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Two approaches to human filtering: Pandora and LAUNCHcast

The two services I tested this month are beautiful examples of the two major approaches to human filtering. The first service uses experts to classify music based on defined attributes, and the second service uses automatic filtering based on usage patterns.

Pandora, a new subscription music service, offers members up to 100 personal radio stations. Pandora has coded about 300,000 songs on almost 400 musicological attributes. Trained analysts take about 20-30 minutes per song to "capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony." When you select one or more songs or artists, Pandora creates a playlist of similar songs from its "Music Genome" database. Every time you give feedback on a song by rating it as "I really like this" or "I don't like this", Pandora immediately changes the playlist of the station to incorporate your preferences. You can play stations that have been created by other members, and share your station with others. The service is free for the first 10 hours and after that costs $36/year.

If you're interested in finding more music like the kind of music you already listen to, it's a terrific service. If you want to learn more about a genre, it looks like a really helpful service because it defines similarity at the song level, not on the reputation of the artist or the genre the artist usually belongs to. And it's easy to use.

However, I found Pandora unsatisfying because it didn't seem to filter by quality. A crummy copy of a great song has many musicological similarities, but it's still crummy. I'm not looking for music that is similar to the music I already like (I could just keep playing my Elvis Costello records over and over again). I'm looking for recommendations from serious music-lovers who like the same kind of music I like, but who will suggest new songs that I would never have thought of, or wouldn't have expected to like.

So I'm looking for another definition of 'similar' that meets my needs. Which brings me to Yahoo.

Yahoo Music's LAUNCHcast is a free music service (its paid version is not yet available in Canada) that creates a personalized radio station matching your special tastes. Here's how it works:

During initial setup, you select your favourite genres and artists from a list of popular artists. Genres include pop, rock, adult alternative, R&B, rap, country, electronic/dance, jazz, blues, latin and reggae. You can select the entire genre, or specific artists within each. For example, under 'Adult Alternative' you can choose any combination of Matchbox 20, Barenaked Ladies, R.E.M., Enya, Train, Goo Goo Dolls, Jewel, Tori Amos, Sarah McLachlan, Alanis Morissette, Coldplay, and Snow. If that's not your idea of a good time, you can add up to four additional artists and click on 'Create My Station'.
Start playing your station. The songs will be played on your computer using Internet Explorer or the free Yahoo Music Engine music player (still buggy and slow - wait for it to improve), or on the new Yahoo Messenger with Voice instant messaging program (I recommend this option, but be sure to choose the 'custom installation' option and refuse to change your Internet settings. The program rudely changes your home page unless you tell it not to.) The music players will all offer you the option to rate each song, as well as the song's artist and album, on a five point scale from 'never play again' to 'can't get enough'.
You can now refine your personal radio station to match your preferences. Each time you give a high rating, your station will be reprogrammed to play more songs by the same artist, more songs from that album, and/or more songs that are similar. When you give a low rating, your station will play fewer songs like that.
LAUNCHcast defines similarity completely differently from Pandora. When you give an artist a top rating, your station will play more songs by other artists that are highly rated by other people who love that artist.

For example, yesterday my personal radio station played a song by Joan Armatrading. I really like her, so I rated her as a '4' ("can't get enough"), which automatically increases the number of her songs on my station. But it also adds songs that are liked by her other fans. By clicking on Armatrading's name (as her song is playing), I'm taken to her dedicated page on Yahoo Music. The 'Fans' link pulls up a list of 93 personal stations that have given Armatrading a top rating. When I gave a top rating to Armatrading, my personal radio station started selecting songs that tend to be highly rated by these other fans of Armatrading, and in turn their playlists are now influenced by mine. If I want a more personal set of recommendations, or if I want to get more deeply into any particular artist, I can listen to any of those 93 fan stations. If I really like one of the stations in particular, I can add it as an 'influencer' to my own radio station. That person's preferences will influence my own playlist. I can have as many influencers as I like, assuming I have signed up to the paid service. Or I can just listen to that person's station from now on instead of my own. Some of these fan sites are extraordinarily diverse and interesting; it's like having a personal mentor who shows me through her record collection.

Speaking of diversity, personal recommendations by a knowledgeable guide is the best way to expand musical horizons. If you only listen to songs that fans of Joni Mitchell tend to like, you're unlikely to bump into Outkast; it's a form of groupthink. Well-designed reputational systems like Yahoo's can allow you to use a variety of strategies to find relevant results. For future improvements, Yahoo should make it easier to locate influencers by their names or other characteristics. Wouldn't it be cool to subscribe to the personal station of your favourite musician?
Most subscription services seem to allow users to share their playlists with friends. If you use Yahoo Messenger, you can set the options to show what song you are listening to when you are online. In fact, that's a growing problem with instant messaging applications; you have to be careful about your privacy preferences or you may reveal a whole lot more about yourself than you intend. But for youth (and music fanatics), music is a way to create and define community boundaries, and it's interesting how music services are contributing to this use.

To some extent, the creativity of the new music subscription services are driven by the weird rules that are incorporated into current music licenses. Services have to design clever workarounds that satisfy their demanding and bad-tempered customers, while following license restrictions so they can keep access to commercial music catalogues. Subscription services can't play a specific song on request; they have to play a "similar song". Users can't rewind to listen to a particular song, though it is allowable to skip to the next one. All of these rules are intended to discourage illegal copying (sigh), but they lead to ingenious solutions.

How is music like information, and what do these services mean for the future?

Music is a form of information, but a very complex form. "Good music" is hard to define, since it relates as much to a listener's personal taste, mood and context, as to its quality as rated by experts. If we can figure out successful search strategies for music, those strategies should be useful for plain old textual information as well.

Reputational systems (see this pdf document for definitions and examples) like Amazon.com's recommendation engine and Slashdot's 'karma points' are getting more popular for all kinds of uses, not just music. Expect to see increasingly sophisticated ways of searching for information, based on usage patterns and social networking approaches.

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

gkerr at realworldsystems.net

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Tuesday, August 30

Summer Roundup

by Gillian Kerr on Tue 30 Aug 2005 08:09 PM EDT

Open source software reviews, using Google maps, new SharePoint applications and a promising online calendar.

Posted on Charity Village August 4, 2005.

I've been catching up on technology news after several months out of the country. Here are a few services and articles that may be of interest to nonprofits:

Online calendar

Trumba is a new service that provides online calendaring for groups and individuals. An organization can quickly create multiple calendars, publish them on the web, and send out automatic email updates. For example, you could post community events in a public calendar and post upcoming board meetings in a separate private calendar. You can also send email messages to distribution lists reminding participants of upcoming meetings, or use the distribution list for email newsletters. Events can be downloaded into Outlook and other calendar formats.

Trumba hopes that group members will all buy Trumba accounts so that they can share each others' calendars. However, that's not necessary. It looks like a great service for organizations that want to easily post and share events and meetings. There is a 60 day free trial, and it costs $39.95 US/year after that, with unlimited calendars and email distribution lists (as far as I can tell). Here's a review from PCWorld .

There are no ads on the public calendars so you can link to the Trumba calendars from your organization's site, using a template of your choice. This example shows the public events for a San Franciso environmental group.

Google maps

Google's latest offering is a beautiful world mapping service at http://maps.google.com . It can be used for the usual direction-finding, like mapquest or yahoo maps, but has some additional functions. For example, see this map of downtown Toronto. Now click on 'Satellite' or 'Hybrid' on the top right corner. The map changes into a satellite photograph that can be zoomed down to see individual buildings.

Google provides an open API for its maps, meaning that organizations can freely create their own customized maps. Here are some examples of how communities and organizations have been using Google Maps. Organizations could map community services or office locations, and use the maps to give directions and estimate travel distances. Many funders require clients and services to calculate mileage costs, and Google Maps is great for this.

