Using Data

The Law of the Third Way...or something

You always think the decision will be A or B,
but it's always some third way
that you couldn't have anticipated.

-- The law of the third way something-or-another--

 

I have learned, after many years of trying to get people to make Big Decisions, that things never go the way you think they're going to go. You get all wound up in advance of The Big Meeting trying to anticipate what will happen - - will they choose option A or option B..? Will they approve my project or reject it..? And it's *always* some third option - - option C - - some twist that you never could have anticipated. This is practically an axiom of organisational physics.

With experience, I've learned to spend less time worrying about these big decision moments and more time becoming comfortable with a wide variety of possible outcomes. I think I'm also learning that Big Decision Meetings (smackdowns, in the parlance of professional wrestling) tend to get called when something is out of alignment within an organization. Best to spend time working on alignment, habitually and always, so that when the smackdown comes the decision is sensible no matter where on the spectrum between A and C it falls. 

(Oh, and "The Law of the Third Way" sounds like something Yoda would say. Gotta find a better name for this...)

Update: Deb Lavoy pointed out that "The Third Way" is a Bill Clinton -era euphemism for centrism (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Way_(centrism) ), so not only does it sound like Yoda but it's got old political baggage too. So I really need to find something else to call this phenomenon. (Thanks Deb!)

Nine Classic Risks of Traditional Website Redesign Projects

(I wrote this post for an internal work blog a little over two years ago. I needed to share it with a colleague today and thought it would be a good idea to just post it publicly.)

I came up with this list whilst thinking about a) how much I dislike "traditional" redesign projects, and b) some Classic Mistakes I've made, seen, and would like to avoid in the future.

My beef with the term *redesign* is that I think it can lead to sloppy thinking and an unhealthy fixation on the org chart, graphic styling, and page real estate over the needs of users. That being said, I'm encouraged by the success of recent efforts at the National Geographic, the New York Times, and the BBC - - maybe there's hope for us!

So I offer for your consideration, Nine Classic Risks of Website Improvement Projects:

1. Happy with just short-term improvements
   Sr. Management wants a quick-fix to prevent erosion of brand value, but fundamental change is necessary to enable growth of brand value. Mitigation: Be responsive to Sr. Management, but start immediately on mid- and long-term change. Recognize that tinkering with a complex and struggling Web property will quickly approach the point of diminishing returns.
2. Ambiguous ownership
   Decision-by-committee and unclear lines of authority frustrate participants and dilute the impact of final results. Mitigation: Establish an owner and clear lines of authority.
3. Lack of capacity
   Organization lacks the internal capacity to manage, execute, and sustain a world-class redeployment of its central portal. Mitigation: Establish a strong Project Management Office to avoid over-reaching. Focus on user-centric, high-impact/low-risk improvements while building the core skills required to own and improve the site over time.
4. Inexperienced Managers
   The trusted go-to leadership team for bricks-and-mortar projects lack the domain expertise and vision to lead Web and New Media initiatives. Mitigation: Evaluate and adjust the management team, structure, and roles-and-responsibilities. Use empirical data from real users and real site-performance to guide decision making.
5. Alienated internal stakeholders
   The day-to-day demands of a large, complex project distract leaders from internal communication. Mitigation: Insist on a communication plan and assign clear supervisory responsibility for internal communication.
6. Missed opportunities
   Lack of vision and/or strategic direction prohibits the pursuit of fundamental and necessary new directions. Mitigation:  Invest in the vision and strategy. President Abraham Lincoln said that if he had six hours to cut down as many trees as he could he would spend four hours sharpening the saw.
7. Insufficient focus from Sr. Management
   Web site improvement is critical to the success of the organization but high-level managers aren't fully engaged in the process. Mitigation: Executives must communicate the importance of Web initiatives to senior staff.
8. Stuck in Web 1.0  or Web 1.5
   The organization invests enormous time/effort working on cosmetic appearance and rudimentary interaction with audiences, but fails to recognize the fundamental sea-change in Web behavior as evidenced through Web 2.0 design patterns (see Tim O'Reilly's What is Web 2.0? http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html). Mitigation: Invest in the core competencies of Web 2.0 organizations and insist on more than a cosmetic redesign—lipstick on a pig!
9. Atrophy over time
   The organization lacks the skills and staffing to own and improve the Web site after the contract is done, and shifting technologies and audience/demographic preferences quickly make investments obsolete. Mitigation: Understand Website improvement as a 24 x 7 x 365 responsibility and plan/staff accordingly. Modest adjustments well maintained will beat big adjustments poorly maintained every time. 

 

Smithsonian Commons Prototype

Uh, it's here:

http://www.si.edu/commons/prototype

 

Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy v. 1.0

(This is cross posted @ the Smithsonian 2.0 blog. Creating this strategy has been my main project for the last year.)

