Tag: local government

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Moving To A National Digital Library?

In a post last year, http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/66967472797/a-national-future-for-libraries , I discussed the increasing volume of digital text, video and audio, produced by millions more writers and artists than have been supported by the big publishing and media corporations in the past.  These trends have important implications for libraries, especially the need to offer library patrons a national collection and reference to materials located anywhere.  That’s why I titled the post “A National Future For Libraries”.

So it was great that the US Government’s Institute of Museums and Library Services (IMLS) conducted their “Strategic Priorities 2014” conference with a focus on a National Digital Platform. 

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The meeting, held at the main building of the New York Public Library on Tuesday this week, featured most of the key leaders in the world of libraries and other non-profit cultural and information organizations as you can see below.

Jason Kucsma, ‎Executive Director of the Metropolitan New York Library Council, was one of the speakers – a nice recognition for the innovative work that METRO is doing under his leadership and METRO’s role as the New York State hub for the Digital Public Library of America.  (Note: I’m President of the board, but Jason and the staff of METRO actually do the work.)

It was very encouraging to see these leaders working together with a generally positive frame of mind, trying to figure out how to create and, more important, sustain a national digital library.  There’s clearly lots of work ahead of us – including much more than the usual community of librarians – but this was a good start.

You can see the conference video at http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/imls/140429/.  Since it was a whole day event, I’ve put the agenda below so you can watch particular sections.

Welcome and Framing the Day

Anthony Marx, President and CEO, New York Public Library – @NYPL

Maura Marx, Deputy Director for Libraries, IMLS – @mauramarx / @US_IMLS

Play Flash Video

INFRASTRUCTURE: Examining the Hubs Model

Moderated by:
Jim Neal, VP for Information Services and University Librarian, Columbia University, @columbialib

Panel:
Dan Cohen, Executive Director, Digital Public Library of America – @dancohen / @dpla

Brett Bobley, Chief Information Officer, National Endowment for the Humanities – @brettbobley / @NEH_ODH

Elliott Shore, Executive Director, Association of Research Libraries – @ARLnews

Play Flash Video

CONTENT: Beyond the low hanging fruit: Strategies on Providing Access to Complicated Content

Moderated by
Rachel Frick, Director, Digital Library Federation – @RLFrick / @CLIRDLF

Panel:
Sari Feldman, Executive Director, Cuyahoga County Public Libraries – @Sari_Feldman / @CuyahogaLib

Katherine Skinner, Executive Director, Educopia Institute – @Educopia

Clifford Lynch, Director, Coalition for Networked Information – @CNI_org

Play Flash Video

USE: Challenges and Opportunities to Broad Use of Digital Content

Moderated by:
Susan Hildreth, Director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services – @IMLSDirector / @US_IMLS

Panel:
Susan Gibbons, University Librarian, Yale University – @YaleLibrary

Bernie Margolis, New York State Librarian and Assistant Commissioner for Libraries

Play Flash Video

TOOLS: Encouraging Innovation

Moderated by:
Mary Lee Kennedy, Chief Library Officer, New York Public Library – @NYPL

Panel:
Ben Vershbow, Manager, NYPL Labs – @subsublibrary / @NYPL_Labs

Martin Kalfatovic, Associate Director Smithsonian Libraries, Program Director BHL – @UDCMRK / @SILibraries

Tom Scheinfeldt , Associate Professor of Digital Media / Director of Digital Humanities at University of Connecticut – @foundhistory / @UConn

Play Flash Video

ACCESS AT SCALE

Moderated by:
Josh Greenberg, Program Director for Digital Information Technology, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation – @epistemographer / @SloanFoundation

Panel:
MacKenzie Smith, University Librarian, University of California at Davis

Jason Kucsma, ?Executive Director at Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) – @J450NK / @mnylc

Dan Chudnov, Director, Scholarly Technology, George Washington University Libraries – @dchud / @gelmanlibrary

Play Flash Video

SKILLS

Moderated by:
Bob Horton, Associate Deputy Director for Library Services, IMLS – @US_IMLS

Panel:
Nancy McGovern , Head, Curation and Preservation Services, MIT Libraries – @mitlibraries

Jack Martin, Executive Director, Providence Public Library – @provlib

Play Flash Video

CONCLUSION AND CLOSING DISCUSSION

Maura Marx, Susan Hildreth and Bob Horton – @mauramarx, @IMLSDirector / @US_IMLS

Play Flash Video

©2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/84466500047/moving-to-a-national-digital-library]

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Urban Farming?

