Audiences
Increasingly at JISC we are asking projects to look at who their audiences are and what the audience would like from the project. I thought I’d write a post to explain what it is we are looking for as I realise it can be quite a confusing area. I’d also welcome comments from those who are grappling with this at the moment so we can improve the advice we give and hopefully make it a positive experience for all concerned.
To set the background, looking in much more detail at audiences has recently become important for JISC. Back in the ‘Thousand Flowers’ days we knew broadly who the audience was for projects and it was sufficient to broadly outline who the key stakeholders were (which, note, could be a larger group than the audience). What was important was to get small projects out there experimenting with the technology and passing those lessons on to quite a broad audience who would pick up what was of interest to them. Some projects would fail as a result of not quite connecting with their audience or simply not having an audience but that was all part of the risk-taking we did for the sector. Fast forward to today and we are commissioning some very large projects and we are getting some of those to go along what we call the Development to Service route. What this means is that we are interested in how they go from being a good idea to being something that can be used by others. Unfortunately JISC can’t support all of those projects so we have to know which ones are of particular interest and for the others we’d like to help them find funding from other sources. This is where knowing who could use the service and who would be interested in funding it proves to be vital.
So, how do you go about doing that? I’ve tried to combine some do’s and don’ts below from projects that have been both successful and unsuccessful in finding audiences to use them.
DO:
- Get engaged with your community through events, mailing lists, blogs, etc and find out what they think about your idea and who they think would find it useful. They are also likely to have some useful input into what you need to do. A good recent example is my last post that I did on OpenID; the JISC-SHIB list are actively discussing its conclusions and helping suggest how we can take it forward;
- Identify named communities, institutions, companies and organisations who would be interested in your project. It is so much easier if you can name members of your audience. So, for example, my NAMES project is working very closely with the British Library. That is so much better than saying the audience is ‘those in the academic community who would be interested in an authoritative registry of academic names’;
- Work with those named entities to establish their interest in your project. They could well help with testing intial demos and prototypes or be able to offer some financial asssistance or resources in other areas such as connections to other similar initiatives or those who could help you;
- Talk with your programme manager who may be able to suggest useful people to get in touch with or audiences it may be useful to engage with;
- Put the work in on your project plan to identify key named audiences, record who those are and come back and revisit these, changing them as necessary;
- Get a demo or prototype out early so your potential audiences can see what it is you are doing and get to grips with it;
- Come along to JISC organised events such as Andy McGregor’s Developer Happiness Days or the JISC Conference as they provide a good opportunity to talk about what you are doing and find more potential named interested parties for your audience;
DON’T:
- Define your audience so widely that it will be impossible to take practical action to engage with them. If you’re aiming at ‘the UK academic community’ or ‘those interested in repositories’ then you need to be doing some more work;
- Skimp on engaging with your audience and getting their feedback. You need their interest even if JISC are doing the funding as it provides evidence that what you are doing is useful;
- Use surveys as a substitute for engaging with your audience or finding it. Surveys are useful but they can’t be used on their own;
Hopefully that is helpful and if you have something to add to the above then please post a comment.
Less of the XML
I’m sitting in another conference where I’ve seen several presentations that are littered with XML that is then dissected ad nauseam. Now, I’m sure that they are very valuable for the people who are presenting them and we’re all familiar with the pride with which we talk about our new ‘baby’. Unfortunately, it switches off the bulk of the audience (I’m not just talking about myself, btw - there are several people who feel the same way). So, if you’re a developer or technical manager then please resist the temptation to put XML in your presentation. Diagrams to show how your system works are good (animated ones even better). Short, concise slides that outline where your solution could be used and how it helps the user are good. Short demonstrations of your system working are good. Sharing all that lot on a site like SlideShare or on a website (which is what we do at JISC) is even better.
If you do this then you avoid the demoralising prospect of people switching off from what you are presenting altogether (and, yes, this even applies to technical people). If someone wants to see exactly what is in the XML you output or take in then you can safely rest assured that they’ll ask you about it over coffee.
IDM2008
Given this is my second blog entry in as many days you’re either in for a treat or the tedium continues; I leave you to decide. I’d also add that due to train issues, this and the above entry WERE written separately but offline as there doesn’t yet appear to be a 3G service that provides continuous coverage on the journeys I make; if anyone can suggest one then please comment below.
So, today was IDM2008, billed as an opportunity for those from business and government to get together and share their experiences on identity management. I was the representative from higher and further education and giving a presentation on Innovation, which outlined what we had done on the Access Management Federation and subsequent developments.
