Sketch-notes - Sarah Drummond

Sarah Drummond's keynote
ALIA Online 2013

Sarah Drummond provided a great deal of inspiration at ALIA Online, particularly for younger librarians who could identify with her in so many ways. She really engaged by participating in the New Librarians Seminar the weekend before the conference itself and then by running a one day workshop on design, that emphasised the importance of understanding and mapping your customers' journeys, after the conference. She was one of several keynoters who urged us to start with people and not technology and she was brave enough to tell us that we hold too much fear and that results in our attachment to too much command and control. We need to let go more.

Sketch-notes - Designing Better Library Experiences

Zaana Howard's session at ALIA Online 2013

Zaana gave a very short session on designing better user experiences in libraries. Her key messages (above) were few and short, but memorable and wise. I think they were timely reminders and her research is evidence based. She had a verysignificant influence on the under current of service design in this conference and I thank her for her input on that.

Design & our future library: more than spaces & technology

UTS future library: more than spaces & technology from Mal Booth

Presentation from December 2012 for a UTS CMOS seminar on organisational spaces http://www.cmos.uts.edu.au/about/index.html 

On becoming extraordinary

Becoming extraordinary from Mal Booth

I found this recently, so thought I'd share the slides from this online talk that I did for QUT's Information Studies Group (@qutisg) in mid-2012. There are no speaker's notes, but most of the ideas presented are pretty self-explanatory.

Thanks to Chris Gaul for his design work on these slides.

Creating a future library

A short interview ... with me:

Unlikely Avian Taxonomies

For those of you who are obsessed with taxonomic strictures and ontological classification:

This image will take you to a set on Flickr that showcases the recent research interests of Zoë Sadokierski and Kate Sweetapple in DAB LAB. See also cargocollective.com/

Design as Catalyst presentation

Design Catalyst CI Lab Notes from Mal Booth
This presentation includes speaker's notes against quite a few of the slides.
It was given during the UTS:CI Labs Series 1 in July 2012.

Shapeshifters: the new creatives

Last night I went to the UTSpeaks event called Shapeshifters. I've been engaging with all of the speakers for some time now, but I still heard some useful and stimulating advice from them at this talk. So here are the thoughts that I noted during the event:

First up was Professor Kees Dorst. He said that after years of research into the processes used by the world's great designers that he has found that expert design behaviour centres around frame creation. Apparently good designers focus on the problem through frame creation. He says the process moves through these stages or phases: Archaeology (gaining a deep understanding of the problem); Paradox; Stakeholders; Problem arena; Themes; Frames; Futures; Transformations; and Connections.

His research led to UTS establishing a Designing Out Crime (DOC) research centre.  Frame creation is at basis of all DOC projects. For example to tackle traffic congestion problems during the Marathon in Eindhoven, DOC started with analysis of the environment and the participants. They widened problem and enriched it to solve it. They mapped all participants, gathered data and mapped the city. This resulted in spreading people all over city according to their interests to solve traffic problem but also much more.

Second to speak was Dr Jochen Schweitzer. He first stressed the need for UTS to graduate more entrepreneurs. To do that we need to provide students with opportunities to test ideas. He also said we should be in the business of surprising customers (I like this idea A LOT).  He went on to point out that innovation is held back by homogenous or non-diverse groups of people (ring any bells?) and said that a common language is needed for design (from designers) and that we need to use it more.

Dr Joanne Jakovich was the last speaker. She also gave some background on her work as a designer and researcher and then talked about her recent experience with u.lab.  She said that u.lab provided a playful creative space for an open design process, allowing for deep understanding from observation. U.lab practices iteration, failing, sharing, prototyping and doing (not just talking). She stressed the importance of initiatives like BikeTank that make connections to rediscover the innate creativity in all of us as a function of our capacity for shared humanity. BikeTank was aimed at making cities more human and she said that cities desperately needed innovation via collective creativity.

Joanne then gave us her 10 point manifesto:

1. Encourage creative collectivism 
2. Love the city 
3. Action first then stewardship 
4. Use creative altruism 
5. Reverse engineer the emotional experience of innovation (what makes people really join in and contribute?) 
6. Raise the bar of creative expression however you can (e.g. bribes and creating the best environment for it) 
7. Orchestrate extraordinary experiences (I love this!) 
8. Good ideas scale when dead 
9. Foster everyday entrepreneurship 
10. We must tap into diversity in our urban being 

In response to a question after the talks Kees said that after tapping into the top level layer of design knowledge he found that the things creative leaders do best is to create an environment in which creativity is encouraged, allowed and recognized. Leaders also need to market and communicate about that, at least in part for their internal audience.