Urban farming would seem to be an oxymoron.  Yet, the idea of bringing farming into the heart of urban regions is – pun intended – cropping up everywhere. 

(In this post, I touch upon on a small subset of recent activities on the urban farming front.  If you’re interested, you’ll find lots more urban farming documented on the Internet.)

A couple of weeks ago, a New York Times article “Farm-to-Table Living Takes Root” reported on Agritopia, a neighborhood in Phoenix that focuses on farming. There have been as well reports of other farm-focused urban neighborhoods around the country. 

Lack of available land at street level is also no limitation.  Rooftop farms are being added to the tops of buildings in many cities.  But why just stop with the tops of buildings?

Columbia University Professor Dickson Despommier has been the modern prophet of the vertical farming concept that encourages building agricultural skyscrapers in large cities.  One example – the largest in the USA – is FarmedHere, which last month opened an indoor vertical farm in Chicago.

In a much bolder vision last year, the architect Vincent Callebaut proposed a Dragonfly shaped vertical farm for the south end of New York City’s Roosevelt Island.  (This is, alas, the same location of the future high tech, entrepreneurial campus of Cornell University and Technion Israeli Institute of Technology that former Mayor Bloomberg commissioned to emulate Silicon Valley.  Silicon Valley, in turn, was once filled with orchards, not tech companies.)

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If a real island, like Roosevelt, is not available within the city’s borders, then the answer is to build an artificial island.  The folks at Blue Revolution Hawaii are hoping to do just that in Honolulu and follow in the early footsteps of other cities around the world with farming on artificial islands – see the article “Floating Farms” in this month’s Modern Farmer magazine.

This may seem like some new trend and, in some ways, it is – as it reflects the ways that the Internet is opening up possibilities for people. 

But it is not completely new.  My favorite examples come from New York City, yes, New York City.  In the Queens section, John Bowne High School with a special focus on agriculture – and the program has been around since the end of World War I, originally in the old Newtown High School.  Even in Manhattan, George Washington High School in the north end of the island has a chapter of the Future Farmers of America. 

So the graduates of these schools won’t have to leave New York City to become farmers, even in the densest urban area in America.

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/80777085555/urban-farming]

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Where Is Telecommuting Going?

Where Is Telecommuting Going?

A week ago, there was an interesting article by Yonah Freemark on the Atlantic Cities website, “Why Telecommuting Really Matters, in 6 Charts”.

He points out that:

Over the past 30 years, at the same time the percentage of commuters driving has flatlined, the share of people working from home has exploded, almost doubling since 1980

[C]ontrasting urban density and the percentage of people with long commutes to work (in large counties across the U.S.), suggests that, at least on average, there’s no relationship between those variables and the choice to telecommute

Given current limitations on funding for transportation infrastructure, planners and politicians have a responsibility to take the rise of telecommuting and the potential for further declines in peak-hour traffic

The argument that telecommuting affects traffic patterns has been clear to telecommuters, if not urban planners and traffic planners in the past.  Indeed, traffic patterns are also changing because of the shift to online purchases which means more shipments to residences, rather than stores.  

All in all, the gradual dispersion of economic activities and their spread over a longer day than 9-5 means that transportation planning needs something better than the traditional rush-hour-to-downtown model.  Yet, there is still much talk among public officials about the need for significant road and mass transit investments to bring people downtown. 

Freemark also notes:

Two other variables, on the other hand, appear to correlate relatively closely with working from home, at least at the county level. Counties with a higher share of people holding a bachelor’s degree or higher are likelier to telecommute, and those with a higher percentage of “professional” workers

[C]ontrary to what we might expect, are people in less dense, exurban communities more likely to work from home than people living in center cities with plenty of jobs nearby.

If you think about the nature of their work – which often results in intangible services or digital products – it is not too surprising that professional workers can easily do their work anywhere. 

Given their generally higher incomes, which affords greater housing choices, it is also not too surprising that these same people don’t live far out on the exurban fringes of metropolitan areas.  

However, today, we are still in the early stages of telecommuting technology.   For most telecommuters, most of the day, they do email, handle documents and maybe text chat from time to time.  That is not yet close to the kind of experience they would have in an office, which offers much more visual interaction with other human beings.

