The Scientist reports that a 'Science and Technology Committee' of the British House of Commons backs open archiving of all government-funded research so that publicly supported research can be accessible free of charge. An excerpt from the article:

“We have recommended that the UK government fund the establishment of an interlinked network of institutional repositories on which all research articles originating in the UK should be deposited and can be read for free,” the committee's report, released today, states. “In order to ensure that the repositories are well populated, we have recommended that research councils mandate their funded researchers to deposit copies of all their articles in this way.”

The committee suggests that the government should appoint a central body to oversee the implementation of repositories and help with their setting up. The UK government has to respond to the committee's report and is expected to do so within 2 months.

Telesat just launched the Anik-F2 satellite which promises to provide highspeed internet access throughout Canada, including remote and rural areas, by next year. The initiative is being heavily supported by the Canadian government as part of its intention to enable national internet access.

According to The Toronto Star, the satellite will “deliver two-way, broadband Internet service to any location in North America at a price that's competitive with residential cable or DSL high-speed services. Previously, you'd have to spend at least a couple hundred dollars a month to get high-speed access to your cottage or rural business…. Telesat's consumer high-speed Internet service, which will be sold through a distribution network yet to be announced (but likely to include Bell Canada), will cost only 5 to 10 per cent more than what Torontonians pay for high-speed services from Sympatico and Rogers.”

The Star article focuses on baby boomers who want to work at the cottage, and indeed that's the audience who may make the service economically sustainable, but for rural communities, internet access will offer more economic and social integration with the rest of the world. VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) can already provide almost free long distance calling through services like Skype (2c/minute CDN to regular telephones in 25 countries), and the improvements in videoconferencing and other online collaboration tools will make far-flung knowledge work truly achievable.

In fact, as reliability of VOIP improves, many households will probably eliminate monthly telephone bills altogether and use highspeed internet for all of their phone calls. Skype software is already available on WiFi-enabled handheld computers the size of mobile phones. It will sure beat the expensive and unreliable satellite phones that many remote northern communities currently use.

Wired News covers outragedmoderates.org, a P2P (peer to peer) network that “isn't offering copyright music and videos for download. The site, launched two weeks ago, has aggregated more than 600 government and court documents to make them available for download through the Kazaa, LimeWire and Soulseek P2P networks in the interest of making government more transparent and accountable.”

The site was created by a second-year law student in New York, who populated it with documents relating to various themes such as the Iraqi war and Medicare, organized so that readers can track the issues in the context of relevant documents. It's a fascinating use of P2P networks to encourage citizen engagement in public issues, enabling them to read the original documents without mediation from news organizations. (This news item was flagged by Slashdot, by the way.)

The New York Times reports that it might be time to revive the 'paperless office' myth: “We may never eliminate our file cabinets completely, but it's too soon to give up on that dream altogether. New scanners from Hewlett-Packard, Fujitsu and Xerox/Visioneer can scan stacks of paper, unattended, with marching-band precision – both sides at once, in fact – and convert them into PDF files on your computer, ready for searching, sorting or sending.” Amazing. With prices of these scanners ranging from $300 to $900 US, it makes sense to begin moving files onto the network rather keeping them in hard storage. The article doesn't address all of the new problems this will create, like data backup and privacy and how much easier it is to misplace a hard drive than several big filing cabinets, and all the other document management hassles that most organizations try not to think about. But the vision of the paperless office is pretty compelling.

Group scheduling is one of those time-consuming frustrating tasks that takes way longer than it should. Setting up a meeting between three or four people in the same organization can take days, and it's one of the prime 'time-wasters' identified by workers when we go looking for opportunities for process improvements. Microsoft Exchange is one solution for organizations that use Outlook, but it's expensive and hard to implement. OfficeCalendar appears to be a good alternative – I haven't tested it yet, but it looks very easy to use and works with Outlook 2000 and above (and Windows 98 and above).

Access to the literature: the debate continues, the latest installment in Nature's coverage of the open access movement, discusses the two major business models for the publication and distribution of research literature – 'reader pays' (the current model), and 'researcher pays' (the primary open access model). This issue is central to the sustainability of open access literature.

Posted on Charity Village July 1, 2004.

A couple of weeks ago I spent two enjoyable hours talking to a group of colleagues in a state-of-the-art meeting centre. Most of the meeting rooms were fully equipped with whiteboards, video and PowerPoint screens. Some of us dispersed into smaller meeting rooms while others hung out in the hall. There was a fair amount of giggling. At one point a few of us got trapped in a room with a door that wouldn't open, so our facilitator deleted the room until he could fix the door. The whole building was a virtual construct, and each of us was represented by a cartoon that could walk, sit, wave and move from room to room.

This inexpensive new service, called SmartMeeting, uses video gaming techniques to emulate a productive meeting space. It was developed by a small company in Iceland whose software has been used by Ericsson, BBC, Orange and other major European companies. The service is designed to work with low bandwidth internet access, including dialup connections, and includes good quality voice conferencing. In fact, the voice quality is one of the most interesting things about it. The voice was three dimensional. I could tell that Robin Good was talking on my right because his voice was mainly on the right side of my headset. When we went out into the hall we could faintly hear the conversation in the nearby meeting room unless they shut the door. We had a mental model of small group breakouts so that people could split up without 'disappearing' from the mindspace of their colleagues. Participants in this meeting were from Iceland, Rome, Boston, Toronto, Munich and a few other places.

