Ideas¶

22 November 2010
in Conferences, Ideas
6 min read

Let’s build a “Debian for Development Data”

I just returned from an intense week in the UK: an IKM Emergent workshop in Oxford, and the Open Government Data Camp in London had me almost drowning in “open data” examples and conversations, with a particular angle on aid data and the perspectives of international development.

As the result of that, I think we’re ready for a “Debian for Development Data”: a collection of data sets, applications and documentation to service community development, curated by a network of people and organisations who share crucial values on democratisation of information and empowerment of people.

“Open data” is mainstream newspaper content now

Mid 2009, after the 1%EVENT, a couple of innovative Dutch platforms came together to explore the opportunities of opening up our platforms: wouldn’t it be great if someone in an underdeveloped community had access to our combined set of services and information?

We had a hard time escaping new jargon (federated social networks, data portability, privacy commons, linked open data, the semantic web) and sketching what it would look like in five years. But then again, suppose it was five years earlier: in mid 2004, no-one could predict what Youtube, Facebook and Twitter look like today, even though many of us already felt the ground shaking.

The technical web was embracing the social web, of human connections.
The social web pushed “literacy”: people wanted to participate and they learned how to do that.

A year and a half later, “open data” is catching up with us, and going through a similar evolution. Governments and institutions have started to release data sets (the Dutch government will too, the UK released data on all spending over £25,000 on Friday). So when will the social dimension be embraced in open data?

A week of open data for development

At an IKM Emergent workshop in Oxford, on Monday and Tuesday, around 25 people came together to talk about the impact of open data on international development cooperation. We discussed when we would consider “linked open data” a success for development. One key aspect was: getting more stakeholders involved.

Then at Open Government Data Camp (#OGDCamp) in London, on Thursday and Friday, around 250 people worked in sessions on all kinds of aspects of open data. Several speakers called for a stronger social component: both in the community of open data evangelists and in reaching out to those for whom we think open data will provide new opportunities for development.

At IKM, Pete Cranston described how his perception of access to information changed when a person approached him in a telecentre to ask how the price of silk changed on the international market: he was a union representative, negotiating with a company who wanted to cut worker salaries because of a decline in the market price. Without access to internet or the skills to use it, you don’t have the same confidence we have that such a question can be answered at all.

Then at OGDCamp, David Eaves reminded us that libraries were (partly) built before the majority of the population knew how to read, as an essential part of the infrastructure to promote literacy and culture ¹.

Telecenters fulfil a role in underdeveloped communities as modern-day libraries, providing both access as well as the skills to access information and communication tools via the internet.

But we don’t have “open data libraries” or an infrastructure to promote “open data literacy” yet.

How open source software did it

It shouldn’t be necessary for people to become data managers just to benefit from open data sets. Intermediaries can develop applications and services to answer the needs of specific target groups based on linked open data, much as librarians help make information findable and accessible.

There are also parallels with open source software. Not every user needs to become a developer in order to use it. Although it is still to think otherwise sometimes, the open source movement has managed to provide easier interfaces to work with the collective work of developers.

The open data movement can identify a few next steps by looking at how the open source movement evolved.

Open Source	Open Data
Software packages (operating systems, word processors, graphics editors, and so on) are developed independently. Each software package can choose the programming language, development tools, the standards and best practices they use.	Data sets (budget overviews, maps, incident reports) are produced independently as well. The data formats and delivery methods can be chosen freely, and there are various emerging standards and best practices.
Communities around software packages usually set up mailing lists, chat channels and bug trackers for developers and users to inform each other about new releases, problems, and the roadmap for new versions. The mantra is “many eyes make all bugs shallow”: let more people study the behaviour or the code of software, and errors and mistakes will be found and repaired more easily.	Data sets mainly are published. As Tim Davies noted in one of the conversations, there don’t seem to be mailing lists or release notes around data sets yet. To deliver the promise of a “wisdom of the crowds”, users of data sets should have more and better ways to provide feedback and report errors.
Open source software is mostly used via distributions like Debian, Redhat, Ubuntu, separating producers and integrators. A distribution is a set of software packages, compiled and integrated in a way that makes them work well together, thereby lowering the barrier of entry to use the software. Distributions each have a different focus (free software, enterprise support, user-friendliness) and thus make different choices on quality, completeness, and interfaces.	Perhaps the current data sets released by governments could be considered “distributions”, although the producer (a department) and the integrator (the portal manager) usually work for the same institution. CKAN.net could be considered a distribtion as well, although it does not (yet?) make clear choices on the type and the quality of data sets it accepts.

