Andromeda Yelton

Across Divided Networks

Mapping #libday8

January 17th, 2012 · Uncategorized

Bobbi Newman’s Library Day in the Life project is an awesome idea (which you should go sign up for), but I admit I’ve had trouble getting into it. There’s (traditional ironic librarian problem ahoy!) just so much data I don’t know where to start. So I’ve been thinking about alternative ways to visualize the data and provide entry points. I thought it would be fun to see the #libday8 participants on a map.

Behold, a map!

(The iframe embed Google generated didn’t seem to be working, but you can click through the image to play with the interactive Google map.)

How I did this

I thought I was going to have to write some code, screen-scrape the HTML wiki into CSV, learn a Google maps API, blah blah blah. It turns out I did not! As with so many tech problems, this reduced to “beat it with rocks until it works”. Unlike many tech problems, no actual code was required; it was mostly copy-paste. To wit:

Step 1: =ImportHTML is your friend. Google Docs will automagically import tables from web pages as spreadsheet data. I followed these instructions; just a matter of changing the number N until the right table materialized. (Note that =ImportHTML is case-sensitive; =importHTML won’t work.)

Step 2: Copy-paste as values. The automagic import is a whole bunch of spreadsheet functions, so it can’t be imported into the tools I needed later in the process. However, this can be fixed. Create a second sheet for the spreadsheet. Copy the first one and paste as values into the second; this will keep the parts you can see (turning them into static values) and throw out the functions generating them.

Step 3: Geocode the data. To get good mapping, you’ll need your address data to be geocoded — latitude/longitude rather than just text. Luckily, the robot servants can do that for you. It turns out there are roughly a bajillion gadgets you can stick into your Docs spreadsheet to make it do awesome stuff — lots provided by Google, plus you can invoke arbitrary custom gadgets if you know their URL. Pamela Fox has a geocoding gadget for you, so I could turn the human-readable address data into lat/lng coding with a few clicks, following the instructions at her site.

Here’s the spreadsheet I ended up with after that munging. I used several sheets as intermediate copy-paste steps so you can trace some of my thought process there.

Step 4: Google’s Spreadsheet Mapper tool. Make a copy of their default spreadsheet, according to these instructions, and customize it with your data. To wit:

  • Pick a template — doesn’t matter which as you’ll be overwriting most of it
  • Alter the static variables to what you want (in my case, just a “Library Day in the Life” title)
  • Alter the KML style variables, if you care (totally optional; just lets you change color schemes and so forth)
  • Change the Unique Variables to be the column headers you will be using for your data (in my case, the same columns as in the #libday8 wiki) — same order as on your spreadsheet for ease of copy/paste (see, I told you this is mostly a copy-paste problem!)
  • Change the HTML layout (scroll down to the bottom of the template sheet — easy to miss). You’ll definitely need to remove references to any static variables you deleted, and add references to your unique variables (it gives you special variable names in curly braces to use). You’ll have to copy-paste to a text editor as you can’t edit the cell in place (make sure to use a text editor, not a word processor — nothing that’ll insert weird invisible characters!). You may want to prettify it.
  • In the Placemark Data sheet, copy-paste the data from the final version of your spreadsheet.
  • Make sure that “Template #” is filled in with the template you just modified for all the columns, and that your spreadsheet data is filled in to the correct columns (in particular, note that the lat/lng data has a special place). Delete any rows without lat/lng data as they will throw an error and you can’t map them anyway.
  • On the “start here” sheet, there’s a Google Maps link. Tada! Make sure to change the visibility on your map to something that other people can see.

Here’s the spreadsheet mapper stuff I ended up with.

Still some things I’d like to improve — I’ll need to re-import & re-munge the data when all the participants have signed up; I don’t love the HTML format I ended up with for the placemarks (would welcome others’ design work here — see that spreadsheet mapper for the format, which is a little wacky); and the import didn’t preserve the links to people’s blogs, twitter accounts, etc. (or the line breaks between them), so I’d like to figure out how to make them live. But as a first pass, I’ll take it.

So: yeah. Lots of beating things with rocks and googling for documentation and a TON of copy-pasting. Not a single actual line of code. Thank you to all the people who did write the code that does the automagical steps, and put it out there for free. And to Bobbi and everyone who signed up for providing data. (Data! Yum.)

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How I wrote @jaguarbot: a manifesto

January 13th, 2012 · Uncategorized

I wrote this twitterbot. It takes deadlines for getting involved with ALA, today and in six months, from my 2011 Emerging Leaders team’s project, and it posts them to Twitter, so you can see them integrated in your everyday (perhaps) life. So it’s easier to find out about what’s going on with ALA.