Skype teleconferencing and long distance calling

Skype , the free Internet phone service, continues to grow and provide new services. I used SkypeIn to forward my business calls to Qatar; when I was on the computer, anyone calling my Toronto office would reach me in the Middle East for a cost of about $4 CAN per month. The cost includes voice mail. Skype is now partnering with Boingo to provide wireless hotspots across the world where you can use Skype for phone calls . Some people have replaced their home phones with Skype, though it's a bit complicated and requires internet access.

Skype includes Instant Messaging and free teleconferencing for up to five people as long as everyone is using a computer. (You can patch in someone on a regular phone, but the quality isn't great.)

For nonprofit organizations, Skype's major contribution would be the teleconferencing and free or cheap long distance calling. As an alternative to Vonage and other VOIP services it shows promise, especially with their growing product line. SkypeJournal , an independent web log, regularly posts updates and gossip about Skype.

SharePoint applications

SharePoint is Microsoft's 'intranet in a box'. RealWorld Systems uses it for its own intranet, and while it has some problems (works better with Microsoft browsers and office programs than with non-Microsoft programs, surprise surprise), it's well designed, inexpensive and powerful software. And it takes just a few minutes to set up a good looking functional intranet.

Microsoft has released several new site templates for SharePoint, including events management, Board of Directors application, Request for Proposal management, and lots more. Unfortunately they don't provide examples of each; you have to download them and see them for yourself. The applications appear to be free.

You can try out a SharePoint site at Outtech , where a site with unlimited users costs $40/month US. There's a 30 day free trial.

Open Source software ratings

Some open source software is terrific, and others are terrible. And still others will be great if they are ever mature enough to use (i.e., have most of their bugs worked out). Several organizations, including Carnegie Mellon, O'Reilly, SpikeSource and Intel, are sponsoring an initiative that will rate the business readiness of open source software. Called the " Business Readiness Rating ", it will provide an open standard to allow organizations to assess and share information about software.

If it works this will be a real help to organizations that are trying to select a reliable and robust piece of open source software.

What open source can teach us about work

Finally, here's an article that discusses some lessons that regular organizations can take from the open source software movement . For example, amateurs are more productive than professionals; homes are better places to work than offices; employment is a paternalistic and infantilizing institution; and so on. It's a fun read. In fact, it's similar to some of the things that Peter Drucker says about nonprofits -- people who work out of a sense of shared values are more productive than those who just work for money.

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

gkerr at realworldsystems.net

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Friday, June 10

Communications technology and culture: Using technology in Qatar

by Gillian Kerr on Fri 10 Jun 2005 08:08 PM EDT

Posted on Charity Village June 8, 2005.

I've been in Qatar, on the Arabian Gulf, for over a month working on a project with the Qatari government. Qatar is in the process of becoming a constitutional democracy, and their new Constitution came into effect on June 8th. The Constitution was passed in a national referendum two years ago, with a vote of 97% in favour, and much of it deals with human rights and public participation in governance. Qatar is the home of Al Jazeera, the television station that is reviled (and admired) by the West and sister Arabic states for its dedication to free speech.

Qatar is a conservative Muslim state, in which almost all of the Qatari women wear abayas (black cloaks worn over their clothing) and headshawls when in public, and most of the Qatari men wear thobes and headdresses. Most women wear veils covering their faces as well, though the Emir's consort keeps her face uncovered. Non-Qatari women are not expected to wear abayas, and in fact, it's seen as disrespectful for Westerners to do so.

Besides being a very conservative nation, it's also a very wealthy nation, due to its massive oil and gas reserves. Sixty years ago there were less than 20,000 people in the entire country; now there are more than 750,000. Only a quarter are Qatari; the rest are expatriate workers from all over the world.

Technology has made great inroads here, but in a way that's consistent with the local cultures. Here are some examples:

Most Qataris seem to have mobile phones, and use them constantly. Every meeting (and I've been to dozens) is interrupted regularly by phone calls, and even the Chair will stop talking and answer his phone in the middle of a discussion. The effect is of being in a large and crowded room, with everyone's friends, colleagues and family members all around us. Apparently, before mobile phones people used to drop in to see each other, and meetings were even more disrupted. Now they just call. It's a beautiful example of cultural values affecting the acceptance of new technology. Interestingly, voice mail is unusual and few people have it. You don't need voice mail when you always answer the phone!
Qatari women, when they have jobs (more and more often, and generally in government), often work in 'women's sections' behind locked doors. There they can remove their abayas and veils. They communicate with their male colleagues and bosses over the phone and via e-mail, and occasionally come to meetings if they can be assured that they will sit beside a woman. Non-Arab women are handy for this, because we can sit between the men and the Qatari women. E-mail has the potential of allowing women to participate more fully in project teams, but it also may lessen the pressure for integration. In fact, with good enough remote collaboration tools, women don't need to leave their homes, though videoconferencing isn't terribly useful when participants are fully veiled.
Most of the expatriates are low paid labourers and service workers from places like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and India. They work all over the country, often in labour camps, and on Fridays they pour into downtown Doha (the capital city) for their weekly holiday. On Friday nights the Internet bandwidth across the city drops dramatically as the expats fill Internet cafés to communicate with their families at home. (I don't know why they are called Internet cafés - they never serve coffee. How did that name stick?)
Many small businesses have web sites, partly because there are no physical addresses. Doha is in a constant state of demolition and construction, and all mail is delivered to post office boxes. To find a restaurant or business, you have to go to their web site and see the map or phone them for verbal directions.
Qatar has won regional awards for its government portal, www.e.gov.qa, and is using web services to streamline the distribution of visas, driving licenses, building permits, and so on. Qatar is a highly security-conscious nation, and requires visas to be renewed monthly for business travellers and expat workers. Online visas make it more convenient for business people, while still keeping a tight lid on who is going in and out of the country. (If you get a residence permit, you need a visa to leave the country.)
Because of the high Internet and e-mail penetration among Qataris, the government is beginning to use web surveys and other online tools for public participation in governance. There are less than 200,000 Qatari citizens, and online communication is a natural way to communicate with them. This is a new approach, and it will be interesting to see how much they use the Internet over the next few years as they develop consultation mechanisms to support their democratic processes.

As in every culture, technology is a double-edged sword. Remote collaboration tools can engage women in teams, but it can also create a type of technological purdah. And web services can streamline bureaucracy, but also provide easier ways to track people.

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Saturday, April 30

Mobilizing communities and sharing information

by Gillian Kerr on Sat 30 Apr 2005 08:07 PM EDT

Suggestions and tools for connecting people.

Posted on Charity Village April 8, 2005.

Last week, at the Ideas That Matter conference on Building Strong Communities, Phillip Smith and I presented a workshop on how to use technology to strengthen communities. Phillip leads Community Bandwidth, a consulting company that "explores the thoughtful use of technology toward creating a more just and sustainable society." Phillip has helped many nonprofits set up web sites that mobilize their communities around social issues, and has kept up with the latest online tools and web strategies.

Here are a few of the tools he shared with me as we prepared for the conference.

Creating and strengthening social networks

There are dozens of free or inexpensive online tools that organizations can implement almost instantly, and that can extend their reach to communities.

Meet-up tools like www.meetup.com or www.upcoming.org allow people with common interests or concerns to connect quickly, whether its 'Friends of Elvis' or a public demonstration.

Social network sites like Friendster and Orkut share information about users' social networks so that they can meet new people. This could be a good way to identify people with common values, but it is also a good way to reveal more than you want to potential employers or colleagues. (Do you really want to link to photos of all of your girlfriends and boyfriends for everyone to see?) It also opens the possibilities of abuse by governments that want to identify and harass people in political networks. It will be interesting to see how these sites evolve. They present all kinds of potential and problems around privacy and etiquette.

