Yuval Ararat

Its been a great weekend in OpenAustralia Hackfest, first let me thank the organizers who have done an amazing job, Matthew Landauer, Alan Noble, Pamela Fox, Henare Degan and Tim Ansell who organized the event. And a special thanks to our amazing sponsorers Google who gave us the space, the food and the great prizes.
A big get well out to Rob Manson, getting sick in the first day and missing out. Hope he gets better soon.
There were some great hacking done on goverment data and some nice things that have not matured to applications during the weekend.

There is one thing, that keeps blinking at the back of my mind.

Is the crowd we are serving the data ready?
Will they be able to use the interface we give them?

It seems there is a gap, a big gap, between the technology world and the political realm. there is always a gap, i was not aware of how deep it is. Reading License to Drive in the Digital Economy exposed me to a troubling figure, a quater of the people in this land are social web illiterate,

“27% of those surveyed aged 14 and over were not currently participating online. These statistics give some indication that about a quarter of those surveyed would struggle to become active participants in the digital economy.”

This poses a big question about utilization of the Government 2. and the usefulness of these tools.
It seems that the information gathered from these types of applications will be biased towards the more capable social layers, thus creating a worse situation to the social segments not represented.
What shell we do?

How can you enable all the crowd to be part of this participation age?
This is a big questions that got some mentioning

My take is that we need to child proof our applications and match them to a crowd of a non technical and non social aware type.
As we develop our systems we should be able to get the information to the users in the most easy to follow and simple to understand thus making it available to all users of the web.
Keep your interfaces accessible, make them conform to WCAG 2.0, if you are not a front end developer DON’T develop the front end.

There was a cry from Tim Ansell, during free hacking sessions and later in the lightning sessions, to find any one who can prettify his interface.

Do the same, there are allot of people that are very capable and would love to do so.

May the web be with you.

This subject was introduced by a group of WCM guys and will be discussed in the best Web Conference in the world by Janus Boye.
This will include a Web Content Management track that is suggesting it will give guidance as it states

How do you get it right? What are the pitfalls to avoid? On this track you can learn from internationally recognized analysts, who will be joined by practitioners, all sharing their insights on how to get it right.

to solve your earthly problems with the WCM implementations.
The panel will be Janus Boye representing the customer viewpoint, Jarrod Gingras of CMS Watch representing the analyst massive, and Jon Marks defending the honour of the implementers.

This session will be an interactive one where you can use twitter to submit questions about the problems or solutions you had to WCM implementations using #fixwcm tag.

But what is really wrong about the WCM that we are in need of this session?

Inspired by the twitter tag #fixwcm i was pondering about the CMS sickness and what is the methods i see to cure that.

some people suggest that the WCM term is bigger then what it should be and thus too hard to handle and needs to be cut into smaller chunks.

Others put the blame on estimates and project schedules, or more politely on the sales process for cutting down on the implementation times.

But what is wrong with the WCM products and implementations?

The customer is not happy with the solutions and usually works with it only due to necessity not because they love using it.

But why is that?
The technology has matured enough to satisfy any customers need.
Implementers have matured.
The web has matured and implementation processes been formed. we have Agile methodology to make the implementation in the most versatile way.

This should have been sufficient to support the creation of the best fitting products for each and every customer. but it just doesn’t cut it.

Whats is wrong with that?

Interaction is what comes tomy mind every time i think of what went wrong.
Internal and external interactions are the place where we lose the implementation.
it starts with the initial process of selecting the right product through translation of business processes to requirements and failing of the requirements to be formed into artifacts in development and to the final grave of testing.
When selecting a product you are dealing with the Sales teams of each vendor and they want you in, that is where you get the more generic answers “Yeah our product can do that” and they are correct but it takes time to make the product do that.
Jon Marks had a discussion about the selection process. iguess there is no clear solution to this enigma.

It continues with the Dictionary each party is using through to politics and risk management.
To prove the dictionary point just ask any of your clients what CMS is, you will be in for a bit of an earthquake.

So what is to be done?
Some of the points that were up in the air like simplification of terms under the CMS with smaller chunks will create an easier dictionary.
use of simpler tools for the implementation.

The way i see it changing is with the maturity of the clients and the implementors in understanding what should be done when implementing the WCM and been trouthful about the weight and cost of such a process we will have a better implementation and love to WCM solutions.
Peace and Love
Yuval.