But that will change in the coming years and telecommuters will be able to have something very much like the office experience.   When that happens, will they ask themselves whether they want to move “further out”?  Some will do so.

Let’s take this thinking one more step.  Perhaps the question of where people will live is misleading.  In an age of enhanced telecommuting, professional workers won’t need to live in one place.  Even now, I know many professionals who identify their home in an urban area.  But, in reality, they are there for an average of only 2-4 days a week.  The other days they are somewhere else, maybe a country home.  

The rise in telecommuting also means that we need to get used to the idea that an individual could be both urban and rural because they can work anywhere and not in the same place all the time.

So here’s a concluding question: Is the like the wrenching mind shift that was required of physicists as they moved from Newtonian mechanics to quantum mechanics?  If so, it’s going to be quite a while before public officials and planners accept and respond to the implications of telecommuting.

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/76427547544/where-is-telecommuting-going]

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Who & What Is Tech For In The Inner City?

The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) was created twenty years ago by the famed strategy professor at Harvard Business School Professor, Michael Porter.  ICIC focuses on economic development strategies for inner cities.  Their stated mission is “to drive economic prosperity in America’s inner cities through private sector investment to create jobs, income and wealth for local residents”.  

As part of their What Works For Cities series, last Thursday, ICIC held a webinar for about two hundred attendees on “How inner cities can increase the impact of technology clusters”.  On behalf of the Intelligent Community Forum, I was one of the invited speakers.

ICIC wanted to address three questions:

  1. What can city governments do to create technology-based economies in inner cities?
  2. How can cities ensure that inner city residents have access to technology so that they are prepared, skilled, and able to participate in a tech-based economy?
  3. What is a local governments’ role in building the capacity of innovative businesses so that they create jobs for inner city residents? What policies have worked?

So I took this as an opportunity to discuss technology-based economic growth from a global perspective, based on my own experience and that of the hundreds of cities and regions who have been identified as intelligent communities by the Intelligent Community Forum over the last fifteen years. My focus was especially on innovation and inclusion.

There were two underlying themes in my presentation.

First, technology-based economic development should not mean solely creating software and other tech companies.  Partly that is because good social policy doesn’t just replace current poor inner city residents with newcomers who are programmers and web designers. 

Helping existing residents learn programming is a key part of the story that the two New York City public officials presented during the webinar.  NYC’s focus is to fulfill the demand for programmers, web designers and engineers from among those who have been unemployed – recognizing that in the tech industry, aptitude is more important than degrees, an important consideration for inner city residents.

I’d add that there are a variety of places and ways that people can learn programming from the Internet, including the well-known Code Academy.   In his recent post “Can Tech Help Inner City Poverty?” Michael Mandel reviewed the generally positive results of these programs.

But the world needs more than just programmers, as was well discussed in a recent NPR report, “Computers Are The Future, But Does Everyone Need To Code?”.

A successful technology-based economy strategy for inner city residents should also help non-programmers and low-tech businesses benefit from being connected digitally to the greater opportunities of the global economy.

Second, in this century with its digital, knowledge-based global economy, innovation is the key to competitive success.  I described several ways that cities can be an example of innovation and facilitate innovation among their residents, including, or perhaps especially, among inner city residents.

While the full presentation will be on the ICIC website later, here is a summary of the various aspects of the strategy that I presented.  The 21st century city:

  • connects residents to the global economic opportunities
  • connects residents to open innovation
  • provides a platform for lifelong learning for residents
  • has a culture of innovation
  • creates places that inspire residents to innovate

© 2014 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/75049511867/who-what-is-tech-for-in-the-inner-city]

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Large County Innovation Summit

The National Association of Counties’ Large Urban County Caucus – LUCC, as it is known – represents the largest counties in the country, where a significant percentage of Americans live.   LUCC held its 2013 County Innovation Symposium in New York City last week from Wednesday through Friday. 

(I was invited in my new role as the first Senior NACo Fellow.)

Although Thursday’s schedule included sessions on health care, criminal justice and resilience, the meeting on the other two days focused on economic development.  Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program and co-author of the recent book, “The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy” kicked off Friday morning.

He and other panelists noted the evolving role of counties and NACo itself, as the old suburban vs. urban disputes are overtaken by important socio-economic trends. 

