Creating a Metadata Schema for the MSIM iSchool Website at the University of Washington

Approach
When considering administration of the University of Washington’s iSchool MSIM website, and what metadata might be helpful to do this, I considered human issues first and then the larger scope of the organizations needs, the users needs, and lastly system’s or machine level needs. My questions were “what are the needs of a website administrator”, “what is this organization and what are their needs”, and “what kind of content I am working with”, as well as “how may information be accessed and why”.

An alternative approach is to view metadata as just another level of information in the metadata stack, one which can aid the site administrator, one which can be automated using systems, and one which can be accessed using interoperable systems.

Starting with the human element first - the website administrator acts as a consultant and advisor, in effect a domain expert working to improve the interface between users and their needs, the organization and it’s needs, and what computers can do, balanced with the costs. However, administrators also actually have their own needs when handling data so I focused on that person’s real needs first and foremost.

Considering which elements are most important to include in any metadata schema, I first thought about the human input and process issues. “How much time could a website administrator reasonably be expected to spend inputting this kind of data into pages,” was my baseline question. Even if you have tools to perform this function, adding data adds cost to publication. This question lead me to conclude that “Administrators have little time to add metadata,” no matter how passionately they feel about the semantic web, or about the possible eventual use of such data.

What are the organization’s needs? The needs of institutions are many and varied whether the University of Washington or other institutions. I came to the following conclusions:

The similarities of large educational organizations needs can be summed up in one paragraph – they need three major things:

1. Educational resources, Books, images, and other stored or linked Materials

2. Knowledgeable speakers, Teachers or other Knowledge holders

3. Support from the community to maintain these resources, Funds

But in order for the combination of these to survive and thrive they also require a fourth –

4. Communication so that the educators and students, as well as other relationships, other teachers, donors, students in distance learning programs, etc can be built by finding, influencing, and interacting with each other.

Marketing arises as a delta communication and support, it may be described as “communication to increase support” - this means knowing where hits are coming from and to what resource. (See more about this subject in section two on Impact.)

The Meta data elements and controls included are based on the minimum number of requirements for an Administrator to bring those things together literally on the same page. They answer several questions shown in Table 1 below, What, When, Who, Where, and How Valuable? Providing the answers to these questions in the metadata would support the needs of the Administrator. They also include questions to provide effective feedback into the decision making process to rework the site structure, and as a process of inquiry to help decide if the metadata elements need modification.

Exploring the various existing schemes on the Metamap I found that many referred to or leveraged the Dublin Core version, based on 15 elements. As a result I reasoned that approximately 15 elements would be the maximum, this number has the practical appeal of suiting both effective and economical administrative overhead. The new ones were derived from the Dublin Core options.

Dublin Core Metadata Element Set has the main attributes both the administrator and the institution need, and the interoperability that computers require, because many other standards include it. Taking into account the fact that Dublin Core is an accepted standard, it would not require too much in the way of selling it to team members unfamiliar with metadata schemas, or standards themselves.

Impact

The conclusion that information is only valuable in context implies a corollary: contextualized information can create more relevant information for the user. From such relevant information users can realize knowledge.

Table 1

Questions	Expanded Questions and Answers	MetaData Element
What?	What is this stuff, the format I am handling? “Format” is for ease of use and knowing what to do with it and what to expect (.HTML, etc). This has somewhat limited use in non-text applications, such as graphics because you can not label an image inside the image. Image headers contain information about the image, not about the context of the image or the elements within the image or images.	Format
What?	What is it called? “Title” is what the document of X format type is called.	Title
When?	What date was it created? (when was it made?) “Date” provides the when it was created or last saved. In some ways this can imply versioning.	Date
Who?	Who provided it? “Source” tracks where the file originated from.	Source
What/who?	What language is it in? (who is it for?) “Language” helps make sure it is located in the right area, and for the right audience.	Language
Who?	Who owns the legal rights? “Rights” provides information on ownership and establishes some idea of copyright.	Rights
Who?	Who created it? “Creator” provides a information as to who made it. Often webpages have more than one author.	Creator
Who?	Who approved it? “dc.Creator.approver” gives another set of eyes[1] watching who approved the document to be published.	dc.Creator.approver
Who?	Which organization owns it?	dc.Creator.org
What?	What is the subject?	Subject
When?	What does it cover?	Coverage
When?	For what dates/time period is it valid?	dc.coverage.date
Where?	For what location does it apply or is it valid for? “dc.coverage.location” provides a detail about where the document belongs, such as an association with a specific campus.	dc.coverage.location
How Valuable/How found?	How valuable is it stacked in an outside Search entity, such as Google? “pageRank” page rank as provided by Google search engine, through Google’s API.[2] Future improvements could add pageRank.searchengine.	pageRank
Value?	How valuable is it in terms of hits? “pageRank.hits” total number of hits as compared to other pages on the MSIM site, from “Clicktracks” data.	pageRank.hits
Value?	How valuable is it scoring within the scope of the MSIM site? “pageRank score” is the mean of the PageRank and.hits, to provide scoring. This could enable authority control to other search systems, when combined with date for example or location for instance.	pageRank.score