The day featured the following presentations;
· Graham Morrison on getting Kerberos to solve the Home Office’s issues of ‘seamless authentication’ across a range of different systems. I liked this one for a number of reasons. The first was that it was using what was already there and proven to work, which I think is important in identity and access management (IAM). Next, it has been kept simple – you can’t get much more simple than using Kerberos to issue a ticket to authenticate the user (the Ticket Granting Ticket) and a ticket to authorise them to do ‘stuff’ (the Session Ticket or TGS). Finally, it deals with levels of assurance but only gets into heavyweight biometrics and role-based access control, etc when it needs to;
· David McIntosh (hope I spelt that right) presenting on biometric technologies and SITC. The former taught me that your ear echoes back any sound that is played into it in a unique way to you; interesting but not particularly useful unless you want to biometrically identify someone in a quiet environment. The latter could be more widely useful to JISC as it is a body consisting of SMEs that would like to engage with universities;
· Jim Slevin on Manchester Airports IDM systems. A very topical presentation as the authentication of a user can now be carried out by National Identity Card, which has caused quite a stir in the papers this morning. More interestingly, their focus was on delivering a capability, not a solution, which I think we should focus more on. You can actually do something with a capability;
· Joe Baguely presented on AD as an identity store. The sub-title was ‘are you mad?’ and I think this summed up many people’s impression of doing this but Joe presented a very convincing argument to re-use what is already in place with Active Directory (AD) and carried out a rather unsubtle plug for his organisation, which does this and I am not going to repeat here. I also quite liked the idea of Segregation of Duties or SOD – I’ve known it as a concept but having an acronym somehow makes me feel so much better;
· Fraud and IDM by Logica. I quite liked the abstract for this so attended. I didn’t entirely regret it but found out more interesting facts about fraud than necessarily the business case for IDM, which is why I’d originally gone;
· Dave Nesbitt on how to avoid an identity trainwreck. Whilst this was saying what we all know such as getting senior level sponsorship, having clear priorities on what is going to be done agreed with key users, iteratively deploying rather than going for big bang and technology is difficult, it’s the human stuff that is difficult, it’s all worth repeating. Even the take home message was worthwhile: ‘IDM is many small projects to constantly improve your infrastructure that never end’;
· David Bowen looked at how identity management worked at Great Ormond Street Hospital. I didn’t learn much from this but had a sharp intake of breath on the mention that single sign-out is more difficult but more valuable than single sign-in. On the Shib front I don’t think we are ever going to get there and we shouldn’t be trying given the issues, IMHO;
· Yours truly was next up and if you read this blog and the stuff on what I do on the JISC site then you’re going to know what was presented;
· Conn Crawford went through how local authorities approach identity management but specifically what Sunderland have been doing. It was great to see Conn again. He has a knack of connecting up a range of identity management ‘stuff’ to do really valuable things in the community. What he has done ranges from federated solutions right the way through to user-centric identity management and he was presenting on the Let’s Go Sunderland portal he has put together that allows kids from a disadvantaged background to load up a smart card with activities they can attend. They have an allowance every month and sign up for activities but the smart thing is that they also tell the portal what they are interested in, which gives the resource providers some anonymised marketing info back and hence an incentive to offer their resources to the scheme. This is a great example of making personalisation work whilst protecting the individual;
· Alan Coburn presented on Glow, a teaching and learning portal for Scottish schools. I think the most interesting thing out of this was that schools wanted to sign up for it, hence there were a great number of users, and that they had used Shib but not the federation. It turns out the latter was due to specifying it before the federation existed;
· Hellmuth Broda had the rather unenviable task of being last up and went through Liberty Alliance. All very good stuff but nothing new for me. What was of more interest was his company’s creation of batches of unique codes that could be attached to 2D bar codes, RFID tags and text messages; basically, name a media and it could be attached. The potential was huge as these codes linked to specific actions such as vouchers, one time visits to web sites, etc. More info on this is at www.firstondemand.com;
Thanks also go to Professor Gloria Laycock, who did a great job chairing the meeting to the extent that we even finished early! All in all, a useful day and there were quite a few contact I met during the day that I’ll follow up further. Well worth a look next year if you are interested in identity management outside the education sector.