Software distributions make it possible to pool resources to make software interoperable, set up large-scale infrastructure, and streamline collaboration between “upstream” and “downstream”. The open character stimulates an ecosystem where volunteers and businesses can work together, essential to create new business models.

Towards a “Debian for Development Data”

To sum up several concerns around open data for development:

Open data is currently mainly advocated for by developers and policy makers, without a strong involvement of other stakeholders (most noteworthy: those we like to benefit in underdeveloped communities). It tends to be driven mostly by web technology and is mostly focused on transparency of spending. It does not take into account (political) choices on why activities were chosen, and also lacks a lot in recording the results.
Data sets and ontologies are hard to find, not very well linked, with few generic applications working across data sets, and examples of good use of multiple data sets. Once you want to make data sets available, it is hard to promote the use of your data, provide feedback loops for improvements, administer dependencies, and keep track of what was changed along the way and why.
There are hardly any structural social components around current open data sets, repositories and registries.

So why don’t we start a “Debian for Development Data”?

A Social Contract and Open Data Guidelines like those for Debian can capture essential norms and values shared by community members, and inform decisions to be made. The contract can for instance value “actionable opportunties” over financial accountability. The Agile Manifesto is another example to draw from.
The community should set up basic communication facilities such as a mailing list, website, and issue tracker, to ease participation. Decision-making is essentially based on meritocracy: active participants choose who has the final say or how to reach consensus.
The data sets should be accompanied by software and documentation, to take away the problem of integration for most end users. Each data set and tool should have at least one “maintainer”, who keeps an eye on updates and quality, and is the liaison for “upstream” data set publishers, offering a feedback loop from end-users to producers.
The CKAN software (powering the CKAN.net website mentioned before) draws on the lessons from distributions like Debian for its mechanisms to keep track of dependencies between data sets, and has version control, providing some support to track changes.
Ubuntu divides packages in categories like “core”, “non-free” and “ restrcited” to deal with license issues, and to express commitment of the community towards maintaining quality.

We stimulate the social component by providing more stakeholders a point of entry to get involved through socio-technical systems. We stimulate literacy by offering the stakeholders ways to get open data, publish their own, experiment with applications, and learn from each other. And we circumvent the tendency towards over-standardisation by doing this in parallel with other initiatives with sometimes overlapping goals and often different agendas.

1A quick check on Wikipedia indicates this seems to have mainly been the case in North-America, though.

13 July 2010
in Ideas, Technical
3 min read

Tasktop to improve a knowledge worker’s productivity

I’ve been using Mylyn for quite some years now. Mylyn introduced the concept of task-focused work: activate a task in your to-do list, and only see the files relevant to that task. Tasktop, the company behind Mylyn, extends Mylyn as Tasktop, with even more features, and promises “improved productivity, guaranteed.”. It works great when I am developing software, and also could support me as knowledge worker, for instance by managing bookmarks and browser tabs in Firefox. But I’d like to see it offer more support for task management within Firefox too. A bit like this.

Mylyn and Tasktop

If you’re a developer, you probably at least had a look at Eclipse at some point. And perhaps at the Mylyn extension, to connect it to various bug trackers to populate your to-do list. It provides a standardised way of keeping track of issues in bug trackers, and helps to focus on the files relevant to a specific task. Switching from one task to another becomes lots easier, and so the cognitive overhead of managing tasks (especially finding the files associated with a task) is reduced significantly. As Mik Kersten, one of Mylyn’s masterminds, demonstrated in his PhD ¹.

Mik founded Tasktop, a company that takes the “task-focused desktop” approach even further, connecting Mylyn also to email (Outlook, Gmail, IMAP) and to the Firefox web browser.

And Mylyn and Tasktop have a lot more features, many of which I am not – or perhaps: not yet – using.

From developer to knowledge worker

These days, I hardly get to spend time on programming, but instead spend most of my time as knowledge worker. Firefox is now my predominant “desktop”, and I find myself flipping back and forth between Eclipse and Firefox quite a bit.

The people at Tasktop have been very responsive to feedback, and thereby also encouraged me to make regular contributions to their issue tracker, mostly with suggestions for improvements or new features. So I filed a suggestion to expose more of Mylyn and Tasktop in a Firefox extension.

I recently decided to try out Wireframesketcher, another Eclipse plugin, developed by Petru Severin, to sketch a bit how I think an extended TaskTop addon for Firefox might help me better.

