Science Library Pad

LIBER 2016 conference livestream

Livestream information

http://liber2016.org/programme/live-streaming/

direct link (requires Flash)

https://connectpro.helsinki.fi/liber2016

login as guest

The stream started on Wed June 29, 2016 at 13.00 local [Finland] time (EEST, +3 GMT) = 6am Eastern time and completed at 8am Eastern time.

I have made a Storify of my tweets from June 29 https://storify.com/scilib/liber-2016-wed-june-29-2016

Livestream on Thursday June 30 and Friday July 1 will begin at 09h local time = 2am Eastern time.

You can see the programme at http://liber2016.org/programme/full-programme/

There is a particular focus on open science.

Twitter

• @LIBERconference
• #LIBER2016

scholarly cyberinfrastructure - Geoff Bilder - #shakingitup14

Raw notes on presentation "Mind the Gap"  by Geoff Bilder (@gbilder) at Shaking It Up 2014.

Scholarly cyberinfrastructure

Bilder uses ORCid as an example of some success in this area.

Ideas developed with Cameron Neylon & Jennifer Lin from PLoS

wikipedia - cyberinfrastructure

need to transcend individual institutions

can't actually do simple things, let alone grand transformation

there is a reluctance to address infrastructure

1) infrastructure is boring
2) associated with huge bureaucracy

anti-pattern: when we talk about infrastructure
funder invites - future of scholarly communication
but researchers don't want to think about infrastructure

funder -> money into A (infrastructure)
researcher -> studying B (research)
researcher tries to overlap A and B

but research projects don't actually produce sustainable infrastructure

when the grant runs out, the server goes down, and the "infrastructure" they built disappears

cloud makes this even worse (not even a hard drive in an office somewhere you can recover)

"open", "distributed", "lightweight", "framework" makes things sound reasonable

Distributed begets centralized, because otherwise it doesn't work.

People trying to punt difficult decisions about infrastructure.

If you don't acknowledge from the start that distributed will be centralized...
you don't realize that you can be co-opted

minimal distributed - need many shims and adapters

trust issues

(there were) big problems with trust and ORCid (that had to be addressed)

ORCid initially CrossRef author DOIs

approach to address trust: principles

10 ORCid principles
http://orcid.org/about/what-is-orcid/our-principles

what would a scholarly infrastructure organisation be like?

coverage
transcending disciplines, geography, institutions, stakeholders

have to get beyond discipline silos

geography is an issue because funders are national

governance
should be stakeholder-governed
non-discriminatory membership

transparent operations (within constraints of privacy)

organisation cannot lobby
- because people fear organisations that just try to keep themselves alive

infrastructure organisation should have a living will

formal incentives to fulfil mission & wind-down

sustainability

time-limited funds are used only for time-limited activities

goal to generate surplus
- breakeven is an incredibly fragile position

goal to create contingency fund to support operations for 12 months

revenue based on services, not data
- need to ensure data remains open

revenue generation should be consistent with the mission

insurance
- open source: forkability

open source
open data (within constraints of privacy)
available data (within constraints of privacy)

insurance policy:
(with open data and open source) if you can bring the community with you (to a new location/organisation), you can win (control of your information and system)

patent non-assertion

Geoff says: if I were a funder, I would look for these principles

need to build foundation

stop asking researchers how to fund infrastructure

get people who are good at infrastructure to do infrastructure
get over the fear of directly funding infrastructure

thanks to
@cameronneylon
@jenniferlin15

okfest14 - Open Digital Science - notes

Open Knowledge Festival 2014 - July 16, 2014

Session "Open, Digital Science - moving beyond open access" by Celina Ramjoué and Silvia Luber.

Sched entry.

Etherpad https://pad.okfn.org/p/Open,_Digital_Science

Dr. Ramjoué and Dr. Luber presented the progress on open science in the EU to date

• full open access mandate in Horizon 2020 research program
• also pilot on open research data in Horizon 2020 - see Guidelines on Data Management in Horizon 2020 (PDF)
• now working on next step: Open Digital Science
• public consultation: http://www.consultation-science20.eu/ closes 30 September 2014

They presented a framework of the larger set of issues involved when you look at the impact of digital technologies on all of science:

The session was mainly group discussions; these are summarized in the Etherpad.

The question of what policy actions are needed to support this new scientific ecosystem is an interesting one; it's a complex system and we are still figuring out necessary pieces.

okfest14 - Eric Hysen, Google Civic Innovation - notes

Open Knowledge Festival 2014 - July 16, 2014

Keynote - Eric Hysen @EricHysen - Google Civic Innovation

"Let's build the road network of civic technology."

Video of presentation http://youtu.be/0UNRZEsLxKc?t=57m20s

Interview video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeyZxsQzes8

Excited by the great reaction to my talk at #OKFest14. I've posted the full talk https://t.co/fIBAWF3Zzm and slides https://t.co/p054R3uCqf

— Eric Hysen (@EricHysen) July 17, 2014

Google Docs URL for slides.

Text of talk.

• (we need) tools (that can) scale
• Google is building APIs
• what's important is not just code and content, it's connectivity (between parts of the ecosystem)
• right now we have a lot of incredible stagecoaches, but not enough roads
• 1) open isn't enough 2) interoperable 3) ecosystems not apps
• (right now open) data is released without incentives
• everyone is repeating the same work (e.g. transit apps)
• (open data released as) spreadsheets far exceeds the releases of data as structured (e.g. XML) data
• plus you must release the data under a proper license, that allows reuse and modification, in order to give developers certainty
• "open data is hardly ever appropriately licensed"
• open data is rarely updated, or when there is new data, it's released as a new dataset (rather than linked to the previous data)
• summary: open data needs to be structured, updated, licensed
• 1) open isn't enough 2) interoperable 3) ecosystems not apps
• (it is) too hard to connect different types of data
• we need unique IDs
• example: The Popolo Project (open government data specifications relating to the legislative branch of government)
• example: The Open Civic Data Project
• 1) open isn't enough 2) interoperable 3) ecosystems not apps
• hackathons -> apps -> then nothing
• hackathons produce apps, not ecosystems
• example: Code for Germany (based on Code for America concept) with multple OK Lab locations across Germany
• example: Voting Information Project
• example: Google Civic Information API

Q: Andrew Clarke, Omidyar @andrew_c_clarke - What is the most needed (thing in this space)?

A: government (unique) identifiers

okfest14 - Neelie Kroes - notes

Open Knowledge Festival 2014 - July 16, 2014

Keynote - Neelie Kroes @NeelieKroesEU - European Commissioner for Digital Agenda

Video of presentation at http://youtu.be/0UNRZEsLxKc?t=29m45s

Interview video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGTLIfk-1BQ

• "I am in a hurry"
• we are in a dialogue, between politicians and the open knowledge community
• Why should we be open?
• 1. transparency. Better information should lead to better decisions.
• 2. fairness. Give taxpayers back what they pay for.
• 3. innovation.  The more you share, the more people have to build on.
• information can long sit gathering dust - let's release and turn dust into gold
• information should only ever be charged at the marginal cost, which in the digital environment is basically zero
• EU member states only have 1 year left to put this approach into national law
• Call for Tender now open: Pan-European open data infrastructure
• this work involves laws + portals + mindset change
• EU has delivered for open science.  Open access can be good for citizens, good for scientists, and good for society. 
• Horizon 2020 will offer 80 billion euros for research, and every resulting publication will be openly and [freely] available. Plus opening a lot more research data.
• EU also calling on member states to open up their publications from their national research funding
• citizens need to be informed + involved + engaged (with science)
• Consultation on science in transition - Open Digital Science http://www.consultation-science20.eu/ - closes 30 September 2014
• Open Internet
• We have "absolutely out-of-date" ideas from telecoms
• there must be an open Internet for all
• there must be an end of blocking and throttling of Internet, across the EU
• Open Education
• it is a crime when teachers are prevented from sharing open education resources
• copyright rules need to change
• rules were designed for a different age, more about limitation and control than creativity
• data mining copyright needs urgent reform
• whole EU Commission needs to have a digital mindset
• there is a better way - an open way

okfest14 - Global Witness - notes

Open Knowledge Festival 2014 - July 16, 2014

Keynote – Patrick Alley of Global Witness @Global_Witness

Video of presentation is not available.  Interview with Patrick Alley at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znu9sSZ6ynM

