TechCrunch has reported a leaked slide from a Yahoo internal meeting which intimates the once popular social bookmarking site delicious.com (owned by Yahoo) may be shut down. It’s early days yet, only being a couple of hours since the report appeared on TechCrunch, but the online world is already responding.

At the moment, #delicious is trending on twitter, Australia – not worldwide, which is likely to be a time zone issue.  The general reception seems to be “Nooooo!” and an online petition #savedelicious on activist social media tool act.ly has been started. I have signed it immediately, because this is the one tool that has stayed the course throughout my Masters in Information and Knowledge Management, keeping track of information, issues and developements in the libraries and information sciences sector. The silver lining of this cloud is that I can share with you a global live map of all the people who have signed this petition! Social media is marvellous, until they shut it down. However, let’s be circumspect about this, as there is no official communication confirming this from Yahoo.

Obviously, though, people like to be prepared, and there are already alternatives to delicious being passed around, evernote, for example, and zotero are two that come to mind. A list of other alternatives is available here. I’ll be keeping my ears open for more news about this, because this has pretty big ramifactions for not only the daao blog, but also designing research capabilities into the daao. It just goes to show that software / application dependency for collaborative research tools must be addressed, and that future-proofing is built into any strategy.

Further resources:

How to export delicious tags html

How to export delicious tags to spreadsheet

Recently, inventor and writer Mark Pesce blogged about web 2.0 and underlying motivations for why people engage collaboratively on crowdsourced web projects. What I like about this post is how he has grounded design theory in a number of social behaviours that drive web 2.0 and social media: sharing, connecting, contributing, regulating, and iterating. It is a very good discussion of value in today’s standards of web content, where relevance and currency is dependant on the openness of your data.

When you think about your design – both technically and from the user’s experience – you must consider how open you want to be, and weigh the price of openness (extra work, unpredictability) against the price of being closed (less useful).  The highest praise you can receive for your work is when someone wants to use it in their own. For this to happen, you have to leave the door open for them.  If you publish the APIs to access the data you collect; if you build your work modularly, with clearly defined interfaces; if you use standards such as RSS and REST where appropriate, you will create something that others can re-use.

Mark Pesce – The Soul of Web 2.0 (Nov 2010) (read the whole post)

This is our current take on colours – it injects two secondary colours which makes the mono a bit brighter without confusing the eye as much as the teal/orange version.

Keep in mind that the block of red /green (see image) will normally be mostly hidden – this much colour is only while looking at the sub menus.

Here is a pass at integrating the two looks — social and mono. What we’re preferring is the `social gravity` look which looses the orange and moves the mono grey into a cool muted naval colour. It’s a little too close to UNSW blue possibly.

Also included is an experiment where we just rolled the social colours over the mono look — it’s called `Social plus`.

Feedback is, as usual, welcomed.

I thought this DAAO blog would be a great place to share the direction I’m going with looking at community engagement, especially with regards to social media strategy. As part of my literature review, I’m looking at practical guides to social media, and this post is a little foray into the ideas coming though in this field.

Tharon Howard (2010) has a nice way of talking about successful elements of online communities. These are renumeration, influence, belonging and significance. This structure is  useful because it foregrounds sociability – social beings in a social context. And, if there’s one thing I’ve noticed about successful how to books on social media and web design, it’s the chatty informal tone of people talking about people. (see also Brown 2006, Weinschenk, 2010)

Remuneration: or the return on investment of peoples’ time and energy. This element can be reflected in the interface design, in the information architecture, the content…etc. Howard suggests techniques such as seeding discussion, removing the fear factor by providing examples of how to participate, creating regular events, using a system to represent membership contribution levels.

Influence: giving members a clear sense that they have a voice and actually have control over how that voice is heard within the community. This area is concerned with actively asking participants why they are interested in joining, and using profiles to give identity to your community base. Also includes tips on grouping like-minded contributors together – eg novices with novices, so that people can learn from each other.

