what we need to do about that. In a nutshell: IT should help people. It usually hinders them. We should try harder. 

That’s the general thrust of what is actually a very straightforward argument. I seem to spend far too much of my time looking at failed potential and not enough looking at astonishing goodness.

From this you’d probably gather – and you’d be mainly right – that I understand, and have much more time for, “lightweight” than I do “enterprise”. I think you can get closer – much closer – to the true horizon of “good IT” with rapid, lightweight approaches than you ever can with heavy, expensive ones. 

More process, please

Process hell. Thanks johnbullas / Flickr (click for bigger)

I do, however, also understand the need for control, for backups and safety, for security. The problem I have is that so, so often these processes are over-specified. And the problem with over-specification is that it flies in the face of the way we normally go about our lives.

It’s much more natural for us to turn to the person next door or call a friendly web guy and ask “is there any chance you could just…”. It’s what us social animals are good at – a bit of sharing, communal back-scratching, wheeling and dealing. Look at specifications. The fact is, no one knows how the damn thing is going to work, so how the hell are is anyone going to write it down on week one of the project? Project Management is a similar veil we draw into the process mix and pretend is useful, but find me one person who can accurately forecast their time on a task, and I’ll show you a liar.

This is how we end up tied into a sterile, personality-free wasteland where every item has to be built into a specification or you have to raise a ticket with a “service desk” (generally an oxymoron, IMO) to get, say, Google Analytics code pasted into the footer of your website or redirect a URL.

The problem is: this isn’t how people do things. That’s why it bugs the shit out of every poor sucker who gets tied up in it.

Here’s the question: why can’t we ring the guy up? Why can’t we call in favours, buy the dev a pint, tell him we’ll help him out with some CSS he’s struggling with? This is the way, after all, that most business gets done – someone you know puts in a good word for a friend of yours, he does you a favour, you remember it the next time around. I’m not suggesting that goes too far – there’s a horrific cronyism at the other end of the scale – but I’m just unsure how anyone gets anything creative or effective done when there is no personality in the system. The reason we can’t do this (usually) is that there’s another process (”change control”) underneath. And under that, somewhere, hiding in the dark, is fear. 

Mitigating risk is one thing. Being over-cautious is quite another. It’s also a rapidly shrinking spiral where your systems and processes begin to close down on each other because of fear that “things might go wrong”. Lock it down, prevent the changes, project manage it to death. Kill the project before – gasp – something goes awry.

I think “lightweight” consistently shows that creativity can only come out of flexibility. I also believe that this can – with some creative, human thinking – be translated into “the enterprise”. Maybe I’m naive. Maybe it isn’t turtles all the way down, but Process.

I hope not.

→ 11 CommentsCategories: content · technology · web2.0
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Crowdsourcing photosynth

January 31, 2009 · 6 Comments

I wrote about Photosynth when it first came out as a plugin back in August 2007.Then, I wasn’t sure, and felt that it was a technology looking for a reason. Since then, Microsoft have done a few very, very cool things with it. The most important of these is that anyone can now create Photosynths (essentially, think image stitching, but in all dimensions..).

All you have to do is go to the Photosynth site, download the app and chuck some photos at it. It munges away for a bit and then after a bit uploads them all to the Photosynth site and gives you a link. It helps very much when you’re taking the photos to think about the fact that you want them to be connected: they obviously have to be the same scene, and I’ve found that standing reasonably still and taking around you tends to work reasonably well.

A “good synth” (the software tells you how “synthy” your selection is once it’s uploaded it – presumably a measure of how well it has managed to stitch stuff together) is pretty satisfying, although there are some obviously winning features which are missing. The single most obvious one of these is that you can’t add links or hotspots to the synth you create. For museums particularly, I think this’ll be a problem.

I did a synth a while back of the Boxkite at Bristol Museum. It’s a nice object to use (or so I thought) – it’s up in the rafters and you can walk all around it, taking photos from 360 degrees. As it happens, the result is pretty good, but not great. I’m wondering whether the software might have confused one side of the object from the other. Either way, it gives an insight into how museums could start using Photosynth to enhance collections online. More interestingly, perhaps (given the fair size of the Photosynth plugin), it could be used in-gallery (maybe with a Microsoft Surface..) to let audiences really engage with objects. Have a poke around the Photosynth site to get a feel for other museum stuff.

Extending Photosynth a bit further is what this post is all about, though.