First, there is an increased understanding and recognition among public officials now of the metropolitan, really regional, nature of economies.  The old game of providing incentives to companies to move within a metropolitan area, resulting in no new jobs in the region, is wearing thin.

Second, the global nature of the economy implies that regions are now competing with each other, not localities.  And only a regional scale can generate the funds necessary to compete on a global basis.

Third, the demographic differences that used to separate suburban and urban areas are diminishing.  The two are beginning to look a lot alike.  Brookings’ research indicates that today there are more poor people in suburbs than in cities. 

Along with this discussion of economic strategy, there was a strong interest in encouraging innovation and in learning how to get good innovations to diffuse quickly.  This interest is one reason why NACo has appointed Dr. Bert Jarreau as its first Chief Innovation Officer.

With that in mind, the group went to visit Google’s New York labs.  (It is interesting to see Google’s entry into the sub-national arena over the last year or so, as more traditional IT companies have withdrawn somewhat from this market.)

A predictable big hit was the demonstration of Google Glass and a discussion of Glass apps, called GlassWare, that might be of value in the public sector.

There were also presentations of two applications that were extensions of Google’s search and other tools.  One was for integrated predictive policing, with heavy use of video cams (both public and private) and unstructured, narrative data.  Similarly, Macomb County, MI (population 900,000) showed how it uses a search tool, called SuperIndex, for text and images of land records.  The latter, by the way, is financially self-supporting.

By the end of the meeting, NACo LUCC decided they will make this innovation symposium an annual event.  It is often these kinds of unexpected, under-the-radar, developments that surprise people later.  County governments has not had a reputation for innovation, but keep your eyes open for what develops with this group.

©2013 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/70392255080/large-county-innovation-summit]

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A National Future For Libraries?

The second and final meeting of the Aspen Institute workgroup on the future of libraries was held last week.

[What follows does not necessarily represent views of anyone else there or even the discussion that took place.  These are purely my reflections when the meeting was over and continue what I started in a previous post.  I also apologize in advance for the length of this post.]

The question that kept crossing my mind is simple: given the obvious trends in the library world and, more broadly, the world of knowledge, is some form of national network of library services inevitable?

When books were physical items primarily produced by established book publishers, the local library was the place local residents needed to go to get access to those books (assuming they couldn’t afford to buy everything they wanted to read).

There are still many printed books in local libraries around the country.  We are, after all, in a transitional period and we can expect to see some printed books lasting long after almost everyone will be reading digitally – 2050? 

But books are changing.  It’s not just that there are digital versions of printed books.  Self-published books and co-created texts already are more numerous than traditionally published books, even including e-books.  With so much digital content, produced by so many different sources, the purely local collections in a local library can easily be outmatched in both quantity and quality. 

The Digital Public Library of America is one important response to this accelerating condition.  Indeed, DPLA is as much the future of libraries as anything on the horizon right now.  DPLA doesn’t centralize all of the digital collections, but it makes them available to everyone.  It uses local library resources (and regional consortia) to collect and organize digital content created locally, but it lets that content escape the constraints of the physical building in which they have been stored.

Another sign of the times is the use of virtual reference librarians.  These were first established to share the load of patron requests especially at odd hours. 

However, the potential of a network of reference librarians is much greater than that.  Consider the deep knowledge that a reference librarian in one part of the country can have about some subject – say Hellenic pottery as an example.  Why shouldn’t she or he get the reference questions that come up about that subject no matter where the patron is?  Can the reference desk in the local library match this knowledge?  Of course not.  Is it possible that the reference librarian locally happens to be that expert in a subject? Of course.  Why not let her specialize?

In a future world where most content will be digital, a national network of reference librarians would provide patrons with the best possible service and pointers to the best places to find the content they are searching for.

DPLA and specialized virtual reference librarians are just two significant ways that library services are no longer limited to the local library building.

So, if not as the collector of printed books or the location for an all knowing reference librarian sitting at a desk there, what will be the purpose of local library buildings in the decades ahead? 

Already we see the library building being used as a meeting place.  Even more exciting, many libraries are becoming centers for create content and culture in various ways – offering Maker Spaces (with 3D printers), poetry rooms, video/audio studios, etc.

Consider also that the national digital collection that is being pioneered by DPLA will need much more manpower to become useful than DPLA and its hubs can provide.  The local library building can be one place where the staff can help with the task of tagging/classifying and otherwise making sense of all the new content produced by others.