• organisation looks at issues such as the resource curse, conflict diamonds
• the organisation has a banking transparency wish: open financial transparency
• TED Prize awarded to Charmian Gooch of Global Witness, "Global Campaign to Abolish Anonymous Companies"
• open data can be used for change
• pushing for public registries of companies
• communications challenge: how to stand out above the noise
• use of graphics to communicate: Deadly Environment shows trend of environmental activists being killed
• some progress is being made
• extractive companies disclosure language in US Dodd-Frank law
• information about beneficial ownership of companies
• with all this info, there's a need for tools (to help people understand the information)
• a shadow system supports the extraction of money from countries, particularly wealth from natural resources
• obtaining the information is not enough
• powerful, rich interests oppose openness
• advocacy organisations need to be tough

csvconf 2014 - The Content Mine - notes

csv,conf 2014 - July 15, 2014

14:00 The Content Mine by Peter Murray-Rust @petermurrayrust

Presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/petermurrayrust/csvconf

• "liberating scientific facts for humanity"
• crawl, then data mine the literature, publish resulting facts CC0
• uses technology to extract information from PDFs, "can now turn PDFs into science"
• information will go to Wikipedia and as linked open data to DBpedia
• site is contentmine.org

Peter is using the UK Exceptions to Copyright for Research (PDF), specifically the text and data mining exception.

csvconf 2014 - Data Hacking with Wikimedia Projects - notes

csv,conf 2014 - July 15, 2014

12:20 Data-Hacking with Wikimedia Projects: Learn by Example, Including Wikipedia, WikiData and Beyond by Matt Senate @wrought and Max Klein @notconfusing

Matt and Max have clearly done a lot of thinking about how to make a project work within the WikiMedia context.  The project they described is about automatically extracting information about open access content and then enriching multiple WikiMedia sites with the appropriate information.

Video available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5T6RoEckAQ

• Wikipedia is by far the largest of the WikiMedia projects
• In order to contribute successfully, you need to understand the community for each project, the cultural protocols.
• Rambot added US Census data to WikiMedia
• When contributing from an open access article to WikiMedia
• text to WikiSource
• media (images etc.) to WikiMedia Commons
• metadata to Wikidata
• signals (information about the article such as license) used to enrich e.g. citations in Wikipedia
• the bot is called RecitationBot
• goals:
• improve citation management
• integrate metadata into wikidata
• forge deep knowledge resources
• automation combined with human judgement
• Paths for Data Hackers (things to work on in order to succeed, particularly in WikiMedia context)
• reputation
• understanding of cultural protocols
• knowing the history and context of previous efforts, and fitting your work into that narrative
• connecting to community e.g. IRC, mailing lists
• RecitationBot is essentially a process of enriching newly posted citations
• can also initiate RecitationBot with a DOI as you create a reference

csvconf 2014 - CSV Validation at UK Archives - notes

csv,conf 2014 - July 15, 2014

11:55 session CSV Validation by Adam Retter @adamretter

Video available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9pIBG5iv5XI

• has been working at UK National Archives
• there is a new digital archive for the UK - the Digital Records Infrastructure (DRI)
• need to ingest metadata from many sources
• CSV was decided upon as file format for metadata
• many possible errors in the CSV provided (including some people just rename Excel files, rather than exporting as CSV)
• approach: fail fast as repeat
• was decided to create a CSV Validator
• providing code to suppliers - now the suppliers can do up-front data validation
• want to be able to write rules, beyond just basic checks, and have it make easy enough to do so that domain experts can write rules
• CSV Schema language as a way to write rules
• https://github.com/digital-preservation/
• looking for developers to help advance this work

See also UK National Archives blog: CSV validator – a new digital preservation tool.

csvconf 2014 - Data usability: the tabular data package - notes

csv,conf 2014 - July 15, 2014

10:35 session Data usability: the tabular data package and friends by Nick Stenning @nickstenning

Data publishers at #csvconf: my message to you today is “put it in a box.” Publish your data as data packages: http://dataprotocols.org/

— Nick Stenning (@nickstenning) July 15, 2014

Slides at https://github.com/nickstenning/put-it-in-a-box

• analogy with international shipping: things in containers vs. people carrying them individually
• things not in containers are very expensive to move
• which means you do a lot of work carrying the things, rather than using the things
• containers are: 1. simple, 2. opaque, 3. diverse within constraints ("moderated diversity")

Introducing The Data Package, datapackage.json

See info at http://dataprotocols.org/data-packages/#specification

My question: What about BagIt?

Answer from Rufus Pollock (@rufuspollock): Other formats were examined, there is a white paper.

UPDATE 2014-08-01: Review of Existing Packaging Work via @rufuspollock

csvconf 2014 - introduction - notes

csv,conf 2014 introduction by Max Ogden and Rufus Pollock - @maxogden and @rufuspollock
July 15, 2014

(csv is Comma-Separated Values, a way of representing data.)

• wanted to reach out to data hacker community
• wanted to bring together open data / open tools / open standards communities
• csv has strength of simplicity
• csv inherently "hackable"
• csv can be used for big or small data, it "scales", it "streams"

Hashtag #csvconf

Gov as a startup - notes on talk by Audrey Chen of the CFPB

It is challenging to innovate from within a bureaucracy.  So when I saw a report about the work that the US CFPB is doing to bring better design, technology and culture to government service delivery, I was intrigued.

Background

For designers like [Audrey] Chen, the CFPB’s approach isn’t just about making the government’s work more tech-savvy or aesthetically pleasing: Horrible design leads to a bad user experience...

Washington Post - Who leaves Comedy Central to work for the government? - September 7, 2012

I contacted the US Embassy and they very graciously worked to arrange a presentation by Audrey Chen.

There have been more recent articles as well.

the change was tiny, a typo fix. Iceeey suggested the agency change the line “Daily rountrip cost” to “Daily roundtrip cost.” But this small request was a very big deal.

For the first time, the Consumer Protection Bureau was accepting a direct change to one of its internal documents not from someone inside the agency but from an average citizen somewhere across the country. The document had been published on the software code collaboration website GitHub, with the express idea that it could be hacked, commented on, and improved in public just like open source software.

Wired - How GitHub Helps You Hack the Government - January 9, 2013

This is an additional point of connection between the Canadian gov and the US CFPB, as Canada has put its Web Experience Toolkit on GitHub.

I later found this article from O'Reilly Radar as well

As the first federal “start-up agency” in a generation, some of those needs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) are even more pressing. On the other hand, the opportunity for the agency to be smarter, leaner and “open from the beginning” is also immense.

Progress establishing the agency’s infrastructure and culture over the first 16 months has been promising, save for larger context of getting a director at the helm. Enabling open government by design isn’t just a catchphrase at the CFPB. There has been a bold vision behind the CFPB from the outset, where a 21st century regulator would leverage new technologies to find problems in the economy before the next great financial crisis escalates.

O'Reilly Radar - Open source is interoperable with smarter government at the CFPB - April 10, 2012 - by Alex Howard (@digiphile)

Presentation Notes

Audrey Chen is the Creative Director, Technology & Innovation, at the CFPB.

There was a short slide presentation followed by discussion. In the introduction, Audrey Chen emphasized the nature of the CFPB as a 21st century organisation, using design and technology to empower consumers.

She made the connection between design's user-centred nature and modern technology's agile development approach - with the two together you can work quickly to deliver designs that meet user needs.

She talked about the rapid growth of the CFPB, from 300 to over 1000 employees, describing it as the explosive growth characteristic of a startup, and bringing concepts that have been useful for startups:

• do more with less
• flexibility
• self-reflection

She noted that even with a large budget in the context of the startup space, the CFPB has a small budget relative to the banks that it regulates.  Thus the importance of maximising its resources, and adjusting to changes quickly.

She talked about innovative approaches for recruiting the necessary creative and design-oriented staff for the organisation, including embedding a recruitment ad in the page source for the website ("If you're viewing this, you should probably come work on our Technology & Innovation team.")

