<br /> No Java 2 SDK, Standard Edition v 1.4.1 support for APPLET!!<br />

Source code: sketch_mar18a

It requires java, so if you can’t see it, that’s why.

	Ariel Waldman Spacehack.org
	Kirsten Sanford This Week in Science
	Jessy Cowan-Sharp NASA
	Natalie Villalobos Google
	Tantek ‡elik tantek.com

How can you contribute and collaborate in open science?

You can go outside and look at birds! There are several websites that you can contribute to that will help scientists track bird population.

ScienceForCitizens.net is trying to bring together lots of different open science projects.

Galaxy Zoo is great for people at all different levels. You can classify galaxies from home. It gives you a picture of a galaxy, and you identify and classify galaxies. If you do a lot of them, then you unlock a button that tells the scientists when something about the galaxies looks strange, and they will help you do research on them.

Team Frednet is an open source team participating in the Google Lunar X Prize to build a robot that will go to the moon, get data, and send it back. They need help from lawyers, designers, and project managers, not just scientists.

Websites like infochimps will let you upload data about how you use the web.

Hacker Dojo is one of many hacker spaces throughout the Unites States. Hacker spaces have become a movement for open science.

Fold.it is a protein folding game. Playing the game helps scientists understand different ways that protein can fold.

	Amy Sample Ward NetSquared
	Beth Kanter Beth's Blog
	David J Neff Lights.Camera.Help.
	Holly Ross NTEN: Nonprofit Technology Network
	Kari Saratovsky The Case Foundation

Short stories about crowd sourcing

Beth
Beth started a blog called spider school. She was writing about how nonprofits can use the web. She would get emails from people she didn’t know pointing out grammar errors and typos. She decided to start a feature called spider school police and give a digital badge to anyone who found typos or errors.

Amy
NetSquared facilitates offline events all around the world. Amy organizes a group in her city, and she tries to ask people to speak, but people don’t self-select to speak. One month we didn’t have any speakers, so we asked people for recommendations. They came through with programming for a whole year.

Holly
It’s been imperative for NTEN to utilize the community to keep up with technology trends.

Kari
Case Foundation opened up to the public and encouraged them to get involved in the grant solicitation. People provided feedback on applications, and they finally did a crowdsourced vote of who should get grants.

David
David has recruited volunteers. He has also built a website to allow people to tell their cancer stories including stories, video, and artwork.

About the panel
All the content for this session has been crowdsourced, including the powerpoint presentation. They launched a social media for social good case studies. It had a submission form which they opened in January. They had a ranking system so that people could rate the case studies. We selected case studies based on that ranking and the focus of the panel. They didn’t have funding for the panel, and it actually took very little effort to demonstrate to nonprofits how easy it is.

The Hybrid Model
The hybrid model has been a popular method of crowdsourcing. There is some good and some bad that comes in when you start crowdsourcing. The hybrid model has some responsibility with “experts” and some responsibility with the crowd.

Freerange Studios
Freerange Studios did a project called utopia where they did $30K worth of free work. Anyone could enter, the audience narrowed it down to the top twenty, and then they made the final decision for which project they wanted to work on.

Seattle Free School
The Seattle Free School uses social media as the entire operation mechanism. The idea is that it’s free to teach and learn within the community. It’s how they operate and how they grow. They use social media to distribute the roles of the members, so there’s no mail or fliers. It was even created through social media.

Invisible People
Invisible people is very good at story telling, helping people understand that homeless people aren’t different or scary. They crowdsourced who they should interview. The most amazing thing about the project is that he is unafraid to look away from an issue that almost everyone else looks away from.

Open Green Map
Open Green Map helps communities map themselves. Community members can enter any locations they consider to be green, like bike racks, eco-friendly restaurants, etc. The whole project is open source, so you can take the code and use it for any mapping project. They are actually creating change in their community.

Trends in submitted projects
The organizations who participated were not household names. Most of them mentioned that they had no marketing budget, and they relied on the power of social media and their communities.

Open Street Map
Open Street Map allowed people to add streets to a map. It is the main application being used by relief organizations to share which roads are accessible and blocked.

The Uptake
The Uptake covers Minnesota politics, and they livestream and let people comment in real time. Using the time stamp on the comments, the editors could easily find the video highlights and put them together.

When does crowdsourcing suck?
Anytime the legal department is involved. Any time you are writing by-laws or mission statements – things that need to be carefully worded and come from within the organization.