Dangerous ideas for libraries

Dangerous ideas for libraries: ASLA 2011

View more documents from Mal Booth

This is the keynote presentation I gave to the ASLA 2011 Conference: http://www.asla.org.au/pd/conference/ 

I had a couple of good questions that went much further than the content of this presentation, perhaps into areas that I've covered in other recent presentations (also on SlideShare). One question, however, was on how we are going to manage all of the changes indicated in this presentation. I don't think I answered that one comprehensively.  I said that for some of the new initiatives such as developing a new range of services that will be more appropriate to the role of a new Library within a world-leading university of technology (UTS's aspiration), we are already engaged in active learning programs to improve our understanding of Design Thinking processes as they apply to service design.

What I should have added, however, is that I don't think there is anything in this presentation that presents a major change for us beyond the development of a new range of services. At UTS Library we are already actively exploring or already doing most of the "dangerous ideas" covered here. So none of this really presents a major change in direction for us.

Change & our future: it's not just about technology

Presentation to ALIA NLS5 2011

View more documents from Mal Booth

Design Thinking

I took some photos at a recent (Sydney) Design Thinking Drinks event at Digital Eskimo. This Flickr set brings together a few thoughts of mine with deeper content created by many others and linked throughout the set in the text beneath the images. Take a look (on Flickr, so you can see the links and read all the text).

Even more from PDC 2010: Release early: Release often strategy

Diana Mounter & Dave Gravina, Digital Eskimo (DE)

DE's Tools: human-centred design, PD, agile & ethnographic research.

Amongst other tactics they:

• ask questions & challenge assumptions!
• Break-up problems into small chunks
• encourage risk taking & celebrate mistakes

Immersion Phase

• workshops include co-design for shared understanding, helps bring all perspectives together
• synthesize outcomes to define scope
• desk research (some is usually already done)
• observe research & interviews
• workshop ideas with communications teams
• they gave out packs for people to record diaries in their homes (incl cameras, diaries)
• co-design activities brought people together, so insights were gained & shared (I think this is extremely beneficial and therefore very important for libraries in educational institutions to recognise)

User Experience Strategy

• working with community (not just a Council)
• synthesising findings & keeping users at centre of process
• develop personas (to represent different user perspectives)
• iterative approach to features (tested & feedback built in)
• branding was a challenge - simple terms are important (not jargon) – and this changed brand “personality”
• testing the first release with small group of users also “seeds” the product & they were surveyed
• ambassadors become champions (checking posts, etc.)
• statistics were given about the difference a small change can make
• iterated on design & site architecture also (addition of events & tags stretched design in a final stage)
• agile & participatory approach worked very well with this process delivering transparency
• they released often got feedback & improved services
• the client was happy, good results came, and a new platform was born

Some debate followed about whether “agile” design is good method to use for conservative/cautious clients.

People like to trial and see how things go.

How to engage skeptics or the uninterested? People segment on values, so there is a range and some people are going to be desensitised to the green message. Feeling of being part of a social norm really helps - being part of something, a growing movement. Not just preaching to converted, but giving voice to those who want to get involved. In this project it was not about (do this ) “because” but about “how to” (do something), so when ready, people could consult.

DE are doing some great work around town and in the social innovation and web-design spaces. They were one of the sponsors for Industry Day and are a company to watch in Sydney for sure.

Lied Library, UNLV

This slide show is from the Lied Library, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The post comes to you from the One World Lounge at LAX, so it may need some further adjustments after a couple of glasses of champagne. Really I should have put up the slide show of the U of Utah at Salt Lake City first, but I just got all confused in Flickr, so here it is, out of order.



http://www.library.unlv.edu/

MCA Denver slideshow from Flickr

Socialising browsers & Chrome

Firefox is currently my browser of choice. I use it at home on my Macs and at work (as I managed to get in before the IT crowd started regulating use of it because like many social networks, Firefox might cause chaos, anarchy and the collapse of civilisation as we know it).
Anyway, I have started using the Yoono add-on to see whether it has any benefit in "socialising" my browser to manage feeds to my networks and perhaps to other stuff like news feeds. You too can try it here.
I'll let you know how it goes for me as I'm a really new user and still haven't explored it much. It sounds appealing and I agree with this post from ReadWriteWeb that it might enable me to keep track of a few things that have started to clutter up my Google Reader.

There have been a lot of posts about Google's Chrome browser, but I liked these early reflections best, from the wonderful JOHN TANgerine.

Libraries and building communities

These notes come from a talk I attended earlier today at the National Library of Australia on building online communities. The speaker was Chrystie Hill, Director of Community Services at WebJunction.org, from Seattle, WA.

It was interesting to hear about her journey as she spoke using stories, and didn’t just regurgitate facts.

She spoke of the shift in services for things like reference – both physical and in the virtual world. She experienced this when being educated. She has worked in the Seattle Central Library and says that the space is now much better to work in. Then she introduced her four seminal realisations (my term, not hers):

See The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg is about connections between people: pubs build communities.

She also spoke of John Seely Brown and The Social Life of Documents (on FirstMonday): documents build communities.

And Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam and the decline of civic engagement & social capital in US: capital and networks build communities.

Is your library relevant to you (& your needs)? She said hers wasn’t (at the time) and her most important need was to know what her friends were doing: individuals build communities.

Libraries were not accepting their role as community builders (maybe they still don't understand that role at all?). But US public libraries became carriers for public Internet access in the 1990s. Eventually home and work use of the Internet also grew. People soon began to find themselves on the web – publishing, subscribing & sharing. It became a story of communities and collaboration on a scale never seen before. Now libraries (& librarians) have to be involved to stay relevant. It is about conversations. It is about people who are saying “here is what I am doing”. People sit behind all the tools and experience. It is also about what your friends are doing. So many tools are now available that it can seem overwhelming, so step back and look at what is behind it all.

So, where is the library?

People are finding their own answers easily on the web themselves. Library use is going down while use of email, online bookstores and search engines is going up!

Can libraries cope where the stuff isn’t completely organised or controlled? Probably not. Many public libraries are closing in the US because they lost their relevance and then they lost their funding. See Content, not Containers (an Information Format Trends report from OCLC, 2003).

Do libraries just = books? Do our users think of us for other information needs? Do we just stop making it feel like church?

She then went back to the new Seattle City Library (image appears above in this post) and said it is what a library should look like (if only!). Real visitation went up 300% in its first year. Public access computer use quadrupled. Its spaces are very inviting and its services are very innovative: multi-lingual programs; online assistance; teen services (via MySpace) – with 50% boys participating!. They are building communities daily and get 1,000s of teens involved.

She said we must do better jobs in all libraries. Online tools help us to see our roles as connectors, facilitators, and community builders.

Currently, Chrystie is writing a book and blogging (one of several). She spoke for a while about the work of Webjunction.org – helping to build relevant vibrant, sustainable libraries in every community. Most content comes from members and partners. All of it is wrapped around social engagement. Public access computing and personalisation services were key to this and to building real communities.

What do they do?

They connect, create and learn:

Connect: using wikis, del.icio.us (others follow this without it being promoted, they just find it – they just use one tag to share stuff for all, eg. we could use AWMWSG or AWMRC), micro-blogging (they use Twitter), phone, Flickr groups, Facebook groups and events, and alternate spaces (eg. LinkedIN, engaging widely!)

Create: blogs and wikis, blip.tv (I suspect schools might find this easier to find than our content on www.awm.gov.au or our blocked content on YouTube), and staff are encouraged to contribute elsewhere (blogs, publications, etc.)

Learn: active learning is encouraged, staff/members are surveyed - What was your greatest achievement last year? (part of bi-annual member survey on webjunction.org – results were visually presented in a tag-cloud), speaking engagements, blogging internally and externally encouraged for all staff.

So what does this mean for us at the Memorial? I think we are heading in the right direction. We are not there yet, but we've made a good start and even though we might complain about some restrictions placed on us by out IT staff, they have already facilitated much more freedom and innovation in our organisation than many, may others (judging by the tone of questions asked of Chrystie). Our management too have been both supportive and visionary. How many national cultural institutions can boast that they now have these words as their first listed corporate priority for the 2008-2011 period: "Enhance online access through use of emerging web technologies and improved web content"?

Low-Cost Multi-point Interactive Whiteboards Using the Wiimote

Wow . . . just wow! Johnny Chung Lee is really clever. He has come up with a complete electronic whiteboard system that you can make yourself really cheaply. You can find the hardware and software instructions, including a very popular YouTube video and the software downloads on his Wii Project page here. You can also view a great demo of his new projects on TEDBlog here. (I tried embedding the video here using the code they give on TEDBlog, but for some reason Blogger didn't allow the video content to load.)