In order to connect all the new employees together, particularly in an environment where 1/3 of them are working remotely, there is a cfpb.local intranet site, enabling self-organisation and discovery of expertise, using e.g. tagging of employee profiles (anyone can add a tag to a profile).  The idea being that this was a flexible, crowdsourced way of building up knowledge about who is in the organisation and the skills that they bring.

The Importance of Design

Design was part of the core message that she presented, a natural fit with her core role as Creative Director at the CFPB.  She showed their design principles:

• public service, public trust
• give the user control
• aesthetic integrity
• design with data
• inclusion and accessibility
• coherent end-to-end user experience

Fundamentally, she said, "design expresses your value system".

She discussed the approach they took to create the Know Before You Owe service.  A key: you can see everything about how they did it online - every design they tried, every consultation they did.  This is not just about sharing, it's about building the public trust in the organisation through transparency.  "Radically transparent at every step" is how she described it.

She also talked about CFPB finding its strengths - data sets that are unique to CFPB, or the ability of CFPB to create a compelling online experience - and partnering with other agencies when it makes sense for them to take the lead (e.g. the Department of Education for student loan information in general, the CFPB for a well-designed Paying for College site)

Q&A

* I asked a question about how they have arranged their physical space to support collaboration and information sharing between all the new and diverse employees.

She said that they use an open space "bullpen" design, with small groups that are working on the same thing ("functional teams") all in one open shared space.  A difficult adjustment for many of the employees, but it was tested on a small scale and they could demonstrate that those teams were more productive.

She said that 1/3 of the agency is remote, in particular many of the creative people they hired were based in major US cities and didn't want to move to DC.  They deal with this by using video conferencing and screen sharing.

* I asked about the online tools

She said that the intranet is primarily wiki based, allowing easy changes, and that the staff directory with open tagging helps people connect.

* Kent Aitken asked about the challenge of placing such a high level of trust in employees (allowing them to make changes and add tags)

She said they always err on the side of trust, but that the wiki requires login, so all changes are tracked, providing accountability.

* Mary Beth Baker asked about recruiting, hackfests and change-making in an organisation

Audrey Chen's reply was that you have to be brave - you have to make a case for what you believe in, at high levels in your organisation, using business language.

She said that CFPB had found success with a code-a-thon that was very specific, centred around a specific data set unique to CFPB.

* I asked about approaches to internal information sharing

She said they have both lunch & learns and "hootenanies", where design teams can share more generally what they're working on and what interests them.

She said they would like to do Google Time (20% time) but they have been too busy with the core of their work to make it possible.

She concluded by saying that as a small agency, in a space dominated by players that have huge financial resources, CFPB is using design to compete and technology to lower its costs.

---

It was an informative presentation.  I wish more people had attended, I should have promoted it more widely.  Thanks go out to Audrey Chen and to the organising team at the Embassy.

Notes from Open Government: Will it be Transformative? event

The AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management) Ottawa chapter organised an event "Open Government. Will it be Transformative?".  The opening speaker covered the national Open Government Action Plan, followed by talks about the City of Ottawa's open data initiative and how open source lessons and licensing might apply to the open data world.

The Plenary speaker was Stephen Walker, Senior Director, IM Division, Treasury Board Secretariat.  He is the lead on the Open Government Action Plan.  Contact him at [email protected] or +1 (613) 946-3052.

You can find Canada's commitments to the international Open Government Partnership (OGP) at http://www.opengovpartnership.org/countries/canada

The other portal for information about Canada's open government initiatives is the site open.gc.ca

As part of membership in the OGP the Government of Canada has detailed specific initiatives in Canada's Action Plan on Open Government.  Stephen Walker emphasised that civil society has a key role to play in monitoring Canada's progress, and that in fact civil society participation is built into the OGP.  One of the key tests of the OGP will be to what extent its partner members are able to deliver on their action plan commitments next year.

Stephen Walker presented a detailed slide deck "Canada's Action Plan on Open Government" (in Canadian government style, the presentation is available in both a complete English version and a complete French version).  Hopefully it will be available online from AIIM and at open.gc.ca, otherwise you could contact him directly for a copy.

The other speakers were Rob Giggey, the City of Ottawa's lead on open data, and Thomas Prowse, an Ottawa tech lawyer with deep experience in the legal issues related to open source.

The City of Ottawa's short links to its initiatives are ottawa.ca/opendata and ottawa.ca/donneesouvertes

There is a partner civil society group (of which I am a member): Open Data Ottawa.

It was recently announced that the city will hold a second contest to develop applications, analysis and visualisations using its open data but there is no budget for prizes this time.  They are looking for sponsors to provide funding.  Contact Rob Giggey if you are interested in sponsoring.

Twitter:

• Stephen Walker @sbwalker61
• Rob Giggey @rob_giggey
• Thomas Prowse @tprowse
• Open Data Ottawa @opendataottawa
• Hashtag was #aiimyow

Here is a Storify of tweets (mostly mine) from the event.  There are many additional links embedded in the tweets.

Twitter archive from Canadian Association of Learned Journals 2012

Here is the Storify of the livetweeting from CALJ 2012.  There were also some side discussions that I will capture in another post.  The hashtag was #calj2012.  @scilib is me.

open policy @ DFAIT - Storify of the tweets

A lightly-curated Storify of the ~500 tweets from the February 9, 2012 event at DFAIT.

Canadian G4 open data cities presentation at GTEC

Just a quick Storify of my livetweeting of a GTEC panel

Treasury Board President Clement speaks about open government at GTEC

GTEC is a big annual IT tradeshow/conference for the federal government in Ottawa.

Tony Clement, President of the Treasury Board, did the opening keynote.

I like to tell people that when I was Industry minister, I was responsible for Canadian innovation. Now that I am President of the Treasury Board, I want to champion innovation in government.

...

a government that takes on the challenge to be a global leader in openness, transparency and security.  We have already taken some steps towards making that government a reality. But there is much more to do.

...

We can transform the way we do business by harnessing IT in new ways—including

• An understanding of the value of social media tools, as a way to bridge the distance between government and Canadians; and
• A further commitment to all three streams of Open Government—Open Data, Open Information and Open Dialogue.

Our Government is committed to offering Canadians greater opportunities to learn about and participate in government, in the economy, and in our democratic process. They will have greater access to data from federal departments and be able to find, download and use information they want more easily.

Our Open Government activities are detailed at www.open.gc.ca, where we describe actions to strengthen Open Data, Open Information and Open Dialogue. We will post information about new activities as they are undertaken.

As announced last March, starting in 2012, all departments and agencies subject to the Access to Information Act will be required to post summaries of completed information requests on their websites.

Canada will soon have the chance to step on the world stage as a leader in Open Government. We were one of the countries to signal our intent to participate in an international Open Government Partnership.

As part of our leadership role in increasing governmental transparency and accountability, Canada has joined the international Open Government Partnership. This important initiative was launched by the United States and Brazil and aims to secure concrete commitments from other governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.

Having joined the partnership, we will be delivering an Open Government plan informed by broad consultation by March 2012.

Being part of this partnership will offer Canada a means to connect internationally through its Open Government agenda. This will be an opportunity for Canadian companies to showcase their innovations.

In the long term, open governments and economies will pay dividends for our business sector. They also stand to have an impact on Canadian society in general: increasing transparency, accountability and citizen engagement.

from Notes for remarks by the President of the Treasury Board - Speech for GTEC 2011 Canada's Government Technology Event - October 18, 2011

Notable is his specific committment to an Open Government plan for Canada by March 2012.

This is a reiteration of our existing commitment to the Open Government Partnership - the country page for Canada has a letter of intent from Minister Baird and the text "Country Action Plan coming in March 2012".

Tony Clement tweets at @TonyClementCPC

The Open Government Partnership is @opengovpart

and GTEC is on Twitter @GTEC and hashtag #gtec

Here is a Storify (my tweets along with a couple from Tony Clement):

Previously:
June 3, 2011  open data in 2011 Canadian Speech from the Throne
June 1, 2011  open data statement in Canadian Digital Economy Strategy update
May 20, 2011  open data supported by Treasury President Clement

ideas for book publishing innovation in Canada & an unconference

I have to admit, when I was scanning through Boing Boing and saw "Six good technological ideas for improving publishing", that word "publishing" started me off with the tyranny of low expectations.  However (and those of you who know me will know I don't go in for false praise) I was pleasantly surprised to encounter Michael Tamblyn's entertaining presentation which has six great ideas, some of which are relevant outside the specific world of book publishing.

