Dr. William Jones of the University of Washington iSchool discusses open XML based tools for managing our data and our lives.

A podcast of the talk is available here.  Our audio engineer apologizes for the poor quality of the recording.

As does the Air Conditioning system he was sitting under.

Audio hosting thanks to The Silverfish Newsletter and the University of Washington.

Continuing with my report on Wednesday’s events, I’ll offer up my notes on Melody Clark & Michelle Fellows’ (UW iSchool) great presentations in the social inclusion afternoon session. I’ll begin with a short summary of the first.

According to the results of UW faculty member Ricardo Gomez’ Landscape Study data of public access venues in developing countries, libraries were not the most popular venues despite them being free, and the goal of Melody’s research was to learn why.  She found that public access ICT users were not significantly deterred by fees - instead, they chose their venues according to the knowledge of the staff, customer service, and the availability of locally relevant content. To increase use of library computers and the satisfaction of patrons, she recommended that libraries focus on these three things.

In Michelle’s presentation, she described her extensive review of literature regarding what impact information and communication technologies (ICTs) have on socio-economic development. She found that most of the existing literature focused on computer use and uses, and on ICT operational conditions. As a result, the degree to which ICTs change socio-economic outcomes cannot be conclusively determined.

After these sessions, I sadly had to return to my school work and missed the TASCHA 10th anniversary event. From everything I’ve heard and seen on Twitter it was a fantastic reception. Congratulations to everyone at TASCHA for all their successes over the past decade!

My Thursday morning began with prep for ASIS&T-UW’s “How to Start Your Own InfoCamp” box lunch event with InfoCamp organizers Andy Szydlowski and Josh Walker. In that informal discussion, we talked a lot about how to balance structure with a free, open-format when organizing grassroots collaborative events. Attendance at InfoCamp has grown at a rate of %45 per year, and as a result some of the new ideas and small group feel have been lost, but they manage to keep it fun by not losing sight of their founding principles. Moreover, the InfoCamp staff isn’t paid, so making every organizing meeting interesting is what keeps it from feeling like just another job. Other insights from the lunch included tips on food and beverage, choosing event themes, publicity, and volunteer staffing/duties. . for full notes.

After our lunch and a few hours spent schmoozing and composing my previous blog post, I attended the reception dinner. I sat with UW PhD students Jeff Huang, John Marino, and Jill Woelfer; UW Masters students Joel Turner (conference Twitterer extraordinaire) and Michelle Fellows; and UW faculty member David Hendry. We had some spirited discussion over excellent food, immediately followed by the awards ceremony and some parting words from Harry Bruce and Karen Fisher.

This morning I’ve enjoyed hopping back and forth between the doctoral colloquium and the last normal conference sessions. Among the highlights of these were Adam Fish’s (UCLA) exceptional presentation on “Governance of Labor in Digital Video Networks” and that of Lisa Nathan, entitled “Multi-lifespan Information System Design”. The latter builds on her work with UW faculty member Batya Friedman on the Tribunal Voices project, which entailed recording interviews with the witnesses and victims of the Rwandan genocide. I won’t provide full recaps here but I highly recommend reading both Lisa and Adam’s articles (accessible from the conference proceedings linked on the iConference 2011 main page).

Thank you to everyone on the organizing committee, and to all of the presenters, volunteers, and attendees for making iConference 2011 possible. I’ve had a great time and enjoyed meeting so many of you!

It’s impossible to sum up two days of iConferencing in one short blog post, but I’ll attempt to give the 10,000ft aerial view of some of the amazing sessions I’ve had the opportunity to attend up to now.

The first talk I attended, Wednesday afternoon, was given by Brian Wentz & Jonathan Lazar (of Maryland and Pennsylvania, respectively) on the topic of companies that design two permanent interfaces to reach the same content. They found in their research that companies often pushed users with perceptual or motor impairments to use their mobile interfaces, which often lacked some of the functionality of the full web version. In their 15 participant study, they found that the same tasks were often much more difficult for blind users to accomplish in Facebook’s web interface than in its mobile interface. Their recommendation: while there are reasons that companies maintain two separate interfaces, they should make BOTH highly accessible to impaired users.

After this session, I hopped from the design room over to the social inclusion room to hear Kentaro Toyama of UC Berkeley on “Technology as An Amplifier in International Development.” Kentaro gave a fascinating speech on how information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) have a magnifying, or amplifying effect, rather than an additive one. In other words, donations of computers and other technology to developing countries only amplify whatever conditions exist, and cannot in themselves reverse a bad situation. Bridging the access divide, he says, will not address social divides. His amplification theory, in short, is this: Technology amplifies human and institutional intent and capacity.

