When I started, the Use Cases that’d been gathered for the Collaborative Tools Project were…

• Collaborative Document Editing
• Project Workgroups
• Public-facing Showcase or Community

…there was another hard to define Use Case called “Meeting Support”, which really alluded to “everything else”, being able to get find stuff, record things easily such as meeting minutes or reports etc.

There seemed to be something missing. Something important. What was missing was the community glue, the undefinable. What was missing was…

• The connective stuff
• The unspecific stuff
• The fluffy social stuff
• The shared spaces
• The fun stuff
• The common sense stuff

And so I internally re-thought the Use Cases in an attempt to simplify the first stage of rollout and meet as many of the requirements as early as possible. They kind of panned out like this…

• Tools - blogging, wikis, discussions, instant messaging, files and more
• Toys - shared, fun and fluffy applications. A means of accidentally stumbling over interesting people.
• Training - less training and more Web2.0 awareness raising

What the introduction of “Toys” does is connect the private workgroups  and the public areas, they become meeting places, places where you can hang out and be nosey, promenades. I know I’m not really making myself as clear as I might… but it kind of looks like this…

In my next post, I’ll look at the tools we tested out…

Today’s Use Case for the Collaborative Tools Project is a difficult one to give an accurate title. It can be thought of as a site that promotes the work of a department or aims to attract a community of like minded people. It might have lots of media such as photos or videos from conferences or even lectures.

The teams I have that need this are…

• The Sustainability Forum - who want to raise the awareness and debate around the University of York’s sustainability
• The Philosophy Wiki - a Community of Practice about, er, philosophy (currently they are using MediaWiki)
• Humanities Research - a cross departmental research department (currently using the Wordpress service)
• History of Art

An important part of this Use Case looks to engage potential students and impress funding bodies and attract collaborators. It is very much an “outreach site” and aspects of  social media marketing or Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or being well ranked in Google might even come into play.

My first thoughts for providing service  this was Wordpress…. and then the Philosophy team turned up and complicated things. Who’d have thought?

The challenge here is to give people what they want.. and what they tell me they want is…

• Something that looks shit hot
• Something that is very much “their look and feel”
• Something that is the beginning of a niche community
• Something that is theirs.

It’s a tough nut to crack.

At first I thought that a shared Wordpress Multi-User environment, with a shared look and feel, although being easy to administer, might not be appropriate at all. It would be just “too corporate”. And Wordpress is woeful at wiki integration and wiki thinking so it wouldn’t do for the philosophers at all.

But on the other hand, maintaining the upgrades on multiple installs of Wordpress isn’t something I would look forward to doing.

I am struggling here to decide what is the best approach to providing great-looking, easy-to-use sites that broadly support self-promotion, blogging, community-building  and wiki working that are public-facing and look to engage the wider world in discussion or even content creation.

I currently am thinking of providing workshops, templates and guides to using Blogger, Wordpress, PBWorks effectively and then make sure that we aggregate the items created centrally. This sort of gives people the “best of breed” service for a few pounds a month. They could even hire their own designers if the look and feel of free templates isn’t up to their very high specifications.

What would you do?

The next use case for the Collaborative Tools Project is Project Workgroups. The sort of online space where people can document their work (in a wiki), can tell each other what they’re working on (in a blog), share files and generally take the pulse of their team.

So far, I’ve avoided the all-out-files-based approach (like Sharepoint or Alfresco) because as I said earlier, I have a deep-seated and purely emotional fear of files (it’s their fault we’re in this mess dammit!)  in general and so we’ve been exploring what wikis and the like can provide.

I have been amazed at how poor many tools are at providing blogging features. It’s almost as if wikis really don’t want to be associated with their more popular cousin at all. Blogs have to be personal and authors need to feel a sense of ownership of them or else somehow they’re not really a blog. It’s just the way it is. And yet most “shared” blogging tools treat the blogs like documentation… uniform… impersonal…

A interesting and probably predictable part of trialling the wikis was the default permissions model… or who can see and edit what. In Elgg, the default state of say a blog post or a wiki page is that everyone logged in to the site can see it. This really scared the horses. Yes it is easy to change a wiki page’s permissions to “visible to the group only” but it was obvious to everyone around the table, or in this case, screen, that someone would forget and hell, or at least embarrassment would be let loose.

The flip-side of this “a bit too free and easy” situation is that when trailing SocialText, an enterprise wiki tool, I added people to their respective workspaces, Biology, Marketing, Maths, Librarians etc.. and people went away, worked hard, created content but because the default permissions model was that content was visible to members of this group, it meant that as a rule, the site felt uninhabited and lifeless.

By meeting peoples’ insecurities about content being private, or “good enough” and hiding content from other teams, everyone suffers… There can be no “happy accidents” or chance encounters when everyones’ office door is shut tight and sound-proofed.

