My colleague and friend Matt Hodgson has written a good article on his semantic analysis work at the PharmBiz project, currently undertaken within the Australian Department of Health and Ageing. It is interesting work and he has performed it well 
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Archive for May, 2007
Matthew Hodgson is now contributing to social computing magazine. The two posts so far are reprints from his blog, and hopefully this will continue.
One of his articles is on Library 2.0. I left a comment on it that probably needs some expansion. My comment was:
Hi Matt, good posting and good to see it exposed to a wider audience. I think that this discussion needs input from the LIS community - but it also needs discussion outside the Library. To me, Library 2.0 is about enabling access rather than loosening control - and while these two aims are not inconsistent, I think that they are different enough to be exposed to a wider audience. Cheers, Andrew
Let me repeat: enabling access to information is not just about loosening control - it is a total 180-degree paradigm shift. It goes from “we will decide where and how people access the information” (knowledge management 1.0) to “We will start the dissemination process and only intervene when absolutely necessary” (knowledge management 2.0).
Some LIS professionals see Library 2.0 as increased access to catalogues and other indexes. This is loosening control, but does it enable access? I would argue that it does not if those catalogues are only available to other libraries, and only where a fee is charged for access. Make the catalogues free - in most cases, public money paid for them. Make them free. Not only that, make them accessible via an easy-to-use API - Amazon does this. When I told Matthew that to me, Amazon is Library 2.0, I was only half joking - and the more I think about it, the closer it gets to my ideal.
I am not an LIS professional - I am an information architect that uses some LIS techniques to get through my working day. I believe that the Library 2.0 discussion belongs to all of us - and that we need to get it out of the library.
Helen and I ate at Cream (Bunda Street, Canberra) last night. It was the most enjoyable meal I’ve had in weeks.
I needed somewhere relaxing after shopping for a while - we wandered past wagamama and wondered what else there was around. Helen had heard some good things about Cream, so we went in. It was fairly busy for early evening (6PM or so) - and with a central island serving area replete with a dozen different cakes on display and a variety of espresso machnery looked to be set up for the daytime coffee-and-cake set. The menu at the door looked tempting - I like the idea of duck risotto (and would probably eat duck icecream if you gave it to me!). I was willing to give it a go. Helen has an eye for design and spent the first few minutes distracted by the impressive layout and decoration.
The menu is impressive - for some reason the entree menu is the largest part of it, which I found appealing. For an entree, I had the Carpaccio of scallop and salmon - just enough to kill my hunger but delicious, washed down with Asahi beer (on tap at Cream, one of my favourites). Helen had one of the specials, prawn fillets and corn fritters in almond batter, very filling and very nice.
Helen had the duck risotto for a main, and loved it, although she said that the bok choi slightly overpowered the duck. The duck risotto is said to be one of their signature dishes, and my small taste of it confirmed that it is something that I will order for myself on a future visit. I had one of the daily specials, a grilled backstrap of veal served with caramelised onion on a bed of caramelised parsnips. I am not a big parsnip fan but the veal was really really good - I have to admit to sopping up the juices with some beer-battered fries that I ordered as a side dish. The fries were one of the many highlights of the meal - they come with two dipping sauces: a light sour cream and a fresh tomato and basil salsa (of the sort that you wish was served on bruscetta everywhere but never is).
Full as we were by this stage, we couldn’t face the idea of dessert, as tempting as they looked. We did fit a Belgian Top Deck hot chocolate in each, a mixture of white and milk chocolate, again very nice.
Service is important to me, and was excellent throughout.
The verdict? We’re planning to go again, and take friends with us next time. I’d book if going after about 6:30PM at night. It could be a wonderful place for a celebration, coffee and cake through the day, or a beer and fries after work to relax. Entrees ran from around $8.00 to $19.00 for the exotic, mains from around $14.00 and up, and the draft Asahi is $6.50 by the schooner.