The last three elements of Table 1 above, pageRank, seek to display how valuable a page is, which is included as an experiment. These would be auto generated on the fly as the page was assembled. These categories would be based in part on the Google PageRank API and on indexing and hits actively made in the system.

Why these and why does it matter? To help end users find the school they want and for the school to welcome them, is just one reason. In my own experience working with the Seattle Community Colleges as a web designer, reading the log files, it became obvious to me that many of the foreign nationals inquiries on the Seattle Community Colleges’ sites were not serving their potential student body, in part because no one was examining the logs. Those who rarely did examine the logs did not take the next logical step to advise the senior leadership on how to improve their website as their most functional, least expensive form of marketing. It is likely that such a field cross-referenced with other metadata could aid systems to enable end users to locate the most current authoritative information on a subject.

Nervana’s Sharon L. Bolding advised students to “Iterate to improve over time” in her class presentation. During class discussions she mentioned that organizations needs for information changes over time. If you try to think of everything you might need the administrative overhead is too large and quite simply you will fail. It’s better to think of what you need as experimental, try something, and iterate as you go along, just like all of Web design and application development.

Understanding “what is being used and by whom” in order to identify patterns, can include some automated information from trusted authorities. Combined with the need for pattern recognition the idea of trapping active logging, and exposing some of it for users occurred to me. Click tracking is done at the University of Washington by “Clicktracks”, according to Joel Larson. But what if that data was exposed at some level, such as in the metadata comments? How could this be helpful? Who will it be helpful for?

The reasons someone comes to the University website are fairly well known, however the right to view some materials is based on authentication. In this environment such user rights are controlled by the ‘PubCookie’ as an authority grantor, using databases as control agents. Customers such as students are a common end user. But are they able to find what they want right away from navigation? How many use a search engine instead, and how often? What Search engines do they use? Where do they come from and where are they going?

This solution could make a difference in the user experience on the MSIM website. It might help improve the logic in the user interface design. From the standpoint of site administration, it might help show where some static materials are helpful in certain ways, and yet completely static materials fall out of use over a longer period of time. What it may show we do not know and that itself is interesting.

Problems

Still with this additional data, we need real human beings to observe, analyze, and accept critical feedback and try exceptional things in order to improve information findability and refine that slippery thing known as User Experience. Computers are here to serve man, not the other way around.

Even the reason to ask these questions of Value is implied in the need for large organizations to continually try to improve the findability and usability of their information. In some way, one wants to take the data out of the hands of those who believe they know what, when, where, and how information is being used, and put it into the hands of the end user to make those decisions themselves. The question really is how to help users do it, and what logical steps can one take to make this possible.

What I sacrificed to make the choices was time and lack of experience in terms of what I could or actually would do with this metadata. Once exposed, how useful is it really? Does it only serve me as the administrator? How can I make it more useful?

While many of the metadata schemas were very intriguing I felt I would need more experience actually using and “munging” data to make it useful for end users, the organization, and at the machine level.

Resources

• Dublin Core. (February-1-2007) Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, Version 1.1.
  http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/

Considering metadata elements over several days I realized that I could not conceive of better buckets myself, not really, just derivative ones. Other appealing systems I considered were RDF, OWL and GEMS. I researched RDF and OWL because my own interest tend toward technical issues. GEMS is included because it is a metadata schema specific to education.

But ultimately I returned to Dublin Core for metadata due to simplicity. I appended that schema, and expect that I would learn much more from it “in the wild.”

• Turner, J. (February-1-2007) Metamap.
  http://mapageweb.umontreal.ca/turner/meta/english/
  
  
• Crandall, M. (February-2-2007) IMT530B: Organization of Information Resources.
  http://courses.washington.edu/imt530b/index.shtml
  
  
• Bolding, Sharon L. (Saturday, January 20) “How to create Ontologies”
  University of Washington IMT530b class “Semantics Overview”, PowerPoint slide #21.
  