One general comment about social networks is that they have significant costs in terms of time and energy to maintain. You have to respond to people and occasionally interact with them in order to stay involved in a network. It is not feasible to maintain active memberships in an infinite number of networks, and social network programs don't seem to recognize the costs. For example, I use Skype, and every time I add someone to my contact list in order to have a conversation with them, I see exactly when they sign on and off their computer and vice versa - forever. Skype assumes that I want to be permanently engaged with all of my contacts. One of the big challenges of social network programs is to figure out how people can maintain their privacy and control over when they are available.

Blogs are a great way to connect communities and build relationships in a more formal way. Some blogging programs, like www.blogware.com or www.sixapart.com/movabletype, are sophisticated content management programs that provide everything most agencies would want in a web site. In addition, they enable individual staff or volunteers to engage in informal conversations with their communities. When you look at blogs, you will notice that many have 'blogrolls' on the side of the page, where the writer lists all the blogs that influence him/her. Many blogs invite comments from users, so they can become a mini-discussion group around specific topics.

Another way to tap into the power of social networks is through del.icio.us, a free 'social bookmarks manager' that allows users to add web pages to their own bookmarks, give them categories, and share them with others. To see how it works, click on a 'tag' that you find interesting from the list on the right hand column, such as 'search'. You will see a list of web sites under the topic 'search', along with the names of people who have marked it. They are listed in chronological order, newest first. The top link today is "Google + Craig's List", which has been bookmarked by 123 people. Click on the 'people', and you are given the names of all the people who have saved that bookmark. Then you can select any of the people to see what other bookmarks they have collected. It seems elaborate, but it's a fast way to share interesting web sites, and could be used by agencies to keep users up to date on web resources. It takes seconds to register as a user, and then all of your bookmarks are available through the URL http://del.icio.us/your_name.

Full featured community mobilizing web sites like CivicSpace and Democracy in Action offer a broad range of tools for advocacy, fundraising, communication, and grassroots organizing. CivicSpace, which is based on Drupal, is open source and needs a programmer to customize if you are hosting it yourself, but you can get a hosted service from Bryght.

The Republican counter-convention is a good place to see several tools in action, many of them free. For example, check out text-mobs, which enable users to communicate to any number of people instantly on their mobile phone text messages. This allows rapid mobilization of groups, and has been used to organize public demonstrations.

Another tool that was used by the Republican counter-convention was an open source phone system called Asterix. Asterix was used in their 'get out the vote' initiative, providing a central phone hub and messaging centre for volunteers.

There are so many options, and so many ways to customize them, that agencies probably need advice to figure out how to use online tools most effectively. Even free tools cost a great deal of time to find, test, and implement. Recruiting knowledgeable technology people onto your boards or committees, or even as ongoing advisors, is a good way to keep in touch with these resources.

However, many technology experts like building their own solutions rather than creatively using existing tools. Avoid this if at all possible. Managing software development projects is expensive and rife with problems, and given the many wonderful options for customizing off-the-shelf tools, it's often unnecessary.

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

gkerr at realworldsystems.net

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Monday, March 28

Building a community web site

by Gillian Kerr on Mon 28 Mar 2005 08:05 PM EST

Creating a successful web site that enables communities to work together depends more on processes than on software.

Posted on Charity Village March 6, 2005.

The Internet is littered with well-meaning community web sites that attracted attention from a few people for a few months and then were abandoned. By community site, I mean a web site that is meant to encourage community participation and engagement, whether it is in discussion forums, collaborative work groups, shared document archives, or public advocacy on political issues. The nonprofits that created the sites had visions of enabling their communities to share information and to collaborate together. They probably had special funding for the sites, and were encouraged by community members who expressed intentions to use it. Unfortunately, many if not most of them fail.

Here are some of the signs of failures in community sites: discussion forums that haven't had a new entry in more than a year; 'news' that has not been updated in months; announcements that new functions will be added 'soon' but are never launched; a list of members that show an early spike and then no additions. These signs are common enough that nonprofits need to avoid the main causes of failure in the design of their sites. It's not enough to launch a site with various functions (discussions, member lists, document archives, etc.) - the site must be designed and populated properly and nurtured continually.

Even if a given community site doesn't succeed for one reason or another, it can be designed in a way that builds or enhances tools that can benefit community-based networks over the long term. In other words, they can learn from each other and build knowledge about what works and what doesn't work rather than making the same mistakes over and over again.

Web sites, as well as addressing the objectives of their particular initiative, should attempt to have sustainable value, in the sense that the nonprofit sector is strengthened by online interventions even after a particular program stops. Sustainable value might be created in several ways:

The tools and resources developed through the site could be made available to other nonprofits and community networks through accessible and easily searchable archives.
Social networks could be developed, with members continuing to collaborate after the initiative is completed.
Communities could be helped to become more familiar with inexpensive and accessible online tools as modeled on the site, and could develop them for their own purposes.

Following are some suggestions for building community web sites that are more likely to have sustainable value for the nonprofit sector.

Whenever possible, design web-based resources that:

Build upon existing networks and infrastructure rather than weakening emerging networks.
Are accessible to users with low bandwidth, older browsers and diverse operating systems.
Follow usability guidelines and generally accepted web interfaces. This builds capacity in the sector by reducing learning curves for other web-based resources.
Enable control by users, not programmers. For example, organizations should be able to post content and change the structure in response to feedback from users. In addition, organizations should be able to switch technology providers rather than being locked into restrictive contracts or platforms.
Enable information sharing across the diverse online communities building civil society. Documents and tools that would be helpful to other communities should be made available to a broader audience than those who happen to visit your web site. For example, you could create a partnership with an institution that has permanent archives - hopefully, one that was accessible to scholarly search engines. There are several advantages to this approach: The product would have a permanent citation; the authors/developers would have an additional incentive in that they would be recognized as published authors; and it would be accessible to the international scholarly and practitioner communities. For more information, see my articles on Google Scholar and the barriers that NGOs face in getting access to research literature.

When you are in the first stages of creating your web site, identify existing web sites or organizations that provide you with a model of success so that you can get ideas from them. Try to find web sites that can demonstrate effectiveness (e.g., by the amount of community members they have mobilized, or the number of visitors they get). Look at award-winning sites for ideas about design and functions, but don't get too wedded to them; many sites are granted awards for their looks rather than their effectiveness, and others cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop. Since most web sites are not evaluated for effectiveness, try to see evidence of success rather than just looking at design and functionality. For example, craigslist.com is an award-winning, highly successful community site that has spread to dozens of cities. It might not be what you have in mind, but it's a good model of a simple interface that gives people what they want. (Some of the above points are taken from a previous Charity Village article on designing web sites.)

The web site design should use elements that have been shown to be successful in other contexts.

Following are some key learnings from other online networks, drawn from published literature as well as our own research:

Most users hate remembering usernames and passwords, and logins present a significant barrier to usage. Logins should be as simple as possible, and used only if necessary. The need for privacy in each of the site sections should be examined to ensure that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
Successful interaction requires push as well as pull technologies. Discussion boards must have the option to provide e-mail notification of new postings; otherwise, users will seldom sign on and the site will languish.
E-mail lists must be easy to manage and control by users.
Many people outside the technology arena are still not comfortable with a 3-column web site format and fancy interfaces; they find such web sites cluttered and confusing. Web site design should either be as simple as possible, or promote tools that would be useful in their other work. Discussion groups and web logs are examples of inexpensive, empowering tools that civil society organizations should get more comfortable with.

