Shift

"Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending."
- Carl Bard

This is the last entry in this blog.

CSSSCampSaskatoon

How Barack Obama engaged zillions of people using social media - Ryan Lejbak

Lots of people think they are social media experts - but they aren't especially compared to Barack's people. Understood what it meant and how to engage people and had a huge budget.

Obama raised $639 million dollars in his campaign, vs. McCain who raised about half as much.

Many small amounts in donations vs. larger amounts from a few

Obama had 5X as many friends on MySpace & Facebook, 40 X more YouTube video views, 240,000 twitter followers vs. 5,700 for McCain. Huge differences!

Used a text campain, 3 million subscribers w/ avg. of 20 messages/month - had to go to website where they collected demographics of users. 13 million spokespeople for the campaign.

Sent a text message thanking for the vote and then said he would be asking for their input in how the country was going to be run.

Developed an iPhone application.

Obama is more popular with web surfers because his followers are younger (said Fox News), however, Obama's campain was immersed in the audience's experience. Have to get audience immersed in the "cause" by engaging them. 35% of people using social media are over 35 years old. Obama met his audience where they already were and sent his message "Change we can believe in" in a clear and consistent manner.

McCain - donate and then let's talk, vs. Obama - let's talk and then donate.

Can a person donate a $1,000 - competition within the donation scheme - went viral.

Made good use of existing technology - like Google Maps (?) not sure if that's Google Maps, though. 65 million phone calls made according to database from website mybarakobama.com.

Asked all opinions, but then made their own decisions. Custom responses to every opinion.

Training Your Client/Managing Expectations - Kevin Stricker

If you don't manage client expectations your client's expectations manage you.

Trust is the key - excessive time is wasted defending your decisions.

A good manager takes more responsibility than necessary and blames less than necessary.

Discussion about what to do if you keep making mistakes and also what happens if requirements keep changing - proposed using Agile to be able to respond more effectively to changes in specs.

Allowing clients access to bug tracking software (FogBugz) .

Non-paper Paper Prototype - Guy Kelsey

This was an awesome little 2 minute presentation detailing how you can take a prototype, mark it up and display it both for client review and developer implementation.

A Perogy Failure - Lessons Learned

When I was a young newlywed we hosted Christmas the first year we lived in Calgary. My Ukrainian in-laws were traveling from Saskatoon and it was important to me that the meal not only be edible, but also authentic enough that my mother-in-law know her son was safe in my care. My nationality isn't Ukrainian, so I didn't grow up learning how to make cabbage rolls or perogies, but being from Saskatchewan I'd eaten many of each. In the years I'd dated my husband, every Christmas we'd not only attended midnight mass, we also had a meal at one of his aunts or his house that included at least one of cabbage rolls or perogies, usually both.

A few days prior to our Christmas celebration I set to making perogies and cabbage rolls for our family meal. Since these were both new dishes for me, I recall that I did follow recipes. I also remember being especially puzzled about how to freeze them. My cookbook didn't have instructions for this. My husband told me just to call his mom and ask what to do. Maybe I was too shy or embarrassed or maybe I just thought I could figure it out on my own. With the cabbage rolls, I simply prepared, poured over a tomato sauce, covered and froze them. I cooked the perogies and then dumped them into freezer bags and froze them.

When it came time to cook the food the day of our feast, I threw the cabbage rolls into the oven, but not before defrosting and not for long enough to prevent them from being icy cold in the middle when it was time to eat. The perogies were a disasterous, glutenous lump that could not be salvaged. My new in-laws were gracious, giving high praise to the turkey and other side dishes and didn't draw any attention to my mistakes, but I felt foolish and to me the event was as good as ruined.

Since, I've learned how to make and freeze good perogies (place them raw individually on a tray and freeze, put in storage container and return to the freezer). As I'm making them for my family now, it strikes me how at a time when I thought I knew it all, I really knew very little and in many ways I still know very little.

Something's changed though, I have so much more appreciation now for the wisdom of others. If I had to do this again for the first time, I'd call my MIL and ask for her advice. Also, now I don't beat myself up when I screw up. I see the value in learning lessons from my mistakes.