I'm sure that many similar services will be popping up soon. But what good are they? The concept is kind of corny. In some ways it provides some of the disadvantages of face to face meetings, in that people need time to enter the room, choose chairs, socialize, get distracted, move around the room, go into the hall for a break, and so on. It also requires several minutes to get used to the space, as well as some personal help for the inevitable technical problems. Waste of time! On the other hand, that interaction gave us an eerie feeling of 'being there'. Something about the experience emulates something about the reality of face to face contact. Most people will find SmartMeeting too cumbersome until it gets easier to use. However, it's a glimpse of the future.

The knottiest questions about distance collaboration concern how to replace or emulate the important elements of face to face communication. Three major elements are facial expressions, interruptability and ease of use.

1. The first element is facial expression and other visual cues that help you engage with the other people in the meeting. Microsoft Research published a study in 2001 that examined how to improve the feeling of social engagement in teleconferences by using simple computer graphics. The researchers showed that simple cartoons that give hints as to human eye contact significantly increased participants' engagement in teleconferences.

Faces are extraordinarily meaningful to humans. For example, “Chernoff Faces” are simple cartoon graphics that assign facial expressions to mathematical expressions, thereby helping people to understand complex mathematical relationships. In a company's financial statements a smile might mean a profit and a frown might mean a loss, with worried eyebrows meaning small financial reserves. A 1996 study by Smith et al (in pdf format) showed that such simple faces could communicate highly complex financial information to both experts and nonexperts compared to the usual tables of numbers. We're designed to 'read' faces. (Unfortunately, the academic paper describing this research contains no cartoons – and what's the use, as Alice might have pointed out, of a paper without pictures or conversation?) Web conferences should introduce cues that help people be more engaged by using our built-in signals of social interaction.

2. The second element is “interruptability” or “real-time open channels”, as Ray Ozzie described it in a web conference this week hosted by the inimitable Robin Good. Presence awareness (telling coworkers when you're at your computer) and peripheral hearing (being aware of what other people in your team are doing) are related concepts. In intense interactions like brainstorming and problem-solving, you have to be able to tell whether your coworkers are paying attention to you (are they picking up their email while they pretend to be in the meeting?), you have to be able to 'keep an ear out' for interesting or important conversations while you're working on other tasks, you have to be able to interrupt colleagues with urgent questions, you have to be able to hang out and brainstorm without worrying about long distance costs, and so on. The intensity is defined by the density and openness of communication on both sides. Instant Messaging is growing rapidly in corporations even when it's against the rules because IM can deliver many of these functions. In face to face meetings you can grab smaller groups of people during the breaks or pass notes back and forth. IM can do the same thing during teleconferences.

3. The third element is ease of use, which includes technical accessibility (e.g., everyone having computers and internet access) but also includes the development of social norms that are appropriate to the communication channel. Teleconferences should be run differently from face-to-face meetings to take account for the absence of visual cues, which is why it's so unsatisfying to be teleconferenced into a meeting where most participants are sitting together. A Boeing study of web conferences (in PDF format) suggests that 'technology drivers' (meeting facilitators who help participants with technical problems and encourage them to be active) are vital to the success of distance meetings. And from our own experience it's also important to have a backup plan in case the planned technology doesn't work. For example, a facilitator should be reachable by mobile phone by latecomers who can't figure out how to join the meeting.

Nonprofits experimenting with distance collaboration must come to terms with the human need for more intense interaction than can be provided through email or teleconferencing. The need for efficiency and geographic diversity demands it for agencies with large catchment areas (e.g., national or state/province-wide). After many years of using teleconferences I'm reluctantly coming to the conclusion that some visual connection is necessary for building relationships and team trust for groups that are larger than about five people.

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Below is a screenshot of SmartMeeting's main meeting room, with my avatar. It looks sort of like me, but thinner. You can also see a breakout area in the background; there are several separate meeting rooms elsewhere in the virtual building.

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Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
RealWorld Systems

gkerr at realworldsystems.net

My second guest column in Philanthropy Journal has just been posted. It's about the costs of technology in the nonprofit and public sectors – “Chances are, you don't have accurate information about your information technology costs. And if you don't know, you certainly won't be able to communicate those costs convincingly to your funders.”

Here are some articles I've written for Charity Village in the last few months: Virtual gaming comes to the boardroom describes a new web conferencing service that allows participants to use avatars in a virtual building to give them all the feeling of being in a 'real meeting'.

Costing business processes covers some research and resources related to figuring out how much your organization is spending on technology and other key business processes.

And other articles include developing evaluation frameworks and reporting data to funders; posting audio PowerPoint presentations on the Web, and getting access to research literature with the help of the open access movement.

For a full list of articles in my monthly column see the 'News and Articles' link on the right. I've also begun writing brief guest columns for Philanthropy Journal and will link to them here. My first is about the end of privacy on the web and how that creates a career risk for young activists.

Boing Boing pointed out this service – RSS scraping for $2/year. Feedpalooza Journal is accepting feed requests for any site, including your own, a competitor's, or a general news site. You would receive an RSS feed that could be read in any RSS reader such as FeedDemon NewsGator and so on. RSS continues to heat up as a replacement for email newsletters and may, with this type of service, make it easy to keep up with changes to web sites that interest you.