When I saw the astonishing CNN Photosynth from Obama’s Inaugeration I started thinking about how else you could use it to enhance online experiences. I had what I thought at the time was an original idea (looking now I realise that Nick Poole had commented on my original post suggesting exactly this!) – how about using Flickr as a source for building a Photosynth?

Apollo 10 Command Module

Apollo 10 Command Module - thanks to Gaetan Lee

I needed an iconic object that would have been Creative Commons licensed on Flickr. Apollo 10 turned out to be a good one – I ran a search on Flickr and found 40 CC photos I could use, all taken in the Making the Modern World gallery of the Science Museum, my old stomping ground.

There’s no API I’m aware of for Photosynth yet. This is another missing trick – imagine if you could step straigt from Flickr to a 3D synthed view of any search… – so for my experiment I had to download the entire set of search results. For this, I used a cunning app called Downloadr, which lets you automatically download all Flickr pics which match a certain search. Then it was just a matter of re-uploading the images via Photosynth.

The result is here. Given that this is entirely made up of images taken at completely different times and by different people, I think it works pretty well. The crowd sourcing element adds a lot to Photosynth, I think. It’s still a shame that it isn’t possible to add links or otherwise play with the resulting synth – I think it’d add a lot.

Let me know if you think of other objects that could be synthed in this way and I’ll give it a go…

→ 6 CommentsCategories: collections · exhibition · gallery · museum
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For the webs2, please follow the crowd

January 19, 2009 · 2 Comments

The last talk I gave – in December 2008 – was at Online Information and titled “What does Web2.0 DO for us?”.

Here are the slides (my third slide deck to get “homepaged” on slideshare…yay…):

This one was attempting to focus on Web2.0 in the Enterprise. Frankly, “The Enterprise” is a subject which fills me with fear, dread and trepidation, but the movement of Web2.0 into that space is probably inevitable as sales teams around the world spot another opportunity and sell it out to cash-rich bods wanting to “be innovative” in the name of their behemoth of a company. It’ll be interesting to watch.

The talk was popular, which I’m pleased about. Online Information is a funny old conference – the halls are stacked with basically the same company replicated about 200 times: reasonably bad CMS systems with reasonably bad sales people trying to sell to a reasonably badly informed market of people. I sound over-rude, but I have to be honest – I last went in about 2003 and absolutely nothing has changed. Which can’t be good in the tech field, right?

My slides were supposed to be about one thing (why the social web is important in “The Enterprise”, and why “The Enterprise” should take it seriously) – in the end, I actually focused on why “web2″ is important to people rather than as a “thing” in abstract. I see the connecting of people with other people as reason for believing in the social web as a sound platform upon which to build any content. I believe this engagement is key to bringing (heritage) content to the foreground; furthermore, I think that even though web2.0 has been hyped to death, we should continue to believe in what “the social web” means. Mainly, we should believe this because the social web is about people and connections and as such has enormous importance to us as social, connected animals. 

One of the problems with talking about “Web2.0″ is that the phrase carries an implicit weight with it: as soon as there is a count attached, you’re naturally looking for the current one to expire – for “Web2″ to be replaced by “Web3″ and shortly after that, “Web4″. Useful though “Web2.0″ is as a phrase, I’m with the commentators now who suggest we talk about “the web”, or – my preference – “the social web”. Not because it is any less important, but because it is more so.

Incidentally, earlier today I was researching some stuff for a keynote I’m due to give in The Hague later in February (more details soon…) and used Google Trends to check on the phrase “web2.0″. It’s interesting to note that it reached its peak during q4 2007, and has since dropped off in popularity: 

 

Web2.0 on Google Trends

You’ll see immediately that this follows the Gartner Hype Curve prediction (or at least the beginning of it) – it’ll be interesting to watch in the coming months and years how the curve settles into a dampened “plateau of productivity”. (I’d also be interested if anyone can figure out why there is a gap between 2004 when O’Reilly first mentioned the phrase and mid-2005…)

For the graph junkies, here’s the same period for the phrase “social web”:

 

"Social Web" on Google Trends

So. That’s the hype. Maybe now we can get on with producing some astonishing, user-focused content..

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Specification Hell

January 6, 2009 · 6 Comments

I just spent my afternoon working on a 50-page functional specification. 

Now that I’ve been on the agency side for more than a year, I’m confident in reporting that agencies hate reading specifications almost as much as clients hate writing them. 