How can we use crowdsourcing to add value to the target population?
Crowdsourcing is one of the values that we have as social change organizations. We have to live by our values, and not just voting online, but actual online collaboration. The community will tell you what sort of research they want to accomplish together.

How do you prevent crowdsourcing from being a resource suck?
Crowdsourcing within a community is already part of the way a community operates. If you’re crowdsourcing to the crowd, you’re probably doing something simple like an online vote.

Netflix prize
Netflix has offered a prize to individuals who can improve their recommendation algorithms.

How do you convince your senior management that some of the best ideas come from outside your organization?
There are huge benefits to build community. You are bringing great people into the process. If your management doesn’t get it, then quit and bring your resources to an organization that gets it.

How do the panelists define crowdsourcing?

Amy
I’m not the best at everything, and I have to trust people outside my brain and empower them. An expert is someone who has a really good network.

Holly
Some problems should be solved by experts, but sometimes experts lack diversity that only large crowds can provide.

Kari
It’s a recognition that you can tap a wider audience than might exist in your own organization.

Jeff
There are smart people outside your organization. You should tap that potential.

How do you get people to work for free?
It provides value to them. They get to work with a community, which makes everyone more effective and efficient. But you shouldn’t ask for people to provide professional services for free. That’s disrespectful.

	Patrick Fox Razorfish
	Becky Gibson IBM

Accessibility is all around us in the real world – curb cuts, access ramps, closed captioning. Accessibility is and should be ubiquitous. Accessibility benefits all of us – we watch closed captions when we’re watching a basketball game in a bar, we use curb cuts for strollers and bikes.

Semantic HTML is the foundation of accessibility. Your markup should indicate where headings, menus, links, etc. are. The essential part of making javascript accessible is to start with a normal page with good markup, and add the javascript afterward in such a way that the page looks normal with javascript turned off.

The sxsw website, for example, is completely reliant on javascript for its functionality. It’s unusable with javascript turned off. Also, rather than identifying the links as links, they are divs with a javascript “onclick” command. They should at the very least have anchor links.

You can use style sheets to show content if the user has javascript disabled, and hide it if the user has javascript enabled.

You should provide both mouse and keyboard events so that users can navigate with keyboard only.

Don’t mess with the functionality of the browser – don’t change how the up and down keys work, how the tab key works, etc.

There is a program called WAI-ARIA that is working on making web 2.0 accessible. It transmits data to assistive technologies (ATs) like screen readers informing the AT what sort of element it is looking at. So if you have a menu with collapsible sections, the AT would recognize that and alert the user.

ARIA also makes items “focusable,” meaning the AT can look at specific elements using tabindex.

ARIA can alert the user if ajax has updated any part of the page. Users can turn off the updates, make them “polite” – meaning that it waits until the AT is done reading or completing it’s current task, or make them “assertive” – meaning that it interrupts whatever is going on.

Examples of ajax updates would be autosaving a blog post and new email arrival. A screen reader user set on “polite” would hear that they have new mail after the screen reader finished reading out the email that it is currently reading.

ARIA works on JAWS 10 and Firefox 3.

To interface with ARIA, your page should have different regions which are identified by a “role” attribute, such as “main,” “banner,” or “navigation.” When the user looks at the page with a screen reader, the screen reader will tell the user what regions are on the page and allow the user to choose a region using the keyboard. The page can indicate to ARIA which regions are “live,” meaning that they might be updated by javascript or ajax. ARIA will watch those regions and alert the user if they change.

However, the page should still determine whether the user has javascript turned on, and serve them a static page if they do not.

Coding for ARIA does take more time, but JavaScript Toolkits have ARIA integrated so that it happens automatically.

Dojo is an open source javascript toolkit that fully supports ARIA.

	Serkan Piantino Facebook Inc
	Alan Schaaf Imgur LLC
	Kevin Weil Twitter
	Christopher Slowe Reddit
	Jason Kincaid TechCrunch

Imgur was released a year ago on Reddit. It was on a shared hosting plan. It lasted two days before the site was terminated for generating too much traffic. The site went down. Imgur moved to Mediatemple. That lasted three weeks, so they moved again, and again. Imgur moved four or five times in four months, scaling up to a better server with more bandwidth. Imgur went to foxhole.net, a content delivery network, because they have servers all over the world. That allowed the devs to concentrate on making the site faster rather than keeping the servers up.

Reddit is running on EC2 using about 50 machines. They have 20 app servers. They got a big speed boost by going single-threaded. They use Postgress and memcache.

Twitter started as a rails application tied to a single MySQL database. They have an open source queuing system, so they can do asynchronous processing.

