Users in the Development Cycle.
Users have to be willing before they will use whatever product you develop. Generally, they will use it if it helps them get their work done--not if it provides important company infomration, not if it increases accountability--because it helps them do their work. Users have to be involved in the development process or the whole thing can too easily become an expensive exercise in failure.
The design steps are: application necessity, intended audience, delivery, technology, timeline, development, delivery, support.
As the project proceeds it's important to know everyone's roles and to balance input from project management, development, and end users.
Meg Hourihan, in an essay at O'Reilly.net, tries to get at the essence of the blogger phenomenon.
Weblogs provide a way of organizaing information independent of topic. What weblogs become from that shared structure are myriad and fascinating.
John Grobol at Psych Central has a response to Hourihan's column.
A usability article by Peter Seebach at IBM developerWorks suggests that we ought to pay more attention to video game interfaces when designing programs for business and other everyday users.
Game developers know that their audience will walk if a program is unusable, so they tend to produce programs that are -- compared to most productivity software -- paragons of stability, convenience, and user control. If productivity software developers made the same kind of effort, users would spend a lot less time cursing the names of the vendors they're stuck with.
Among the things Seebach suggests we look to games for are: streamlining, reliability, approachability and adaptability.
The Philip Glass engine, that is.
The Philip Glass website has online a deep navigation tool called 'The Glass Engine' developed as an ongoing research project at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center.
The Engine allows you to navigate the collected musical works of composer Philip Glass based on a number of criteria: year, length, emotion, etc. and how the criteria interact with one another.
The engine requires IE 4.5 or higher and works best in a higher bandwidth environment.
A recent article at destinationKM.com discusses why more people in an organization don't spend more time sharing the knowledge they have. It suggests that the top five reasons are:
A reason not mentioned in the article but critically important is that an organization can't value people's knowledge without valuing people. A company that doesn't say, 'you are good at your job, we couldn't do what we do without you', and mean it, can't expect its employees to readily share knowledge, trust that knowledge sharing will be positive, or even believe that they have knowledge worth sharing.
A recent article, Lessons from the Anthill, in the Online Community Report discusses the development of anthill communities on the Internet. Anthill communities are large groups of people who come together through online networks, each taking a small piece of responsibility for a large significant project. Open source software development is one of the first and most successful examples of an anthill community, producing Linux, Apache, and Mozilla, many people contributing small pits of code, discussing the results, and working out the bugs.
Examples of anthill communties outside the programming community include OpenLaw and ThinkCycle.
A new and interesting article at Boxes and Arrows by Nathan Shedroff, discusses Computer Human Values.
Computers have enabled cultures and individuals to express themselves in new and unexpected ways, and have enabled businesses to transform how, where, when and even what business they do. However, this rosy outlook has come at a proce. Computers have become more frustrating to use. In fact, the more sophisticated the use, the application, the interface, and the experience, the more important it is for computers and other digital devices to integrate fluidly into our already-established lives without requireing us to respond to technological needs. Also, the wider-spread these devices, the more socially-agile they need to be in order to be accepted.
According to research by Cliff Naas and Byron Reeves, people treat computers like people (yes, the rest of us yell at our computer screens, too). While we don't expect 'intelligence,' we do expect actions to be consistent with human values.
Therefore,
Jon Udell on Seeing and Tuning Social Networks:
A number of people are starting to say that the 'W's'--Web services, web logs, and WiFi (wireless connections) are starting to make the web, which was in danger of becoming a big consumer mall, fun again.
So what is some of the current thinking on web logs, social networking, economics, and the web? Udell talks to Jon Schull, a biological psychologist turned software entrepreneur, and Valdis Krebs, a developer of software for mapping social networks.
Jon Schull thinks we ought to be looking at patterns of nature and agriculture rather than commerce and manufacturing to understand the way the web works, how things travel, and to find new ways to handle intellectual property and the spread of knowledge.
Valdis Krebs says information travels at most three 'hops' (person to person to person). The most effective organizations, then, are those with the most reach (richest interconnections). Companies who handle change best are those with high reach and leaders adept at plugging holes (making connections where they don't currently exist).
In a recent article, eWeek and the University of Wisconsin took a look at platforms for providing web based meetings.
The University of Wisconsin needs collaboration/meeting applications both for traditional meetings and e-learning. After testing a number of systems, price and confusing pricing models turned out to be among the biggest factors in making a final decision.
In addition to the general article, eWeek includes a detailed evaluation article, Striving to Make a Mark, and a one page 'scorecard' (eVal Scorecard: Virtual Meeting Collaboration)
Yet another recent article on reading the manual, this time in Wired News.
Company executives and marketing consultants say over half the calls to U.S. tech support address issues that are already discussed in manuals provided with products. And even though they suspect that no one in the United States has ever read an entire product manual, companies continue to provide them because they are legally required to do so.
Simply providing one of course, doesn't guarantee that it's readable or that the information is organized in a way that makes it possible to find what you're looking for. On the other hand, some manuals are surprisingly good and still don't get used as frequently as they might.
In addition, a 'good' manual in the United States might not work at all in, say, Hungary where, according to the article, the assumption is that everything will break and users demand do-it-yourself fixit instructions.
flashforward2002 -the Flash Film Festival has finalists in the following categories:
If you're looking for examples of what Flash can do, you might want to check it out.
The world's flags get letter grades and a brief critique.
According to a recent article in Science News, the Internet is providing social researchers with a wealth of opportunity. But what does it all mean? Are heavy Internet users depressed and withdrawn? Or are they happy, social, and well-connected? Does Internet time cut into passive television time or family time?
Early results of research into Internet usage and its effects can be confusing and contradictory, made more so by the speed with which the Internet grows and changes.
Freedom Ship (TM) - City at Sea is a proposal for a floating city of up to 60,000 people. The ship would circle the globe once every two years and include schools, offices, warehouses, a library and housing.
Lucent, Qwest, XO Communications...the list of telecom companies with cash-flo, sales and customer problems just grows and grows.
According to a recent article in the New York Times, 24 of the nation's 29 top telecom companies that haven't file for bankruptcy recently are in danger of doing so soon.
In an article called, 'The Third State of KM emerges,' in the March, 2002 issue of KMWorld, Michael Koenig says that the three stages of Knowledge Management are:
The February, 2002 issue of Informatik deals with the topic of Knowledge management and Information Technlogy. Articles include:
Cory Doctorow at Boingboing blogs Howard Rheingold's Reboot talk on the populist side of technology.
It's not all dot-coms and venture capital. New tech can make infrastructure cheaper and a tech commons can spur innovation in ways restricted access can't.
According to recent article in WiredNews, UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism now has a course on blogging. Students are maintaining a blog on blogging and web issues (deep linking, copyright, online music trading).
Other schools are also looking at incorporating blogs into their online journalism courses.
Cory Doctorow, one of the folks who maintains the excellent and eclectic BoingBoing blog, has a recent column at O'Reilly.net about weblogs as memory tools. Blogging is not only a way to pass knowledge to others without having to constantly walk around the office saying, 'Look at this, look at this.' It's also a way to keep track of stuff for yourself.
How does storytelling fit in today's business environment?
Telling stories can build community, intitiate change, and share knowledge. In an article entitled, Bringing Us Back To Life: Storytelling and the Modern Organization, Seth Weaver Kahan of the Performance Development Group talks about some of the ways that storytelling can be used in the workplace.