Sub Ubi

Over on Scripting News, Dave echoes something we’ve been saying in our house for a few weeks now:

I missed this week’s West Wing, so I fired up my BitTorrent client and downloaded the latest episode, and 25 minutes later I was watching it, without commercials. While I love the West Wing, and didn’t want to wait for the rerun (to be aired months later) it’s not right to get the show without commercials. So, why don’t they offer a legal version of the show, for BitTorrent download, including commercials, maybe even special commercials for people who watch the stuff on their computers.

In the US, Battlestar Galactica is airing on the SciFi Channel. In the UK? Well, I have no idea. In our house, we’d pay £3/week to download the most recent episode—compressed, it would be around 350MB. There are three of us who really enjoy it, and considering a “season” is only half a year or so, that would be roughly £60 in almost pure profit—per interested household, per season—if we were able to download, legally, a Battlestar episode the day after it aired. Since advertisers might not like that, I’d be willing to wait a week, even.

Is this possible right now? No. Instead, the episode magically appears in our household. We watch it, without commercials. The DVDs of the show won’t appear for months after the season ends (if then), and it may (or may not) air on some premium channel next year.

It’s a no-brainer—make the content available at a reasonable price to consumers, and they will buy it. Unfortunately, powerful, greedy white men control the entertainment industry; I don’t expect them to “get it” anytime soon.

As a followup to my WWW/community thread (one, two, three), I noticed that Tim O’Reilly posted a summary of the Web 2.0 from Foo Camp. I guess I’d score high on the “Do You Get The Web 2.0?” quiz in Esquire this month, because a lot of his memes were in my thread.

What did I hit on that Tim did as well?

• Trust your users
• Small pieces loosely joined (web as components)
• Software that gets better the more people use it
• “An attitude, not a technology”
• The right to remix: “Some rights reserved.”

There might be others, but my point is that the notion of a participant community creating content that they flow between each-other, share, and build upon is not new… but “radical trust” and “radical decentralization” are difficult stances to adopt, as you can’t “wade in” and test the waters… you have to dive in, head first, and find out that the water’s just fine.

I suppose I should finish the “site redesign” thread (part one and two).

My “proposed redesign” is more of a sketch than anything else. And it has rapidly evolved past any specific comments or criticisms of my own department’s web presence, and become more of a statement regarding my thoughts about how to support the community that exists within a department, online. Shared goals are part of what defines a community, as well as clear and unhindered communication. Most academic departments (all around the world) manage the shared goals bit, but often fall down on the communication bit due to politics, schedules, and the general business of the academic lifestyle. Between teaching, research, the neverending quest to publish and obtain funding, as well as administration—well, it often makes for a busy day.

One way to provide structure to this communication and collaboration (online) is centrally.

The challenge to centrally managing a website like this is that the webmaster/mistress must be incredibly well integrated into the community to be effective. Faculty, staff, students of all kinds, as well as other departments are all, in a sense, customers to the service that a webmaster provides. Are all of these people able to adequately achieve their goals and communicate effectively via the WWW? What services and content must be added, designed, built, or possibly removed, refined, and replaced to achieve those goals and facilitate communication? Meeting the needs of all of these disparate groups involves being aware of what is going on, the various needs of each of these communities, and the ability to respond quickly and with agility to new and shifting needs.

Of course, people who are plugged in to a community this way are often called deans or pro vice chancellors, or something similar—they don’t have time to build effective websites. They would probably benefit from the existence of such a website, however, as it is their job to be on top of the state of the community.

The other way to manage this is to decentralize the process.

In the decentralized process, each stakeholder in the community contributes to and is responsible for their own cloud of information—a constantly changing, dynamic resource for their immediate peers and colleagues. And each group can peer into the process by which the other communities organize, share, and move information. The webmaster simply becomes responsible for the connective glue, and is no longer primarily responsible for information and content on a broad and overarching scale.

But this is not how academic departments work—because in the first model, it is clear what role the webmaster has: they’re a gate keeper. They say what does and does not happen on the WWW. If they are truly amazing, they enable the free flow of information into and out of the department via the WWW. If they are not, however, then they can become roadblocks, preventing the easy dissemination and communication of information within and without of the department. In the second model, it isn’t obvious to the community what the webmaster does, because if they do their job right, the infrastructure just works, and everyone is happy creating and sharing content.

And, the reason I know this kind of thing cannot, and will not, happen, is it represents too much loss of control. No-one likes giving up control—it’s hard, far harder than most people think. Furthermore, a site this dynamic requires participation on the part of all of the shareholders; even though the individual contributions are small, and actually things they do already (via email, in the hall, over the phone, etc.), it will be perceived as being much more work than it actually is. The idea will die, and, we will build no communities today.

