Online Groups Blog

I have been thinking about the Apple iPad, specifically how it relates to other devices. I then recalled my undergraduate course in human computer interaction, and the work that was done on ubiquitous computing. I looked about me, and realised that I was surrounded by devices that were restricted to a few research labs fifteen years ago. The hardware is all there, with a few differences, but we are a long way from the vision of computing that came out of the last decade of the 20th century.

In the 1970s the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) gave birth to the computing interface that would be used for the next 30 years (at least): the personal computer, modern graphical user interfaces, Ethernet networking, laser printers, and object-oriented programming. Famously, Apple stole most of these ideas to create the unsuccessful Lisa and highly successful Macintosh computers. As a follow-up, under the leadership of Mark Weiser, Xerox PARC started work on the next generation of devices.

What they came up with was the concept of ubiquitous computing — where computers will be vastly better at getting out of the way, allowing people to just go about their lives (Weiser, 1993). To achieve this Xerox PARC decided that we needed three devices to supplement, or largely take over, from the personal computer: tabs, pads and boards.

Tabs

Tabs were the smallest interface; about the same size as a Post-It Note. Originally they had very limited capabilities, with 128KB of store and the ability to play video at four frames a second. Tabs did have wireless networking, using a bespoke system that Xerox PARC developed, so they could work like a two-way pager (a device that the original tabs superficially resembled). Input was provided by a pen, but because of the limited processing power a simplified alphabet called Unistrokes was used (Goldberg and Richardson, 1993). Within an office building a tab could report its position, so your workmates will know where to find you, a bit like an advanced RFID security card.

Cell phones (alias mobile phones) are the same size as tabs. The intervening few years have seen store increase into hundreds of gigabytes, video increase to full-motion, three wireless protocols (Bluetooth, 802.11, and GSM) are typically used for communication, and GPS is used to track the location of the cell phone anywhere in the world (except in an office building, where satellite coverage can be a bit spotty).

Pads

Pads, or tablets, have had a longer history than tabs, as far as I can figure out. Commercial pen-based interfaces had been available for a couple of years by the time Xerox PARC started working on the MPad. Unlike the commercial offerings of the time, the MPad had wireless networking, multiprocessing (unlike the not-yet-shipped Apple iPad), and multimedia capabilities. However, it was the software that made the MPad dramatically different from the current crops of pads, but more on that later.

The pad has had a hard time commercially. Microsoft has been pushing tablets for over twenty years without much success (I can recall booting a Windows 3.1 for Pen Computing machine). The Apple Newton was problematic enough to get a mention on The Simpsons. Far more successful has been the netbook, which has a user interface similar to a desktop but it is as portable as a pad, for a lot less money. Interestingly, some netbooks are acquiring touch-screens, so they can behave even more like tablets. (The photo above is of a netbook, rather than an actual pad.)

Boards

Of the three interfaces I recall learning about as a student, the board is the first one I can recall ever seeing, sort of. The idea was to create a shared space where many people could interact — much like a whiteboard. The Xerox LiveBoard (Elrod et al, 1992) was the result of the PARC work on boards, which actually made it to market as a Xerox product. It could be used to record drawings, and make presentations, blazing a trail that Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote follow.

I first came across the LiveBoard concepts with the electronic whiteboards, which would record and play back the drawings that were made on it. However, game consoles are most common board-sized interface that I come across. They drive million-pixel displays, providing a shared space where people can interact using wireless controls.

The Hardware Difference: Keyboards

The tab developed by Xerox PARC did not have a keyboard as they have a very small interaction area — too small for a keyboard (Weiser, 1993). The Palm Pilot and Apple Newton had pen-based input like the Xerox tab. However, most tab-sized devices are not pen-based: even the Apple iPhone uses a keyboard when text needs to be entered. I do not know why this is the case. Maybe it was a long running patent suit (1997–2006) brought by Xerox against Palm (over the Xerox Unistrokes system, on which Grafitti was based) that made others wary. Maybe keyboards are easier to implement and learn. Maybe the tricks used by tab-like devices to allow text input (like multi-tap and T9) are good enough: the speed of input using T9 is 14.63wpm (σ 1.09) (Wobbrock et al, 2007) compared to 15.8wpm (σ 4.02) for Unistrokes (Castellucci et al, 2008). The Unistrokes patent must be close to expiring, so we will see soon if someone picks up the pen-input ball and runs with it.

