Stories from my Life as a Technologist
Dan Sinker & Dylan Richard
Basic premise: Saw a lot of big websites go down. This is a really stupid problem for news to have. We have a major problem if your site goes down when you’re the single source.
Need to think about how to approach this problem, in a manner of strategic thinking rather than throwing servers into it. Continue reading “MozFest: Practicing Failure in the Newsroom”
Dale Askey, Mark Jordan, Catherine Steeves, & MJ Suhonos
Want to talk about communities and community building. It was a partial contextual shift as to her place in a number of communities.
Thought a lot about where she fits in. Have had a lot of identities, and thinks of herself as: nerd, geek, wonk, curator, archivist, woman, leader. Originally thought of herself as just another person, but everyone in this room should take on the role of leader.
Everything we do is part of the community, everywhere. Everyone in code4lib is part of a
community that succeeds through relationships.
Take the ethos of code4lib back to each organization.
Every software requires a community. Each person is part of it cares. Sustaining software requires a community of people who really care. We need to think about who uses our software. This
community is not just about people who write code,
it’s also about people use the software.
The most important thing is to work with those groups of users.
These communities are built using communication, inclusiveness, consideration, even more communication, and sense of ownership.
Need to think about users, stakeholders, researchers.
Everyone should read this blog post on backchannel conference talk.
Seen projects fail because they’re shared with the world but no one really takes ownership. Ownership goes both ways. Owning what you release, but also helping other projects be a success. Not everything fails, but it needs a community to thrive.
This is what we’re looking for in our communities and in our projects.
That they thrive.
You want a community that participates, looks out for each other.
Participation. One project was a massive failure because no one participated.
Enthusiasm. Who would even want to fund it?
A sense of pride. ‘I’m part of that, made it happen, succeeded in part because of me.’
Learn from the history and the people who can be your mentors. Look at what you’re doing and what came before. Part of inclusiveness is acknowledging that you’re not the only person who has ever worked on the problem, who can work on the problem.
Adoption. A sign of success is that they’ve take it, use it, and contribute to it.
Now we will discuss.
This supposedly not shy group, but is actually shy a lot of time.
Do we not think we’re not ‘real’ coders? Have the self imposter syndrome. But actually, she is a coder too.
Why does this community has to self-organize? Actually, awesome that this community has self-organized. Used to think every collection is unique and not doing the same thing, but we’re seeing emergence of communities that are realizing this is not true. For example, linked data community cross-fertilizing regardless of the type of collections they had. We self-organized was a sense of shared problem and shared passion.
No one organization can do it alone. We all need to work on it together.
Two most attributes to fail projects. One person thought it was a good idea, but no one else knew they were working on it. It didn’t succeed because there was no sense of participation, because no one was invited to participate. No one should work alone. We fail because we don’t collaborate.
How do you convince someone that they are a leader? Tell them that they are a success.
How do you adopt something when the leaders are not on board? ‘But everyone else is doing it, dad.’ Adoption by others. It’s really hard to be the first one though, we know.
Data-Driven Documents: Visualizing library data with D3.js
Bret Davidson, North Carolina State University Libraries
Being a smaller session, there was a lot of tangents and what not, so apologies if the notes seem a little disorganized.
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How do you measure “value” or success of projects in library setting where ROI is not measure in the amount of money?
Most of these issues boil down to a break down of communications of some sort.
Sometimes the problem is not knowing what a project manager does. The person who comes up with the idea thinks they run the project; think that they know everything to make the decisions. Or, they become the one dictating all the requirements.
A lot of the issues are political. No way to move it over to having systems oversight.
Project manager is in charge of day to day operations. Project lead is thinking about high level requirement, more strategically, and becomes liaison between systems and the rest of the library. (e.g. public services project, would have public services librarian) Decisions are made collaboratively.
Once it settles in, make an oversight team for maintenance purposes.
Product is the reflection of the process? But, want to see evidence of process. Without ‘evidence’ of the process, what about accountability and transparency? The evidence can also be a good reference so that you don’t have to explain.
Get people to meet to discuss what they’re going to do. Can cut down a lot in the amount of time spend doing things that aren’t needed, and waiting for dependencies.
Staff frequently also think they know what users want better than users.
Major Projects
Timeline
Option for Failure?
How to Successfully Survive a Mandated Project
This is a reference to the Dilbert comic called “The Right Approach”, which a porcupine says that “we must stick them with quills – it’s the only way!”, because the ‘correct’ approach in any situation is the only approach you know.
While the project I worked on wasn’t quite like this, it was more the ‘the status quo’ is the best approach.
Seagull failure
Examples – Fail Projects
Never went live
Fail by Bloat
Need to communicate with the staff. Present and allow feedback. Need to give people an outlet to provide feedback and response to feedback. You don’t need to implement most of it.
Don’t assume that the person is ignorant, dumb, or just out to get you. You’re not always right, and sometimes ideas are tossed in just to make people think.
Do a post-project review and go over the failure points. Post-mortem meetings can be very cathartic (even if it ends up being a rant).
Learn from your mistakes. You should always do this even if the project didn’t actually fail.
Now it’s back to braving the cold at the end of the pre-conference day.
So I didn’t do a full post for all the sessions, but the live notes that were taken and presumably, video recordings will later be posted on the Access 2011 website.
Jer Thorp gave a great talk on the data visualization work he’s done and has been working on at the New York Times. I couldn’t really take notes since so much of it was visual, but he blew a lot of minds with his work, so check out his blog.
What really excited me beyond the work itself was the fact that he mentioned he was doing it all through Processing, so I decided to do a lightning talk to introduce everyone to Processing and more importantly Processing.js.
For those who aren’t familiar with it, Processing is an open source programming language primarily used for dynamic and interactive graphing and data visualization. Processing.js is the sister project which brings processing to the web. What’s the greatest part of processing.js is that a developer can start doing the same sort of thing but from the JavaScript side.
Check out the demos to see what kind of things you can possible do. I am particularly interested in the educational applications, such as giving students interactive graphs to see how mathematical functions work (see the Bezier Curves tutorial).
Added value: web accessible, Drupal plug-in, WordPress plug-in, fun games like a remake of Asteroids on the exhibition page.
See Access Live Notes for Lightning Talks and talks about other tools.
The fail panel was great, because there were a lot of great stories by the panelists and others. Here are some of the lessons learned from the fail stories.
Share your own stories at failbrary.org
This was actually my first conference, but I think (and I’m clearly not the only one) it’s been really well put together and the food has especially been awesome, many within great socials. There’s been some tech fail, but that’s expected at every place I think.
I have particularly liked this conference because rather than simply having speakers talk, everyone has been highly encouraged to participate in some way (i.e. hackfest + presentations, lightning talks). I never though I’d be speaker at a conference, especially my first, but with the nature of the talks and encouragement of people got me to do a lightning talk. I think that alone speaks loads to the community.
It’s been an awesome experience, I’ve learnt a lot, and met a lot of great people. I really hope to be able to attend the next one.
Sad to see Access 2011 end, but for next year, a site will be set up to see who will host it, and the planning of the conference will be continued code4lib style.