Fortunately, ideas are free. Regardless of whether the department I am part of now, or part of in the future, decides that this is an interesting experiment to engage in, the idea exists. It has been written down. It is there for others to be inspired by, or ignore, or tear apart, or build upon. In fact, we’ll make that explicit:

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5
License.

This post and the images contained herein are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike license. Feel free to rip, mix, and burn, as long as you provide a pointer back to this document.

Mike points out that this piece by Philip Greenspun may be relevant to my thoughts regarding our departmental website:

http://philip.greenspun.com/research/academic-web-research.html

Sadly, I think Phillip is right: journal publications are the only thing that matter. There is no getting around publish-or-perish. You have to bring in grant money, and you can’t do that without peer review.

I wrote a bunch of other things here, and decided, really, they don’t matter. The website redesign is a fun idea. It’s more about fostering communication and collaboration than anything else; two things I seem to do naturally, and two things that shape much of my own work and practice. The proposed redesign is nothing more than a fun distraction to fill some of the in-between moments; I don’t see this kind of change taking place—not here, not now.

But I like the idea nevertheless.

I’ve received a number of responses regarding my post regarding our departmental website. These responses have either come in via email, or people have caught me in person to comment on the post. I have not yet received any comments praising the site. Instead, I have consistently received comments along the lines of “that’s exactly what I think.” Often, it’s a bit more explicit: “I’ve been here n years, and for as long as I can remember, people have thought that the departmental website was an unnavigable nightmare.”

So, lets work from the premise that we have a website that is, by-and-large, ready for a complete overhaul. I’m going to suggest how we might rebuild the site to capitalize on communication and fresh, dynamic content as opposed to static content and the occasional (static) rendering of a database.

The Front Page

The front page of a departmental website is both the starting point and the ending point; if your viewer isn’t interested by anything they see, then they’ll be gone in a heartbeat. To do this right, I’d grab about 20 first-year students right now, and ask them what they looked for just a few months ago when cruising the WWW and scoping out prospective universities and CS departments. You see, people who build departmental webpages are usually faculty and/or staff in the department, and these people typically lack critical insights that most any user of their product would have. Driving a redesign user-first is the best way for something like this to proceed.

Seeing as I don’t have these insights readily available, I’ll ignore my own knowledge of best practices and proceed. First, I’d turn the front page of the site into a weblog.

Branding matters; the logo is still necessary. Persistent navigation throughout the site is also important; if users can’t easily jump back to the top (or the top of any other section of the site) at any time, I’d consider that a usability problem. On the right, I’d have some boxes that show the most recent “News” and “Events” in the department and/or University; seeing as we control that content, that shouldn’t be a problem. In both cases, I’d want to be able to “See more News…” and “See More Events…” at the bottom.

The body of the page should be one or more articles promoting activities and events in and around the department. Publications, awards, events, talks… really, anything that is of potential interest to the larger community (eg. here at Kent) or the world should end up in this space, for a time. It is, after all, a weblog. The danger comes not from putting the wrong things here, but not putting enough things here. The site, and therefore the department, cannot suffer from having a constant flow of fresh content.

The orange boxes in my picture are places where I expect users to be able to subscribe to an RSS feed; the News, Events, or main-page feed should all be things I can subscribe to from the main page. Having a link, somewhere, that explains what these little “RSS” or “XML” buttons are is a good idea, yes, but I think the world is more savvy regarding these things than you might think. Consider: my father uses an RSS newsreader now, for keeping up on weblogs, newspapers, and job searches.

Research Group Pages

The group pages are, again, fundamentally dynamic in nature. I would shrink my departmental logo (allowing me to return to the main page by clicking it), and then have a group header/logo for the remaining 3/4s of the “branding” area. There might be a bit of “static” space for something about the group, but this might not be necessary. Also, I’d retain the navigational space on the left; if done correctly, I suspect it wouldn’t change at all from the main page.

The rest of the page is dynamic. The top right strikes me as a good place to put links to the weblogs belonging to each member of the group; likewise, I’d include links to the RSS feeds for each of those weblogs right there. Following those, I’d have a dynamic box where recent publications by the group could appear, as well as a place where the group can post recent CFPs. This way, the group contributes to placing calls that may be of interest in the feed (as well as, perhaps, the research support administrator), and all the members of the group (as well as people outside of the group) can subscribe to see what comes through their “CFP” feed.

