Tweaking Cyn.in’s Features

Posted on April 13, 2010 by tom

Cyn.in is a great platform for collaboration but I am looking into how it might be adapted to be a better fit for the University of York’s needs.  What I need to do is work out which features …

  • should be rolled into the development of Cyn.in. A good example of this is the UI for the Home Page when we have more than 40 spaces. It’s already apparent that you need a very different user interface for working with 4,000 people as opposed to 40. It would be good if Cyn.in “adapted” based on usage so that as the site gets bigger and more complex, the UI reflects this. One very easy (and cool) addition might be an “I’m going” button on events.
  • already exist and are are about integration. Good examples of this are the FeedMixer product for displaying RSS feeds and the Faculty / Staff Directory product which lets people add more information about themselves in their profiles. the Anz.Jabber instant messaging product has caught my eye too.
  • can be easily developed myself (or with a little help from my friends). I am currently looking to maybe use Archetypes to create a Location content type. There are others out there such as PloneWorldKit (uses Flash) and GeoLocation (uses GoogleMaps?) but I’d quite like one that worked with OpenStreetMaps and has less strict GEO-focussed functionality.

Other features such as “can I have a taxonomy of jargon-related abbreviations and acroynms that get appended or search-and-replaced when editing a document”… seem hard to define and even harder to work out if they are a low-level feature request to Cyn.in or something I could easily create myself. This isn’t essential, but it would be nice and could be made to work for peoples’ name, locations (such as room numbers) etc.

Another feature I find hard to explain is to do with how groups (and Spaces) are administered. I would quite like to create a Group/Space that automatically has a “private sub-space” … but that this isn’t set to be the default (otherwise people tend to work away in privacy and obscurity). I’d then like a “knock to join this group” button which the administrator manages. The alternative to this is a massive top-down administration overhead that I just don’t think will work.

One feature I would definitely like is the “First Use Ten Second Tutorial”… so that having accepted an invitation to a Cyn.in community you are presented with a one-page (maybe two) tutorial saying “this button does this… and don’t swear please (or similar)”…

Lastly, as I said, I don’t think the design of Cyn.in’s Home Page works very well for larger organisations and yet vanilla Plone does have a “Dashboard” screen. I like the notion of a personal dashboard where you can decide which portlets to show (or have them pre-configured for you). This, in one fell swoop solves the problem of “Fire Hosing”… it opens up the possibility of adding Google Gadgets (say for email or calendars)…

So in a nutshell… I need to…

  • Attempt creating a new Archetype based object type (this may  be useful as a Minutes object for recording meetings).
  • Add Location abilities (collective geo looks good but I can’t contact them)… this just needs to be very simple
  • RSS Feedmixer and portlet
  • Anz.Jabber for instant messaging (even if just for status … i.e “is online”)
  • I tried at the WebServices product but get an error when I call it. This might be handy for hacking and integration (not essential).
  • integrate Faculty / Staff Directory (does it do Twitter accounts and Blog URLs? If not needs adding)

And finally I need to work up and discuss with Cynapse some UI ideas, particularly with regards to the Home screen.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | 3 Comments

The Best Collaborative Tool?

Posted on April 12, 2010 by tom

After lots of trialling with lots of people the tool that shows the most promise has the worst name… Cyn.in. Coming a close joint second were SocialText, Confluence and LifeRay.

Why did Cyn.in pip the others at the post? There are lots of reasons…

cyninscreen

It’s open source (and built on Plone). The importance of this can’t be stressed enough for me. It buys the project the ability to benefit from other extensions and development work. I’ve already seen an XMPP (instant messaging) plugin that we’ll be able to slot in. It also means, ironically, that we don’t have to make a decision about which tool to use just yet, we can continue trialling Cyn.in for as long as we like, even getting to grips with what it is like to bend and extend. And lastly, open source is a good fit ethically.

It’s not based on a per-person pricing model. Because I am planning to create a collaborative environment where it is easy to invite collaborators in, I’m expecting that people will set up projects that maybe only run a few months – and maybe some people in those projects might be invited in to “cast an eye” over sketchy, unfinished work.

Its user interface, which is based on jQuery is by far the most instantly usable and likeable. This can’t be stressed enough – people actually like it. And for me, seeing how well the wiki interface behaves is delightful being able to link from one page to another without any special codes or URLs is refreshing.