We usually recommend that small nonprofits use a hosted service for their web sites rather than installing and programming software themselves. Good hosted content management systems can be easily customized by the client, and most can be switched to different providers/vendors after the web site launch if support is unsatisfactory. Possible choices are Drupal (hosted by Bryght), Blogware, Invision PowerBoard, and WebCrossing Intranets depending on the needs of the web site. I posted a brief article on inexpensive CMSs in 2003, and much of the information is still current.

There are seven steps in creating a collaborative web site:

1. Definition of your audience and the outcomes that the web site aims to achieve (also called the definition of user requirements).

2. A list of components and criteria that are necessary in order to meet the objectives listed in the first step (e.g., do we need to have a password protected area?)

3. Information architecture and design. (If possible, use commonly understood, 'standard' elements rather than trying to look original. You need to make the site as easy to use as possible.) Before you can create an information architecture, you need to be pretty sure of what content you want on the site.

On the basis of the first three steps, you should have a document or a set of PowerPoint slides that lists the web site's structure, functionality and other specifications in enough detail to build it. The requirements may go through several drafts with stakeholders before a programmer touches the web site, or even before you decide on the software that it will be built on.

4. Comparison and selection of software and technology provider. I have put this as the fourth step because it is difficult to select a content management system before knowing what you are trying to do. For example, you may need to have your administrative functions available in French. However, you may be committed to a technology provider (like your own I.T. staff) who may be knowledgeable about a particular software program. In that case, you may not get exactly what you want, but that's okay. Just ensure that your users get a simple, easy-to-use site that meets their needs. Otherwise, switch the software.

5. Writing the content. For some reason, organizations seem to underestimate the time that is necessary to actually write the information in the web site. We have been hired to develop sites where the content was several months late because the client that was responsible for content just couldn't get around to writing it. The site must be launched with adequate material in it, and most of the content should be completed before the final design of the web site and architecture.

6. Customization and testing of the web site. Most organizations also underestimate the time it takes for software programming and testing. Even simple customizations of off-the-shelf web sites take more time than you think. Some pilot testing of the site by real users is essential, and you will almost certainly find things that must be changed. You have to have enough time and probably some programming resources to fix things before you launch.

7. Launch. For an interactive site involving community involvement, the launch of a web site is as important as any other public launch. People must be invited, the forums - if you have any - must be seeded, and software bugs must be fixed as soon as they are spotted.

With this approach, you may not get the community web site of your dreams, but it's more likely to be successful.

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

gkerr at realworldsystems.net

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Saturday, February 26

Coping with e-mail in 2005 - spam, viruses, phishing, security and privacy

by Gillian Kerr on Sat 26 Feb 2005 08:00 PM EST

Now that we're all dependent on e-mail, it's taking over our lives. Here's some advice on dealing with spam and other e-mail cons, dangers and irritants over the next year - until it gets worse.

Posted on Charity Village February 10, 2005.

Remember life without e-mail? Ten years ago, in 1995, Compuserve and AOL connected their proprietary bulletin board systems to the Internet, making a unified e-mail standard available to everybody. The explosive growth of e-mail has been at least as transformative as the World Wide Web, and represents one of the fastest proliferations of innovations in history (along with television and radio). [See this pdf article for more detail.]

Unfortunately, as e-mail use has spread, the usual parasites, criminals and cons have followed it, and are doing their best to suck money out of the online population. Life online is feeling more and more like an arms race between prey and predators.

SPAM

Nonprofits suffer in several ways:

Consumer rage against spammers is going to be directed against any messages asking for money, even messages that consumers originally agreed to. People forget that they asked for updates from charities, and just react against the endless stream of requests. Nonprofits need to keep updating their e-mail fundraising and communication strategies to minimize anger from donors and potential donors.
Spam filters are getting tougher, to the point where legitimate bulk messages are routinely rejected. For a while, I couldn't send e-mails to a colleague at a Canadian university because the overloaded IT staff had decided to reject all e-mail coming from Sympatico servers. Apparently sympatico.ca wasn't filtering out spam messages so all of their users were penalized. More recently, I'm seeing my e-mails rejected if I include words like 'free', 'service' and other spam-like words (as in "immigrant services are free for government-sponsored refugees but not for refugee claimants"). And the problem with spam filters is that mail just disappears; the sender is not notified that the e-mail isn't delivered. Robin Good purposely misspells many of the words in his excellent and informative newsletters to fool spam filters, but he must keep updating them to keep up with the latest ones. And some filters block all messages from developing countries using IP blocking.
Individual users are acting as their own spam filters. Increasingly, I'm finding that e-mails are deleted if the recipient doesn't know the sender, even when the recipient has asked for information. E-mail users go through so much junk, they just delete most e-mail without reading it. Nonprofits pay two ways: their e-mails are being rejected, and their staff are spending way too much time going through junk e-mails. If you haven't heard, "Oh, sorry, I deleted your message because I didn't recognize your name," get ready for it.
The cost of dealing with spam is horrendous, in terms of wasted time, storage space, bandwidth and so on. Nonprofits who have their own IT staff are using precious IT support time fighting the spam arms race. Nonprofits without IT support are wasting staff time by restricting e-mail use or going through endless junk e-mails.

Viruses are a weird variant of spam. They prey on the Internet population but instead of money, their creators get fame among their own community. Social networks, human ingenuity, voluntarism, and community-building have their negative sides. It's fascinating to read about the culture of hackers/crackers, but the impact of viruses is terribly destructive to the civic space of the internet.

PHISHING & SECURITY

Phishing is a popular - and effective - con in which victims get an e-mail from a 'legitimate' web site asking for password verification. When they click on the e-mail's link and log onto the web site - apparently PayPal or their own bank or whatever - they are actually giving their username and password to a con artist. It's a huge problem and it's astounding how many people fall for it.

Nonprofits are penalized in two ways:

Donors are getting more suspicious of e-mail as a way to respond to fund solicitations. It's a similar problem to spam, but it attacks the legitimacy of e-mails by making knowledgeable users question whether e-mails from your agency are really from criminals.
Nonprofit staff who fall for phishing schemes may be revealing more than their own bank accounts. Most people use the same passwords for multiple web sites, including intranets and databases with client information. And someone who falls for a phishing attack will be the same person who uses the name of their cat as a password. (You know who you are.) Phishers often capture usernames and passwords for a trivial web site and then try them out on more important services. Good password policies are extremely hard to implement and monitor, and with online-accessible databases we are creating a system that is wide open for abuse. If nonprofit staff aren't using strong passwords that are unique for each service (which requires training, discipline and an encrypted password list like the free Password Safe), your agency's information is vulnerable.

PRIVACY AND BACKUP

Imagine that all of your work-related telephone conversations and many of your personal phone calls over the past few years was taped and transcribed, and could be instantly searched by your boss, even after you left the organization. That's what is happening with e-mails and instant messages. Our dependence on e-mails means that a big part of our relationships are being captured in text. The launch of excellent free desktop search programs are creating great anxiety among people who thought that personal e-mails (and documents) could stay hidden in their computers. Confidential information takes only seconds to locate.

Implications for nonprofits? Confidential client or donor information, as well as embarrassing reminders of past errors, may be searchable in old e-mail archives. On the other hand, it can be really helpful to have information from old communications. Document management policies should describe how long people should save e-mails, how they are backed up, and who may have access to them. Many staff are unaware that their e-mails are backed up centrally and may be subpoenaed or used in human resource actions.

Speaking of backup, you do know how often your data is being backed up, right? And when it is deleted, and who has access to it?

CONCLUSIONS

The big technology companies like Microsoft and, well, all of them, are concerned about the threat of spam and viruses to the viability of the internet as a safe place to interact and buy things. Expect to see interesting responses to spam and other problems, but prepare for disruption to your e-mail services while solutions are tried out.

Despite these problems, I believe that e-mail is a boon to most organizations, in the same way that telephones are a vital tool for most workers. Problem is, its strength - the ability to communicate with many people at once - is also its vulnerability. It's going to take us a while to figure out how to minimize its disadvantages while using its potential to connect with each other.