The local library can also be the outreach center to get volunteers to help with this enormous task and thus be the local chapters of a national pool of librarians and colleagues.

As with any other sea change, the shift to a national library network will not come without strife.  The most obvious trouble is that libraries have been inherently local institutions supported by local taxes.  There is currently a very small amount of Federal money devoted to library services, mostly in the form of a fraction of the e-rate program.

As library services become not merely local, but an interstate concern, the Federal government or some other national organization is going to have to step up funding for the national institutions that will make those services work.

***

The Aspen Institute has also been involved in projects about citizenship so it worth remembering that our founding fathers strongly supported libraries as the cornerstone of an educated citizenry, which they thought, in turn, was essential for democratic government to survive. 

Our national leaders today don’t explicitly share that understanding and seem to find it easier to deal with a less engaged citizenry.  Perhaps the nationalization of libraries will make it easier for American citizens all over the country to gain the knowledge necessary to play their proper role in our democracy and thereby improve the way that our national government functions.  Now there’s a long term goal!

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/66967472797/a-national-future-for-libraries]

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New Uses For Subway Spaces?

Well over a year ago, I began working with executives at the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to help them envision the future of their facilities.  Traditionally, subway and train stations were considered to be nothing more than places where people got on and off trains.

That was obvious.  Not so obvious is that the MTA is the largest owner of enclosed public space in New York City and that space had the potential to be so much more than passages to trains.

Practical considerations – barely having enough money to run the trains well – meant that the MTA needed to tie in this vision with some revenue.  The MTA gets a small percentage of its total budget by selling advertising space and renting the few locations that were appropriate for retail stores. 

But many of its spaces were long corridors, funny corners, big open areas and the like – which couldn’t work as a traditional store.  In those spaces, however, it is possible to insert a digital retail experience, which would be both a pleasant surprise in the subway halls and a source of revenue where none was possible before.

And, with considerable planning, a partnership of companies that combined digital advertising and technology and an enthusiasm for innovation at the highest levels of the MTA, last week the idea came to life.

In the Bryant Park station at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, riders came upon a digital shopping experience – a first in the New York subways.  As pictured below, in the Intelligent Color Experience by L’Oréal Paris, one panel consists of a virtual mirror that sees what the woman is wearing and her own skin tones.  Then she gets suggestions on what cosmetics to select and, of course, she can buy the products with a swipe of a credit card.

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For more articles on this experiment, see:

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/66372336558/new-uses-for-subway-spaces]

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Isn’t There A Better Way To Build Government Software?

The awful performance of healthcare.gov has been a staple of the news as well as satire.  This cartoon in the New Yorker this week sums of the frustration of users – http://www.newyorker.com/humor/issuecartoons/2013/11/04/cartoons_20131028#slide=4

I normally don’t like to comment on hot news stories, but this one offers just too much of a teachable moment, especially for public officials who are not technologists, yet who will suffer public criticism when things go bad.

It’s worth noting that this is not the only case of Federal IT system problems.  Before healthcare.gov, the great cost and the long delays of the FBI case management system were in the news.  And, not to be outdone, New York City had a major scandal with its timekeeping system, both for the huge cost (close to $750 million) and the fact that there was a significant amount of that money diverted into the personal pockets of the project staff.

Indeed, costly and disastrous software projects are not just found in the public sector.  It only seems so because the public sector problems are more visible thanks to taxpayer funding, whereas the private sector can keep its mistakes better hidden.

In part, this review of bad projects reminds me of an old line in IT project management.  “Of the three goals of any the project – being within budget, on time, and of good quality – you’re usually only going to get two, but not all three.”  But, for the Affordable Care Act, is none of the three some kind of trifecta?

Part of the problem is that these projects cost way too much money.  That’s often because of rules intended to ensure everything is above board and serves the taxpayers’ interest, but which have the reverse effect.  And so ultimately, the purpose of the procurement rules is, as a well-intentioned government attorney once told me, to follow the rules – not necessarily to get maximum value for the taxpayers.  The big companies that dominate Federal technology projects have learned to master these rules and not necessarily do the best job.  Their reputations are also victims of this focus on process, rather than outcomes.

Another reason for the bloating of these projects is simple ego.  Some top executives have the belief that big important projects should have big budgets. 

