The Next Generation of User Centric Government Web Sites
by mschwar99 on November 8, 2008
Web 1.0 was static data, pages upon pages of data that a user searched through to find information. Web 2.0 brought a vast improvement by enabling user generated content. Users could provide feedback to the information that was provided and were enabled to collaborate amongst themselves.
The next generation of the web will consist of applications that make decisions about what information to provide based on their analysis of the user and of conditions of that could effect what the user wants to see. It will be a Priceline .com that discovers your flight has been delayed and sends alternate flight information to your Blackberry without you asking. These applications will be proactive in addressing their user’s needs.
User Centric Web Sites
In order to better serve the public, government web sites need to find ways to do several things:
- Offer contextual data to users: Because the scope and mission of government agencies are so large, only small portions of the data that they have available are useful or relevant to the average user that arrives at their web site. Unless the user is a researcher or a member of a regulated community, much of the information on government web sites is not relevant or remotely interesting to the user. Successful web sites will find ways to drill through the mounds of data and serve up subsets that are relevant to the user’s interest, geographic location, etc.
- Organize the data as it is relevant to the user, not as it is relevant to the organization. Many if not most sites are structured in the same way that the bureaucracy of the particular agency is. Information is relegated to the particular office that was responsible for producing it and then stove-piped within that corner of the website. Without knowledge of the bureaucracy’s structure, the user can not possibly hope to locate the information.
- Something beyond searching by text has to be offered. Requiring that a user use a search box puts the onus of making the web site meaningful on the user. While good search is necessary, sites should aim to be usable at face value.
- Don’t expect users to know what is available at the site. The average citizen probably has very little idea of the breadth and depth of information that each agency contains. A smart site would find ways to present its information to the user, rather than having it buried in deep levels of the site.
Construction Projects and Building Successful Wikis
by mschwar99 on October 31, 2008
A good wiki is hard to find, most are full of much more fail than knowledge. Google around a bit and you will find countless numbers of wikis that started full of potential, but wound up with few contributors and only a smattering of content. There are many reasons for these blank slates, but a primary one is misuse or at least a misunderstanding of what wikis on the modern web tend to do well.
When Ward Cunningham built the first wiki the goal was to create a web (Hypercard) application that allowed people to write their content in the same place that it was viewed. Click a button, type some text, behold your wondrous creation. These days however, with all of the tools that are available to allow the easy creation of content, a wiki will rarely be the best tool for that job. That’s why people build CMS’s.
Lets be clear, there are plenty of sites out there that use wiki software to host their content. A site built by one or a few people that happens to be built on Mediawiki is not the plate of failure I am talking about. It is the site that sets out to be an actual distributed collaboration project in the model of Wikipedia and winds up consisting of three pages of editorial about HAM radio.
Maverick or McBush?
by mschwar99 on June 18, 2008
So like the 60 million other blogs created every thirty seconds I set out with the intention of being an avid poster. I found that it is hard to keep the outpouring of my knowledge and opinions to only one site, what with all the blog commenting, iReporting, YouTubing, microblogging, and femtoblogging. I love the technology and consider the turn toward mainstream user generated content a good thing. However, I think there is an ever increasing possibility that future historians will not reference the Maya Angelous and Carl Sagans of our time, but rather will dredge up quotes from Legolas_Dude_34 ranting about a city ordinance on his local LARPing message board.
I made a small website as a project in order to get some practice with the technologies that I don’t get to use in my day gig. Here lies Maverick or McBuch: The McCain Voting Record in the 110th Congress. I had settled on some of the web techniques I wanted to work with and hunted for a subject. Since you can’t watch Maury in peace these days without election news interrupting I embraced the horror. I consider myself an above average follower of this election cycle, and participate as an Obama campaign volunteer in the DC area. I was interested in – and terrified by – the often repeated charge that McCain has turned in to a George Bush clone. I sorted through many of the key votes of the 110th Congress and categorized them.
Web 2.0 and the Transparency of Process
by mschwar99 on February 17, 2008
Federal government and large enterprise communication managers alike are pulling their hair out. One of the most sensible strategies for communicating to an audience, whether they be customers or constituents, is to speak where they are listening. With Web 2.0 sites now clearly out of the “quirky trend” phase and moving into mainstream adoption it is becoming important for all serious communicators to establish a presence in places like YouTube, the bloggosphere, iTunes, etc etc. More and more people are using the sites like this as primary sources of information. No one feels like they have the first clue how to both use these sites to reach their growing audience and also follow the best practice methods that are enforced upon federal websites.
One of the things that gives federal government content managers the biggest migraines when planning for using this new media is that on 3rd party sites they do not control the whole page. Is it really appropriate for a federal agency to disseminate information in a YouTube video when the rest of the page is going to have god knows what on it?
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Building a Healthy Wiki
by mschwar99 on February 1, 2008
A successful wiki is a site to behold. It is a living, breathing repository of knowledge that is tended to and expanded by its users. Many wikis will never see that fate, instead living out their lives long on potential but short on success. The largest culprits for this fate are often the planners themselves, having gotten caught up in the hype and not touching down to earth before the launch.
A wiki, like any other user supported application, seeks to obtain a “critical mass” in order to be a successful collaboration. That critical mass is a balance between what information users get out of visiting it, and what they are willing to leave behind.
Here are some of the guidelines for getting beyond the buzzword and into the productivity.
Focused Subject Matter
A wiki needs to be about something. Simply instituting a wiki for “our office” or some other generalized idea that lacks a specific function is not going to be successful. Without a specific purpose a wiki is just a buzzword. Like all Web 2.0 material a wiki is an application, not a website. It is in effect a computer program that allows people to come together and easily create a repository of knowledge about a subject.
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Wiki Security
by mschwar99 on January 30, 2008
Security Fundamentals: Prepare Your Wiki
Overview
This discussion will be both the most important and also the least technical. It is very important that planners and technical operators not skip over it in order to jump into the discussion of the technologies used in securing the wiki. This discussion provides the foundation on which all security discussions will depend.
As is the case with most questions of IT security, the most effective dose of protection is to properly plan how the application will be used in advance. Operating a safe wiki becomes much easier if both the administrators and users realize its benefits and limitations before launch.
A wiki is a system that is by definition open. Most if not all of its operational benefits come from the ease at which content can be added and subtracted, and the wide audiences that can participate in the process. The wiki is not a Content Management System or secure shared work space – although it can effectively and easily distribute files, images, and documents. The wiki is not a business messaging system – although it quickly and thoroughly distributes messages.
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Ray Kurzweil: How technology’s accelerating power will transform us
by mschwar99 on January 20, 2008
This is an extremely interesting talk given by all around genius Ray Kurzweil. He examines the forward march of technology and tells us that while you can never predict what dot com company will do what, there are some metrics that can be very accurately predicted. Evidently advances in technology have been marching to a very regular and rhythmic drum beat.
Next stop: Skynet.