Revisiting Web Accessibility Metadata

At the OzeWAI 2009 conference Liddy Nevile gave a talk on “AccessForAll Metadata for all Australian Resources”. I’ve known Liddy for over 10 years (I think we first met at a W3C working group meeting on PICS). Liddy has interests in both metadata and accessibility and has been working on the development of standards for accessibility metadata for some time. Liddy prefers the term ‘adaptability’ to ‘accessibility’ for reasons she explains in her paper on “Adaptability and Accessibility: a New Framework” – and I’m in broad agreement with her.

Liddy gave several reasons why the vision of making every digital resource universally accessible to all was flawed (but unfortunately her talk was not recorded, so you’ll have to take my word for that :-) .

Her talk reminded me of the ideas concerning accessibility and metadata which I had about 10 years go and presented in a talk in May 1999 on “Accessibility, Automation and Metadata” at a WAI meeting held in Toronto after the WWW 8 conference.

It’s funny looking back at a presentation like this after a period of almost 10 years. Sentiments such as those expressed by Julie Howell (who then worked at the RNIB):

“Rather than encouraging ‘simplicity’ in Web design … we try to encourage ‘flexibility’, so that Web sites can be tailored to individual need ‘simply’. Flexibility affords the personalisation which people with sight problems require.”

still do not seem to be accepted in some quarters (such as policy makers in the Government) where there still seems to be a culture of mandating a single approach rather than responding to a diversity of requirements.

I suspect that the (rather vague) ideas suggested in my talk haven’t yet really surfaced in widespread use not because of the lack of tools to implement such approaches, but because ideas based around personalisation weren’t popular back then.  But now that PLEs and PREs are in vogue, we need to be revisiting these issues – and not just at the application level, but also the metadata standards needed to implement this. But as Liddy and I admitted in a paper on “Web Accessibility 3.0: Learning From The Past, Planning For The Future” we also need to acknowledge that good ideas are not necessarily implemented.  There a need to learn from failures of the past and take into account the following when seeking to develop alternative approaches:

• The need for acceptance in the market place for tools which support the a personalisation vision for accessibility;
• The dangers of seeking to standardise too soon;
• The dangers of embedding technological decisions within legislation too soon;
• The need to ensure that solutions can scale to vast numbers of resources and users.

Are we, I wonder, now in a position in which such concerns can be addressed?

Impact Of This Blog On My Publication Record

Does The “Blogging Bug” Affect Academic Publishing?

Martin Weller, Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University, recently wrote a blog post on Blogging impacts on formal academic output in which he describes how the numbers of his published articles had declined since being “bitten by the blog bug“. He didn’t regard this as necessarily a bad thing, though, as Martin feels that “Blogging meets these needs [to share ideas and fulfill a creative urge to write] better than formal publications” and the benefits of networking, which was an important factor in submitting papers to conferences can now be achieved using online communications technologies such as blogs and micro-blogs.

My Publishing History

Martin asked if anyone else noticed a similar trend. So I checked my publication record – the figures are illustrated in the accompanying diagram.

I  started to write papers for peer-reviewed journals and conferences seriously in 2004 with four papers being published: two based on a JISC-founded QA Focus which I was the project manager of, one on standards and the fourth a short paper I co-authored with Andy Powell and Pete Johnston, then colleagues at UKOLN. Interestingly, although one of the QA Focus papers was co-authored by fellow team members the second was written jointly with staff from the University of Strathclyde, following a discussion in the pub after I gave a seminar in Glasgow.

The following year another four papers were published which cover three of my main areas of interest: Web accessibility, social networks and interoperability.  Again three of the papers were written with contacts I had made professionally but another one arose from discussions in a pub in Bath, at a Semantic Web Southwest meeting.

My most productive year for publications was 2005 with nine papers published, covering accessibility, social networking and standards. In retrospect this was the year in which I had gained the confidence that I had something worthy of publishing, the necessary writing skills, a good appreciation of the effort needed and contacts who I knew could contribute to a joint papers.

By 2006 I was able to further develop ideas on Web accessibility and standards and contribute to a short paper in a new area which I suspected would be of increasing relevance to myself and UKOLN, preservation of Web resources. A total of six paper were published that year.

The UK Web Focus blog was launch in November 2006, so during 2007 I was developing my skills in writing blog posts and responding to comments. But I still managed to publish four papers in the year, on accessibility, open standards and the first on Web 2.0 – the lead author of this latter paper, incidentally, was Mike Ellis whom I first got talking to in a pub in Leicester after the UK Museums on the Web conference.  “Let’s write a paper” was my parting shot to Mike as he left the pub – which we went on to do (and subsequently much more).

Six further papers were published in 2008, together with two contributions to books.  The papers included one on Web site preservation with fellow members of the JISC PoWR project (I was correct in 2007 when I felt this would be an important area). The final paper of the year was an invited paper which was presented at the Bridging Worlds Conference in Singapore. The co-authors for that paper included people I had met once at a workshop in Wales, had met at a conference several year’s ago but re-established informal contact through Twitter  and one person who I have met primarily via blog posts, blog comments and on Twitter.

Discussion

Preamble

The first comment I should make is that I’m not attempting to suggest that there is any equivalence in quality between my papers and Martin Weller’s. My papers, for example, include those which have been accepted by a formal peer-reviewing processes, but also include short papers, papers for which only the abstract has been reviewed and, in the final example, an invited paper for presentation at an international conference. But at least I am aware of a level of consistency across my publications.

Finding Co-Authors

Writing this post has given my an insight into the ways I have gone about the  task of discovering people to collaborate with in writing such papers (I’ve realised that, apart from the two books, there have been only two papers which I have written on my own). The approaches I have taken can be summarised as:

Initially the papers were a dissemination activity of a funded project (initially the QA Focus project) and this has continued with, for example the recent JISC PoWR project).

I had also supported the staff development of colleagues in my team at UKOLN and regarded joint authorship of papers as a way of developing writing skills and adding valuable content to their CVs.

Several of the papers were written with staff from our strategic partners – other JISC services with whom we have good links with and a desire to work with (and be seen to work with) including JISC TechDis, CETIS and OSS Watch.