Unfortunately, this attitude fails to distinguish the cost of writing the software from deploying it.  The cost of software development does not increase much if the number of users is 100 or 100,000. 

Obviously, the cost of deploying that software will increase in a linear fashion the more people who use it because the deployment may require more servers, more complex database arrangements, etc.

But spending hundreds of millions just to develop the software is usually unjustified.

So what can be done by executives who have to deliver new systems to the public, but feel they are enveloped in a fog of technical jargon so don’t question things until it’s too late.

Consider these alternative ways of handling software projects, none of which is really new, but seem to be not well known to non-technologists in both government and elsewhere:

  • Adopt the agile approach – this means having frequent deliverables and thus taking advantage of learning by users and developers.  It stands in contrast to the traditional practice of big requirements documents and all at once delivery of mammoth amounts of code.
  • Frequent testing, which is also a part of the agile approach.  It’s so important that some people build the test before the software.  After all, proof of the pudding is in the eating and it’s useful to know you’re off course earlier rather than later.
  • Parameterize.  This is something you don’t hear too much about, but it’s something I’ll mention here because some of the healthcare.gov vendors blamed their problems on changes in Federal decision making about whether users need to register first.  I would always tell my development staff this simple rule – if the debate about whether some requirement should be X or Y will take longer to resolve than it takes to program it both ways, then program it both ways by creating a parameter that will switch the system one way or the other.  Don’t let these debates hold up progress of software development.  (By the way, if the debate is that hot, there is good reason to expect the decision to change in the future, which will cost more money in future programming.  So parameterize and let the decision makers argue and change their minds as much as they want.)
  • Gradual scaling – don’t roll out a big new piece of software to the whole world at once.  (Do we really need to say this?)  If the scale of deployment is expected to be a possible problem, why not minimize the problem by taking it in several steps and, again, learning what needs to be improved.  Even experienced Broadway veterans try out the show on the road first.
  • Simplify deployments by using a scalable infrastructure.  There’s much discussion about “the cloud”, which is really just a good marketing term for the vast scale of computing resources available over the Internet.  Use it instead of trying to reinvent this vast scale, which is impossible for any organization, no matter big.  Many Internet businesses you’ve dealt with use these resources to handle peak demand or initial rollouts. 

I could go on, but these guidelines are normally enough to keep your next big systems project out of the headlines.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/65612237318/isnt-there-a-better-way-to-build-government-software]

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Does Your Website Talk To People The Way They Think?

(This blog post is a broadening of the recent post on gamification.)

Almost all governments have some kind of website.  Aside from when these sites just don’t work because of bad links or insufficient computer resources to meet demand, they mostly feel like an electronic version of old style government whose employees were often accused of treating other people as “just a number”. These websites talk at people in a kind of monotone, not having a conversation or interaction.

Yet, most of us realize that people have different interests, personalities, cognitive styles and ways of interacting with others.  Thus, to be most effective,  a website should change to reflect who is interacting with it.  

Unfortunately, the only variability that exists in most websites – public or private sector – is usually based on purchasing patterns, such as the different web pages and pricing that appear on Amazon’s website, depending upon your past consumer behavior or perhaps by providing languages other than English.

Glen Urban, who is a marketing professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, calls this the “empathetic Web”.  (See the article, “Morph the Web To Build Empathy, Trust and Sales” by him and his colleagues at http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/morph-the-web-to-build-empathy-trust-and-sales/)

As their summary states:

We’ve long been able to personalize what information the Internet tells us — but now comes “Web site morphing,” and an Internet that personalizes how we like to be told. For companies, it means that communicating — and selling — will never be the same.

The authors distinguish between people on the basis of two pairs of cognitive preferences (visual vs. verbal and analytic vs. holistic).  At the very least, a website should reflect these cognitive differences.  

But it is also worth thinking about other differences. For example, many people prefer a conversational style to the completion of a long form.  The widespread use of smart phones to access the Internet has increased the need to have a more conversational style on the web since the screen is too small to do otherwise.  (That’s why games are a useful model to consider.)  

As the authors note, this is not just a matter of making a website more convenient, but also is essential in building trust, which helps a private company increase sales – and is an absolute requirement for any public official.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/64296674666/does-your-website-talk-to-people-the-way-they-think]

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New Soft Cities

Carl Skelton is my colleague and co-founder of the Gotham Innovation Greenhouse and former director of the Experimental Media Center at NYU/Polytechnic Institute.