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

gkerr at realworldsystems.net

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Monday, January 10

Technology-mediated living for people with disabilities - and the rest of us

by Gillian Kerr on Mon 10 Jan 2005 07:35 PM EST

Posted on Charity Village January 4, 2005

When I worked with deaf and hard of hearing people in the 1980s, it was clear that advances in information technology would soon make community life far more accessible for people with sensory disabilities. In fact, this promise of transformation was one of the big reasons I became fascinated with technology. Unfortunately, it's taking much longer than I thought it would. There are several reasons for the delay in realizing the potential of technology for people with disabilities:

Existing tools prevent better alternatives

For example, e-mail, which provides an alternative to telephone conversations and is a great way for deaf people to communicate easily with the hearing world, was not adopted by the deaf community for many years because it is incompatible with TTYs (also called TDDs). TTYs, introduced in the 1960s and based on old teletype machines, were like simple e-mail appliances but could only communicate with other TTYs. By the time e-mail was introduced, there was a huge installed base of TTYs among deaf people and service providers, and the deaf community was shackled to this obsolete technology. It has taken decades to replace TTYs in favour of the more accessible and powerful e-mail, and TTYs are still around.

This is sometimes called the ‘QWERTY problem'. Computer keyboards are arranged in the same way as their ancestral 1872 typewriters, even though the reason for the QWERTY layout (to prevent typewriter keys from sticking together) has long since disappeared. The cost of switching to a new keyboard layout for experienced typists has shackled generations of knowledge workers to a totally irrational skill. Keyboarding skills are so ingrained in fast typists that trying to learn a new layout (I tried Dvorak a few years ago in an attempt to reduce a repetitive stress injury) is a good way to simulate a mild stroke.

You can see evidence of the QWERTY problem everywhere. I'm always amused by public washrooms that have gone through several generations of soap and paper dispensing technology - they are marked by multiple gadgets attached to the wall, and users must try several in succession to find out which is the currently stocked version. Each generation was installed in an effort to reduce costs, but after a few upgrades you end up with expensive rework (replastering the walls, retraining staff) or a junkyard. The alternative is not to change at all, and to become increasingly obsolete.

In other words, the brilliant technical breakdown of one generation becomes the millstone of the next.
Broadly available tools must be based on common standards

Standards are double-edged. Old standards become barriers to innovation, as described in the previous point, but standards also provide an essential base for innovation and adoption. Early telephone systems couldn't communicate with each other because different towns used different communication standards. Like the telephone, the Web and e-mail are becoming core standards for information search and dissemination.

People with disabilities were slow, as a population, to get access to these enabling technologies for a variety of reasons. But as most of them are becoming comfortable with basic communication technology, new solutions will be able to build on those platforms. For example, new voice recognition software is amazingly powerful, but it easily integrates into standard e-mail and word processing programs. If you already have a computer and know how to use a few basic programs, it's no big deal to take advantage of huge leaps in functionality - as long as the interfaces stay the same and it's not too difficult to learn.
Technology is driven by markets

People with disabilities have not been, in general, a high income group, making them an unattractive or irrelevant market for technology companies. Small and obvious technical improvements that would be tremendously useful to a disabled population can take years to achieve just because of their low priority. This situation is changing as a result of two developments.

First, the demographic journey of us baby boomers into the land of declining vision, hearing, and mobility will make a big difference in the awareness of accessibility issues. Just wait until we stomp our collective feet about the teeny print on web sites.

Second, major technology corporations are responding to the enormous market power of the U.S. government mobilized by a recent amendment to the U.S. Rehabilitation Act called Section 508. The U.S. government is the largest purchaser in the world, and by law, it must purchase only computer technology that is accessible to people with disabilities. There are a few exceptions, such as technology that is used solely by soldiers in the battlefield, but otherwise, all vendors must demonstrate to the government that their hardware and software products meet accessibility guidelines for a range of disabilities. As a result, all of the major software and computer companies have invested massive amounts of effort in enhancing their accessibility features. Unfortunately, most web site programmers are still not aware of how to implement these features, and most disabled consumers don't know how to use them. But they are there.

New developments and the future of humans

The distinction between people who use assistive technology and those who don't is not based on disability anymore; it's based on technical sophistication. Anyone who carries around both a mobile phone and a digital music player will see the advantage of a hearing aid that selectively amplifies or dampens external noises while automatically switching from their music to their phones when a call comes in - but only if it's a call they want to take. As the quality of hearing aids improves and the functionality of consumer gadgetry increases, they will become indistinguishable from each other. Already you can buy headphones that cancel out irritating noises like engine roar; there's no reason you couldn't block out tinnitus as well.

Another gadget that I'm looking forward to buying in the next couple of years is a pair of eyeglasses with an integrated computer display. They already exist, and are used by field-service technicians and the like, but I hear the quality isn't very good yet. I'd like to be able to see in the dark, manipulate my computer with eye movements, zoom in to see distant objects in more detail, and take photos or videos of scenes that interest me. And who wouldn't want to select visual channels based on your interests - Star Trek or a videoconference with a friend rather than staring at the old magazines in the doctor's office? Combine the wearable computer display to electrodes that transmit signals into the visual cortex, and voila - you have Jordi from Star Trek Next Generation as well as Jerry, a farmer near Napanee Ontario.

Voice recognition software that transcribes spoken words into text (as well as software that translates text into the spoken word) has been on the market for years, and steadily improving. The latest version of Dragon NaturallySpeaking achieves accuracy of over 98% after some training. Despite its awesome complexity, any reasonably up-to-date computer will be able to handle the processing. Text to speech software now offers different accents and 'personalities', so you can select your favourite voice to read out your e-mails or documents.

The most visible signal of disability is a wheelchair, even though wheelchair users represent a very small proportion of those with disabilities. Wheelchairs are another example of a technical achievement becoming a millstone. A well designed wheelchair is a wonder - light, compact, flexible and responsive. But it can't climb stairs or curbs, and it relegates its users to having most of their conversations at belt-buckle level. Dean Kamen, the inventor of the ridiculous Segway scooter, spent 15 years developing iBOT, a "mobility system" that can replace wheelchairs and can climb stairs, rise up to standing level. Check out the video. It costs over $25,000 US but hey, it's cheaper than renovating your house and allows you to visit your neighbours and go to restaurants. It was approved by the FDA in 2003 after extensive safety testing, and incorporates elaborate gyroscopic mechanisms.

It gets even more interesting. People who are unable to speak may soon be able to communicate through manipulating their own brain patterns. That's actually what any of us do, but we're able to move muscles through brainwaves. Some patients with locked-in syndrome, some of whom are unable even to move their eyes, are experimenting with generating alpha waves to control computer software. Others are moving a cursor around a screen just by thinking about it, wearing a helmet - no electrodes into the brain!

Steve Mann of the University of Toronto, a self-described cyborg activist, has been living as part-machine for years, and very weird he looks, too. And here's a creepy article about another cyborg activist who rewired his arm to connect directly with his computer. These guys are exploring the implications of being permanently wired, and finding fascinating issues around privacy (Steve records everything he sees through a wearable camera), attention, communication, and the potential of computer viruses that could shut down your sensory apparatus.

In a sense, we're all becoming cyborgs - part human, part machine. Many people with disabilities will benefit; either they will be able to adapt off-the-shelf consumer gadgets to meet their needs, or new tools will be developed based on consumer technology. And the rest of us will become accustomed to living technology-mediated lives, spending most of our time connected to a multitude of technical aids that we take completely for granted as extensions of ourselves.

Resistance is useless.

