Spencer Critchley

Communication and Change

The Web

When A Pointless Flash Animation Is Just Right

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We’re all familiar with pointless Flash animations that serve only as barriers to getting to useful web content. But I recently stumbled across an instructive exampe of a “pointless” Flash animation that works.

It’s on the web site of the musician Adem:
http://www.adem.tv/site/

Why does it work? I see a few reasons, none of them mysterious and yet all of them frequently ignored:

  • The animation is not an obstacle – it’s on the same page as the main content.
  • But it’s designed to support, not compete with, that content.
  • It’s light weight – Firefox’s Web Developer extension tells me the whole page is just 107 KB.
  • It’s relevant to the site, expressing a sense of the artist’s identity.
  • It’s delightful in its own right. I just like watching it go.

Achieving this kind of deceptively simple design balance makes all the difference – the same difference that distinguishes an iPod from an iPlod.

The Adem site is designed by worklesshard.

Digital Politics: An Interview With CivicSpace Founder Zack Rosen

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Also on my O’Reilly blog:

We may have the seductiveness of the amazon.com shopping cart to thank for CivicSpace, an enhanced content management system (CMS) that has spawned many of the leading political web sites, starting with that of the Howard Dean for President campaign.

As an impoverished University of Illinois computer science student, Zack Rosen browsed his way across titles such as Emergence, Smart Mobs and Linked – and then accidentally bought them all. When the expensive pile arrived, he figured he might as well read it, and he quickly found himself absorbed in ideas of connection via networks. At the same time, he began hearing more and more about longshot presidential candidate Howard Dean, and how his campaign was using the web to find supporters and raise money. Things clicked. Rosen entered his zip code for a Dean meetup, and soon he found himself working with a team of like-minded technologists, adapting the Drupal CMS to build Deanspace, which would eventually evolve into CivicSpace, a robust and growing platform for grassroots online political organizing (aka netroots), especially in its pairing with CiviCRM, a politically-oriented Customer relationship management system.

I came across CivicSpace while researching open source technologies for montereycountydemocrats.org. Our team elected to custom code the main public site, while also using or experimenting with pre-built solutions such as WordPress for our blog, and CivicSpace, Advokit and dotproject, among others, for our internal needs. CivicSpace has proven to be one of the most robust and usable of them all.

I interviewed Zack recently via email:

How did Deanspace come together?

It started a simple web page and mailing lists and was fleshed out in IRC chats and on our wiki. Pretty soon we were building software (on top of Drupal) and deploying one DeanSpace site after another. I dropped out of school after the summer of ’03 to work in the Dean campaign headquarters on the web team. My primary responsibility was to service the web technology needs of the state organizations, main constituent groups, and grassroots groups. We leveraged the DeanSpace software to a great extent and members of the DeanSpace community were very instrumental in supporting the many projects in which it was deployed.

What were the design goals?

We were focused on providing a toolkit that would help grassroots groups publish a website, sign up contacts, organize events, collaborate, and communicate seamlessly with the wider campaign effort through web-standard data sharing technology (RSS, FOAF, etc.).

Why was Drupal chosen as the platform?

#1) It was built on LAMP (PHP) by far the most supported web-app environment. This made it much easier to find engineering help (wider pool of talent) and much cheaper and easier to host the software.
#2) It has the cleanest code-base and provided the most powerful web-app framework of all the other CMS’s by far
#3) The development community focus was on community websites.

How well did it work?

It has worked better than we could ever have dreamed. Without Drupal, DeanSpace likely wouldn’t have worked nearly as well and CivicSpace almost certainly wouldn’t exist. CivicSpace is now poised to become the dominant web application platform for the non-profit, NGO, and advocacy web-technology sector due to the power and phenominal success of the Drupal project. And we’re just getting started.

What are some of the most important things you’ve learned since, and what improvements have they led to?

I’ve spent most of the past year steeped in the world business more than technology. While technology is fueling the CivicSpace project, the largest and most complex obstacles we have confronted are in the creation of the business infrastructure that will allow us to successfully support and sustain the development and use of the technology. This is the remaining hurdle we are required to overcome to scale our community and our platform out to the millions of organizations in the world who need access to the tools. With the establishment of the CivicSpace Foundation under Compumentor and with CivicSpace LLC building an on-demand CivicSpace service the remaining pieces are quickly being put in place.

