KMDK

A group of us had just finished an excellent dinner and were now deciding what dessert to eat. Everyone was laughing and talking at once. Except for one person. One person who had, moments before, been joking loudly, fell silent. She sat very still.

Her husband noticed and turned serious. “We need to leave now“, he said, and they left. The rest of us paid for our meal and moved to the exit on foot and on wheels. The silent woman and her husband were already farther down the sidewalk heading back to their hotel.

I was shocked at what I saw. To me, it looked like the man was walking beside a stiff, wooden figure. The figure was not the sporty, active person I had met a few days previously. This was a person possessed. She was possessed by the pain of fibromyalgia right in the middle of having fun with friends. Her husband got her back to the hotel as quickly as they could walk. He gave her the medication she needed, put her to bed, and drew the curtains so the room was completely dark. He then joined us in a café next to the hotel where we had our dessert and coffee.

That was the day that I saw the face of real pain. I couldn’t pretend to understand it fully. I realized that I could never say “I understand what you are going through.” That would be a lie. There was no need for pity, either. All I could do was show respect and tolerance – the kind of respect and tolerance that we owe all human beings.

This particular incident comes to mind when I hear anyone express the thought that some people fake their illness or that they just want to collect benefits. How can we be so suspicious of others that we immediately assume they are lying or taking money from others? That is a shocking and terrible attitude for people to have.

When I read the blog posts submitted for Blogging Against Disablism Day (BADD) each year, I am struck by one theme – a lack of respect we human beings can have for other human beings. Could it be that many of those posts would not have been written if some respect and tolerance had been shown? There could have been collaboration instead of conflict.

I think projects like BADD are good as an outlet for the voices of people with disabilities. I believe those voices are the key to developing more respect for each other. I almost feel like I shouldn’t be taking any of the spotlight on BADD. Then I remembered what I learned from watching my friend’s transformation under pain and thought of sharing my own path to better awareness about disability. We need to rid ourselves of any negative attitudes – especially in our governments where it is often amplified.

My humble plea is that we all examine our attitudes and start showing more respect today. Respect is not a cliché. It is the first step toward awareness and inclusion. We owe that to each other.

Now, go and read all the posts on the BADD 2012 web page. I hope they blow your mind.

100 years ago, a man wrote passionately about the incompetency that led to a terrible tragedy. The freshness of his words struck me when I first discovered them in 2001. Today, on the 100th anniversary of that tragedy – the sinking of the Titanic, I thought the words of that man – Thomas Fleming Day – were worth repeating. The Open Library makes it possible to do so.

When I read this 1912 article in 2012, many questions come to mind. How are we designing today? How do we communicate simple safety procedures? How do we conduct training? How do we shoulder responsibility at all stages of a project? (As an uncomfortable parallel, read D.A. Winsor’s IEEE PCS article from 1988 called “Communication Failures Contributing to the Challenger Accident: An Example for Technical Communicators” (link opens PDF).) We are supposed to learn from past failures. Is that happening, or do we need to listen to a 100-year-old voice?

Background and Copyright Information

Thomas Fleming Day was the founder and editor of The Rudder, a magazine about boats. The contents of this post come from part of a regular section in The Rudder magazine called “Round the Clubhouse Fire”. The source for this post is a 1912 edition of The Rudder found at the Open Library.

In the edition from Volume XXVII, May 1912, Number 5, “Round the Clubhouse Fire” began on page 360. This particular version began with the commentary that I am sharing with you in this post. For reading convenience, I made headings that are from the first sentence of the following paragraph. In the printed version, these sections are merely marked by three asterisks. I made no other changes to the original text.

To ensure publication of this text without violating any copyright rules, I did some research. On the Internet Archive page for this magazine, it states “Possible copyright status: NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT”. I then found an explanation about NOT_IN_COPYRIGHT in the Internet Archive forum. I used a link in that thread to make sure there was no copyright listed for this magazine. If anyone knows otherwise, please let me know in the comments, and I will make corrections accordingly.

Vol. XXVII, May 1912, No. 5 begins on page 331 in the PDF (scanned image) version on the Open Library (page 309 in the original bound volume). The article I reference is found on page 382 in the PDF (page 360 in the original bound volume).

(Do visit the Open Library on your next break. They provide a good home to many, many books, and they have high ambitions. Check them out!)

This post is like having a guest blogger, only my guest wrote his post 100 years ago. Thank you, Mr. Day.