I am now getting to grips with Plone. I may be gone sometime. I’m trying to work out how hard it would be to mine some data from social media sites and research repositories and create a sort of discovery engine for people at the University of York (see below). I’ve done the mining and the visualisation bit, now I just need to figure out how to save objects in the ZODB and how to create Products in Plone.

If anyone knows of any good resources/books for learning Plone, please pass them on… So far, the two books I’ve tried have left me a bit cold with code that doesn’t work very, very early on in the “Getting Started” chapters (sigh!). Wish me luck…

Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Tools, Toys and Training

Posted on April 2, 2010 by tom

toystoolstraining

As I was just saying to Richard Millwood, during trialling software with different teams we found that the way the permissions model is communicated (or who can see what) makes a huge difference to the feel of the community. Quite early on in the project I knew that as well as needing the things that people explicitly asked for that tended to “shut people up in corners” we needed spaces and places that pull people together, like public promenades.

And additionally, we needed public-ish places where people can share what they’ve used, what worked and what didn’t… sort of peer to peer training (or a pattern language even). By public here, I don’t mean totally public, I mean public to all the members of the community. More public spaces are sites like LinkedIn, Twitter etc…

This all breaks down, in my head at least as Tools, Toys and Training…

Later I’ll explain what’s in the Toy box… apart from things like the PPPeople browser and  heaps of fun.

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Tools and More Requirements

Posted on March 27, 2010 by tom

We have a number of teams trying out the tools, some quite seriously others just poking them with sticks… Here are some of the other things we needed to think about…

Who else uses it – Are they “like us”

Cost – If it is a per-user model then what would be the cost “if” half our students sneaked in

  • SocialText: Approximately £30,000 a year (for 3,000 users)
  • Jive: Roughly £40,000 a year
  • LifeRay: Free (open source)
  • Elgg: Free (open source)
  • Confluence: £1,200

Extensibility options – Can we develop new modules – How far can we get with templates? How hard is creating portlets? How easy/dangerous is hacking PHP?

  • SocialText: Gadgets. Restful API. Has template documents. SocialText seems to be PERL ( they’ve kept that quiet! )
  • Jive: It looks like the development opportunities for Jive are better than I’d first thought. You can create and deploy plugins as JAR files. There is both a SOAP and RESTful API.
  • LifeRay: The model here is that you develop portlets. There is a full API (even for JavaScript jQuery API access).
  • Elgg: You create plugins for Elgg or adapt the source code.

Development options – Does the platform support our technologies / abilities?

We currently are more than happy with a TomCat/ Oracle or LAMP platforms. I am familiar with python.

  • SocialText: Perl based. Actually open-source, although licensing is a moot issue.
  • Jive: Java-based.
  • LifeRay: Java-based.
  • Elgg: PHP.
  • Confluence: Java development.

Community and Documentation – Is it up to date, helpful, copius and easy to use.

  • SocialText: There actually seems little in the way of developer relations, meaning this would ultimately be a client / vendor relationship. It then becomes important that the company have a transparent development process and are open to recommendations. I already have a growing list of usability issues/suggestions that I feel are important enough to raise before purchase.
  • Jive: The Jive Developer Community use Jive and as such it seems well serviced. I received a reponse to a complaint from a Jive staff member in days.
  • LifeRay: Being open source they LifeRay community seems to be vibrant, current and helpful.
  • Elgg: Although the community seems willing and able, the discussion forums seem difficult to use, with each person seemingly forced to create a group for their particular question. This doesn’t bode well.

Deployment – Does this fit what we have?

Are there any issues?

  • SocialText: Hosted or appliance.
  • Jive: Hosted or software. “Not resiliant but reliable“
  • LifeRay: Self-hosted TomCat portal.
  • Elgg: Hosted or self hosted LAMP stack.

User Interface – Is it nice to use?

  • SocialText: Missing a few Web2.0 niceties such as inline validation etc.
  • Jive: Exemplary.
  • LifeRay: Has a few styling rough edges but handles adding tags etc very well.
  • Elgg: Competent and clean, but at time clunky.

Reports and Feedback – do people like it?

Elgg: Rachel from Leeds…

My personal perspective – I don’t like it much. I found it clunky and difficult to customise. I doesn’t display properly in different browsers (this may now have been resolved). I find it difficult to navigate. The best thing I can say is the file store was useful – also the ability to set different levels of access to files. But again, this process was clunky. As you may gather, I’m not really a fan.

LifeRay: InfoWorld has named Liferay Portal the “Best Open Source Portal” on the market.

Jive: Sheffield and their users really like it.