That is not what this post is about.

I put the code for the bot up on github. That’s what this post is about.

It’s all there if you want to learn how I wrote it, or if you want to modify it to write your own twitterbot. The code, and also a README where I tried to extensively document the things I needed to do to make the code work: setting up the development environment, obstacles I encountered along the way, et cetera.

But you’re here through the blog, which means you may want the English, not the Python, explanation, so here is how I made my twitterbot work:

I was extremely bullheaded.

My approach with technology is always: Assume it’s possible. I ran into obstacles — things like “I don’t actually have any idea how to write a twitterbot” or “I don’t know how to make Python talk to MySQL” or “I don’t know how to use OAuth to let my bot post to an account” or “I have no idea what a cursor is in this context” or “what in the name of all that is concise or clear am I supposed to make of this launchd documentation” — and I just assumed there was an answer out there, somewhere, and if I googled my error messages, and altered my code and reran it to see what changed, and read the documentation even if it made limited sense, and just generally beat it with rocks long enough, my code would work. With code, nearly everything’s possible. I just have to figure out how.

That isn’t really what this post is about, either.

Then I put my code on github. That was scary. This is what this post is about.

I put it on github because I want you to use it. I put it on github because the library world is full of amazing, creative people doing amazing, creative things with technology, alone and in their basements, and if you know them and ask them maybe you can get it, and it shouldn’t be that way. It should be somewhere you can just…get it. And use it. And make it better. Even if you don’t know the right people. Even if asking is scary.

I put it on github because I know it’s deeply flawed. I know just enough about code to know an inkling of how very many things there are that I do not know about code. To know that I’m tripping over aesthetic standards I don’t even realize are there, that there are performance and etiquette issues I am utterly blind to. And as an introvert I have a reflexive, nearly hardwired, inclination to not share an idea before it’s burnished and glowing and perfect.

And one of the great lessons of 2011 was that if I push myself to share those half-formed ideas earlier, before it’s comfortable, they run up against other people’s half-formed ideas which, together, turn out to be ten times better than either alone. Things I thought were daunting obstacles turn out to be trivial, in the face of resources or connections or skills someone else has.

We here in librarianship tend to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I am giving you this flawed thing because I believe that the world is better if we are open with our ideas. I believe that our technology will be better if we share. And yes, we are nearly all self-taught and yes, as such we see the myriad of ways our code is not production code and we know there are many myriads more we do not see, and if we share it will still be better.

So I am going to take that step. Even while I — not characteristically daunted — am shaking inside over this. Even if I feel like I’m running into heavy crossfire, shouting encouragingly about how great the weather is up here.

I made a Connect group for people doing Code Year. I made a Libraryland github organization I want to add you to, so we can find each other. I made a bot for you.

It’s made of duct tape and wire, and people will see. I know only that I know nothing. I plant my flag upon this hilltop nonetheless.

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the first plank in my philosophy of librarianship

December 16th, 2011 · Uncategorized

‘Tis the season to write what-I-learned-in-2011 posts, and I’ve been turning that over in my head but making no progress, because I’m fundamentally more interested in how to change the world in 2012. But there is one thought that keeps bubbling to the surface, the first plank in my philosophy of librarianship. (Which I haven’t written yet. I always found it ludicrous when new librarians, or teachers, had to write those statements of philosophy — how can you have one before you have experienced practice? So here it is after time in the field: a first plank, emerging. Bear with me; it hasn’t yet had time to become concise.)

In 2010 we saw Wikileaks pose a fundamental challenge to government. In everyday life, here in the US, we live with the poles of government defined by two parties and pretend they etch the entire space. They, of course, do not. There are vast possibilities of government not encompassed there — not just other parties, the Greens or Libertarians or what-have-you, but fundamentally different ways to do government — parliamentary systems, dictatorships, anarchism, seasteading, et cetera — so far outside the everyday scope we treat them as if they do not exist. (Though they do.)

Wikileaks wasn’t just cowboy journalism and bomb-throwing, though it can be appreciated on that level. Assange has a philosophy (long; worth reading) here: a mental model of government as information flow. He theorizes that secrecy and authoritarianism are intertwined, and governments enable their authoritarian elements by metering information flow. Therefore, government’s authoritarian tendencies can be undermined by altering the network structure of government itself through forcing change in information flows. Prevent secrecy, and you prevent the structure which allows authoritarianism to emerge.

What got Assange pursued by international law enforcement, what got Wikileaks’ DNS and funding service cut off without due process or any particular outcry about due process, wasn’t bomb-throwing, or even the genuine charges outstanding against him for other reasons. It was the fact that he challenged something fundamental about how government worked.

