Updates¶

5 March 2008
in Research, Work in progress
3 min read

How “web 2.0” can you become in six months?

A while ago I was asked to help answer an interesting question. Imagine: you want your website (and organisatuon) to become “truly web 2.0”, and a donor is considering a sizeable grant to help you do that, under the condition that you define yourself how you will measure your “web 2.0”-ness, set your own targets for the next half year, and have reached those targets by then. What would you measure and what targets would you set?

Indicators: Web 1.0 metrics like number of visitors or registered users are not really a measure for “web 2.0-ness”. Amount of user-generated content maybe more. Per registered user? Number of mashups? Position in Technorati? Having an API, connecting to the APIs of other sites? Number of feeds into your site?
Targets: A 6-month timeframe to do the technical work and show measurable results would lead me to focus more on the infrastructure and organisational side of things. What’s a realistic target… needs to be compelling enough to get the grant, but also a pretty certain win…

I tapped into the wealth of wisdom in the Web of Change crowd. Marty Avery send me an interesting link to “Experience Attributes: Crucial DNA of Web 2.0”, an essay by Brandon Schauer of Adaptive Path. “Quite old” by web 2.0 standards (written December 2005), but very relevant to help guide our thinking and provide a bit of authority. Brandon distinguishes two sets of attributes, that together make up “web 2.0 DNA”:

Foundation attributes: user-contributed value, the long tail, network effects. In Brandon’s words: “They enable Web 2.0 offerings to generate and maximize value from many sources, no matter how small they may be.”
Experience attributes: de-centralization, co-creation, remixability, and emergent systems. Again, in Brandon’s words: “By blurring the lines that traditionally delineate supplier, vendor, and customer, these services have pioneered new value streams that can output new types of offerings, harness new efficiencies, and produce higher levels of continuous innovation.”

A quick analysis showed that the focus should indeed be on these experience attributes: the foundations were there, the basic system and processes work, things are happening. But they need to accelerate, explode, go viral. It still wasn’t hard to distinguish supplier, vendor, and customer in the current setup. We all could see new ways to offer new types of value to all stakeholders, but it was time to deliver, and the experience attributes nicely mapped onto dreams, visions, and ideas to move forward.

So with all the technical development just starting, and only some five months left to show concrete, measurable results, targets were mainly defined in terms of those experience attributes:

Get at least a couple of formalised partnerships to decentralize and scale up major parts of the organisational processes.
Get content in from a few dozen external sources, to remix with the user-generated content already there.
Provide new website tools to transform all of that content into compelling stories.
Provide new ways for people to share their experiences with their peers and promote the platform, and see them use those.
Double the overall amount of page views this way (ay, is this a web 1.0 metric slipping in after all?)

Ambitious goals, but more important: not just hoping on technical wizz-bang to solve things. Developing partnerships and compelling stories is far more a process and collaboration issue (and by far not easy to accomplish in half a year either, but work was already further on the way here). And if nothing else, burning some cash on advertising will provide a reasonably predictable growth of page views if needed — although I’m not supposed to take such a cynical view on these things (yet).

25 February 2008
in Conferences
3 min read

Back from FOSDEM in Brussels

Back from FOSDEM in Brussels. In their own words on the information booklet: "4000+ geeks, 200+ lectures, 2 days, 0 EURO". I had two motivations to go there: Brussels is close to my home in Amsterdam and always nice to visit; and I could sit and listen a whole day to Drupal presentations, and get the opportunity to check out some other projects too.

As the FOSDEM booklet says, it’s a gathering focused on lectures, so I got my portion of sitting still and getting powerpoint-poisened in over-crowded and under-ventilated rooms. A lot of people breaking the "show me, don’t tell me" rule. But Brussels was nice, and some of the presentations on Drupal and Thunderbird were useful for me:

Drupal 7

Dries Buytaert presented the general direction for Drupal 7: taking the top feature requests from end users and developers from a survey as suggested priorities to work on by the community, to hopefully deliver a killer release by 2009 to succeed to recently released version 6.

The long-term focus will shift from modules and functionality towards data and inter-operability, being able to integrate content from different sources, allow others to reuse, and decentralisation: a general move towards RDF and its "subject-predicate-object" triples, and towards XML to better define web services interfaces, as well as allowing for object validation and so on.