30-5-10
I visited Paul Walk over at UKOLN recently to talk about Shared Infrastructure Services (SIS), amongst other things, and one idea that came out of that discussion was the 30-5-10 idea.I’ll set a bit of background before ploughing into the idea itself. Most projects at JISC do some really useful stuff that researchers, educationalists, developers and a whole range of other audiences can take and use for themselves (in response to the cynics, we also do really useful stuff for the other projects that can’t necessarily be used straight away but it helps get us along the process to things that can be used ;-)). The problem we often face is that the stuff we produce isn’t used because it might not be communicated in quite the right way or the target audience may well not be aware of it. As a programme manager that can get very frustrating because sometimes you see an alternative widget that isn’t as good that is being used simply because the project staff or organisation they are working for are better at promoting it. So, we come to 30-5-10. It’s intended for software or services that can be quite easily demonstrated. So, good core candidates are some of the SIS projects and projects like NaCTeM. The idea is this:
- 30 seconds to get across what your project or the service(s) within your project do. This could be used at a JISC meeting, when you’re at a conference or wherever you meet other people that might be interested in what you are doing. The reason for 30 seconds is that within that time you should be able to get across what your project or service does in a sufficiently compelling way that it piques the interest of those who may want to use it so they want to know more. So, if we take NaCTeM’s Termine service, the 30 seconds could go something like ‘Termine is a service supplied by the National Centre for Text Mining in Manchester to extract meaningful terms from a piece of text or a corpus of texts that are submitted to it. It uses advanced text mining techniques to ensure that those terms are very accurate relative to the area that the body of text was submitted from. Termine also ranks the occurrence of terms. Possible uses include automated metadata extraction to tag the articles submitted.’. I’m sure that if someone from NaCTeM sees this they will have a few corrections but it gives you an idea of what you would say;
- 5 minutes to outline how to solve a problem your audience have. So you have the person or audience’s interest. What next? You have a dialogue with them to understand how your widget could solve a problem they have, which makes what you have done relevant to them. This involves actively listening to what they say so they spend more time talking than you do? There’s a lot on active listening on the web so I won’t try to cover it here but if you’re asking open questions like ‘What kind of things that you’re doing do you think my widget would be useful for?’ as opposed to ‘Do you think this is useful?’ then you’re onto a good start; try to ensure you’re not asking questions that have yes or no answers. In my text mining example above, I’m a stressed new programme manager who hasn’t much time to understand the background to committee papers so term extraction helps me by pulling out the key terms that I can then research on the web, making me seem knowledgeable (well, more so than Sarah Palin
); - 10 minutes to set up a quick demo that produces results. Even if your service or project is quite complex and has lots of configuration options, you need to be able to have something a developer can integrate pretty quickly and 10 minutes is a good target. My term extraction example above is to some extent a bit unfair in some ways; I can submit text online and get answers in substantially less than 10 minutes but it would be good if I could do that in a RESTful way, which I can’t currently;
So there it is. I’d welcome comments from projects or others about how do’able or sane this is but please bear in mind that the whole premise behind this is to quickly get potential users to a point where they have experienced your solution and are interested in taking it further. They are then likely to have the patience to get to grips with that SOAP interface or spend a little more time discovering the nuances of what you’ve put together.
Ubiquity
There’s quite a lot of buzz around Ubiquity at the moment, which is probably most simply described as an attempt by Mozilla to take the mashup out of the domain of the web developer and into the hands of the user. The product allows a user to create their own mashups without having to be fluent in web scripting and coding; all they need to do is install the appropriate client on their browser (currently Firefox only) and then type in what they want to do.
The applications demonstrated in the demo are fairly simple at this stage but it’s easy to see how they could have quite a lot of use in education to help take the drudge out of some common tasks and to open up what we’re doing about combining services. So, as an ex social scientist I seemed to spend quite a lot of time combining stats together and then displaying them on a map; it would be great if a I had a ‘widget’ that would do that for me and take some of the spadework out. That then frees me up to do a bit more of the interesting research that I really want to do.
Add a little more and it’s a tool that could become extremely useful. It’s all built on an open source license so there is potential for Grease Monkey type extensions that allow further extensions. We are slowly and painfully seeing the freeing up of data under Open Access and a revival in the citizen scientist as a result (see here) . Then we have tools and standards such as OAuth and OpenSocial that are allowing us to selectively release data about us and permissions to help these services do something for us.
Ultimately, I think it’s worth watching what Ubiquity is doing over at Mozilla Labs because it could start opening up some mainstream avenues for really useful mashup tools that save the researcher and educationalist a lot of time and let them get on with what they’d like to do.
It’s all about the Process and Training
If you haven’t read the recent reports on the root causes of government data loss and you deal with personal data at your institution then you really should. They highlight that whilst the technology was adequate for the job both the training, culture and process were far from adequate. If you only read one report, though, then this should be it. The data handling review gives some good pointers on how process, training and cultural adptation are vital to ensure that personal data is handled sensitively and appropriately. It’s a message we relayed through the Identity Project and as we store more and more personal data about staff and students then we need to have measures in place to ensure that everyone who deals with it knows how they should be handling the data so that the end user gets the experience they deserve and can be secure in the knowledge that their identity is safe.