(Sorry, initially published as a blocked link - have to unflashblock this content - hazard of browser-editor interaction.)

I have to admit, this is my first time hearing of (or at least my first time paying attention to hearing about) BookNet Canada and this particular event, BookNet Canada TechForum '09.

To be honest, I think it starts a bit slow - Michael Tamblyn starts off talking about the recession - I recommend you skip ahead to about the 3 minute mark where he gets into the meat of his talk.

He calls for a number of things, and I don't want to steal his thunder, but some highlights include:

* publishers getting smarter about how they share their data online - BookNet has an initiative called BiblioShare - "BiblioShare is a service that allows Publishers to store their most recent ONIX files at a central server that can then be picked up by any aggregator that needs them."

* publishers getting better at XML workflows - he indicates O'Reilly's Start with XML as one place to begin

* publishers opening their organisations up to innovation, and embracing ideas from creative technologists (I like this terminology of "creative technologist" a lot)

* publishers experimenting and connecting - BookNet is supporting an unconference called BookCampToronto on June 6, 2009

The one area of mobilizing data he didn't really talk about was connecting publishers to libraries (he focused on the connection to booksellers).  I think there are lots of opportunties in the library space, particularly for sharing data.

I know we often give publishers a hard time for being resistant to innovation - this is a great example of an individual and an organisation that are leading with their ideas.

I have to say I found their site a bit confusing.  There is a blog which doesn't seem to have an RSS feed.  There is an RSS feed, but it appears to be for news items.  There are supposed to be slides at There are slides from the TechForum at

http://slides.booknetcanada.ca/

but I could never get it to load.  You can also see Michael Tamblyn's slides directly on SlideShare.  There's also the blip.tv channel, which has a few other talks on it so far.  The blog slice that is about the TechForum is also useful.  The tag was bnc09 if you want to dig around further.

Mathew Ingram at Third Tuesday Ottawa

First to get some administrivia out of the way - yes, in words I think I can attribute to Douglas Adams, as his trilogy grew to four books and more - "there was a miscounting" and Third Tuesday was indeed on the 5th Monday.  But regardless... thanks to Joseph Thornley, CNW and everyone involved for bringing Mathew Ingram of the Globe to talk in Ottawa.

I think as part of his role of engaging the community Mathew has been giving this talk a lot, but it was still good - he covered a range of topics including the Public Policy Wiki and Twitter, with unexpected praise for CoverItLive (which I didn't know was Canadian) and TweetDeck as powerful tools.  I have to admit that while I had skimmed through the TweetDeck interface options, I hadn't tried them all - the Twitscoop tag cloud integration is a way to keep an eye on the realtime news topics streaming by - Mathew said he found out about the Mumbai attacks when he noticed Mumbai getting larger and larger in the word cloud and clicked through to see what was going on.  (See my posting on Twitter modes for a bit more about TweetDeck.)

There was time for a number of questions (it's always good to see a presentation that makes time for this) - I won't go over them all - you can see the--what are we supposed to call it--liveblogging? livetweeting? of the event under hashtag

#tto

He had a posting earlier this month The Guardian ups the ante on APIs and if you've been reading this blog, you know I'm all about the APIs, so I was glad to have an opportunity to ask him a question about it.  It would be great if the Globe could offer this kind of capability.  In my opinion the winners in the online space are going to be the ones who figure out how to be open, machine readable, and (somehow) monetized.  (Maybe we all buy tshirts that say "I love the Globe API", I don't know :)

UPDATE 2009-03-31: Brief summary with links to audio of presentation and Q&A now available.  Via Twitter/FF.  ENDUPDATE

SIDEBAR on the space and on technology: It was a good meeting space, although there's no free wifi.  I'm getting increasingly tempted to get a Rogers Rocket Stick 3G USB network stick, but I don't think I could justify the cost - I wish they had a pay-as-you-go version, I'd use it all the time.

Since my tiny netbook got attention again, I'll mention it's the Asus Eee PC 4G, it's a first-generation device and handy to throw in a backpack or shoulder bag, but it has a few issues: small screen, tiny keys (I'm lucky that my fingers are small), limited battery life (maybe 1.5 hours) and limited storage 4G "hard drive" - internal flash drive.  People asked if it was slow but it's actually not compute limited for basic web surfing tasks, even using WinXP - that's one of the lessons netbooks are teaching us - you can even play full motion video on it.  You can add an SD card in a built-in slot for more storage, it appears as a second drive.

I think you're probably better off with a second-generation device, say 9" to 10", with better keyboard, longer battery life, and 160GB internal HD, something like an Acer Aspire One.  There's a good comparison chart of netbooks in Wikipedia (although look at the raw weight numbers only, not the colours, since they've made an eccentric decision to colour the weight ranges differently depending whether it's measured in pounds of kilograms).  END SIDEBAR

Brady Gilchrist - presentation notes - Social Media Breakfast Ottawa

Social Media Breakfast Ottawa #7
Brady Gilchrist

Summary of Presentation

I would say his message was: instead of marketing TO your customers, market WITH your customers.
In other words, instead of just repeating "Cos-tanza" over and over again, you'll have to actually be interesting and engaged (which is much harder).  Be a real person, not a faceless "brand".

My Thoughts

Brady is a very good speaker and I thought he made a compelling case for the transformation that is sweeping over the media landscape - and he understood that this has been coming for over a decade, and that it's about engagement, not particular technologies.  Also he gets bonus points for mentioning Battlestar Galactica and showing the Star Trek: The Next Generation PADDs as precursors to our modern mobile devices (I made this same point myself - using the same image - on slides 4-5 of the Trendspotting presentation I gave two years ago).

You can see the power of customer engagement just by following the #lost and #bsg hashtags as the shows are airing on old-fashioned television (and of course before and after as well) or by seeing all of the work that has gone into the Wikipedia Battlestar Galactica pages and the entire dedicated Battlestar Galactica wiki.  This is all work that consumers do for free, because they are engaged with the product.  They're not doing this because it's some obscure thing that geeks do, they're doing it because people will share what they're interested about.  That could be your thing they're talking about and creating content around and (implicitly) promoting - if your thing is interesting enough.

There were some good (thoughtful) questions from the audience.

On the Interweb

You can follow Social Media Breakfast Ottawa discussions using hashtag #smbottawa , they also have a blog.  Brady said the best way to connect with him is through his Twitter (bradygilchrist), he also has a website.

Raw Notes

he's talking - good speaker

* talking about challenge of getting people to understand the technology
* talking ab0ut Kurzweil - rate of change - things changing so quickly we need open minds

* blogger in 1999 accidentally
* digital life - wired sailboat
* Starship Millenium - "most expensive blog ever done"
* ISDN-B Inmarsat channel
* (lots of talk about) rate of change
* more voices and more knowledge
* Tim Berners-Lee (not recognized - photo)
* business models are based on scarcity - but we live in an age of abundance
* everything is coming out of its containers
- music
- starting to happen with books

World we live in
* Near Web (desktop)
* Mobile Web
- "there isn't anything that isn't connected"
- "digital snacks" - low price
- fundamental shifts - "unboxing of newspapers"
- newspapers are made more interesting by social media
- the community joins the media
* Far Web (broadcast + Internet) - (ed comment: more like video on demand web)
- (paraphrase) has anyone noticed that the people with money aren't watching commercials
- what do people talk about: Lost, BSG...
- Eee PC-in-a-keyboard
- social media are great tools for creating a revolution (ed comment: maybe)
- could have very rapid adoption curves, e.g. Twitter
* Not so new.  1991. - Third Wave - ubiquitous computing - ubicomp - Mark Weiser - "The Computer for the 21st Century"
- (paraphase) we are now surrounded by computer chips / computer technology

*** Star Trek PADDS
- in science fiction technology doesn't really matter for technology's sake
* William Gibson
- "The future has already arrived.  It's just not evenly distributed yet."