Round the Clubhouse Fire – by Thomas Fleming Day

WHAT we have all expected and predicted would happen, has happened. Many a day I have stood on the bridge and watched one of the mailboats go rushing by at 20 or 25 knots, thick or clear, driving through so as to make her tide and land the mails and passengers on time. We watched her out of sight, and then said, “Some day one of those fellows will hit a berg or another ship and there will be a terrible killing,” I have talked with the men who drive those ships. They have shudderingly admitted the danger. “But what are we to do? We are put here to drive them, and drive them we must. If it is thick and there is ice ahead we will hit it.” For this disaster the American traveling public are wholly to blame; it is their mania for speed that has brought about the abnormal and dangerous development of the Western Ocean steamship. The American has no love for the sea, every day upon it is to him a day of torture. But then is he ever happy anywhere unless he is being rushed along at a speed dangerous to life and limb? Hear the constant’ cry on ocean steamers, “Captain, can’t you get us in to-morrow? Can’t we hurry and land to-night?” etc. “Get us over this ocean as soon as possible,” is the cry. “Never mind risking our lives, take the shortest route and rush your vessel through. Never mind the fog and ice or the other ships. Rush ! rush ! rush !” We have the same mania on land, trains running at 70 miles over tracks built for a speed of forty, and the passengers paying an extra fare for the privilege of risking a horrible death.

It is to play to this speed demon

It is to play to this speed demon that the mailboats have been taken across the cold water in Spring and Summer. To go South into the warm water meant a longer distance and more time at sea. If a line refused to let its ships take the risk, it lost the favor of the public. They transferred their patronage to the line that would send its ships over the shorter route, and take the chances of hitting ice or bashing another ship in the thick. The fact that none of these vessels carried sufficient boats to salve a full passenger and crew list was well known, and often commented on. But steamship men, like the rest of the world, grow indifferent to such conditions; the dangers are too remote; long relief from serious accident made boats an ornament and a nuisance, and the less carried the less work and bother. Not two months ago an officer of Olympic said, in response to a passenger’s remark that there were not boats enough, “Oh, we’ll never need them; just carry them to comply with the law.” Another theory that has sent many a ship to the bottom is the watertight bulkhead. No bulkhead with an opening through it is watertight. When you put a door through it, it becomes a menace not a safeguard. Bulkheads should have absolutely no opening of any kind through them, and should be carried up to the main deck intact. “That cannot be done,” cries the designer. “Impossible,” echoes the builder. Then, gentlemen, don’t call them watertight, and don’t tell people they will prevent ships sinking. I have known ships to be saved by their bulkheads, but they were solid partitions reaching from keel to deck.

The saddest thing to me in this terrible happening is that hundreds might have had a chance for their lives if only some one had been there with the brains to direct those inexperienced landsmen. I have spent hours thinking over what I would do in just such a crisis. I never go on a steamer but what my first duty is to look over the boats, to see what tackles they are fitted with, and how they are released. Then I look around and note what other stuff aboard can be used in an emergency. On Titanic there were probably four or five thousand mattresses, and yet no one seems to have thought of using them. How often have you looked over a ship side and seen a mattress, a sailor’s “donkey’s breakfast,” floating perhaps days after it was thrown over from some inbound packet. There were hundreds of wooden cabin doors; why were these not torn off and thrown overside? Because nobody was there who had been trained to think of these things. If you are ever caught on a sinking steamer remember this: Take two mattresses out of the bunks, place between them an empty suit-case, a cork life-preserver, or if you cannot get anything else two pillows or any bulky article that will float, take the bed sheets, twist them, and lash the mattresses together, sandwich-fashion, with the suit-case or life-preserver between. Here is float that you can lie full length on and that will keep your head and body above water. When in the water several of these can be brought together and lashed side by side and thus be prevented from capsizing. I know a man who saved himself by taking two water-jugs and stuffing their mouths with towels; he floated with a jug under each arm until picked up. He told me he thought of this method years before, and when the hour came it flashed back into his mind.

The loss of Titanic is a dreadful lesson

The loss of Titanic is a dreadful lesson, but, like all such that have from time to time been given to man, it will go unheeded. The same disregard of safety when safety is present will rule, and ships will speed merrily over the ocean, bearing crowds of passengers only too delighted if they break a record and get to port before the sunset gun closes quarantine.

There is one lesson that man never has learned and never will learn, and that is to put into power the competent, to choose for his governing masters the trained, experienced, and intelligent. Instead, he allows his governing masters to choose themselves, consequently we have men entirely ignorant controlling our affairs and dictating the laws and conditions under which we shall live and travel. As a specimen look at the British Board of Trade: a collection of incompetent civilians, acting under the advice of theoretical landsmen, making laws for navigating the seas. Was there anything more criminally imbecile than the late work of this body in raising the Winter load-line, a piece of folly that has sent dozens of ships and their crews to death. The Winter load-line should have been sent down, not up. Would these men have sent it up if they had spent a stormy night on the bridge of a deep-loaded vessel? No; but they are ignorant politicians who, afraid to offend the clamoring vessel owners, played politics, the stakes being the lives of men. Look at our Senate, sending three hayseed senators to investigate a shipping disaster; men who by their questions show they know nothing about the sea. What would the public say if we sent three ship captains to inquire into a mine explosion in Colorado? It is the same story: men designing and building vessels who never go to sea in them, men making sails who never set or trimmed one, men writing about the sea who never saw it.

There is only one knowledge that is of value

There is only one knowledge that is of value,—the knowledge gained by experience; all other is secondary and of questionable value. It is not so much what experience teaches but what it unteaches. You learn to unlearn, a most difficult lesson, the most difficult of all. Theoretical knowledge is piffle; it is the empirical that counts. All the speculations of all the philosophers were not worth the experience of Magellan; they with all their talk proved nothing, he by his voyage established a fact. It was this theoretical humbug, mathematical office work, that sent Titanic to sea an unsinkable ship. This monster was unsinkable because calculations proved she was so, calculations worked out by men with no seagoing experience. The Board of Trade man sits at his table and proves that with the Winter load-line where he wants to put it, the ship will have ample reserve buoyancy. Yes, certainly on his paper; but how about on a black stormy night at sea? O man, how long will you let yourself be governed by imbeciles and your affairs be regulated by blockheads?

Now I will give the world a piece of advice

Now I will give the world a piece of advice. It will not accept it, because it is a product of sense, and therefore at variance with all the accepted methods of regulating our earthly affairs. Choose three veteran captains of each of the maritime nations and form them into a Board with international powers, and give into their hands absolute control of the Western Ocean traffic. Let them plot and establish the routes, regulate the speed, specify the equipment, and make rules governing the lights, signals, and the use of the wireless telegraph. These men know what is wanted; you don’t, your Congress doesn’t, your Parliament doesn’t; the vessel owners do, but they won’t because they are after money first, last, and all the time. The members of such a board would safeguard your lives because they would be safeguarding the lives of men who have stood with them on the bridge, and they know what it means. These old skippers would be free from owners’ influence, and free from political influence, they would bring to the council table the experience of years. They would not have to call and question advisers and experts, they would be their own experts and advisers. You and I who have been down to the sea in ships will see the sense of this suggestion, but will our imbecile blockhead rulers? Never! There’s nothing in it for them.

Safety at sea is the product of constant vigilance

Safety at sea is the product of constant vigilance. Never allow this vigilance to sleep in yourself nor in others, if you can possibly help it. It is not only necessary that you should be constantly on the lookout, but those under you should be trained to be eternally on the alert. Nothing is too small to notice and care for, if it concerns the safety of your vessel.

The majority of ship officers I have been with have shown an interest in their duties, especially when on the bridge, and the same with lookouts; but there is one fault that is too common, and one that there is no question has often led to disaster, and that is, what a watch officer cannot see or does not see a lookout cannot have seen. I make it a practice never to ignore or deny a lookout’s report until it is proven groundless. It is better to believe he has seen the thing or something until you are absolutely sure he has not. Once while running in for the Hook in a thick fog, the lookout reported a buoy; the officer on watch laughed at him, as we were supposed to be ten miles offshore. I saw the buoy at the same time and told the Captain so. He stopped the ship and took a cast of the lead; we had about three feet under the keel, and in two minutes more would have been aground. No doubt Titanic’s bridge was warned of ice by the lookout; but the officer on watch did not see it, so nobody saw it. Orders were to push her through, make a record, land the passengers early, big advertisement for the line. Everybody delighted. Skipper congratulated, chief thanked. Same old story, the office on shore running the ship at sea.

The truth of what I have preached to you for years

You people will now realize the truth of what I have preached to you for years—that safety at sea has nothing to do with size, and that because a ship is big she is not necessarily seaworthy. As I have told you, small vessels are safer than large, providing they are properly designed, strongly built, thoroughly equipped and skilfully manned. The risk of being overcome by a storm or being destroyed through what seamen call stress of weather, is only one of the dangers of the sea; there are others to which all vessels are liable and which are more likely to wreck large than small craft. Of these collision is the most to be dreaded, and from a collision a small vessel runs scant risk. Huge steamers cannot go slow, because they will not answer their helms at small speeds, and it takes a long time to turn them on their helms; whereas a small vessel moves slowly and answers her helm quickly. A long straight keel vessel, like a steamer, pivots on her bow, so that when the helm is put over it is her stern that turns, not the bow, and she continues to approach the object she is helming to avoid until she swings round.

The greater danger on large vessels

But the greater danger on large vessels arises from the enormous increase of the attractive force. The attractive force between two large steamships, or a steamer and a berg, is enormous, and unless worked against will bring them rapidly together. It is this and not suction that draws vessels together; there is no suction between vessels in deep water.
This attraction is what causes collisions in fogs and strandings especially on high coasts. It is dangerous because it not only affects the vessel but affects the minds of the men on the vessel. It pulls every particle of matter, even the brain matter of the crew. In thick weather or a dark night, if left without the guidance of a compass, a man will invariably direct his vessel towards the land or towards another vessel if close to it. I have tried it time and time again. Your eminent office philosophers will probably deny this and assert that suction, and currents, and waves of one kind or another are the cause of these collisions and strandings, but try it for yourself with two small pieces of match stick in a glass of water. The laws of nature operate in the same manner in a glass of water as they do in the ocean, you will admit, even if you are an expert.

I never remember any disaster affecting me as this one did

I never remember any disaster affecting me as this one did. It made me fairly sick. Even now it seems like a dream, as though it could never have happened, that monster sinking as she did in less than three hours after receiving the thrust. The calm water made the thinking of it worse, for with no sea on nearly all could have been saved if the boats had been there. But, thank God, the officers and crew did their duty like sailors.

No fireman shirked his duty, and no seaman left his place,
For the honor of the calling and the glory of the race.
For the very pride of nations—the pride that lifts them high—
Is the strength to do their duty when the straw is drawn to die;
And in this the Anglo-Saxon—I say it not in boast—
Has gained the heart to perish like that Roman at his post.
For the first thought in our danger, the last before we pray,
Is our ancient grace for battle—And what will England say?
O Life, we cannot shame her, for all that thou canst give,
When brave men stop to perish and weak men flee to live!
For her glory’s in our keeping, and her face shows grandly when
They bring the log and tell her that we lost the ship like men.

Nothing man can write or can utter can add to the glory of those who died, passenger or crew. But perhaps some day such a time for us will come, then let the example of these men and the example of others who have gone as bravely to an ocean death be with us, and help us to meet our fate as they met it that calm Sunday morning in fifty West.

I found two excellent posts on Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism blog that I had to share. (Unless you’ve already read them, in which case, great!)

In one post, he asks the £10,000 question: who benefits most from a tax threshold change? What wonderful real-life examples. Go read the article and see whether you can spot the difference in these charts. Take heed of his point about making the raw data available.

The other post discusses the means of presenting data. This builds on lessons learned from Dan Roam’s “The Back of the Napkin” and Stephen Few’s “Now You See It”. A rough summary reads: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Remember to think about the content. The content. What are you trying to tell the reader? What is appropriate or suitable for the situation? Are you actually trying to confuse them? Really??

Paul Bradshaw updated his article with this gem from a New York Times senior software architect entitled Word Clouds Can Be Harmful. It is a must-read. It includes the statement that you can whip out when someone asks you to make a fancy-schmancy visualization:

…if it obliterates the ability to read the story of the visualization, it’s not worth adding some wild new visualization style or strange interface.

Ah, to think that attending a lecture by Paul Bradshaw last year could lead to such delight in reading these valuable blog posts.

Takeaway links

• Paul Bradshaw’s Online Journalism blog
• Stephen Few’s “Now You See It” book
• Dan Roam’s site for “The Back of the Napkin”

A mini-vacation and some random negative tweets stirred some dusty brain cells this week. As a result, I want to make a constructive call to action.

Let’s work on constructive and positive approaches to spreading accessibility awareness everywhere.

This is not being cheesy and cutesy. I’m not bringing out the unicorns and rainbows, even though they can correct accessibility errors in one sprinkling of fairy dust.

The background

Somewhere at the end of 2008 or beginning of 2009, I saw Chris Heilman make a similar call. He said something about making positive changes. He proposed that we stop (negative) rants about some inaccessible something. Instead, he suggested taking constructive action. I took that to heart. I recall coming across a website for some spinal injury organization that had a useful-sounding brochure on exercises for people who had spine problems. The brochure was a PDF and it was inaccessible. I immediately wrote to them and suggested that they make the PDF accessible. I never heard from them. That didn’t stop me. Only time stops me, especially when I make such discoveries on a tangent to a tangent to what I was in the process of doing!

Since then, the marvelous volunteers in the Education and Outreach Working Group (EOWG) have produced a sort of fairy dust. They made templates for how to contact organizations about inaccessible websites. Just brilliant. (I wrote about the efforts of EOWG and several others recently.)

Now and then, discussions pop up in social media about negative versus positive in the process of making the web truly universal and accessible. Such a discussion popped up yesterday on Twitter and jiggled the memory of Chris’ old call to action. I sent a tweet to Chris yesterday, asking about the source of such a statement. Chris’ links led to some awesome resources I had forgotten. That man has a passionate way with words on technology and accessibility. That’s why I stalk him, uh, follow him on Twitter, even though I am not a web developer. (At least I can comprehend the funny videos he shares from time to time!)

Chris Heilman’s awesome must-read articles

I may not have found the exact quote I was looking for, but I found two articles that I hope people will read and ponder.

• July 2008: The biggest barrier to accessibility and inclusive design is us
• September 2009: Finite Incatatem – my keynote at Accessibility 2.0

The Finite Incatatem has a passage I thought worth highlighting here:

Our job now is to get out of our own little world and educate the world about accessibility and the issues bad web development and design causes. We don’t do a good job with this as we always try to excuse ourselves by saying that we don’t understand technology and its ins and outs. The point is though that as someone who advocates accessibility you don’t need to know everything but all you need to do is to listen, collaborate and communicate with the right people in the right format.

Last year’s Paris Web conference had a great example of Aurelien Levy and Stephane Deschamps showing and teaching accessibility by explaining the problems using magic tricks and making people from the audience experience the issues by blindfolding them or only allowing them to use one hand to use interfaces. This is what we need to do more – bring the human aspect into our presentations and trainings instead of banging on about guidelines and laws and minute technological solutions.

Note the phrase “all you need to do is to listen, collaborate and communicate with the right people in the right format”. Note that “listen” comes first!

We must also remember that teaching is hard, as Chris states elsewhere in that speech. That is because “it not only means transferring knowledge but also changing mindsets. And that is something we have to do if we want to make this accessibility thing work.”

That’s is why communication is on par with knowing code. Changing mindsets can be just as tricky, if not more so, than wrangling HTML code in any way, shape, or form! This communication theme continues from the 2008 presentation where Chris said that “the main problem is that we just don’t talk to each other the right way. AND we communicate with the wrong means in the wrong manner.”

This shouldn’t be the case for technical communicators, right? We know how to communicate correctly, right?

While digging through Chris’ old blog posts, I read a blog post somewhere else. I think it fits nicely into this discussion. Mark Baker discusses technical communicators and respect – a respect that many think is always just out of reach. He distinguishes between one-of-them respect versus one-of-us respect. Accessibility is about removing barriers, yet many of us are quite good at building and maintaining barriers in our work. Mark’s post provides an interesting and useful little wake-up call.

Do we want to win arguments or solve a problem?

A newer post from Chris continues some of his older posts and presents a challenge for 2012. He discusses a winter of discontent for web design, but I think his points apply to those preaching accessibility regardless of whether they code, write, or design.

What about my call to action?

I don’t have a spinal injury, yet I took action when I encountered a problem on that website I mentioned previously. I was professionally aware that there was a problem, and I felt that knowledge came with a responsibility. I think more of us can do this. If in doubt, discuss the issue with friends and colleagues, or turn to the resources I mentioned at EOWG. During elections, you always hear how your vote counts. Well, the same applies here. Your accessibility efforts do count.

Other people have bigger access barriers to the web than I do. Far bigger barriers. I can sympathize with their frustration. Realizing what they experience – well, I’d be outraged and furious. Especially if I felt I was all alone with my troubles. That’s why we need to work together. We can learn from each other and support each other in this project. I’ve done my share of mocking and scorning inaccessible sites. Nothing constructive comes out of that, however.

Write to a site when you discover they lack correct (or any) alt text on images. Bit by bit, we can fix this place. Let’s do it in a constructive and positive spirit. If they fight back and resist your suggestions, use intelligence to counter that. Fight back, but with honey and constructive ideas. Be kind and polite when you vocally take your business elsewhere. You who master words – you know it can be done! Let’s do this!

PS UPDATE: Obviously, I’m giving credit to Chris for his inspiration made-to-stick a few years ago. However, the tipping point or nudge to write this comes from Jennifer Sutton. Thank you, Jennifer!

Sometimes there is a bit too much oohing and aahing over the bling and not enough discussion of how the bling got there.

Hey, I like fancy gadgets and cool technology as much as the next geek girl. I know that fancy gadget didn’t just materialize out of thin air. There are no replicators around here, either. So how does cool tech get here? Where does bling come from?

It comes from the neurons in brains shooting messages back and forth around the brain at lightening speed. Brain activity, that is. Thinking. Wondering. Someone has to think up this bling and do so standing on the shoulders of those who have been thinking and wondering earlier.

If we want more cool tech in our lives, we need more people to gain knowledge about these things through learning, teaching, collaborating, and creating. And lots of hard work.

We need young children, especially girls, to look at the cool technology and not say “I want that”, but say “I want to know how that works and I want to make things like that, too”.

While there are women out there touting technology products, some women are aware of something more crucial – the need for some girls to help make that technology.

Dorte Toft is one such woman. As stated in the Danish wikipedia entry on Dorte, she is a Danish journalist. She blogs in Danish about many IT topics, including management, security, and investments. Apparently, she describes herself as a “devil’s advocate”. Her persistence in getting to the bottom of matters led to the downfall of Stein Bagger, a man you could perhaps call a Danish Bernie Madoff. She received a number of awards for her high-quality and excellent journalism. (What a shame that the English wikipedia article about Stein Bagger doesn’t mention Dorte at all.)

Her area of expertise is information technology, most likely coming from her first education as a developer. She knows what she is talking about when she writes her blog posts for technology and business blogs. She values knowledge.