The world is full of dry documents, and I try (probably like most people) to avoid them as much as I can. That’s why I spend as little time as possible on Mr. Nielsen’s site or over on the W3C. What always strikes me about specifications for websites, however, is the extreme contrast between the engaging, colourful, user-centric thing which is the intended end-result and the grim, stultifying 100-page dirge which is usually provided at the beginning of a web project.

Functional specs have emerged from a kind of pastiche of needs. On the one hand you have the client who is forking out tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds. Not only do they (obviously) want to know what they’re getting for their money, but specifications are impressive, aren’t they? Nothing like an enormous great fat wad of a document to really show the agency that you mean business. From the agency side, you have a bunch of project managers and web developers: the PM’s are desperate to assign days and the web developers are desperate to avoid those “ooh, you couldn’t just…” moments later on in the project.

Under the hood is also a kind of legal wrangling which everyone hopes they won’t ever need – what if it all goes to shit, relationships break down and all those “sure, I’ll just do X” or “they said they’d do Y” moments come back to haunt you?

The net result is grim, particularly when you take a step back and consider the impact on creativity, innovation or “moving things forward”. When developers and PM’s are working to the letter of a specification, it’s no wonder that those additional extras get left behind. When your document binds you so closely to a fixed output (”the dropdown on the right displays X, which when selected does Y to div Z”) you don’t have a hope of being flexible, let alone able to take on board user needs or requirements.

In my experience, the reality is far from the dotted “i” and crossed “t” scenario which forms the backdrop to specifications. Developers are terrible (as is everyone, IMO) at estimating effort, usually resorting to doubling their initial guess because they know someone somewhere is going to take the piss later on; PM’s are terrible at taking flexibility on board; clients are terrible at writing specifications (or reading documentation). 

People are, after all, human.

What actually happens in a successful web project is very different, very fluid, and relies on a series of largely undefinable communication strands between client and agency. Personality plays a huge role in this: I’ve worked, for example, with developers who are incapable of doing anything except working 100% to the letter (me: “this dropdown has 10,000 items in it” – them: “that’s what you asked for”), and I’ve worked with clients who are 100% happy for the agency to drive the entire process, just wanting “a website” and no further questions, thanks anyway. 

There is no golden bullet, but in my experience there are a few approaches that have proven themselves time and time again.

  1. Be prepared to be flexible, both as a client and as an agency. Rigidity is almost always going to go wrong. Start the process (as client) knowing what you want but be prepared to accept different approaches. If you’re on the agency side, be creative enough to think about (and suggest) approaches that you’ve seen out on the web – say AJAXy validation or particularly good ways of going through a sign-up process. Clients usually like nice things.  
  2. Put legal measures like contracts in place but remember that the chances are you won’t end up in court and it is usually better to devote more time to talking and meeting consistently and regularly during your project than to writing huge, hefty legal horrors. Use a standard contract, attach a design brief, get everyone to sign it. Then move on.
  3. Always (always!) have a single point of contact defined early on in the process. Never step outside of the golden rule – the contact is between these two people: one from the client, one from the agency; any other communication goes through you, with no exceptions. Make sure communications are logged (usually via email, but bug trackers, Basecamp, Google Docs etc etc ultimately do the same thing). 
  4. If you’re a client with a vision or an agency with a solution, create it as visually as you possibly can. Instead of writing vast documents, create the following (in increasing order of effort and usefulness):

    - hand-drawn sketches of the site map, key pages, user interactions, “pinch points”

    - wireframes, initially in Powerpoint but ultimately in something like Axure or Protoshare. You can also use wikis or tools like Google Sites to re-create key bits of the new site

    - if you have really hefty bits of functionality which can’t be explained easily with a wireframe, consider building a working prototype. I can hear the intake of breath here – yes, it’s a hell of a lot of effort, but if you have a friendly web dev who can knock out something in a day or two that explains functionality better than a 100 page document, it will pay for itself in no time at all.

The best web projects I’ve worked on have had a core document which clearly explains the overarching reason for the redevelopment, any constraints (either technical or otherwise), and then references a sitemap and a wireframe or prototype. Somewhere in the background is usually a contract, too.

That’s it. The rest is down to clear, open communication, flexibility and – perhaps most important of all – a shared committment to make the new site better rather than just “redesign” it.

Incidentally, if you hear (or use) the phrase “content migration”, the project has probably failed already :-)

→ 6 CommentsCategories: content · design · innovation · museum
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Where the F have you been?