At at this point it’s worth considering what is collaboration anyway? For many, the collaboration isn’t actually working together on say a bid document (in real or close to real time) it is just keeping an eye on other departments and teams and spotting overlaps and opportunities.

This “encouraging people to be open by default” is going to be a difficult nut to crack… not that people are naturally secretive but they often want to practice a bit before they jump on stage. One solution, that occurred quite by accident, is to start with an environment that is completely open…. with the promise that areas can be made more private later… This means that everyone gets to see the benefit (to them) of being able to nosey around other peoples’ areas and that can be more valuable (to them) than the need to be private and polished.

One of the main requirements for the Collaborative Tools Project is collaborative document editing. A group of researchers, at York want to be able to work on a paper or a research bid document with researchers at other organisations. You’d think that by now this would be a solved problem wouldn’t you?  Some of the first GUI computers in the 1970’s created were designed to be used by two people, each with a mouse of their own, so surely by now collaboration should be as natural as a mouse gesture. It’s not.

The two most commonly used approaches for working collaboratively on documents are a. wikis where the document lives in one place online and b. emailing documents around lots of people. Both of these approaches are flawed.

The Problems With Emailing Documents Around

• You receive feedback from seven people about the same typo
• The latest version is sent to Jill who is on holiday and you have edits you want to make
• Someone on the team doesn’t have the “right” version of Word
• Someone just joining the team has no idea of “how we got here”
• It’s difficult to add comments to text (without adding text to the document)
• It’s difficult to know who added what. I’ve found most people aren’t comfortable with merging documents at all.

p.s If you are in the hell that is emailing documents around then CompareMyDocs (for merging) and CC Betty (for keeping track of who has the latest version) may help. I’ve also had a quick look at Alfesco (an open source replacement for MS Sharepoint) but deep down I feel that documents themselves are the root of problems so I keep looking for “document free” solutions to the whole collaborative editing itch.

The Problems With Wikis

• The editing screens are often ugly and difficult to use. Nobody should have to learn wiki markup.
• They often only work online, meaning you can’t edit the latest version on the train.
• The interface, being browser-based is often slow or even worse “faulty” resulting in people losing their carefully crafted work.
• Many wikis don’t handle concurrent saves very well, resulting in you losing other peoples’ carefully crafted work.

There are some interesting attempts at solving the collaboration problem, including Google Docs. Here’s a collaborative document about collaborative documents (shown below).

Google Docs (like most document editors, whether online or not) is poor at document navigation. Most of the document editors out there almost assume that you start at the beginning and then write until you’ve finished, whereas most of us jump around a document filling in the bits that we can. This jumping around (or what Jef Rasking called LEAPING ) is normally only ever done with the scrollbar which is woefully clumsy way of getting to the bit you want to edit.

Despite Google Docs being one of the most interesting tools, other alternatives have features worth exploring. I’ve been using Zoho editing tools recently, which have been integrated into a workgroup application called Huddle. Did you know they have an API meaning that you can embed a Google Docs quality editor in your web application?

Adobe Buzzword (apart from looking nicer) has the ability to add comments (or annotations) to the text. You can see the mess that Matthew and I got into in the Google Document (above) as we added our comments to the document. It took us a while to work out that we could assign colours to our comments and there isn’t a key (I don’t think) that keeps a track of who is which colour. I think annotation is as important as actual editing and is often overlooked in these sorts of tools.

One tool that tries to tackle annotation head on is Revizr. It’s not the clearest of interfaces, it could do with a Web2.0 lick and spit, but I like its thinking.

Etherpad, the “real time collaborative editing tool” is also worth a mention. Although it has a limited set of tools (this in itself may be a good thing) it’s nice because it is so immediate (see below). What I like most about Etherpad  is…

• people are automatically assigned colours (which can be removed later)
• there is a “chat room” (bottom right) so that you can discuss the changes you are making without them becoming part of the content.
• I also like the fact that this chat room is time-ordered, whereas the document may “evolve” over time.

Etherpad has just been bought by Google, which probably means either Google Docs will inherit some of its features.

All of these tools seem to work better in different situations, or on different points on a collaboration lifecycle… which might look a bit like this… When you look at the process of putting a research document together, in really simple terms, there are distinct phases each which might need it’s own user interface.  For example, Etherpad works really well for documents around a page long but when the text is longer, people can be working on a completely different section and you have no idea that they are busy working away.