A lot of the core architecture behind Facebook is still LAMP. They run newsfeed, ads, and search all on separate servers. On Facebook, you’re typically friends with 0-5000 people, whereas on Twitter you can follow millions of people, so they can render everything on the fly where Twitter can’t.

What is Reddit using for indexing?
They roll their own indeces using memcachedb. They are getting a .02% failure rate with that.

At what point are LAMP stacks not enough?
Knowing when a machine needs to be replaced is tough. Facebook has a monitoring system set up with alerts and teams dedicated to figuring out where they will have scaling problems before they have them. Monitor. Monitor. Monitor.

How do you scale search?
Search is really hard. The metric you are measured against is Google, which is a ridiculous standard. Reddit does about two queries per second. Getting quality results is really hard to tweak. It’s very qualitative in terms of what is “good” search.

What was the first thing that blew up?
Imgur had apache blow up first. “It was like trying to hammer a nail with a sledgehammer.” Twitter originally put the whole social graph in a MySQL database, but it was getting into the billions of rows. They had to build their own social graph store. They are in the process of open sourcing it.

What modules is Facebook using to convert PHP to C++?
They built a project called hiphop which compiles all their php down to binary C++. There are whitepapers about it, and it’s open source.

How do you deal with deployment?
Facebook and Twitter use BitTorrent to deploy builds to all their servers, cutting deployment from 12 minutes down to 30 seconds. Reddit cobbled something together in perl.

Why haven’t any of you used proprietary databases?
We prefer to work with open source. As you deal with scaling problems, you have to peak under the hood and see what you can tweak. Calling a vendor is a pain. Oracle is expensive. We like to be nimble and play well with the community.

I’m mostly here because ACLU of Washington definitely deals with issues of creating/curating/editing content. We have dealt with this so far by having weekly standing meetings where the techies enter the content into the website as the writers create it. This strategy does take up more of people’s time and “bandwidth” (i.e. they can’t multitask), but it has significantly decreased missed deadlines, and minimized the endless editing problem, as the writers are less likely to send in edits on something if it’s already up on the site, and they’re less likely to change their mind about how they wanted to phrase something if they just came up with the phrasing five minutes before it’s put up on the site. I’m curious what strategies Brain Traffic uses to skin this cat.

Turns out that “ftw” is “for the web,” not “for the win.”

Content online is like the piles of trash in WALL-E. Most of it is crap, but some of it is cool and interesting, and he collects that, and when he finds a friend, the first thing he wants to share with her is all the cool stuff he’s found. That’s what we all do through social media.

The twitter stream for this talk is freakishly worshipful:

@halvorson is a content goddess and an amazing presenter
Kristina Halvorson lights up my life!
I’ve written “I love you” on my eyelids Indianna Jones-style for @halvorson’s talk.

Srsly. I’m a little worried about these people. Maybe they’ve just been in panels so long that they’re suffering from Stockholm syndrome?

Now she’s bitching about how her clients don’t give her enough time to write content. That’s probably accurate for most copy writers.

Copy is unintuitively complex. It’s easy to gloss over 40 hours of work as “that ‘about us’ part of the site.”

Edward Tufte was a breakthrough because he used design to communicate information without text.

Early in the project management projects, information architects will identify what content they will need, and they think about content the same way they think about features. They look at building a great house with a lot of buttons, but we didn’t engage the people who will be using the site. Content is not a feature. We can’t just check off pages on a spreadsheet and call them done. It requires ongoing care and feeding.

Late, poor, and disorganized content is just a reality of the web. We’ve been taught to just accept that, but we can strategize to minimize these issues.

Make sure there is someone in the organization whose fault it is if the content sucks. Make sure that person is at every kickoff meeting.

Text is much more mutable than pictures or video. We need to focus on every word written on the site and make sure that there is a consistent strategy.

Strategy isn’t just “what is on the website?”, it’s “why are we creating it?” “how is it being created?” “how is it being consumed?” and “what happens next?”

Messaging isn’t a tagline, it’s the understanding that we want to impart on our users when they are done interacting with our content.

The Quicken site doesn’t convey that it will help you feel more in control of your money. It’s just shots of different editions of the software. It’s telling the customer that Quicken wants them to buy something, not that Quicken can actually help them.

The Mint.com site on the other hand has an example graph of expenditures, copy that talks about being in control, saving money, and getting out of debt.

Quicken focuses on Quicken. Mint.com focuses on the user. Content strategy helps you identify what your messaging strategy is, and content will flow from that.