December 23, 2008 · Leave a Comment

It’s been a long while (possibly the biggest gap since the launch of this blog..) since my last post – over a month.

This is unprecedented for me, and I’ve had four or five emails (thanks!) asking me why. I’ve always dodged around with an answer, not because I was trying to avoid some horrific truth but because until the last couple of days I simply haven’t had the brain time to devote to the reasons.

The first part of the answer to “Mike, where the F have you been?” is this: I’ve been busy keeping balls in the air: another presentation (What does Web 2.0 DO for us?) which I delivered to a roomful at Online Information 2008 on 4th Dec…the beginning stages writing a module for the new Digital Heritage MA/MSc at Leicester University – an opportunity which I’m hugely excited about, and not a little bit scared too…continuing work on three side-projects, none of which I can talk about just yet…development and writing for a corporate blog for internal comms…a desktop notification app…not to mention the hectic craziness of helping look after a 2-boy young family. Etcetefuckinra.

All of which is terribly boring, TBH, because if there’s one thing we all know about each other it is this: we’re all much too busy. In fact a corporate stat somewhere a while ago said that everyone believes themselves to be busier than 90% of everyone else. This is, of course, also true for me.

This leads to the second part of the answer: I’ve felt for a long time that the landscape of blogging has been changing considerably, particularly with lifestreaming now a part of our daily diet. I’ve blogged about noise on various occasions, and I’ve also noticed a huge shift in my own reading habits – a shift which has an obvious effect on my writing habits, too. I’m less interested in “blog post as news”, instead preferring longer, deeper, better written pieces like the beautifully-crafted Business Requirements Are Bullshit. I’m me – you’re you – but the important thing for me is that I write in a way which complements the medium and as much as possible brings some kind of value to those of you who have given up some of your valuable time to read what I have to say.

This brings me neatly on to the third part which was summed up in a conversation with Brian Kelly and Paul Walk over a post-work pint recently: why the F do we all blog, anyway? We were talking at the time about Paul’s much-commented post on blog awards. Paul is similar to me – and different to Brian – in that the former blogs as a hobby and not as a job. Paul runs his blog under his own name; Brian runs his (albeit not “officially”), under “UKWebFocus”. Brian has a series of blog policies and sticks closely to his particular topics; Paul could write about his washing powder if he so chose. I’ve always been clear (both to my readers and employers) that this isn’t a “work blog” – but it isn’t a “personal” one, either.

I started Electronic Museum as a way of reflecting on technology in the museum space. More than a year on and I’m interested in innovation, in technology ubiquity, in sharing data, in real people, in the value of attention data, in the user as focus. All of these call back to what makes museums unique, in my opinion, and it is in these arenas that I personally feel the battles for online content will be (or are being) fought and won. The point is it isn’t just a conversation about museums any more. And really, it never has been, in this always-on, radically-connected crazy internetwebthing we spend so much time staring at and talking about.

Much as I’ve carved a niche here with museum professionals who seem to value what I have to say, I’m also fascinated by the irony that nowadays it isn’t niche professionals that we need any more. Curators (museum and otherwise) – IMO – aren’t anything at all without the vision to see that what they know needs communicating in new, challenging ways; ways that may well undermine their professionalism purely because the social network they engage with has dug up someone who knows better than them. Content owners need to start to understand that value simply can’t be measured by “visits” when many people are out there having experiences with their content and not within the walled garden of their site. Technologists have got to stop hiding behind PEBCAC and start engaging with the people that are currently alienated by technology.

So what – exactly – am I saying?

I guess it is this: you’ll notice a shift over the coming weeks and months as I write about more of the things I’m doing outside of the museum space: my dabblings with the Arduino, for instance, the various other projects I’m continuously working on, a secretish partnership I’ll be able to talk about in January, and so on. I hope I won’t break the niche I’ve created – I hope that if you are a “museum professional” then you’ll continue to hang out here – I think what I have to say will be interesting, or at least mildly entertaining, whoever you are.

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If you love something, set it free

November 19, 2008 · 8 Comments

Last week, I had the privilege of being asked to be one of the keynote speakers at a conference in Amsterdam called Kom je ook?. This translates as “Heritage Upgrade” and describes itself as “a symposium for cultural heritage institutions, theatres and museums”.

I was particularly excited about this one: firstly, my partner keynoters were Nina Simon (Museum Two) and Shelley Bernstein (Community Manager at the Brooklyn Museum) – both very well known and very well respected museum and social web people. Second (if I’m allowed to generalise): “I like the Dutch” – I like their attitude to new media, to innovation and to culture in general; and third – it looked like fun.