We’re seeing this again in 2011 with the Occupy movement. I’ve never been clear on what they’re for but I’m clear on this: they too are posing, through action, questions about the nature of government. Both their use of public space and their consensus structure model alternatives to the status quo. And they, too, have been opposed by a government that’s gotten tired of countenancing that, and hasn’t reliably felt the need to engage in due process about that.

I found the unifying principle for these in Brooke Gladstone’s wonderful graphic novel on the nature of media, The Influencing Machine. In this she introduced me to the concept of Hallin’s Spheres. There are three: the spheres of consensus, legitimate contention, and deviance.

We don’t talk about things in the sphere of consensus because everyone is publicly presumed to agree. (If you don’t, you both know this acutely, and know that you can’t talk about it without facing social backlash.) Things in the sphere of legitimate contention are things that get discussed in the news and in the Senate. You may have strong feelings on abortion or health care or religion — you may think people with different views than your own are profoundly wrong — but you almost certainly recognize that these are topics where dissent exists and can be aired in public without violating social norms.

And then there is the sphere of deviance. Everyone is also presumed to agree on all of these topics, or perhaps presumed not to think about them at all. They’re settled. They’re not up for debate. And if you hold one of these views, you are, well, deviant. Again, you know that your view is in this sphere because you feel gnawing fear or anger whenever you contemplate discussing it in public, and the near-certainty that no one in your immediate environment will agree with you. You may have chosen where you live and who you term family today because they agree with you on crucial boundaries of this sphere, and the place you grew up did not.

Here’s a key thing about the spheres: they change. At various times in history, the sphere of consensus has contained “slavery is OK” and “women shouldn’t vote or sign contracts” (in fact, there are places in the world where these views still hold). The sphere of deviance has contained their negations and plenty of other things that are now consensus or at least legitimate controversy. A huge amount of the power of the It Gets Better project is its implicit statement that, if you’re a kid who lives in a place where being who you are puts you in the sphere of deviance, there’s a world waiting for you where you’re not.

The government quashes Wikileaks and Occupy, and debates SOPA with a straight face, because threats to its fundamental structure are — at least as far as the government’s concerned — within the sphere of deviance. Rights to due process and free speech can be suspended for actions within the sphere of deviance with little to none of the objection you would expect to find accompanying such suspensions. (At least, little to no objection on the part of the government, whose assessment of the sphere of deviance is not necessarily the same as the broader society’s; government has its own set of incentives to take into account.)

But I promised you a plank in the philosophy of librarianship. To wit:

Society needs safe spaces for views in the sphere of deviance to be floated, or the boundaries of those spheres can never change. We need to be able to raise questions like “is government an authoritarian conspiracy?” and “can we do things better by radical consensus?” We needed, in American history, to be able to raise questions like “is it really okay to own people as slaves and profit from their labor?” and “can women go to university without their migratory uteri unhinging them?” We need to be able to tell kids whose communities tell them they’re unholy that, yes, it gets better.

Libraries are one of the great safe spaces of history.

Libraries. Paper books, public domain and open-licensed electronic content (that is, free of both locking and tracking), and an open internet. Access to ideas beyond your doorstep, in a place where no one looks (even virtually) over your shoulder.

Many of the views within the sphere of deviance are there for good reason but here’s the nature of the thing: we, from our limited cultural perspective, can’t reliably tell which. Only by having unfettered access to information and safe, however quiet, spaces to pose provocative questions can we discover where, in a great and historic way, we have been wrong.

“Libraries: they facilitate deviance!” isn’t going to be on an ALA poster any time soon. But please believe me when I say there’s nothing flippant here: the right to interrogate that sphere is something I believe in fiercely, with a passion that lives in quiet spaces but is connected to all the warmth and hope I feel for humanity.

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pseudonymity and the commons

November 26th, 2011 · Uncategorized

In Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky quotes Elinor Ostrom, the economics Nobelist who studies the management of shared resources:

When individuals who have high discount rates and little mutual trust act independently, without the capacity to communicate, to enter into binding agreements, and to arrange for monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, they are not likely to choose jointly beneficial strategies.

This. This is what we’ve been saying about pseudonymity — both I, and people who disagree with me.

Internet civility is a shared resource: a backdrop against which we couch our online cultures that can be easily run to tatters by selfish actors.

And that blockquote is the concern about anonymity, isn’t it? The anonymous have the ultimately high discount rate: their fragment of identity does not persist beyond the moment of the quote, so they need bear no future costs at all. There’s no reason to trust the truly anonymous and no way to communicate with them. Moderation provides monitoring and enforcement, but that’s about it. So it’s easy for true anonymity to result in social strategies which are not jointly beneficial.