Keyboards were optional on the MPad developed by Xerox, all netbooks have a physical keyboard, while the Apple iPad relies on an on-screen keyboard. As for boards, the Nintendo Wii, Sony Playstation 3, Microsoft XBox 360 consoles all have an optional keyboard. In addition, Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote presentations are usually presented on workstations acting as boards and the keyboards are vital to the creation of many presentations (sadly).

…But Where is the Software?

Reading back across the ubiquitous computing papers, old and new, I am amazed at how far the hardware has come, and how little the software has changed. The original concept was to move beyond the intimate nature of personal computing, and to create devices that were better suited to communication and collaboration. The software would allow tabs, pads, and boards to interact with each other; not just your own devices, but those used by others. A presentation could be displayed on a board, appear simultaneously on pads (for annotation), and be controlled by a tab (Myers, 2001). A drawing made on one persons’s tab would appear on the shared board. A running program would follow you (well, your tab) from your workstation to another person’s office, where it will display itself so you could discuss it, a bit like cut and paste writ large (Rekimoto (1997) dubbed it pick-and-drop). There was excited (albeit awkward) talk of shared situations and collaboration. However, the seamless interplay between the multiple device surfaces that Weiser imagined is still far from reality (Klokmose et al, 2009).

Recent Apple products also lack the joy of ubiquitous computing. The language that Steve Jobs uses to talk about the iPad is still the language of the personal computer. Take the list of tasks that the iPad has to support:

• Browsing (which did not exist at the time of the Xerox MPad),
• Reading email,
• Viewing your photos,
• Viewing video,
• Listening to music,
• Playing games,
• Reading eBooks

There is no shared space, beyond email (which is older that I am) and Web browsing (which is fifteen years old by my count). Instead he claims that unless a pad is better than those tasks listed above it has no reason for being. He then goes on to discuss how the iPad can be personalised and discusses the many single-user tasks for the iPad. When he briefly discusses sharing, in the context of photos, the talk is centred around a single device.

I am not a ubiquitous computing researcher (I studied undo) so I cannot offer any insight into why the software is not there, while the hardware is more than capable. Instead I take heart that there are still people working away at the problem — publishing papers about frameworks and software architectures, as user-interface researchers do when they need something to present and the coding is harder than expected. Software is also what free and open-source development is good at. With the free and open software present in tabs of all shapes and sizes, pads and boards I hope that some hackers may be inspired to take up the ubiquitous computing ideas, dodge the remaining patents, and create software that brings people together, allows them to share situations (not matter how awkward) and make the world a better place.

Me? I am still trying to sort out email…

If you are a geek, or have geekly inclinations, there are a bunch of opportunities to hang out with web people in Christchurch.

The Valley in Christchurch meets monthly for casual web-related conversations that lead to bigger things.

The Christchurch Web Developers and Designers meetup also happens monthly.

There are informal beers at the Twisted Hop pretty much every Friday after work. If you’re new in town you’ll have to guess whose table to crash, or get in touch with one of us.

We Effusion Group folks often have lunch together in the CBD around 12:30. You’d be welcome to join us. Get in touch for an invite.

The Christchurch Creative Space, is a geek crafter hangout, currently happening twice a week.

If you’re looking for a place to work while you’re in town, check the OnlineGroups.Net hotdesk.

Finally, if you are suitably inclined try searching Twitter for #christchurch and #tweetup :-).

Due to the off-shoring of some of our team (Alice and Michael, but more on that later), some space has been freed up in the OnlineGroups.Net Christchurch office. Even though Marek and William from encode and Tracklr are using the adjoining office, and Julian Carver hot-desks here some of the time, things have become a little quieter. The buzz and what’s happening on Twitter and don’t quite make up for warm bodies and the bouncing of ideas that happens in a room.

If you are visiting central Christchurch, even if just from the suburbs, and you’re looking for a place to open your laptop, swing by. Anyone who wants a (mostly) quiet place with warmth and wireless, to work for a few hours, is welcome. If we get on and you’d like to make it a regular thing, then let’s talk about that.