Nina talked about “The Participatory Museum” – in particular she focussed on an oft-forgotten point: the web isn’t social technology per se; it is just a particularly good tool for making social technology happen. The fact that the online medium allows you to track, access, publish and distribute are good reasons for using the web BUT the fact that this happens to populate one space shouldn’t limit your thinking to that space, and shouldn’t alter the fact that this is always, always about people and the ways in which they come together. The changing focus of museum moving from being a content provider to being a platform provider also rang true with me in so many ways. Nina rounded off with a “ten tips for social technology” (slide 12 and onwards).

Shelley gave another excellent talk on the incredible work she is doing at the Brooklyn Museum. She and I shared a session on Web2 at Museums and the Web 2007, and once again it is the genuine enthusiasm and authenticity which permeates everything she does which really comes across. This isn’t “web2 for web2’s sake” – this is genuine, pithy, risky, real content from enthused audiences who really want to take part in the life of the museum. 

My session was on setting your data and content free:

Hopefully the slides speak for themselves, but in a nutshell my argument is that although we’ve focussed heavily on the social aspects of Web2.0 from a user perspective, it is the stuff going on under the hood which really pushes the social web into new and exciting territory. It is the data sharing, the mashing, the API’s and the feeds which are at the heart of this new generation of web tools. We can resist the notion of free data by pretending that people use the web (and our sites) in a linear, controlled way, but the reality is we have fickle and intelligent users who will get to our content any which way. Given this, we can either push back against freer content by pretending we can lock it down, or – as I advocate – do what we can to give user access to it.

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Limiting addiction

October 24, 2008 · 10 Comments

Before the brave new world of cloud computing, selling and buying software was a pretty straightforward thing. It’d either be shareware, in which case you’d download and walk away, or there would be some kind of time- or function-limited demo which you’d (if you liked it) upgrade at some point in the future.

Since stuff went cloudy, life has got a little bit more complicated in the world of the software business model. Recently, I’ve happened across a number of services that approach their business models in different ways, and I thought it’d be interesting to compare and contrast.

Pic from http://tinyurl.com/5hwvvp

One of the models that has now become popular carries the buzzword “Freemium”. It’s essentially not a whole lot different from a downloaded bit of software which is functionally crippled in some way. In the Freemium model, something is provided which allows the end user access to free stuff, but a lack ultimately convinces them to upgrade to some kind of paid – “premium” – service. A classic example is the widely-lauded hosted project management software by 37 Signals, Basecamp. You’re encouraged to sign up for free. Your account then gives you access to a limited version of the software. In this particular instance, you get a single project and no file uploads, but apart from that everything is the same as the paid version. The unpaid version gives you enough of a glimpse into the functionality and usefulness of the tool to realise that the additional functionality provided by the paid version is likely to be useful. 

Another example is SugarSync, the cloud file-syncing service. Interestingly, while they used to have a “get 2Gb free” freemium model, they have now reverted to “10Gb for 45 days” on their free plan. We’ll examine why in a moment.

The Freemium model is based around something I’m going to call limiting addiction. The service provider is attempting to find a fine balance between provision and lack of provision of service. In the Basecamp example, 37 Signals are looking for users to find the service useful enough that they see the value, but not so useful that they’ve got enough with the free version. In this particular example, they’ve got things right: a single user without file upload ability gets you far enough to see the value of the service, but it isn’t enough that you can actually run any projects usefully. Net result? You upgrade to premium.

Let’s examine SugarSync now. When they first launched, they offered a time-unlimited 2Gb of storage space under a free account. I don’t know the inside track, but I’m betting that users found the service too useful - 2Gb is after all a fair amount of synced disk space – and I’ll bet that not enough of them were upgrading to the premium editions. The Freemium model in this case offered too much for nothing.

In the last couple of days I’ve signed up for a service called Spotify. It’s a downloadable app which lets you stream pretty much any music on demand to your desktop. I love the service, possibly more than anything I’ve come across this year – I’m an avid last.fm and Seeqpod fan, but Spotify goes a step further – it is fast, reliable, content rich. It is pretty much the perfect music application for me. The Spotify business model is interesting: you can get music for free, but it is ad supported: every 3-4 songs there is an audio advert. To remove this you can either pay 99p a day or £9.99 a month. 

