Resistance is Voltage Over Current Events

Note: Posts like this are going to be a bit blurry in content and scope. I'm writing about a political tool, and I have political thoughts that I'll share on my other blog. Here, I want to talk about ResistBot's features, uses, good points, and possible points of failure.

Resistbot came to my attention about a week ago via Twitter.  Very simply, you text "resist" to 50409 and the bot will walk you through sending a fax, first to your Senators, then your Congressional Representative. Occasionally you'll be prompted to invite others, donate to the cause, or write again if it's been a day or so. There's a lot more information on the website.

What problem am I trying to solve?

Abuse

I've been concerned about online abuse and abuse of online tools for some time.  Commentors on ProductHunt point out that having the name "Resistbot" is going to turn people off, especially those who don't feel like resisting.

At a certain point this will not matter. People who are not resisting will begin to use the tool if they have not already.

Other potential abuses:

• Sending nonsense: mostly harmless.
• Jamspam - attempts to send control codes. I don't know if this will jam the SMS or fax or the sorting software, but it's something to think about.
• Sending threats - it's unknown if there is a language filter in the bot. There certainly ought to be something in the software that Congress uses. Since you're required to send a name along, there's obviously a mechanism for dealing with that, which leads to 
• Impersonation - Right now the bot asks for your name and address. At this point, you could be sending faxes to several offices with just the names on your Christmas list. 
• Filtering by phone number will not work, as people have whatever number they got with their cellphone and/or messaging service. I'm in California, and my phone numbers are from two completely different states.
• This is where the harassment issue gets very serious. Officials have to take threats seriously, and it's not hard to imaging someone setting up an innocent person to take the heat.

I don't know if any of these things have happened, but it's almost guaranteed that they will.

A thornier problem are people who have registered in their state's Confidential Address Program. Victims of abuse can register an anonymous address, usually the Department of Justice or the Secretary of State. This can make determining a Congressional Representative very tricky. There should be no reason for people to put themselves at risk by giving the bot their actual address.

Is there anything you like?

Of course! It's very easy to use, and I can send a fax to my representatives the minute the idea comes to mind, day or night. It has about a five sentence limit, so I have to think carefully about what I say.  It's a bit awkward sending things to all three reps when it might only concern the Senate or Congress, but that's minor.

What I really dig is that there is a huge potential for participation by people who have been unable to voice their concerns in the past: 

• People who don't have time to call and wait on hold and then get nervous and lose track of what they wanted to say. 
• People who can't get access to email except at a public library, and they have to use that time for things that matter more, like getting a job or doing one.
• People who literally cannot afford stamps.  Politicians have franking privileges; people should have them, too.
• People who have limited use of their hands - they can either use voice to text, or a stylus to say what they want. No stamps, and just one button to click, <send>.

I have passed this on to disabled friends and am waiting to hear back. I am a big fan of making things easy, but I'm a much bigger fan of making things possible.

Negative Results Part II: Owning your misconceptions

I had a nice long chat with my partner in crime on the KnowWiki, where we looked at the answers to the Ten Questions, and dissected what's happened since then.

One thing you might have noticed right off is that we didn't answer "what problem are you trying to solve".  Part of the reason was that I was only working with ten questions at the time. I didn't add the "plus one" until later.

The other part was that to us, it was obvious. The really cool stuff we were putting online wasn't being used or even found by people looking for it.  That was a bug in the software we were using at the time.  I wrote about our Evil Plans before: I wanted online collections to live, and Joy wanted the collections to be a part of the Semantic Web.

What I found out over time was that if someone didn't care if their material was accessible online, it wouldn't matter if it was or not. If they did care, they weren't going to tell us about it.  They'd share it with their own monkey-sphere and leave it at that.  Not everybody wants to be a wiki editor - or any kind of system editor, for that matter.

What Joy found was that the Semantic Web was happening in an unanticipated way, like most things do.  With the normalization of hashtags as the world's informal folksonomy, material we had available was becoming part of a semantic web-like thing, independent of any metadata that we'd entered.

We'd both fallen for the hasty generalization or unrepresentative generalization: if we thought it was cool for these specific reasons, so would others. And, it followed that of course other people would do what we thought they'd do.

That turned out not to be the case.  But if nothing else, doing something was better than doing nothing.

So we did something, and it turned out pretty cool, if not in the ways we expected.