So far, I have yet to find a collaborative editing solution I’m completely convinced by. Tools that try to solve the problem by over computerifying the workflow end up too difficult for occasional users. Tools that totally mimic word processing applications are kind of starting from the wrong place. For me, I think all the opportunities for innovation are in the early and late stages of the collaboration lifecycle above, in collecting ideas (brainstorms etc),  shaping or outlining and finally annotation (or adding comments and content without changing it). We already have a plethora text editors that work well enough or work the way we want them to. I’m looking for tools or processes that support the whole process rather than just the middle bits.

I’ve been inspired by OffMessage’s - A Little Every Day re-invigoration of his blogging and decided to follow suit. It’s time to eat my own dogfood again, so here goes.

Recently I’ve been working on the Collaborative Tools Project at the University of York which aims to improve online collaboration. It’s a fantastic mix of designing and providing tools, evangelizing Web2.0 concepts and hands-on training… I’m absolutely loving it!

So my plan is to share some of what I’ve been doing, thoughts, tools, results in a one blog post a day for a month format… or close enough anyway (don’t hold me to it). For me at least, it’s going to be Collaboration Month.

See you  next Monday…ish for day one which will be about the Use Cases we gathered.

I’m going to keep this below a Table of Contents as we go…

Use Cases

• Collaborative Document Editing
• Project Workgroups
• Public Showcase Engagement Blog Wiki
• The Missing Use Case
• PPPeople PPPowered ( http://pppeoplepppowered.blogspot.com/ )

The Tool Trialled

This week I have been at Dev8D, a JISC-funded BarCamp-like conference which included a whole heap of three minute lightning talks from other JISC. Three minute talks are a wonderful format, long enough to hint at detail and short enough to skip boredom or irrelevance.

The best bit was of course my lightning talk, not because mine was “any good™” but because by doing it Jim Hensmen at Coventry University came up to me afterwards and introduced himself. It turns out that he is running an almost identical project to the Collaborative Tools Project at the University of York. Over lunch we shared our ideas and experiences so far, like Oompah Loompahs complaining about getting chocolate out of our uniforms.

This one meeting, for me made the whole trip worth it. Jim and I have arranged to share our directions and thoughts and results with each other.

Session: Yahoo Pipes

Tony Hirst gave a beginners guide to using Yahoo Pipes to scrape and shape data. I already follow Tony’s blog, Ouseful, and so didn’t learn anything new (that’s not a criticism) but I did manage to create something that I have tried and failed to do before ( a slightly complex aggregator publishing site ).

What I find fascinating about Tony’s work is that he has an almost maniacal avoidance of “programming”, creating things that “you can do too” without the need for programming skills. Added to that, he also has a unique ability to spot opportunities lying around the web, conceive of them in terms of tools like Yahoo Pipes, then he has the grace (like a bad magician) to carefully show you how he did it.

It was interesting to spot how many developers he’d infected with his mode of thinking, I kept seeing people Yahoo Piping all over the conference.

Session: Arduino

The wonderful Garry Bellamy, who isn’t a million miles from the Fast Show scientist who’s colleague was called Dave, gave us a beginners’ guide to Arduino. Arduinos are mini computers to which you can attach lights, motors, sensors that migt detect light/humidity/temperature or mini speakers, in fact almost anything, and make your own devices and robots.

I have so wanted to get my hands dirty with these for ages now, probably not because I will ever make anything but it’s nice to know what it’s like and what you might do. In our session I began to try and make our little and lovely LED light to blink in morse. I thought it’d be nice if a single light might be connected to a twitter account or search and tweet in morse, not so that anyone but a super-spy might read it but so that it could become an ambient “activity indicator”. Tweets tend to appear in an instant, displaying them via morse gives them more of a “visual echo” in that they simply take longer to “appear”.

Session: Amazon Cloud

Like playing with LEDs, I found this session extremely illuminating too. We created a computer in Amazon’s cloud, installed a webserver and MySQL, moved it onto a disk (also in the cloud) and then accessed it. What I appreciated most about this session was that it worked. Well prepared scripts were downloadable to do the things we needed to do (great preparation). We stopped when anyone got lost (for anyone read me). By the end of the session I had a number of servers running all sorts of services ( Alfesco, LifeRay etc).

Session: IPhone Development

This session gave us a introduction to iPhone development. I’ve tinkered before. I actually learned a lot, who’d have though THAT was the difference between header files and, er, implementation files. About three quarters of the way through the session my code stopped compiling and I couldn’t salvage it.

The thing that I think I took from this session is that I think I’m just too stubborn to accept crap programming language syntax. If the answer to a question why is “because you do” then my awkward gene throws a wobbly. I don’t think I will ever learn Objective-C and the world just probably be thankful for that fact.

Research Repositories

Throughout the whole event there was a buzz surrounding LinkedData and libraries and repositories. It’s ironic in a way that I found out about ePrints (a research outputs repository) is used at our university, from someone at our university (hi Aaron in the White Rose Grid) at the Dev8D event. Hey, I’m new…. still.