All well and good. But (and I hate to say this in case they’re reading..), Spotify is offering too much for free. The ads just aren’t annoying enough or frequent enough for me to bother paying the premium. The value is – like with the original SugarSync model – too high. I’m addicted, but not limited by the free version of the software. I’m a customer waiting to happen: If those ads were more in my face – if the software was more limiting – I’d almost definitely pay to get rid of them. I’m sure Spotify will get this right in the end: they’re currently still in closed beta and are very early into their market, and I’m delighted that I get so much value for nothing for the time being. If they’re savvy, though, they’ll continuously tweak their business plan as time goes on until they have the perfect freemium balance. And what is that balance? Well, a high addiction -> limitation -> upgrade rate.

There’s one more example that I’d like to look at, and this one fails for reasons that I’ll highlight in a minute. This example is a web prototyping tool called Protoshare. Rather than opting for a Freemium / functionally limited model, they’ve gone for a 30 day free trial. During that 30 days, you get full access to all the functionality – but after that you have to pay.

Again, all well and good. However, there’s a subtlety here which I think Protoshare have missed. It’s this: People like me who do IA work for a living tend to do stuff on a client/project basis. This means I have two options when it comes to Protoshare: I either start the 30 day trial at an arbitrary (between projects) time – this is fine, and pressure-free, but like most people if I’m not using a tool for a specific purpose, I don’t fully evaluate it under real-life conditions. The second option is to use Protoshare for a specific project. In this scenario, however, I’m putting myself way out on a limb – I haven’t had a chance to test the software before committing to it, and there’s no way I’m going to do a bit of paid (and timetabled..) work for a client without using a tool that I know and trust. Net result? I walk away from a product which could be exactly what I need – and would pay for. If Protoshare had a limiting addiction model, I’d probably have signed up by now.

There are infinite ways of cutting the Freemium business model: you can do it around paid support, functionality, disk space, speed, look and feel, etc. The extent to which various facets of the software are measured and valued is key, and – as the Protoshare example shows – really quite subtle as well. It’s not a case of “X has value Y, do Z” – it is more about considering the software against the likely market, users, use scenarios and so on. Ultimately, though, all these approaches are about giving a taste of something which tempts to an extent that you want more, but doesn’t satisfy. If you fail to tempt enough (Protoshare) or satisfy too much (Spotify), it’s very likely that you’ll either miss markets, or revenue, or both.

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“we have a tech generation that thinks that’s all there is”

October 14, 2008 · 8 Comments

How to go about writing up a conference like Future of Web Apps? With, what, a thousand plus people converging on a space as large as London’s Excel centre, it’s not like you can be at every talk, breathe in every vibe, taste all the startups. I was even more crippled by the fact that I couldn’t make the first day. Nonetheless, here are some thoughts…

Mark Zuckerberg. Now with media training (TM)

Mark Zuckerberg. Now with Media Training (TM)

Conferences – in my experience anyway – aren’t usually about the sessions. They’re about the people, the schmooze, the drinking, the between bits. FOWA does these bits – big time. I had the headache to prove it. From that perspective, FOWA (and I believe I’ve – almost by accident – been to every one) is a winner. Big name (Zuckerberg, Rose, Arrington, Sierra..), big announcements, big…well, everything.

 

For this, Carsonified (and I’m slowly getting to know ‘em – they’re Bath-based after all..) get massive quantities of respect. Ryan Carson is good at this shit: he knows it, the industry knows it, and it’s obviously a formula that works.

But..but..but..

I also think that conferences need a very strong sense of direction. It’s all too easy to revel in the hero-worship that surrounds people like Zuckerberg, and somehow forget that however much we might want to influence 100 million people with our web app, most of us aren’t there yet, and there’s a huge number of boxes to tick – technology, funding, usability, content, luck – before we’re going to even stand a chance of getting there. FOWA should be the place that, even if not actually answering these questions, goes about helping young developers begin to ask them: how can I get funding, what technology should I use, how can I create outstanding content, and so on. I’m not close to being a cutting edge developer, but every session on the developer track was so generic you could probably sum them up like this: “oAuth: it’s quite good”, “cloud computing: it’s quite good”, “work-life balance: it’s quite good”. To me, FOWA doesn’t come across as the future of web apps. It’s the near past of web apps. 