We’re in 409 Kenton Chmbrs, 190 Hereford St, Christchurch, Aotearoa (New Zealand). You can phone on +64-3-377-5377 and +64-27-431-4928.

Now that I’ve cleared the backlog from spending last week at GOVIS 2009, here is my impression of it: two. There were two clouds, two topics, two presentations, and two conferences.

Two Clouds

From the opening keynotes to the closing ones, GOVIS was overshadowed by two clouds: the recession, and cloud computing. In his opening address, Hon Dr Richard Worth, Minister of Internal Affairs and Land Information announced that the NZ economy is expected to lose $50 billion in the next few years, and that permanent budget cuts would be made across the state sector. This meant a move towards front-line service-delivery, enabled by collaboration between government agencies, including the sharing of data and IT services. The shadow of this cloud could be see in the half-empty auditorium, and the cancellation of the keynote from SSC with a “not ready to talk” note. GTS had already been moved from SSC to DIA. Rumours were that further restructuring of the SSC would affect quite a few of the ICT people there. Cloud Computing, and its web of data was mentioned by pretty much every presenter as a major disrupter, both by reducing the cost of enterprise IT, and by opening up new data-sharing possibilities. It seems that the horror of locating government data somewhere in the sky, and paying by the minute, is being eroded by talk of 80% cost-savings.

Two Topics

The two hot topics at GOVIS were open data and public engagement. These are two sides of the same coin. Broadly, one allows government data to be used by the community, and the other enables government to hear what the community think and want. The open data message conveyed by Laurence Millar in his last blog post as Government CIO was echoed by many speakers at GOVIS. If you have the data, and it’s easy enough to open it up, there is no reason why not to. And if you do, there’s a chance that someone will do something innovative with it, maybe even something that generates income and tax revenue. At least other government agencies will be able to get it without bothering you, and you might just increase your transparency. Of course, it is not always easy to open up data, or even to share it between agencies, and there were many conversations about the problems and solutions around this. Ironically, most of the stands in the trade show were focused on data security and protection. The second major topic was public engagement. The public are using social media, so government can too. Forums and other social media can be used to let the public see the human face of government, and to increase dialogue between government and the public. The message here is pretty much Cluetrain for government.

Two Presentations

There were two main presentations at GOVIS: “it’s alright to use social media” and “you’re a dinosaur if you don’t”. The Thursday morning keynote from Fergus Hogarth of the Department for Families and Communities (Govt of South Australia) provided low risk but effective effective examples of the use of social media for engagement, mainly within the department. I expect that these made sense to many of the government folks who are relatively new to these concepts. Matt Crozier of Bang the Table also provided several examples of effective online consultations. The message from Stephen Collins of acidlabs was more urgent: participate or be hyperisolated. Joanna McLeod and Matt Lane, both of SSC also gave engaging demonstrations that if you aren’t doing social media now, you are starting to be bypassed by the real world.

Two Conferences

The most exciting part of GOVIS for me, however, was to be in the #govis09 Twitter backchannel. Whatever was happening on the stage, there was a lively conversation in the audience. What do you think of this? What’s going on in the next room? What do the people who are not at GOVIS think of this? These conversations liberated the participants from the usual constraints of passively ingesting whatever the sage on the stage is saying. You didn’t even have to be at GOVIS to participate. This heralds a new model for conferences. The conversations in the corridors are happening the whole time, and the corridors have no boundaries.

Rod Drury’s ten trends in accounting are spot on, but they could all be encapsulated in the first: “Online accounting won’t exist as a product category for long.” Rod writes…

Small Business don’t do integration projects but in the SaaS world vendors are encouraged to work together to integrate their products so small businesses don’t have to. Some vendors may decide to develop the surrounding modules and have full suites and others will make it easy to link with complimentary solutions.

Like all software, accounting software is becoming part of an ecosystem. As the ecosystem evolves, components evolve and connect to diverse related components. The emergence of standardised APIs, integration with other business modules and with banking systems, and the emergence of a market for integrators are all artefacts of this.