CivicSpace LLC is a social enterprise focused providing a CivicSpace on-demand service. They are now beginning alpha testing with a select group of resellers. I am the Director of the CivicSpace Foundation which is fiscally sponsored by Compumentor. We are focused expanding our community and serving the needs of the organizations, development communities, and servicing firms we work with.

What’s happening with Civicspace & CiviCRM?

CiviCRM is now included as the primary CRM system in CivicSpace. It allows our users to utilize a fully featured best-of-breed open-source CRM system fully integrated into the CivicSpace platform.

Do you have any favorite Civicspace sites?

nextbillion.net < - nominated for a Webby
musicforamerica.org < - one of the first CS sites jerrybrown.org < - very cool new candidate site citizenspeak.org < - awesome free web-service built on CS
What would you consider the major competitor and/or partner technologies?

Competitors: Kintera, GetActive, Convio

Partners: Drupal, OpenNgo (creators of CiviCRM), and all of our vendor firms

What’s your assessment of the impact on politics of this kind of technology, and where do you see all this going in the future?

We will see 🙂 We are building the most powerful community organizing technology in the world and a channel to deliver it to any size organization, regardless of budget. If we are successful I think CivicSpace will play a definitive role in the intersection of society and technology in general as well as in political communities and events. Two years ago, when the Dean Campaign ended, we started CivicSpace to make sure that the “next time around” we would have the proper infrastructure available that would enable us to much more effectively build and support the new and radically more powerful kinds of communities we had proven are possible to form. We are almost there.

What have you learned about the intersection of politics and technology that you didn’t know when you started with the Dean campaign?

The extent and speed at which the social medium new that technology makes possible will govern the future of the political process and campaigns.

An in-depth podcast interview with Zack Rosen can be found at:

http://lullabot.com/podcast/drupal_podcast_no_11

Digital Politics

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From my O’Reilly blog:

I’ve been doing more and more work in politics since the ’04 election (communications consulting and web production). I got involved at first out of a sense of civic obligation–and because my wife told me to “stop ranting and go volunteer”. I expected to dread a lot of what I’d encounter, figuring politics is where the worst people you knew in high school went. You know, the manipulative weasels fascinated by power. But I’ve been surprised by how deeply interesting and satisfying the experience has been so far, and by how many people I’ve met who are still motivated by service.

The intersection of technology and politics is one of the most fascinating areas of all, so I think I’ll be writing about it some.

A couple of recent items I’ve come across highlight the subject’s currency. From Tim O’Reilly’s report of a Clay Shirky talk at ETech:

Social software is the experimental wing of political philsophy, a discipline that doesn’t realize it has an experimental wing. We are literally encoding the principles of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools. We need to have conversations about the explicit goals of what it is that we’re supporting and what we are trying to do, because that conversation matters. Because we have short-term goals and the cliff-face of annoyance comes in quickly when we let users talk to each other. But we also need to get it right in the long term because society needs us to get it right. I think having the language to talk about this is the right place to start.

And from a New York Times op-ed titled Exporting Censorship, by Xeni Jardin of boingboing:

One of our most laudable national goals is the export of free speech and free information, yet American companies are selling censorship. While some advocates of technology rights have proposed consumer boycotts and Congressional action to pressure these firms into responsible conduct, a good first step would be adding filtering technologies to the United States Munitions List, an index of products for which exporters have to file papers with the State Department. While this won’t end such sales, it will bring them to light and give the public and lawmakers a better basis on which to consider stronger steps.

If American companies are already obligated to disclose the sale of bombs and guns to repressive regimes, why not censorware?

Why not indeed. Increasingly wars will be fought via electrons over networks, not bullets over land.