Does your content achieve your business objectives and your user’s goals?

You can’t be reactionary about your content. You can’t put something up just because it’s new or just because what was there before is old. You need a larger strategy.

REI did a great job of creating new fresh content by outdoors experts. The topics are closely targeted to the questions that customers ask in the store.

Room and Board’s mission statement says that they work closely with the builders and users to make sure that the furniture is useful. Their website reflects that by creating content from the people who are interacting with builders.

You can’t just give the writer a wireframe and tell them to go to work. The writer needs to know about the audience and the overall intent, otherwise the writer will include everything that anyone might look for by clicking to that page.

You need to take down old content. The swiffer page on youtube is for a campaign that ended in 2008, a broken graphic, and a notice that the last time anyone from swiffer logged in was 9 months ago. It’s like being invited to a party and finding an abandoned house.

Content strategy forces you to take a cold hard look at what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Websites exist to house content. The reality of content is that it’s messy. It requires infrastructure to keep it clean and current.

Stuff you can do to fix this problem:

1. Audit. You have to know what content you have online. Where are you inviting people to interact with you? Make a spreadsheet that is the complete inventory of your content. What’s the low hanging fruit? What’s redundant, outdated or trivial?

2. Ask. If you are asked to write copy, ask why, and you will be invited into meetings earlier and earlier in the process so that you can understand why someone thought this was important.

3. Analyze. Take a high level view of your content ecosystem. What are your users actually doing? What are your competitors doing? What are trends in your field? Your content doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It is affected by many things out of your control.

4. Alignment. The content strategist sits between several different departments and process phases. It is your responsibility to make sure everyone is in line with the larger goals.

5. Assume responsibility. You should begin to see happiness in all the stakeholders. You should see your metrics improving. You should see better SEO.

	Alissa Black City & County of San Francisco
	Dmitry Kachaev OCTO Labs/DC Government
	Noel Hidalgo New York State Senate

I had no idea there were state governments that are so open! New York was the first state senate to adopt Creative Commons. They even send out their web traffic bi-weekly via RSS. They have built idea generator applications and put them under a GPL 3 license.

Alissa Black uptalks! She says that they built out a platform for different departments of the San Francisco city government to submit datasets that would be released freely online, but departments didn’t do it. So they then implemented a scorecard for each department. They have an internal city-wide wiki called citypedia! They pushed open source software adoption through the procurement side. They created a policy that says if a department is evaluating a software purchase over $100K, they have to investigate open source.

OCTOlabs created a contest asking developers to create open source government data applications using one of three government APIs. They have found that if you wait to have complete datasets, you will be waiting forever. Partial datasets should still be put up online. There seems to be a dillemma in that the return on investment of open government is very difficult to measure, so it’s very difficult to draw attention to. They are trying to build a community of people who participate in government through various applications and use that as proof that the program is working.

Audience questions are after the jump!
Question time!

How do you address the digital divide?
Nearly all households have phones, so any online systems or in-person town halls have 1-800 phone numbers that households can use to participate. There are also several initiatives attempting to get inexpensive broadband into low-income communities.

Why isn’t there a red state representative on the panel?
California has a republican governor. Lots of red states are working on this issue as well. It’s a bipartisan effort.

What’s the difference between egovernment and Government 2.0?
Egovernment was about distributing government services online. Government 2.0 is about getting government data online.

How have you avoided some of the worst headaches of the work you do?
They try to find “change agents” in each department who can plant the idea that open government and open source software is important.

Can you talk about open311 apis? How are you going to work together to solve interoperability issues?
It’s really hard to collaborate with other city governments. We meet at conferences, so we are able to identify each other and get a channel of communication going. As we create future versions of our software, we will attempt to make them increasingly similar and interoperable.

What have you done to get cities to collaborate?
The open planning project has helped various city governments to collaborate and they facilitate regular conference calls. Once you’ve talked to someone on the phone, it’s more likely that you’ll call them if you have a question or an idea.

Are you using crowdsourcing programs like peer to patent?
Ideascale and uservoice are both sites that New York has used to get ideas from citizens. DC collects feedback online about how people feel about the job that the city government is doing.

How do you deal with the fact that people can organize against every single government initiative as initiatives become easier to access?
Both sides can organize, for or against. The only people who are really skewing the representation are people with a lot of time to come to policy meetings.

For instance: yesterday, some crazy dude emailed me from out of the blue wanting me to blog about a Capitol Hill open house event for urbnlivn, the real estate blog I write for. I had no context for who this person was. Today, I install Rapportive, and voila:

You can even make little private notes to yourself about where you met these crazy people and why they know who you are! Genius!