So that’s what people are attacking with things like real name policies or its computational proxy, sign in with Facebook. By affixing public identity they’re decreasing the discount rate, adding back-channel communication possibilities, and increasing enforcement options.

But the thing is, it’s the lazy option. Because if you’re doing this by affixing real names without having put any time into building community norms, what you’re doing is importing wholesale the most, well, normative norms: the idea we all have in our head of how we are expected to act in the most mainstream possible version of society.

And those of us who crusade against real name policies do so, I think, because we fear the strictures of that normativity. There are lots of interactions you can’t have if you have imported that set of norms. You cannot have any conversations from Hallin’s sphere of deviance — you cannot even have any conversations which intimate that you might hold views within that sphere — even if they are not deviant within some subculture. You cannot safely interact with modes of discourse or cultural touchstones that are normal and safe in some subculture, but are not so in the mainstream.

Real name policies reaffirm the power of those already in power, and re-silence those already wary of voice, by lazily and unquestioningly handing power to a particular set of social norms in a space — the internet — where it did not inherently have such power.

The magic of the internet for some of us has lain in large part in its ability to create safe spaces for new norms. It can get better because online we can have a space where elements of our identity are no longer deviant — but only if we can wall them off from places where they are — which means: only if we can avoid using the name attached to us in those normative spaces.

Social norms are important. We can, indeed, not generally function without them, and I have common ground with the anti-pseudonymity crowd there. But there are many sets of social norms, inhering to many subcultures (online and off), and I strongly condemn the inclination to privilege only one of them in all milieus. And social norms are a brake on innovation, because precisely of Hallin’s spheres — because they circumscribe what it is allowable to say and, therefore, restrict what it is allowable to think, and make it difficult and dangerous to form communities which could advance certain lines of thought. There are social norms littered throughout human cultures which would have me be illiterate, or unable to form contracts, or subservient to my husband or my womb. I do not feel any great need to bow down to mainstream norms simply because they are, for now, mainstream.

So: pseudonyms. Real names are the lazy way to get Ostrom’s criteria because persistent pseudonymous spaces can, and do, meet those criteria. Persistent identity of any form decreases the discount rate because it creates an emotional and practical bond with the future self and thereby increases the perceived costs of punishments it may bear. Persistent identity is required (though not sufficient) for communication, agreement, and monitoring. Pseudonymity isn’t enough for productive spaces — maybe or maybe not civil, mind you, but productive — you still need community-building. (Just as you do by importing real names, in fact! You get the illusion of a functioning space by early wholesale import of norms, but it doesn’t save you the need to do work to cultivate that space.)

I believe in spaces with cultures and norms. I believe in the power of the internet to create spaces with their own norms, with unique power to welcome and inspire and innovate and challenge and unite in ways the offline world cannot. A real-names internet, an internet that imports wholesale normativity and makes it into a stick to beat away the unusual in the name of civility, is an internet that leaches away nearly everything I have found beautiful and transformative.

A more open internet will show us seamy underbellies that humanity had anyway and feared to express, yes. But it will also show us more beauty. A more open internet is the one that welcomes the disaffected and the dissident. A real-names policy is a cheap, cargo-cult imitation of Ostrom’s criteria.

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How to pick your Emerging Leaders project

November 9th, 2011 · Uncategorized

The 2012 class of ALA Emerging Leaders has been announced. I’m super-excited by some of the names on the list (you all get to work with Jo Alcock and John Jackson and Coral Sheldon-Hess?! lucky you), and I trust I will be excited by the others when I get to meet them, too.

One of the things past years’ ELs told me when I was researching the program, and that proved to be true, is that the networking will be great no matter what, but the project experience varies wildly. ELs who were dissatisfied with the program generally cited a bad project or poor mentoring. I took this very much to heart when selecting my project and was extremely happy with our result, my team, our sponsoring unit (ITTS), and our completely amazing mentors Aaron Dobbs and Jenny Levine.

If you’ve been reading this blog for more than about thirty seconds, you know I have Opinions on this, so here is my advice on project selection:

Look for real deliverables. Yeah, this is ALA, which as we all know stands for “let’s join committees and do lots of navel-gazing”, which means a lot of the projects are just that — do some research and come up with a report that will be presented to another committee and filed away and never acted upon — and this is super lame. You’ll do lots of work and have no impact. Look for a project whose deliverable is more than a report; whose audience is larger than its sponsor; and whose mandate includes the power not merely to recommend, but to act on your recommendations.