"Search" in Drupal

Robert Douglass spoke about his ApacheSolr module: searching on Drupal is a disaster still, and he nicely demonstrated that by showing he couldn’t find a post of him complaining about this on drupal.org, but showed it was the first result via Google. Also, the search function on drupal.org had to be disabled a few times at high loads, because it would bring down the whole server.

So Robert built the ApacheSolr module to work with the Solr web service (which in turns works with Lucene for the indexing), and actually get better and more useful results on the content of the Drupal site. And Solr scales perfectly, and offers interesting extra options that make search a lot more useful.

See Christian Scholz’s blog post on this presentation for the details!

Mozilla Thunderbird

There also was a presentation on the recent launch of Mozilla Messaging, and the interest of Mozilla to make get to a staff of around 10 people working on Thunderbird as influential mail and calendar application by the end of 2008. The challenge is finding the right people to grow the team in the right way, funding seems to be no problem.

With a possible version 3 by the end of the year, including a calendar and better workflow, this all makes me feel a bit more confident again about the future of Thunderbird, after discussions a while ago seemed to suggest it might be abandoned.

In general

I found it interesting how people in some projects seem to look at the current/"old" situation with a relatively inward-looking orientation, and define themselves as an improvement over that; while others look more at "best of breed" practices, and seem to be more competitive and/or open. Drupal in my perception fits a bit in the former category, I had a bit the same feeling I had at BarCamp in Amsterdam in 2005: a very strong drive to "do it yourself" and a bit of a barrier of entry for outsiders.

23 February 2008
in News
1 min read

Our first Nivocer office is open

Klooster Dolphia We’ve got our first Nivocer office space this month! My business partner Jaap-André is based close to Enschede, in the east of The Netherlands, and found this lovely former seminary-now shared office building not too far from his home, where we now have our first room and access to facilities in an inspiring setting. A building completed in 1937, but having a pretty rich history of use already. Far away from my Amsterdam home for Dutch standards, so I will continue looking for something closer by. Canadian friends remind me that a two-and-a-half-hour commute to work is not even really rare within the Toronto area, but my 1-minute journey to my home office is quite precious to me still. Meanwhile, Jaap-Andre is connecting his now truly separated business and private life with his recumbent bicycle.
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14 February 2008
in News
2 min read

Dear Humane Society International,

Today, I received an action alert from you, through my membership of Care2. It’s great to hear your contributing to the fight against Japanese whaling, but I was somewhat taken back by your approach. You’re asking me to “Help Humane Society International lead the opposition on Japan’s Whale Hunt!”. Pardon?

Having worked at a desk next to the international anti-whaling campaign team of 2006-2007 of “another organisation”, your name wasn’t at the top of my list of anti-whaling campaigns. Frankly, it wasn’t at my list at all, and I’m sorry to say, I didn’t even know Humane Society International existed.

So I wanted to find out a bit more about your campaign. But…

All the links in the email go to a donation page (fair enough, with that big “Donate Now” button, it was pretty clear what you wanted from me).
Once on that donation page: still no clue about what your campaign was all about, and again: no links. Do you have a campaign?
So I hovered over the “please send us an email” link at the bottom of the page to find a web addres: www.hsi.org
The word “whale” doesn’t even appear on that page! And neither does the word “Japan”. It took me some fiddling around before I actually found something like a whale campaign page (with breaking news from 21 December?)
There is also a campaign page for the US organisation (where did I see that photo before? and where’s the photo credit for that photo in your email, who took that one?)

I applaud your efforts and involvement in this issue, trying to end to this ongoing unnecessary cruelty. It’s great you had a victory at the Australian court. But asking me out of the blue for a $100 suggested donation in this manner is really putting me off. You’re exploiting cruel images made by other organisations to fundraise for yourself. That’s not how I envision an organisation to “lead the opposition”.

9 February 2008
in News
2 min read

Inspiration and hope?

As I am not from the US, I have no vote in the elections there. But as a world citizen, I am experiencing the choices made. I’m ambivalent about each trip I make to the US: going through the crazy bureaucracy at the border is a perfect way of demonstrating how much the US government likes to invade into my life.