The remaining space on the page could be used as a space to promote weblog posts from members of the group, or to highlight group-specific projects, events, or other work. Either way, we want this to represent information specific to or created by the group flowing through this space.

Faculty, Staff,and Student Homepages

If you haven’t figured it out already, everyone in the department gets a weblog.

What do we gain by providing every member of faculty and staff, as well as every student, with a weblog? A number of things.

• Currency.

  Not hard currency, like cash, but instead “currency” as in “current events.” Everyone can remain up-to-date regarding everyone else. While I can’t be part of every research group, I can subscribe to every feed in the department. At a glance, I can find out about the research that a classmate or faculty member is engaged in–meaning any, and every, classmate and faculty member. If I had tea in the common room every day for a month, I wouldn’t get caught up on everyone’s academic and professional doings; this is much more time-efficient and effective for all involved.

• Interactivity.

  If every weblog has a comment system, it is now possible for students and staff to interact in new and important ways. If I write about my teaching, a student can chime in with “Yeah! That was great!” Or, they might say “Wow, I didn’t understand your analogy between the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and packrat parsing in functional languages at all.” Either way, I have a new, personal, and timely communications channel.

More importantly, I have a way for colleagues and researchers around the world to interact with me; the weblog is not an “internal” thing. This way, people who come to my weblog because they subscribed to it in Bloglines, or with a desktop newsreader like NetNewsWire, can comment directly on things I have to say about my teaching and research. That, I think, is a Good Thing, as it increases the number of people reading and commenting on my ideas, as well as improves the visibility of the department as a whole.

• Visibility.

  What happens when one of our posts gets propagated around the WWW? We end up with lots of people talking about and pointing to a webpage in the cs.kent.ac.uk domain. They might even subscribe to that feed, or perhaps several others in the department. If you have thousands of people reading news and events taking place in our department every day, is that a bad thing, or a good thing?

Undergraduate weblogs

While we’re talking about benefits of having a dynamic, constantly-fresh departmental website, I might mention that treating undergraduates like first-class citizens of the department would be a great move. These are smart people with good ideas who have come here to be challenged. Well, some of them might have come to get away from their parents and drink beer as long as the GPA holds out, but by-and-large our students are hard-working and engaging. Every one of them should be allowed to have a voice in this framework, and that means a weblog.

More importantly, they should never loose that space. If they want to maintain their weblog here at Kent for 10 years after they graduate, they should be allowed to. If one of our students goes on into graduate school, or the corporate world, or anything else, and becomes a Voice on some topic of interest to them—whether it is type theory or basket weaving—we want that voice to come from Kent. It is, I think, a no-brainer when you think about the time and effort involved in maintaining a service that can host a weblog and the possible tangible and intangible benefits of having someone draw significant amounts of traffic from around the world because they are writing on the topic of something they are passionate about.

[plea]

While I’m at it, the service might as well allow faculty, staff, and students to run CGIs without having to beg and plead for permission. This is the only way, in a Web-App World, for students to experiment and do interesting things that might draw good traffic to our domain. If they do something illegal, slap them on the wrist; if they do it twice, yank all computing privs at the University. There are no policy “problems” in doing this, and there are no “security” concerns, either: Apache 2, running suExec, is one of the most secure pieces of software in the world. Please. Give us all some freedom to do interesting things.

[/plea]

–>

In closing: the Big(ish) Picture

There are certainly details missing; many, many details. The theme, however, should be apparent: everything on the site, and I mean damn near everything, should be dynamic, participant-generated content that can be ripped, mixed, burned, and shuffled all over the planet using simple mechanisms like RSS, email, and similar communication and collaboration tools. Instead of viewing the departmental website as a static brochure for selling our wares, it should instead be a living, breathing document that sells our services by giving away our knowledge and expertise to any and all who are interested.

If we provide a simple interface for people all throughout the department—students, faculty, and staff—to update one or more parts of the site regularly, we will have one of the most novel and useful departmental websites in the world today. It will get coverage in the mainstream and educational press. Different parts of the site will draw readership from all over the world. In England, prospective, current, and former students will be able to subscribe to various feeds and keep up on their application process, topics of interest, their friends and their lecturers. Faculty and staff will be kept abreast of the goings-on in the department. Researchers and practitioners in industry will be able to easily keep tabs on the excellent research taking place at Kent. We will be connected to many people and places where we were unconnected before.

Put another way, we will be the single most interesting and open academic department in the world when it comes to the flow of information in, around, and out of the department. And it doesn’t take a quantum information theorist to do it (rocket scientists are old hat); it just takes some commitment and planning. It is, I would think, imminently doable. Failing to consider something like this seriously is, by-and-large, unjustifiable and criminal.