But I was surprised when I did this analysis and found that significant numbers of my papers had been written with people with whom I had developed good social links. And this is even more important than I’d realised as the papers with strategic partners and project partners also reflected good social contacts with individuals within those organisations.

For me it seems that the social contacts can be important in the writing process. On a number of occasions a paper has arisen from discussions and a shared understanding which have taken place over several pints which has led to papers been written and accepted for publication.  More recently it seems that discussions based abound blog posts and on Twitter have served to support the social lubrication when a pint (or two) of real ale was not available.

Quality Issues

Discussions based on the content of blog posts supported by getting to know people on Twitter may have helped to build links with authors and potential authors, but has blogging affected the quality of the papers themselves? I feel my papers have improved in quality, although clearly this would be expected as one gains experience and gets a better understanding of the topics of the papers.

But I also feel that blogging has been beneficial to the process of writing papers. I’ve used my blog as an open notebook, recording ideas which previously I may have forgotten when it came around to writing a paper. And as the ideas have been exposed to a wide audience I have benefitted from comments I have received (and perhaps even a lack of comments which may possibly that the idea isn’t too outrageous).

And as a number of my papers have been about observing how the world is approaching particular uses of technologies (such as Web accessibility) I’ve made use of blogs and microblogs (both as an author and reader) in order to gain a better understanding of patterns of usage.

Dissemination

The dissemination aspect of the blog for my papers is self-evident. For papers presented at conferences I normally publish something on this blog. Over the past six months of so I have also recorded my talk on video, providing an additional dimension for those who prefer the more chatty explanation of the ideas to the more formal prose of the scholarly publication.

Conclusions

Returning to the question posed by Marin Weller “Does the ‘Blogging Bug’ Affect Academic Publishing?” I would say it does. But for me, unlike Martin, I feel it has enhanced the quality of my publications, enhanced awareness of the papers and the ideas they have explored and widened my circle of peers with whom I collaborate with.

And although I recognise that thing may be different in other disciplines and for people with different working styles and organisational priorities (e.g. the RAE) for me blogging and engaging with blogs (reading other blogs and commenting on them) is now an essential part of my paper-writing process.

Crowd-sourcing Ideas for IWMW 2009

In a trip report on the Institutional Web Managers Workshop 2008 Andy Stewart was full of praise for the event: “it was absolutely fantastic“. Andy went on to say that although “The plenaries, parallel sessions, discussion groups and social events are all extremely useful in their own right” for him “it’s the inspiration and sense of belonging that one feels during and after the conference I think makes the difference“.

We’re currently inviting proposals for this year’s event, IWMW 2009, which will be held at the University of Essex on 28-30^th July 2009. Last year we providing an innovation competition and encouraged developers to make use of the data provided by the university of Aberdeen, Bath and Edge Hill University. This encouragement for openness within the community was welcomed by Andy:

“One theme which stuck out above all, to me, was that of transparency through initiatives to open up our information allowing others to do what they feel with it“.

We are looking to build on this culture of openness. So this year rather than simply inviting submissions for talks and workshop sessions to be sent to the chair of the event (my colleague Marieke Guy) we are using the Ideascale service in order to crowd-source suggestions for content at the workshop.
We’re doing this to allow potential participants and other interested parties to provide suggestions on topics they’ve like to see covered at the address (as well as provide other more general suggests for the event – such as what type of social event we should provide). Doing this in this open fashion, as illustrated below, enables participants to become more active participants in the processes of putting together the programme for the event.

Now we have to be honest and admit that we can’t guarantee that the most popular options will necessarily be provided or that seemingly unpopular topics won’t be covered. But at least everybody will have had the opportunity to participate in this process. And this is also a learning process for ourselves – in retrospect we realise that the suggested titles should have been neutral in tone, rather than the provocative title which could be suited for a session itself (we don’t know if people are voting on the sentiment expressed in the title or on whether the topic should be addressed at the workshop).

And I’m not sure what the usage statistics are meant to be saying. It doesn’t seem likely that 16 users have cast 1018 votes!

But if you have views on topics which members of institutional Web management teams should be discussing feel free to provude your suggestion. Now this won’t be regarded as a submission to the event, but if you would like to give a talk or run a session at this year’s event details of how to submit proposals are available on the IWMW 2009 Web site.

Twitter Can Pimp Up Your Stuff – But Should It?

I recently published a blog post entitled “Are You Able?“. Shortly after it was published I wrote a tweet which linked to the post. Although at one stage I had registered with a service which would automatically send a tweet when I published a new post I no longer do this. Rather I’ll send a tweet if I think the post might be of particular interest or is relevant to discussions which have taken place in my Twitter community.

Shortly after I sent out my tweet I received a response from George Brett who had retweeted my post (forwarded my tweet to his group of followers):

RT @briankelly: Are your resources available, reusable, usable, accessible, exploitable and preservable? Is it feasible? http://is.gd/jOWg
6:57 AM Feb 17th from TweetDeck

This was followed by another retweet by digicmb (Guus van den Brekel) tweeted:

RT @briankelly: R ur resources available, reusable, usable, accessible, exploitable & preservable? = ur approach feasible? http://is.gd/jOWg
6:32 AM Feb 17th from TweetDeck

Now at recent Web 2.0 and blogging workshops I’ve facilitated for staff working in museums, libraries and archives I have been asked how one can demonstrate that time spent in using various Web 2.0 technologies provides an positive return on investment. The impression I get is that people in these sectors do need to demonstrate tangible and measurable benefits in order to justify their usage (and perhaps even have firewalls configured so that the services can be accessed).

How, then, might you provide evidence that Twitter can be used to support organisational aims? Well I currently have 777 followers on Twitter, so I might argue that Twitter can provide a cost-effective dissemination mechanism. And as George Brett has 1,109 followers and Guus van den Brekel has 332, there could be over 2,000 users who have received the notification of my latest blog post.

Job done, you may feel, I’ve provided an example of the how Twitter has the potential to maximise access to one’s digital resources, whether this is a blog post, as in this example, an event, a new service or whatever (although I should add that I haven’t said anything about whether those followers still use Twitter or that they may not be people, but spam harvesters).