It could be that as a relatively new eatery in an over-subscribed Canberra market, Cream are making an extra effort to provide a top dining experience. If so, I hope that they never lose the drive to be excellent - for excellent they are now. The only other reference to a review of Cream was not that positive - perhaps we caught them on a good night? I don’t know, even the best of places has their good days and their bad, and sometimes there are staff members on the tail end of their usefulness. For now, Cream is good.
Facibus Reviews is proud to bring you a world exclusive: it’s official, Donna Maurer has a new haircut/style, and everybody loves it!
Donna revealed her new do to a gathering of her peers at the Canberra IA Cocktail Hour last night. Comments from onlookers included “You look great!”, “Wow!” and “You look different, but a good way”.
Donna and friends enjoyed a glass of pre-discussion wine at the famous SMS Canberra Back Bar area:
Shown (from the left) are Ruth Ellison and her partner Alistair, Caronne Carruthers-Taylor, Donna Maurer, Matthew Hodgson, and Steve Collins. Caronne’s partner Nigel joined us shortly thereafter.
After drinks and nibbles, the group discussed Matthew Hodgson’s fascinating Grand Unified Theory of information sharing, an update on his ongoing semantic analysis work at the Department of Health and Ageing, and Steve Collins‘ slideshow-in-progress on Knowledge Worker 2.0.
It is fair to say that a fun time was had by all: if you are interested in joining this group, or hearing about future activities, please join the Canberra IA Community mailing list at http://au.groups.
PS: I’ll put the images up on Flickr soon, they are only exclusive here for a little while
Ever buy a toy as a child and race home, open it, and discovour that it is useless without the batteries? Toy marketers caught on a long time ago that a prominent “Batteries not included” label was appreciated by parent and child alike, because unmet expectations can be avoided. Some include the batteries now (Nintendo do this for their Wii) - I believe that if you make something, you should always include the batteries.
My partner Helen and I are discussing investment and lifestyle choices now that we’ve been cohabiting for a while. I bought a few books on investing in shares and property. Helen needed a book to read on the bus to work the other day so I suggested one from our “to be read” pile: Margaret Lomas’ “The Truth About Positive Cashflow Property”. She handed it back to me that evening and said “She says not to read this one until you’ve read some of her other books, what else do you have to read?”.
I thought I must have screwed up when I bought the book - I have my moments, but I do pay attention to order when buying books. For example, I wouldn’t buy part 3 of a science fantasy series without having read parts 1 and 2. I looked at “The Truth About Positive Cashflow Property” today - there on the cover is the recommendation from Neil Jenman, famous for his honesty in an industry not famed for it. There is the list of Margaret’s other books, and on the front, her smiling face. OK, so maybe it is in the front matter. Nope, there are pages of raves from other readers, but nothing about “Don’t buy this book until you’ve read my other ones”. Then I read the introduction - nothing there on prerequisite reading. I was beginning to wonder if Helen had misread it, so I started on the first chapter. Four pages into chapter one, there it is:
It is crucial that, in order to grasp the basics of how to successfully invest in true positive cash flow property, you read one of the books in my How to series, plus A Pocket Guide to Investing in Positive Cash Flow Property.
She goes on:
Once you have educated yourself about positive cash flow property and you are fully conversant in the process you must follow to buy it, you will then be ready to read this book.
As a reader I have a few options. I can get over feeling suckered and go and buy the other books. I can throw this book in the bin and never intentionally purchase another book by Margaret Lomas. Or I can ignore her advice and read the book anyway, and see if that buys back some of my trust - which is a conundrum, because if I trust her I would not read any further. Whichever way I go, I feel foolish for having bought the book in the first place.Why has she done this? If her intention was to prevent the reader from making my mistake, she probably would have put the warning on the front cover - or at least the back - that this was an “advanced topic” book that requires some pre-reading. It is OK to do that, serial fiction authors do it all the time, as do the writers of academic texts. Because I have a trust issue with her, cognitive dissonance leads me to think badly of Margaret even when there is no evidence to support it. So now I think, rightly or wrongly, that she has deliberately hidden this warning in the text of the book (nine physical pages) so that I would have to buy her other books to find out what happens in this one. I don’t know her from a bar of soap, and was prepared to trust her until proven otherwise, so I may have this wrong. Neil Jenman’s recommendation aside, I have no logical reason to feel this way about her - but as a human being, I distrust what I percieve has burnt me.
