Over the weekend I read about the end of EventVue first on the CrowdVine blog, then the very honest post-mortem from EventVue themselves and then finally Techcrunch. In fact as is often the case they appear to have gained more publicity by closing down than they ever got when they were in business!
EventVue were initially a white-label, event specific social network system. It was a very similar offering to CrowdVine (which I’ll admit was the system I preferred and evangelised in my little corner of the world) but well thought of and like Tony says on the CrowdVine blog came about too soon after CrowdVine launched for it to be a copycat. I’ve always thought this was an interesting space but have never been sure there was enough demand to build a successful business around it (though CrowdVine seem to have done so!). It appears EventVue became convinced of something similar themselves and starting looking to re-focus their offering into something more profit focused. If I’m honest I’m not sure I understand the purposed of the Discover app they mentioned and the switch to ‘real-time conversations for events’ – basically a Twitter stream around hashtags doesn’t seem that compelling on its own (it appears to essentially be less functional than the open source Guardian Twitterfall and that sort of thing that a decent team could put together in a weekend..let alone the sort of things Mike has planned for Onetag.)
It is always sad to see a startup fail – especially when it is in a niche I think is interesting but I’m sure the team involved will bounce back – they obviously have talent. I still think there is mileage in a business built around the digital elements of events but I increasingly see that as services based around support for open source and third party tools rather than a startup. Maybe someone will come up with something compelling but I can’t see it at the moment (though some kind of next-gen listings engine to replace the creaky Upcoming would be useful!)..
As anyone who has read this blog can probably tell I do a fair bit of semi-aimless trawling around the web driven by vague ideas for projects I’d like someday to attack but more often than not life gets in the way so they stay ideas and slowly fade away. Some ideas though hang around and gnaw away at you and everything you read seems to somehow connected to them.
Ideas also find themselves merging into one uber-idea that threatens to overtake all the others and this post is an attempt to make some space in my head as this one just keeps on rattling around. It pulls together a number of ideas I’ve written about before along with some ideas I have drunkenly babbled about at geeky nights out and isn’t very unique but is I think worthy of more consideration.
At JISC some of our major preoccupations are various flavours of ‘open’ – access, education, source, standards etc and for me at least I group them all under the top level heading of the ‘open web’ – more for my own sanity than anything else. As I mentioned recently I see the world through the eyes of a Web Manager and break these complex ideas up into pieces that make sense in that world.
I am particularly interested in the open education movement – especially around things like ‘open education resources’ and how that effects the market for traditional learning materials. I especially find the ideas around open textbooks compelling and find the business model that Flat World Knowledge are moving forward with interesting – but I am not sure it goes far enough to exploit the opportunities.
Cory Doctorow is experimenting with a new, freemium based publishing model for his next novel – the eBook & audiobook are free, there is a tipjar style donation model, a $16 print on demand version, then a $250 premium hardback and then a $10k custom written, unique story.
I think this opens the door to a new model for open academic/textbook publishing though I can’t imagine much demand for the $10k option! I was thinking there could be a model that looked something like;
* Free HTML version (including mobile version)
* Free Standard ePub version
* Tipjar/Donations
* Audio book (? don’t know much about this market as never listened to one!)
* iPhone/iPad/Kindle optimised versions $5
* Print on Demand version $15
* Premium hardcover (for libraries?) $40
[Unlike alot of people I know I think the iPad is going to be a huge success and will present an opportunity to shake up the publishing world - especially with the inevitable rise of an Android/Chrome OS Google tablet to challenge it.]
Like I have mentioned before – custom options for elements like covers could be offered plus the ability to pull content from several sources and create custom books.
I would be interested to see if this could work with the Creative Commons Zero License – offering the original text as completely open, remixable content allowing people to create their own version if they wish and relying on the inherent laziness of most people plus the kudos of being the originator of the material as enough to build a business on.
An additional wrinkle that would need to be worked out around this idea would be the need of some kind of peer-review social network to ensure that any text would be of sufficient standard to pass as truly an educational material. The technical side of this would (I think) be relatively straightforward though building a strong and committed community would be no easy task but as the open access model in scholarly publishing seems to have shown not impossible.