Immediately following Kentaro’s speech, Alex Pompe and Steven Jackson (Michigan) presented on their research of computer donations to Namibia, and they had some startling stories and photos to validate their argument, which was that too often donations take place without any further thought with regard to maintenance. One story that resonated with me involved a high-tech computer classroom built in the best room of a small Namibian school. From the picture, it looked like a lab that you might find in a well-financed American university, but unfortunately this lab requires 8 amps of electricity to run, which was almost equal to 9 amps that the rest of the school drew - forcing the school to choose between working computers and light. Consequently, the computer lab had never been turned on, and it instead took up valuable space for no benefit. For those computers in Namibia that do get used, when any upgrades or maintenance are needed, turnaround time through National Education Technology Service and Support Centre is typically 2-3 months.

The title of the presentation described above was Things Fall Apart, and interestingly that is how they propose that those the business of ICT4D think of the natural order of things - as being in a constant state of disrepair - because they would be more likely to provide the maintenance and support needed for continual operation. During the question and answer session we also broached the question of how design of computers and phones might change with underdeveloped communities in mind. Instead of “disposable” devices that are cheaper to toss than fix, might manufacturers create durable devices with more upgradable and replaceable parts?

So much for the first recap of Wednesday! My next post will pick up with the end of Wednesday and what I saw of Thursday.

My Day at the iConference is courtesy of Dr. Joe Janes, chair of the University of Washington’s iSchool MLIS program.

Our second offering, recorded on-site during a short break in the action, is due to your’s truly, who’s Audacity with a microphone is well known.

Audio hosting provided by the University of Washington and The Silverfish Newsletter.

Look for more podcasts as the iConference continues!

During the Wednesday afternoon, I attended the session on Assessing the Practical Impact of Healthcare Research which had the panelists Aleksandra Sarcevic (Rutgers), Sharoda Paul (PARC), Peter Scupelli (CMU), and Brian Hilligoss (Michigan).  Each panelist gave a quick presentation about their involvement with healthcare research and its impacts for the Information School community.  After the presentations we engaged on a group discussion which included discussing the following questions:

1. What is the practical impact of healthcare research?
2. Why do we care about the practical impact of healthcare research?
3. What are the approaches to studying hospital work to improve patient care in hospitals?
4. How can we apply the findings of healthcare research to real-world settings given the challenges in technology use in healthcare?
5. How can we assess the practical impact of healthcare research given the slow pace of transferring research results into the real world?

What seemed to be the of most concern was how to share research with the health community as well as across disciplines outside of the information school community.  It is difficult because not all professions know or read certain publications from other communities.  There is a need for collaboration between those communities.  As well, there was a discussion on getting the word out through attending conferences outside of the information discipline and to promote research to other librarians in the medical libraries across the countries that may be working with teaching hospitals and other communities.  As I am very interested in health sciences librarianship, I found this session to be interesting to see where the healthcare research is occurring and how the information is being disseminated.

Librarians have always been on the front lines of privacy. What we read has always been a charged issue, and librarians have been defending both our right to read without fear since before Alexandria burned the first time. Which is why I find it so exciting to see the interest in privacy taken up in relation to the massive libraries of data bound up in “The Cloud.”
     
Here are a few people wrestling with these large and thorny issues:
     
John Christiansen
Attorney, Christiansen IT Law firm.
Adjunct faculty, UW iSchool’s MSIM Program.
Professor Christiansen stands unique in the legal profession; knowledgeable in technical issues—bits and bytes—he also holds a JD, enabling him to see the the legal impacts of those advanced.
     
From this intersection, he very rightly points out that much of cloud privacy problems stem from a lack of maturity in the space. That cash-strapped organizations tend to make deals with cloud providers and then ask a lawyer to document it, when all involved would be better served by bringing law into the conversation early.
     
Jim Adler
Chief Privacy Officer and GM Data Systems, Intelius
Jim approaches the process from the point of view of a privacy advocate investigating our reputation inside the cloud: How we use data, how we access it and how we can control it. While he believes the cloud privacy bell cannot be unrung, he points out numerous strategies to “tune” how our public lives ring.
     
Melissa Chase
Microsoft Research
     
How do you search encrypted data on the cloud?
     
Why don’t you develop a system that uses tokens capable of returning searches from encrypted data without the need to access the plaintext data… or even without even knowing what you are searching for? 
     
Why not? That’s what Melissa Chase said.
     
Ed Lazowska
Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering
Director, University of Washington eScience Institute
Chair, Computing Community Consortium
     
Ed was not a popular person for pushing back against cloud providers who wanted UW to rush student email and other systems to the cloud. Connecting student and faculty use of cloud services may have made the UW one of the last major universities to do so, but also meant that the entire system complied with additional regulations such as HIPAA.
     