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

gkerr at realworldsystems.net

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Friday, December 10

Academic search engine may help the voluntary sector

by Gillian Kerr on Fri 10 Dec 2004 07:33 PM EST

Posted on Charity Village December 8, 2004.

New Google search for scholarly literature

Google has launched Google Scholar, a specialized search engine restricted to scholarly literature, such as peer reviewed articles, technical reports, theses and abstracts. It includes results from subscription-based online journals that are hidden from the public web. For more information, see Google Scholar's FAQ.

Google is offering to include posted reports from eligible professional associations. This is an opportunity for the voluntary sector to disseminate research and reports without big investments in OAI compliant archives, as I recommended in an earlier article. If a website such as www.nonprofitscan.ca was included in Google Scholar, it could instantly provide a free search function on its own site at the same time as joining the international scholarly literature.

Post your reports on Google Scholar!

Anyone doing research in the voluntary sector is constantly frustrated by the difficulty in finding relevant publications. Yet hundreds of reports and studies are written annually, many of them posted on individual agency web sites. Some studies are submitted to research journals and thereby disappear from public view - unless you belong to a university and can get access through the library.

'Grey literature' is the term for scholarly papers that are not published in a public journal. Most of the research in the sector is in the form of grey literature, and while some of it is of poor quality, some is excellent.

Google Scholar may provide an inexpensive way to make this literature searchable and accessible. It includes both published and grey literature, and even books that are not online, or journal articles that are only in hard copy. The search is designed to provide the kind of information that researchers look for, such as the number of times other researchers have cited the article.

In the case of many published journal articles, Scholar will link to an abstract and then give you the link to the publisher's site, where you can buy the full text. Scholar now includes the full catalogs of 29 major academic publishers, with more to come.

Books or hard copy articles are also listed, as long as they are cited in an online article that is posted on Google Scholar. Scholar will even help you find a library that stocks the book.

In the case of posted grey literature, Scholar will link directly to the text. So if a nonprofit agency is able to post its reports, searchers will be able to quickly find it while simultaneously searching for the more conventional academic papers. The voluntary sector needs to do three things before it can use Google Scholar. First, we need a few gatekeeper organizations that will define, approve, and post eligible documents, and convince Google to include its repositories in its scholarly database. We don't want to see service brochures or annual reports listed as scholarly literature. The new organization that is emerging from the Canadian Centre for Philanthropy and the Coalition of National Voluntary Organizations would be a natural choice for this role, but there could be many others.

Second, there should be a quality control mechanism to allow users to filter their searches. In academia, a peer review process is the accepted way that readers can be sure a report was evaluated for quality and relevance. The voluntary sector should develop a similar process, possibly its own peer review, to increase the legitimacy of the best material - the documents that are worthy of being included in the international scholarly literature. Future Google Scholar features will (I believe) include a way to search only in peer-reviewed articles, and the sector should prepare for that.

Finally, there should be a stable archive for the posted documents using DOI or some other persistent identity so that the documents don't vanish every time an agency redesigns its web site. The simple first step would be for one major nonprofit research organization like NonprofitsCAN or the Canadian Council on Social Development to submit its existing research papers to Google and see what happens.

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

gkerr at realworldsystems.net

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Wednesday, December 1

Should you move to a Voice over IP phone system?

by Gillian Kerr on Wed 01 Dec 2004 07:23 PM EST

[Posted on Charity Village in November 2004]

Telephone systems, as I've often said in these columns, are the most important communication technologies in our daily lives. They are so integrated into our work and relationships that we don't even think of them as being 'information technology'. Yet our phone systems keep getting more complex and functional (look at how mobile phones and voice mail have changed our lives) and there are more big changes on the horizon. The biggest transformation in the next five years or so will involve Voice over Internet Protocol, or VOIP.

VOIP sends spoken conversation over the Internet instead of over regular phone lines. Several instant messaging clients like MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger offer VOIP for computer-to-computer conversations, in which people talk to each other through computer headsets. VOIP has had a bad reputation because of often-poor audio quality, but it's finally improved to the point where major corporations are switching away from Plain Old Telephone Service (often called POTS) to VOIP. And you don't need a computer to use it anymore; you can buy IP phones that plug into your Internet connection just like your regular phone plugs into the phone jack.

With the new VOIP services, agencies can:

Get rid of their current phone systems entirely, and replace them with Internet-based phones that use their broadband Internet connection. Or add Internet-based phone services to their existing system for telecommuters, offsite locations and project staff.
Eliminate long distance charges for staff who work in different cities or even continents. If you work frequently with an organization in India, for example, you could give it a local Toronto phone number. With a broadband Internet connection, your Indian colleagues could call any number in the Toronto calling area for free - and you could call them.
Assign staff to satellite locations like libraries, shopping malls or home offices, and allow phone calls to follow them wherever they go.
Move to another location without changing your phone number, whether it's to permanent new offices or to a temporary space for a couple of weeks while your agency's plumbing problems are fixed.
Set up complicated routing rules so that callers can be automatically forwarded to different phone numbers based on their phone numbers or the time of day. So, for example, your phone extension might ring at the shopping mall on Mondays and Wednesdays, at the library on Tuesdays, and go to voice mail the rest of the time - unless it was from your child's school, in which case it would automatically be forwarded to your office phone.
Get phone numbers for new project staff instantly, and cancel the service as soon as the project is finished. No waiting for a month to get phone lines set up.

These features have been available for a couple of years for companies that are willing to buy and manage the hardware and software to run their own phone systems. They are also available to individuals through services like Vonage. But until now, they haven't been accessible to small organizations and businesses that need a hosted service.

I'm now looking at a new hosted VOIP phone service that, as far as I know, is the first in Canada that is suitable for entire organizations. It's offered by Congruent IP Communications and is based on Nortel's MCS 5200 Communication Server. I haven't finished testing it yet, so I'm not endorsing it, but it's a good example of the services that will be widespread very soon. At a cost of up to $55 CAD/month per user depending on the service package, Congruent offers a full corporate phone system based on broadband Internet. I've heard that Quartet Communications offers a similar service also based on Nortel's technology, but I wasn't able to reach them before this article was written.

Like a regular office PBX, you get a central number with extensions and voice mail. You also get individual direct dial phone numbers for each person, fax-to-email service, voice mail messages that can be sent to email or picked up from the phone, and many other fancy options (for a demonstration you can contact Congruent). The voice quality seems great, though I haven't tested it in depth. Long distance charges anywhere in Canada and the continental US are 4.5c/minute (CAD) unless you are calling someone on the Congruent network; in that case, there are no long distance charges.

The price of full-featured VOIP is similar to regular phone service, but with many more features and a few disadvantages. The major advantage is the ability to grow and shrink your telecommunications structure quickly as projects come and go, and to enable more flexibility in where you offer services. Agencies may be able to cut down on office costs because staff aren't tied to telephone 'land lines'. Telecommuting becomes much easier, because office extensions can forward transparently to staff wherever they are. (And they can maintain privacy since staff don't need to give out their home phone numbers to anyone.)

VOIP can handle some kinds of business disruptions better than regular phone service. Disaster recovery is simple - if your office is closed down because of fire or flood, you can instantly forward everyone's phone lines to other locations or have people plug into another Internet broadband connection in rented accommodations.

One big disadvantage of VOIP is that your voice services are dependent on your Internet connection, so if that goes down (e.g., because of a power shortage in your building), you've lost your phone system. Poor Internet connections will decrease the voice quality, so you may require a better Internet service than the one you have now. Organizations should have a regular phone line or a mobile phone to call emergency services if the connection goes down. For more technical and historical information about VOIP, see this article.

There are similar phone systems available in the Toronto area that provide some but not all of these features. RealWorld Systems currently uses Unite for our corporate phone system, which we've found reliable and inexpensive, but it only forwards to existing phones rather than replacing them.