Social Visualization to Motivate Participation at the 2nd Girl Geek Dinner

The second Saskatoon Girl Geek Dinner was held in the luxurious (not kidding) basement of Point 2. We ate lasagna, Caesar salad and garlic bread. There was dessert too, but I'm not sure what it was - it looked good though. After some chatting and eating we settled in for our speaker Julita Vassileva, of the MADMUC Lab in the Computer Science Department at U of S. Julita is a a Professor and researcher in online communities and she's also the Cameco NSERC Prairie Chair of Women and in Science and Engineering.

Her presentation was titled "Social Visualization As a Tool for Motivating Participation" or as she said, "what can we do as designers to make our sites more sticky or attractive?". I made some notes which I will share here, but, of course, I wasn't able to type as fast as Julita talks. As they say, "you had to be there".

Social Visualization is based on several areas of related work:

• User Modeling - creating profiles of users,

• Artificial Intelligence in Eduction - mistrust and privacy issues - 10 yrs ago there was the idea to make models inspectable, leading to Open User/Learner Modelling (OLM).

• CSCL (Computer Support and Computer Learning) People learn through collaboration - which interaction is productive vs. non-productive.

• Interaction Analysis (IA) - Computer support and collaborative work - Carl Gutwin, Director of the Human Interaction Lab at U of S was one of the first people to coin the term "awareness" (assume awareness in terms of Interaction Design) - so you know that one person is typing as you are.

AIED (Artificial Intelligence in Eduction)

• Ensure awareness of progress & reflection
• Learner to correct errors or involve in dialogue
• Provide teacher with a tool to monitor learner progress

CSCL

• Provide teacher with overview
• Provide model and suggestions

Experiment used a sociogram for online discussion forum - important participants vs peripheral participants.

HCI/CSSW

• Communicating knowledge
• Activating social norms (can exert pressure)
  
• Triggering users to self regulate their behaviour

If you create social transparency you represent processes that happen in real face to face situations - so you cannot hide if you are lagging.

Comtella, developed by MADMUC Lab, is a peer-to-peer file and bookmark sharing system, allows students and researchers to share papers (either their own, or downloaded from the web). They studied Comtella in order to determine patterns of participation and learn how to improve participation among contributors. One goal was to get people to identify with an elite group of top contributors. Users visualized a star - denotes more or less giving depending on brightness of the star. They competed only by number of papers contributed. Participation jumped (due to cheating to boost their ratings - very motivational) after new views introduced but then dropped again.

Discovered that they needed to eliminate user effort and integrate as much info as possible into one view. Visualization should be intuitive and self-explanatory. Had to look into "Freakonomics" to find out how to deal with cheating. To counter set the rules so it's cheaper to behave honestly (obscure the rules - don't tell them how you are measuring participation), reward early contributions, do not reward excessive contributions, reward depends on the quality (received ratings).

Gave explicit currency for rating - C-points - earned with each act of rating. Can be invested to "sponsor" own links. These decay over time. Want to see you contributions at the top. You can pay for sponsored links with your C-points. In a test group 2x as many ratings compared to the control group. Found they could orchestrate the desired behavior. More contributions at the beginning of the week and no over contributions.

A version with no competition was also introduced with the purpose of encouraging reciprocity in reading postings and encouraging ratings. Came up with a visualization of the symmetry of relationship of people in the community.

Should be a movement to reciprocity, ideally. People are curious. You will be flattered if someone is reading your post and go to read theirs. Immediate reward - if you rate a post it will change colours (based on energy units - goes from blue to yellow as it gains popularity).

Experiment with Philosophy class and CMPT class (they were comparable - but not identical) - to test connections of lurkers. The visualization stimulated participation.

Important to decide which actions you wish to stimulate - social comparison should be centered on them. Pack them in default view. Make visualization attractive and intuitive. Don't overload with too much meaning, be careful with those that don't have too much meaning as they might attach too much meaning where there isn't any.

There is a gamer in everyone (esp. competitive computer science students). People are generally vain they want to see their stuff. Compete to get gold membership, or star brightness. Even the brightest plastic star was desirable to those who could only afford this - different dimensions of competition.

Participation depends on what your purpose is.

2nd Girl Geek Dinner on the Way

The second Saskatoon Girl Geek dinner is in the works. It's planned for November 17, 2008 at 6pm at Point2 Technologies (Circle & 8th).

Topics of interest can be posted on the Facebook group wall. If you are interested in speaking or know someone who is Melanie Cey is the organizer, so please contact her directly for more details.