Belonging: cultivating a sense of community, and emotional attachment. My inner buddhist is a little alarmed at aspiring to create this, (detach! detach!)  however it is important to note the emotional pay offs in social media. When someone 🙂 at me on twitter with a thanks for #followfriday, I know that I feel a little more connected to the twittersphere. Howard recommends techniques such as establishing protocols and routines, (eg, like twitter’s #followfriday) and maintaining consistent visual identity with colours, symbols etc. A story of origin can be very powerful (ahem, bible!) in cohering a community, but it could be as simple as a congenial fireside chat paragraph on the about page.

Significance: the broader picture, and success of the whole community. Howard explores the paradox of exclusivity and social capital (oh hai Bordieu!), in a chapter that discusses PR, marketing, and policy making. It’s a way of talking about strategic direction as it relates to how people relate to their community. For “community designers” this aspect returns user approaches to the broader general strategic direction of creating the community in the first place. After a semester of Knowledge Management earlier this year, I have renewed interest in strategic direction / organisational strategy / mission statements etc!  Detailed analysis of these documents will provide the best guidance for your community building and knowledge sharing strategies.

What do you think about the experience of being in an online community? Are there any that stand out as outstandingly good or shudderingly awful? I’m keen to hear your thoughts.

PS – please email g.fuller[at]unsw.edu.au or l.stokes[at]unsw.edu.au to turn on commenting rights if you are not yet a member of this blog.

Further reading:

Howard, Tharon W., (2010) Design to Thrive: Creating Social Networks and Online Communities that Last, Elsevier Company.

Brown, Daniel M (2006) Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning, New Riders.

Weinschenk, Susan , (2010) The Psychologist’s View of UX Design

Two directions for the look and feel. Note : we’re not looking at content or layout – just look and feel ( colours, line weights, treatment ). We’re calling these `social` and `mono`.

We are currently seeking feedback from  Key Users/Contributors about how we are expanding certain areas of data capture in the database. Below is a short (6 min) video in which Jo Croucher (Our Data Manager) and I talk through some of the issues that we are using this abridged version of database to test.  Those of you who have been asked to test this have been sent an email.

Click here to see  AbridgedSchemaTest2

Feedback notes:

Friday; Feedback two CIs/Editorial Board Members.

Negative ( which is a good thing when trying to solve a problem!)

Too much information on works? is measurement necessary?

Too many stubs will be generated if we create record files for each ROLE associated with the production of works ( particularly in design)? Ie. we don’t need a record for Kambrook associated with Musset’s kettle. Just need to be able to note that Kambrook  made it. ?

Requests for clear citation policy (I agree but  this is an editorial Board issue- over to you!)

Positive( also useful)

Like the way that works can be dividied into parts- helps with complex works.

Like the way that Roles will now be searchable.   Also appreciate the inclusion of curators and arts professionals.

Appreciate the logic of associating medium with work, rather than a person.  So person  + Role and Medium +work.

Tuesday; CI x2  ( I CI also Ed board)

Measurement is important and should stay as field for design objects. ( 1)

Both want clear citation and additional reading policies.

Issues with category confusion over medium- ie Musset eg. Is Industrial design of the same order as Plastics etc… (totally right- catgeories get covered by TAGs and medium is medium and relates to a specific work.)

Agree that we don’t need records for every associate- we need to define primary roles ( ie Creator, curator etc)  who get full records and secondary roles ( ie Kambrook in the Musset eg) who don’t.

I attended an Acquia webinar last week on Drupal Commons. There will be a recording of it here shortly (look for November 11 2010).

Drupal Commons is a pre packaged Drupal 6 (D6) distribution by Acquia. It includes an install profile, a patched D6 core, a set of community sourced modules, some Acquia modules and a Drupal Commons core (glue) module.

Drupal Commons goal is to provide an out of the box community building solution based on Drupal. It requires a lot of memory (128MB to PHP minimum) and runs heavy. A D7 release is on the cards but has no release date – too many modules require D7 ports at this stage.

