Tom Hume

I posted back in September that I'd been invited to join the W3C Mobile Web Best Practices Group, specifically to work in the Content Transformation (CT) "task force": which is every bit as macho and manly as it sounds.

The document we're writing is coming along (contentious though it may be), but abstract of the document, I've wanted to write a post about the process of working in the group. It's my first experience of being inside a technical standards body, so I've found the processes and tools interesting in and of themselves.

The CT group operates in public, mainly on the public-bpwg-ct mailing list.

Once a week there's a conference call, typically with anything between 3 and 8 attendees, and usually chaired by Francois Daoust. In tandem with the voice call, all participants are in an IRC channel; here, a couple of bots are active. Zakim is the one I tend to notice the most, providing a bridge between the voice call and the channel. So, when a participant dials in or drops off, Zakim recognises them and announces their arrival in the channel. If there's noise on the call coming from one participant, Zakim can tell where it's originating - that kind of thing.

On each call, there's a volunteer scribe; I took on this job myself on the most recent call. The scribe is charged with typing what's said on the call into the channel; another bot records these notes and uses them to create minutes which are published to the mailing list after the call is done.

One interesting little tweak is the use of a bot to substitute for gestures that might be used in face-to-face meetings. By typing

/q+ to say we should point our orbiting lasers at Italy

one places oneself onto the "speakers queue", maintained by one of the bots, with a reminder of what one was about to say. This queue can then be accessed and speakers popped off it as necessary, giving them permission to speak: so in this sense, IRC substitutes for the raising of a hand or eye contact. It's surprising how well this works.

Off-the-record comments and notes can be recorded using the "action" method in IRC:

/me thinks we should hurry up with the goat sacrifice

Another bot tracks the creation of actions and resolutions, such that the group can create tasks to be done and assign them to a member, and record decisions taken and voted upon.

Last Call comments are, in particular, tracked quite exhaustively into a web-based tool. Every one is assigned to a member of the group who is charged with summarising the issue, doing any necessary research, and then recommending a course of action. During the call these comments are discussed; typically this leads to either a resolution or a decision to gather more information (from research carried out by group members into the area being discussed, from other W3C groups, or elsewhere).

It's interesting. There's no monolithic tool handling everything, and there's a vague sense of duct-tape lurking in the background, but it all hangs together rather nicely, in a quirky way, and feels quite human - a bit like the web in general, I guess.

I really enjoyed Future of Mobile yesterday.

The day started a little sluggishly with a well-qualified panel discussing the future of mobile operating systems. I didn't feel I learned much here - revenues of the panelists businesses weren't particularly exciting, and aside from an interesting conversation around runtimes I didn't feel I learned a great deal.

For me, things really started to take off with the presentation from Doug Richard of Trutap (disclosure: they're a client of ours). Doug was talking about the rise of a middle class in the developing world that shares aspirations with the middle classes everywhere, and quietly pointed out our arrogance in assuming that it could be otherwise. I particularly liked his notion that Western operators would adopt defensive positions and hence take fewer risks (and be less innovative) than those coming out of India.

I didn't devote much attention to Matt Millar from Adobe, I'm afraid - sorry Matt, but I was doing last-minute panicking about my own presentation. I've not watched the video yet, but whilst I'd spent more time preparing than I ever have in the past (and felt the slides were reasonably polished), I made the mistake of over-planning what I was going to say. Normally I work from bullet points and just chat around them (something I'm comfortable doing) but after my hour-long overrun at the Werks talk a month or so back I tried to restrain myself by planning what I'd say in great depth. The upshot was I felt like I was working from a script, and had to keep checking where I was, staring at a screen instead of talking to the audience. Lesson learned there, but at least I managed to get my macaroons-as-analogy-for-porting slide out.

The bloggers panel was a really good format: 6 bloggers, 6 minutes each, mirroring blogging itself. Really nice to hear Vero Pepperell evangelise a human approach to communication - as an industry we ought to know that stuff, but I can't help feeling we need someone to gently beat it into us on occasion. Helen was righteous - nuff said.

A lunch, or non-lunch, followed. If there was a weak point to the day overall, I'd say it was the facilities. I heard plenty of people complain about a lack of wi-fi (though as a 3 USB dongle owner I managed OK), there was no lunch provided, and no coffee in one of the coffee breaks. Fortunately Kensington is full of restaurants and cafes, but it would've been nice to hang around in a throng during all these breaks. The auditorium itself was excellent - a lovely space, good sound, and power to most seats.