Update, 20050926

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5
License.

This post and the images contained herein are available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike license. Feel free to rip, mix, and burn, as long as you provide a pointer back to this document.

Dave has one, too.

Something fishy is going on here…

I need to update my blogroll. I’ve got a few I need to add, and I’ve just discovered that John Sherck has a weblog. Who knew!?

Update 20050923: A followup to this piece has been posted.

The University of Kent Computing Laboratory has a homepage that is completely and utterly unusable. What’s worse, it gets “tweaked” every now and then, with links and text changing in subtle ways, leaving the user to try and guess where the information they need has been hidden. If there are “standards” for page design driven by usability research, I would argue that this page is not influenced by them.

The UKC Computing Lab homepage

The thumbnail below links to a full-size screenshot of the UKC CS homepage as of Saturday, September 17, 2005.

We are immediately aware this is the computer science homepage because the top 1/3rd of the page is taken up by a title banner, as well as a relatively large sidebar, both proclaiming “Computer Science at Kent”. “News,” taking 18% of the page and nearly centered vertically and horizontally, is probably the most prominent feature of the homepage, although there is no RSS feed for me to subscribe to. (RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, will be described more fully later; it is a format that helps enable the automatic distribution of content around the WWW.) The prominent, top-right corner is taken up by links to the “Site map” and “Staff Homepages”; I hope click-through usage supports their prominent placement in the page design.

The “Search” feature is effectively hidden by it’s uniformity with “Events”, “Vacancies”, and “Sun Microsystems”. While “Events” might be a front-page item, it is another candidate for having an RSS feed. Also, the link text “Vacancies listed on the university web site:” could do without the trailing colon. “Sun Microsystems”, while an important partner for the department, is out of context in this bar; there must be a better way to incorporate the link into the page.

The remaining 42% of the page is given over to paragraph-style linking that is difficult, at best, for people to navigate. If I want to find out what research groups are active in the department, where do I go? I suppose I look to see what “information” is available under “Research”, or perhaps I scroll down to see what is hidden under “Prospective Postgraduates”? I can easily discover “Courses at the Medway site”, but what about courses here in Canterbury? If I leave the front page, I drop into navigation hell, where navigation bars at the top and bottom of the page are different, and it isn’t clear at all how they do (or do not) relate to each-other. I know the place, people, and work that takes place here, and our departmental pages confuse me; where does that leave a prospective student or researcher who is considering the department as a place to study or work?

Pages for comparison

We can compare the UKC CS homepage to homepages around the ‘net, and see if there are any patterns—conventions, even—that we might learn from. I’ve chosen a number of computer science department homepages “at random”, meaning I’ve chosen universities and colleges I know the names of, and typed “http://www.cs.<insert-university-here>.edu/”, and looked at what popped up. Each thumbnail below links to a full-size screenshot, and the school name links to the live departmental homepage.

School	Homepage
Princeton
Harvard
Arizona State
Brown
Cornell
Indiana University
Dartmouth

What is the same about all of these pages? What “standards” or “conventions” have they all employed?

1. A title/logo bar at the top of the page
2. Persistent navigation on the LH side of the page
3. A picture of the building or members of the department
4. Links to current news and events
5. Search

In most cases, the Search is provided at the top-right or top-left of the page; the top of the persistent navigation bar or to the right of the title are popular places. Given that eBay places their initial search bar to the top and left, and built-in browser search bars are often upper-right, both locations take advantage of locations users are likely to look.

Having a “fresh” homepage is good for Google rankings, and “News” and “Events” are an easy way for external and internal visitors to quickly get a taste for a department at a glance. None of the pages viewed had RSS feeds obviously available for dynamic content like news and events.

Having a picture of the place and/or people gives the viewer an impression of the department actually existing. The UKC webpage, in its washed-out blues and grays, does not give the viewer anything tangible, from the world, to anchor their vision of the department on. Indiana’s departmental pages are particularly good in this respect; each section is highlighted with a photo or photos of the people representing that part of the site.

Navigation

None of the pages in the UKC CS website take advantage of a hierarchical, persistent navigation bar on the LH side of the page. Instead, the leftmost 10% of every page is wasted on a dark-blue space that, at best, duplicates the title of the current page. This is a catastrophic flaw; it is one of the most common conventions in use on the WWW today. Weblog software, freely downloadable, provides better navigation “out of the box” than the hand-crafted Kent CS department homepage. Every one of the pages I managed to find via “random selection” included a persistent, consistent left-hand navigation bar on their site.