A major reason I picked my project was that the deliverable could be a real, useful site on the web that anyone could see and use. We could build a thing. Our audience could be the entire membership. This is way more fun than writing a report. (Even if you like to write.)

Look for committed sponsors. Another major reason I picked my project was that ITTS had been an EL sponsor before, and in fact the 2011 project was designed based on the recommendations of the previous year’s team. This meant that I could ask prior years’ ELs how ITTS was as a sponsor (I heard great things). I could also see from the project design that ITTS listened to their teams and was invested in their success and wanted their work to have meaning. Excellent.

Look for the mentors you want to work with. The big win of EL is the networking and that doesn’t just mean your teammates — it also means your mentors and sponsors. You know: the people with loads of experience in ALA that now you get to just…hang out with…even though you’re pretty new. Win! And their names are right there in the project descriptions! If they’re people you’ve heard of and know you want to know better, that’s a good thing, but don’t just limit yourself to the people you’ve heard of. Ask around; see if they’ve worked with previous years’ ELs or what sorts of things they’re involved in with ALA. Look for people who do interesting work, who care about your success, and who will be involved if you need them to be. Our mentors were tremendously useful for helping us define the scope and structure of our project (which could have been impossibly unwieldy otherwise) and for helping us navigate ALA and find the information we needed. Mentors can also be useful for helping you navigate the conflict that (naturally and healthily!) arises in many teams.

Don’t just pick the sexy project. You know what I mean. Everyone will want to pick the sexy project. But having a good project experience isn’t so much about the topic; it’s about the support you get from your mentors and sponsors and the kind of deliverable you produce and the quality of your teammates. I may well have picked the project with the driest description of all — but it had a real deliverable, a top-notch sponsor, and hugely exciting mentors. In fact I think the dryness worked to my advantage, because the only people who were interested in this project were serious, drama-free people who wanted to work. I ended up with completely amazing teammates and now I look for excuses to work with them again.

Any other EL alumni have suggestions for this year’s class?

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three more things I know about public speaking

November 5th, 2011 · Uncategorized

Monday I wrote about the two most important things I know about public speaking, and response to that has been gratifying, and here I am on a train for a few hours, so here you go: three more things I know about public speaking.

When you’re stuck, tell a story. I mentioned in the last post that finding a hook is the first important way to get un-stuck when you’re planning a talk. The second is to tell a story. Seriously, next time you’re feeling speaker’s block ask yourself: “What story can I tell here?” It will work.

It will work during the talk, too. People like stories. People relate to stories. People remember stories. Your audience is likely to be more engaged with a story-driven talk than a more abstract one.

It also works because you’re people too, which means that you probably like stories. You will probably be more comfortable and personable telling a story than in other modes of engagement.

Not all types of talks lend themselves well to storytelling — it may be that you really need to communicate about data or teach people an abstract concept — but even in those cases, you can frame, motivate, illustrate, or enliven the whole with a good story.

Corollary: when you’re stuck, use concrete details. Part of why stories work is narrative, but part of it is the concrete details: they’re more memorable and striking than abstract ideas. (“Social media, crystallization nuclei, and empowerment” vs. “Twitter, lightning rods, and spoons”? Seriously, no contest).

Sandwiches are tasty. I had the fortune to have exceptionally good professors in my undergraduate department. I mean, it was spooky: I could actually pick courses based on what I wanted to study rather than who was teaching, because I knew all the teaching would be solid. So one of the things I thought about when my mind was wandering (it does that) during class was, what exactly are these people doing that’s so effective? And I realized: it was sandwiches.

I think, broadly speaking, there are people who need to see concrete examples before theory makes sense, and there are people who crave theory and then can apply it to examples. Some people can play against type, but often it’s a struggle, and some just can’t. My professors were reaching both types by teaching new concepts either as theory-example-theory or example-theory-example. That is, explain the theory, illustrate with an example, and re-explain; or provide a motivating example, generalize to the theory behind it, and wrap up by showing an application. Doing this means some people may be confused for the first third (but they’ll hang with you because they know everything will make sense by the end) and others may find the last third extraneous (or maybe not; they might appreciate the review from a standpoint of greater understanding), but everyone will have received the concept in their preferred order.

So, particularly if you need to get across some kind of abstract or technical material, I recommend sandwiches.

Be a person. As noted above, you’re a person. So be one! Lots talks are painfully dry, as if people have confused “professionalism” with “leaching all the personality out of the room”. Against this backdrop, having any personality at all will make you stand out. Telling jokes, even if they are totally lame, will be funny, if only because it’s so unexpected. (Similarly — but only with the right audience, and in moderation — swearing.) It is fine if your personality is awkward or quirky or otherwise not what you think of when you think “polished public speaker”. Just have one.