That chart she’s standing in front of is her “1, 2, 3 Marketing Tree” (pdf). You should fill this out before you even think about hiring someone to work on your tech or communications.

There are many resources for small businesses to build a business plan, and nonprofits should take advantage of them. It’s especially important for nonprofits going through Founder’s Syndrome. It takes a lot of time to define your organization on such a granular basis, but it makes the services that Erica and I provide much more valuable to your organization. If you don’t have a goal, we can’t build a strategy.

Sarah: What does it take to motivate a community that spends 12 hours a day in front of a screen to meet in-person on a regular basis? How do you build that sort of community?
Mary Jane: I think this question hits at the heart of a lot of important issues. Technology is a wonderful tool for facilitating social interaction, which we all need. Like any tool, though, it can be misused. Multiple studies show how vital in-person communication is for maintaining the close relationships that are necessary for health and happiness. While virtual communication can definitely enhance relationships, it can’t ever totally replace the experience of being with other people in person. With so many demands on our time, though, it’s very tempting to try to replace face-to-face meetings with quick IMs or status updates. We need face time, though, and there’s really no replacement for it.

I think the key to building a successful networking community is to provide that in-person interaction in a way that is sensitive to busy schedules. Flexible, casual meet-ups work well, especially if there’s an incentive to attend, like an interesting topic, a cool venue, or, of course, free food! Timing is just as key, since it’s easier to cancel and go home than to rush through traffic to get to a meeting right after work.

Sarah: Do women have a unique role to play in the digital world, or should we have the same expectations for women that we do for men?
Mary Jane: Women absolutely have a vital and unique role to play in the tech industry. In addition to the hard tech skills required for our projects, women can also be excellent at fostering team cohesion and propagating a shared vision, and I think that most women do this very naturally. So often on a tech team, because we get engrossed in the details of our particular tasks, we forget that solutions are still created by people. That oversight can put a project at risk because even the best idea can fail without the right team to make it happen. I believe that women have a natural aptitude for bringing teams together above and beyond the explicit shared work items, and until we have machines to design, make, and repair our technology for us, the human factor will continue to be vital to the future of technological innovation.

Sarah: What perks can organizations provide to motivate young people, particularly women, to work there? Do you think most young people would take a pay cut for some of those perks?
Mary Jane: Flexibility and work-life balance are very important to young people, especially those who have family and volunteer commitments. Creative work arrangements appeal to bright, involved employees who have a lot going on outside of work, and there are some great models of how value increases when employees have more freedom and input about their work environment. For most tech jobs, flextime and working from home are easy to arrange with the right tech solution. It’s different for each organization, of course, but I think that in a lot of cases, especially for highly skilled, self-motivated employee bases, the added performance, decreased overturn, and increased project morale gained by keeping employees happy would probably more than offset the overhead. Implemented correctly, there’s no need for pay cuts, since the company would be getting a return on the investment.

Sarah: What do you think the next revolution will be for online dating?
Mary Jane: Online dating is a great way to meet potential friends and dates, when it’s used the right way. It’s most effective as an introduction tool, when communication moves from virtual to real life as early as possible. People are wired to respond to in-person communication, especially when it comes to dating, and the risk of building up unrealistic expectations increases the longer the communication stays strictly virtual. Of course, people want to have an idea of what they’re getting into first and there are real safety concerns, so some communication is important before the first meeting.

We’ve seen a lot of improvements in online dating since it first started out. I think that a service-oriented matchmaking site would be an interesting development. Dating services can offer more than simply providing a forum for user-generated content, some personality tests, and a chat client. I’d be interested to see some branching out into profile editing/advice, date scheduling, better screening, and maybe personalized relationship coaching.

Sarah: Is there a good way to help upper management folks understand digital culture, or do they just have to trust the people who are immersed in the internet everyday to provide the answers?
Mary Jane: I think the best way for management to better understand digital culture is to get more involved. It’s so simple to generate content that there is practically no barrier to entry. Setting up a blog or Twitter account that employees could read would be a great way to improve personal tech skills, get informal feedback on decisions, disseminate non-sensitive information, and improve team/company cohesion. Personally, with the low resource cost and high potential gains, I don’t know why more executives don’t participate in some form of active social networking.

The purpose of these interviews (in addition to just being fascinating) is to promote my panel proposals at this year’s sxsw, but the panel picker is now closed, so this one’s just a bonus!