* when creating a business: work in the space between early adopters and early majority - GET OUT EARLY before it becomes commoditized

* discussion about whether lurking has negative impact - it's ok to be a watcher -
1. You need to pay attention to what's going on
2. even if there's a small amount of interaction it's still good
* Black Swan - changes all the rules

* (paraphrase) if you're a business you'll never see it coming - you're out of your mind if you're waiting for it to hit the mainstream media
* social media as early warning medium for business

* "social media makes people smarter" - "deeper connectors on subjects"

* Rome burns and few react
- no one is paying attention to PVRs
- just "digital" doesn't solve anything - "Understand how to create abundance, knowledge, trust and connection is (the solution)."
- The One Computer Theory - the Internet as one big computer
- don't silo yourself

- "all roads must lead to dialog" - Age of Connection - lateral connections

New Rules

1. Be Present
2. Connect to others
3. Participate in ways that enhance social capital (ed comment: "don't be a marketer, be a market")

* master ubiquity and engagement

* "Many decision makers have no clue"
- the idea of the media buy (or he's maybe saying media pie) (old thinking)

* (advertising) money is being spent in places where people aren't looking

* "Motivation is the new segmentation"
- (I think he said) by participating in the conversation you can help shape the motivation

END PRESENTATION

Q: What do you tell broadcasters, newspapers to do?
A: Understand your audience / Ask your audience - create a platform for dialog

Q: Is social media just the vocal majority
A: (paraphrase) well, mass media is all lurkers - so social media is "truer"

Q: Is what's working well companies creating their own social networks?
   e.g. some companies go awry on Facebook
A: What is participation - add value to existing dialog, or spark a new one

"semantic web for marketers" - (ed comment: ???)

Q: some industries are starting to adapt
how do we compete as a country if a lot of new technologies are not available here
(Kindle etc.)
A: (paraphase) CanCon is killing CanCon

... consumers find a way... (geoproxy)
"the more you deny it, the more bittorrents..."

Canada as a digital ghetto?

Q: how does the Globe continue to create... they have extraordinary content that makes their platform worthwhile... now what do they do in terms of costs and sustainability?

A: no one knows - engage with audience/... "I don't have the answer"

Comment on music industry - they tried to fight with DRM and are now giving up...
A: "information wants to be free" - but everyone spends money on things they find interesting

"DRM sucks!"

END QUESTIONS

People Promote Their Events

* (didn't catch name of event) Mark Evans April 2
"brandividual" ????

* cupcakecamp.ca
March 29

podcastersacrossborders - Kingston, Ontario - June 19-21

The usual sidebar about wifi

I was (as usual) the only person I saw with a laptop (my little Asus 7" Eee PC 4G) - this did make it easy to camp the power outlet.  Also the only person to ask about wifi (AFAIK) - result:
* tried to get online but no luck - user/pass doesn't work
"The User Name and Password combination you have entered is invalid. Please try again."

Sometimes I feel like I'm back at Internet Librarian 2004 all over again (where I was in a giant room full of people, and almost the only one have a laptop, open it up and start typing).

I think I probably annoyed people with my aggressive typing, I'm sorry (but welcome to the 21st Century).  In a way I feel on the outside as usual - I'm not in the "writing on paper about how technology is transforming our lives" crowd (which I could never understand - writing URLs and notes on paper?  so then to share it, you have to transcribe it to digital?  what?) - and I'm not in the 3G-erati, the iPhone crew who never have to worry about Wifi access.  (I refuse to pay for the iPhone which doesn't meet my needs, just so I can get 3G, and I'm not getting a 3G stick for the small amount of usage it would get - what I'd like is pay-as-you-go 3G - there's a market opportunity for you.)

I think they're going to work on getting wifi access for future events.

Us Now - presentation notes

Disclaimer: These are just raw presentation notes, with some editorial comments inserted.  I apologise it may not be clear whether something is a quote, or to whom exactly it should be attributed.

I should also mention that Paul Miller in this context is PaulMiller.org Paul Miller, not CloudOfData.com Paul Miller.

*** begin raw notes

Us Now
Canada School of Public Service

Thursday March 5, 2009

masslbp.com

US NOW - playing

more people can say more things to more people than ever in history

can we all govern? - we become part of the government

reconstituting what is a government

* couchsurfing

low barrier - all you need is desire to engage

Eric Tomczak

social status and interaction plays out online in ways that it couldn't do in the broadcast world

* netmums

"about loss of the community ... we have to find some other way of doing it - moms net

Clay Shirky
- "is couchsurfing a small organisation (staff)... or a huge organisation (users)"

- "The old model of social trust and anointed experts is only one of many patterns"

CouchSurfing - "it's not as dangerous as you might think"

if you show trust... you reduce the incentive to game the system...

You can use a number of mechanisms for trust and reputation - Shirky

can you trust google more than a doctor... the good rises to the top
(ed comment: a lot of trust in google rank)

you get advice from 25-30 people in minutes...
moms - you trust other moms more than traditional authorities - motivation to network peer to peer

directionless.info - sources questions to local area people
connect to people with local knowledge

gift economy has always been there... social media is bringing gift economy out into the open

not generic do-gooding, it's highly specific to individual interests and abilities

Shirky - "what's happened in the 20th century was really an anomaly" - we're returning to old,
empowered, gift economy ways

public service built on model of passive consumers - the problems and needs model

(paraphrase) these hugely centralised approaches have got huge problems - people can now work together to ask deeper questions about the role of government

we now have tools that are competitive with large institutions in terms of organising people

Shirky - "everyone is available for group action" (now)

Ebbsfleet FC United - co-op football team

Paul Miller - turn institutions upside down using the net (a different Paul Miller than the Talis one)

semi-final of FA Trophy

MS vs. Linux - (ed comment: a bit of "self-organisational" magic worship - it's not as easy as that)

you can no longer instruct and tell - you have to persuade
from manager to leader... people who are comfortable letting go (of direct control)

William Heath - Ideal Government - would Gordon Brown listen to the people directly

Shirky - "more and more people take it for granted that they can get involved, ... and that there is significant value (in doing this)"

Don Tapscott - "because the web drops collaboration costs, consumers can now produce"

zopa (UK microlending)

Don Tapscott - customers can cocreate, coinnovate value for organisations

zopa guy - banks have got themselves into trouble by focusing on optimising rather than their clients

"I fought the Lloyd's and the Lloyd's lost"

Slice the Pie is a financing tool for the music industry - fan financing

Don Tapscott - "the power of transparency" - "(the net) is becoming a new mode of production"

change in the relationship between customers and corporations... mirrored in change of relationship between citizens and their governments

Don Tapscott - (traditional model of government) "is inappropriate in the 21st century"

... participatory budgeting

citizens deciding how to spend L20,000 in ?poulton?

TheyWorkForYou.com

Tom Steinberg... "much greater transparency makes (politicians) much more electable"

George Osborne (ed note: I think this is the right guy) - Shadow Chancellor - "it will shake up British politics"

Don Tapscott - "vested interests fight against change"

Paul Miller - "representative democracy was based on the idea that people are thick" (ed comment: I don't think Canadian audience got this idiom)

the point - London Birmingham Rail Link

Green Party Canada - policy wiki (ed comment: it was called the Living Platform, I don't know the details)

Don Tapscott - "I call it Government 2.0" (ed comment: yeah, you and everybody Don)

Don Tapscott - "governments could more create a platform where citizens could self-organise to create better value than already exists"

some other guy - "we should be careful about being too utopian"

Paul Miller - "a politics where you can say how you can help"

*** end movie

Panel:

* David Hume (err, not that one)
* Maryantonett Flumian, University of Ottawa
* Mike Kujawski, Marketing Professional
* Anthony Williams - coauthor of Wikipedia

(ed note: notes are even more raw at this point because I'm trying to transcribe as they're talking)

David Hume:
- what they're doing in British Columbia
- 1/3 to 1/2 workforce retiring/not available in next 10 years
- focus on human resources "being the best"
- building a culture of innovation and collaboration - Web 2-y "ideas factory"
- how to bring in citizens