Use case: stumbling upon a new thing for my to do list

../../../assets/posts/1d38dfe92a46d352bd21fc468c10fcd0_MD5.png

Step 1: See an interesting page

I somehow end up on a page in my browser for a conference, event, or topic I am interested in. For instance via email, a chat, a twitter message, a phone call, a visitor in my office. I want to quickly make a new task to capture what I’m looking at.

../../../assets/posts/e7c043f1bf8cff670187fa7c14122d24_MD5.png

Step 2: Collect information

Once I created the task or activated it, I want to perhaps add a few pages to the task context, and perhaps some notes or a copy of some text on a page. And maybe schedule it or add a due date, for instance a deadline for registration, or for submitting a proposal or a paper.

Ideally, the task context could also add downloaded files to the context.

../../../assets/posts/11b8f5199af1a4d7291f9fecfe576b95_MD5.png

Step 3: Back to previously active task

And then I want to go back to the task I was working on, or another one on my schedule.

In summary, my wishes:

create a new task or switch to another task within Firefox, without switching to Eclipse;
have access to notes, task context (especially bookmarks and visited pages), and scheduled and due dates
be able to add or remove pages that I have open to my task context.

1 Mik Kersten, “Focusing knowledge work with task context” (Vancouver, BC, Canada: University of British Columbia, 2007), http://www.tasktop.com/docs/publications/2007-01-mik-thesis.pdf.

17 November 2009
in Ideas
2 min read

Goodbye to the gatherers, welcome to the web: mammoths and modernity.

Imagine the first farmers: they lived in a society of hunters and gatherers. Every so often, you’d pack up your stuff and move along, to follow your food. Find new things to eat, because you’ve exhausted the place you lived in.

The farmers introduced a new way of thinking: what if we could just grow our food in one place? That would save the effort of travelling around. So they started experimenting: sowing seeds, taking care of the young sprouts, trying to cultivate their plants. Until it was harvest time: reap the benefits of your labour, indulge in cornucopia for a while, store a bit, and start working on the next cycle.

The hunters and gatherers must have looked upon those folks as weird people: building houses ("sure, nice to live in but not very practical on your travels!"), creating ploughs and tools ("great way to move dirt, but how are you going to catch a mammoth or pluck a berry with that?"), storing food in storages ("won’t the mice and the rats just run with it?"). The hackers and nerds of their times, saying "go ahead and chase your mammoth, I’ll see you around, next Summer".

The farmers prevailed. They changed the way society works in most places on the world. We try to stick to where we are, and we even make rituals and routines around that, to affirm our convictions and location. And most of us are no longer involved in producing food, but rather in pursuing other goals.

I’m working in the field of international development collaboration. I often feel like a farmer, talking to hunters and gatherers, about what "web 2.0" is really about. Oh, he’s a techie, an engineer. But I’m experimenting with ways to grow compassion, engagement, collaboration. Online communities? Blogs and bookmarks? RSS and wikis? Social networking? Sure, but won’t the rats just eat your products while you’re having a party?

We don’t eat a lot of Mammoth Burger these days. And we could cultivate collaboration towards a common goal, without sacrifice or giving up (a lot of) our current live. We can build a global society based on solidarity, without loosing identity or community.

Lets move from chasing to cultivating.

(photo: CC-BY-SA-NC-20 by Poo-tee-weet?)

11 November 2009
in Ideas
2 min read

Flying saucers, flow and serendipity shape the web

Recently, my work has moved again towards "concept" and "facilitation", into the realm of the unknown, the things to be discovered. Especially around online collaboration, platforms to facilitate that, and internet strategies and architectures to support such processes: Web of Change, WijZijnMedia, NABUUR, Internationale Samenwerking 2.0 (in Dutch for now). It’s all about new community-organising strategies and tactics, and I love it: a potent mix of "where do we go from here" and "what will we have built by the end of today". Pragmatic idealism: punk+utopia with web 2.0+mobile as catalyst, or perhaps: "do it yourself serendipity". But also: how to let flying saucers get you there. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s talk at TED and Matt Leacock’s Google Tech Talk guide me.

"The travels and adventures of Serendipity" is a book, given to me by a dear one, about sociological semantics and the history of the term "serendipity". And although my short life seems full of serendipity, I haven’t paid proper respect yet to both the book and the gift and the idea, by reading it. I’m more of a "watching" person, absorbing presentations, documentaries and films over reading a book. Maybe soon, but until then, here are two (connected) examples to show what I understand by "serendipity".