But yesterday (Sunday 22 February 2009) Mia Ridge sent a tweet saying:

You are not you, you are a brand. ‘no one enjoys someone who posts spontaneously’ http://bit.ly/qGRdk I don’t get the obsession w followers

Mia was linking to a blog post on Being a Useful Twitter User [and receiving followers in the process] which provided advice (“Be consistent and organized”; “Pace yourself!”;  etc.) aimed at helping you to maximise the number of your followers.

I think Mia was quite right to highlight the dangers of such depersonalisation of Twitter. And as the individual and quirk, aspect of Twitter has played a role in its success following a set of guidelines which aim to provide a sterile environment could well lead to a killing of the golden goose.

Which isn’t to say that one shouldn’t ‘pimp up’ one’s blog posts, however. Mia herself tweeted a few hours after her previous post that she “blogged my dev8D talk (http://bit.ly/d9z5y) on happy museums, developers and punters (right URL this time), open to suggestions, comments“.

But rather than Twitter users using the service to post factual information about themselves, their work and their organisation I’d suggest that the emphasis should be on those aspects that you care about and, as Martin Weller suggested recently, the things you love: your iPhone, your musical taste, your football team and the like.

And as Mike Ellis recently suggested that Twitter “needs an edge, a voice, a riskiness” I think I’ll announce this post with the tweet “Pimping up my blog post on the attractions & dangers of pimping up blog posts: http://is.gd/kt2t“.

“Slowly, One By One, The Stars Were Going Out”

I recently asked on Twitter “Who remembers the SciFi short story ‘Slowly, one by one, the stars were going out’?” I went on to add “It’s happening with Twitter profile pictures“.

It turned out that this came from Arthur C Clark’s short story “The Nine Billion Names of God, although I’d misremembered the final sentence which, according to the entry in Wikipedia, actually read “overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out“.

The reason many people are blacking out their profile image  is to express support for the New Zealand Internet Blackout campaign. This campaign, which has successfully made use of a number of social networking services (and not just Twitter) in a viral fashion to protest against a new law in New Zealand – the Guilt Upon Accusation law ‘Section 92A’. As described in a post on the Read Write Webblog “this law may have major implications for Internet users in NZ, because it calls for internet disconnection “based on accusations of copyright infringement without a trial and without any evidence held up to court scrutiny.“

The use of social networking services as a way of exploiting the network effects in protests against political decisions which seek to impose restrictions on Internet services is not restricted to just New Zealand. I was surprised to learn recently that in Australia, as described on the No Clean Feed Web site: “The Australian Federal Government is pushing forward with a plan to force Internet Service Providers [ISPs] to censor the Internet for all Australians. This plan will waste tens of millions of taxpayer dollars and slow down Internet access“.  Regional protests, such as the No Clean Feed Canberra rally held in December 2008 made use of  Facebook event page. to provide details of the rally (with an alternate page provided for those who could not/would not access Facebook).

Now I haven’t blacked out my Twitter (or Facebook) profile, although I would agree that the proposed developments (in Australia as well as New Zealand) are to be regretted. I’ve chosen not to do this as I prefer to reserve any protests I may wish to make to something I feel more strongly about – and rationing such protests should enhance the impact of any campaigns which I may chose to support. I also find that blacked out profile pictures is reducing the usefulness of Twitter, as it is more difficult to see who is writing the tweets.

However that is not to say that I do not want to contribute to the protests, so I am writing this post in order to alert readers of this blog who may not be aware of the New Zealand Internet Blackout campaign (and I know that not everyone is a regular Twitter user and so may not have seen these blacked out images). I also thought it would be worth embedded this YouTube video:

Note that if you wish to join in with this campaign you’ll have to hurry as the dates of the campaign are 16-23 February 2009

My Thoughts On The Facebook Debate

The blogosphere and the Twitterverse have been full of angry posts and tweets on the recent changes to Facebook’s terms and conditions and the subsequent reversal in the light of the negative publicity. My, perhaps somewhat controversial, view is that there has been a failure to recognise the complexities related to ownership of data in a social networked environment and instead we have been seeing simplistic solutions being proposed which, if applied generally, would undermine the development of the more open social networks which, ironically, many of those engaged in the discussions would actually prefer to see.

Consider the view that “it’s my data and if I wish it to be deleted then this must be permitted“. There’s no ambiguity in such a view which, on the surface, appears reasonable.  But how might this be applied in other contexts such as, for example, the UK’s JISC-funded JISCMail service. This service has a policy document which is publicly available. This states that “When you leave JISCmail, your name, email address and, if relevant, Shibboleth Targeted_ID will be removed from our database“. That sounds good, and is in keeping with the expectations which have been raised in the context of Facebook’s changes to its terms and conditions. However the JISCMail policy goes on to state that “However, any message you have posted to a list will remain in the archives“. What? JISCMail are going to keep my data (forever, I assume) even though, in the policy on copyright, JISCMail have admitted that “When you send a message to a JISCmail list, you retain your copyright in that message“. JISCMail, it would seem, are behaving even worse than Facebook; at least Facebook have been honest and openly stated that they won’t delete users’ data, with (new) users having to acept these terms and conditions. JISCMail, on the other hand, states that it’s the user’s data but keeps the data if the user leaves the service. What about all of those embarrassing messages I posted when I was young and naive, I may wonder?

Now I should hasten to add that I’m not saying there is anything wrong in JISCMail terms and conditions; I am simply pointing out one example of the complexities. And yes, I am aware that an email message will be replicated in many places, so deleting one instance in the JISCMail archive wouldn’t be of much use. And I am also aware that deleting individual messages would undermine records of discussions.

And these are arguments which Mark Zuckerberg has been making in his defence of the changes to the terms and conditions. But many of the initial responses have failed to acknowledge such complexities. The first post I read which did have a more considered view was the Dataportability blog which, in a post on “Redefining and Standardizing ‘Ownership“, acknowledged that “Facebook, by virtue of its sheer size and scope, is often the first to run into issues that the rest of the social web will need to address sooner rather than later“.