He has written a book about the Betaville open source project that enables residents of a city to collaborate and participate in urban design and planning.  But it’s more than just about the history and role of the Betaville project.

The book provides context for urban design in an Internet-enabled era.  As the publisher’s (Springer) summary states:

“the reader can gain a deeper understanding of the potential socio-technical forms of the New Soft Cities: blended virtual-physical worlds, whose public works must ultimately serve and succeed as massively collaborative works of art and infrastructure.”

Hence the title of Carl’s book: “Soft City Culture and Technology”, which will be officially published at the end of this month.

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

[http://njacknis.tumblr.com/post/61587029722/new-soft-cities]

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Aspen Institute on Public Libraries

Last month, the Aspen Institute gathered about two dozen leaders and innovators to a workshop on the future of public libraries.  I was honored to be asked to participate.  I will be helping to develop the larger strategy, but I thought I’d share some immediate observations from the discussions and my reflections on them.

As a pre-condition to thinking clearly about the future of libraries, we need to leave behind legacy thinking. The libraries of today cannot be and shouldn’t be the libraries that we fondly remember from our childhood.  A library is no longer a building merely with books.  Even the addition of e-books to printed books is not a fundamental and sufficient change in the traditional library model.  

To escape that old mold, library services can now – and should now – escape the confines of the library building itself.  With the Internet, library services can be everywhere.

At one point in the discussion, someone put up a picture like the one below – which isn’t quite what I have in mind by going beyond the library building 😉

image

The reaction of some people was a feeling that the “little free library” movement built cute little boxes but it is sad that library funding has been so diminished that we are left with such pitiful collections.

My reaction was a bit different.  I said I agreed that this little box was limited, if what you had in it was printed books.  But why not take all the outdoors and other locations which are targeted for “little free libraries” and make the real and much bigger digital library available to people there.  As a portal to the digital library online, the collection can be as large as possible even in this little box.

I also pointed out that our economy has been changing and more people earn a living in digital ways, based on knowledge and innovation.  In such an economy, you would think that libraries should be the key institution and hub of society.  I gave examples of how some libraries are providing support to entrepreneurs.  Another implication of this role for libraries is that the distinctions between public libraries and those labeled as specialized, school or university libraries will be weakening because often an entrepreneur or other innovator needs access to specialized technical knowledge as well as general audience information.

It was clear that the idea that Google and the Internet make librarians unnecessary was weighing on the minds in the room, as elsewhere in the library world.  Maybe it’s because I’ve been an unusually long time user of the Internet, but I’m waiting for help from good librarians.  What most of us face is TMI and TLK – too much information and too little knowledge.

Librarians can be the guide, curator, re-mixer, and knowledge creator for people who are drowning in a sea of information, or worse, swimming in the wrong part of the sea considering what they need to know.

Of course, it was clear from the discussion that many of us realize the users of libraries can also contribute, as in the pro-sumer model where a person is both consumer and producer of information.  So librarians should encourage and make space for people to self-publish.  Going beyond text, libraries should do the same for people making videos, music or even things (through the availability of maker rooms and the like).

Along those lines, there was a bit of discussion about the Douglas County (Colorado) Library model.  That library got fed up with the refusal of four major publishers to sell e-books to them and the tough conditions imposed by the other two big publishers.  So it reached out to many independent publishers to get their e-books in the library.  

A much wider possibility in the future is for the libraries to help authors to publish their works without the traditional publishers. Yes, I know there could be a lot of junk published, but there is no reason why book reviews, peer reviews, and other means couldn’t be used to help identify the junk without the need for editorial approval from the big six publishing companies.  The Public Library of Science (PLOS) has, as an example, established itself as a respectable medium for research using these techniques.

Finally, it seems that each library is trying to create the future itself.  Why can’t librarians and others in the library world work together nationally, enabled by the tools of the Internet.  If there is a librarian in Seattle who is an expert on Eritrea, why can’t she be available all over the US?  Someone described this as the library version of MOOCs.  This kind of federation, perhaps mutual aid pact, is a natural result when librarians realize their services are no longer limited to library buildings.

The Aspen Institute project is asking important questions not only for libraries, but for our country as a whole, so keep track of its efforts.  For more information now, see www.aspeninstitute.org/dialogue-public-libraries

© 2013 Norman Jacknis

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