First, I watched Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talk at TED about his chance encounter to get into the psychology of flow through flying saucers. His TED question "What makes a life worth living?" touches deeply on the kind of talks we have at Web of Change, the kind of work that made Obama’s campaign so successful, and NABUUR’s concept so addictive: once you feel connected, you can take on the world, and once you’re in flow, you change reality:

Then I watched Matt Leacock’s Google Tech Talk on how he used the principles of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to guide his design of a cooperative game: Pandemic. As players, to win you basically need to beat the system ("the algorithm" as he puts it — any similarity to Google and the "Society of the Query" conference in Amsterdam this week is purely serendipituous, not coindicental). The link between Pandemic and current society obviously is left as an exercise to the reader, and I encourage you to watch till the end: the Q&A with Matt had some insightful moments for me.

Around an hour and a half watching time to put ideal theories into practice, pretty close to where I work right now. Matt’s takeaways common to game design and user experience design are worthwhile.

8 June 2009
in Ideas, Technical
5 min read

Curing “Data Hugging Disorder”

Last Friday, the 1%Club held their (first, probably not last) 1%EVENT, about “international development cooperation 2.0”. I facilitated a session on “connecting the platforms”, to pave the (technical) way towards a cure for what Ushahidi’s Juliana Rotich aptly referred to as “ Data Hugging Disorder “. It resulted in a positive discussion with several people of organisations that build or host online platforms. Coming Monday, I hope the discussion continues at a meeting in The Hague about a possible Dutch IS-Hub.

Tools, platforms, exchange, goals

The evolution of international development cooperation in a nutshell:

first we tried to build the best water pump
we realised we need to build the right water pump
then we started to exchange lessons learned about building water pumps
and now we have the Millennium Development Goals to let all water pump work contribute to a common goal (in this case: “ Target 7.C: Halve, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation “)

“International Development Cooperation 2.0” heavily depends on using ICTs as tools for collaboration. In essence, my feeling is we’re repeating the process in building online platforms: some people still want to build the best platform, most are busy building the right platform for the situation, and (as the session proved) are getting ready to exchange the lessons we learn, and for standards to work towards common goals.

Open standards as a way forward

With several people in the room with (information-)technical affinity, the discussion quickly moved to open standards to choose or to develop. Although there are many concerns about privacy, identity, and security, an important breakthrough was that most of those concerns are not at all specific to the field of international development cooperation. We should make sure our concerns are documented, but more likely than not, those concerns will be addressed in some form by the big platforms. For the exchange of “actionable opportunities”, the Open Actions format is just emerging. The uncharted territory seems to be information around projects in international development.

Probably no coincidence: some of my current consultancy work is on project administration and project management solutions in such a context. Logframes are popular vehicles for project goals information, but so far I haven’t found clear patterns in how organisations deal with their projects and programmes from a management process point of view. Maybe this is the area where the conversation still needs to develop before standards can emerge.

A Dutch IS-Hub?

The time is apparently right to get to standardisation: indepently, Cordaid and their platform development company have initiated a discussion on Monday about how to deal with the technical, organisational and legal aspects of sharing information and reducing redundancy for people in building up expert profiles and making them available on various platforms.

Again, this is not an area specific to international development cooperation, so hopefully a chance to benefit from the work in many other places. Not so long ago, Aldo de Moor and I visited D-CIS at Delft University, where they try to solve similar problems in a different domain: how do you create “actor-agent systems”, where software helps a crisis manager to quickly get to the right expert in the case of a disaster. How to harvest expert profiles across many fields of expertise and organisations, and also take into account that an expert is not an expert anymore after 48 hours without sleep…

Making “data portability” the next “accessibility”

As the Dutch Ministry of International Cooperation is shaking up the NGO world here in The Netherlands. “Collaboration” and “Partnerships” are the new buzz words, and since “2.0” is part of the official policy, many organisations are slightly panicing about how to move forward, and how to quickly embrace some of that “2.0”. A great time to leapfrog for the Dutch international development cooperation world.

Over the years, “accessibility” has become a standard requirement for web sites. It’s easy for a client organisation to demand compliance to a certain level of accessibility as specified in open standards. It would be great if we now can move to a similar model with levels of “data portability”, to get NGOs to add those to the requirements of their next platform.

Hopefully, Monday’s discussion is a next step towards such a standard requirement, and also offers a common road map for the platform builders. That would also open up the opportunities for BarCamps and such to join forces on implementation.