Its been 3 weeks since the NSW Sphere and the announcement of aps4nsw competition been announced by our PM Nathan Rees.
There has been some movement in the twitscopia but nothing been announced in the website.
Is this open gov? i know its a competition but you can show the people who have submitted an idea cant you?
It looks like its not picking up in the site, which is deceiving and might lead to less participation.
Even the datansw twitter and site are not giving up any information.
This hurdle is the main characteristic of the information sharing we lack from the government, just seems like this apps4nsw is missing the main point and that is dont be RailCorp!
On another note there is a cry from the people to become more active in the creation and not the discussion over the next social applications. some tweets from today

“@rbuerckner @purserj agreed. Let’s have a mix of thinking and *doing* – lots of small wins and examples needed #gov2au”

“@trib @purserj #gov2au We can think all we want, right now it’s time for doing, need to get on with it”

This is all true but there is a lack in Government participation, not You Penny you are the best, to enable us easily accessing the data, so in addition to that cry i will add use your personal contacts to move the government and make the required data available. there are people inside the parliament house that want this to happen and will gladly help you so just be pushy.

Just a bit more about the enablement of the social age in the government services and the risk that is growing out of it, reading the long article by Charles Leadbeater and Hilary Cottam about the individual making their own decision over the support of the government to disabled people using In Control’s social platform made me think about the possibility to manipulate the system.
The way that the writers look at the personal enablement and the role of the social worker is a bit naive to my taste, the system grew to become what it is today because the clients have driven it to that not because of a conscious decision to endorse red tape and disable their employees with forms. people are looking to manipulate the system and the system is using their employees to be gatekeepers.
My thought is that we need to rethink the way we as a public gatekeep these new social platforms and let the professional do their jobs at the same time.
So let me ask for the new social gate, a tool to enable the community to stop the cheating an robbing of the system and let the money flow to the people who need it most. who is going to take the plunge and thinker the details?

 

 NSW-Sphere Government 2.0: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Just dropping a Wave demo using the Wavr plugin.
[wave id="wavesandbox.com!w+3yummUgy%D"]

Can you submit to this one not from the wave?

Reading Why Parents Write More Persuasive Copy post, only because the post title was interesting for me personally as a parent.
During the reading i got to the thought that this post is not true just for writing, its true for conversion and SEM as a guide.
The mental image i got while reading the line

“Have you ever walked into a toy store with your kids and asked them to choose something? Good luck with that. They’re overwhelmed by the options and run about, touching everything and totally unable to make up their minds about anything.

Your site visitors feel the same way. Give them too many links, too many options, too much to do, and you’ll lose them to option paralysis.”

Was so strong that I had to autosuggest it to the latest shopping experience i had for a compact flash unit.

most of the shops don’t offer all the information in a simple way, when you go to the electronics shop front you have 10-25 categories on the right hand side asking you to start drilling down, their titles are not always that easy to encrypt even if you are a tech guy. Memory in one shop is RAM at another and Media at a third.
The massive amount of links makes it impossible to choose the items that are right for you, nor is it easy to find items at all.
This resonated for a while in the need to create some easy to follow conversion rules.

I will start the list and want you all to participate in adding to it.
So here are the items i got so far:

• use simple navigation and make the choice easy – don’t give me 15-30 navigation points to get me to the subcategories of these to get me to a list of items for the subcategory! Give me my product in the realm I would look for. give me the product using classification and not your internal stock order, if I need a Compact Flash card put it in memory->compact flash or camera->memory->compact flash, Don’t make me think!
• cough up the cost – I want to know how much is delivery before I click “add to cart”, give me related alternatives if there are with costing.
• tag your products and make them match – use tagging to handle products that need to match, i.e. cpu to motherboard, memory to motherboard, display adapter to motherboard, soil for pots to pots and so on.
• push me to buy it – this is the place for the store to shine, make me know how good this product is and how much i need it, be the salesman I miss. Learn from Amazon and give me the full store experience. Taking the article answer to the “Why?” question
  

  “Site visitors who feel good about their choice and feel they’re making the right decision for them are going to take action — and confidently so.”