We've just posted Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy, Version 1.0. The strategy talks about an updated digital experience, a new learning model that helps people with their "lifelong learning journeys," and the creation of a Smithsonian Commons—a new part of our digital presence dedicated to stimulating learning, creation, and innovation through open access to Smithsonian research, collections and communities.

This strategy was created through a fast and transparent process that included workshops, the Smithsonian 2.0 conference, Twitter, YouTube, and ongoing collaboration through the wiki. It's a work in progress, and we welcome your comments, questions, and input, via this blog or through any discussion tab on the strategy wiki site.

This strategy will feed into the Smithsonian’s comprehensive strategic plan, currently under development.

The Courage to go Open Content

I've just posted something new to the Smithsonian 2.0 blog, The Courage to go Open Content, about a) the MIT faculty's vote to mandate open-access publishing of their scholarly work, and b) U.S. Representative Mike Honda's recent O'Reilly Radar post about open content and crowdsourcing.

I'm really jazzed about this!

Web Tech Guy and Angry Staff Person

I made this animation for the 2009 Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) Webwise conference.

I was on a panel titled Online Communities and The Institution chaired by Nina Simon of Museum 2.0 with Shelley Bernstein, Chief of Technology at the Brooklyn Museum and Deanna Marcum, Associate Librarian of Congress for Library Services.

Nina wanted us to be provocative and I thought this might be the time and place to, as @ulotrichous (Eli Neiburger from Ann Arbor Public Library) said, defuse "traditional arguments against letting go of content." I was a little worried about the presentation. I thought that either I was being too harsh in caricaturing those who have reservations about online content, or that Webwise attendees were already past objections like "if we put content online nobody will come to our museum/library/archive."

Far from the case apparently.

Deanna said she thought the animation "was filmed inside the Library of Congress" and many many attendees told me that the script cut very close to home.

I'm going to cross-post this to the Smithsonian 2.0 blog, Slideshare, and also put a linear video clip of the first part of the flash file on YouTube.

Update: open the animation in a bigger window

Been Quiet

It's been hard to post since I took the job as Director of Web and New Media Strategy for the Smithsonian Institution last February. I run an internal blog and listserv and most of my energy has gone into a kind of organizational thinking/hacking that's hard to share in a public blog.

Much of my recent work has been focused on understanding content commons (plural) - - what they are and how they work. I've been speaking at conferences a little bit: text and slide versions of my Imagining a Smithsonian Commons talk is up on slideshare.

Numbered Conversations: Design-Pattern Zombies of the Modern Workplace

Some ideas just won't die. Though enterprise and government Web teams have made enormous progress in recent years bringing their organizations into the modern world and preparing them for what comes next there's always somebody who missed the memo, or was out sick the day that we talked about new media and moved on.

I can sympathize - - there's a lot of new stuff here and I've had to hit reload more than once to wrap my head around things like the cut-and-paste Web and free content - - and I definitely come from the "there's no such thing as a stupid question" school, but it is exhausting to confront the same basic ideas and/or misconceptions over and over again. This happens frequently enough that I've come up with a shorthand method for referring to these zombie-like ideas that won't die.

It's from an old joke that goes like this:

A guy is having his first day in prison. He's having lunch in the cafeteria. It's very quiet and everybody is shoveling down food when a prisoner yells out "twenty-four" and everyone busts out laughing. A few minutes later another inmate yells "thirty-two" and everybody starts laughing again, knee-slapping guffaws all around. The new guy is baffled and whispers to his neighbor to ask what's going on. He's told that they've all been locked up together so long that they all know the same jokes, and to save time they just refer to them by number. (A follow-up punch line has the new guy mustering his courage to yell "twelve!" and the result is dead silence. He asks his neighbor what he did wrong and is told "some guys just don't know how to tell a joke.")

Thus we come to the idea of Numbered Conversations - - ideas and concepts that recur so frequently in the technology workplace that you can refer to them by number.

These are some of my numbered conversations I have far too frequently:

27. If we put it online, people won't come to the museum.

I thought we got over this one a long time ago. Online museum visits are different than actual museum visits. I don't know of a single piece of actual or anecdotal evidence that shows that somebody didn't come to a museum because a work of art was viewable online. And we know that people compare museums' Web sites with those of other cultural attractions when planning visits. (I saw a survey recently that said 44% of museum visitors did this - - I'm looking for the citation.)

32. Digital Images online take attention away from actual works of art

This may be true for the very few people in the world who already know a lot about said work of art, but for the rest of us our attention can't be taken away because it isn't there in the first place. I also  suspect that the experts and enthusiasts are wise enough to keep their focus where they want it.