A quick guide to standards

Here’s a dump of the standards mentioned at Friday’s meeting (not linked yet, but maybe one day):

News, updates: RSS, well-accepted by now
Identity and authentication: OpenID, OAuth
“Social actions”: Open Actions
Projects: Open Archive Initiative as meta-level, Dublin Core, DIDL, OpenPro
Constituency, membership:?
Social networks: FOAF, XFN
Applications: Open Social, Facebook Connect?
Payments: mobile banking? how to do payments?
Market places:?

Raw notes of the session

After an intro by Niels about the importance of open source and free software as a basis, and my intro about Social Actions, the Change The Web contest, and the emerging Open Actions format, almost all of the 25 or so attendees (note to self: build a list of participants again next time!) shared their concerns and aspirations. I have tried to write down key elements I heard, here’s the raw dump of the flip chart notes:

How to work together? Technical standards seem feasible, pride and identity seem to get in the way.
What are the standards we should focus on?
Is there any form of collaboration already?
What open standards for exchanging projects are there? Is it about project information, how to deal with quality, what about the social networking around it?
How to get away from having profiles on many different sites?
How to enable collaboration on many different platforms?
How to make the collaboration itself central: from social network to collaboration network?
For example: how to get Kiva into your project environment, rather than your project into Kiva?
Concerns about identity, safety, privacy, security. How to keep control over where your information and identity is going?
What formal ways are there to capture documentation?
How to activate people who normally wouldn’t be active or interested in this context?
Can we enable knowledge sharing through micro-blogging?
How to guide the choice of a platform?
How would we even define “platform”, are we all talking about the same thing when we use that word?
Lets create best practices, compatibility, and meta standards. But: we can’t do that, “Google should do it” and “Facebook wins”.
Types of information we could share, standards in that area we could use (see earlier in this post).
Which platform gets what part? For instance: the business model of one platform is based on taking a percentage of the funds raised – how to deal with that when adding the fund raising feature to another platform?

Thanks 1%Club

For the 1%EVENT, Bart and Anna walked the talk, listened to all the suggestions made to them over time, and had two great Open Space facilitators to set up the day’s agenda. Maybe not every attendee and “poster pioneer” felt comfortable with it at once, but the co-created, slightly chaotic and creative sequence of events was precisely the kind of event I missed in The Netherlands so far!

14 March 2009
in News, Ideas
3 min read

Clay Shirky as my Sound Byte Hero

I haven’t managed to write (publicly) for some time: new projects kept me busy, either launching, or preparing. But thanks to a tweet by Planspark, I read (yet another) piece by someone who is becoming my personal “Sound Byte Hero”: Clay Shirky. At the moment, Siegfried Woldhek and I are preparing a position paper on how International Development Cooperation will change, as part of a series of debates with existing organisations and the Minister for Development Cooperation here in The Netherlands. So when my friend Tim Bonnemann send out a tweet today “Must-read of the day: Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”, I summarised the take-away quotes for me.

My personal selection of “quotable quotes” from Clay Shirky’s “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”

“With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.”

“As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn’t know what to think. If you can’t trust Aristotle, who can you trust?”

“And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.
There are fewer and fewer people who can convincingly tell such a lie.”

““You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model”

“Imagine, in 1996, asking some net-savvy soul to expound on the potential of craigslist, then a year old and not yet incorporated. The answer you’d almost certainly have gotten would be extrapolation: “Mailing lists can be powerful tools”, “Social effects are intertwining with digital networks”, blah blah blah. What no one would have told you, could have told you, was what actually happened: craiglist became a critical piece of infrastructure. Not the idea of craigslist, or the business model, or even the software driving it. Craigslist itself spread to cover hundreds of cities and has become a part of public consciousness about what is now possible. Experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.”

““If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.”

“Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism.”

“No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the reporting we need.”

11 December 2008
in Ideas
4 min read

Aldo de Moor and I are rapidly approaching the end of our mid-week work retreat. The fresh sea breeze and the occasional glass of wine have helped us divide our attention between Real Work, and Serious Study. It resulted in an emerging framework or meta-model, with a few purposes:

Advance our earlier modelling work with new insights, and assess where we think things are by now.
Enable us to combine our years of experience in talking about various parts of the puzzle in a common structure.
Provide an overarching framework to look at the various models we have come to use or see over time.

