Projects

Boris wrote about a conference

August 30, 2005 by Michael Boyle

Boris wrote about a conference

he went to the other day and had an interesting experience: Documenting human rights abuses. I tried to write a comment on his site, but somehow his comment script kept rejecting it. So here is my comment:

Information wants to be free… when there isn’t a warlord at the other end of it who will use clear evidence of Western tampering and favouritism (clearly anyone featured in a North American website is supported by the US) as cause to raze the village and stop relief efforts by international organizations.

Information wants to be free… until that warlord repurposes the images to demonstrate how clearly those people need his help and protection and uses them to gain financial support from other organizations in his bid to be seen as the legitimate protector of villages he controls.

Boris I love the idea of the project and think it would be a great thing for you to bring to life. But the concerns they mentioned in the conference are pretty valid. People in parts of the world where basic human rights – food, shelter, right to life – are routinely abused have a lot to fear from such projects, and to do it right I think a group would have to go the extra mile to make sure those problems were addressed, and aggressively so.

I think Karl has hit on part of the solution, but if you are going to move forward with this – which I hope you understand I would thoroughly encourage you to do – I would recommend including a specialist in such development issues on the team. There’s a lot of bad history with abusive media representations of disadvantaged people, and I know you’d want to avoid that as far as possible.

Jesse James Garrett

January 31, 2002 by Michael Boyle

Jesse James Garrett

: ia/recon: The Discipline and the Role (part 1 of 6). Distinguishing between the discipline of IA and the role of the information architect. I come at this a bit differently. Since I have started teaching, I have been re-thinking the component jobs and roles involved in web projects, and although there is a solid, not-going-away box for IA in the little flowchart I work from, a lot of what Jesse discusses as the role that IAs often fill is just like what I call a “project manager”. As distinct from the producer or technical lead or what have you.

More on this subject to come. I think that most organizations get the organization of web projects grossly wrong.

Zeldman

January 20, 2002 by Michael Boyle

Zeldman

: “Our stupid industry pitifully undervalues good web writing.” Bravo! In my experience this is completely correct. Sadly a lot of writers resist learning about the web as well, and so can’t transition to becoming good web writers in the first place.

Zeldman does repeat the old saw that people don’t read, though, which I simply don’t believe. They don’t read everything on every page. But if there’s actual unique content, they’ll read it. They do every day – millions of people read websites very thoroughly. But in general I agree with the proposition.

I approach this from the point of view that the workflow involved in developing sites is fatally flawed. Contrary to many, I don’t believe websites are primarily IS/IT projects, or that they should be managed by technical managers. Of all the activities that must be carried out to make a successful website, only about 30% of these are “technical” in the sense that a programmer, DBA, or other coder must be involved. Content development, graphic design, IA – all these are more fundamental to the development of a website than ANY technical function. The leadership of a web project should be done by a person who can speak intelligently to all of those folks: the editors and writers, the programmers doing any application development or DB work, the IA person and the graphic designer. And each of those functions should be done in concert with all the others on the team.

News.com’s article and interview

April 19, 2001 by Michael Boyle

with Dan Bricklin (The man who saved “blogging”?) is a pretty good read, overblown title and all. The interviewer manages to catch a certain spirit that I think is very real – a certain seriousness that attends Interesting Projects.

But the article is totally bizarre at the same time. Lots of nice questions about his thoughts on Blogger and the place for personal sites and small companies in the world… and then right at the end blammo: “There’s some skepticism out there about whether Microsoft can resist coming up with a lock-in regarding SOAP. Do you think the big companies will support something like XML-RPC in addition to SOAP 1.1?” An editor’s note longer than the question itself was required to give enough context to readers!

Via Zeldman

April 12, 2001 by Michael Boyle

Via Zeldman I came across a wonderful little tutorial about website production. It’s very good, although it does diverge somewhat from my usual path. The divergence mostly has to do with the fact that I generally have started on projects prior to the point where the article picks things up. For large projects, much of the early “production” work – the content definition and sourcing, preliminary architecture issues, and basic site organization comes in the proposal phase, when the goal is to do as much as you can to keep the whole thing as a mental, and flowcharted, model – because if nothing has been signed, you want to keep expenses down. More or less.