  
• Crandall, M. University of Washington, iSchool Class IMT530b (January -February-2007)

“Module 3a: Metadata” PowerPoint presentation, slide 4, from IMT530b class and website.

· Element refinements allow narrower definition of the elements for specific purposes http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#H3

· Encoding schemes (authority control) can be used as rules for the values allowed within elements http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/#H4

Email: Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2007 12:29:54 -0800 Subject: RE: [Imt530b_wi07] FW: Exercise 3 instructions
… examine metadata standards that are related to content/resource description… looking for is repeated elements across many schemas, which will give you clues about what is commonly used for describing content… The standards I list in the first part of the assignment are recommended starting points, because many of the others are more technical and not appropriate for this work.

· w3schools. (Feburary-7-2007) RDF Reference.
http://www.w3schools.com/rdf/rdf_reference.asp

· Herman, I. (Feburary-7-2007) Web Ontology Language OWL.
http://www.w3.org/2004/OWL/

· Seeley, R. (February-7-2007) The Semantic Web: The OWL has landed.
http://www.adtmag.com/article.aspx?id=8144&page=

“The language provides a standard way to define Web-based ontologies so that data can be described as what it is -- an enzyme in a biological application or a hotel in a travel industry application -- instead of as document in a tree structure or other database abstraction.”

• W3C Recommendation, . (February-7-2007) The global structure of an HTML document.
  http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4

W3.org information on how metatags should be formatted

• Berners-Lee, T. (February-7-2007) Paper Trial: Web Architecture Ideas.
  http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/PaperTrail.html
  “Introduction
  Social processes look like state machines. However, they don't exist as a state variable stored in one place, but as a trail of documents. You know the true state of the machine only if you have access to the latest documents. (This is not the problem addressed here, this is real life being modeled.) Paper-trail is a system which allows one to follow a strict process by creating new documents in a constrained fashion. Every paper-trail document has a pointer to a "paper-trail schema" which defines its document type (eg "constitutional amendment") a pointer to its justification documents (maybe) a notarization of when it was checked against the schema by the paper-trail program. The schema defines:

· Prerequisites for a document being valid, in terms of other documents

· Hints to other document types you can make from this one (state transitions)”

---

Alernative to Paper Prototyping - Case Study

Thought you might be interested in reading this case study about an application, iRise, which claims to reduce the cost and time to develope software substantially. It's termed "Application Definition Software" (This article was suggested by Bill Marriott to the MSIM2008 cohort as additional reading.)

See iRise's Citibank case study for increasing the competency for capturing user requirements for user interfaces along with functionality requirements:

http://www.cio.com/archive/020107/fea_tec.html?CID=28501

That article was written in Feb 2007, the iRise software, established 1996, is growing, see the site at:

http://www.irise.com/

Also see the 2005 Computerworld Honors Case study:

http://www.cwheroes.org/laureates/Business/20055302.pdf

Eventually a companies, such as Microsoft, will need to find ways to flatten the organization and cut costs and time to market. This is one of those ways -- knowing about and offering this kind of advise either to lease or build may help information managers shine in productivity and reduce the need for several levels of management governance.

Microsoft is building it's own ERP application to compete with Oracle and SAP. Assuming that Microsoft understands their small to medium business market in the ERP space still makes planning, designing, and building a new ERP solution a huge undertaking. iRise is the kind of software which could make that process easier and faster.

iRise's application could plug into Microsoft's ERP solution nicely while maintaining the kind of traceability SOX requires, especially as more Western firms leverage outsourcing to India.

This kind of application, an enhancement over tools such as VISIO could help program management shave time off of planning, and increase relevance and adaptability in what each IT unit does. As I understand it, even in considering what difficult business styles and classes of IT units need what kinds of direction and storage of related enterprise level information.

Urban -- Wildlife

What a great city - you can walk around Greenlake at 1:30 in the morning fearlessly- because there are no wild rabbits running about. Ha ha!

Accidentally I woke up the blue heron asleep at the south east corner of the lake from the crunchy sound of the gravel under my 'New Balance' sneakers. The bird rose wide and quietly flapped away, filling the space next to the dock, and I whispered - "it's ok, it's just me."