It’s very much still a work in progress, but while twittering about our progress, I got into a conversation (via Facebook) with John Bywater of the Appropriate Software Foundation, which helped me clarify a bit of my thinking. I met John just over five years ago at Summer Source, where he introduced me to the concept of pattern languages. At that time, it was still too abstract for me to apply in my actual work, but over the years, patterns have become more common-place, for instance in PHP programming and in wikis.

Why a framework?

Over the years, I’ve been involved in several projects that crudely could be characterised as: a non-profit or governmental organisation takes the lead, and wants to embrace the internet in their attempt to increase effective collaboration and learning of people and organisations they work with. A few typical examples:

A development organisation wants to improve learning and knowledge management among their international offices, local staff, beneficiaries, and relevant experts.
A policy organisation wants to draw upon a multitude of opinions and experiences, to draft a policy proposal to be submitted to decision-making processes.
An advocacy organisation wants to coordinate their activities across a global network of grassroots, autonomous member organisations.
A campaigning organisation wants to enable their constituency to self-organise activities that create both local change and global impact.

The starting point can be a very detailed question, like “how can we use web 2.0”, “what platform should we use”, “how can we write a document together”, “how can we manage our projects”, or “how do we set up a knowledge management strategy”. There usually is a deeper question behind this, and I usually find myself approaching a project from three perspectives:

“Purpose”: what is the vision and mission of the organisation, how are they partnering with other organisations, and who are the people they try to involve?
“Process”: how do people work together, what policies and strategies are there, and what communities exist already?
“Technology”: what platforms can be used, what tools are people using to perform their work, and how does it link with the rest of the internet and ICT in general?

More often than not, there is a gap between the “purpose people”, who think in organisational strategies and communication impacts, and the “technology people”, who manage the tools, both ends often in a more central role. In between are the “process people” who work in the field. The challenge is then to find a way to “make things flow” between all of them.

Putting models together

With my colleagues, I have basically tried to answer the overarching (or underlying) question of how to tie it all together in several of such projects. We often did this by combining a few models we knew with our own thinking, to come up with the next iteration of our own concept. The models I know seem to address only part of the picture I sketched earlier: looking at community building, business planning, monitoring and evaluation, Community of Practice, life-cycle management, strategic networking, user experience design, agile development, and so on. How do they connect, or overlap? And how can they strengthen each other.

What we came up with, is a framework that combines the “purpose, process, technology” dimension with sphere of influence: how much control does the leading organisation have in a specific area of their environment. You completely control your own strategy, you can work in partnerships with others, and you try to offer value to individuals elsewhere.

In a matrix, with some examples of model elements for each part:

	“core”	“periphery”	“world”
Purpose	Programme vision, mission, strategy business plan	Partnership strategic networking “movement as network”	“Market” market research competitive analysis
	“communication” identity design brand mantra common story
Process	Intervention knowledge management strategy monitoring and evaluation	Community processes and roles community of practice life cycle	Network social network analysis
	“engagement” pyramid of engagement communication matrix tool selection
Technology	Web platform technology roadmap tool configuration	User experience information architecture usability visual design	Internet web 2.0 benchmarking metrics

This is a first version of our framework, and we’ll try to map the various models we have worked with, or know of, onto this framework, to see if it holds. In different parts of the life cycle (plan, create, maintain, adapt), you’ll need different types of models, and you’ll likely put the emphasis on different parts of the framework.

To be continued…

4 December 2008
in Ideas, Research
4 min read

“Doing things together online”

Recently, a couple of events allowed me to look again at how groups of people “do things together online”.

I’ve had a chance to meet up a few times in a short period with Aldo de Moor, and that helped us reflect on where things have come since we first drafted the contours of our “social context model”, nearly ten years ago now.

Add a few potential projects in the pipeline that deal with global networks of people who should produce something together. And the opportunity to dive a bit deeper into the NABUUR concept, to see how it is still pretty unique.

Aldo and I quickly concluded that although a lot is happening, and happening fast, there actually has been little progress in what we see as the hardest part of (online) collaboration: supporting work flows. Sure enough, people find ways to use the techno-centric tools that emerge, and services like Basecamp are making inroads into this. But most platforms still have some way to go.

With the rise of general-purpose social networking platforms, more and more organisations look at ways to also have such a platform. Let’s first distinguish two aspects:

One is to create a meeting point for like-minded people, to (eventually) work on a group activity.
Another aspect is to use it for “social media marketing”, to let people talk to their peers about an idea or campaign.