Rich Miner gave a great talk in the afternoon, filling in a bit more detail around Google and their plans, and drawing on his own history launching the Windows SPV Smartphone when he was at Orange. He gave a good if negative insight into the world of operators when he talked about product managers feeling threats from new product developments and derailing them.

Interesting also to hear about his take on mobile web apps - that they fail for reasons of network latency, lack of local storage, and access to device capabilities. Whilst you can see efforts in Android, PhoneGap and OMTP Bondi to address some of these, it's a little way from the "web apps as future of mobile" angle which I'd heard Google were adopting.

And similarly it was good to hear Rich quizzed on the topic of Android and fragmentation by David Wood (who's more qualified to talk about this than he?). Rather than espousing the rather bland "we don't think fragmentation is in the interests of the industry" line I've heard from Google before, Rich talked about the value of having a reference implementation by which to judge others; a conformance test being introduced for OEMs; and the use of challenging and popular reference apps to provide a "Lotus 1-2-3" style evaluation of an Android implementation.

Tomi Ahonen was hilarious and upbeat as usual - full of detailed and slightly threatening stats on the hold that mobile has on us, and case studies of fantastic things launched elsewhere (usually Asia). The Tohato "worlds worst war" was my favourite: purchasers of snack products fighting one another in vast virtual armies, wonderful.

And the day finished with another panel discussion: lots of disagreement from qualified folks who've been doing this stuff for years, including two of our clients. We had some kind words said about us by Carl from Trutap and Alfie of Moblog fame - thanks guys! - and it was particularly interesting to hear the pendulum of fashion swing back towards applications, away from the mobile web. I wonder how permanent this effect, which is surely down to the iPhone App Store, will be?

The evening party followed, carrying on the upbeat atmosphere :)

My slides from the day are online here. The lens-tastic Mr Ribot took video footage of the talk which you can see here, and I heard a rumour that the official footage from the event may go online some time too.

Thanks to Dominic and all the team at Carsonified for the hard work they put into the event - I know all too well from Sophie how much this takes, and they did a cracking job. And a particular yay to Mr Whatley, who stepped in as compere at the last minute and did an excellent job of keeping the audience engaged, even in those sleepy after-lunch slots ;)

Depressing thought: if social networking tools bring us all closer together, what happens when a generation that grew up hyper-connected starts to pass on. How will all this affect the grieving process?

TechCrunch has a story on Trutap:

"And I think that while the world seems in love with the iPhone, the reality is that the biggest mobile applications market remains Java, so any application that can run across hundreds of handsets and is lightweight in download size has legs. The harsh reality is that most handsets, including most in the US, are terrible, so any app which makes the business of accessing social networks and IM over data easier is on to something. The very lightweight Trutap mobile protocol means is uses very low amounts of data so low bills are low as well. They have also been smart to stay away from VOIP, which means they can deal with operators. And the Trutap application really is great to look at."

We've been working with Trutap for a couple of years now, helping define, design and develop their mobile client. And Doug Richard (CEO of Trutap) and I will both be speaking at the upcoming Future of Mobile conference in November.

Mobile Industry Review also ran a little piece on Le Tap:

"He showed me a demo of the next version of Trutap — it’s going to be quite stunning. IM, Content, Social Networking — all aimed at the emerging markets (and India in particular). I think that kind of audience will eat up Trutap.

Part of the new roll-out — including this whizzy new client I saw — includes offering Trutap users the ability to subscribe to and receive content."

Watch this space :) We've got some fantastic stuff going on which we'll be able to show off soon...

