Content about Computing

Driving around Boston one day, a city employee spotted something unusual, according to a post over on Fast Company’s blog:

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National Building Museum staff left this pyramid overnight. The result on the next day: a room filled with Lego pyramids.
One of the hidden gems in the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. (which is itself a largely hidden gem) is the Lego exhibit on the second floor. The room includes a bunch of stunning off-the-shelf Lego models of many of the most recognizable skyscrapers around the world as well as an adjacent “free-play” space filled with tables and Legos and dominated by an invitation to build.
Alex Gilliam posted on the BMW Guggenheim Lab blog last week about noticing that the Lego creations assembled by museum visitors (many of whom are kids) are often dominated by a specific type of building or pattern. On one day Lego skyscrapers filled the room, while on another day it might be houses. This lack of diversity seemed to happen despite the staff systematically disassembling everything at the end of every day. Every morning the room offered a clean slate, yet some design approach took hold and then persisted throughout the day.
On one occasion, departing from the usual practice, the staff left a structure – a large pyramid – intact overnight. The next day, the room was filled with pyramids. Alex writes about placing strange structures in different locations around the room at the end of the day and seeing the same dynamic unfold in the morning, the initial creations serving as points of departure for many of the visitors during the day.
The dynamic is really important for designing civic participation processes, a point which Alex explores as well. People participating in a process of some kind, whether formalized like a community planning effort or informal like the National Building Museum’s free-play area, respond to, are inspired by, and perhaps are even limited by what they see around them.
Alex suggests that nearby examples serve as “scaffolding” for subsequent participants (a metaphor that gets used elsewhere in the museum exhibit design world, as well, such as in Nina Simon’s NODEM 2010 talk), but that doesn’t sound quite right to me. The best we’ve come up with so far is to think of mashups or remixes … those initial expressions become elements that subsequent participants build on, riff off of, react to, or in some other incorporate through their own lens, often mashing them up with other ideas or models they might have on their mind.
The mashup metaphor isn’t entirely satisfying, either, but regardless of the metaphor the implication for architecting participatory processes is substantial: the questions you ask, the tools you provide, and the examples you offer can all have a profound impact on the scope of the participants’ imagination and creativity.
Scaffolding is important: as Nina Simon explained in describing a Denver Art Museum project inviting visitors to draw their own versions of the psychedelic posters they had just seen in an exhibit, if the invitation was limited to art supplies, the people most likely to participate would be those confident in their artistic abilities. By providing tracing paper and prints of some of the posters in the exhibit, they offered visitors a tangible starting point, dramatically reducing the barriers to participating.
But the scaffolding, prototypes, and models can also deeply constrain the universe of ideas as well.

Creating sustainable, meaningful civic contributions to government is something I’ve addressed before, and it’s something that continues to elude us in the form of civic applications and hackathons, despite the overwhelming attention given to each.
Related to this point, FutureGov founder and CEO Dominic Campbell’s recent tweet resonates with me:
Tired of people seeing value in #gov20 as what app someone built rather than what actual real measurable difference they made to the world
— Dominic Campbell (@dominiccampbell) February 25, 2012

So much of the hype surrounding Gov 2.0 achievements is relegated to applications (or ‘crapplications’ as one prominent U.S. city CIO once said to me) and hackathons that fail to truly address bigger accomplishments that could be made with less hype. There’s an understandable driver for some of this hoopla: organizational awareness, community building, media hits that drive funding, ego, self-satisfaction or even actual results. Some are valid, but my fear is that much of it is driven by self-interests or misguided intentions.
Are the number of apps built off open government data of value regardless of their utility or usage? Are hackathons without direction or specific goals that fail to build on sustainable, long-term objectives a waste of time?
Should our Gov 2.0 leaders and funders have a more solid plan of action to better harness our civic surplus? With all the money and hype being driven to certain areas of the movement, it’s more important than ever for them to show leadership and deliver real, measurable results, as Dom says.
How do you measure the value of Gov 2.0?

Now in its eighth year, Where Conference: The Art and Business of Location, is where the grassroots and leading-edge developers building location-aware technology intersect with the businesses and entrepreneurs seeking out location apps, platforms, and hardware to gain a competitive edge. In the O'Reilly conference tradition, Where Conference presents leading trends rather than chasing them.

The term geodesign,once hard to define, is becoming part of the vernacular in the design field. That observation opened this year's GeoDesign Summit, a gathering of professionals interested in using geospatial technologies to arrive at the best and most sustainable design solutions.

Thanks to a tweet by Evgeny Morozov I came across this new research paper by W. Ben Towne and James D. Herbsleb, published in the current edition of Journal of Information Technology & Politics (Volume 9, Issue 1, 2012, pages 97-115): Design Considerations for Online Deliberation Systems (subscription required)
ABSTRACT. Online deliberation enables structured, topical discussion about particular questions or concepts. A number of Web-based deliberation systems have been independently introduced in recent years, and reported on as single-point examples. This article reviews several of these systems, focusing on the design principles behind them and how they worked out. From this literature, we distill another iteration of design considerations that can be used to design online deliberation systems to “inform the debate.” These considerations focus on the mutually reinforcing goals of attracting contributions, navigating through content, improving usability, focusing on quality content, and promoting wide-scale tool adoption
On page 100, the authors explain that in selecting these guidelines, they sought ideas that are “understandable, robust, likely to remain stable, and consistent with one another” and that they are presented “at a reasonably high level”:

These are general guidelines that should apply to most online deliberation systems. As noted in Lindström’s (2006) description of general principles for IT systems, “The principles are not imperative; they are only supposed to provide operative directions and guidance” (p. 3). We recognize that not every item below will be appropriate in every context; [...] We propose that each of these items should be considered during the development of an online deliberation system, hence the term “considerations.”