General-purpose platforms like Facebook, MySpace, Hyves are great tools for the social media marketing. With technologies like OpenSocial and Facebook Apps, you might even be able to structure your meeting points inside such a platform. Or you just build a “store-front” like a group or fan page that tries to draw people into your own platform of meeting points.

So now you are gathering groups of like-minded people. Now what?

Many platforms seem to stop at this “gathering phase” around a more or less single step: sign a petition, raise funds, pass on some viral video, feel solidarity around your idea. To me, it often feels “evangelic”, people take turns and “come out”, talk publicly about their deep-felt passion and ideas. However, there is no support or follow-up to actually help you through implementing your ideas, and often even little opportunity to actually have a real group conversation. It’s more like a flash mob, depending heavily on the social marketing to go viral.

Pledgebank helps you make a pledge and get solidarity from others
ChangeEverything lets you express the change you want to make
Kiva and MyC4 let groups of people raise money to invest in business

Keep the members informed

Some platforms make it a bit more sticky, and do offer tools to develop a group identity, essential for group members to build stronger commitment, and a level of (individual) accountability. This usually happens with tools like discussion forums, blogs, document and file sharing, and perhaps an agenda or wiki. Since the first BBSs of the 1980s, the technology has become easier to use (task-level improvements), but has not developed a lot of workflow support yet (group process improvements). The execution happens “outsite”, with progress reports online, and few tools to track progress or results.

Change.org gathers people around causes, keeping each other informed
Voor de Wereld van Morgen helps actions to gather support by others
Amazee is actually mentioning “collaborate” as part of the activity (but still needs to deliver)

Track progress

And then there are a few initiatives that actually try to help a group translate their goals into individual tasks and phases, closer towards a work breakdown structure, and then offer tools to let group members keep track of tasks and results. The main example of successful communities collaborating together online are open source projects, where group process patterns have emerged, and tools like issue trackers, road maps, and revision control actually support group members. Attempts in other fields seem to be still exploring how to make such group process patterns understandable for “everyone”.

NABUUR has “project rooms” with tasks you can do, and is adding story-telling and more social fun elements
OpenPlans helps keep track of tasks needed to realise the goals
Microvolunteerism is just starting to explore tools and formats to structure volunteer collaboration
BiDnetworks allows investors to also coach the projects they invested in

Reflections

The “group gathering” initiatives build mainly on personal motivations of members, offering a story-telling environment to strenthen and sustain such motivations and connect individual members. The “work process” initiatives are pretty results-oriented, with very implicit reference to motivations of members.

Bringing these approaches together is a first step. They cover different parts of the sociality model, and address different levels in the social context model. But then there still will be gaps.

Next week, Aldo and I will be on a work-retreat, something we do more often, to mix day-time work with night-time deep reflections. We’re both stoked to dust off and develop our social context model, and I hope to have another look at the sociality angle as well.

21 May 2008
in Ideas
3 min read

Moving from "Open source" to "Open roadmap"

Many NGOs are good at forming strategic alliances to achieve their objectives (they’re usually also good at competing each other nearly to death, often at the same time, but I’ll keep that for a different post maybe). Yet, at the level of web technology, this usually seems to be limited to the level of exchanging tips and tricks, perhaps some RSS feeds, and referring each other to providers and vendors.

Two major developments are changing that situation now:

Many organisations are investing in Drupal for their web platforms. This creates an eco-system where it’s easier to exchange actual technology, and to talk about it on a higher level of abstraction of artefacts and concepts.
There’s an exploding interest in the NGO world to align strategies and investments in technology. The “Tool Pool” discussion revived at the Ecampaigning Forum, and the NetSquared conference next week brings this closer as well. Not to mention to emergence of more and more BarCamps like Social Innovation Camp.

From the code level: Easier sharing in the form of Drupal modules obviously is a great step forward, but still leaves you to reverse engineer the code and functionality of a module, to find out what the objectives and constraints were at the time of building.

From the organisational level: The predominant thinking still follows the pattern of coming together, listing needs, identifying commonalities, then trying to pool resources and plan towards development. It doesn’t facilitate a “long tail” approach with more ad-hoc alliances based on existing schedules and deadlines.

Enter the “open roadmap”

The middle ground in this is starting to share road maps in a more standardised way: to formulate organisational needs in terms of technical functionality, and indicate “organisational value” as well as expected “workload” (and maybe even available resources or indicative planning).