• Put yours in the comments

NOTE: this rant is brought to you from the latest online shopping experience I had for compact flash, most of the stores I gone through didn’t get my business because they made me think. I didn’t buy from the easiest to use but I spent more then 30 minutes to get the bloody thing even though I knew what I wanted and how much I wanted to spend.

 

 Conversion-Rules-a-call-for-contribution [1:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Australia is in the early stages of government 2.0 and has been communicating some information through a blog where the latest post in it caught my eye.
The post is titled with a twist over Bill Clintons known 1992 election phrase IT’s the economy stupid latching on it and forcing the post to adhere to the title.

The depiction of interaction using web 2.0 tools is uneven and tends to look at the community to government communication channel.
This in turn is depicted as an overwhelming tidal wave making government representatives conduct several conversations at the same time whilst responding to these “Social Applications”.

“Web 2.0 can’t turn Ministers into omniscient beings able to conduct thousands of simultaneous conversations”

This aroused a bit of sarcasm and made me think that they deserve their future as they are planning it. They should suffer their stupidity!
But that is not my true nature and i thought i need to help them out.

The issues that are obvious revolve around the aspiration of the Australian government to build and maintain a community for every aspect of every office, doing so will make them the omniscient creatures they are so scared of.
This aspiration is probably driven from the need to control and is lacking true eDemocracy feature like freedom of speech.
Government doesn’t need to go through the extremely difficult process of establishing a community it has to tap into existing online communities as a participant.
The role of the government as a community builder is twisted and wrong, it opposes the ground over which a government is established, government is the peoples tool and should be capable of gathering the needs from the public, election is one of these tools.
The disregarded area of Government to Citizen communication channels in the post is, from my point of view, makes a much more natural Web 2.0 adoption process then enforcing the political infrastructure to change its way of conducting business and become community moderators and builders.
Looking at Enterprise 2.0 toolset and how it might be implemented in the internal corridors of an office makes me think of enabling the internal processes of the government with internal wiki’s and external blogs and twits, that is probably the initial stage.
I totaly agree with tim’s point of view about the adoption of the hyped up toolset,

“It’s all too easy to get caught up in the ‘cool’ factor of Web 2.0. The potential of the technology is so amazing that sometimes we can forget that at the end of the day, it’s still people on either end of the tubes.”

but there is a need to advance with the time and the way people communicate with each other, there are many new tubes out there.

To enable the voice of the people there should be a more rigours study of the current communities and their covered subjects, a map of this eco system will benefit the short term initiatives exposure online and might reduce the need to use of media to announce the initiatives, in some cases.
The eco system map should be global to all offices and managed by an independent contractor, may be in Australia by Smart Services CRC, enabling all the offices to be exposed to the vast array of community and publish the word in multiple community making the information more visible.
Enterprise 2.0 in the government space is not as intuitive as the solutions in the Enterprise space and requires aggregation of many sources to a more coherent need of the citizens, this makes the adoption of the Enterprise 2.0 tools different and much more challenging then the Enterprise workspace but not much different.
The current processes of aggregation of information should not be abandoned for the sake of a new hyped up technology, technology should enable the prices to be more efficient and open thus improving it not abolishing it.
Should Government open their doors to outside information? yes they are required to do so in order to keep up with the citizen and the service he is getting from the business entities surrounding him. Citizens are getting used to know what is going with their friends and neighbours almost instantly and are capable of letting their opinion show, government should be able to let us know what is going on and how we can affect it by using the new communication tools like rss and twitter and allow us to act when we feel it matters.
I see the room for applications like online voting and crowd pools, experts forums and hosted forum threads, twitter/RSS updates for the office news based on subjects (not one twitter account for an office but multiple to each area) and so on.
What do you see in the future of eDemocracy?

 

 Government-2.0 [2:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I use Lomboz and Aptana as my main development studios but realised that if i use my Aptana to edit JSP files i dont get highlighted text and tags. So i needed a solution to make me stop switching for JSP editing back to lomboz.
My solution was in the Jira bug space of Aptana pointing me to the Amateras project for their HTML editor.
Surfing their main page i realised that they are making great plugins for more required tasks like: ERD, UML, JSF and more. their moto is Enjoy your development, i think i will now.
I have also realised they are Japanese guys who were kind enough to put their site in english for us. thanks!
so i highly recommend following this link to their english homepage and endulge on their toolset.