The other post which gave carefully considered thoughts was published by my colleague Paul Walk in his post which argued “Facebook wants your attention, not your photos“. Now Paul has admitted “I’m certainly not a fan of Facebook. I have yet to find a use for it in my professional life and have criticised before the assumption that, for example, Higher Education should be embracing it as a service because it is widely popular“.  But rather than taking an opportunity to join in the general condemnation, Paul describes how he  “think[s] the furore about Facebook’s ‘ownership’ of user-generated-content has, by and large, slightly missed the point“.

As someone who has posted a number of posts which have had a more positive view towards Facebook than Paul it would be appropriate for me to agree that Facebook have made mistakes in the way it has handled the changes to its terms and conditions. And yet, ironically, Facebook can manage (and delete) content held in its ‘walled garden’ than would be the case in more open and distributed social networked environments.

But let’s join in with the Data Portability blog and Paul Walk in having a more mature and considered discussion of the complexities of ownership and controlled within social networks.

Are You Able?

There were two invited keynote speakers who travelled from Europe to speak at the OzeWAI 2009 conference. As well as my talk (which I described recently ) Dr. Eva M. Méndez (an Associate Professor in the Library and Information Science Department at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and not the American actor!) gave a talk entitled “I say accessibility when I want to say availability: misunderstandings of the accessibility in the other part of the world (EU and Spain)“.

Eva’s research focuses on metadata and web standards, digital information systems and services, accessibility and Semantic Web. She has also served as an independent expert in the evaluation and review of European projects since 2006, both for the eContentPlus program and the ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) program and her talk was informed by her knowledge of the inner working of such development programmes funded by the EU.

Her talk explored the ways in which well-meaning policies may be agreed with the EU, although such policies may be misinterpreted or misunderstand and fail to be implemented, even by the EU itself.

I don’t have access to Eva’s slides, so I will give my own interpretation of Eva’s talk.

We might expect the EU to support the development of a networked environment across EU countries across a range of areas. These areas might include:

Available: Have resources been digitised? Are they available via the Web?

Reusable: Are the resources available for use by others?  Or they it trapped within a Web environment which makes reuse by others difficult?

Findable: Can the resources be easily found? Have SEO techniques been applied to allow the resource to be indexed by search engines such Google?

Exploitable: Are the resources available for others to reuse through, for example, use of Creative Commons licences?

Usable: Are the resources available in a usable environment?

Accessible: Are the resources accessible to people with disabilities?

Preservable: Can the resources be preserved for use by future generations?

Since the acronym ARFEUAP isn’t particularly memorable (and ARE-U-API would be too contrived) we might describe this as the Able approach to digitisation. But there is 0ne additional concept which I feel also needs to be included:

Feasible: Are the policies which are proposed (or perhaps mandated) feasible (or achievable)? We might ask are they actually possible (can we make all resources universally accessible to all?)  and can they be achieved with available budgets and with the standards and technologies which are currently available?

There is, of course, a question which tends to be forgotten question: is the proposed service of interest to people and will it be used?

The worrying aspect of Eva’s talk was that the EU don’t appear to be asking such questions – or even used the same vocabulary.  We need to have the bigger picture in order to address tensions between these different areas and the question (and power struggles) of how we prioritise achieving best practices – for example, should we be digitizing resources, even if we can’t make them accessible; should we regard access by people with disabilities as being of  importance than ensuring the resources can be preserved?  And let’s not fudge the issue by suggested that each is equally important and all can be achieved by use of open standards. That simply isn’t the case – and if you doubt this, ask managers of institutional repositories. They will probably say that they are addressing the available, reusable, findable, preservable and, perhaps, exploitable issues, but I suspect that the repository managers would probably admit that many of the PDFs in the repositories will not be accessible.

Should Projects Be Required To Have Blogs?

The Context

Last week CETIS’s Mark Power started off a brief Twitter debate when he asked “Is the use of project blogs becoming too formalised by JISC? Still strikes me that many set one up simply because they feel they *should*“.

Amber Thomas, a JISC Programme manager, responded by informing the Twitter community that she was “interested in what you all think about project blogs. for lightweight projects we like the idea of enforced transparency” concluding this request with “… thats easier said than done. we don’t expect every project blog frequently but it does provide the chance to aggregate easily“.

The Tweet Debate

The responses received over the next few hours included:

Brian Kelly: @MarkPower I disagree. Project blogs mean words get written, content is public and content is syndicable. let’s encourage such openness!

Sheila McNeil: @briankelly but how much really gets written in project blogs? I think still an onerous task for many

Owen Stephens: @ambrouk don’t necessarily think you shouldn’t mandate, but keep in mind you are mandating a tech/platform not attitude. What to achieve?

Andy Powell: @MarkPower blogging is an attitude not a technology, so simply “setting one up” doesn’t necessarily lead to results anyway

Amber Thomas: project blogging: so … noone says make it mandatory, some say strongly encourage, some say don’t. good blogging good, bad blogging bad. ok

Brian Kelly: @ambrouk bad blogging ok as part of learning proces. Allow mistakes please

Amber Thomas: @markpower scoping a Call as we speak where we want to make it mandatory to use a blog or wiki

Paul Walk: @MarkPower not sure that JISC is culpable – but there are definitely examples of project blogs where you wish they hadn’t felt the need

Amber Thomas: @sheilmcn i guess community engagement and collaboration are one thing, reflection is another, transparency of progress is another again???

Andy Powell: @MarkPower blogging is an attitude not a technology, so simply “setting one up” doesn’t necessarily lead to results anyway

Mark Power: @andypowe11 Exactly right…that’s why they won’t always work for a project and why the use of them shouldn’t be mandatory…not that they

Paul Walk: @ambrouk the attitude of ‘publish early, publish often’ is worth cultivating. But team blogs are often terrible. Encourage – don’t mandate

Amber Thomas: ..but is the issue that they create extra “noise” that makes it hard to spot the real voices amongst the dutiful posts?

Brian Kelly: @ambrouk Project managers should encourage ‘noise’ and use good filtering tools . Noise is better than silence!