There are two main processes that need to be in place to make this “open roadmap” work:

Organisations should develop and maintain product roadmaps for their online platforms, and make those available openly. In that way, (inhouse or external) developers can easily get an overview of multiple roadmaps, and identify overlaps. Occasional developers can also more easily contribute to a feature that will quickly be used.
Development should be done in an agile way: relatively short iterations with new releases, and a mindset of continuously assessing opportunities and priorities. When developers signal overlaps, organisations can change their plans and truly join forces, without jeapordising their end goal.

I’ve taken the opportunity as “NetSquared project lead” for the Oneworld Connect project to explore how to translate organisational objectives into feature requests for engineers to work on, working towards a roadmap via a wiki.

And so I was excited when my friend Rob Purdie (who has managed migrations to Drupal for Greenpeace UK and Amnesty International, and is currently working with Concern) organised the first of hopefully an ongoing series of Drupal for NGOs meetups in London, and suggested a session called How To Build a Product Roadmap, with the dream that it helps participants identify roadmap overlaps and then collaborate.

I hope to see this “open roadmap” develop quickly in various conversations in the next two-three weeks already 🙂

11 January 2008
in Ideas, Research
3 min read

Designing sociality for Nabuur

Nabuur has been pioneering online volunteering since 2001, and is currently redesigning their organisation: how to put "web 2.0" into the DNA of everything that’s happening? And how to engineer that, rather than try and hope it works?

So I spent the day with Nabuur team members, who invited René Jansen to facilitate drilling down to the core of their activities. René is one of the authors of "The Realm of Sociality: Notes on the design of social software", a paper which won the Best Paper Award 2007 at the “International Conference on Information Systems” in Montreal, last December, and (to me, at least) introduces the concept of "sociality" as the centre of the design process.

The model uses theories of "Practice", "Identity", "Social Structure" and "Situated Experience" to define four realms of design areas to focus on. I’ve just downloaded the paper to read a more indepth explanation (and be able to explain it myself). It was a good framework to guide the discussions to a few crucial dilemmas and hard choices.

What Nabuur does

Nabuur offers opportunities to volunteer for villages and communities in developing countries: a local representative describes a project that would help improve circumstances for people in his or her community, and people anywhere on the world can contribute research, knowledge, connections, and organise resources from behind their computers. It works, and leads to wonderful results. But Nabuur needs to, and definitely wants to grow far beyond the 150 villages and 10,000 volunteers it has.

The focus used to be on the villages themselves. Last year I was already involved in a redesign that would speak more to the various personas that would use the site. The resulting website was orientated first towards "doing a task" and getting more results from the efforts of volunteers (basically focusing on Dave, a persona who wanted concrete tasks and outcomes).

But the reaction of existing neighbours was mostly negative: they felt the site was broken and "stolen" from them, and needed to be fixed (ASAP please). Incrementally improving the interface for other personas was stalled, and the team reflected on the question "what went wrong?".

A new approach

In terms of the model of René and his colleagues, the heart of the sociality around which the design revolved was shifting from village to project, and now maybe moving to the local representative or to the experience of contributing to improvement in people’s lives. A choice had to be made, and the way to do it was by determining the core social practice of Nabuur.

A social practice is "a way people do something together" (the paper probably has a real definition), and we identified and discussed four candidates:

Bringing supply and demand together: a marketplace of people with skills and time, and villages with work to be done.
Achieving something together: a project bank where people work in a team to deliver results.
Helping neighbours: a community where people help to address acute needs of each other.
Sharing stories: experiencing a trajectory together, and telling stories about it to each other and others.

Listening to the neighbours, who experienced a gap between "them in the office", and "us who do the work", the Nabuur team wants to focus on a truly social approach, positioning themselves and the whole Nabuur development among the neighbours as well. And the practice that is furthest from sterile transactions, and leads to the warmest social ties is sharing stories (around the work in villages and communities, of course, but also around Nabuur as a whole.)

"Writing our experience together"

The practice of "writing our experience together" can encapsulate actual projects being completed and results being delivered, but puts celebrating those achievements on the foreground (right now, the successes are still mainly hidden gems). It will lead to some difficult choices and self-restraint in reviewing the functional specifications: let’s really not build a knowledge repository or community of practice, but really first try to connect with existing initiatives. Only if it doesn’t exist anywhere on the ‘net, yet is crucial to work being done, and maybe even then on a site separate from the Nabuur.com site.

I’m pleased with the outcome: it aligns with many take-aways from NetSquared in May last year, and it opens many ways to improve engagement of the neighbours, and also exposed a lot more of the groundbreaking changes in how international development is done here. And looking forward to working with James and Pelle to translate this into a new site!