How could she have avoided this? By being up front - totally transparent - and discussing the prerequisite books, if only for a paragraph or two, somewhere that could not be missed, and stating plainly why they should be read before this one. Who knows, I might have decided to buy one of the others first.
But for now, the book goes back into the shelf, because Margaret should have included the batteries. I will seek out other authors that cover the same or similar material, and sadly I may be a little wary of Neil Jenman’s recommendation on the next one. This is a pity - my late father spoke highly of Neil and in his (brief) career in real estate said that he was a man to be trusted.
Unexpected behaviour is a user-centered design issue. It is where you get, well, unexpected behaviour. Imagine clicking on a link that says “Search” and it takes you back to the site home page. Hmm. Oh wait, in the top right hand corner of the home page there is a search widget. If you miss it, or even if you don’t, you will be annoyed because the system behaviour was unexpected. Other examples of unexpected behaviour include:
- random popups,
- hellish MIDI muzak when entering a site,
- the Blue Screen of Death, and
- zero response on an action (like clicking “OK” and nothing seems to happen).
I’ve been banging on about unexpected behaviour as an issue for years now. Others (like Jeff Johnson in GUI Bloopers
This morning I had to look through an interface provided by some system integrators for a project I’m working on. There was not a single menu item that linked through to a screen of the same name. Not one.
This is basic UCD101 stuff - it is not rocket science, it has been known about for years, so why do people still do it?
A lot of it comes down to “you can only know what you only know” - and this is why there are specialist designers and usability professionals whose job it is to watch such things. Expecting system integrators and coders to get this stuff is like expecting your GP to perform open heart surgery - sure, both the General Practitioner and the heart surgeon are doctors, but both have their areas of specialisation.
Permaculture is a system of sustainable agriculture. My late father was a big fan of it, and I’ve designed my own gardens along permaculture principles in the past. Two of the principles that apply themselves nicely to information architecture and information management are:
- Rarely use one thing for one purpose alone
- Think holistically: look at everything as part of the system
Imagine a fence dividing your chook (chicken) pen from your orchard in a suburban back yard. You grow beans and other edible creepers along the fence. The creepers get a little overgrown so that the chooks can use them for shelter. You eat the chooks and the eggs they produce. You eat the beans. You use the manure they produce in the compost that feeds the next generation of beans. The chooks go into different yards that contain the vegetable beds lying fallow for next year. You supply the chook-feeding and -watering labor. Everything feeds everything else. Everything contributes, and everything benefits. It is one big holistic system, and fractally expands in scope to include every energy transaction on the whole planet.
How does this apply to information and to Information Architecture? Think of a small closed information system, like an spreadsheet sitting on a thumbdrive. It is perfect, and wonderful, and there are hundreds of millions of such little spreadsheets like it on thumbdrives all over the world. To be of any use to more than just the originator (even to the originator in the longer term), it needs to be shared - that is, it needs to be part of a system.
To form a useful part of that system, the spreadsheet needs to be updateable, mergeable and findable. Without access to the data, and the attachment of meaningful context, it will never make the jump to being information, and beyond it, knowledge.
The biggest leap forward in computing came when the designers and engineers at Xerox PARC stopped thinking about the computer in this way and instead started thinking about it instead as a communication device. And we’ve seen what this led to: email, networks, the internet. The network is the computer now, and if you don’t believe me, do what I did a few weeks ago and unplug from the internet for a few days and watch yourself squirm.