The challenge that Ryan et al. face is not an easy one: they’ve built a conference of big names, and with that comes a conference with a high level of sexiness and kudos. But what they haven’t done, IMO, is to build a conference with big ideas. This is increasingly going be a problem as – in the words of developers – FOWA attempts to scale into the future. As much as the bits-in-between make you feel warm inside about the whole tech scene, it’s a transient kind of warmth – as Simon Cowell said recently on XFactor (I know, hard to imagine someone as high-brow as me watching..): “it’s like eating water”. Without really challenging sessions, the socialising bit becomes really pretty vacuous. 

I don’t have the answers to this, but I have some thoughts:

Firstly, and most importantly – ideas. If we’re not at FOWA to exchange ideas, what exactly are we there for? At events like this – actually, at events like life – I’m looking for disruption, for new stuff, for insight, for difference. I’m not expecting academically rigorous research: I go to museum conferences for that – but newness should surely be a part of a conference all about the future, right? While some of the sessions delivered that (for me: Kathy Sierra on engaging users and Gavin Starks on green computing), for the most part this was very much a safe, formulaic place and not a bleeding-edge, forward-looking one. The business talks were leagues ahead of the developer ones, but even so there wasn’t enough challenging going on. Even Jason Calacanis, who pretty much makes a living from being offensive, didn’t manage to say much about life/work balance apart from “work hard, play hard”, which is hardly disruptive or original. Originality is often brave and sometimes dangerous, but I think this is the space that FOWA should be striving to be in.

Second: speakers need to be not just mediocre or good, but fucking great. I want entertaining, well-delivered, funny. Simon Wardley (I missed his session, but we shared a stage in Cardiff a couple of weeks ago) – is all of these. He rocks. He could talk shit and it’d still be great – as it happens, he talks with sense and conviction AND makes it funny too. Ditto, Kathy Sierra, who in my opinion did the best thing I’ve seen in some time: a funny, insightful, interactive session which really engaged as well as inspired. Many of the people presenting at FOWA just can’t do it. They might be great developers, but they can’t talk in public, and I’m sorry, but if you can’t do it, don’t do it. Or at least have a mind-blowing idea to cover up the fact you can’t talk about it :-)

wakoopa. software without a reason, and bad spelling too...

wakoopa. software without a reason, and bad spelling too...

Finally: I think that all events like this can – and should – learn from people outside the specific sector. The tech scene should increasingly be listening to, and encouraging discourse with normal people. Ask yourself – where were the users at FOWA? It’s easy impressing a room full of developers with your new startup. It’s incredibly hard impressing a room full of people who have full, busy lives doing things other than geekery. It’s great having the funders and business guys there, but I also think it’d be really interesting to hear from people who struggle with technology – and endeavour to get some insight into what works for them. I’m personally 100% in support of Tim O’Reilly and his crusade to encourage tech that makes a difference rather than tech that scratches a transient, unimportant itch (and yes, Wakoopa, I’m afraid that’s you..).  I think it’s especially important to focus on this stuff in the current wave of uncertainty about our financial and environmental futures.

I hope this doesn’t seem an overly negative response to FOWA. It’s not meant to be – after all, I’ll be going again next year. This is a great event, and really the only one of its kind in the UK – but I also hope they learn to grow over time and mature the conference into something with a bit more weight – not serious, or academic, but perhaps finding ways to improve quality, Pirsig style…

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It’s FOWA time again

October 8, 2008 · 4 Comments

I’m off to Future of Web Apps tomorrow. It’s (I think) my fourth year, but I could well have miscounted, what with getting old and all. Unfortunately, I can’t make it up until late on Thursday, but the schedule on Friday looks better anyway, so better that way round I guess.

FOWA is usually a good one to go to – a kind of chalk to the cheese that are standard museum/HE get-togethers. Wheras the latter tend to be fairly cautious, slightly academic affairs, FOWA is usually stuffed to the hilt with VC-funded 17 year-olds just waiting to be bought by Google or for the next bubble to explode and dash their dreams on the rocks of inevitability.

Having got the bitterness out of the way (I’m fookin 35 ffs, and STILL don’t have any VC funding :-) ), I usually come away from FOWA with a fair amount of enthusiasm for the world of web apps and what they have to offer. To be honest, right now I could do with some of that enthusiasm – I’m slightly feeling that the stuff we’re seeing right now is all pretty transient, non-game-changing stuff; technology that is funded just because somebody somewhere needs to fund something, and not because useful things are actually being built.

It’s stuff like sw0p (by my new friend and BathCamp helper extraordinaire, Darren Beale) that is getting me excited right now: web apps that solve real problems like “shit, we throw away a lot of stuff” rather than “hey, another twitter AIR app…”.