My Tips From An E-Musician Article On Podcasting

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Electronic Musican recently ran a comprehensive article on podcasting, written by David Battino. It includes some tips from me. A lot of what has stuck with me about communication over the years I first learned as a freelance writer-broadcaster for the Canadian Broacasting Corporation:

“I think the most important thing is a strong focus-an angle,” he replied. “The focus is a simple, active, emotionally compelling statement of what this story is about and why it matters to people. ‘Water pollution’ is not a good focus. But, ‘When you wash your car, you’re sending toxic chemicals into Monterey Bay,’ is.”

Another skill podcasters can learn from radio is how to write for the ear rather than the eye, Critchley says…

More at emusician.com.

10 Journalism Tips For Bloggers, Podcasters & Other E-Publishers

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Blogs, podcasts & e-newsletters make it easy for anyone to be a journalist. But just as the debut of desktop publishing led to some very ugly documents, these newer tools are spawning some very sloppy journalism, which does no good for the reputation of participatory media. Here are some tips on how good journalists do useful work (first published on my O’Reilly blog):

  1. Respect the value of people’s time. Anyone who publishes is making a deal with their audience: This will be more rewarding than real life would have been. Know your point, get to it quickly, and make your content dense with value. We live in a narcissistic age, and free access to world-wide distribution is not helping. We all need to remember: It’s not fascinating just because I said it.
  2. Have a strong focus, and relate everything to it. A good focus is a simple idea that people care about–in a newspaper story, it’s the lede. It’s a hard discipline to learn, but you can really only get one good idea across in any one article or program–everything else either supports and develops that idea, or it conflicts with and confuses it. Think of Beethoven’s Fifth as a model: the whole first movement is based on four notes.
  3. Look for the heat in your subject. Appeal is emotional, not intellectual. Even theoretical physicists get excited more by primal motives like pursuit, struggle and triumph than they do by abstract concepts. This primacy of emotion is routinely abused in mass media–hence the prevalence of sex, death, greed and vanity–but you don’t have to go that far, just look for what people will really care about in your content and use that as a guide. For example, this headline and first sentence draws you into a recent Scientific American blog about a primitive member of the genus Hibbertopterus:

    Supersized Water Scorpion Strolled Scotland’s Shores
    The other day I had an unfortunate run-in with a cockroach in my apartment…

  4. Whatever your subject, write about people, physical objects and actions. These are what engage the imagination and the emotions, and concentrating on them has the added benefit of aiding clarity (see next item). Avoid abstractions, generalities, jargon and clichés.
  5. Use plain speech, and talk like a real person. Too many people have been trained to use big words and complicated sentences to build an edifice to hide behind. If a simpler word can be used with no loss of meaning, use it. Same goes for fewer words vs. more. If you can’t say it plainly, that may mean you don’t understand it well enough yet.
  6. Avoid adjectives and adverbs wherever possible. They seldom have any impact. It works much better to find the right nouns and verbs. As Mark Twain said, “If you find an adjective, kill it.” Try it, you’ll be amazed at the difference it makes. Compare “The widow Douglas was sanctimonious and hypocritical” with the way Twain wrote it in The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn:

    The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names, too, but she never meant no harm by it.

  7. Opinions are not facts, even your opinions. Opinions make personal journalism lively. But be sure you know the difference between opinion and fact, and make it clear to your readers as well. It’s all too easy to jump to conclusions when you’re predisposed to believe something. This is the source of deluges of unreliable information on the Web.
  8. Identify your sources. Just asserting a fact is unpersuasive–even in ALL CAPS with lots of exclamation marks!!! –and it contributes nothing to a discussion. Your audience needs to know where this information comes from, so they can judge its credibility.
  9. Identify interests. If someone appears to be an expert, that’s one thing. If they also have a financial or other interest in you believing their version of reality, that’s another. Be skeptical. Good journalists have to assume that everyone, even people they like, may be lying.
  10. Fact-check. Reputable pro media outlets use professional fact checkers, and they still manage to make mistakes frequently. People may be citing you as a source, so try to get the details right. Related to this: spell-check!

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BTW, O’Reilly editor & blogger David Battino has a good in-depth article on producing podcasts in December’s Electronic Musician, with a companion web-based guide based on a podcast with composer BJ Liederman (of NPR themes fame).