What Rod misses is that the exact trends he predicts are strongly favourable to open source accounting software components. Accounting software is the classic example of the “critical non-core” category where open source works best. As Geoffrey Moore points out, accounting software doesn’t by itself make anyone any money, but everyone has to have it. There is therefore no threat to competitive advantage in collaborating around it. In a component-based environment, even business models that do rely on particular transaction flows derive their advantage from implementation, rather than the components themselves.

Another trend that favours open source accounting solutions is the suspicion of business models based on lock-in and datamining. With open source cloud solutions, the customer has greater freedom to move between service providers without having to change the software that they use.

In the last couple of weeks, I have heard of two projects to integrate time and job management modules with the open source accounting system that we use, Ledger SMB.

Microsoft has announced that MSN Groups will close in February 2009.

They have made a deal with Multiply so that MSN Group Managers can create a group on Multiply, migrate their content and invite their group members from MSN Groups. The migration process worked pretty well on the small MSN group I created today, but managers of large MSN groups report long migration times, incomplete migration and other problems. Still, I think getting most of the content over is doing pretty well, given the challenges of integrating disparate systems.

Multiply groups are great for posting photos, videos and music, and their site customization is pretty flexible. What I haven’t found at Multiply is good old email discussion group functioning. You can get email delivery with a Multiply group, and you can post via email using a “Secret Pin”. There is a scary form in the HTML email that flips you to the site to make a comment. This is a web forum with an email interface, and a long way from the equivalent participation using web and email provided by Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups and OnlineGroups.Net. My MSN Group works pretty well that way, too, although the forum interface feels pretty old school and the text at the top of the email body is slightly disconcerting. I can, however, post and read posts using email or the web. I am sure that MSN Group users would find that OnlineGroups.Net groups compare pretty favourably with the MSN Groups messages feature, after the small time that it takes to get used to anything new.

You can’t delete posts with OnlineGroups.Net groups, but we think that’s a feature not a bug, as most posts are emailed out to most people. If spam is a problem, it’s easy to put new members on moderation.

The messages system at OnlineGroups.Net is not totally vanilla, though. Online groups topics are great for document-sharing, and make a passable photo album, and you can post YouTube movies quite easily. OnlineGroups.Net groups also have live chat.

A Multiply group gets its own subdomain (like my group at http://test20081027.multiply.com/), as do people (like me at http://danrandow.multiply.com/). If you have multiple related groups, I guess you just have to link between them, like you do at MSN. A big difference with OnlineGroups.Net is that you can locate multiple related groups on a single site with its own domain such as http://demosite.onlinegroups.net/. This is perhaps of more appeal to organisations than it is to MSN Group Managers who, I am guessing, tend to be individuals. If there are clusters of MSN Groups looking for a single location, however, then starting an OnlineGroups.Net site would be a good option. [Update: clearly many MSN Groups have multiple message boards. Groups like these, whether convened by organisations or inviduals, could benefit from starting multiple groups on an OnlineGroups.Net site.]

Another difference from both MSN Groups and Multiply is that OnlineGroups.Net sites have no ads. We charge for private group members (although they’re still free just now), so the business model is clear. Use a free public site and bring us customers who might buy the premium service. We want OnlineGroups.Net sites to reflect our customers’ identity as much as possible, rather than ours or some arbitrary third party’s. We even invite site adminstrators to put their own domain on an online groups site for free.

So, MSN Group Managers, if it’s good old email and web discussion that you want, with some file, photo and video-sharing and a bit of live chat, an OnlineGroups.Net site could be well worth considering. If you also want to have multiple related groups located on a single site, and you’d rather have no ads, I’d like to know what other option beats ours.

Unfortunately, we can’t offer the same migration process that Multiply can. I can’t find an API at MSN Groups or any way to export messages or user profiles. If you can get a list of group members’ email addresses, it’s pretty easy to invite users to join an OnlineGroups.Net group, in batches of up to 100.

What we can do is to reply to email. If you have any questions about migrating from MSN Groups to OnlineGroups.Net, we’d love to hear from you in the OnlineGroups.Net Admins group. [Update: Here are some details about the benefits of OnlineGroups.Net for MSN Group Managers and a demo group that you can join to try out OnlineGroups.Net.]