Other competing products/services that popped up in talks and mentions were Mendeley (ben.dowling@mendeley.com) , which I’d previously dismissed as an alternative to EndNote, a personal research bookmark-keeper but is more akin to LastFM’s audio scrobbler for research (it even has an open API). Interestingly, it tracks reading of research papers (how long I spent) so may have something to offer in terms of measuring the all important IMPACT factor in the future.

Mendeley and Zotero are things I will have to swot up on later.

Other sessions included:

Edina from the University of Edinburgh. Unlock Places a Geo Information Service. It includes hierarchical information… footprints, polygons, historical names of places

Twapperkeeper.com, an archiver of hashtagged tweets, brilliant for conferences.

Linked Data demos from Hugh Glaser, University of Southampton, http://rbkexplorer.com/demos/ http://sameas.org

Ross McFarlane @rossmcf gave an honest “lessons learned” introduction to Processing, the visualisation tool.

In the afternoon I learned Scala from Tom Morris, but, and this isn’t a criticism, Scala to me feels like Jython done different rather that Java scripting done right, but that’s just me, I only have room for a few languages in my head at once, including “body” and “english”.

Graham Klyne gave an insightful presentation on agility, demonstrating how the “travelling light” approach had lead them to avoid working with a web framework altogether (it was all done with Javascript, RDF, SPARQL, Lucene, Json, smoke and mirrors). An interesting assumption (which framework?) artfully and completely avoided by using gadgets (I guess).

All in all, a fantastic conference with the right mix of hands-on, sit and listen,have fun, get involved, just chill activities.

The catering was excellent. The whole event was well organised, friendly and helpful.

If I had a criticism it might be that some of the sessions suffered because the wifi really couldn’t handle a roomful of geeks downloading a development environment at once.

I do have  one suggestion …. I don’t think I quite “get” the whole LinkedData thing. Don’t get me wrong, I get the basics having noodled around with RDF/semantic stuff for years (very badly) … but there wasn’t a “get your hands dirty with the basics” session for LinkedData… I would have definitely enjoyed one of those, a session where I could go home with less than a page of working code that I’d written that maybe did something fun and simple with dbpedia and ePrints perhaps.

Last night I dropped in on the Illuminating York exhibits. In previous years, there were more varied, smaller events in old churches around York (we have quite a few of those) but this year there were only four main events.

The first was some bangin’ choons and some two people doodling with another doing the zoomy animation (it seemed). It all was projected onto the tower in Museum gardens and very colourful. At 8PM, an artist arrived “all the way from Venezuala” and hilariously did some doodles like a precious granny playing Pictionary - you know those artful flicks and embelishments that the insane quivver onto the page.

The striking thing to me was that here was a medium that had something (dualling doodlers) being used by people that didn’t.

Then there was a piece at the back of King’s Manor by Bright White. It was visually very lovely, with animations of owls and moons and moles and foxes and hedgehogs - what’s not to love? But it felt like a 10 minute ident for a spooky nature channel.

For me, any installation of this kind should have some empathy for the space and so almost rule itself out from being used elsewhere, whereas this felt like an experience that would work just as well in a cinema in Cleethorpes or projected onto a Library in Macclesfield.

For me, this piece broke the cardinal rule that I call “Don’t Just Project Stuff Onto A Wall”… in that no thought was put into this wall, the shapes that are already there, the history, anything. I have a friend who’s telly is almost as big as the wall of King’s Manor, what is brought to piece by not having central heating, comfy sofas to sit on and Sky.

To put it another way.. if you are going to “Just Project Stuff Onto A Wall”  why not use all the walls in the courtyard and live a little. Do something that can’t be compared to my mate’s telly.

We missed the KMA piece (it’d ended) but I can guess what it was all about. It was called 5circles so using the vast powers of my imagination I can see an installation where you walk about a bit and circles of light follow you around. KMA already have this particular “been there done that” badge, maybe they should move on or set their ambitions a bit higher now.

I did see some lights on a tree that might have been an artwork or maybe it was just the mushrooms kicking in.

I think York City council are being ripped off a bit because, although enjoyable, lots of the work isn’t art - it’s more like entertainment where the chances of catching your death are quite high.

York City council should maybe also think about the permanence of the pieces. If you remember when they projected candy colours onto the Minster, it was fantastic, what a sight!  That piece should be shown every Illuminating York if only for a few hours.

If the pieces could be easily re-constructed (or left in situ) then each and every year the Illuminating York thing would only get bigger and better. It needs to.

I’ve always being fairly celebrity-blind. I don’t forget faces but names are fleeting at best. Last year I spent a train journey chatting to (the charming) Kevin from Grand Designs on Channel 4 and it wasn’t until Doncaster that the penny dropped that he was a star and by then he’d shared his plans for a new series and Fizzy Pigs with me.