SocialText: Unknown.

Confluence: Lots of positive feedback, particularly from the development community (and Julie in Digital Library).

Integratability – From systems we have (calendar, email, LDAP, XMPP) to those we might have soon(Files/Sharepoint/Alfresco, VLE stuff, HR widgets? Portal etc)

This is one of the most amorphous and yet important factors, in that, we are looking not to duplicate work already underway in different departments. For example, the VLE is soon to be “socialised”, the portal project looks to unify some sort of dashboard mix of information and we have existing enterprise tools like email and Sun Calendar in place and potential tools lurking on the horizon, such as Sharepoint or Alfresco file sharing.

Any system that integrates well with LDAP, and that can be easily gadgetized will be at an advantage. Shibboleth also lurks.

  • SocialText: LDAP.
  • Jive: LDAP yes.
  • LifeRay: LDAP yes. XMPP (I think so)
  • Elgg: LDAP plugin currently alpha and untested.
  • Confluence: LDAP. XMPP (unsure, plugin available for JIRA)

Change management – can we import from existing tools like MediaWiki / Drupal etc to provide a migration route for existing platforms?

  • SocialText: Don’t believe so.
  • Jive: Don’t believe so.
  • LifeRay: It looks like this is possible in theory. May need some development.
  • Elgg: Don’t believe so.
  • Confluence: Yes.

Can group admins invite external people easily? This is kind of crucial…

  • SocialText: Yes
  • Jive: Yes.
  • LifeRay: Unknown.
  • Elgg: Yes.

Is the privacy and permissions model well communicated? This one “scares the horses” most… not when it’s bad, but when it’s not clear.

  • SocialText: Could be improved. Need to ask further questions, for example, in the SocialText admin screen below what does “public” mean, is there a mode that means “logged in users”? Not completely clear… AND … The workspaces themselves do a poor job of communicating their Permission settings.
  • Jive: Good.
  • LifeRay: Adequate.
  • Elgg: Slightly poor. Could be improved with minimal development.
  • Confluence: Unknown.

Given the widespread adoption of Google tools, how well does it play with those?

  • SocialText: There are gadgets for Gmail and Gcalendar.
  • Jive: Doesn’t seem to support gadgets at all.
  • LifeRay: Supports Google Gadgets.
  • Elgg: Kind of.
  • Confluence: Unknown.

Events Calendaring – almost everyone playing (seriously) with SocialText has created an “Events wiki page”… this should be noted.

  • SocialText: Poor events handling. Seem to be missing completely instead adopting an “everything is a wiki page” stance.
  • Jive: Doesn’t seem to support events, although a task oriented calendar is available within a Project.
  • LifeRay: Social office has a pleasant calendar/events tool built in.
  • Elgg: Groups have events.
  • Confluence: Unknown.

Branding options for individual groups

In my travels, lots of people have expressed a keen interest in how things will look.

  • SocialText: Little to none. You can add images to the “Home” page for a project.
  • Jive: Little to none
  • LifeRay: Unknown. It is possible to fully brand an install. Not sure about group level
  • Elgg: Unknown. It is possible to fully brand an install. Not sure about group level
  • Confluence: Looks totally skinnable, even for individual spaces
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

The Tools

Posted on March 22, 2010 by tom

We started looking for suitable collaborative tools by looking at Gartners Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace – a lovely chart that plots all the movers and shakers in the social media space. We could quickly rule out tools that seemed too CRMy, had a pricing model that ruled them out (i.e per user) or too business focussed. After a few rounds of testing we were left looking at….

The Candidate Tools

SocialText – a commercial enterprise wiki with a social layer

socialtexthome3

One of the most interesting things about SocialText are what it calls Signals, which are a bit like Twitter for the organisation, except Signals include tweet-like messages AND document changes. Very nice. We found the blogging tools very poor though – with blog posts essentially being wiki pages.

Like most wikis you can embed tags to give pages more functionality (such as showing a list of Recent Changes, or items from a Delicious feed etc). This means that you can cobble the functionality you need together very quickly. One example we played with was for the IT Support Office to individually use Delicious to bookmark and tag fixes they found out in the rest of the web and have them “collected” back on their wiki pages.

socialcastdesktop

One of the “killer” features of SocialText is it’s Desktop application which, like email, tells you when something new has happened. This is an essentially component of any new collaborative tool because it “pulls you back” rather than becoming “another place to check”.

Jive – a commercial forum-based tool with wikis and blogs etc

jivescreen1

Jive has a lot of polish with regards to the interface. It is easy to create content.