So, Barcamp Brighton 3: absolutely fantastic. I'll scratch down a few thoughts before they evaporate:

• Really annoyed I missed Paul Silver talk on social networks and death: he brought it up at Tuttle last week and it sounded really great;
• Saw 2 talks on Selenium: I am going to be force-feeding this to our QAs until they burst;
• The last afternoon was appropriate New Age, given that we were in Brighton. Sunday closed for me with a yoga session with Jenny, meditation and GTD with Michael Rose, then a retrospective on the whole of Barcamp ably facilitated by Joh;
• The highlight was Rebecca talking on typography and design, which seemed to be the best-attended of the whole event (necessitating a mid-point shift in venue) and generated some really good debate afterwards. No Tantek, there is no repository of mobile typography. Yes Tantek, mobile fragmentation really *is* that bad.
• I also really enjoyed James' skit on Derrida and XKCD (so much that I forgot my promise of a good kicking if he ever mentioned Big D again), and the session which combined Thai OCR, DNA sequencing and minority African languages... but ended up being a database optimisation back-and-forth with the audience :)
• We decamped to a dark corner for the warts and all of Scrum - my talk on the last year at FP, which I may be repeating locally in the near future...

The only low point for me was the university food - but hey, out of everything that had to be organised and put together to bring an event of this scale to fruition, that's quite properly a long way down the list.

Already looking forward to the next one :)

dConstruct 2008: The Jones/Biddulph Connection: Designing for the Coral Reef

I shut the laptop and just watched this one :)

dConstruct 2008: Tantek Celik: Social Network Portability

Why does every social site make you

1. re-enter your personal information?
2. re-add all your friends?
3. turn off notifications?
4. re-specify privacy preferences?
5. re-block negative people?

Keeping multiple sources of info (social networks etc.) up-to-date is a maintenance problem.

The goal should be giving users complete control over their data. Portable data + consistent URL = data syndicatability.

Had an interesting chat with Mr Thorpe after this one, who raised the point that in many cases, you don't want to share your identity between sites: you want to maintain many identities and quite specifically compartmentalise them.

Leaving aside whether we can enable people to express very instinctual and deep-seated behaviour explicitly... will they want to? Could we take the N different inconsistent versions of ourselves that we project in the real world (all the time lying to those we project to that yes, they're seeing the genuine article), XML-encode them and set them in concrete online?

dConstruct 2008: Joshua Porter, Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design

Web design is now about psychology; web designers need to learn about it to create decent experiences.

"Bandwagon effect": people often do and believe things because many other people do and believe things.

Heuristics: rules of thumb which prevent us from needing to gather all information required to make a judgement. Sometimes these don't work all that well - this is cognitive bias. e.g. "Not Invented Here", prediction biases which lead to underestimates of time to work.

Seminal paper on this is "Judgement under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (1974)"

Talks about a few biases:

1. Representation Bias.
2. Loss Aversion.
3. Ownership Bias.

These sometimes combine: in the sign-up problem, loss avertsion and ownership bias overvalue what they use by a factor of 3. Because of ownership and prediction biases, software manufacturers overvalue their products by about 3x - so there's a combined 9x dissonance between what they want to charge and what users want to pay.

Demonstrates Freshbooks, which emphasises number of users through a worldwide map showing them (encouraging bandwagon effect).

Q: isn't this evil?
A: It's more about business ethics.

(Sounds like a "guns don't kill people, people do" type argument).

See also Duncan's talk at XPDay last year. Alan Cooper also touched on this at Agile2008.

dConstruct 2008: Aleks Krotowksi: Playing the Web

The web industry and the games industry DO NOT MEET. Strange, given that web people don't talk about games.

Games are sticky. Some people die playing games; many people lose their lives playing them. Stickiness is important because of advertising. (Shows a Wordle of business plans from Seedcamp to demonstrate the important of advertising to business models).

What do game designers do to create this social web and stickiness?

Graphics? Games have great graphics, but some games (e.g. VIb Ribbon) have deliberately poor graphics and are still compelling. So it can't be graphics.

Story? Many games have strong stories. But traditionally the story is the last thing to be stuck onto a game system.

No, it's the stickiness of play. "The experience economy": a very boring term for the word "fun".

Games designers and developers use three systems to bring social elements into games:

1. Controlled systems: what designers explicitly build, deliberately giving reward and encouraging repeat play. The web does this - encouraging an investment of personal data in order to see more value. Also consider openness: creating spaces to play in, or sandboxes. Look at Grand Theft Auto world. Sometimes this backfires, in games which are too open and too large (e.g. Tomb Raider 3). But the web is enormously open, vast space. The challenge is to create a funnel that feels wide enough that you have freedom, whilst directing them towards an "ending goal"

2. Enabling systems: social phenomena emerge based on the design decisions made by developers. On the web we have community; in games there may have been some, but not a great deal until games met the web (with Everquest, WoW, etc.) (Not sure I agree with this: what about LambdaMOO etc?). Look at real-money transfers on ebay arising from virtual goods in online games: a community rallying around a virtual object with real social value. Game walkthroughs or FAQs might fit into this category. There's no need to create an economic model around your site to do this: look at PacManhattan, amillionpenguins.com, PerplexCity, or ludic visualisations.