- how do you address climate change - you can only go so far in legislation
- need to "facilitate action"

Maryantonett
- how does government stay relevant
- fear (of)... disintermediation... government being replaced by other actors in society
- participants are across the age spectrum (not just a youth phenomenon)
- all based on trust and confidence
- (ed comments: some backhanded complements for this technology)
1 how do we manage accountability? (without hierarchy)
2 privacy and security issues
3 leadership skills are going to have to change
- what are the costs of not collaborating

Mike
- what is the cost of not collaborating
- this isn't about technology
- it's about the people
key concepts
- trust - people are inherently good
- people are talking anyway (you can't control it)
- Most of the time (if your offering is good) negative comments will be neutralised by positive commenters
- don't hide from discussion
- the Era of Free
- why should (your presentation etc.) sit and collect dust - let others do something with it
- CrimeReports (ed comment: I don't think it's live as Mike says)
- it's not everybody, but it can be tremendously leveraged
- mention of appsfordemocracy.com
- government 2.0 best practices wiki

Anthony
- we have an unprecedented fabric of connectivity now in society
- reach outside of traditional silos - tap into pockets of expertise that exist in society
issues:
- regulation (example: lack of financial transparency, corporate social responsibility - conflict diamonds)
- service delivery (netmoms, patientslikeme)

Q: There was a question about how to handle "information overload" - I was at the mike so I don't have it transcribed, but I blogged my thoughts about it - connecting with information and finding your community

Q (me): how to create positive engagement?  negative engagement
issue - YouTube comments, 90% lurkers

(ed comment: I don't have full notes on their answers since I was standing at the mike)

David
- engage your community - not about the size, it's about the impact

Mike -
* Understand your audience
* Remember you're human
* Be respectful
* A small number can be extremely meaningful

Maryantonett
Be careful how you engage - shouldn't just be playing with a tool, have a purpose

Q from the regions - what weight should online participation be given
A: - use it as appropriate for important topics
- the ultimate decisionmaking has to remain with the representatives
- use it to generate ideas
- design the consultations to include everyone you want to reach (online and offline)

David - remember that you're serving your minister by gathering MORE information
- realise that not everyone is connected - takes a broad practice of consultation - use both online and offline

Q: conflict between open consultation and people who won't even circulate drafts without approval - the risk averse
A: Maryantonett - change how we work - get the best value and decisionmaking - if you can't demonstrate value people won't adopt it
This is not just an add-on, this is a new way of doing business - this is not about a process, it's about an OUTCOME.
The nature of how we use information has CHANGED.

Q: ?Bruce Foresster? - Department of Defence - Question of Trust
Need to know vs. need to share...
Practical applications to gain, hold, spread trust
are their differences generationally?

A: David - be open and honest, do what you say you're going to do - continue to be open
By sharing (in New Zealand wiki consultation) - able to move fast - put responsibility onto the entire community

A: Maryantonett - 9/11 was a breakdown in sharing information
intellipedia
We can't assume that the smartest person in the organisation sits at the top.

A: Mike - find relevancy at a personal level (use these tools so you understand how they work)
usedottawa site
It works because if you put in a little bit, you're going to get tenfold in return.

Q from region: collaboration between different agencies - turf wars - how do you see collaborative technologies helping?

A: Anthony - look at the vision of what we could create together
e.g. if states could work together they could share common software

A: David - ircan.gc.ca (for Government of Canada)

A: Maryantonett - 1000 wikis is no better than 1000 siloed programs
Create panels of client groups and ask them what they expect and let that be a guide in what your collaboration does -
let's not just talk to each other, let's really engage citizens.

Q: Jan from Treasury Board - biggest challenge is culture of government
Sometimes the organisation doesn't care about outcomes.
How to create cultural change?
Her comment: It's important to separate the culture of collaboration from the technology - you can collaborate without using any technology at all.

A: Maryantonett - the biggest thing we need to do is culture change -
put the citizen first (Service Canada)

Spend way more time opening up to what people actually need and want from our organisation
- ask in a forum that you can partially control.
Constantly bring the outside in.

Understand: everyone has a vested interest in the current structure.

SERVE THE PUBLIC

Technology can be powerful if you find the right things to do at the beginning.

A: David - change starts with you

Q (comment): Came in with expectations of government use of social media... discovered there's not much yet.
A: We are the drivers of this culture change.
Get people internally to work together.
Cost of contributing is far less than the benefit that you get back.
Find the community of people who get it internally.  Find the people who help you.

Q: one of the challenges is the language barrier - discussions in realtime -
how to establish a discussion across the official languages (in government)

A: Anthony Williams thinks machine translation will fix this issue in 3 years (ed comment: I've heard that one before)

Questions I would have asked if there was more time:

Q: how to connect online to offline (not about technology)

That is, how to you connect between the online interactions and having meaningful discussions and making real change happen offline?

Q: sustainability of these tools

That is, what happens if we move the whole government to Twitter, and Twitter goes bust or everyone moves to using Twitter 2.0?  Also we're only a few years into Web 2.0, do we even know what we're talking about?

Q: spread of unauthoritative info (vaccination)

That is, it's all great for the netmums to be supporting one another, but what happens when they start reinforcing bad information, such as the ongoing scare about vaccination that is leading people to NOT vaccinate their children, based on unscientific information?

SIDEBAR: When I arrived and asked what the CSPS Wifi password was, I got a startled gaze that indicated to me that probably no one taking this kind of training had ever asked this question before.  Then seeing the rows of people in the audience dutifully writing down information about the the transformational power of the web and great URLs to check out... on paper, I was reminded of Internet Librarian 2004 where I snapped open my laptop and looked around to find myself alone in using technology in the audience.  While this doesn't bode well for technotransformation in the short term, there is a positive example in that many library conferences are now very tech-enabled, but I don't know if I have the patience to wait for an entire new culture (the government) to spend the next three years discovering the amazing 1999 world of blogs.  (For a discussion of the Web 2.0 timeline, see my presentation Web 2.0 history + lifestreaming.)

Making government data visible - and is Change coming to Ottawa?

I went to the event about open government, it was good.  (It was a "meetup" I guess, in the popular terminology, or a new term I learned, 5à7).

Jennifer Bell of VisibleGovernment.ca did a presentation that I liked a lot, about mobilising government data by opening it up for public engagement through APIs.

Her presentation should show up at

http://www.slideshare.net/jenniferbell

In the meantime the presentations currently there give an idea of the concepts and objectives.

UPDATE 2009-02-12: Her presentation Benefits of Open Government Data is now available, and I also found an article by her that covers some of the same ground

Bell, J. 2009 Feb 1. Government Transparency via Open Data and Open Source. Open Source Business Resource [Online] 0:0. Available: http://www.osbr.ca/ojs/index.php/osbr/article/view/829/802

ENDUPDATE

Given my experience trying to sell the idea of APIs and open data to a community that mostly understands plain web pages, this is a challenging concept to promote, but I think there are some good US and UK examples that we can point to (about which more later).

Having learned from the experience of twitter-spamming people by live-tweeting an event, I made a FriendFeed room for my live notes instead.  I don't know how well it turned out - because of screensize limitations on my 7" netbook, it was much easier if I kept creating new top-level items, rather than just making a long section of comments - I'm not sure if this mix is right - maybe they all should have been toplevel items, or all comments.  Anyway the room is at

http://friendfeed.com/rooms/open-government-canada

in the spirit of the event, it's currently completely open.  You're welcome to add any relevant items, they don't have to be specific to this event.

Change Coming to Ottawa - Part 0

Jennifer also mentioned the possibility of a ChangeCamp Ottawa (for background, see my previous posting about ChangeCamp Toronto).  It looks like a good way to connect is through the ChangeCamp Twitter account,

http://twitter.com/changecamp

and the rather long hashtag #changecampottawa

Change Coming to Ottawa - Part 1

New web technologies face many adoption challenges for Canadian Federal Government - official languages rules, Common Look and Feel rules, slow tech adoption and a risk-averse culture.  That being said, there is a lot of excitement about the potential of these tools both internally, in an Enterprise 2.0 sense, and externally, in a Government 2.0 sense.  As I said in my Web 2.0 presentation at CISTI, in some ways I find it hard to get particularly excited when this is stretched to include blogs and wikis, which are actually both pre-Web 2.0 technologies (as you can see from the timeline I posted on FriendFeed) that are now quite mature.