Paul Walk:  @ambrouk @briankelly ‘noise is better than silence’ just doesn’t work for lots of ppl – especially researchers. It’s not appropriate for all

Now as Paul Walk’s last tweet was preceded by “@andyramsden nah – that one wasn’t James’s fault surely. The Calamity will come in the second half. The dropped ball came close though” we can see that this discussion was taking place at around 10pm, while people were also watching the Spain vs England match live on the TV. I think from this dialogue we can see that a useful discussion can take place using Twitter, and that JISC are getting their money’s worth from their investment in UKOLN and CETIS, with us (together with a number of others) being on call on Wednesday evenings, even when we are in the pub watching England, once again being beaten!

My Thoughts

But what of the discussion itself? Should projects be required to have blogs? I think the Twitter debate brought out many of the important issues, but as Mark Power commented “twitter [is] not the best for such an in-depth discussion really“. However I do think it is worth exploring these issues in more depth.

I would very much agree with Amber’s comment on the need for transparency for JISC-funded project work and, as a couple of people commented, blogs can provide a simple lightweight way in which projects can make visible what they are doing, what they are thinking and what they are planning – and feedback can be easily obtained using blog comments.

However concerns were raised regarding the time and effort in may take to write blog posts, the associated (writing) skills needed and the dangers of too much information being published. There are also the dangers that blog posts will be written for their own sake, so that contractual requirements or expectations will be achieved to little concrete benefit.

But surely skills in writing useful blog posts will only be gained through experience? And we should remember that blog posts can be useful for a variety of purposes: not only should project managers find blog posts useful in seeing how project work is progressing and seeing how the project is engaging with its user community but benefits can be gained by other project partners (through open sharing)  and by the intended user community. There can also be a public record which might prove useful if project staff leave.

The benefits of syndication of blog posts, which allow the content to be easily viewed on various devices as well as on a range of RSS readers should also be considered. And this is where filtering capabilities and other visualisation tools (e.g. Wordle) may help programme managers and other interested parties to have access in ways which are appropriate to their specific interests.

Having said that, I’d still avoid a formal contractual requirement for project blogging, preferring, instead, an expectation that the benefits of  open engagement with the key stakeholders and ease of use and reuse of the content would be provided. I would hope then that the bidding process would see projects which fulfilled such requirements would be funded. This approach, it should be noted, should also be future-proofed, allowing  new technologies (Podcasting, micro-blogging or whatever)  to be included in the range of options.

So for me, project blogging would be a strong should rather than a must. But how do we ensure that blogs are useful? We all have come across the good, informative and perhaps opinionated blog with a clear voice and a passion which engages our interests – and this is no doubt something we would like to see more of. But how do we get there? And what about the dangers that we’ll end up with bland team blogs? Are such blogs an inevitable part of a learning process and better than no blog at all? Or are counter-productive?

What’s are your view of blogs to support project work?

“Standards Are Like Sausages”

“Standards are like sausages” suggested Charles McCathieNevile at the OzeWAI 2009 conference. “I like sausages” he went on to say “but I’m not keen on exploring too closely how they’re made“.

This was a wonderful metaphor which appealed to several Twitterers at the conference, including scenariogirl and RuthEllison.

A quick Google suggests the origin of this saying is “Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made” by Otto von Bismarck (although this origin is disputed) with the Healthcare Standards blog applying it to standards-making in a post on The Making of Standards and Sausages published in August 2008.

Paul Downey, an advocate of Web Architecture at BT and formerly BT’s Chief Web Services Architect, chair of the W3C XML Schema Patterns for Databinding Working Group and BT representative at various organisations including OASIS and the WS-I, may has some sympathy with this view judging by the title of his talk at the QCon conference  ”Standards are Great, but Standardisation is a Really Bad Idea“. The abstract for this talk is worth quoiting in full:

Standards arise from consensus between competitors signaling maturity in a marketplace. A good standard can ensure interoperability and assist portability, allowing the switching of suppliers. A widely adopted standard can create new markets, and impose useful constraints which in turn foster good design and innovation. Standards are great, and as the old joke goes, that’s why we have so many of them!

If standards represent peace, then formal standardisation can be war! Dark, political, expensive and exclusive games played out between large vendors often behind closed doors. There are better ways to forge consensus and build agreements and the notion of a committee taking often a number of years to writing a specification, especially in the absence of implementation experience appears archaic in today’s world of Agile methods, test driven development, open source, Wikis and other Web base collaborations.

This talk will draw upon Paul’s personal experiences forged in the wonderful world of XML and Web service standardisation, examine the risks of premature standardisation, unnatural constraints, partial implementations and open extensions, puzzle how to avoid cloud computing lock-in, and contrast formal activities with lightweight open processes as exemplified by open source, Microformats, OpenID, OAuth and other Web conventions being ratified through open, lightweight, continuous agreement.

Now I’ve heard it suggested that in order to avoid choosing the wrong standard, you simply need to look at the worthiness of the organisation which produced the standard, perhaps on the assumption that a reputable standards-making organisation is like an approve sausage-making company. But as Paul Downey suggests, and Keith Boone seems to confirm in his post on the Healthcare blog,  the unsavoury standardisation processes take place in an organisation responsible for delivering globally-accepted standards such as HTML, CSS and XML.

Selecting the standards that will not only work as specified but will be widely accepted and supported in the marketplace is not an easy task.  And it is good to see that evidence of such concerns is now becoming more widely available.

What Can We Learn From The eduWeb Conference?

Background to IWMW

The Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) series was launched in July 1997 and has been held every year since, with the 3 day format being used since 1998. This event is aimed at members of institutional Web management teams and has been attracting an audience of 150-200 for some time now.

The eduWeb Conference

But what, I’ve wondered, is the equivalent in the US?  I recently came across the eduWeb conference Web site, which appears to be similar to IWMW. Reading the history of the eduWeb conference page I find that the original conference started in 2000 although it previously had a different name and location. The event, which is privately owned, was relaunched in 2005.  I found it interesting to read about how it perceives its target audiences:

“The conference continues to focus on “both sides f the fence” (front end and back end) regarding a website’s development.

• The “front end” includes marketing, communications, advancement, admissions – it includes any non-IT office that now has a website and knows that part of its strategy is to communicate to internal and external audiences.

• The “back end” includes information technology, database development, applications, instructional design, mobile technology, RSS and more.