LifeRay Portal and LifeRay Social Office – a java-based, open source portal tool

liferayscreen1

LifeRay is an astounding product. When you initially log in, you just drag the components you need into your community site ( pages, wikis, blogs, calendars ) and then invite people in. This is staggeringly easy to do, like having a Ning-builder (but better). The LifeRay Social Office suite is sort of a “pre-built” version of the portal.

If you have ANY java abilities at all this is worth a look. I was slightly scared by having to compile CSS into jar files to change the look and feel and work with a gazillion XML files but some people can eat that geekery for breakfast.

Elgg – a php-based “community in the box”

elggscreen2

Elgg is immediately likeable. You create Groups that have blogs, discussions, files, wiki pages etc. The problem with Elgg (for us at least) was to do with the permissions model, or who can see what. It’s funny but with almost ALL these tools, the permissions model is where the pain is… And often, it’s not that it’s difficult, it’s just that it’s poorly communicated. You can’t see who can see what…

Other Tools Worth Considering?

Half way through the trials we kind of re-discovered Confluence, a commercial enterprise wiki with an impressive list of plugins (including Sharepoint connectors which may come in handy at some point).

And later I stumbled across Mike2.0 which is interesting in two ways. Firstly, it is attempting to share the knowledge about collaboration… and secondly, it attempts a shot at combining some best of breed open source tools into one suite. You can download omCollab which is WordPress, MediaWiki, phpBB and other tools all rolled into one seamless environment. It’s a great idea… it almost works… but there are seams (and it’s fun to install).

Some of the others we tinkered with are listed in my Delicious tag for collaboration .

The Difficulties of Evaluation Community Software

Because collaboration is almost impossible to simulate… the plan is/was to get as many teams actually using these tools on short length actual projects so that we could get reliable feedback about what works and what doesn’t. So, through a process of “walking about a lot” I met as many different teams at the university and badgered them into helping test the tools. We now have teams sharing content daily … and others tinkering at the edges. It’s a good mix and so far has been a damn sight more productive than attempting to evaluate what the organisation needs without people in the mix.

The next post will be about some of the features and bugs that we found along the way.

p.s This post would have been a lot longer, in fact it was, but somehow WordPress lost it and I’m still a bit grumpy about it… As it turned out, it’s probably a better blog post for being shorter…. still… grr!


Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

PPPeople PPPowered

Posted on March 19, 2010 by tom

One of the stranger parts of the Collaborative Tools Project was that a few weeks into the job we accidentally landed a JISC funding grant to attempt to create something like Amazon’s “if you like this book – you’ll like these” but for people. The Jisc project is called PPPeople PPPowered and I will be blogging about it here.

The idea in itself isn’t that original, creating a browsable serendipity engine for people. Many people have tried to do this before. The basic wireframe of how it might look is shown below. What I am hoping is that I can simply make a reasonable job of assembling existing open-source tools to create something new, used and useful. A large part of my approach involves involving people in the project very early (like now) creating a site they could use every day and then augment that with mined data but also even have activities such as “Tag Yourself Day” so that we kick start the process at a human level rather than trying to achieve it all with technology.

At the moment I’m collecting tools that might be useful for working with peoples’ social media profile data, tools for reasoning about unstructured data and tools for working with large repositories like ePrints, Mendeley, CiteULike or Academia.edu AND tools for visualisation…  So if you have any suggestions, do  leave a comment.

wireframe

Of course, one of the obvious visualisations would be something like a MentionMap network diagram (shown below).

mentionmap

… but then again, in many ways, although beautifully swooshy… it is something of a cliche isn’t it. What are the best methods for displaying connections, or possible connections between people I wonder?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

The Missing Use Case

Posted on March 18, 2010 by tom

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

…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…

privatepublic

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

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Public Showcase and Engagement Blog Wiki Thing

Posted on March 17, 2010 by tom

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?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 6 Comments

Project Workgroups

Posted on March 16, 2010 by tom

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…

elggscreen

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.

socialtexthome1

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Collaborative Editing

Posted on March 15, 2010 by tom

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).

googledocs2

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.
acrobatscreen

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.

usingrevizr

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_screen

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.

collaborative_lifecycle

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 5 Comments

This Month Is Collaboration Month

Posted on March 12, 2010 by tom

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

The Tool Trialled

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Dev8D 2010 Review

Posted on February 27, 2010 by tom

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | 5 Comments