I switched to the concrete for quiet but back again - too early - unfortunately disturbing the guys sheltering under the dark trees near the hot dog stand. They rolled over and ruffled their tarp somewhat protectively I thought.

The only other humans encountered were a guy counseling a homeless looking short dude about where to find work. The councilor encouraged his full grown and wet Weimaraner hound dogs to give me love. These sweet 'Grey Ghosts' did, all snuffling and wise.

Understand y'all this is 1:30 am, it is pitch black punctuated with few street lights which lend an occasional eerie presence to very tall trees.

Actually walking Greenlake midweek in odd hours is often an improvement over middays. About 6-7 weeks ago after the iSchool class was over around 9:30 pm I drove to Greenlake and as I pulled into park -- my car lights struck an interesting sight. Blocking the street entry in the middle of the parking area, a couple was playfully laughing and goofing around. The pretty young woman had removed her clothes so that she was completely al naturale, with only her levis around her ankles and a young man was well, doing what any solid citizen would do, he was praising her in his own way, with one arm around her waist, though mostly clothed on the very chilly night. She had lovely pale skin fully lit against the dark night.

Surprised by my head lights these adventurous lovers did not rush to their car, like I would have. I paused and waited, and she swung her long hair around, as they giggled merrily, put her clothes on and shuffled to the edge of the street so I could park. By the time I was walking their vehicle was gone.

It's too cold for the northeast side bats now. I was hoping to see the lone white rat who lives on the east side next to the long extra path behind the new trees, but he's a no show for 2 months now. It all just seems so very uber urban natural.

Don't Whine to Me You Are So Well Off - Stay In School

What I wanted to say to the bright dropout University student but didn't--

I feel need to give you a reference to my perspective and you can make of it, whatever you want. So I will use myself as the example - here goes:

I'm from Alaska, I started working professionally at age 15 as a legal librarian and law clerk.Because neither of my parents saved money to send me to college I worked on the Alaska pipeline as a bullcook, seven days a week, 10-12 hours a day to save enough money for the tuition, books, materials, and living expenses.

This meant that I was a dishwasher on the Alaska pipeline camp that served meals for 400-800 men a day, and cleaned up the accidents that very drunk pipeline workers left in their beds, toilets, and the hallways where they got sick. I worked in Coldfoot Camp for 5 months with only a one day break. It was not the only job I had like that; I also slimed herring, and was a US Fish and Wildlife photographer!I went to the community college just like you did, starting when I was 16 years old.

At 21 I moved to Seattle to attend the University of Washington. I earned an undergraduate degree in fine art, which is in painting, finishing at the private college Cornish Institute - I completely funded my own education working either full time or part time while I attended school full time - it took ten years. Might as well say "would you like fries with that?" as they hand you your diploma.

After running out of money while on my own, and going without food for 4 days once in 1980 I decided I would take any job and do whatever is required to make a living.

To that end I took any job - the bottom of the barrel jobs as a support tech - while working for RealNetworks when the Internet was brand new -- I emailed someone I never met over the internet and told him I was copying his site so that I could learn to script HTML, and asked would he mind helping me a little bit?I took his site apart and put it back together as my own (http://www.wonderlane.com/).

I taught myself HTML. Once in a while I emailed him with a question and he looked at my work from Indonesia where he lived at that time. My Internet teacher and I still trade Happy New Years greetings via email - we have never met in person.From there I worked increasingly better jobs until I was earning a 6 figure salary.Now I am much older, after having worked since I was a kid, I decided I hate what I am doing for what is barely a living when I am lucky to have a contract. Like many people as I have gotten older I am earning less and less instead of more and more.

So I decided to go back to the university and earn a Masters in Information Science; I will learn something new and it is a challenge. I am not a good writer. And maybe if I am lucky and work hard to learn new things I will restart my career as a result. I follow my intuition -- one never knows what exciting thing one might do next!

One of the things that made a huge impression on me is traveling to India in 1989 and seeing starving people laying in the street and beggars with no clothes in the hundreds - standing around on street corners with nothing to do (and I thought I had it bad!) Even the educated people told me they had no jobs- so when I returned to work at Microsoft I worked to improve business relationships with India.As Americans we are such a rich people we can follow what we love to do and maximize the challenges presented to us in our lives, or we can make choices that make our lives easy.