A few years ago, she started a project to educate people in all the opportunities girls can have by getting an education in the “hard” subjects like technology, IT, and the natural sciences. You could say that she wanted to get at the heart of why more girls weren’t studying the highly technical subjects in school. Her journalism drove her and her expertise supplied the quality. The project resulted in a book, “Lykkelig i Nørdland” (literally “Happy in Nerdland”). You can explore her project, perhaps with the support of Google Translate, at the Danish-language blog Lykkelig i Nørdland.

The reason I admire Dorte Toft and chose her as my Ada Lovelace Day “tributee” is because she gets at the real heart of the issue of technology. It’s about education and stimulating an interest in technology, IT, and sciences. We shouldn’t be encouraging all our little girls to get 15 minutes of fame on some talent show or to fight for the spotlight in Hollywood or Bollywood with millions of others. We need to get them drooling over the thought of changing lives for the better through development of the technology that can develop our society, provide creative outlets, and improve lives.

Dorte Toft isn’t so much about the cool tech as she is about what’s behind the cool tech. I think that is a far more powerful a position to take. We have so many engineers and technicians and designers to thank for the technology that we enjoy every day. Their ranks will always need refilling and we need to encourage more girls to do that. We need diversity in the creators to meet the needs of the diversity of the world.

A big thanks to Dorte Toft for her constant reminders about the joys of nerdland as well as its importance in our lives. Education in science and technology is what puts the bling in bling!

18 Days in Egypt is “a collaborative documentary project about the revolution.” The co-founder of this project, Jigar Mehta, was in Copenhagen June 14th, and I was one of a handful of people who was privileged to hear him speak at Politiken’s Hus.

I was sad that so few attended this talk. He did tell his tale to a much larger audience the next day at another conference, but he had a valuable tale that deserved more listeners of the journalist variety. (News of this talk was circulated in journalist circles.) Here are my brief notes from his lessons learned about crowdsourcing “an interactive documentary of the events in Egypt” that occurred from January 25th to February 11th 2011.

My notes from the talk

Mehta describes how he watched the tale unfold on television. He noticed that many, many people were holding up their mobile phones to record the events. He thought that must be a rich source of material that could reveal many stories from those turbulent days.

Inspiration came from the Hypercities project at UCLA.

You have loads of content from all those who recorded what happened. How do you add context to that? Deep meta tagging is required.

You need to go to the streets to find the stories. In Egypt, only 25% have internet access and the internet quality is often poor. How can people who have content share it in those conditions? What about people who have tales and no devices for sharing?

The team behind 18 Days is teaching journalism to 30 students. Those people, in turn, can help collect the stories. They will learn how to approach people and how to encourage them to share their stories. They will make “pop-up shops” on Tahrir Square and elsewhere. People cannot afford the price of sending text messages (SMS). These pop-up shops are places people can stop by and tell their stories. The plan is to use raw material – nothing prepared. It’ll be all about the tagging. When you get context-rich material, the media will tell the story. The aim is also to highlight differences at various spots.

The goal is 5000 unique stories. Of course, the overall goal is to share this with the Egyptian people. Some people who were hesitant about sharing their experiences became eager when they realized that this could be a legacy to future generations – that they could one day tell their own grandchild “this is what I did during these important days in Egypt’s history”.

On the technology side, they are using Popcorn from Mozilla. Most of their software is open source, but they may have to build some parts themselves.

In the following picture, Mehta is talking about the site “I am Jan 25″ that is being displayed in the slide on the screen behind him. It is another example of aggregating information in one place.

My thoughts from the talk

I was very excited by the way they planned to engage people in this project. Those journalist-trained students will have to tell tales to get tales.

The entire process of collecting content and tagging it properly is a tale unto its own. I noted that they were creating a process that tells story and gives the whole thing a life of its own. “18 Days in Egypt” is the main tale, but a secondary tale is emerging from the entire process of making that main tale.

I picked up some new (to me) terms in this talk: transmedia and cross-media. (PS I also found an article that debunks some myths about transmedia that is worth a read.)

The stories from 18 days in Egypt are very important to tell the world. From a professional viewpoint, I think the process of producing this documentary is tremendously exciting. Anyone in journalism or communication or video/film production can learn a lot from the processes that are coming out of this project. I hope they document that as well.

How do you attend a conference from your desk and gain wisdom and insights?

Last year, I would have answered ScribbleLive. I followed the STC Summit 2010 using ScribbleLive, and I had a feeling I was at least having the conversations in the hallways. Tweets were drawn into the ScribbleLive setup, but people could also have accounts where they wrote more than 140 characters at a time. You got substantial tidbits directly from the event. I had a sense of the problems on the first two days of the conference (too much organizational navel-gazing that drove people batty), and the overall success of the conference when it was just about technical communication and its myriad of topics.

I felt like I attended the conference in person.

Real-Time is Exhausting

The STC Summit 2011 was far less enjoyable from my faraway perspective.