Software Usability
We’re currently in the process of sorting out a new intranet at JISC so that programme managers, amongst others, can very easily access information about the ever-increasing portfolio of projects that we deal with every day. For those who have dealt with JISC for a while, you’ll know that this is massively long overdue and should provide what we need to help cope with our own data deluge ;-).
So, it was with a great deal of happiness that I saw one of the first areas that was covered was usability. Again, for those of you who know me it’s a subject that I regularly get up onto my soapbox about as I think it’s absolutely critical for good quality software. Even the best written code can be let down by a shonky user interface that hasn’t involved the user but is ‘functionally perfect’; it’s not the greatest of starts and often leads to a system being dropped before it even gets off the ground. We’re now into the second round of providing input into the usability of the system and I’m really hoping that what I’ve seen so far makes it through to the final system and we get an intranet that is both usable and useful.
This brings me onto usability and JISC-funded projects. Whilst we are always going to cover bleeding edge software that’s going to be sub-Alpha, never mind perpetual Beta, we’re increasingly funding projects to deliver software for use by users rather than proof of concept. That means usability is really, crucially important and that the user has to be involved. If I had one piece of advice to give to new projects producing software to be consumed by users (and some of my own projects are doing this as we speak) then it would be to get the usability right and adoption by any community will be a lot easier. It’s a lesson a good deal of successful open source products such as Firefox have learnt and thrived on; I’m hoping it’s one that my own and several other projects within e-Research learn too.
Risk
Without a doubt, one of the areas that can most benefit the projects we commission is the effective management of risk and yet it comes up time and time again as being a problem area. The most common response is to repeat what is in the template project plan or to come up with some standard risks that seem to do the job. So, I’m not going to be surprised to see in my next project plan something along the lines of ’staff may leave the project’. This really isn’t doing anyone any favours, least of all the project, and my standard advice is to think very simply and list out all the ‘bad things’ that could happen in the project, how likely they are to happen, what would be the impact if they did happen and what the project is then going to do to avoid them. Generally, about 10-15 minutes of thought on this leads to the risk section being completed far more effectively and hopefully to us avoiding some of those ‘bad things’.
I’m mentioning this because in this week’s Computing there is a whole section dedicated to risk, which starts with how to address it (see http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/analysis/2216492/damage-limitation-3990558) and there is a comment piece on one of the webinars they run that was on managing risk (see http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/analysis/2216502/managing-risk-people-process-3990563). Both are worth a look as they contain some good practice that can be used in any project, not just business projects.
To Wiki or not to Wiki?
There’s always quite a lot of discussion as to what to do with wikis and never more so than at JISC, where we have projects using them and we quite often use them ourself. My personal experience has been that they can be extremely useful but only if they are used properly. One of the most frustrating aspects for me is when information is put into a wiki and it’s very difficult to either find it or read it and there are other issues such as finding what has changed since the last version, which is quite often poorly managed. However, on the positive side, a wiki can be a great way of collaboratively authoring a document and what I’ve found useful is to use a mailing list or Skype conversation (hey, or even talking with people ) to frame up what needs to be on the wiki and then put it in there and have an editor who can bring the whole thing together at the end from comments that have been added below the text. So, wikis can be very useful when they are blended with other means of getting discussions into a form that can be used for calls, project documentation and programme documentation. It would be good to hear from others about what they feel works best.
First Post
As this is my first post I thought I’d say a bit about me so that anyone having a look at this blog at least knows what I do and the reason for the blog.
I am a programme manager in the e-Research Team, with primary responsibility for leading the development side of the identity and access management area, both within research and across JISC Innovation Group. I currently manage the e-Infrastructure Security topic under the e-Infrastructure programme. Finally, I am chair of the e-Framework working group and take a keen interest in software development methodologies and practices, which I am taking forward in the identity and access management area by reviewing how to map current projects into the e-Framework.
I’ve started up the blog for a few reasons. The first is that I keep my own personal blog but I haven’t had a work blog before (not too sure why as I’ve always worked in technology). The second is that I have kept on promising that I would start one up whilst at JISC so I’ve been waiting for the platform and then the time to put stuff onto a blog. Finally, and this is the most important one, I think it’s a useful way of sharing ideas, getting comments on the work that I do and, for those that subscribe, making announcements of funding that’s available and some of the reasons behind funding specific areas of work. It’s the reason why I have started a blog for me rather than multiple ones over my areas of responsibility as those are going to change over time.
Finally, I hope that you enjoy reading this. The first ‘real’ post comes after this one and is what gave me the impetus to finally get this blog rolling so thanks to Lawrie Phipps and the folks who attended the NGE Event for providing the trigger.