The contrast with the people I meet once inside the country could not be bigger: many of them are passionate about making the world a better place, and equally feel their own government as the main obstacle in realising that. So with their elections this year, I’m trying to make sense of the candidates.

Of course, there’s the chance of Stephen Colbert taking on the challenge (I’m sure he has seen Man of the Year …).

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!

9 January 2008
in News
2 min read

First “XS4ALL Professor” in cyber securtity and privacy appointed

Talk about corporate social responsibility: Dutch internet provider XS4ALL has always been at the frontline when it comes to protecting the rights of internet users. And now I read in their newsletter that they’re sponsoring Syracuse University School of Information Studies professor Milton Mueller as the first “XS4ALL professor” at Delft University of Technology (press release in Dutch), for three years, focusing on security and privacy of internet users, especially mobile users.

Mueller has written about internet governance not even that long after XS4ALL’s precursor Hacktic opened the internet for Jay Citizen here in the Netherlands, and IT staff at my university tried to block access to them for a brief moment in history. Later they kind of made up for it by hosting Rop Gongrijp’s “Hackers at Large” conference. Rop was active in Hacktic and co-founded XS4ALL, and went on to remain a general PITA for authorities with his campaign against voting computers, and just this week was in the news again when the Mifare Hack demonstrated at CCC made it to the front page: it’s at the heart of the to-be-introduced chip card payment system for public transport throughout the Netherlands.

I really got to know XS4ALL when they sponsored a machine for our freeteam in the ’90s, where we hosted several early-on projects such as contrast.org (political asylum for banned content) and the Eurostop precursor to current independent media centres, during the EU summit in Amsterdam in 1997. They’ve also been fighting several legal battles: the EU data retention laws and their translation into Dutch law, and Karin Spaink’s battle with Scientology.

In the same newsletter I learnt that XS4ALL is now also offering unlimited wifi access to its subscribers through the KPN Hotspots, so I’m once more reinforced in my belief of being with the right provider 🙂

1 January 2008
in News
2 min read

Starting 2008

The new year is here, and the holidays are nearly over again. I managed to find some time to finally do some real upgrade work on my website, so it all feels like my own website again. Mainly completing the move from Typo3 to Drupal, and looking at some more content to add in the coming weeks: plugging in a few more external sources of content, and making some materials available as "books".

Over the holidays, I looked at some old notes, flipping through my notebook. It was surprising to read some thoughts of "last century" (around 1999), on online discussions and online collaboration, and realise that several ideas and hopes of then are still waiting to be implemented. Somehow it feels 2008 could be the year in which a lot of that might happen: a year of convergence. Some technology notes to look back on at the end of 2008 perhaps.

My move from Typo3 to Drupal was partly motivated by a desire to reduce the number of technologies to deal with. Although Typo3 really is a solid product, setting things up with TypoScript remained cumbersome. I’m more comfortable fiddling with PHP to make my site work, and it fits in with version control and having separate development and production environments.
With Nabuur wanting to redevelop their site in Drupal, with Acquia having $7 million to build a commercial foundation under Drupal, and most of my North-American friends as strong believers in Drupal, all "forces" seem to be going in the same direction.
The Zend Framework is out, and the new Zend Studio is based on Eclipse, so developing PHP code has become a lot more powerful, with for instance proper debugging and profiling. Very useful in developing our WebEnq software further: we’re running into the first performance bottlenecks.
Eclipse also has Mylyn and Tasktop as powerful task-managment tools. They nicely connect to our Mantis bug tracker, and to Google calendar as shared calendar tool, forming a good foundation to improve our project management practice at Nivocer.
After a year of mainly setting up our business, it looks like we’re able to accellerate now, and hopefully hire our first programmer in the first half of the year, to speed up development work on our survey software, as well as it work on making it more available again as open source tool.

It feels as if a lot of experiences from the last few years come together now, and all help to focus and advance our work in "online collaboration" for a few projects all aimed at international development.

19 November 2007
in News
3 min read

Private initiatives for international development should organise

Lau Schulpen of CIDIN at the Radboud University in Nijmegen researched the effectiveness of Dutch “private initiatives” working in international development. Last week, his first findings were published, and created a little storm in the Dutch development sector (see e.g. the Dutch Trouw newspaper, copied by most other papers). I’m just returning from a presentation of his results, followed by a debate with Henny Helmich of NCDO, and Robert Wiggers of Wilde Ganzen: two organisations who fund a lot actvities of private initiatives. My take-away: private initiatives need a branch organisation, a kind of union.

