Wireless Community Weekend 2010 at Berlin is a conference of different wireless networks around Europe. One of the sessions we held was on what kind of services people are running on their networks and what should be develop (as a community) next to enrich our infrastructure.
I’m at Campus Party EU in Madrid this week and while it was a decent event, the part that it’s interesting is to see how community of over 200 international participants organize themselves as most of the flights back are canceled. As almost here is versed in IT technologies it is safe to say that we’re seeing the future of citizen self-organizing using modern collaboration technologies.
1.Projecting Twitter stream to the stages. This was more of a gimmick and nice to have back channel before, but during the time of the crisis provides an excellent overview of the chatter and what people are saying or trying to organize.
2.Travel Wiki, where people started writing down which cities or towns they need to get and what are different options of travel and prices.
3.Official blog that keeps everyone updated with the latest information. This if of course transmitted to the wiki and twitter stream.
All the solutions, except for the official blog, relay on the crowd to filter the information and self organize while everyone thinks of the solution. It ensures people don’t panic and there are centralized and maintained places to find the latest information, reducing the level of misinformation and things lost in translation.
Usability of 3rd party modules is often interesting and you can see evolution of the product through the interface. Breezing Forms is not exception to this, as it uses interesting formation of radio buttons to indicate validation options.
Trick question: what is current setting?
Yep, it’s None. Not Library that it seems from the first glance. Readability of this form can be greatly improved by moving radio button field to the left of text:
The lesson here is that if you’re forms are making you hesitate before clicking, you probably have to rethink them.
Update: D. submitted further improvement in the comments (thanks!):
Slovenian budget is a 12 billion euro monster that most citizens don’t understand or even have remote idea how it’s structured and where does their money go. As it turns out, people are just not good at taking abstract numbers to go into billions and understanding proportions and what it means to spend 50 million on one thing and 1 billion on something else.
That is what I’m trying to solve with this Visualization of budget of Slovenia for 2010. Show where the money is going as well as tell a story of a country that’s so much in debt that it would be a reason for panic if it happened to a person or a company. Yet we don’t seem to talk or address the issue that we’re 3.6 billion EUR short of making budget and that we have to borrow more money to pay our old debts.
(click on image for interactive version)
Income
Spending
(red is debt)
Lesson
Having access to experts or your own understanding of the data you’re trying to visualize is essential. In this case we had to reassemble budget since they form listing in a way that presents debt separately from the rest of the budget.
Kiberpipa is a large organization with lots of volunteers. This means that whatever you do, you’ll have organizational problems and you’ll see technology as a way to solve them. To a certain degree of course. A few years ago Boštjan and I saw this as an opportunity to reinvent the wheel and write our own groupware software. This is is how intranet project (yes, a terrible name from branding perspective) was born almost 5 years ago.
Since then a number of people have picked up the project and used it to improve their Django skills as well as help Kiberpipa get a bit more organized by a way of technology. While learning my way around some video editing software I’ve thrown together a video of commits of pieces of code into intranet’s code repository. Project used to generate frames is an open source Java based code_swarm. I’d like to encourage it to try it out and run it on your own source repositories.
This is the story of the following video. Please watch it in ‘full screen’ for the best experience:
