In late March, I presented to about 150 attendees of the HighEdWeb New England conference at Mt. Holyoke College. My topic: how to plan and run an effective livestream fundraising event. This is something we’ve had a chance to do at Bates for the last two years, and it’s been very successful for us. It […]
Reply All is my favorite podcast. It bills itself as “a show about the internet.” The latest episode is about diversity in Silicon Valley, approached through the lens of a black engineer who recently quit his job at Twitter. It is fascinating and absolutely worth a listen. One of my favorite parts is an example […]
I have been thinking about this phrase today. It comes to me from a lesson imparted to campers at the summer camp I attended as a boy and worked at into my twenties. Here’s how it is presented there: Be kind. Do at least one act of unbargaining service each day. I have always really […]
Wired profiles former U.S. CTO Todd Park in an excellent piece that absolutely nails the issues with stagnation in federal tech: procurement and inertia. Park knows the problem is systemic—a mindset that locks federal IT into obsolete practices—“a lot of people in government are, like, suspended in amber,” he said to the crowd at Mozilla. […]
Maine was recently ranked 49th among US states for “quality and availability of broadband internet access.” At least we’re ahead of Montana. I thought this 20-page overview of the problem and 10 recommendations for addressing it (PDF) did a good job of cutting to the quick. It’s penned by the CEO of Biddeford-based GWI. Take […]
At LaGuardia about to fly home from a day-long session on university websites from the Neilsen Norman Group in NYC. I have to say, there is no happier line in any airport anywhere than the one of folks getting ready to head to Portland, Maine. The conference was excellent. There is just no substitute for […]
The movement to assess and improve the usability of federal government websites is small, vocal, and growing. GSA’s First Fridays program makes free usability testing available to federal agencies, and a wide range of agencies have undertaken their own regular assessments of their sites and applications. Slowly but surely, the archaic mindset that a .gov […]
Fascinating interview with telecommunications expert Susan Crawford on Bill Moyers’s show. The gist: public access to ubiquitous high-speed internet is being strangled by a lack of competition and oversight. A petition to support the appointment by the president of Susan Crawford as chair of the FCC is circulating now. After watching this video, you better […]
What makes a particular design successful can be hard to define. Elegance and intuition can take a variety of forms, and all kinds of different interfaces can get the job done well. Plus, what works for one person may be totally inaccessible to another, which is why the process of iterative design and testing is […]
Our last crowdsourced endeavor was a real success — with dozens of people contributing over 80 examples of points of interaction between citizens and government — so why not push our luck and try another? With the election behind us, it’s time to focus on how government functions, and how that functioning can be improved […]