The other great thing about this tactic is — if you’re nervous about public speaking or you haven’t found your voice yet — you can be someone else. This was my first effective tool against my formerly-crippling terror of public speaking; when I first had to present to a serious audience, I thought about all my favorite teachers, and I thought: which of those has a personality that I think I can emulate? And I copied his style for slide design and body language and vocal modulation as well as I could. Because excellent teachers can have a wide range of personalities, you have probably had an excellent teacher with a personality not unlike yours — or, at least, not unlike something you think you can fake on stage. Awesome. Just be them until you figure out how to be you.

For what it’s worth, my style on stage and (especially) my slide design have changed a ton since I started with this tool, since I now have my own voice. And I’m not going to claim I’ve ever been so excellent in front of an audience as he is, because Ran was one of the flat-out legends of my undergrad experience — people majored in CS so that they could major in Ran. Really what I’m saying is: thanks, professor. Debugging and infinite series were diverting, but this is the part where you really changed my life.

Ask me about the Nerf guns someday.

This is Professor Ran Libeskind-Hadas and he is pretty much the man.

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the two most important things I know about public speaking

October 31st, 2011 · Uncategorized

So I was talking to Annie Pho on Twitter a month or two ago, about the keynote I was about to give at ACPL, and the fact that I used to be completely terrified of public speaking. I mean, completely, hiding-in-the-bathroom-having-a-panic-attack terrified. And that was interesting, and I thought I should write a post about how I got over that, and maybe I still will, but I realized I don’t have as much to say about that as I do about how to be a good public speaker.

So the short version is, “teach middle school for five years”. But I realize this may be impractical advice for some of you, so let me try to distill the key points. Here are the most important two. If I remember, I’ll write more posts about others. (Anything else you want me to address?)

The most important things I know about public speaking concern audience and structure/hook.

Audience. The key part of preparing any talk is considering the audience. We’ve all seen meticulously prepared, articulate talks that fall flat because they are delivering information into a vacuum, without any consideration of audience. (Academic papers read aloud at conferences and most vendor talks: I’m looking at you.)

How familiar are they with your topic? Are you going to need to give them backstory — and, if so, what, and in what order — for your points to make sense? Do you need to skip ahead to the advanced stuff to stay engaging?

Why are they there? Do they have to be (in which case you have a whole range of concerns about getting their interest and possibly overcoming hostility) or do they want to be? You have to establish rapport and credibility either way, but it’s easier in the second case, and can be driven more by engaging their curiosity and less by engaging their hearts. Are they there to be educated or inspired? Do they need to walk out with new, actionable skills, or are they there more for ideas or entertainment?

The more hostile or skeptical (not the same thing!) they are, the more you need to think about “how can I solve their problems?” These audiences won’t be there to hear you give your spiel about your thing, and they won’t care if you do. You have to relate to their thing. This can mean piquing their curiosity, or addressing some concern in their everyday workflow, or any number of other things, but you must think about what problems they have that you can solve. The more hostile they are the more you will need to be explicit about characterizing these problems and framing your talk in terms of their solutions.

What’s their subculture? This governs both the kind of jokes you can make and the subcultural references you can make to establish rapport. Yes, you can try to establish rapport via your bio, but this is usually boring, or via sheer incandescent charisma, but most of us don’t have that. Referencing subcultural touchstones adds personality, is frequently funny, and communicates that you are part of their tribe, or at least understand their tribe, and thus are more relatable and credible. (Of course this only works if you actually do have some level of familiarity with their subculture…otherwise it makes you look more out of touch. Good reason to read widely, I guess.)

Example: I gave a talk at Google’s Cambridge office about Gluejar, in which I explained what we do by reference to the Unix command chmod. Trust me, not only does this communicate to engineers that I have some technical credibility (and thus they should give me the time of day) even if I’m not a developer, but in context it’s is hilarious…and I cut that slide out of every non-Google version of that talk.

Since I mentioned middle school earlier, I should mention that age is an important element, too. If you’re not speaking to adults you have this whole other range of concerns about age-appropriate language and activities, and a much increased need to break things up, to let people move around, and to establish behavioral norms. But I’m not going to worry about that in this post.

Structure and hook. I find that I have speaker’s block preparing every talk until I have either the structure or the hook…and once I have one, I have both, and the rest is relatively easy.