The only limits to what we might be able to use this for in museums are the bounds of our imagination.

Key messages from VALA 2008

Some people don't have the time to plough through all this text, so I've been asked to put together some of the main messages that I picked up at VALA. I reserve the right to adjust these as I complete posting all of my notes. So, to date, I think the key messages that come to mind are as follows:

• The importance of pro-active engagement and interaction with the relatively new social networks that have emerged on Web 2.0. That is where the future will evolve from (very rapidly) and we need to be aware and involved to stay up. It is relatively risk and cost free. We should start making more use of engagement/interactive tools like wikis to develop and grow our own community (utilising the wisdom of crowds).
• Systems (on the web) need to be engaging and intuitive (not "must do") or they'll be avoided by users.
• We need to look at the ways we catalogue and who we are cataloguing for (ourselves). If you think of the Collection-Cataloguing continua it is something like Acquisition>Arrangement>Store>Keep - we are good at all of that, but we are not so good when it comes to the "providing public access via the web" (assisting our users to find and get) part. Our catalogues need to be fully optimised for search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. If we are maintaining systems that do not get the data out to the web because of some facility or capability that only we need, we should consider using a mash-up to account for those needs and simpler more open web standards for the essential needs of the public users. The use of persistent identifiers (particularly "canonical" URLs that in many ways are brief catalogue entries themselves) was a plenary topic that attracted much interest.
• Web services are increasingly being used and can provide almost anything. Slideshare is a good online example of an online repository in the Web 2.0 world. Much of the useful cataloguing (or tagging) is done by the extended community or network. Library Thing for Libraries was also mentioned quite a bit as being used by many libraries around our size (mainly to augment their conventional cataloguing systems).
• We must stay in touch with developments in Copyright and we should consider making use of the Exceptions in the Act to ensure they stay with us (this will be relevant to the WW1 non-OR digitisation project that we are just beginning - many orphaned and unpublished works).
• Regarding digital repositories - much of the experience so far has been in the universities storing research material. From them we learn that a one-size-fits-all approach (from the outset) should not be applied too rigorously. Needs and different requirements will evolve as the repositories are used and certain assets may have vastly different needs to others (eg. storage, metadata, etc.) Otherwise, the ECM itself may become a victim of "Gorbachev Syndrome" - swept away by a tide of change that it started and could not keep up with through its own inflexibility and resistence to changing with the times and new technological trends.

Making identifiers concrete

Here is a link to LukeW's good summary of Stuart Weibel's plenary that closed VALA 2008. I liked what Stuart had to say and my notes probably differ a tad from Luke's notes, but maybe I just misunderstood what Stuart had to say?

Stuart comes from OCLC and presented really well, leaving most of us with a new perspective on what could have been a dull a dry topic. I found his message easy to follow and quite inspiring.

Branding & Web 2.0
OCLC have released a report on the perceptions of libraries and information resources.
Libraries and search engines are trusted about the same.
People care about the quantity and quality of information.
They do not view paid information or free information differently.
Branding can be achieved by building on trust by making things look free. Scale is represented by libraries and their presence everywhere. They have global scope and reach (via networks?). BUT people need more awareness. We must be part of the new online environments that dominate our lives.
Social networking software. Only technical manifestation is new (we've always networked). Motivate people to tag, participate. Wired said 40% of those they interviewed contributed in one way or another. (Higher than Yahoo's figures.)
Re social consumer environments. Facebook, etc. are not just for games. But they are probably not the right models. There are lessons to learn though (OCLC has just put an application into Facebook). They are flawed – closed gardens, rudimentary features, but offer an experience as well as a service.
Libraries must compete and compare favourably with popular models (in Seattle books with coffee is the law!). But can we compete and should we? What can we do to fit in and how to distinguish between the trends and the trendy?
Catalogues – how can they change morph/grow? Networking. Collections linked to people, organisations, concepts, context, metadata, etc. (So I've just started an account on Library Thing to learn how this works.)
Do we need a web or scaffolding – do we want more – coherence, durability, etc.
Mentioned FRBR – works, expression, manifestation and item. But with other dimensions.
He said that for discovery on the web, a book review is more useful than a MARC record (I agree - how many people truly understand MARC records?). They are a social bibliography. He also cited: lists, services, commentary, etc.