Now who would actually produce the content for these mythical open textbooks is another big question and will depend (I think) on how much recognition is given by the powers that be in higher education to the producers of open content. If contributing to the open education movement in this way becomes helpful to career progression in a similar way as being published in a more traditional manner can be then people will start to see this as a viable option for career progression.
Anyway smarter, more connected people than I would have to deal with those issues. My main interest would be creating a usable and attractive technical platform that could handle the workflow from initial collaboration on creating something, to reviewing it, to automating the process for producing the various versions (as much as possible), to getting them out to the right places for them to be downloaded or purchased, to offering detailed analytics to every author/publisher. It would have to embrace open source technology as much as possible as well as the appropriate open standards otherwise it would be a bit of a sham.
I actually think this could actually be quite a small, cottage industry kind of deal. Business models could spring up around particular subjects areas to take advantage of the long-tail and if the platform was opensourced (with perhaps a white-labeled version for the less technically astute) then the key would be arranging the print-on-demand capability (shocking enough I’m still stuck on my dream machine – the Espresso Book Machine) and building the relevant community as authors and reviewers. Probably the place to start would be a community already committed to the idea of open education and willing to experiment and take a risk and then target niche subjects after that.
That is enough of a braindump for now I think. Now at least when someone goes ahead and builds this startup in a year or so and makes a great success of it I can point to this post and prove I had the idea way back when!
On Wednesday I attended a JISC meeting on the subject of Persistent Identifiers (#jiscpid) which is a long term topic of discussion in JISC-world. Now I came to this as pretty much a newbie. I have a long history of obsessing over the design of URL schemes and remember reading the original(?) TBL paper on Cool URIs years ago but I have never really been concerned with the wider picture as regards things like digital preservation until quite recently – previously (and still really) I was more interested in creating human hackable URLs.
[On a bit of a tangent my favourite URL scheme I have seen in a long time was discussed in this article over on Carsonified - I am also a big fan of the http://traintimes.org.uk URLs - great stuff and an inspiration I think..]
In preparation for the meeting I spent alot of time reading up on same of the schemes and technologies involved in the ‘persistent identifier’ space and I’m glad I did or I would have been totally lost. The issue seems to have risen to the top of peoples agendas recently due to the rise of Linked Data and the role of things like ‘cool uris‘ and identifiers within that movement. I am reasonably familiar with this activity so I focused on the alternate universe that exists just out of step with our own. A world of DOIs, Handles and ARK. A world where publishers and researchers have created solutions outside of the normal web architecture to deal with very real issues but in a manner that will (it seems to me) never break out of these very tight use cases around (scholarly) publishing because it is just too different from what most people find familiar. That said these solutions cannot be dismissed as they have created solutions for their users and built businesses and communities around these solutions.
One of the problems (though as it turns out far from the only one) ‘persistent identifiers’ seek to solve is the very real issue of ‘linkrot‘ which has long been a thorn in the side of any serious user of the web – and a particular pain in the rear for me for a large part of my career. The thing here though, as was mentioned multiple times, is that for the most part this isn’t really a technical issue but rather a political and organisational one. Websites are re structured, departments renamed, platforms updates. All of these activities often cause problems to persistence. However DNS and server technologies already offer the tools to mitigate these happenings if appropriate resource is given to the task. This is about education of management as much as anything. As one of the attendees at the meeting said the website is not seen in terms of how it performs as an information resource for the wider web community but how it responds as a marketing tool and thus persistence is not as important as the next big thing.
Something I found interesting was part of the work of the RIDIR project which had created a kind of ‘crowd-sourcing’ solution to fixing ‘linkrot’ for Digital Repositories by allowing people to associate the found resource with the no longer working ID or URL (this is based on the – I think – very real use case that when a link is found to be broken users often perform an alternative search to attempt to find the original resource – once they do this they map it using a ‘widget’ or browser plugin to the broken link creating a redirect essentially. The system allowed for multiple endpoints to be mapped if there was a disagreement and for it to be left to the users discretion as to which option to follow based on the reputation of the original mapper. No idea how something like this could be scaled for the web in general but I think it would be interesting if it could avoid the inevitable spambots!).
All-in-all I came out of the meeting without the bolt of lightning, moment of clarity I had hoped for on the subject but with a real sense that this was an area of importance and that maybe it was also an area where, to paraphrase someones tweet, there was a sense of compromise and pragmatism that could make something happen. I also realised, not for the first time, that I am forever destined to see the world through the eyes of a Web Manager and I will always boil issues down to things I can understand in that context.