The core to having a conference like this was to bring these sides together…to learn from the other side, to learn to talk each other’s language and hopefully bring a better working relationship among the personnel that now create the Web.“

It was also interesting to view the call for papers, which has three strands: (1) Marketing Communications; (2) Design & Development and (3) a Guest Track on Getting It Done!. An accompanying page provides suggestions for possible topics. A draft timetable is also available which, although it doesn’t yet provide details of the individual sessions,  does show how the conference is themed into the three strands.

Comparisons

The IWMW event, like eduWeb, has sought to engage with the marketing, design and management communities as well as those involvement in development work.   And I have to admit that I find eduWeb’s terms ‘front end’ and ‘back end’ quite useful – although I’m unsure how those involved in RSS, XML and other TLA and XTLA work will take to the ‘back end’ term. I wonder if developers in the UK, with the pantomime tradition which is probably not significant in the US (“oh no it’s not”),  would resent being relegated to the back end of the pantomime horse?

Unlike eduWeb, plenary talks at IWMW are intended for all participants. We have wondered whether we should provide streamed plenary talks, but feel that having a small number of plenary talks (ideally by charismatic speakers, such as Ewan Mcinosh’s closing talk at IWMW 2008) can provide a unifying theme which we can all talk about during the conference and afterwards. But is it time for a change?

As all twelve IWMW events have been organised by UKOLN with myself, initially and my colleague Marieke Guy having responsibility for the events, we have been able to ensure continuity of access to the event Web sites.  This enables myself and Marieke to be able to review the content over the years and to  spot trends and themes – and as this Web site are publicly available, others can do the same.  In the past few years we have also provided RSS feeds for various data sources, which enables us to, for example, provide a Google Map of the locationof the events and locations of the plenary speakers.

Trying to find out what had happened at previous eduWeb conferences has proved somewhat difficult. The best I could find were the Google results for searches for “eduWeb 2008“, “eduWeb 2007“, etc. which typically take me to individual blog posts about the event. I could find an official Web site or even a page which aggregates content from blogs of the event.

In the bar at the recent dev8D event I did, however, learn that a number of developers from the UK repository community had attended the eduWeb 2008 event. The developers, who attended several events in the US thanks to funding from the JISC CRIG project, have provided a video in which Dave Flanders (who, despite his American accent is based at Bloomsbury Colleges consortium and will shortly be starting work at the JISC) describes how the University of Chicago winning web site could be made even more effective. As described in the accompanying description of the video:

The EduWeb Awards had the University of Chicago as the winning web site (CMS). It was acclaimed for its minamalistic design, but we thought it could even take it a step further by utilising the Google minamalist search approach. We also thought it might be worth looking into Google SiteMaps to provide a common way of presenting University web sites to the user which could be optimised via the kinds of searches that took place on the local search engine.Point being that better search facilities (analytics) should be put into the institutional search engine so as to guarantee that the user is getting back what they want

It seems that valuable links have already been established with eduWeb. What other links could be made, I wonder? And has anyone attended both the eduWeb and IWMW events? If so, it would be useful to hear about the similarities, differences and things we can learn from each other.

Note that eduWeb 2009 will be held in Chicago on 20-23 July and IWMW 2009 in the University of Essex on the following week (28-30 July). An enthusiastic University Web developer could therefore attend both!

Is The UK Government Being Too Strict?

I recently noticed a blog post published on the home page of the WASP (Web Standards Project) Web site.  The blog post, UK government browser guidelines: good sense prevails by Bruce Lawson, Opera applauded the UK Government for responding to pressure from the Web standards and Web development communities on its guidelines aimed at providers of UK Government Web services. The document initially stated that

… webmasters need not test in less popular browsers (those with less than 2% in that site’s usage statistics) and that there should be a page on the site listing the popular browsers which had been tested with the message “We advise you to upgrade your browser version as far as your computer allows and if possible to one of those listed above”.

Following over 400 emails made in response to a plea from Bruce, Adam Batenin, author of the document,  published a revised browser testing guidelines, and, according to Bruce “he’s done a great job of including best-practice development.” I too welcome that change.

However the guidelines also state (paragraphs 21-23) that:

All (X)HTML content must validate with respect to your chosen DTD.

Now although I’d agree with Bruce in his comments on the ”importance of valid code” I feel that a formal requirement that all (X)HTML content must validate with the appropriate DTD will be counter-productive.

We should recognise that the vast majority of HTML content does not comply with HTML standards – and it will be difficult for one sector to deviate substantially from the norm. This situation is likely to be made worse as use of embedded Web 2.0 technologies grows (e.g. YouTube videos of the Prime Minister embedded in UK Government pages) as embedding these services  typical causes HTML validation problems.

Now such problems are (primarily) the responsibility of the third party Web 2.0 providers. And here we should be lobbying them to ensure that code to embed their content does not break HTML standards. But they might argue that, as global services, they need to be very conservative in making changes to services which work, even if they don’t necessarily comply to published HTML DTDs.  The companies could argue that they are being user-focussed in such considerations, as isn’t there some truth in this?  I can recall one hard-line ‘standardista’ who, on being told that a (University-developed) service didn’t render correctly in Internet Explorer, was told that the user should upgrade to a standards-compliant browser. And of course the university’s provided browser, was Internet Explorer! Such indulgences may occur in the public sector, but a commercial company which behaved likewise would soon find itself out of business.

As well as concerns that a formal requirement that UK Government Web pages must be fully HTML compliant may mean that pages aren’t rendered by the (flawed) browsers which people use, there is also a danger that this requirement will stifle developments and innovation in Government.

HTML itself has, sadly, proven a difficult language to evolve over time.  We are now in a position in which the usability and accessibility benefits which sensible use of AJAX technologies can provide and being made accessible to, for example, screen-reading software and assistive technologies through a standard known as ARIA. However use of WAI-ARIA (to use its official name) will normally mean that strict HTML compliance will not be possible. And when I’ve raised this issue with people involved in development of the standards and assistive technologies the response I have consistently received is that accessibility benefits which can be provided shown be prioritised over strict HTML. And this view has been endorsed in WCAG 2.0, which has dropped WCAG 1.0′s formal requirement for HTML compliance, requiring, instead, that markup elemnts are currectly opened and closed.