Infusing bibliographic ideas into the web & vice versa?
First class objects need: persistent identifiers; access to all; stand alone status (identification & clear IP); and they are curated (not left lying around unintended - bit-rot!). Allow users to enter and traverse the catalog from any point!
Establishing a canonical identity on the web is very important.
See WorldCat identities. This should have been done ages ago. Tag cloud into popular Ids. Has stuff by/on author, works, links, encourages serendipitous discovery, associated subjects. All from bibliographic data.

Identities on the web
What characteristics are best in identifiers? There are no hard/fast rules – just suggestions. He thinks URLs need to reflect something about what they are. Make them meaningful.

Design criteria for identifiers
Characteristics:

• persistence (function of organisational commitment);
  
• universal accessibility & global scoping (work everywhere, open to all, WorldCat provides architecture for library assets mapping global surrogate to the local);
  
• optimised for search engines and canonical (raises search engine ranking);
  
• branding via URIs (mini-billboards);
  
• usability by people and machines – speakable, short, predictable (hackable).

This amounts to gluing the pieces together with identifiers.

WorldCat identifiers – are they good enough?
Unique, free, citable, resolvable, linked, canonical (no, not really). Some functional duplicates (more records pointing to same thing).

A glimir of the future?
A global manifestation identifier. Global, business neutral, canonical, provides URL equity, fits with FRBR model.
There are other identifier schemes. So, OCLC is cautiously exploring this territory.

Summary:
IDs are the key; they are needed for mission, to compete, brand, to bring bibliographic values to web, to provide services and access to digital tribe. Books not done yet.

See particularly his blog posts on related subjects (persistent identifiers).

Andy Powell asked whether he was talking about the semantic web. Stu supports it, but is skeptical about the technologies involved. He spoke of middleware as the plywood of the internet. It needs to become the plywood of our arena. He said the abstract model has fundamental importance on the web.

Designing for today's Web

Luke Wroblewski, Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design, Yahoo! Inc. and Principal of LukeW Interface Designs, USA
I really enjoyed this plenary and got a lot out of it. He may have initially been a bit biased towards Yahoo and anti-Google, but eventually he got over that and had excellent points to make. Again these notes are pretty rough. It was a great start to the final day and really got us in the mood and opened our minds.

It isn't that people don't read – they'll read when they find something they want to read. So, there are three key considerations in designing websites: Presentation – voice, where interaction happens; Interaction - responding to users; & Organisation - structure.
Luke strives for usefulness, usability and desirability (why do I care, why should I use it?)
He referred to videoegg – as a good example.

What is different about today's web? What are the recent shifts?

A. From locomotion to services
We interact through locomotion, conversation and manipulation. It is all now much easier and more widely evident on the web. He showed us the huge use of yahoo answers (5 mins to an answer in US; 0 to 90 mill. users in 1.5 years); the spread and use of word processors online. It is all part of the web transition – the locomotion to digital representations of physical entities, then digital manipulation of physical good (e-commerce), and now purely digital services (no physical presence, just display services: aggregation, flickr, MySpace, blogging tools, video editing online, entertainment sites). Many of these services have popped up in last few years with hosting for around US$6 per month. Instantly you can reach a huge audience; there are few barriers to enter; and you can use free open source platforms. BUT, you have about 1.6 secs per month per person to convince them your site is interesting, unique, worthwhile. Therefore you need to know your core – define, focus & build outwards. Some examples of those who do:

• Eg. eBay – global economic democracy. 30th largest economy in world. US$1,800 sold per seconds. 520,000 stores hosted worldwide. (Sorry, no link to eBay, I was the one who shouted out "greed" when Luke asked what makes it work so well.) Luke said it was held together by democratic feedback. Any search or browse defined by democratic comments & feedback; they are not sorted. Interaction on a level playing field is core underpinning element that makes it tick.
  
• Also digg with 3 million people online filtering the news. Interaction on all news items. All can express opinions. One click interaction made the site go - the core element.
• flickr – builds outwards, can be shared, embedded, favourited, etc., but core is a picture of a subject.
  