Most of the other people in the world have no such choices. They work all the time until they die. They don't have "free time" or "disposable income" most people don't graduate from high school.According to UNESCO, at least 875 million adults remain illiterate globally, they never have any chance for an education, they never learn to read or write. Count out 875 million pennies and call me when you are done.

While in the backwoods of Nepal, one lady asked a friend of mine "is the sun that shines on your country is the same one that shines on my country?"30,000 people starve to death every day. Since you started reading this about 600+ people died. So after that grim baseline -Taking a class means taking initiative, to go through the materials, take the tutorials, and/ or work with other people, like following up on my offer to help you - I know both of those things can be challenging as learning experiences, alone, not even counting the subject matter.

And of course I have no knowledge of your background.My best advice is to follow whatever in life fills you with passion. But this was a once in a lifetime chance - everything is - it always is, nothing ever is repeated in just the same way or with just the same people. For example it is very unlikely I will be a TA again.We are very, very lucky, don't you agree? With that said we must take responsibility for every action.You have tremendous potential and only you know what that is and where to place your focus. I wish you every success.

But don't whine to me, because you are so much better off than most people it isn't even funny.

----- Sponsor Ad -----
http://edu.searcheric.org/graduate-schools.html graduate school
http://searcheric.org/edu/online-schools.html online school


Going to graduate
school is a big step in your educational
career. To choose an
online school can be on of the hardest parts in the
college selection
process with all of the not so reputable programs out there.

----- Sponsor Ad -----

Why Information Management?

"It's not easy to turn a conceptual grasp of a large space into workable solutions, however, and takes many different skill sets—not the least of which is learning to focus and work with talented people who may not have the overall picture but can contribute to the solution." (Mike Crandall, email Jan 21, 2007)

A thorough understanding of information, verses just design or data structures, is at the core of refined application and web design. In depth comprehension of information may help with design in ways planners, designers, and developers may not be able to imagine until actually undertaking the action to expose or make transparent data structures for human and machine use and interaction.

Is your Erdős–Bacon number indeterminate or infinite?

Is my Erdős–Bacon number is indeterminate/infinite? What is yours?

I propose by authoring this blog with a link my Erdős–Bacon number is .1/1/9 (.1.1.9) Therefore if I really do author a paper with (or am referenced by) or make a film(including clips) with Erdős or Bacon, I'd like to be a 1 like the act of Frank Aaron signing the same baseball with Erdős, but I'd still be much further down the chain of connection.


If you link your blog or web information packet to mine, than you will by the 'Totally Finite Rule of Community' acknowledge your Erdős–Bacon number.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdős-Bacon_number


Another game brought to you by The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, and Google Lunar Jobs Recruiters "lunarjobs@google.com".

Cheers!~

Photographer's Ethics in a Free Society, Why is this Case Important?

Here is a case of an artist, a photographer named Philip-Lorca diCorcia, using someones image without permission, and profiting by that, even though the subject of the photo asked the photographer to cease using the photo because it runs counter to his religious tradition. See case information: http://www.bigredandshiny.com/cgi-bin/frameset.pl?section=news&issue=issue40&article=STREET_PHOTOGRAPHY_AND_25151059 (Pardon the sticky site!)

Is this really what we meant by a free society, to not respect each other's wants and needs? How is the photographer informed by the law but not by belief? Where do people get the idea they have a right to take another person's image?

From a Boston based art/music community site:
http://www.bigredandshiny.com/cgi-bin/frameset.pl?issue=issue40

"New York State Supreme Court dismissed a case contesting the ethics of street photography and whether it violates the rights of those individuals photographed"

[the person photographed without his permission and against his will] "Nussenzweig, an Orthodox Jew, claimed that the photographer using his image violated his First Amendment right to practice his religion on the grounds that his image constituted an engraven image that was exhibited and consumed commercially. However, Justice Judith J. Gische said that Nussenzweig's claim to privacy was not valid, finding that diCorcia created the photograph for artistic purposes."

He may have done it for artistic purposes but he certainly did it for profit: "The photographer said multiple prints of Nussenzweig's picture sold for about $20,000 each. The picture also was published in "Heads," a book that sold several thousand copies, diCorcia said. (boingboing.net/2005_07_01_archive.html)

Law.com claimed that the photographer sold 10 copies of the image for 20K-30K each - no starving artist there. "As commerce, the picture would be subject to the restrictions set forth in New York's right-to-privacy laws; as art, it would not." (http://www.law.com/jsp/law/sfb/lawArticleSFB.jsp?id=1139565912319 )

In this case the photographer may have justified this as an act of free expression, but what if it was a photo of him? or his parents? What if he was doing something embarrassing? Does this justify the artist/photographer and any American's right to make money off another person's image without their permission? How far could this be extended? Could Nike or Levis or McDonalds run images of people on TV, say making fun of them without their permission?