Over on the Groundswell blog this week the published an interesting post with a much more interesting graphic based on an update of their ‘Social Technographics‘ work that Forrester use in their consultative work and if I remember rightly was featured in the Groundswell book (which I’ll admit I’ve never finished..)
I’ve added the graphic below and the big change was the addition of ‘Conversationalists’ to the ladder. These people are defined as
..not just Twitter members, but also people who update social network status to converse (since this activity in Facebook is actually more prevalent than tweeting). And second, we include only people who update at least weekly, since anything less than this isn’t much of a conversation.
I like this addition as it reflects my experience of the social web much more. Unlike many of my colleagues I am still a regular user of Facebook and have watched it change to a much more conversational platform over the last year or so and Twitter, for me at least, has also become much less about broadcast and more about conversation (though that may well have more to do with my new ‘follow’ and ‘block’ on Twitter than anything else!) Most of my friends on Facebook wouldn’t see what they were doing as contributing to the social web and almost exclusively find Twitter ‘weird’ – yet they increasingly use Facebook in much the same way as I use Twitter.
To be clear while I like the terms in this ladder (though I appear to cross-over into an awful lot of them) I do not recognise the figures used at all. The idea that only 17% of people aren’t regularly using the social web (with regular being monthly or weekly for this purpose apparently) seems very low if it was mapped against the UK but that is just a gut feeling and I could be wrong.
One of the things I miss from my time at Jiva (apart from the team of course) is working closely with everyone to actually build the product and the way we used to Scrum in a relatively flexible way to give us a framework to work within.
Of all the myriad roles I’ve had over the years Product Owner in the Scrum sense was the one I felt fitted me best. I enjoyed the agile nature of things and also the user focus of creating stories, the collaborative manner that work was estimated and especially ’show and tell’ element at the end of each sprint. The whole aspect of protecting the ‘doers’ from the ‘talkers’ suited me as well and all-in-all given the right product it is something I would very much like to do again.
I don’t really get to work that closely with projects these days but I do continue to maintain an interest in the area and over time have come across some tools that I would like an excuse to use one day soon.
Scrumy is actually something I looked at a while ago but had forgotten about. It allows teams to create story ‘cards’ online and drag’n'drop them according to their status. At Jiva we went old school with a great big wall, lots of drawing pins and stacks of index cards – which was brilliant (and also a great visual) but perhaps something like this is more practical especially with remote teams. Even office based using a projector could give you the big wall effect when needed! PivotalTracker is a similar tool and one I enjoyed using in the past. As far as I can tell there isn’t much to split them on features but I enjoy the sense of fun that Scrumy exudes (though I also appreciate the fact that Pivotal is entirely free!).
MeetingMix got a bit of coverage this week on Techcrunch and it is a simple idea done well. Essentially it just aims to improve the planning and management of meetings. Recently we started to look at structuring meetings at work slightly differently based on this article about how Google run meetings and I’m pretty sure at least some elements of this app were inspired by the same thing. The ability to easily collaborate on an agenda is obviously possible via something like Google Docs and the same is true of live note taking during the meeting but this pulls these things together in a very elegant manner and the clock letting you know how much time has been expended on each agenda item is nice. I do think this is the sort of thing that could really help meetings but I do wonder how many organisations would be in a position to have a spare projector to allow this to be visible independently throughout the meeting which is how it would make the biggest impact.
Planning Poker is a nice little site that helps remote teams quickly handle the estimation of stories for the upcoming sprint or beyond. A moderator enters a story (this is another reason where tools like Scrumy and Pivotal come into their own above the old school index cards – copy and paste!) and the dev team gets to vote on score to give it for the coming sprint (I’m not going to explain estimating etc for Scrum here – lots of articles about it out there..) This should speed up the process considerably with discussions taking place around ‘poker’ to give the stories context (this can be via Skype, Campfire or anything else). It has pedigree as well as its developers are major evangelists for Agile development.
All of these tools obviously are only there to support you and your project and don’t do much to help if things are not going well elsewhere but I think they could be useful and are well worth considering amongst any suite of applications used to manage agile projects.