My talks tend to be structured around a list of three things, plus intro and conclusion. This is a fabulous structure because it can be used at any length — it governs both my 7-minute TEDx talk and my almost-an-hour ACPL keynote. It’s also a fabulous structure because the three-act (or five-act, if you count the intro & conclusion) structure is well-established in literature; it’s something audiences will easily comprehend. And it’s fabulous because it creates a hook. For both talks, my hook is a one-sentence description of the structure of my talk, using some offbeat words. “It’s a story of Twitter, lightning rods, and spoons.” “I’m Andromeda Yelton, and I’m going to tell you three lies about technology.” That’s it. Dead simple.

Hooks are great for a couple of reasons. One is that they pique your audience’s curiosity and give them a reason to listen. Twitter and lightning rods, whuh? Lies? They’re going to have to listen to make sense of the hook. Furthermore, the hook is a promise: “I’m going to cover the following topics. You listen for them, I will reward your attention.” And it’s a roadmap: “You’re always going to know where you are in this talk and how the elements fit into the whole, because I just gave you an outline so short you can keep it in memory.” (Some people really crave the roadmap.)

And having a good structure removes a lot of the cognitive overhead from designing the rest of the talk. It tells you what to do. And, like I said, it’s expansible, so your one favorite structure will do for a variety of formats. At 7 minutes, my list of three is three brief anecdotes, with a lead-in and conclusion. At an hour, it’s three higher-level ideas, each of which has a couple of supporting examples I use to elaborate those ideas. I can readily see making the list-of-three a daylong workshop.

Another advantage of the list of three is that less is more. Too many presenters try to shove everything they know about a topic into their talk — yes, you’re an expert, that’s great, but your audience cannot comprehend or retain the firehose of everything you know. They don’t have time to think about it and listen in a talk. Whether because they’re thinking or distracted, they’re going to miss parts of what you say (another reason it’s good for them to have a roadmap — easier to reorient and catch up). If you give them a ton of facts, they’ll leave dazed. If you give them a list of three things, they’ll remember it. Maybe not the details, but the important parts. A spare structure is a discipline forced on the speaker for the benefit of the audience.

Of course, list-of-three isn’t the only way to go. I expect a lot of my readers are English majors, which means you know a lot more than I do about stories and how they’re put together. And doubtless some of you know about the great structures of music or dance. I think any time-tested artistic structure works; human brains comprehend them readily, and any structure is a hook when laid bare. But I don’t know a lot about that and am limited in creativity, so I like my list of three.

So there you have it. Use a good, simple structure; explain it with quirky words as a hook; and consider the needs of your audience in elaborating your structure with anecdotes and examples. You’ll be most of the way to a good talk.

ETA: There’s a follow-up post, Three more things I know about public speaking.

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thoughts on revealed preferences from #il2011

October 20th, 2011 · Uncategorized

So the thoughts percolating in my head from Internet Librarian are all swirling around ideas from economics: revealed preference, the Turner thesis, the Coase theorem. It would be awesome if my knowledge of economics were grounded in anything more than reading the Marginal Revolution blog and a handful of pop economics books, but it’s not, so bear with me, and tell me if I’m wrong.

Revealed preference. It has to do with the idea that what you actually want is revealed by, not what you say, but by what you choose to buy. If you bought it, you wanted it — at least, more than the alternatives.

I was on this great panel today, with representatives from Ingram and OverDrive, and Michael Porter representing Library Renewal, and Sarah Houghton-Jan representing, full stop. Diverse perspective, lots of audience interest; good times.

The librarians in the room were talking about privacy, and DRM, and having their needs taken seriously in the content distribution chain. And the OverDrive representative was not talking about any of these things; he was talking about creating a model that successfully gets content from publishers to libraries. And the room clearly hated him.

And I don’t feel that’s fair. Because here’s the thing: libraries have lots of great values, like privacy and accessibility and openness and access to information. OverDrive is offering access to information. And libraries buy it. And when you buy it, you are telling OverDrive that that is what you value. If those other values aren’t in the packages, you are telling OverDrive you do not value them, or at least that you will compromise them all before you will compromise access. Is it any wonder that’s what the market gives you more of?

I’m not saying it’s as simple as “well, just don’t buy it”. All those great library values are, in fact, sometimes in conflict, and if you can get, say, DRM-free content (openness, privacy) or nothing (no access to information), that’s a tough choice and no matter what you do there’s a value not being served. But I get the sense many librarians feel like patrons have them over a barrel — our patrons want to read this book/have to have access to this journal! — and what that translates to is access to information being the only value acted upon economically, and again, if that’s what people are saying they value, if that’s the revealed preference, if that’s what they’re rewarding the market for providing, that’s what they’re going to get more of — and the market is working precisely as it’s supposed to.

I heard a lot of passion about these issues at Internet Librarian. But talk is cheap. Passion is cheap. If libraries really value privacy and openness and flexibility and control and having a voice in the process, they need to say that by spending money on those things, and negotiating, or declining, things that do not advance those values.