Schulpen’s findings

Schulpen did a qualitative research, starting with an address list of 257 private initiatives, narrowing it down to interviews with 35 of them, and visiting 28 field projects in Ghana and Malawi. Of those, he qualified 24 as “brick & mortar” projects (like building, handing out materials, paying for certain things), and 4 as “complex” (like micro credits, educational programmes). Schulpen concluded that many projects do not deliver sustainable results, due to a couple of main reasons:

There often is (too) little attention for capacity building, often taking one of these forms:
- Working with local individuals rather than organisations, sometimes even harmful
- Having a mirror organisation of family or friends, with not enough self-reflection or patronising local capacity
- Working with a whole village or community, resulting in unclear responsibilities and relations
- Working with volunteers and no budget, and not investing money
Many work in splendid isolation, not benefiting from learning opportunities
Almost no monitoring & evaluation, and no full accountability of activities and spending.

The debate

The panellists mainly concluded that the donor organisations who fund private initiatives should align their policies more, have stricter requirements before funding, work together on that, and support more collaboration and learning events for their grantees. When finally some of the people of private initiatives in the audience got a chance to say something too, their reactions were somewhat to be predicted:

Don’t talk about us, talk with us.
Stop talking as if we are not professionals.
Acknowledge our strengths and work with us.

My takeaways

The funders ask you to comply with requirements before you get training and support as part of a grant. The definition of “private initiative” seemed to narrow down to those who apply for funding with them. Take away the money, and the service of the funder looks bleak. Its value mainly defined by the grant. The private initiatives would benefit from being organised in a way where their interests are leading:

Connect with each other, and learn from each other based on their needs
Offer their skills and expertise to the big NGOs, and get proper support when needed

This was exactly the kind of input I was hoping for: tomorrow I’m meeting again with people from many COS centres. They actually work with a lot of these private initiatives to support them in their work. We’ll discuss next steps for the Dutch World Atlas, a platform helping you find such an initiative near you to join (well, if you’re in The Netherlands…), and this fits nicely in distilling a service offer for that platform.

14 November 2007
in Tools, Technical
2 min read

First look at Tasktop

Today I took a first look at Tasktop (claiming it "takes the effort out of being organized"). It didn’t quite take the effort out of being installed, but I’ve kind of grown used to that with Eclipse, and it is still in beta. Tasktop is taking Mylyn, the "task-focused interface" to a whole new level. First geeky impressions from an Eclipse user.

Mylyn starts…

Creating and scheduling tasks: define the things to do, and schedule them for a particular day. Then work through the list.
Provide "context": activate a task, and Mylyn keeps track of which files you open and edit. You can then "focus" the interface, showing only those files, and store the context with the task. Next time you activate the task, it will only show those files. (I still have to get the hang of it, though)
Integrate with several issue trackers (Bugzilla, Trac, and also Mantis). So I have the issues in our tracker that are assigned to me available as tasks in Mylyn.

Tasktop continues…

The thing I like the most so far is the integration with Google Calendar, since I already use that to share information with my colleague.

See items from selected Google calendars in a week overview, and post the tasks I schedule to a calendar of choice. Makes it easy to share more detailed workplans, and to reschedule from either Google Calendar or Eclipse with Mylyn and Tasktop.
Have a week overview with all the tasks from various calendars.
Easily navigate to either a browser window for a calendar appointment, or the issue ticket in a tracker. Tasktop nicely stores a link to the issue tracker in the Google Calendar appointment.

Tasktop also can link to your Outlook tasks and emails. I can only hope someone will make that work for my Palm desktop too… I’m still not ready to start using Outlook.
Ever since I read the first bits about Mylyn (called Mylar in the old days) I have been eager to see each next step. Eclipse makes it easy to connect to different version control repositories, work in different languages, and on different servers. Mylyn makes it easy to connect with various issue trackers to work as task repositories, and now Tasktop starts adding more scheduling options too. Having a single, uniform, and consistent interface to work on a variety of projects and backbones is getting closer.