Here are a list of modules broken down into feature sets:

Content / Collaboration

• OG (organic groups)
• Shoutbox
• Tagadelic
• Drupal Wiki
• Freelinking
• Profiles (core)
• CCK (content types)
• Discussions
• + 10 more

Users

• Profiles (core)
• Relationships (friending)
• Heartbeat
• Userpoints (reputation) but not Badges (though that’s possible)

Personalisation

• Flags (bookmarks)
• Panels + Context (custom layout per path)
• Apache SOLR (filters for search)
• Acquia Search (from Acquia Network Subscription – a pay service – for faceted results and content recommendation)

Management

• Quant + Charting
• Featured

General

• Admin menu
• CTools
• Calendar, Date and Time
• Flags
• Messaging + Notifications
• Strongarm (configuration in code)
• Token
• Skinr (theming)
• Rules
• Vertical Tabs (theming)
• jQuery UI (theming)

Features not in Commons but requested (contribute to http://commons.acquia.com/ to add your vote)

• Projects
• Subgroups
• per group layout
• per group content types
• Homebox (user level dashboard)
• community tagging
• popular content block
• private messaging
• document management

Acquia offer Commons open and as a managed service, as an implementation service and with their network subscription.

Huge meeting last Thursday with DAAO core team (Jo, Olivia and me) and the House of Laudanum team ( Zina, Snow and Lotte (who skyped in from Amsterdam).

Snow talking us through some of the ways we can automate data entry making the task less onerous and more accurate.

We talked a lot about the contributor- that is the person who will write accurate quality biographies and enter accurate relevant data in the metadata fields. When we extend the schema- we are also asking people to enter in more data- to make a greater commitment to the DAAO.  We have to make it worth their while. We can think of this extra value along two different paths: the satisfaction one gets at interacting with good design and seeing a change being made to a record in real-time; and the additional value one gets from being part of a community that is relevant and useful to you.  In the image above, Snow is talking us through how a semi- automated data entry system could help ease the burden of data entry on the contributor. For instance, imagine if you could just cut and paste an exhibitions list into one field, rather than entering every exhibition into a single field?  Too much data entry is placing a big obstacle to to contributing to the DAAO. However, each decision we make has consequences.

If we allow cutting and pasting exhibitions into one field-how will that affect exhibition search results? Could we find a system that structures the data automatically?  For instance, we are thinking about using Open Calais to help use semantically structure the biography text fields so that much of the metadata fields can be automatically populated from the biography text.  Using semantic web technologies (which is important in terms of future proofing our site)  also has implications for the structure of our database.

Only one week back and Olivia is as focused as ever. Lotte on the lap top is holding up well, given that it is 10pm Amsterdam time.

There are always compromises made in the design process- who we do focus on- the contributor ( the person who produces, checks and updates the content) or the user? Of course,  ideally they would overlap considerably (think social media)- but our research shows that they are pretty disparate groups at the moment- which is why ‘community building’ is so pivotal in projects like this.  At this stage, we need to think a lot about the experience of getting content onto the site as we need more content- and it needs to be authorative, up-to date and comprehensive. There is no user without a contributor.

There is lots to do, but the DAAO is in many ways still in its infancy- we can plan for the future, by making priority lists. This process is sometimes called MoSCoW- Must-Should-Could-Want. Because we are developing the project in a modular fashion, we can assign some things as CANs and WANTS and develop them later and write new grants to develop them with different partners. For instance, it would be brilliant to have a ‘save search and annotate’ feature in this iteration of the DAAO, but can we afford it? Is it the most important thing now? or would we rather try and get images into the site? (User research says Images gets Must, Save search and annotate gets a Could).  All of these features that we want go into the technical specification which we hand over to the Developer and we work with them to get as far down our priority list as we can without compromising the quality and functionality of the site.

More soon!