You get what you pay for. What do you want?

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multihand devices

October 12th, 2011 · Uncategorized

So Griffey linked, somewhere, to this slide set on hands-per-device. (Go read it; it’s interesting.) Its premise is that our current strategy of designing web content for a variety of devices — based on their different screen sizes — is wrong. Yes, you have to take screen size into account, but a more important factor is hands per device. When people use devices with one hand — be they smartphones or large-screen TVs with remotes — they’re limited in the interactions they can gracefully handle and tend toward quick-reference sorts of actions; two-handed devices lend themselves to more immersive experiences.

So this raises the obvious question: what about three?

No, I don’t plan to sprout any more extra appendages. Bear with me. There are piano compositions for four hands — two players. They require collaboration. And they allow for different kinds of music, with more complexity and range, than the two-handed sort.

So a multi-handed device would be, inherently, a collaboration device — hence a device at home in schools and libraries. And maybe laboratories and movie studios and anywhere that collaborative creativity and problem-solving matters.

Let’s leave aside that I can’t imagine the economies that would make it make sense to design such a device, in a world that inclines ever-more toward personal electronics. (Except maybe I can — any sufficiently large multitouch screen can be a multihand device, with the right software.)

Let’s think instead of the awesome park. This is a new park not far from me, near Harvard Square — its real name is something else but in our house it’s the awesome park. It’s awesome because it was designed by people who didn’t get the memo — you know, the one that says that modern childhood has to be safety-obsessed and sanitized? It has audaciously large climbing structures with nary a net, and big wooden blocks that aren’t even attached to anything, and sand and water and hills, hills built into the park, and there is in fact no place a parent can stand and have a sight line to everything. You have to run around and get down in the sand and play, or you have to let go.

And the kids have to work together. Because the climbing structures are hard, and they need to see how other people attack the problem. And the wooden blocks can turn into palaces or cargo for the Viking ship or — greased with a bit of sand and carted up the hill — a ludicrously fast sled or skateboard. But it’s all big enough or heavy enough or complicated enough that kids acting alone can’t do all the fun things. The obvious, fun things.

The world is a multi-hand device.

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a facebook privacy experiment

September 30th, 2011 · Uncategorized

So yesterday my super-awesome friend John (he’s a published author AND he knows how to make sneaky robots) linked to a blog post on how to see how Facebook’s tracking you:

  • Find a file named ‘hosts’ on your computer. On Mac/Linux systems, it’s under /etc/. On Windows, it used to be under System32 somewhere, but who knows now. Stash a backup copy somewhere.
  • Add the following on a new line: 127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
  • Configure a web server running on your local machine.

He suggested trying this for 24 hours and seeing what happens. So, OK, I did! (I have a Mac, so the file in question is /etc/hosts, and configuring a web server is pretty easy since Macs come with the stuff you need — it’s been so long since I did it I’ve forgotten the details, but I think it was pretty much “find the magic Apache checkbox. check it”).

Sadly I did this in the blind-idiot-following-the-directions way. This is sad because I’m already using 127.0.0.1 for Gluejar web development stuff, which means I cannot just naïvely look through my access logs for anything with 127.0.0.1 — I actually have to read them a bit to find a pattern which I believe matches the Facebook stuff and doesn’t match the development stuff — if I were doing it again I would have used some other spurious address for Facebook. Oh well.

So what I ended up with was this:

less /var/log/apache2/access_log | grep -c fbcdn.net

For those of you who don’t speak command lines (and why not? don’t you like phenomenal cosmic powers?) let me translate:

less is a command for showing a file
/var/log/apache2/access_log is the logs for my web server
| (pronounced “pipe”) means “take the output of the first command, and run it through the second”
grep looks through stuff (and is totally one of those Phenomenal Cosmic Power commands)
-c is the “count” flag for the grep command
fbcdn.net is a Facebook address. That’s that unique pattern that I think matches all the Facebook stuff, and doesn’t match any of my stuff. (I could be wrong — it definitely doesn’t match my stuff, but there might be additional Facebook stuff that’s not hitting that address)

So all together, what that’s saying is “spit out my access log, run it through grep, and give me a count of all the lines that contain fbcdn.net”.

So after a day of doing my normal Internet stuff, trying neither to seek nor avoid potential Facebook stuff — except that I almost never checked facebook.com itself from my computer because that doesn’t work right now — here’s what I got:

less /var/log/apache2/access_log | grep -c fbcdn.net
52

Well, then.

I think tomorrow I’ll go and do something paranoid about cookies.

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