When asked if Facebook was changing our expectations of privacy to the advantage of cloud companies he replied, “I don’t believe that there is a grand conspiracy out there, but I do believe that there is a number of companies with a very problematic relationship to privacy.”
     
In a completely unrelated story, Facebook Seattle has agreed to an on-campus discussion on their approach to privacy.

Deborah Frincke
Chief Scientist for Cyber Security, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
A CIA agent blown on Facebook.
Wikileaks
Targeted marketing driven by psych profiling via deep data mining.
     
These are some of the consequences of the cloud revolution. Recent technology is making it much, much more difficult to maintain a separate private and a public persona 2 personas.
     
Deborah Frincke points out that in addition to these negative consequences, these facts also stand out:

Google used its voice-to-text technology to allow Egyptian protesters to get communicate around an internet blackout.
Scientists can the cloud-or at least a properly administered, assured and uncorrupted version thereof-to access data and share research.
And that a quick scan of her foster daughter’s Facebook told more than her mother knew about her life, aiding a difficult transition.
     
Kirsten Ferguson-Boucher
Lecturer in Records Management at Aberystwyth University
     
All the way from Dr. Who country (by which I mean Wales) Professor Ferguson-Boucher asks, “How do you destroy information once uploaded to the cloud?” an important question to anyone who works in Records Management.
     
In the UK, regulations dictate absolute destruction at the end of the mandated storage period, an ability to produce that information upon proper request, and that certain data stays withing national or EU bounds during this period.
     
She has produced a Toolkit for outsourcing to the cloud, which answers some of these questions. It is available from:
http://www.archives.org.uk/images/documents/Cloud_Computing_Toolkit.pdf

Wednesday morning I attended the Alternative Event Session on Homelessness and Information Systems, organized by David Hendry (Washington), Julie Hersberger (UNC), Christopher Le Dantec (Georgia Tech.), Bonnie Nardi, (UC Irvine), Jill Palzkill Woelfer (Washington).  The session was conducted in a fish bowl environment where the panelists and attendees sat in a circle and had a discussion about homelessness and information systems.  The panelists set out to answer and discuss the question, “How can information systems improve the welfare of homeless people?” In this session we discussed the potential impacts of information systems on four dimensions of homelessness: community, identity, stigma, and vulnerability.

We first began our discussion around the usage patterns of homeless youth and how they use the local public library as an information resource.  Some people discussed how librarians are reaching out to the community to partner with others to assess the information needs of youth, yet libraries have policies in place that make it difficult for them to have access to the library.  As we all know, many homeless people use the library as a lifeline, resting place, and temporary escape from the street.  One librarian discussed how some libraries have designed spaces that can handle the need for a safe haven through providing lockers to store belongings and showers.  However, another librarian contrasted this with libraries as an “extension of the street.”  We also noticed through our discussions that we cannot categorize all homeless people as the same and that they are quite different.  There are long-term homeless, short-term homeless, mentally ill people who might be homeless.  One librarian spoke about how libraries assess who’s worthy or unworthy of library access and that the problems librarians face are not necessarily with all homeless people, but with people breaking rules and that public librarians often become “social workers.”

We also discussed how access to information by mobile phones affects social networks and how looking for information is tied to resources.  There was the idea of the information hook: how getting people with low information literacy hooked on something using technology (facebook, Farmville, twitter, etc.)  We discussed the design issues surrounding technology, where there are barriers facing those with low information literacy such as complicated user interfaces and accessibility.  One solution for these barriers is crowdsourcing, where information designers work with the entire population to design systems that get everyone involved in helping the homeless.  There was also a discussion of how causes are “liked” on facebook go from being online to actually outreach in the real world.  We need to remember to avoid creating technology with a population sterotype in mind that limits the options for individuals using the system.  We found that the hardest part about contributing information technology to groups is evaluating the contribution that it gives people who learn the new technology.

Finally, we concluded that homelessness and information systems are complex, and many different social, political, and technological aspects need to come together in order to work with the community.  The other thing that came to fruition was how do we deal with tensions in changing realities and what do we want to give to populations at risk.

The iConference Opening Reception

Something magical happens when you give people a relaxed environment (and a moderate dose of beer and wine aka “social lubricants”). Last night I had the privilege of attending the iConference reception hosted at the Central Library in downtown Seattle.  If you guys missed this, you may want to put it on your list (Once time travel becomes possible). Some of the top movers and shakers in the information field were at their most approachable with beer and wine flowing and appetizers so tasty, I have no doubt that most went back for seconds and thirds ( At least, I hope I wasn’t alone).