I think it’s time this strange celebrity blind spot or as I like to think of it, “blessing”, of mine should be made more widely available. It’s time for the death of celebrity as a concept - we don’t need really don’t need it and without it my life will be that bit easier… won’t it?

So, who is it exactly that needs celebrities? Well, the music industry for one and the vast amount of profits they cream off, supposedly to find and develop new talent as if talent needs funding. The problem is, talent is doing it for itself. Listen to Tom Robinson’s show for a night (or subscribe to his podcast), cruise MySpace or listen to BBC6 and you’ll hear what I mean. Contrary to the X-Factor evidence, there’s loads of actual talent out there.

The press and fashion industries both seem a shade too comfortable with celebrities. And it seems to me that at the opposite end of celebrity-love is blatant contempt for you and me. Us plebs. The fashion industry’s love of re-touching photos is actively harming your and my daughters, projecting a body image that simply doesn’t exist onto every screen and magazine cover and surface that can be bought. Ralph Lauren (and his kind) are evil misogynist prats, but you knew that already.

The simple fact is this. We don’t need celebrities any more. In the olden days  their “output” could be carefully crafted, manipulated, pumped out and charged for - but nowadays, they are on twitter, facebook and their blogs… And you know what, they’re nasty, thick (and often racist)  talentless twits.

The celebrity spell has been broken.. you really wouldn’t want to hang around them - and don’t. Even Stephen Fry, surely a contender for most affable and interesting bloke this side of the grave, shows himself up to be a bit lacking and, well, human, like us and nothing like the Wildean version of him that celebrity confers (Even just mentioning Stephen Fry increased my likelihood of using a word like “confer” by 200%). In “real life” he’s a let down…. And should be, thank god.

And not only do we not need celebrity, they don’t need to be that ridiculously rich. Even Radiohead (a band who, in my opinion have avoided that crap album syndrome, apart from Kid A) don’t need THAT much money, because nobody does. Just because you’ve ended up with that much money doesn’t mean you earned it (or that you should keep it).

You might say that there are “useful” celebs, that act as a figureheads, like that dumbo Jamie Oliver and that School Dinners campaign, except, thinking about it, common sense should have sorted that one out really. Feeding kids saturated fat and sugar was always a crazy scam, I mean, that’s what an inreasingly litigious society is for -where were the Kids Fed Fat and Sugar Scam headlines? They were on page 23 after the Katie Price coverage.

There has to be enough twenty-something chubbies with diabetes and heart problems to bankrupt the entire primary and secondary education system by now. Schools would change quick sharp to healthy school dinner diets after a few stinging compensation court cases. So, really, thinking about it, we should be ashamed to have needed Jamie Oliver.

There does seem to be a difference between stars and celebs. Stars are like rye-bread where Celebs are white sliced… and, like rye-bread, you don’t ever really fancy it, it just does the job.

But at the end of the day, celebrities aren’t sustainable. In order to be a celeb, you’ve pretty much got to have at least five massive fuck off cars and spend half your time in an aeroplane snorting coke. And then, record companies, having to cover expenses like getting your hat flown first class to New York have too invent lunacy like the “Home Taping is Killing Music” campaign and Lily Allen to pay for it.

I think that we might still need figureheads though, but like carrots, your figureheads should be locally sourced (say within a 20 miles radius of the required figure-heading activity)… And you definitely can’t import them.

So How Do We Lead A Celebrity Free Life Tom?

I haven’t a clue.. You could try to boycot anything that is remotely celeb-driven. I do, but that’s not deliberate.

We should all relentlessly push for transparency and the publication of celebrity wages, particularly of talent at the BBC . For example, Jonathan Ross is quite funny but not a million pounds funny… He’s about £50,000 funny.

And how about maybe….

• Let’s all agree not make new celebrities… let’s make friends instead. Only go to see live acts that would return the favour.
• Go to a gig, buy a CD at the end… let’s all reward the creative process but not the creative industry
• Buy a book written by someone you know
• Go to the Library, I’m not sure why, but go anyway
• Go to a comedy club … invite the comedian home…
• Find B Movies and watch them. Don’t watch any film with anyone you know in it.
• If you see a celebrity in the street, take a picture of the person next to them and ask them for their autograph.
• Buy a slightly over-priced handmade mug
• Use software recommendation engines such as Last.fm rather than endlessly brain-washing yourself with stuff you’ve heard before
• Scour your local gig listings for something worth going to see. If you can’t find anything - TAKE A RISK!

Instead of worshiping celebrities, we should celebrate small fish in smaller ponds - it’s simply more humane, I mean, most celebs whinge about a celebrity life anyway, let’s save both them and us the pain.