It is important to note what is linked in on these navigation bars as well. I have only included those links that are visible in my browser with it’s current size without scrolling (a viewable area of roughly 850×700 pixels).

Representative navigation links

The content of the navigation links on these pages is remarkably consistent; a review of 20 more sites would provide us with a set of links that could be construed as a “consensus” on essential navigation for a CS departmental homepage. However, even our short review reveals conventions and design patterns that the UKC CS homepage could benefit from.

• Both Indiana and Brown choose not to “explode” their navigation on the main page; only by selecting a top-level item do you see what is underneath it. Not terribly useful (as the user must guess where their content might be), and furthermore there is a great deal of screen real estate that goes to waste.
• Dartmouth has one of the “cleanest” site designs (minimal background shading and other distractors), and is the only page in this set to explicitly flag “Admissions.” In a tough recruiting climate, making it easy for students to find out about what they might be doing, and how to apply, makes sense. Once they’re here, they can fight with some other, internal, poorly designed webpage—they won’t complain. Much.
• All of the pages make it easy to determine what research is going on—and to locate “groups” or “areas” of research from the main page.
• Colloquia, talks, or seminars are highlighted in the persistent navigation of every department except for Indiana.
• None of the navigation bars are dominated by “internal” concerns; if there are “internal” pages that are for current faculty, staff, and students only, those pages are located somewhere else. Perhaps those internal pages are located at an easy-to-remember URL like “internal.cs.<insert-univeristy-here>.edu”, and therefore hidden away where we, as browsing outsiders, cannot see it?

Lessons learned

The single biggest lesson to be learned from these departments is that their homepages are sales documents. They are selling their program and their research. They want excellent students to come join them at the undergraduate and graduate level, and they want excellent faculty to join their ranks so they can attract more funding and more (excellent) students. Industrial relations feature prominently into the navigation of most of these departments as well.

The Kent Computing Laboratory homepage fails to provide the level of usability of any of these pages. In sacrificing usability, it therefore fails to sell the department effectively. It is likely that more than half of the homepage could be moved to “internal.cs.kent.ac.uk”, freeing up the homepage to sell the excellent research, teaching, and opportunities we have to offer to prospective undergraduate, postgraduate, and researchers, and faculty alike.

Markets are conversations

I mentioned RSS—Really Simple Syndication—more than once. This machine-readable XML format allows aggregators like Google (blogsearch.google.com), Technorati, Feedburner, Bloglines, and others to automatically add content from the RSS feed to their search indices. As we can see, some of the top CS departments in the US have failed to take advantage of simple technology that has driven the weblog revolution; undergraduates in our department have weblogs that provide more, timely information than the UKC CS homepage. The specifications are open, the tools are free, and the benefits are that more search engines and potential viewers can access our content, and therefore, our brand.

If you extend this idea to its limit, we would provide every research group, faculty member, postgraduate, and undergrad with a weblog, thereby providing the tools for everyone to generate content, and therefore traffic flow, to a site in the cs.kent.ac.uk domain. It would make Kent one of the first (if not the first) CS departments to transition from the notion that research and teaching are static publications to a department that acknowledges that research and teaching are markets operating in a bazaar, and that markets are conversations.

I won’t, however, hold my breath.

Comments? Feedback? Feel free to email jadudm at gmail. Anonymity is preserved, by-and-large.

Update, 20050926

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5
License.

The text of this post is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Sharealike license. Feel free to rip, mix, and burn, as long as you provide a pointer back to this document.

Reduce the risk, hire from open source:

In the wake of open source, traditional hiring practices seem like an unnecessarily risky way to hire new employees. Especially for small teams where each hire can make it or break it. Why bet the composure of your collective on abstract indicators, hearsay, and a biased bio?

And the rest of the post. Interesting.

You know how there’s little things you have to do that just keep getting swept to the side?

I have to edit the CS-ED.org site to add a link. Just one link! In fact, it’s this one. Perhaps I’ll do it today. Really. I mean that. Honest. …

Anyway, ecto makes posting a weblog entry easy, so I’ll do that right now to start. Des Traynor is a colleague out at NUI Maynooth doing his dissertation work in CS Education Research. He’s a good guy. And, he’s got a weblog where he writes about his work and related topics.

Except for the fact that he’s a PUNK, because he’ll be out at ACE in January. This is the Australian Computing Education conference. Yeah, I’d rather be in Australia than Ireland in January. This year, I’ll settle for having a dissertation done instead of a paper, though… I can’t really complain.

Lucky bastard.