If I’m perfectly honest (and REALLY not wanting to do the media thing and fan the flames of fear..), it all feels a bit pre-burst right now. But I’ll let you all know on Friday once I’ve heard and schmoozed and mingled.

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Assumptions, exactitudes, perfection and creativity

October 7, 2008 · 4 Comments

A while back, those wonderful fellas at Box UK asked me to take part in their Cardiff Web Scene Meet-up #4. I pondered for a long while what I was going to do. The obvious one was an overview of BathCamp: how we put it together, what tools we used to collaborate, and so-on. In the end I decided I’d use the slightly different format (an informal gathering in a bar) as an excuse for a slightly different kind of presentation (an informal gathering of thoughts and slides..), and not just do the obvious thing..

The slides are an expansion on my previous post, Newton vs Einstein, and form an underlying question which continues to be an itch I need to scratch. The question is really summed up in my third slide: When do we need perfection? . 

The Newton / Einstein metaphor (for those who can’t be arsed to read my original post) stemmed from In Our Time on Radio 4: given that we manage to go about our daily lives (and even carry out a number of fairly stunning technical tasks, such as putting a man on the moon) without worrying about the complex rightness of Einstein, how much can we make do with simple approximations - how much do we actually need to worry about being “right” when we’re in an environment of wanting to get things done, where “rightness” actually hinders rather than helps?

This question isn’t as simple as it first appears. There is no binary position here, no right or wrong, and yet often in IT scenarios, we are asked to choose EITHER the easy, quick, risky, “lightweight” way OR the long, arduous,  ”enterprise” one (this Dilbert cartoon, posted by @miaridge on Twitter about museum projects, may seem oddly familiar…). And yet this isn’t just about over-speccing or analysis paralysis. This goes deeper, asking questions about creativity and innovation and what these mean.

Here’s an example. For maybe 5 of my 7 years at the Science Museum, the entire website was published (not served – how stupid do you think I am ;-) ) from an Access database using a simple system I built in ASP during my first year at the museum. This system enabled maybe 20 authors to contribute to the site, whilst maintaining a simple templating system and look and feel. During this time, the site was run out of a single (and slightly battered) web server. Just before I left, we went through a long CMS project, and ended up installing the excellent Sitecore content management system across (if my memory serves me correctly) 7 servers, plus having a re-design which culminated in the current Science Museum website: it is beautiful, clean, well coded, and – frankly – the apple of my eye. 

It would be very, very easy to dismiss the old site and way of doing things in light of the “professional” approach that content management at “enterprise” level brings to the party, but the fact was for five years the old site performed nearly perfectly, both technically and in terms of responding to the content needs of the organisation. It was imperfect, hacked-together, “lightweight” – and did the job. Compare that to now (when I’m betting that 90% of the CMS functionality and 95% of the server capacity isn’t used..) and it’s not immediately obvious to me – and this is a quite open statement, without bias – which is the better solution. I think both bring benefits and disbenefits, and somewhere in the middle is a ground which more of us should be striving to inhabit, rather than hanging on to our notions of “lightweight vs enterprise”.

These questions begin with a bias even in the naming. “Lightweight” seems fickle, faddish, subject to change and risk. “Enterprise” is laden with visions of dull corporate lunches, sales people and multi-million pound pricetags.

The question I ask in the slides really outline the entire theme to this blog and the questions I have been asking over the past decade (eek!) working online. Brian Kelly suggests in this post that “it is time to get serious” – that strategic thinking somehow lives in a different place to the lightweight. He’s referencing the presentation we did together a couple of years ago (Web 2.0: Stop thinking, start doing) – but I can’t help thinking that now is the time to bring strategic and lightweight together rather than trying to drive them apart.

My time as Head of Web at the museum was almost all about strategy, about bringing together digital and real content and about getting things done. Ultimately, I’m way, way more on the strategic side of this stuff than anything else. But…getting creative things done requires making assumptions - inaccuracies and uncertainty are inherent and valuable. 

Ultimately, most of us work in enviroments that are at complete odds to creativity: we are forced to work to project plans, “plan” our time, “justify” our expense, “do” the actions. Web2.0 and “lightweightness” are never going to be comfortable – these approaches are deliberately disruptive. The question is – and always has been – how do we embrace this uncertainty and creativity and move forward but still maintain a clear view of the horizon..?

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