And lastly, in this war on celebrity, we should all maybe stop wanting to be one and grow up.

I was looking forward to Light Night Leeds 2009 in Leeds, a packed evening programme of sound and light public artworks of various kinds, all finished off with a tour of an installation at the magificent Temple Works building. It sounded fab and this review is admittedly a review of just the things I saw, which down to time and geography (it was a 3 mile walk all in all!) wasn’t much.

The first thing I saw was a feminist projection onto Old Broadcasting House.

#1. Projecting something onto a building is neither big nor clever.

In fact, it’s rubbish. No thought was put into the where on the building it was projected, what audio should be used (there wasn’t any) or anything. In fact, ironically, round the corner is a walkway with interesting lighting that I thought might be an artwork.

At the Old Broadcasting House there was an animation and a projection of a flash “My Galaxy” application.

#2. Putting an interactive digital thingy on a projector doesn’t make it more interactive.

In fact it makes it worse because then everyone else in the room is automatically (whether they want to or not) placed into ” a virtual queue”… waiting to “interact”… or more likely bored to tears at being forced to watch interaction. I hate these digital arts things that essentially say to you, add your stuff then watch as nothing in particular slowly unfolds. They come the same stable of digital arts projects where crappy animations respond to your voice, movement, hand gestures. Ooh look, arm-waving and purple blobs…Big deal.

On the way down the hill back into town, there was a projection of a marionette onto a building. In a Leeds Met entrance hall, there was a band on with a small crowd around it. Whoop de doo. Mind you, the entrance was lit interestingly.

At this point I saw 4 people wandering along in hoodies swinging glow-in-the-dark balls on strings. I noticed the huge car park to my left and how it was lit.

#3 Just because you’ve got some balls, doesn’t mean it’s performance art

The only things that hadn’t annoyed the arse of me were architectural, the walkway, the hallway and a yellowy car park in the drizzle. So far, Architects Utd 3 - 0 Leeds Creatives.

Cutting through the centre of town, at the Art Gallery there were some speakers making bubbling watery noises. I quite liked this “piece”… it wasn’t “interactive” so that you’d notice, it was entertaining some kids there and made me want a wee.

In another beautiful building there was an exhibition of the The Yorkshire Overland Sailors, which, er, despite being a great idea and cause, wasn’t art. It was a museum or educational exhibition, like a trade show stand for zany charities.

On the buildings there were some projections on buildings. Lame, lame, lame.

Dashing through to New Briggate I saw “The Idea of the North” by Lumen and  Terje Isungset, which was nice and contempletive and by far the best attempt of the night. Although it still gets my goat when something with a couple of screens and some audio is described as “immersive”…

It was then a brisk march down to Temple Works and we were initially introduced to the ante-rooms to the main room in which some pieces has been created and they were eyeball-stabbingly bad.

Someone had made a man out of rubbish (bless!). Someone had taken some monitors and put stuff on it. There was a Cornelia Parker-esque collection of plates on fishing wires but not enough for a tea party. Bizarrely, there were some bloody fashion images of pretty girls in dresses which I hoped were harkening back to the previous tenants of Temple Works, the Kay’s Catalogue, but suspect was just a chance for a photographer to work with pretty girls. In one room there were some shelves attached to which were photographs.
The piece de resistance (and I mean piece as in “taking the” ) was a performance artist running around like a mad Mrs. Mop from kids telly pretending to clean the place.  Dear god!

The work was appalling, embarrassing and vaguely insulting. When it comes to shit art, I’m actually quite tolerant, in fact I even like it, but shit art should pass at least one of my basic rules of thumb …

1. Has some thought gone into it? This is the biggy, some works of art I don’t even need to see because the idea is so fab that simply hearing about it is (almost) enough.
2. Did it take a long time to do? Effort can be a great substitute for thought.
3. Did it take some skill? Skill is underrated these days, but can still be admired, especially when you might be a bit light in the Thought and Effort departments.
4. Does it look nice? Hey, sometimes you can just get away with this one.
5. Does it make me re-think the space? Space is a funny thing and when short of stuff to put in it, simply tarting up the physicality is an option.
6. Does it make me laugh? For me, although not strictly essential, most good art makes me laugh out loud. Some makes me laugh probably as an attempt to cover up my fear, some at the preposterousness of someone’s Thought or Effort, some just because it’s funny.

These six criteria all fit together in a concept called Is It Any Good? which come in handy when looking at shit art because you can pretend that what you have just been looking at wasn’t a complete and utter waste of your time.

And then came the worst part, after having spent a long, long, long 30 minutes being held in captivity looking at rubbish, we still were no closer to seeing THE BIG ROOM…Like being locked in a never ending school pantomime, all smiling, bemused, embarrassed and wondering dear god when will this end.