I agree. Without effective sharing, whatever is created is lost.
So what do we do about it? At CeBIT Australia’s eGovernment conference I learnt that the Queensland government has done an information audit and determined that 85% of government documents can be covered by Creative Commons licensing - in effect they are saying that a large proportion of their information is publicly releasable. For a government to admit this is pretty remarkable - they are shifting from a “tell ‘em nothing unless they plead for it” paradigm to a “unless there are security/privacy/commercial sensitivity reasons, let’s give them everything” mindview.
Sounds very new-age, but I believe that Information Management is changing, slowly but surely, to concentrate more on effective dissemination than control. Time will tell.
Parting can be such sweet sorrow - in this case, leaving my old hosting provider was sweet, and it has caused a little sorrow
If you’re reading this and there are still over a hundred categories listed in the side bar, it means that I’m still working on it.
Redirection of those oh-so-important inbound links is going to be a priority, as is getting the word out that http://skonkwerks.net/facibusreviews and http://facibus.com/facibusreviews are now http://facibusreviews.com/blog. I’ll keep at it as time allows (I need to maintain that work/blog/life balance).
facibus.com is moving! The blogs need more room to grow and a bigger traffic allowance, which is a good thing.
What this means is that until the DNS change propagates around the world, this blog will appear to be off the air. All going well this will only be a day or two - at the most.
Thanks for reading - it is because of your interest that this move is possible.
Update: The move worked - well, sort of, my over-tagging and WordPress import/export means that there are now over 200 categories in the sidebar This needs to be adjusted manually which I will do over the next couple of days. I’m completing the move from http://skonkwerks.com/facibusreviews and the aliased http://facibus.com/facibusreviews to the new http://facibusreviews.com/blog/ so there may be a little bit of confusion for a while - my apologies.
My father’s family had some fairly old-fashioned sayings - one about “going west” as a euphamism for death has its roots in an Ancient Egyptian belief that the souls of the departed would accompany the sun as it set in the West.
Another saying was “as dear as poison” when describing an overpriced item. I have no idea what this means really, but my best guess was that the poison was not expensive originally because of its ticket price - it was expensive by nature of the effect it could have on family and livestock. In other words, my guess is that poison was expensive because of the damage that it could do.
I’m researching the art and craft of writing white papers at the moment - I’ve written a heap of them in my professional life, and some have been what I considered truly great. What I want to do is write a truly great white paper every time. I want to avoid poisoning my writing with expensive mistakes.
I’m pretty hot on the power of differentiation at the moment - I want to know what I can do to make my writing stand out from the crowd - and the first best thing I can do is to perfect the craft of writing.
There is a great metaphor for a poisoned white paper at Michael Stelzner’s Writing White Papers blog. He talks about an episode of “The Apprentice” where the losing team skipped a basic step - the needs assessment. They went into the task with inadequate knowledge of the client needs - what they wanted and how they expected to receive it - and failed accordingly.
I wish that I could say that this is unheard of in the world of consulting, but that is not the case.
Michael’s hints to avoid this particular poison are:
- Identify the primary and secondary target audiences for the paper.
- Ask lots questions about the audience: what is their typical title, average age, general disposition and so on.
- Determine the objective of the paper: to educate, sell, inform, differentiate, introduce, etc.
- What are the big level issues, problems or needs that must be addressed in the paper?
- Develop an outline that will guide future discussions.
- Who are the key players who must be interviewed?
- Who are the key competitors to analyze?
- What is the schedule and timeline?
A couple of thousand words could be written on each of these. Most of the answers to these questions come with following basic commonsense consulting 101 principals - look at the story, talk to the necessary people, adjust the story to fit the reality, work out what really needs to be done, and do it while selling the solution. It’s also basic user centered document design - Stephen King said it well when he said “Write to your audience - everything else is BS”.
What I would like to do is take you on a journey with me as I discovour the true art of writing white papers - if nothing else, it will be entertaining.
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