While dismissing the case, Gische, the judge did say this: "Clearly, plaintiff finds the use of the photograph bearing his likeness deeply and spiritually offensive," she concluded. "The sincerity of his beliefs is not questioned by defendants or this court. While sensitive to plaintiff's distress, it is not redressable in the courts of civil law. In this regard, the courts have uniformly upheld Constitutional First Amendment protections, even in the face of a deeply offensive use of someone's likeness." ( http://www.law.com/jsp/law/sfb/lawArticleSFB.jsp?id=1139565912319 )

What if Nussenzweig had just said - I don't want others to make a profit off my image. One, stop producing images of me, or two pay me whatever you make, because I did not give you permission. But he didn't - he just said 'no'. Isn't that good enough?

Here's Nussenzweig's attorney quoted on the subject:
"We claim that to take someone's picture without their consent is bad enough," said Jay Goldberg, Nussenzweig's lawyer. "But to then hang the picture in galleries, put it in books and sell it around the city without telling the person or obtaining permission is unfair and outrageous."

Wouldn't it have been more ethical for diCorcia to just respect Nussenzweig's request? What if diCorcia decided to sell the photograph of Nussenzweig for an advertisment such as a billboard or use in a film? Why does it being art or in a public place mean that a person's image is not their own? How more deeply offensive can it be and still be justified as art or good practice -- can it still be art worth all this money and hold no concern for the living person?

Are there other examples of this, where something of yours is not yours because it is art or in a public in a free society? What about medical footage taken in a state hospital of a woman having a baby? Could that be run on television without her permission? Or does she have a reasonable expectation of privacy?

In this case I asked Jeff Stein - a student in the University of Washington's Informatic program, in the Info344 class, and he told me that he feels our culture prefers to honor the needs and values of commerce over the needs of personal privacy. He said this is especially true in public spaces.

Personally if he were asked not to use a picture of a person he had photographed he would honor the request. I would too. What is artistic about not honoring people. Isn't the lack of regard for their privacy doing violence to them by ignoring their request?

How is it that people will resort to the law in such an instance and not use their own belief system to inform them of what is respectful or reasonable?

As the BigRedandShiny.com article concludes:
"From this, therefore, we can conclude that artistic rights under the First Amendment trump freedom of religion, also protected under the First Amendment - at least when considering privacy laws within the civil courts of New York. "

What I find a sad twist of fact is when querying 'diCorcia', the photographer's name, in a local warm and friendly public search engine you will receive an image of Nussenzweig, probably many of them, as I did.

Why is this case important? It's important because our sense of ethical judgment tells us it isn't right, while the law says it isn't wrong.

Freedom of speech is closely tied to freedom of thought which trumps freedom of religion.

On Accessibility from Dan Comden's lecture in Info344 (Informatics, iSchool UW)

Today Jan 18, 2007, Dan Comden presented a wealth of information on Accessibility on Web sites and presented a variety of devices to assist disabled people with accessing the Web and networks by either enhancing their disabled sense such as increasing the font size, or using another ability to make up for the disabled sense, such as a screenreader for the blind.

There were a couple of things I took away from his lecture, which reminded me that "getting around" to making my site accessable was never going to happen unless I had more empathy and just took the time to do it. As you can imagine lots of companies large and small approach accessiblity and usability from the same standpoint - someday we'll get around to it.

It seems that only when we are directly affected do we really understand. And we all know that someday never comes. So to this end we had the class count off 1-3 for assigned disabilities. The groups assigned were:
1. Physical Disability (such as missing limbs or being in a wheelchair, or unable to use hands without pain) - this is called motor-impaired as well.
2. Aural Disability
3 Visual Disability

Our goal is to communicate information effectively and to reduce barriers to the presentation and access of information.

Some of the issues Dan presented were -
1. Tab order and labling form fields
2. Alt tags to provide text for screen readers
3. Content skipping - to the main text
(such as the Whitehouse.gov site has hidden in the top left hand side of the main page - so that those visually impared useing screen readers do not have to read or tab through the navigation on each page every time the user hits a new page. Check it out, it's almost unnoticable.)