In packaging design for the web, Luke saw three key tools:

1. "Meaningful shouting" through: differentiation (distinct and appropriate), attraction, and embodying the brand. He looked at three well known wiki tools – how are they distinguished meaningfully? Is it coherent story-wise?
2. “Back of pack” – supporting the story & outlining benefits/features. The new Yahoo home page calls up elements and gives you benefits in three bullets on a pop-up window. It helps people use the product. Yahoo also provided a 2 min video on how to use Yahoo Bookmarks.
3. The unpacking experience – eg. the Apple experience. Culminates with the personal photo taken from your new laptop. Google video just gives you a form. It is an interrogation room. That happens with 90% web services. Jumpcut first asks you to make a movie, so the first things seen is the movie and online editor. After that, you are asked for an email address. Also showed pbwiki – it does the email messaging thing and then three more steps, re passwords, access terms of service, more services, etc., and then you need to get through a barrage of marketing material, all before you can even start! But he compared that to geni (creates a family tree) – it starts with a name to make a tree. You jump straight in right out of the gate. It is what people want to do! They got 5 million profiles in 5 months.
   

B. From pages to rich interactions
It is all about design considerations. Ajax interface design. Pages become more dynamic, updated and rich (although these same pages become more difficult for those who are print handicapped). Examples of inline micro-actions (within previously flat web pages): ratings, online indication, fade, transition, status, transition, etc. You manage three spaces by design: the invitation (to vote/drag); transition (when voting/dragging); and feedback (when the vote/drag is done). All are then encapsulated in design patterns – repeatable design patterns (they catalogue different states and interfaces – eg. Yahoo's pattern library) – the use of search assistance layers after some user hesitation and these deliver more meaningful results, and more conversational information retrieval.

C. From sites to content experiences
Sites used to be structured in hierarchies – closed and rather negative. The emerging networks, like clouds, etc. are not as accurate, but maybe they are accurate enough? Content is not treated as part of a structure, it is treated as part of an experience. See his article on primary and secondary action in web form. The new experiences are delivered in the form of: content creation tools (eg. search, blogs, like ajaxian, wikis), aggregators (like digg, del.icio.us), display surfaces (eg. Facebook, MySpace), and entertainment services (eg. You Tube).
Design considerations again. When readers come to his page it delivers primary content, related content and a bit of context. How much of site dedicated to overhead? People really just want what they came to find and maybe a bit of related stuff and context. Why hamper the user experience with what they don't want. Do you need to get everything into the whole page? (The long tail phenomena again - for most web sites, only a few pages get most of the attention/use.)
Eg. personalised search like ROLLYO and a party planner/arranger like RENKOO
If expectations are met . . . people will look around and may take up relevant invitations.
Distributed or re-mixed content. These experiences are not just about distribution, but bringing content in context (and core design still matters!). Eg. blog posts with rich metadata in it, say from Yahoo Shortcuts (interestingly, I found it easier to find this page online via a Google search than a Yahoo search). Things can be added in with a single click on your blog. Context can be king.

D. From webmaster creation to everyone creates
Community on the web comes from features like tags, ratings reviews, trackbacks, blogs, wikis, subscribe RSS, etc. Unity through shared interests and goals. Something gets them all there around something. Social behaviours – reputation & identity; communications; sequences, etc. Implications: GOOD - Filter, content creation, increased engagement (Yahoo answers), invested consumers and collaborative innovation. BAD – blurred focus, spam and poor quality, power laws (abuse), factions and tribes, privacy and exposure issues.

• Enable identity for communities: welcome, anonymity can be a death sentence, profiles.
• Provide for creators synthesizers, comsumers, not just one or two. Who creates – only 1% create, 10% are synthesizers and 100% are consumers – they read, engage, benefit from content. Value from reaction of people with each other.
• It all depends on the tools. How to get people to contribute and how to encourage quality? MySpace kinda ugly? But is is possible to create good stuff. It is hard to create good profiles on MySpace and easy to create ugly stuff.
• Quality content is based off the level of effort needed to put something in. Burying the submit button encourages fewer but better posts! So some barriers to entry can help QA. The best check on bad behaviour is identity. Has implications for comments on our blogs (Facebook founder, Mark Z.)

See his blog – Functioning Form

Luke's responses to questions:
Re government websites – any trends? Enormous opportunity for us to build on these principles. Many different ways to engage. Eg. initial (adverse) reactions from digital media, film and music and their attitude now.
Getting around crappy content – don't just go for the quick fix, quick dollar, think about the long term (what Liz usually urges us to do!). There are ways to make it good.
Redeveloping sites from scratch – all about knowing your core. Start at that. Not with the amalgam that you have that hides the great original idea. What is really working and what is the core essence?