I recently had the chance to compare an organization to an email.

The organization has had a number of meetings and made some useful decisions. They’ve put up a small site, but want to reorganize it and update the copy (it’s currently a shell with no visitors). This has been going on over approximately two months.

The email was from an email list about a startup competition:

On Friday night individuals pitch ideas for new ventures

Teams form around the best ideas and then work over the weekend to develop and launch a prototype on Sunday

——

Useful observations:

• In a startup, your limiting reagent is how fast you can build. If you have a fast engineering team, you can iterate quickly.
• Just because a product is minimal doesn’t mean it’s viable. The key criteria: Does the user have something to do?

1. Creating proposals
2. Proposing amendments
3. Up or down votes

I know some people who are working on a constitution. If you let everyone go all over phase 1, the process will never end. But if you let the minority control the whole process, well, then, you have an oligarchy. And we’ve learned that lesson already.

However, what if you compromise? If you let everyone in on phase 3, but not the others, then you get at least some approval, but you moderate the populism and the paralysis.

Parliamentary procedure is underrated. When we hear about direct democracy, the pundits don’t usually separate out these parts. But there’s good reason to dissect the procedure when talking about democracy. It’s common sense not to be all or nothing.

Summary as the standard view (sentence-long synopsis); points can be added, admins can refactor, users can merge/vote on best version/edit points.

How do we decide which points are central theses? Merging/separations

[Originally recorded a long long time ago]

Americans are increasingly choosing to live among like-minded neighbours. This makes the culture war more bitter and politics harder

The

most interesting thing I discovered about it though, was not the article’s basic conceit

- that Americans are being subdivided into different cultures, but how it was discussed. Naturally on Slashdot, Reddit, MetaFilter, and others, you have certain standards of discussion. I generally find Reddit to be the most politically confrontational.

You could

argue

that it’s the community–

the people in it

that decide whether a website will be a meeting of parliament or a Hello Kitty fan club. But I think there are other things to look at.

Interestingly:

I was also recently looking at a Yahoo! blog on patterns for designing a reputation system. Basically, a pattern is a recognizable formula that a lot of sites use. For example, both Digg and Reddit use a “points” system. Users can award each other points when they like each other’s posts.

The most interesting thing,

however,

was taking Yahoo!’s reputation systems and using them to

reverse engineer sites like Reddit,

Digg, Slashdot, etc. and see the results.

From http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/pattern.php?pattern=points:

(Emphasis Theirs.)

Problem Summary

In some communities, participants want a tangible measurement of their accomplishments for personal satisfaction and to make comparisons with other competitors.

EXAMPLE:

Use When

Use this pattern when the community is highly competitive, and the activities that users engage in are competitive in nature (e.g., player-vs-player contests, or coaching a fantasy football team).

Points are generally discouraged, except in cases where the fundamental, primary purpose of the community is competition, such as fantasy sports or games.

The competition isn’t just because the people on Site X

are jerks

• political extremists
• or sexually frustrated

The design of the site is built to promote competition.

[more (full article)]

I was just as much shocked as dismayed. Mulberry was hawked by so many colleges that I assumed its destiny was all but sealed. College students, as early adopters, would all be exposed to Mulberry and see how wonderful it was, and they’d take it to their jobs, promoting an almost viral spread.

I guess the Thunderbird/Outlook duopoly was just too strong for Cyrusoft to handle. However, all is not lost, as Mulberry is available for free now.

Let’s take a look at all the wonderful features of this program! (full article)

[originally started a long time ago]

Security is not just about locking down a system from a list of attacks. The way you design a UI dictates how people behave, and people’s behavior is responsible for 90% of attacks. [citation needed] Defaults matter. No one forgets to lock an automatically locking door.

The fact is, while a security system must be set up to prevent hacking attacks, guesswork, and theft, it must also be designed in such a way that leads people to behave more securely. When you have a system where keys are hard to create but easy to copy, naturally, people will end up using the same keys at eBay that they do at Flickr.

The need to “educate users” is an indication of design failure.

You probably have friends who use the internet. How much would you guess most of them use the buttons on the IE (or Firefox) toolbar?

Observation suggests a rule like this: For 80% of the users, only 20% of the buttons gets used (I, for one, never click anything under “Page”). There’s a great book that points this out quite nicely, but it doesn’t draw the thought to its conclusion. Perhaps there’s a place for ugly design that stitches together a haphazard mess of seemingly unrelated functions, knowing that most long term users will use their tunnel vision to filter out all but the most important functions to them.

TimGas: saying myspace and “design” within one sentance of each other
TimGas: is just asking for me to block you
Me: but it’s so true
Me: i don’t look at all the stuff on a mys**** page
TimGas: i’m feeling sick now
TimGas: brb, puking