We already agree that these should be our standard practices from here on out.

Dan also gave us some things to consider as our take aways from his presentation - to me the most compelling one was "Test your sites and applications for accessibility."

When I am being interviewed as a product designer or manager my best way of communicating how strongly I feel about usability and accessability testing can be summed up by "What makes a good designer is insisting upon usability testing."

Often what makes good designers great is their enthusiasm for what they do - enthusiasm for excellent design is contageous! If you wonder should we make this useful and accessable because it will add $more money to the cost - no one cares - not really. But if you take the lead and remember that "Design adds value faster than it adds cost" (Thomas C. Gale) -- consider that usability includes accessability - design your sites and applications with that in mind - you will have useful sites and applications which are open and available to everyone.

The real time to "get around" to making a site usable is the first time - the costs of resources associated with makeovers on sites are too large oftentimes to go back and retrofit. Dan told us stories about how the orginal designers of sites did not take accessability into account and here, months or years later are still arguing over what should be done.

The what or how may be open to discussion but the why is not. Let's make it a point of this humane professional skill, add it to our arsenal of design capability to make things right the first time.

We were very pleased to have the entire class submit papers which reflected their passion for providing usable sites for those with disabilities.

Check out these guidelines:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/

White Christmas animation set to the Drifters version of "White Christmas"

A flash animation set to The Drifters' 1955 version of Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" created by Joshua Held in 2002. From Joshua Held's YouTube capture of the original Flash animation which is no longer linked from various sites. This is a national treasure... starring Clyde McPhatter and Bill Pinkney of The Drifters, the solo and bass ...

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR to YOU!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ooc5eJc5SHA


White Christmas

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas
Just like the ones I used to know
Where the treetops glisten,
and children listen
To hear sleigh bells in the snow

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas
With every Christmas card I write
May your days be merry and bright
And may all your Christmases be white

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas
With every Christmas card I write
May your days be merry and bright
And may all your Christmases be white

By Irving Berlin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(song)

Pray for Infomation - Death Cab for Cutie? The Thermals?

Pray for Information?

Searching Google (is that redundant?) on Death Cab for Cutie I found this image of the band holding up a sign "PRAY FOR iNFORMATION" Which lead me to the following blog entry:

"Most of the signs, however, feature contemporary slogans--some familiar, all straightforward and others terrifically witty. Death Cab for Cutie did three signs for the shoot: "Speed the Collapse," "Dissolve the Senate" and, riffing off the band The Thermals, "Pray for Information." (A helpful sidebar explains the provenance of each slogan.)" http://www.thenation.com/doc/20041018/frey


Link rot and the fact the auction is over means I will have to snoop around to discover what "Pray for information" means in this context. Why? Because popular culture informs directions culture is turning even as a hyperreference.

http://yahrah.blogspot.com/2006_05_11_yahrah_archive.html
My cultural informant is paz y amor - a teacher, he quotes the lyrics as:
"pray for a new age
pray for information
i can hope, see
even if i don't believe"

"pray for a new state
pray for communication
i can hope, see
even if i don't believe"

THEN the song tosses in this little paradox of a line.....
"and
i believe...i think.....i don't know"

Interesting mix of prayer, information, and belief. Followed up by a little Spy vs Spy image.

http://www.undertheradarmag.com/protestauction.html

Ok - it's a reference to Track 8, God and Country from The Thermal's "F****n A" album - Who are the Thermals?

The Thermals: Hutch Harris (vocals, guitar); Kathy Foster (bass instrument); Jordan Hudson (drums).Recording information: Avast Studios, Seattle, Washington (2004).
http://www.towerrecords.com/product.aspx?pfid=2983208&title=Fuckin+A+%5BExplicit+Lyrics%5D+%5BDigipak%5D+*&artist=The+Thermals

For those of us living under rocks - and "Avoiding the Rush" Death Cab for Cutie are: Benjamin Gibbard, Nick Harmer, Jason McGerr and Chris Walla
http://www.barsuk.com/bands/deathcabforcutie

Three reflections on an email design assignment

Adapting and Appropriating eMail, ProcessRight WorkFlow


First,

I have always loved email since 1978 when I began using it over the University of Alaska’s UNIX main frame in Anchorage to email people in Fairbanks. Significantly at that time we were discussing music, Bob Marley and The Wailers (how I discovered them), another thing of strong social importance Microsoft managers failed to recognize as valuable.