I've caught the car. Now what? BRQ part II

I've been asked how to go about "teaching" the Questions.  The short answer is that I'm not sure.  The longer answer has me channeling my grandmother when I asked her how to season my first new cast-iron skillet: "Put food in it and cook it".  In other words, act normally.  Do what you've done before except with this new thing.

Of course it's not quite that simple.  I fried a lot of chorizo and eggs in my skillet before trying more complex dishes involving potatoes and onions and peppers (acidic stuff).  I did try "traditional" seasoning on the next pan and I couldn't discern any difference between the two after a while.

As for the Questions, I haven't "taught" them to enough people to say "This Is How It's Done."  How I lived it was by having them close by when I needed to tackle something.  I wrote about some of that in "Shut Up".

The original set of questions (I think there were seven) grew out of a need to assist people in setting up intranet sites on SharePoint.  After a year of missteps, I finally drew up a document of what a site needed to have in order to be useful: group sites had a list of members, a calendar of their meetings, and document libraries for agendas and minutes.  Project sites had announcement lists for milestones, lists of stakeholders, etc.

Common to all sites were the Operational Questions, which boiled down to, "who is going to feed this kitten and clean the litter box?"  Once I got answers back on who was doing what and where and when, I was able to organize a new site without a lot of difficulty or confusion.  The only problems that came up after that had to do with personnel changes that come naturally with turnover.  Eventually people learned to ask for a specific kind of site and do the organizing and training themselves.

The Directional Questions started making sense to me in the context of Digital collections and what was big at the time, electronic Institutional Repositories.  Repositories were to be static collections of digitized works: theses, dissertations, articles, visual performances, music.  Nothing would be expected of the user except to consume it somehow.  Having met the Internet, I didn't think that would fly for very long, and in fact it's had a mixed record.

Having people use them hasn't been easy, even sometimes for me.  They can be too broad if you're just trying to tackle something simple

If you want to "teach" or "live" the questions, I'd say print out the Official Doc on that other tab up there and keep it handy.  The Big Red Question might be the one you use the most often, and it's most useful when you make it a habit of your own.

If you find yourself with a pile of problems to solve, the Directional Questions can help you winnow them down or at least categorize them.

Once you have your priorities set, you can start in on the Operational Questions if you're starting a new site or service.  They're also useful if you have an orphaned site or service.  That is, if you haven't already killed it off with the BRQ or the Directional Questions.

TL;DR - Those who can, do & teach.

We made this cool thing!

One of the fun parts of having this blog is being able to show off and brag a bit.  And this is one of those times.

My colleague Joy Perrin and I went to the Texas Conference on Digital Libraries this past May to show off our new baby, the KnowWiki.

It came about through a number of factors:

• Our digital collections weren't getting much use, and we couldn't determine if it was because they were hard to find, or if they were hard to find because they went unused.
• Projects for the digitization lab came in unevenly because there was no real policy on what should and shouldn't be online (and that didn't even include copyright headaches).
• Putting something in digital format is only the beginning.  As Joy will be pointing out in her upcoming book, there's a lot more to "digitization" than just scanning.
• After my work on intranets, shared drives, and SharePoint sites, I'd come to the firm conclusion that "things" online can't just exist, they need to live or operate.
• And what I mean by that is that people need to interact with your stuff, not just "ooh", "ahh", and "Save As".  I'll explore that in another post.

So we first tinkered with digital collections as a whole.  We sent the Six Administrative Questions around to staff and asked how they'd answer it.  We got the academic equivalent of blank stares.  It was an unanswerable question for the most part, because we'd digitized things without thinking about what would happen once they got there.  We could promote a collection through marketing, and that would bump interest some, but then usage would fall off.

Evil Plans

Now both Joy and I had what I called at the time "secret agendas".  Joy wanted to find a way to get us into the Semantic Web.  I wanted to make the collections come to life, as in have people participate somehow in the gathering of knowledge about the objects (a.k.a. metadata), as well as contribute information about the knowledge from the objects - what I call knowledge representation(1)(2).

Trouble was, we had no way to do that with the software we had at hand, so we had to go looking for something else.

Questions and Answers

At this point, I had the Ten Questions, and since we'd gotten nowhere trying to answer them for all of our digitized material, we chose to focus on one collection.  We got those answered and started looking for a platform.