I jokingly asked if we could leave. And asked again more seriously. I gave up and bailed and went home.

On the way home I got a text that said “would have bailed too - but they shut the bloody doors! Was really shit, you missed nothing.”. The organisers very pleasantly told me they’ll up the tempo for future showings and offered me a second run at it, but.. meh… like so many light-based installation events, the photos afterwards are often the only non-shit bit. (The Photo by Jim Moran of the main room is stunning isn’t it? But if I was been full on snarky, and so far I’ve resisted (a bit) it is just a great room with some lights in… or did I miss something? I’ve not seen any positive post event blog posts yet).

FOUR TIPS FOR LIGHT NIGHT ORGANISERS

Not that I know anything about events organisation, but…

1. Throughout the night there was the heady reek of  “audience participation” boxes being ticked for arts organisations. Repeat after me “projecting something onto a wall doesn’t make it interesting and doesn’t make it inclusive”… in fact in many ways, it does quite the opposite if you think about it.

2. Just because it’s on, doesn’t mean you have to list it. Lots of the pieces were small and crap, and if I’d stumbled across the plinth people by accident I would’ve found them charming and fun but they are a disappointment as a destination. They aren’t a “main act”.  It’d be like listing a witty remark about MPs in some bar as satirical entertainment.

3. Create a few big key events, something worth going to see, on a grand scale. Leeds as a city has that scale and the stuff I saw was more Dewsbury. The events should bring people together (briefly) to punctuate the evening somehow and create a shared experience… a tempo… a point.

4. Next year, why not try to avoid anything that uses the words, interactive, inclusive, immersive or projection…and put on something that is Any Good™… something to be proud of, to remember, to talk about.

I hope that helps…

I’ve had a lot of responses to my post about twitter, attribution and passing on links. And most people have been commenting on the retweeting/attribution side of things but that wasn’t the point I failed to make.

My point is this: When people share a link what is in their mind with regards to audience?

It might fall in the bleeding obvious category, but everyones’ audiences are different… And so when sharing a link (or a gag) you can’t know if you are late to the party or an early worm. Do people think about this or even care?

Do people know what, if ALL of their followers RT’d them would be the total number of people who would potentially see their tweet? Is tweeting just blogging lite or something else?

Do people know what timezone their followers (and followers followers) are in?

Which of the people you follow get RT’d most?

Does it matter? I don’t know… I too share links, but don’t know WHY I do it…or who I do it for (me probably?).

If you don’t know, there was a joke that rippled around Twitter about  ‘H from steps being dead‘. Relax, the gag was just a picture with no malice involved… but it caught on…

What I found interesting, and then annoying was how it rippled around (my) twitterverse. Initially, I heard it lots…. and lots… Some people chose to attribute (or retweet) their source with an RT, others didn’t, some attributed the person they heard the joke from, but not the person that that person had heard it from.

The next day it started to happen again as a new crowd started laughing at the same re-cycled joke… and people did the same with regards to attribution. Hearing a joke for the six hundredth time can get annoying.

And then, perhaps days after that, it hit Facebook and sparked off another round of comedians sharing the love. And still some people were more inclined to claim authorship (by omission) than to accredit the source…like, for example, Tom Hingley who isn’t pointing at the original twitpic, but a copy that has been put on a server somewhere else completely. The Facebook resurgence awoke part-time twitterers to pass the joke on… What absolute never-ending joy!

I think there’s something interesting in whether or not name their source when they pass on links, and I know sometimes you don’t have enough characters to be able to do so, and some people don’t know how to, and sometimes life is simply too short but what I think is important is what people are really thinking… Are they, deep down, knowingly stealing? Are they pretending that the gag was theirs?  Like we all do in real life… Like I did last night for example… I told a friend unloading his worries that he shouldn’t fly RyanAir because they’ve bought in a surcharge for emotional baggage… I can’t remember where I heard that meagre gag, but it got re-used, royalty, copyright and credit-free. Almost humour free too.

I’d love to see a visualisation of a twitstorm that took into account peoples’ willingness to credit the source with regards to a “H from Steps” meme or any other meme where there is clear personal benefit, such as “being a wag”

But this then lead me onto to thinking about, what are people who post links in twitter thinking? Why do they do it? What is it for? What do they gain from it? Who do they think their audience(s) is/are?