Why Bill Gates and the factory did not see what a huge innovation email was, and how extensible, I never understood. Why, despite my input and the input of others at Microsoft, development for email failed to gain much footing. Until the last few years a very small amount of money was invested in developing email. This was due in part to the structure of the development managers directly reporting to Bill Gates -- within that hierarchical structure, at each level there is a decreasing amount of authority, however at the next level down one can not really question the voice of authority above. This is an old fashioned management style based on military structures developed for waging war.

From interviews I did last fall including one of a former Microsoft lead email development engineer, I found that all that required was one manager at one level to wipe out Bill Gate’s vision – if Gates said spend $10-$20 million, the next manager changed that to 3 million, or less, there was nothing the visionary email engineers below could do about it. Eventually they quit and formed other companies.

Everyone understood the value and power of email of communications – but no one, save the customer voting with their buying power, could get management to budge. Finally when Microsoft's eMail product became the leading selling product after Windows itself did Microsoft management take notice. They were forced to do so by the downward trend in stock value and sales. Now we clearly see all end users really need are two things – browser and email -- and some products can be both and more at the same time using the same basic interface.

I believe this is why we have this as an assignment – had Gates encouraged other non-traditional, cooperative, even tribal structures to form leadership in various ways the product we describe would already exist, not just be embedded as a possibility in applications such as Outlook which require a developer to pull into reality.

In this way, over so many years, I learned that new ideas can be killed due to stubborn traditional systems which may not be recognized for what they are. New ideas may long await fresh new management.

Second,

Having the third party review engage the cohort from our idea stage down to their formal presentation was a stroke of genius in envisioning and shaping up our resulting product.

I found much that I took for granted was still embedded in my thinking as an “of course” and not explicit. In communicating with people you have to make your ideas explicit.

So such usability issues as landing pages to track the results of a process are one of these “of course” structures, which will be included in my future product designs.

Performing recent usability studies I found the exact same problems with beginners learning software exist now as they did in 1989 – the year Windows 3.0 was released. In 1984 I recall having very little trouble learning the MacOS interface.

Third,
The VIEW

There is a small political commentary nod in our selection of the title for the company “ProcessRight” Actually it relates to the political LEFT because the public voided the Right. I recently searched on ‘processright’, and quickly realized it owes its name in part it to the format of method calls in C++ and C sharp, such as used in the Invaders game at Duke University:

http://www.duke.edu/~jbs3/cps108/ooga/oogadocs/invaders/Invaders.html

“ProcessRight
public void processRight() - Provides the rules for what to do when a left event is pressed
Overrides:
processRight in class Game”

We used Google Talk IM to communicate in the last hours of our project. One of my cohorts, an employee of our favorite 800lb gorrilla across Lake Washington, may not want a GMAIL account to communicate using Google Talk IM.

It is true that Patton said, “There's a great deal of talk about loyalty from the bottom to the top. Loyalty from the top down is even more necessary and much less prevalent. One of the most frequently noted characteristics of great men who have remained great is loyalty to their subordinates." This should apply to Microsoft employees too.

But you got to get into the game so I invited my cohort to get an GMail account to learn what the other guy is doing - here is why - to paraphrase Patton (if even from the film) metaphorically --

'Google are Microsoft's enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood. Shoot them in the belly. Lift their software and interface ideas.'

“For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of a triumph - a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters and musicians and strange animals from the conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children, robed in white, stood with him in the chariot, or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror, holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.” -Patton

Last,

Very much enjoyed working with my team – it was a blast!

“We're jammin'
I wanna jam it wid you
We're jammin',
And I hope you like jammin', too
Ain't no rules, ain't no vow, we can do it anyhow
I'n'I will see you through;
Everyday we pay the price with a little sacrifice,
Jammin' till the jam is through. Ooh, yea.

We're jammin'
To think that jammin' was a thing of the past
We're jammin',
And I hope this jam is gonna last
No bullet can stop us now, we neither beg nor we won't bow
Neither can be bought nor sold
We all defend the right; Jah - Jah children must unite
Your life is worth much more than gold. Ooh, yea.[1]”

[1] Song lyrics from Robert “Bob” Nesta Marley, “Jammin’” Release Date: 1977 Genre: Reggae Label: Tuff Gong Downloaded Monday December 9, 2006 from http://www.hotlyrics.net/lyrics/B/Bob_Marley__amp__The_Wailers/Jammin_.html Lyrics originally published on the album.