That being said, the "Standard Set" of modern web tools (Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook) is getting deployed (perhaps somewhat quietly) on Canadian Government websites, the example I have been using is the Prime Minister's Official site, under Family Centre - Social Networks.

Part of what prompts this section of my posting is that there was a recent "Social Media for Government" event in Ottawa (unfortunately rather expensive).  Via the Twitter tag #ali I see that the Canadian Afghanistan mission is also using the social media tools: Flickr, YouTube, Facebook (and RSS feeds)

http://www.afghanistan.gc.ca/canada-afghanistan/multimedia/index.aspx?lang=en

Change Coming to Ottawa - Part 2

In addition to the internal drivers of change, the entire government information environment is changing worldwide.  Whether it's phenomenal reports like the Power of Information Taskforce in the UK, or President Obama releasing principles of openness on WhiteHouse.gov in his Memorandum on Transparency and Open Government

• Government should be transparent
• Government should be participatory
• Government should be collaborative

or declaring in his Memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act that

The presumption of disclosure also means that agencies should take affirmative steps to make information public. They should not wait for specific requests from the public. All agencies should use modern technology to inform citizens about what is known and done by their Government. Disclosure should be timely.

Of course, words alone won't achieve these goals, and people like Don Tapscott have been talking about transparency for years (see e.g. "turn your organization inside-out" and Tapscott keynoting about transparency at SLA 2005).  What is changing is that more people with IT expertise and a passion for engaging the public are gaining prominence.  One great example is Vivek Kundra, who is rumoured (but AFAIK not yet currently announced) to be the Obama administration's choice for Office of Management and Budget administrator for e-government and information technology (an obscure title but one that is as powerful if not more than the government CTO).  Even if Kundra just stays working for the DC city government, he's already done some great things:

47 Applications in 30 Days for $50K

Like many cities, Washington, D.C., collects a vast amount of data and metrics about its people and operations including both realtime (or near realtime) data as well as relatively static information such as neighborhood demographics. Much of that information is now available to the public through more than 200 data feeds accessed through the Office of the Chief Technology Officer's Web site.

Kundra's idea was to use a competition to encourage developers to use those feeds to create applications for the public good.

You can see the competition site at

http://www.appsfordemocracy.org/

I think these kinds of open government initiatives are pathfinders that show us ways in which governments at all levels - federal, provincial, municipal - can open up and engage citizens.

are your circulation stats a gold mine?

Chris Keene has an interesting posting about the ALT TILE meeting.

(TILE = Towards Implementation of Library 2.0 & the e-Framework)

(ALT TILE = Association for Learning Technology meeting 'Sitting on a gold mine' - improving provision and services for learners by aggregating and using 'learner behaviour data')

He says

This is one of those things that once you get discussing it you’re never quite sure why it already hasn’t been done before, especially with circulation data. There’s a wide scope, from local library services (book recommendation) to national systems which use data from VLEs, registry systems and library systems. A lot of potential functionality, both in terms of direct user services and informing HE (and others) to help them make decisions and tailor services for users.

Chris Keene - nostuff.org blog - sitting on a gold mine - December 12, 2008

via my FriendFeed and Twitter

I suggested to Chris that TILE should also have a look at all the information Johan Bollen is gathering in the MESUR project.

Web 2.0 history + lifestreaming

I completed a presentation about Web 2.0 at work, I would say overall it was about 60% successful.

First, here is a version I did at home, slides plus audio (SlideShare calls this SlideCasting).

Web 2.0 timeline and future

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web2.0 ib2)

You can click through the slides as usual, but if you press the green play button (arrow) in the centre, you will also get audio.  (I will have a follow-up post about how to make a slidecast.)

If you have some background in Web 2.0 you may want to start on slide #46, "Social Netwhat?"

UPDATE 2008-12-15: Thanks to some great work by CISTI Communications, the video of my presentation is available.  The camera is only on me, so you may also want to bring up the slides to get an idea of what I'm talking about.  The lighting is not great so it's a bit murky, but good I think for a first attempt, the audio is clear.  It's about 50 minutes of me presenting, plus an additional 5 minutes or so of information from our head of communications about how government employees can use Web 2.0 appropriately for work.

Google Video: Web 2.0 timeline

In case you're wondering why GVideo and not YouTube, GVideo allows unlimited size and length of video (I think YouTube limits are 1GB and 10 minutes).

Note: I would really consider the SlideCast audio to be the "full" presentation, in the video I ran out of time at the end to fully cover the social networking and lifestreaming parts.

END UPDATE

UPDATE 2008-12-19: If you want just the 1.5 hours of audio narration (I'm not sure how much sense it makes without the slides), it's available as an audio stream or in various formats for download at

http://www.archive.org/details/Web2_December2008

ENDUPDATE

(Not) Fitting 1.5 Hours into 45 Minutes

When I ran through the slides at home, even with a big section of organisation-internal stuff taken out, it took an hour and a half, this should have been a warning to me.  I only was supposed to present for 40 minutes (40 minutes for me, 5 minutes of material from our communications department, and 15 minutes for questions in a one hour slot).

As a presenter it's really my duty to make sure I fall in that time constraint.  I'm there for the audience (otherwise they could just look at the slides online) and an important part of that is leaving time for questions and comments, because as we know from the Wisdom of Crowds, the audience is going to have more information and ideas collectively than even the best-informed presenter.

When I told my supervisor that my test run went an hour and a half, and that I had cut out 2.5 slides, leaving me with 45 slides (or 43 slides plus opening and closing title slides), he suggested that I cut ruthlessly but there wasn't any part I was prepared to lose.  I guess one of the consequences of picking a large topic and then spending time over a period of months preparing it is you grow quite attached to the form and content of your presentation.  I really did think that I could "just say less" for each slide to get under the time limit.

More realistically for my speaking style (which tends to be a bit detailed and digressive) I should have had about 30 slides for 40 minutes.  I was thinking about it and it really is two presentations, the first piece is reasonably general and takes you through the history of Internet and Web at CISTI and NRC, through a timeline of Web and Web 2.0, to the current situation with these technologies at the Government of Canada and CISTI.  The second part moves into more advanced topics, explaining the nature of social networking and finishing with the very recent development of lifestreaming.  (If there had been time beyond that, I would have talked a bit about how mobile devices are shaping web use, and how we appear to be moving into a more personal and real-time web.)

The logical cutting points for the presentation would have been to end on the slide just before the social networking section (Social Netwhat?), or end on the first slide of that section, or end with the first "Zero Degrees of Separation" slide.  Lifestreaming is a topic that really needs another 45 minutes of presentation all on its own.  I really should have done more runthroughs until I could get the material under 40 minutes, as it was, what happened was that I was watching my time carefully and made it through the first section of the material ok, and then looked at my watch at the start of the social networking section and realised I had another 30-45 minutes worth of material to present in 5 or 10 minutes before the absolute end of my time at 15:00.  I should have just stopped then in order to allow some questions.  Instead I gave a very rushed and probably neither very comprehensible nor useful sweep through the remaining slides down to "Web 2.0 Warnings".  (I should have realised when I was telling people online to *start* at slide 46 for the social networking section, that there was no way I would be able to reach and cover it fully in my presentation - anyway in the online version you can start there and hear me very unhurriedly go through the material.)