Some of the available VOIP features may sound weird or irrelevant at first blush. For instance, with a wireless Internet network, staff can use pocket PCs as wireless telephones, sending and receiving email and text messages or taking notes on their tiny handheld computers while talking on their headsets. It will take creativity and persistence for agencies to figure out how to use the amazing computing power available to them. For instance, I'd like to see more accessible and cheaper phone interpreting services, in which interpreters set up 3-way call conferencing between clients and service providers in remote locations, using encrypted voice communications while at the same time tracking the length and type of calls for billing purposes. Unfortunately, people get freaked out by too much complexity, so for now, VOIP will do better by looking like regular phone services. Still, as Jill Rucci from Congruent says, "This service allows you to control your communications on a whole new level - this is going to change everything".

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Tuesday, August 31

Research on distance collaboration

by Gillian Kerr on Tue 31 Aug 2004 07:19 PM EDT

Posted on Charity Village in August 2004

This article is a summary of recent research literature on the benefits and success factors related to dispersed teams. I've been pulling it together for a couple of projects, and though this month's column may be dense, the references might be useful for people who are trying to design collaboration initiatives.

Distance collaboration is difficult to manage successfully (Olson & Olson, 2000), but with the changing nature of work, dispersed teams are ubiquitous (O'Leary & Cummings, 2004). Most of us don't have a choice - we use phone and email to communicate with most of our colleagues at least some of the time. More and more often we're working in dispersed teams, where at least some people on a project are in a different location from others. A growing field of research is showing how to manage dispersed teams successfully, and what the advantages are.

The two major benefits of distance collaboration are in innovation and productivity. It turns out, not surprisingly, that innovation is more likely to happen when new ideas are brought into a group. In practice, new ideas are brought in through the social and work networks of the group members, so for innovation, you want a group that is linked to diverse external networks through their various relationships. In fact, diversity seems to be an essential condition for learning and innovation (Nooteboom & Gilsing, 2004). If you can manage a dispersed work group, you can systematically pull in a highly diverse team who can later be assigned to another team, ensuring that new ideas are spread throughout the organization. See Cummings (2004) for details. It's important to note that successful innovations also are more likely to happen in organizations that encourage knowledge sharing with external networks, and encourage group members to communicate relevant information between each other.

Productivity includes impact as well as efficiency and cost effectiveness. For example, improved productivity can mean that a team does the same work faster or cheaper, or it can mean that the team's work is higher quality and has more impact on the organization. In academic research, productivity could be measured by impact factors of published papers, research citations, or number of peer-reviewed articles approved.

Impact and quality is higher when project teams can take advantage of experts who don't happen to be located nearby (Faraj & Sproull, 2000). This is related to the importance of diverse networks, but it also is tied to the increased knowledge available to teams who can engage distant contributors (Majchrzak, Malhotra, Stamps, & Lipnack, 2004).

Efficiency and cost effectiveness is improved when teams can be built and managed without moving them all to the same physical location. Distance collaboration processes, though difficult to establish at the beginning, can be spread throughout an organization and dramatically reduce the costs and failure rates of dispersed teams (Beise, 2004; Powell, Piccoli, & Ives, 2004). Other potential sources of efficiency include lower costs for training (Kirschner & van Bruggen, 2004), and if flexible satellite offices are enabled, reduced costs for physical plans and office occupancies. Note that dispersed teams are not the same as telecommuting (for discouraging reviews of telework and productivity, see (Bailey & Kurland, 2002; Westfall, 2004).

Management processes in dispersed teams

Dr. Jonathon Cummings, after many years of studying dispersed teams in major organizations, summarizes the most important effective management practice thus: "What should work group leaders make sure to do when members are geographically dispersed rather than co-located? The empirical evidence...provides one simple answer - communicate frequently with members," informally and outside meetings, face to face if possible and by phone if not. (Cummings, In press)

According to his research and others', in virtual teams, leaders have a paradoxical role. They have to provide the interface between the team and the broader organization, negotiating expectations and resources between them. They have to provide a constant stream of informal and formal communication between members to ensure lines of communication stay open and that problems are identified before they get too serious. But they also have to allow multiple routes for information flow so they don't end up as 'bottlenecks'. Some research suggests that many leaders restrict information flow out of 'ego needs', dramatically reducing the effectiveness of their teams. In co-located teams, it might be easier for members to communicate informally even if the leader is trying to impose too much centralization. In distributed teams, with less opportunity for informal conversation, this creates a serious problem for effectiveness and can cripple a team. (Cross, Parker, & Borgatti, 2002; Cummings, 2004; Cummings & Cross, 2003)

Communication norms within groups include predictability. If people don't respond to their messages in a reasonable time, the team falls apart. This is a crucial norm and must be described and enforced. Team members that break agreements decrease trust, and the performance of the team is compromised (Aubert & Kelsey, 2003; Piccoli & Ives, 2003). A 'reasonable time' might be defined as within 2 hours in one project, or within a week in another project, but most sectors have norms (such as one business day) when specific expectations are not negotiated.

Project management research suggests that at minimum, teams define measurable objectives and milestones, and then revise the project as required based on continued monitoring of those milestones (De Meyer, Loch, & Pich, 2002). Otherwise distance projects tend to fail because they are 'out of sight and out of mind' (Fussell, Kiesler, Setlock, & Scupelli, 2004). Appropriate technology is vital here because tools like instant messaging can remind team members of the presence of their colleagues (Majchrzak et al., 2004).

I'm planning to list a number of other management processes that appear to lead to more successful collaborations, as well as describe the kinds of technology that are most useful. If you'd like to be kept updated, e-mail me at gkerr at realworldsystems.net.

References

Aubert, B. A., & Kelsey, B. L. (2003). Further understanding of trust and performance in virtual teams. Small Group Research, 34(5), 575-618.

Bailey, D. E., & Kurland, N. B. (2002). A review of telework research: Findings, new directions, and lessons for the study of modern work. Journal Of Organizational Behavior, 23, 383-400.

Beise, C. M. (2004). IT project management and virtual teams. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Computer personnel research: Careers, culture, and ethics in a networked environment, Tucson, AZ, US.

Cross, R., Parker, A., & Borgatti, S. (2002). A bird's-eye view: Using social network analysis to improve knowledge creation and sharing. Executive strategy reports. Retrieved July 16 2004

Cummings, J. N. (2004). Work groups, structural diversity, and knowledge sharing in a global organization. Management Science, 50(3), 13.

Cummings, J. N. (In press). Leading groups from a distance: How to mitigate consequences of geographic dispersion. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers, Inc.

Cummings, J. N., & Cross, R. (2003). Structural properties of work groups and their consequences for performance. Social Networks, 25, 197-210.

De Meyer, A., Loch, C. H., & Pich, M. T. (2002). Managing project uncertainty: From variation to chaos. Mit Sloan Management Review, 43(2), 60-+.

Faraj, S., & Sproull, L. (2000). Coordinating expertise in software development teams. Management Science, 46(12), 1554-1568.

Fussell, S. R., Kiesler, S., Setlock, L. D., & Scupelli, P. (2004). Effects of instant messaging on the management of multiple project trajectories. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 2004 conference on Human factors in computing systems, Vienna Austria.

Kirschner, P. A., & van Bruggen, J. (2004). Learning and understanding in virtual teams. Cyberpsychology & Behavior, 7(2), 135-139.

Majchrzak, A., Malhotra, A., Stamps, J., & Lipnack, J. (2004). Can absence make a team grow stronger. Harvard Business Review, 82(5), 131-+.

Nooteboom, B., & Gilsing, V. A. (2004, 19-Jan-2004). Density and strength of ties in innovation networks: A competence and governance view. ERIM Report Series Research in Management Retrieved July 30, 2004, from https://ep.eur.nl/handle/1765/1124.