3. Psychological systems: e.g. the relationship between avatar and reality (shows lovely slide of people photographed next to their avatars). But yet most of the web is personalised: MySpace, Facebook, but even before that pseudonyms/tags/avatar photos. Web developers see points-earning systems as a means of bringing gaming principles to the web. Look at PMOG as a game where you earn points for on-web behaviour (e.g. "don't use google for a week"). Game developers create beautifully efficient feedback systems to encourage repeat play, should they not engage with these types of things? Games developers and designers don't tend to use formal HCI, they tend to be instinctual by nature - and by and large do a good job of it, partially because games developers are making games for people like themselves. In contrast, the web industry tends to be applying their skils to create things for other audiences.
   

Why is there such little games representation at web events?

Ends with a call for a group hug between games and web industry, then questions.

Online games involving community in the form of MUDs/MOOs predated the web by quite a long time. How has the arrival of the web (as opposed to the improvements in graphics and UI) changed the way these communities operate

dConstruct 2008: Steven Johnson: The Urban Web

Wants to start with "a rousing speech about intestinal disease".

London, 1854 - mired in its own filth. A Victorian city with an Elizabethan health structure, creating a smelly environment regularly swept by cholera, particularly in the summer. The smell was seen to be the cause: the miasma theory "all smell was the disease".

A public watering hole in Broad St gets contaminated. August 28, 1854 the first victim dies, and following on 10% of the neighbourhood dies in the next 2 weeks.

The story: John Snow works out that cholera is caused by filthy water and creates a map visualising deaths and their relation to contaminated pumps. Snow was a local physician who saw the concentrated outbreak in his community as an opportunity to identify the source of water and thereby prove his theory. He produced a diagram showing location of deaths plotting on a street map - though this itself was nothing new. But he also plotted on the map the area within which local residents would walk to get water - i.e. showing who would be affected by this pump. This disproved the link between miasma (smell) and disease.

Another significant individual: the Reverend Henry Whitehead (local vicar, 25-26yo) was well known in the neighbourhood as a "connector" figure. The pump was well known for its water quality (!) so Whitehead set out to disprove the theory through interviews with local residents, in the process often uncovering data supporting a link back to the infected pump and identifying individuals who had left the area. Whitehead eventually discovered "patient zero".

Snow & Whitehead has access to archives of open data, created in the previous century by William Far (sp?) and in a standardised format allowing consumers to identify deaths from cholera by geography. The idea behind this was that third parties might do interesting things with this data: Snow & Whitehead's first mashup!

Snow's incredible intellectual skill was the ability to move between levels - individuals up to the water system of all London - and draw conclusions. His map was "a social network of dead people" - those united by their disease.

Cholera never returned to London after 1866.

So, to the geographic web. The initial web kicked off in part because of having a standardised means of locating pages: the URI. Stacks can be built of top of this information only because you know where it is. We're now starting to get standardised geographic formats for data online (e.g. Google/Yahoo mapping APIs).

We have local expertise (knowledgeable sources of local information, spread via self-publishing in blogs), open standards for information, and visualisation/mapping tools.

We should be able to filer queries and provide results by "what people near me are saying". Yet in real life things that are said near to us matter more than things said further awau.

Demos "outside.in GeoToolkit" - to help authors Geotag their content properly, then examine it.

Another product: Radar. Takes a location, shows you what's happening in 1000ft from you, your neightbourhood, your city...

Amongst startups doing location products, there's a disproportionate emphasis on finding restaurants, local businesses, etc. Whilst this is valuable, there's a lot more to geography in everyday life.

Outside.in seems to provide a twitter-like feeling of connection to a location.

Geoweb could provide "eyes on the street" (quotes Jane Jacobs, "The Death and Life of American Cities" - sure I remember Adam Greenfield mentioning this at LIFT or PICNIC last year). These eyes, and the intelligence behind them, are what make cities great.

- snow go ethno

- what geo formats?