The Venue, Presentation Technology and the Perfect Storm

I had a good venue and great support from the technical staff and presentation committee, who agreed to all of my unreasonable presentation diva demands, including a wireless clip-on mike and using my Mac to present using Keynote.  This was an additional complication for them because we use Adobe Acrobat Connect so that people in our offices across the country can see the slides, fortunately it installed and ran fine.  For audio we use a separate voiceconferencing service and a Polycom speakerphone.  To add to the tech mix, I was trying out Salling Clicker on my Nokia N82, it worked quite well, just a couple issues, one (that I was aware of in advance) is that the N82 has a sensitive position sensor, so if you're swinging it around in your hands while presenting, the screen tends to rotate, which also rotates which buttons move the presentation forward and back (I always used the "down" button to advance, since it works in either screen orientation).  It would probably be good to lock the screen from rotating before presenting.  Another issues was that for some reason a couple times it got out of slide-turning mode and into the general presentation selection mode.  It has a nice feature of displaying slide notes on-screen, but I found I didn't actually use the on-screen notes, I always present without notes anyway.  (As a sidebar, I didn't know Salling was an actual person, until with zero degrees of separation he contacted me to answer a Tweet about how to see more than one phone-screen of notes for a slide.)

The presentation was also video-ed, they were concerned about the video camera's audio though.  In retrospect, there are a bunch of other audio recording options we could have added, including:

• recording the audio from my mike directly somehow
• recording the voice conference either through the service itself, or through channeling it to some recording software/service
• both of my phones (K790 and N82) I'm sure can record an hour of audio easily
• I actually have a dedicated audio recorder that I never remember to bring.  It can also store over an hour of audio, has reasonably good pickup (I could have placed it next to the speakerphone) and is easy to work with since you can just plug it into USB when you're done and download the standard-format file it creates (I think it makes a Windows audio file).  It's an Olympus WS-320M.

The logistics side was quite complicated due to a series of unforeseen events.  First the number of RSVPs for the presentation exceeded the firecode limitations for our usual room, so in the weeks before the presentation they had to arrange for an auditorium in another building, which of course means different setup, (somewhat) different network, sending out a room change notice etc. etc. all of which the committee handled very ably.  Then, with everything arranged, on the day of my presentation the entire transit service (mostly buses) for Ottawa went on strike, plus there was a fairly big snowstorm (snowfall from 15-25 cm, later upped to 30cm, with risk of freezing rain).  How did the day go?  Well here's how the Ottawa Citizen put it: Strike, storm lead to commuter chaos.  (My workplace is about 35 minute bus ride from the downtown core where I live, and Ottawa is a very widely distributed city, so people come to my workplace from many different directions with often long commutes.)

I was grateful that anyone showed up at all, I was worried there would be about 5 people in the audience.  I (as usual) forgot to take an audience photo despite having both of my cameraphones, but I would guess around 25 people.

Part 1: History of Web 2.0 - Some Key Messages

The messages that I wanted to convey included:

• libraries were a little slow in some cases to embrace Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, but around 2006 there was a tipping point and I would consider that now e.g. library conferences are leaders in web-enabling (what Lorcan Dempsey calls amplified conferences, a concept which Brian Kelly has, well, amplified and extended).
• That being said, the academic sector, including academic libraries and some large research and technology organisations were early to the Internet and to the Web.  In fact it's not an exaggeration to say these groups were the Internet, in the pre-Web days.  USENET newsgroups were filled with scientists and students asking questions and having conversations.  The Web itself came out of CERN, and so it's not surprising that scientists were also early to the Web.  So when we say scientists aren't using Web 2.0, to some extent it's because they already have well-established communities online, and because science has always been about your peers, they already know their networks and connect to them online and offline.
• My organisation in particular was (based on my amateur USENET sleuthing), posting to newgroups in 1988, talking about xmosaic in 1993, and putting up websites in 1994.  That's about as early as you could possibly adopt - so I don't think we can say that (academic) libraries are necessarily always late adopters.
• Many libraries unfortunately got "stuck" in the mental model of the browse-based web that existed from (very roughly) 1995 to 1998, the pre-Google Web.  It was a very compelling analogy:
  • physical address-> web address (URL)
  • front desk -> front page (home page)
  • browse through stacks -> browse through web pages
  • library -> digital library
• Unfortunately this model of the web, where users type in specific URLs and then browse for content usually within a single site, the Yahoo model of locating information, the model that is even embedded in our terminology of "web browser", is completely false in the post-search world, the post-Google Web.  In the post-search world what matters, the only thing that matters really, is rich content that gives you PageRank.  The page that shows up may be many layers deep within your website, and people may stop there only briefly, before jumping to another site in order to satisfy their need for photos of rabbits with pancakes on their heads (err, or whatever particular topic you provide expertise on).
• Web 2.0 is about many things, including this rather awkward term of "user-created content".  (I kind of messed up my message here, I was trying to say, with the Communications team in the audience, that Web 2.0 is typically personally-identifiable, amateur content, whereas organisational communications are typically more anonymous and professional - I think I may have unintentially given the impression that Web 2.0 communications are "cool", when I just want to say that they're different modes of presenting information, they both have their pluses and minuses.)
• I also didn't have time to cover some interesting work that Alison Ball and others are doing with delicious bookmarks and the Federal Library Web 2.0 Interest Group

Part 2: Social Networking and Lifestreaming

Skipping towards the end of the presentation (as this posting is getting as over-long as my presentation itself) there are some trends that we can see.  One is that we have many new options for making social connections online - but you have to keep in mind that the solution you choose is going to depend on where your network already exists.  If, like is often the case with librarians, your colleagues, your social network is already in mailing lists, then it's going to be very difficult to get much benefit from new social tools.  I give a very simple example, which is that my generation (I finished my undergrad in 1990) is primarily email-based.  If I want to reach my friends, I send them an email.  I can send them messages in Facebook until I'm Faceblue, but they'll never get them, because they never check Facebook.  So this kind of "build it and they will come" idea ONLY works if either people don't have good ways to connect to their social network, or if somehow you convince enough of them to move over (which is tremendously difficult to do).

That being said, IF your connections (friends, work colleagues, whatever) are using social, Web 2.0 tools, you can see their lifestreams, their patterns of activity.  This may be in Facebook (which really was just intended for university students to tell each other where they were, what parties they were going to, and to share drunken pictures of themselves), in Twitter, which I think of as a kind of digital watercooler, and in FriendFeed, which is a sort of meta-site for aggregating all your activity in other Web 2.0 sites.

So your choice of social network online will be shaped by where your current (or desired) community already participates.  Additionally (and I'm grateful to Owen Stephens for this insight), your choice of tool may depend on how you consume the information, in particular, mobile device versus computer screen.  Facebook and in particular Twitter have mobile versions that work very well on a small smartphone screen, their "short snippets of stuff" design takes this environment into consideration (and Twitter can even be used entirely just through SMS).  FriendFeed, with its longer message fields, extensive comment threads, and more complex content, is not at all as well suited to this environment.

Additionally, as we move past Google at 10 Years, we're starting to see a change in search and information exchange.  In the Before Time, because looking up information was expensive/timeconsuming, we often turned first to friends or to reference experts like librarians when we had questions.  Then we had the era of keyword search.  But with the rise of Instant Messaging, SMS, and other more real-time social network interaction, people are again turning back to asking questions first.  That is, they will post a question to their social network, and use keyword search only as a supplement to the information they get from their peers.  This may seem like we've actually gone back to an old way of doing things, but as with all historical cycles, it's both similar and different.  People are asking others questions again, but now they can ask many more people at once than ever before (in theory, you can ask the entire Internet world - sometimes called "crowdsourcing").  There is, I think, an opportunity for librarians to re-introduce themselves into this new real-time question-driven environment.

Conclusion

If you're looking for an overall conclusion, for me it's that as someone who is web-based (rather than mobile), with a widely-dispersed web presence, and whose community is fairly intensive web users, FriendFeed is the best Web 2.0 tool for me.  Facebook I didn't like much at all, it mixes work and personal together and neither my work nor my personal community are particularly active users of it, so it doesn't make any sense for me to spend much time there.  So you can catch me Web 2.0 lifestreaming at

http://friendfeed.com/scilib

As a presenter, there's always a risk of putting yourself forward as the Expert, and I want to say that I very much don't consider myself a Web 2.0 Expert of any kind, I'm not even in the right generation to be talking about Web 2.0 (although perhaps being an outsider to this environment gives me a chance to see things that the Digital Generation may take for granted).  I invite your questions, comments and corrections (and I wish I'd made time to do so in my presentation yesterday).  You collectively know much more than I do.

SPARC 2008 liveblog experiment

Just an experiment with CoverItLive - may fail totally, we'll see.