Here at OnlineGroups.Net, we don’t just provide sites where people can collaborate in online groups. We also build and release GroupServer, the software that underpins OnlineGroups.Net, and we help organisations to implement GroupServer to create successful online groups and communities. Sometimes, that involves technical work such as hosting, configuring, customising and maintaining software. At other times, it involves social and organisational consulting, to get people engaged and participating in online groups. I affectionately refer to the latter as “wrangling”.

One of the wrangling projects I’ve worked on recently is establishing the Canterbury Online Public Issues Forum. Now that the forum is up and running, and looks like it’s going to be a sustainable part of the local democratic landscape, I’ve written the Aotearoa Local Online Public Issues Forum Guide (PDF, 445kb), which aims to help others to get similar forums started. The guide is based on our experience with the Canterbury Forum, and includes the text of various documents that we used to get the forum started.

One of the main contributors to the Canterbury forum project was funding provided by the Community Partnership Fund. The 2008/2009 funding round of the Community Partnership Fund will open on 6 October 2008. If you are interested in starting an online public issues forum in Aotearoa New Zealand, you may be also able to get some support from the CPF. You can use the Canterbury forum as evidence of what can be achieved, and use the guide to increase your chances of creating another sucessful forum. I would also be happy to help you in any way that I can, so feel free to get in touch.

If you plan to start a local online public issues forum outside Aotearoa New Zealand, the guide will probably be of some use to you, too. Of course, I also recommend you get in touch with our friends, customer and colleagues at E-Democracy.Org, because they are the world experts in local online participative democracy. It was only with their help that I was able to achieve what I have in Canterbury. Thank you Steven Clift and Tim Erickson for your inspiration, assistance and leadership. My thanks also to Ron Kjestrup, Nicki Reece, Plains 96.9FM, Andrew Groom and the Canterbury forum steering team, and the participants and Guest Speakers in the forum, Environment Canterbury, and Christchurch City Council, who have all been instrumental in the success of this project.

Today’s Computerworld lists the finalists for the second NZ Open Source Awards, and I’m happy to say that we are there in the “Open Source Software Project” category with GroupServer.

Almost as cool is to see the health of open source software in Aotearoa New Zealand. This is the second year for the NZ Open Source Awards, and they received nearly 100 nominations. Among them are our good friends Dave Lane of Egressive, Hagley College of Computing (big ups, Josh Campbell) and Glynn Foster of Sun Microsystems. Finalists also include Wellington’s Silverstripe, whose CMS powers the US Democratic Party National Convention website.

The awards will be announced at a gala event on Wednesday 24 September in Wellington. That promises to be a fun night!

The other night, I was at dinner with some friends, and some friends of friends. The conversation turned to OnlineGroups.Net. One of the guests I didn’t know so well said “Oh yeah, I use that. I really like it. I just delete the emails.”

I was happy of course to hear that she liked our system, but I was happier to hear why. OnlineGroups.Net was making it easier for her to deal with email.

Why does it make me happy that people are deleting emails that are sent using our system, especially when there’s an implication that she is deleting them without even reading them? Because this is exactly what we hope people will do.

We don’t want people deleting all their email unread. Email works just fine for ad hoc conversations in small groups, especially groups of two. In this case, the subject line is more or less irrelevant (in fact, I often have trouble choosing a subject line for social emails and have even been known to commit “no subject” sin).

In groups, however, the task of a group member is often simply to keep track of conversations. Often, detail is irrelevant, and it is sufficient to know that A and B are discussing X.

Email without OnlineGroups.Net defeats the task of keeping track of conversations in the following ways.

• The recipient usually needs to open and read the emails to find out what is being discussed and who is participating in the discussion.
• The recipient usually has some obligation to keep the email, in case they need to refer to it later.
• If they do need to refer to the email conversation later, it is likely to be difficult to find, especially if the subject line has changed during the conversation.

Email with OnlineGroups.Net supports the task of keeping track of conversations in the following ways.

• The email subject always shows the group name which provides instant cues as to the participants in, and the purpose of the conversation.
• There is no need to keep or file the email, as it is kept on the server.
• If there is a need to refer back to the conversation, it is easy to find the email, and the other emails in the same conversation.

Actually, these benefits don’t just apply to OnlineGroups.Net users. Yahoo! Groups, Google Groups and all list servers with a web interface provide the same benefits. If you’re using one of these systems, really, try this: just delete the emails.