O'Leary, M. B., & Cummings, J. N. (2004). Geographic dispersion in teams: The interplay of theory and methods. Unpublished - May 4, 2004, 48.

Olson, G. M., & Olson, J. S. (2000). Distance matters. Human-Computer Interaction, 15(2-3), 139-178.

Piccoli, G., & Ives, B. (2003). Trust and the unintended effects of behavior control in virtual teams. Mis Quarterly, 27(3), 365-395.

Powell, A., Piccoli, G., & Ives, B. (2004). Virtual teams: A review of current literature and directions for future research. ACM SIGMIS Database, 35(1), 6-36.

Westfall, R. D. (2004). Does telecommuting really increase productivity? Fifteen rival hypotheses. Communications of the ACM Volume 47, Issue 8 (August 2004). Retrieved July 30 2004 from http://www.cyberg8t.com/westfalr/prdctvty.html.

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Saturday, July 10

Video games come to the boardroom

by Gillian Kerr on Sat 10 Jul 2004 07:31 PM EDT

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.

Virtual Boardroom

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

gkerr at realworldsystems.net

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Friday, June 25

Cheap Online Presentations using PowerPoint

by Gillian Kerr on Fri 25 Jun 2004 07:26 PM EDT

Posted on Charity Village May 4, 2004.

In a recent project for Citizenship and Immigration Canada, Anne Simard and I led a series of workshops on 'Results-Based Management' for settlement agencies across Canada. The objective was to develop logic models and an evaluation framework for national settlement services.

Only one person from each agency was invited to participate in the day-long face-to-face workshops due to travel costs and the importance of having small intense interactions. However, many additional settlement staff wanted to be involved in the consultation. As an alternative to the face-to-face meetings, we posted our presentation and the handouts on the web, and offered people in the sector the opportunity to comment via e-mail or phone conversations.

We were surprised at the interest. Many people downloaded and listened to the presentations, and even passed around the link to others. We heard that some agency staff listened to the presentation as a way to get an introduction to logic models, even if they weren't involved in settlement itself. It turned out to be an effective way of expanding the consultation process, and a great way to use online presentations.

There are two ways to make online presentations; live and canned. In a live presentation, you can use a web conference tool like the ones I describe here to present to a group of people who are watching presentation materials that you are demonstrating on your computer or have posted onto the web. People can ask questions and interact with each other during the event. Another alternative is to record your presentation and post it on the web; the canned presentation.

The advantage of having a canned presentation is that the content is available any time, and you don't have to deal with the considerable logistical challenges of getting everyone to solve their computer access problems and log in at the right time to join a live presentation. There are an astounding number of technical problems that come up when people are beginning to use web conferences, and while I use them frequently, I'm learning that it takes most people a few times before they are comfortable with the approach.

Canned presentations can also be combined with handouts, articles and other learning materials, and can be followed up with teleconferences or interactive discussion groups.

Last month, I made two additional online presentations for a group of researchers who work in the area of early childhood development with the support of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. The topics are 'Making effective presentations' and 'Managing complex research projects'. They are posted publicly on our web site, and you can test them out to see whether you like the technology.

All of the presentations were recorded in one sitting at my computer using a regular headset and Microsoft PowerPoint, plus one of the many PowerPoint plug-ins that are available. I intentionally didn't edit them after recording them, so you get all of the ums and ahs that you'd get in a live session; I wanted to show how this technology works in the real world.

Software for online presentations

There are many options for posting PowerPoint presentations online, and the options are getting simpler all the time. This is an inexpensive way to provide training or to communicate with a group over distance.

All of the options I describe work with Microsoft PowerPoint, and work mainly with Windows. I'm sure there are other approaches, but they are harder to find.

Presentation Broadcast for PowerPoint. This free download from Microsoft is very easy to use, though it is not as nice looking as Apreso, which is the plug-in I chose. If you need to edit after you record your presentation, you can export the content into Microsoft Producer, which is another free download, but much more complicated and difficult to use.
Apreso offers a free trial for 30 days and then costs $149 US for the audio version. I liked it a lot, though it doesn't yet offer an ability to edit. They hope to revise the software to allow editing in the next few months.
PowerPoint to Flash Conversion Tools - This article, by the master of consumer testing, Robin Good, lists the top 20 software solutions from his perspective. Advantages to Flash presentations include compatibility with a wide range of browsers and operating systems, small file sizes, security and so on. I haven't tested all of these tools myself.

The simpler services do not allow editing; you have to be relaxed about talking to the slides, making occasional errors, and not worrying that it's supposed to be perfect. It keeps the presentation informal. You should do a test run first to get comfortable with the software and to make sure you can play it back.

After you have created the audio/PowerPoint presentation, you have to post it on the web. If you need to play it to many people you probably will require some type of media hosting or streaming service. Most nonprofits will not require hosting for heavy traffic, but if they do they should look at services like Apreso Online (a companion service to Apreso) or media hosting. Audio presentations take up a lot of space and bandwidth on a web server; generally half a megabyte per minute of audio.

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

gkerr at realworldsystems.net

Permanent Link

Thursday, June 10

Costing Business Processes

by Gillian Kerr on Thu 10 Jun 2004 07:29 PM EDT

Posted on Charity Village June 9, 2004.

Last month an Open Standards Benchmarking Collaborative was launched by a group of major international corporations including World Bank and IBM. According to its sponsor, the American Productivity and Quality Center, the initiative will "revolutionize how organizations improve performance by creating a publicly accessible framework for measuring performance." Over time, they plan to collect a wide range of costs that have been submitted by members so that organizations can benchmark their own performance against similar organizations or across other sectors.

These benchmarks have the potential for helping nonprofits to reduce costs for key business processes by showing them (a) how to measure what they currently spend, (b) what other similar organizations are spending on the same processes, and (c) best practices on how to improve their performance. The activities that will be measured are listed in APQC's Process Classification Framework, which is described in the appendix below.

Many agencies never examine their processes carefully, resulting in extremely inefficient administrative functions. One agency I knew discovered it was spending about $40 in today's dollars for each invoice that it sent out, because new financial processes just kept growing on old ones without ever being streamlined. They dramatically redesigned their invoicing system. Another agency discovered that it was spending over $50/hour (again in today's dollars) in staff and operational costs for every single hour of volunteer involvement. In other words, a two-hour advisory meeting of 10 volunteers would cost the agency an average of about $1,000 when all direct and indirect costs were added in. As a result, they began using volunteers much more strategically.

The activity of measuring real costs for activities is a powerful intervention even without benchmarking. Measuring your own costs almost always leads to a painful awareness of the ways that processes can be improved as well as building an almost automatic business case for change. However, it's not necessarily obvious how much processes should cost, or what they would cost if you were following 'best practices'. It might be useful to know, for example, that the median cost of delivering a paycheck is $6.40 U.S, but that efficient processes can lower that cost to $3.22. If you're spending $15 to deliver each paycheck, you might focus change efforts on that process rather than another one where your costs are closer to the 'best performers'. Here's a longer description of how the benchmarking process works.

Mind you, it's rather dangerous to apply benchmarks from other sectors. Nonprofits have cost structures that are closer to small businesses (usually defined as having fewer than 50 employees) than to large corporations, and benchmarking initiatives tend to focus on larger companies. Furthermore, nonprofits aren't exposed to the same kind of financial competition as market-driven businesses, and though they do get pressure from funders it may not be based on process efficiency.

An even bigger danger with benchmarks is that they don't necessarily take account of non-financial costs and benefits. You might be able to deliver a paycheck for $3.00, but in a way that is so unreliable and inconvenient for your employees that they hate to work there. Or you might be able to serve 25 clients per hour, but only by giving them ineffective services. Or you might be able to save money