44. If we put it online for free, we'll never be able to make any money on it.

Wellll, maybe and maybe not. I'm willing to have this conversation, but what disturbs me is that it often doesn't go anywhere beyond this assertion, and there are a number of instances in which it is demonstrably not true. Witness the Victoria and Albert's liberalization of their image-use policies. (Related blerb on Boingboing.)

61. If we put peoples' opinions on our Web site our customers will confuse those opinions with our own authoritative content.

I used to worry about how to work through this one convincingly until I saw how the New York Times was mixing letters to the editor with reporting and editorials in their search results. Public and non-public content are intermingled and highly findable and the combination gives users more knowledge/insight than either would separately. (For an example see this NY Times search on "Jonathan Lebed," a bright kid accused by the S.E.C. of giving illegal stock advice.)

72. We can't do/think about that because we don't know anything about technology

The train has left the station. If you're a manager and don't know enough about technology to have opinions or lead and motivate your staff then I think you're in trouble. See Universal Music CEO: Record industry can't tell when geeks are lying to us about technology for a point of reference.

12. I don't need to do audience research because I know our audience.

Ohhh, how I wish this were true. What this statement usually means is "I've had some experience with half-assed audience research and it was expensive and I didn't learn anything." Circular logic and self-fufiling prophesy.

6. Let's do a blog so we can attract a younger audience.

Related to #12. Do a blog because you have something to say and let it find its own audience.

I don't really refer to these ideas by the same number week-in and week-out, but I do say to colleagues "hey, I had a numbered conversation with Joe Schmoe about xyz" and they get the picture.

 

usingdata: the prequel

Jacques Lacan proposed in his Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis that meaning is created where language breaks down i.e. we find the most important content of communication in the cracks in language, the spaces left when an idea tries to conform to grammar, syntax and the words available for us to express ourselves and fails in a fascinating and meaning way. It is these juxtapositions of words and grammatical structures that animate the building blocks of language, that take information or data and imbue it with meaning; they are sometimes expertly crafted and linguistically 'accurate' and sometimes solipsistic accidents that resonate with others and help modify our language structure to accommodate this new insight.

The interplay between data and technology operates in much the same way: data is not information without the effect of technology to animate it. I use the term technology in its purest sense from the Greek meaning a crafted or systematic treatment, so the book is as much technology as the computer. And in so doing suggest that there are two complementary missions we undertake as caretakers of knowledge: the first is to collect and protect data, the second is to apply technology to that data in order to reveal and explore its meaning as information.

The danger arises when our desire for meaning encourages us to elide the distinction between data and information; we see it as a useful shortcut that gets us to the point faster, but in so doing we risk morphing the data, altering its fundamental nature to suit a particular interpretation. Once changed the data cannot be re-presented, interpreted or analyzed and potential new and more informed meaning is impossible.

I see enormous value in interrogating data projects through this lens to understand if our short term goals preclude the future utility of the data inherent in the project. It seems there are many things to consider about the data per se before we are in a position to start using it! 

Different Takes on Mobile Media

Top: screen grab of NY Times slideshow. Bottom: Zune marketing cruft.

Different ideas about mobile media this morning.

Item 1: David Pogue's fairly favorable review of Microsoft's second attempts at the Zune.

Item 2: But why putz around with sub-1 watt speakers? See how to carry the big iron in Corey Kilgannon's article in the NY Times this morning, Bicycles that Carry a Powerful Beat, and Sometimes a Rider or Two, about kids from Queens who mod their bikes to carry enormous sound systems. Pictures by Tyler Hicks in the online slide show are exquisite. The joy of cruising, tinkering, and friendship in the crisp light of a warm winter day.

Item 3: This mobile-protest platform sited at the edge of Lafayette Park, in front of the White House in early November, 2007. The armature is made of galvanized pipe clamped to the frames of two BMX-style bicycles, and supports a platform with a generator and a fairly large LCD screen and speaker system, as well as a Statue of Liberty, donation and comment buckets, and at least one American flag. The normal medium for Lafayette Park protesters is hand-painted plywood signs and outrage-photos in worn office-supply presentation sleeves, so this guy really stood out. I wonder if his rig can be rented out for parties?

Item 4. Vista-guy. In January of 2007 there were three or four people with computer backpacks at my subway stop advertising the launch of Windows Vista. The backpacks looked heavy, and the people looked self-conscious, but the concept was well executed. I asked them how they could keyboard and mouse when the screen was above their heads and they just smiled and shrugged. I also asked them if they needed to travel in groups so they could reach each others backpacks for all the obligatory Windows reboots and, to their credit, they thought that was pretty funny. I desperately want to see these guys on the club scene, using the screens to pick up dudes/chicks or be outrageously retro-techno.

And I'm neglecting to mention the Amazon Kindle. I've yet to speak with a non-technologist who actually knows about this device, or, when it's explained to them, has any interest in it. I'd like to tie this to the National Endowment for the Arts' To Read, or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence report in a future post.