This is the essential thing: If you don't have clear, simple answers to the Questions, you won't get anywhere. You'll be so bogged down in "what if's" and "yeah buts" that you'll never get past the review process.  Once you know what you're doing and why, the questions of how and what are very much simplified.(3)

The Contenders

DSpace is the platform that is used at the Texas Digital Library.  It's got what Librarians consider to be good metadata handling, and it can take any sort of content you want to throw at it.  The "bitstreams" can be .PDF files, video files, music files, whatever.  It's also indexable by search engines, although the contents of the bitstreams are not.  

ContentDM was another platform we'd used that also had ways to handle images and documents, but that had too many parts that needed attention, and customizing it was a major undertaking.  Its other major disadvantage was its inability to be indexed by search engines without a lot of work.

Fedora Commons came to our notice about this time. It had social media hooks and possible links to blogs, where we thought we might be able to capture audience feedback.  It also had hooks to DuraSpace/Cloud (As did DSpace), where we could store the preservation-quality materials)

The Test

We eliminated ContentDM because it failed most of our requirements.  DSpace also failed, but since we're committed to the Texas Digital Library, we can't simply abandon the platform.  There's nothing stopping us, however, from using a combination of platforms.

Fedora Commons was fairly simple to install, but the interface was user-indifferent, and seemed to be about as care-intensive as some aspects of DSpace, and we didn't have the resources to fully explore what it would take to customize it.  The proposed link to Drupal never seemed to come to be, either.

Surprise!

Joy emailed me one day and asked if we could use a wiki.  I blinked a few times and ran it through the crucible of our evil plans and the ten questions.  Except for security, some cosmetics, and the fact that nobody else had done it that way, it was a perfect fit.

The rest, as they say, is history.  We've got a few more hurdles to jump before we make it completely live, but we're optimistic, and looking forward to doing more experiments on what we can do with collections and audiences and living sites.

The PowerPoint file of our presentation can be found here. 

_____________________________________

(1) Yes, I know, Knowledge Representation is already a Thing in Computer Science.  It's a way to teach a computer context.  I contend that the knowledge contained within the object is represented by the object, and the words used to explain that are aids to human understanding.  Making a computer understand it isn't my problem.

(2) We had other agendas/evil plans that I'll explore in still other posts.

(3) I'm afraid I can't share the specific answers for lots of reasons.  I won't be able to email them, either.

How to have a good failure

The other day I got an email about an old conference room I'd had set up in Exchange.  Nobody remembered how it came to be except me and the guy sending the email.  We'd both moved on to other jobs, so that's why we'd been asked about this thing.

If you don't use Outlook/Exchange, this is what I'm talking about: you set up a "user" that's actually a room or classroom.  They're called "resources" in Exchange, and when you're setting up a meeting with a group of people, you can list that room as your meeting room.  Depending on how the resource is set up, you're automatically booked, automatically rejected because of overlap, or a human reads an email and gets back with you.

Someone thought that setting up room schedules via Exchange was a better option than the shareware program we'd been using (and that was going away), and in some ways, that was true.  In other ways, not so much.

Our previous program was going away because it was insecure, out of date, and on a server going out of warranty.  We'd been working in SharePoint for a while, so the decision was made to do scheduling of rooms there.  At the same time, I and a few others looked into the Exchange option.

A lot of times there are more than one set of audiences or customers to consider.  As IT, my interest is in keeping the servers humming and the services moving their data around.  The end users wanted a simple way to book a room and to know that the room they're after is actually free.

The other customer to consider is the department actually responsible for the room(s). In this case our building manager.  He needed to know more than how many people would be at the meeting. He needed table set up information, video/projector information, and other specifics that would not fit on to the Exchange forms, but that could easily be added to the SharePoint calendar forms.  (Modifications could also be made to Exchange, but at a much higher cost in time and coordination).

So after a review, the building manager - the real owner of the service of booking rooms - made the decision that we would stick with the SharePoint calendars. If folks wanted to avoid overbooking, they'd have to check the calendars first.

I changed jobs not long after, and so I got the email, asking if it was OK if that old room was deleted.  I said sure, nobody's using it.

In the process he'd learned about customizing forms, I'd learned about customizing Exchange, and the limits of what's available to a single department in a large enterprise.  Even if we'd gone up a blind alley, we'd come out with more knowledge than we'd had before.  Failure isn't always a loss.

But like every other job, there needs to be a cleanup afterwards.