One problem was the distance. From Denmark, the Sacramento, California location was 9 hours away. They got going when I was heading home from work. I tried following the tweets all evening, but I needed to get dinner and I had other things to do (my so-called life). I’d come home and turn on the computer, but after making and eating dinner and doing non-Twitter-computer tasks, I was often too tired to bother checking up on any #stc11 tweets.

There was no ScribbleLive for easy viewing. The organizers tried a social networking tool called Zerista, which was used mainly as a calendar and coordinator for meetings. It was a walled garden given only to attendees, so if anyone did use it for chatting or sharing, outsiders like myself were excluded.

There was a CoverItLive widget on the Summit website. That showed tweets with the #stc11 hashtag as they rolled in. I didn’t use it because Twitter search was just as good for me, if not better for my nearsighted eyes. As of this writing, the widget is still active on the page, but I have no idea if a CoverItLive user can also grab a file of those tweets. Few seemed to know about using Lanyrd.

I suddenly found myself working too hard to follow events 9 hours away from me. I think I hit a mental timezone limit. What I did when the conference was in Dallas (only 7 hours away) was uncomfortable with a 9-hour difference.

How to Grab and Archive Tweets

I don’t have the perfect answer to this, but there are some methods – as long as the applications pulling the tweets don’t shut down or drastically change their business model, as WTHashtag.com did.

• If you use Google Reader, you can grab the RSS feed for a particular hashtag. You must do so before the event starts or else you miss tweets. After the event, it is too late.
• Search Hash can grab tweets and let you download a .csv file for offline viewing. This is how I collected tweets from the 2011 STC Summit. I collected them while the conference was on. When I try collecting them now, the results are incomplete. Perhaps they struggle with the “disappearing” of tweets at Twitter, too.
• I tried using The Archivist for Summit tweets. However… Over 5000 tweets were collected, but I cannot see them all and I cannot download them. Twitter’s Terms of Service do not permit this. (Commence wailing and gnashing of teeth.) Oh, and I’m irked the search is named for me and not the hashtag. Not sure how that happened, and I can’t change it.

What’s in These Tweets?

Do I really want to read all tweets? No. Some will be people tweeting about a lost item, where to meet for a shuttle bus, or the joy of meeting a virtual friend in real life. They are OK because they add color and life to the event. When there are hundreds or thousands of tweets, I need those types of tweets filtered out somehow.

This is where curation comes in. A tweet from @wion and supported by @annindk says it all: “I’m less concerned with live tweeting and more interested in the thoughtful write-ups during/after”. @Wion addressed his tweet to people attending the Content Strategy Conference in Minneapolis, which used the hashtag #confab. His comment applies to any conference.

@fionacullinan tried her hand with Storify where she curated tweets about Confab for FireheadLtd. Storify looks interesting as does a similar curation tool called Chirpstory.

But… maybe we should just go back to blogging after the event – or during, if we have the time, energy, and internet connectivity.

Some people are investigating and pondering this capturing events for posterity and for pondering. @annindk, a.k.a. Ann Priestly, shares her explorations and excellent insights on this very topic at Danegeld. Through one of her posts, I found two must-read articles on this very topic:

Ann led me to Real-Time is Burying History on the Web by Stephanie Booth.

And Stephanie’s article led me to Sacrificing web history on the altar of instant by Suw Charman-Anderson (yes, the @FindingAda Suw!)

Real-Time or History?

You think these posts talk less about the real-time experience and more about the history? Of course. Shouldn’t that be the aim of these conferences? Sure, you have some beers, you meet people, you laugh, you talk. In short, you get re-energized for whatever it is you do. However, isn’t learning or teaching an ideal goal for a conference? That means you need to collect this wisdom somehow. Some sort of curation is needed.

Why don’t we attend more conferences and stop whining about curation? They cost money and time, and not everyone has big (filled) pockets or a sponsorship at their back. Again, if goals are teaching and learning, then the conference should extend beyond the days at the physical conference site. STC has provided Summit@aClick for the past few years. (Free for attendees or at a fee for non-attendees.) This is a collection of most presentations where the audio is synchronized with the slides. Unfortunately, it is not captioned and there is no transcript, which is a huge drawback. It excludes anyone with hearing issues and those who have English as a second language and who like the support of captions or transcripts.

What Now?

There are automatic curating or collecting tools, but the best curation tool is inside the head of each conference attendee. More of them should expand beyond 140 characters when they get home. Two sources of inspiration are

• Jimmy Chandler (@uxprinciples) with his writeup on his own #IXDA presentation, which provides loads of background (and teaching!) material.
• Léonie Watson, (@LeonieWatson), who did a writeup of cognition and accessibility topics at Standards.next last September.

Now… What conversations do you need to expand?

I’d like to have the real voices of accessibility reverberate around the globe!

Back in March, I heard Mahmoud Salem, better known as @SandMonkey, speak about using social media in the revolution in Egypt. He gave a fascinating presentation, which was followed by a question and answer session. The person who asked questions was Solana Larsen, a managing editor at Global Voices.