I would therefore suggest that the guidelines document should state that:

(X)HTML content should validate with respect to your chosen DTD.

After all, if the Web Standards Project Web site isn’t able to fully comply with the standards, should we expect every government Web site to?

And let’s also remember that these requirements only apply to (X)HTML content. If these requirements are too difficult to achive, won’t we see content being trapped in PDFs? You might, for example, like to think that the Digital Britain – Interim Report would be available as a HTML resource, but no, it’s only available in PDF and MS Word formats. But at least the such PDF documents won’t fail the government guidelines I’ve described. Let’s not pretend that mandating conformance with HTMLK guideines will result in better HTML documents. I’m convinced that it won’t – it will result in documents being provided in formats such as PDFs. And who bothers checking that PDFs conform with PDF standards?

Web Accessibility Framework in 3 Words

Since 2005 I, in conjunction with a number of other accessibility researchers and practitioners in the UK and Australia, have sought to develop a framework for Web accessibility which addresses the shortcomings of the WAI model (which suggests that universal accessibility will be provided by a combination of guidelines for Web content, authoring tools and user agents).

This work began with a paper on “A Holistic Approach to E-Learning Accessibility” by myself, Lawrie Phipps and Elaine Swift published in the Canadian Journal of Learning and Research in 2005.  Ten further papers were subsequently published which furter developed these ideas.

A fair amount of thinking and discussions have taken place in the past 5 years. However at the recent OzeWAI 2009 conference Lisa Herrod summarised our work in a Twitter post:

massive thanks and kudos to @briankelly for adding context & purpose to my accessibility methodology i.e. Accessibility isn’t binary.

Yes, that’s a great summary: “Accessibility isn’t binary“.  It’s not about following a set of rules to achieve universal accessibility.  It’s about shades of grey, differing interpretations, differing user requirements, differing scenarios, etc. And the advocacy, the policies and the appropriate areas for standardisation all arise from those three words.

Thanks to Lisa for spotting the key aspect – and for perhaps coming up with an appropriate title for my next talk on this topic.

Twitter For JISC Bid Writers And Web Developers

Twitter and Bid Writers

On Tuesday (3^rd February 2009) Grainne Conole send off a Twitter post:

just about to do presentation at OU on how t get JISC dosh – any tweet suggestions to throw into the pot??? use #JISCBIDS

In response she received a fluffy of useful suggestions, which Lorna Campbell has helpfully summarised:

“Advice ranged from the obvious:

Make sure you read the call. sounds obvious, but you would be amazed at how many bidders don’t!

We’ve all done it – it’s simply not fun, and risky, sending proposal on deadline day. Get into mindset of deadline is week before.

Provide *all* info asked for – such a shame to mark down a bid because it didn’t include risk assessment for example

10 page limit means 10 page limit. Do not put your budget on page 11.

Read the circular. Then read it again. Then do what it asks.

To the astute:

Don’t underbid to be competitive if this means your project will run out of money before the end.

Your background/intro section is too long. Ditch half of it and write a really good use case scenario instead.

Make it clear what funding your proposal would do for the wider community.

To the obscure:

A project with an acronym that alludes to bodily functions or sexual practises will (almost) always remain an unfunded project.“

What a wonderful example of how people involved in writing JISC proposals, those who have been involved in bid-writing previously, potential  markers and JISC programme managers themselves are willing to share their thoughts and suggestions. And, of course, such sharing is good for everyone – better submissions should be prepared which makes it easier for the markers and JISC and the wider community should benefit from the project deliverables.

Twitter and Web Developers

I recently received an email from the manager of an institutional Web development team who asked

“Do you know of any universities which have implemented some kind of iGoogle like home page for their students and  staff?  Something which lets users customise the data sources and layout and presentation of their start page, and which supports both internal gadgets – my courses, my marks, my timetable, etc. – and external ones; my Twitter, my Facebook, my news feed, etc.  It seems like something  someone must have done already somewhere, but who?  Any pointers very welcome.“

The University of Southampton’s iSoton service (which I wrote about a while ago) came to  mind initially, but that wasn’t quite what was wanted. Not being able to come up with any other suggestions (and not wanting to give a negative reply and look stupid!) I turned to my Twitter community and asked:

Any universities provide an iGoogle-style page for staff / students with personalised links to remote (e.g. delicious) & internal stuff ?

Responses appeared immediately:

Response  1:
my old university did. https://my.mq.edu.au/ both for staff and students. various boxes showing your inbox, exam timetable etc.

Response 2:
do you have an example? Would this be as a personalised or general portal? Interesting idea.

Response 3:
OU has a couple of iGoogle widgets….?

Response 4:
Is iSotton (http://www.soton.ac.uk/isoton/) the kind of thing you mean?

Response 5:
check out http://www.uspace.org.uk. – jisc funded igoogle project. (must record I’ve used twitter as a dissemination tool now)

Response 6:
we have some delicious links in our toolbox and looking are a few other things … what about you guys

Response 7:
is it still the case that iGoogle pages don’t have unique urls? (So publishing them to the world is problematic.)

Response 8:
Sussex do. it’s called SPLASH http://splash.sussex.ac.uk/

Response 9:
See also the PADDLE project http://www.chester.ac.uk/ple/ both SPLASH and PADDLE are part of http://tinyurl.com/75khnw

Response 10:
iGoogle/NetVibes/etc examples http://tinyurl.com/5jgucc

And it seems that these responses where of use to the person with the initial query as he commented “Brian, that’s fantastic; thanks for your help” :-)

Discussion

The UK HE’s development community has a well-established tradition of sharing, as can be seen by the popularity of (initially) the Mailbase mailing list service, which was replaced by the JISCMail. But as technologies develop well-established tools get replaced by new, and often more flexible alternatives. I think we are now seeing this with Twitter. But what of the Twitter sceptics, the ones who invite us to:

Imagine a world in which Twitter did not exist (give it a couple of years…) would you really invent a constantly-updated trivia machine as the best way of communicating with [your] audiences?

Is Twitter a trivia machine? Yes, it can be. But then again, so can email. And did you stop using email when those first Viagra posts appeared in your inbox?