Breezing around from conversation to conversation, I heard comments ranging from political debates and the current state of our field to the “statuesque-ness” of the representatives coming from a certain East coast iSchool. I even saw a true gentleman blush at the mention of a burlesque show. If the purpose of the reception was to get people relaxed and talking to each other, I’d say mission accomplished

Who’s going out to have a good time tonight? I’d love to see everyone on the iConference After Hours group page inviting all their fellow iConference attendees for a good time!

The first day of IConference 11 finished in style at the Seattle Public Library Central Branch. First the important part—catered by the professional and unflappable staff of Ray’s Boathouse, we info geeks enjoyed Northwest beers and wines, smoked salmon, hors d’œuvres and desserts (loved the lemon tartlets!) Next the fun part—smoozing with conference attendees from all over the world! I really enjoyed the atmosphere of some many information-loving people exchanging ideas in the expansive and chic beauty of Rem Koolhaus’s monument to Seattle’s avid readers (hey, we’re number 1!) Much thanks to the library staff that stayed late to make it all happen so smoothly.

If you got in to the conference too late to make the opening gala, try to make it the half-block from the hotel and check out the library in action during the week. Also, if you have time during the lunch hour today, there’s a free concert by the The Ladies Musical Club will perform music by Ravel, Saint-Saens, Debussy, etc. from 12:10 p.m. to 1:10 p.m. at the Central Library.

The iConference has gotten off to a great start today as I began my day first checking in attendees as a volunteer at the Registration Desk.  It was so much fun getting to know the attendees as they came to pick up their badges and bags of swag.  After lunch, I had some free time to jump in and out of a few workshops, which are very interesting.  It is amazing what some people have been working on.  A workshop I found particularly intriguing was the “Information, Values, and the Justice System: Transformation and Challenges.”  There was discussion of the Washington law help website, http://www.washingtonlawhelp.org  which caters to information for everyone with legal needs.  It is great to see librarians and the legal community coming together to support the information need for legal knowledge. 


The best part of the day that I’m looking forward to is the evening reception at the Seattle Public Library downtown.  What a beautiful place to schmooze and enjoy the company of others at the conference.  I have to say that I love conferences because they have some really amazing and smart people that you probably would not meet on a regular day.

Serendipity stepped it up this morning and guided my path on the road to iConference Awesomeness!
I randomly walked in on a workshop and to my pleasure it involved one of the jewels in the UW iSchool ‘s crown: Dr. David Levy. Teamed up with Dr. Theresa , they gave a lively and thought provoking talk about finding the time to synthesize and produce creative works under the pressure and fast paced expectations of modern society.

A number of problems and solutions were carefully discussed. One of my favorites was the indigenous knowledge idea put forth by Dr. Cheryl Metroyer called, “A Constant State of Awareness”  (Cultivating qualities that come in handy in these sorts of situations). Cheryl’s comments double my regret at not being able to take any of her courses before I graduate from the iSchool.

As a sort of devil’s advocate, William Jones posed a viable counter argument that creativity isn’t something that’s sustainable. He went on to parallel creative endeavors with being an athlete in pique form, which left everyone with a bit to ponder.

I left this workshop comfortable with my creative gifts and walking taller and more confident in the knowledge that just because my thought process takes a little longer, doesn’t mean this tortoise won’t ever win the race.

Mike Katell & Don Horowitz—- Thanks to @durazz for photo.

If you want you can insert a Lawyer joke here, but I won’t.  Not after being privileged to meet some of the most brilliant minds from the light side of the legal force.

These are judges and lawyers working with librarians and other information professionals to create systems for a more just world.

Here’s one example: The Washington State Access to Justice Technology Principles. The link takes you to the real skinny of the principle, but I really suggest you spend the few minutes reading the whole thing.

It’s an amazing document, not the least because I can read it (D*** it Jim, I’m a Librarian, not a Lawyer). It sets out principles that ensures that technologies used to give access to courts, legal aid and other state services include rather than exclude all those people the system is intended to serve.

Let me give you an example: You are a non-citizen parent of a US citizen. A few financial reversals lead you to apply for food stamps in order to feed your child. The courts ruled that such applications must be considered even if the applicant doesn’t have a SSN. The paper forms allowed you to submit without a SSN. The online application doesn’t allow you to get to the next page unless you plug in a 9 digit number. Your choices? Starve or commit fraud.

The Access To Justice project wants to give people a third option, they got millions of dollars to set up Community Technology Centers through the Communities Connect Network. These centers, set up in Libraries, Parks and Recreation facilities and other community based organizations are a hand offered across the digital divide, connecting people in need of legal advice with organizations such as www.washingtonlawhelp.org that exist to “help low-income people find solutions to legal problems.”

After this, the panel got really interesting.

We’re pleased to announce that students will be blogging their impressions of the conference Tuesday through Friday.