Table 1: Considerations for the Design of Online Deliberation Systems

Below the list of considerations:
Design to Attract Contributions

• Maintain low entry barriers for contributions of value
• Make contributions immediately visible
• Divide and conquer
• Self-selection of roles
• Well defined tasks and questions
• Overcome or accept access bias
• Accommodate but identify content bias
• Link in outside resources
• Loosen up on structure

Design for Navigability

• Relate solutions to one another
• Allow hyperlink exploration, but not as the only option
• Organize content topically, rather than temporally
• Minimize or eliminate duplication
• Use visual aids to navigation
• Include an effective search utility

Design for Usability

• Build clear affordances
• Stick with the principles of Robert’s Rules
• Open windows to the content in many places
• Interoperate with other systems, e.g. through APIs
• Attach unchanging URLs to specific content
• Automate nonsemantic operations
• Use stable, functional, secure, responsive technology

Design for Quality Content

• Identify contributors
• Maintain accountability for decision-making outcomes
• Institute an effective rating and reputation system
• Allow iterative “horizontal” interactions between users

Design for Adoption

• Improve the decision-making process; don’t overthrow it
• Have a “plausible promise” and achieve it
• Open opportunities for communities to form
• Open up the design process

The authors conclude (page 112):
[...] We strive to take a step beyond case studies by surveying the literature and its many single-point evaluations, examining them for common themes, and deriving a set of design considerations that can be used for the next iteration of online deliberation tools. These considerations are derived from the online deliberation literature, and we have described the justifications offered for each of them.
An online deliberation system does not need to perfectly match all the guidelines presented here, but its designers should consider these points when making their design decisions, as a way of learning from the work that has already been done in this field. [...]
We hope that this work will broaden the reach and improve the quality of future online deliberation systems by enhancing their usability, utility, and ability to attract and organize quality contributions. We also hope that through further experimentation and exchanges of experience, future work will systematically test each of these design considerations to produce a solid foundation of proven design principles leading to high quality online deliberation and further development of this field.
This article complements another design-oriented paper we covered recently (Five Design Categories for Online Deliberation), and the guidelines presented here should prove quite useful not only for tool builders but for anyone trying to make the best use of existing tools:

• Some of the considerations are in fact process questions that don’t necessarily require any particular technical implementation.
• With any tool, it’s important not to overlook the functionality and features that are already in place and which might help achieve the design goals.
• There may be more than one way to achieve a certain outcome, and lists like the above can serve as a good starting point to discuss possible work-arounds should a necessary feature be missing.

The paper mentions several online deliberation tools, most of which are already being tracked on ParticipateDB. Accordingly, I’ve added this paper to the list of references.

Augmented reality applications haven't yet reached their potential as a community decision-making tool, but they are maturing quickly.
Way back in January of 2011, I asked my colleagues here at PlaceMatters what they were most excited about for the new year. Here’s a quick look at how our expectations for 2011 tracked to what the year actually held:
Ken was excited about how the rumored addition of a camera on the new iPad would enable very cool augmented reality apps that might include, for example, information like bus routes, Walkscores, and zoning proposals. As it turns out, the iPad 2 rocks but the augmented reality technology still has a ways to go before it really plays a role in community decision-making. Nonetheless, augmented reality technology is advancing, including implementations by Bosch Home Appliances, CASA, and Wikitude Drive. Ken was also excited about integrating interactive touch tables into public meetings (which we’ve been doing a bunch), about emerging online community dashboards (which are more and more common now), and about the PlaceMatters Decision Lab, which in 2011 started to find its sea legs and is poised for some great work this year.
Jason pointed to mobile apps. He was excited about the growing smartphone adoption rate (Pew reported 35% mid-year) and technological advances in the apps themselves enabling low-cost and high-value engagement tools. And he was right in his prediction about the expanding use of game-based approaches to civic participation, as well, like Crowdsourced Moscow 2012 and those Jason described in a May blog post (“Can Games Save the World?“).
Jocelyn’s enthusiasm was more focused on federal policy and funding rather than technology, in particular the ramping up of the HUD Sustainable Communities Grants program. Forty-five regions and communities across the country begin implementing HUD grants, kicking off a fundamental shift in the way the federal government tackles regional planning. PlaceMatters has long championed the integration of transportation, land use, housing, and environmental considerations in regional planning, and to watch this integration begin occurring in so many places across the country was truly exciting. And in September, HUD announced the recipients of a second round of grant awards, including two that PlaceMatters will work on (Erie County, PA and the Denver Metro region).

Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl announced the city has successfully transitioned its email service from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps for Government. According to the announcement, the city will save an estimated 25 percent in email support costs.
“Adopting Google Apps aligns with our goals to utilize the best, most innovative technology in order to modernize our government, cut costs and improve operational efficiencies,” Ravenstahl said. “We’re very excited about this new service and I’m very proud of all of our employees for adopting it so swiftly.”

(HT Sid Burgess)