I have a lot of respect for Global Voices and the citizen media movement providing a platform for voices around the world. These are voices that you normally do not hear in mainstream media for so many different reasons. I chatted with @SandMonkey and a group of my friends after the talk. Solana was there, and I said hi, because I follow her on Twitter. We started talking about Global Voices.

Solana asked whether I would be interested in writing for them. I was reluctant because I honestly didn’t know what to write and because I have been saying yes to too much lately! If I wrote about something, it would most likely be accessibility.

Then I had an epiphany.

Why not encourage people with disabilities from around the world to join Global Voices? They could tell their story and raise awareness about disability issues and the efforts to make changes for improvement in their country.

The Real Voices of Accessibility

It’s been said before (in casual tweets and on blogs) that many accessibility advocates are people who do not have major mobility, vision, hearing, or cognition disabilities. It’s implied that although they care deeply, they are not directly affected by inaccessible websites, buildings, gatherings, etc. There are people with disabilities who are active bloggers and presenters at conferences, and there are some who blog quietly in one corner of cyberspace.

Why not find more? Why not find people with disabilities – those who are not directly involved with web development and design and all the web accessibility discussions – and get them to blog about what is happening in their countries? What are their governments doing to be more inclusive of all its citizens? What legislation is being debated or passed? What grassroots initiatives are thriving and what seeds have been planted?

Global Voices has sections dedicated to geographic areas and topics of interest. Accessibility is a topic of interest. More blog posts on this topic would be joyfully welcomed by the editing team. The real voices of accessibility deserve to be heard by a larger audience.

Tell Your Story and Make a Difference

This is a shout out to people with disabilities everywhere. You in the wheelchair. You with the chronic pain. You with the signing hands. You with little or no sight. And you and you and you. You have voices, regardless of the state of your vocal chords. You who know the value of accessibility and the value of inclusion. Your voices are the really important ones.

Global Voices is a vehicle ready to drive your message to every home. There is strength in numbers. This is not a job for one person, but a job for many.

Let’s start discussing it in the comments or on Twitter, but if you are ready now, go talk to Solana and the people at Global Voices. Learn about the specific details for blogging, especially those of you who already have an active blog.

@SandMonkey talked about using social media in a revolution where people wanted to make improvements in their lives. I’ve read Oliver Sacks’ Seeing Voices and the part where he describes the strike at Gaulladet University and the rise of Deaf culture. Recently, many people with disabilities took to the street in London in the Hardest Hit march to protest the cuts in disability spending by the UK government.

Maybe it’s about time to take to the (virtual) streets and explain the importance of inclusion and rights for persons with disabilities. After hearing about the Hardest Hit campaign in London, I speculated what it would be like if there was a Million People with Disabilities March in Washington, D.C. (like other Million Something marches in the past).

The chat with Solana and my great respect for Global Voices ignited an idea in my head. Someone else fanned the flames. I want to credit @nethermind with something she said on Twitter. I believe she was making a direct or even an indirect call for action on spreading the word about accessibility. Anyway, the two ideas made me think that Global Voices would be a great channel for that call to action.

Globa11y

Let’s do this. Accessibility is an issue that is not confined to one country or to one language. This leads me to the odd word in my title. I have a great hashtag for this project.

#Globa11y

This is the word “global” plus the special abbreviation for accessibility called “a11y”. The “11″ stands for the eleven letters of the word “accessibility” found between the “a” and the “y”. (This technique has been used for the words “localization”, which is “l10n”, and “internationalization”, which is “i18n”, so it’s not a new idea.) Merge Global and a11y and you get globa11y.

As an aside, I believe the word “inclusion” is better than accessibility in many ways. I think some people are put off by the term accessibility, or they simply do not understand how it can relate to them. Inclusion may be far better. However, both terms are not recognized that easily outside the group of people who work with or are interested in the topic of accessibility. Hashtags do tend to defy grammar and syntax, and the word accessibility lent itself more easily to a marriage with the word global.

Whatever we call it, let’s give it a go and start a movement!

Each year, I swoon with delight at the scene in my backyard. After a long winter with bare branches, the tree in the backyard puts out tiny buds of a delicate green. If the sun is out and the temperature is warm, the tree fast-forwards to an explosion of white blossoms. No green is visible, just the white blossoms. I have never learned the name of the tree, and I have never tried to look it up. I don’t need to know its name because I know its beauty. Corny, but true.

Perhaps my delight comes from knowing the winter coats and boots can truly be packed away for a season. Or knowing that the days are longer with more sunlight to give energy to so many ideas and activities. It’s definitely a sign that this bear is coming out of hibernation.

Hello, glorious spring!

When the blossoms disappear, I settle in for a summer viewing of green. When the leaves disappear, I know the blossoms are only a few dark months away. Sometimes, those dark months drag on, but the blossoms always erase those memories and the cycle starts again.