So when someone adds a link (or lots of links) in Twitter, there are a number of scenarios…

1. You’ve seen twenty times already! Argh! Unfollow!
2. You’ve seen once before already from someone you both are following
3. You have seen it before from someone this particular person isn’t following
4. You’ve seen it before from someone, and they haven’t accredited the source
5. You haven’t seen this yet

… and depending on your overall grumpiness rating, your respective reactions might be…

1. And your tweet is the one that made me realize, as a news source you are at best, late, top spamming me, unfollow
2. You are arse-licking at worst and making yourself redundant at best
3. I really didn’t need this link, I’ve already got it, you are only useful as a measure of popularity
4. Ooh… not only are you a spammer, so now you are noise AND a dirty rotten retweeter.
5. Thank you very much, that link made my day

Which makes me think, that given you can’t see your audiences’ worlds (they’re all different to yours) then when passing on links you are either always there first (you up-to-the-minute saddo) or you have a dullard audience (you saddo) or you have a one in five chance of not pissing people off.

Like those odds?

Then again, I don’t think many people care about pissing people off with the amount of stomach-lifting, puke-making tweets I see. I started collecting them, but found the stench too much to be able to keep it up… but if I get enough I’ll post a link (please RT).

Last night, under the banner of “You TWEET if you want to: the web is for opposition, not for governing”, Fishburn Hedges and Channel4 brought us Twinge. What was essentially a twitterfall page where us public could chip in with questions for Ed Balls, Miliband and others by adding the hashtag #twinge to our tweets.

And despite Simon Redfern declaring…

Suffering a bit of a #twinge hangover this morning.
Format worked well - perfect for conference, real engagement with outside world.

… It was a Twitterfall page. Nothing more and nothing less. Hardly what I’d call real engagement and more like standing outside the city walls in a big gang and shouting. And like all Twitterfall pages, it quickly succumbed to the inane (see screenshot below)… And yes, I took part in that inanity, the really funny thing was that everyone else I knew did too, at the same time.

Stepping aside from the sniggering masses for a while, there is so much more that could (and can) be done that move beyond the simplistic idea that a Twitterfall page is real engagement. As a participant you get to make and see your question amongst heaps of others which has a twinge of excitement because it feels like you are participating and more importantly, that hundreds of your fellow participants have read (and enjoyed) your tweeted contribution.

The fact is, however, that because everyone else in involved in the same activity… vanity tweeting (Ooh look I’m on telly) … they probably didn’t notice your hard wrought comment. Add to that the fact that when hundreds of people “engage”… you simply can’t read them all, there’s too many.

So, given that the technology is a bit rubbish, we have to improve it….for example…

Make the question selection process transparent

By this I mean.. Currently what happens is that everyone contributes and then “magically” somebody’s question gets used… Presumably there are some researchers queuing up good candidate questions, seeing a list of those would alter what I choose to contribute. I can imagine a sidebar of the tweets being stacked up, like Post It notes…

Be transparent

The fact that there were Fishburn Hedges employees taking part in the jollying along of the twitterfall stinks. It simply makes me feel that everyone else is a bot… a paid stooge, a hired hand. If you can’t get this bit right, Twitterfalls like this will be dead in the water before they’ve gained any traction because everyone will feel that the discussion has already been hijacked by PR wonks.

Cut the spam

How hard can it be to filter out some of the bots that jumped on the Twandtwagon (and don’t you hate it when everyone is still “tw”-ing words?). Looking at the remnants of the #twinge comments here, it’s unfortunate that there are so many “download a movie here” comments that need clearing up. Of course, clearing up tweets is a tricky one if you are then seen to be censoring dissent or trolling.

How about voting?

A simple voting up and down of comments may help with “making the selection process” transparent.

How about comment limiting?

What if you only get three tweets. You might use them more wisely. If you receive karma for more votes, maybe you get to make more comments. In effect this would be a real-time election of representatives from the masses on the fly.

How about a chuckle tool?

I have to admit, I like the silly stuff that people tweet in these situations but at times it drags. If a real engagement-oriented twitterfall page had a “chuckle” tool, then I’d be free to filter those too… and only let the ones with a guffaw ranking get through (or vice versa).

Add Some Bloody Value

There are so many functions and features that could be added to a Twitterfall page. You, or Fishburn Hedges,  could even just make it look nice(r) like this, which might accompany watching the TV show better than a disorientating scrolling vertical list.The visualisation of the tweets could, potentially be wonderful, not in an eye-candy fashion but to empower the participant… What if all URLs mentioned were shown in a sidebar and summarized (in real-time)… what if the most RT’d items were kept on screen (this again might help with the transparency and selection process ideas).

But the important thing is that this could be a new form of engagement and isn’t.

Yes, I know it’s early days and broadcasters as well as audiences are still getting to grips with the tools, shaping them as we go but slapping up a Twitterfall is so unambitious.

I’m not even sure if the likes of Twitter will be able to deliver when it comes to engaging with the masses and maybe it will always  just be like shouting outside the city walls at the silly burghers - but let’s at least have a try at enabling real engagement rather than something that looks like it.