The Launch of OPuS

The University of Bath’s OPuS service, the online archive for University of Bath research publications, was launched yesterday (3^rd February 2009) by Professor Jane Millar, the University’s Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research).

OPuS (which, incidentally, stands for ‘Online Publications Store’) currently holds over 12,000 references including journal articles, books and book sections, conference items, patents, reports and working papers, and research degree theses. Some of these items, including the theses are available in full-text. The aim of the service is to help strengthen the promotion and preservation of research outputs.

I recorded (with permission) Professor Jane Millar’s official launch of the service and this clip (which is also available on YouTube) is embedded below:

I should also add that the introduction to the launch was given by University Librarian, Howard Nicholson (YouTube video clip available) and Kara Jones, the university’s Research Publications Librarian, concluded the event by providing some facts and figures about the service and the role that she can play in supporting departmental use of the service (YouTube video clip available).

Many thanks to Kara Jones for organising this launch event and ensuring that a large number of the University’s research publications were uploaded to the service prior to the launch. Readers with particular interests in repositories may wish to add Kara’s My:self Archive blog to their RSS reader.

#uksnow and the Mainstreaming of Twitter

In Sunday’s post about the problems with Google search in passing I commented that I have learnt of this problem from Twitter. I went on to add that:

Now I could use this as an example of showing the benefits of Twitter when something significant happens in the world. And I suspect that when the next major incident (bombings, severe weather problems, major accidents, etc.)  occurs we’ll hear stories of how Twitter was used and we’ll have another of influx of subscribers.

Little did I realise that the severe weather problems occurred the following day. And yes, Twitter did have a major role to play. I noticed this first thing in the morning after I switched on my iPod Touch and downloaded my latest Tweets.  There were several updates on the state of the weather around the country. When I got to work I gave an update on the weather at the University and in town (Bath University, being located at the top of a steep hill, has its own microclimate). And I tagged my tweet with the #uksnow hashtag as I’d noticed many others doing.

And later that evening I discovered that people were adopted the convention of using this tag in conjunction with the post code together with a scale of the intensity of the snow. So I should have tweeted “No snow in Bath BA1 0/10 #uksnow” but a few hours later given the update “Snow started at Bath University BA2 4/10 #uksnow“.

This use of Twitter to exploit the wisdom of the crowds at the advent of the snow was driven by Ben March, using an approach which seems to have been inspired by Ben Smith, who built UK Trains Wiki which Tweets disruption alerts for 25 UK train operators.

You can view the snow map which is built from an aggregation of tweets with the #uksnow tag on Ben Marshs’s blog. And a follow-up post on the blog provides links to people who have commented on this approach which includes The Guardian, The Telegraph and UK Techcrunch.

Some people might regard this as trivia – and many of the photos uploaded to Flickr with the #uksnow tag show kids making snowmen, sldeging, etc. But for me this is a great example of community benefits of Twitter. And if I was travelling London today I would be reading the tweets from my Twitter contacts in London.

A recent high-profile BBC news item on Twitter suggested it was becoming popular because of the number of celebrities, such as Jonathon Ross and Stephen Fry, who are on Twitter. Not for me. The reason it’s becoming embraced beyond the early adopters and becoming mainstream is because of the benefits which early adopters  have been talking about for the past year or so.  It provides a sense of community; it can be used for sharing and for alerting.  And I’m pleased that this has happened. Now where have the Twitter sceptics gone?

Google Breaks!

There was much lively discussion from my Twitter community yesterday – and not on from the football fans whose teams were involved in a flurry of goals in the second half. Josie Fraser was one of the first to report the incident:

Google’s gone a bit mental. Every site it returns for any search comes with a ‘this site may harm your computer’ warning 2:52 PM yesterday

Phil Bradley commented seconds later:

Google malware error running wild http://tinyurl.com/akuar3 Everyone is seeing this from what I can tell. 2:54 PM yesterday

And then there was a flurry of comments from people confirming that the problem was widespread.

Now I could use this as an example of showing the benefits of Twitter when something significant happens in the world. And I suspect that when the next major incident (bombings, severe weather problems, major accidents, etc.)  occurs we’ll hear stories of how Twitter was used and we’ll have another of influx of subscribers.

But as I suspect that many readers of this blog will be aware of the benefits which Twitter can provide I’ll instead comment on the incident itself.

The official Google blog has described this incident in a post entitled “‘This site may harm your computer’ on every search result !?!?“.  The post summarised the incident:

If you did a Google search between 6:30 a.m. PST and 7:25 a.m. PST this morning, you likely saw that the message “This site may harm your computer” accompanied each and every search result. This was clearly an error, and we are very sorry for the inconvenience caused to our users.

And goes on to explain what happened:

What happened? Very simply, human error. Google flags search results with the message “This site may harm your computer” if the site is known to install malicious software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. We do this to protect our users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. We maintain a list of such sites through both manual and automated methods. …

We periodically update that list and released one such update to the site this morning. Unfortunately (and here’s the human error), the URL of ‘/’ was mistakenly checked in as a value to the file and ‘/’ expands to all URLs.

So a simple human error caused all results returned by Google to be flagged with a worrying message. Now the Google blog posts points out that the problem was quickly resolved, claiming that “the duration of the problem for any particular user was approximately 40 minutes“.

But should this act a a wakeup call warning us of the dangers of a reliance on Web 2.0 companies?

It should be pointed out that this isn’t really a question of the ownership of the service. Does anyone really think that if a global search engine was nationalised that it would be immune to human errors? The incidents we’ve seen in recent years with government data clearly demonstrates this.

However as my colleague Paul Walk commented in an email shortly after this incident in a paper he had just submitted to the Museums and the Web conference “ I talked about distributed web services and chains of responsibility“. The Google incident would have provided a great example of such dangers, if it had only happened before he had submitted the paper!

Now Phil Bradley has already written about this incident, including a screen image of a Google search warning about the possible dangers of visiting the Goole Google site itself! But I think that I’d agree with Paul Walk that the more interesting issues are to do with the chains of responsibility, rather than a destination site which people visit, even one as popular as Google.

Google may have quickly fixed this particular problem. But we’ve not seen the end of discussions of the implications of breakdowns in cloud services. And what will this incident do for the trust people may previously have had in Google?