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.

That’s what Jacob Nordfalk did. He was the first speaker at today’s session of Talk IT at Copenhagen Business School.

Apertium

Jacob talked about working with Apertium, a free and open-source machine-translation platform. Don’t worry, translator friends, this was not a push to replace the human element! The value here is a machine translation tool that is open source and free. Participation in Apertium does require XML knowledge as well as knowledge of the languages used in the corpus, the body of electronic texts that provides the translation foundation. Jacob has even received stipends from Google Summer of Code for projects to build the corpus for Nordic languages.

Apertium does a rule-based type of translation, making it more reliable, but more boring. Jacob calls it “shallow translation”. If you enter “see the dog run”, then Apertium translates those four individual words, whereas Google Translate looks at the entire phrase as a unit. (The amount of calculation that Google Translate uses is quite mind-boggling and impressive.)

Jacob walked us through Apertium’s approach to translation, showing us how rules are applied for a simple translation from English to Esperanto. (Most languages in Apertium are Indo-European – and now Nepali – but that can change as more people contribute to this tool.)

A Pen is a Pen is a Pen

A lot of discussion came out of his simple phrase “He saw a pen”. The first step was determining what pen was – a noun or a verb. Because of its position in the phrase, it was considered a noun. Esperanto had only “plumo” as the word for pen – a writing instrument. It did not have the word for a place to hold animals and it did not have the slang word that was an abbreviation for penitentiary. Realizing how much effort had to go into calculations for such a simple phrase highlighted the overall intricacies of translation.

One person in the audience asked whether Apertium could handle irony. My personal opinion was – that’s where the human enters the equation! Jacob’s response was somewhat the same. It all depends on the context, and the human brain is needed for that.

Mozilla with a Mobile Twist

The second speaker of the day was Mike Kristoffersen fra Mozilla. Unfortunately, our many discussions during Jacob’s presentation ate into Mike’s time, so the talk was short and sweet. Mike came to tell us about Firefox for Mobile. I saw a presentation on Fennec (the code name for the project) at Reboot 11 in June 2009, so it was interesting to see how the project had developed since then.

Mike also told us about other Mozilla activities to emphasize that Mozilla was not just Firefox! He opened with Mozilla’s declaration that

We believe in the power and potential of the Internet and want to see it thrive for everyone, everywhere.

He then walked us through several of the projects Mozilla runs to promote an open internet, such as Drumbeat.

Mozilla’s Drumbeat

My favorite Drumbeat project is the Universal Subtitles project. This can help build text needed for the deaf (captioning) and translations for those who do not speak the language of the orginal recording. In light of this project, it was appropriate that an entire slide was dedicated to mentioning Mozilla’s support of accessibility in a statement that echoed Tim Berners-Lee. You know. This quote:

The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.

P2PU – Peer to Peer University – is about teaching the latest open web technologies to young people and helping them to develop an attitude to succeed in open collaborative projects. P2PU made me think about the overlap with both Scrunch Up magazine for young designers and developers and WaSP InterACT. They’re not quite the same, but I think they should know about each other. Web standards and open source should be kissing cousins.

When Mike mentioned Mozilla grants, I was happy to see their support of the Ushahidi project in Chile. Ushahidi cannot get enough recognition, in my opinion. I think it is just the beginning of the great potential we will see coming from Africa in the coming decade.

I was surprised to hear that Denmark ranked lowest in the Nordic region for adopting Firefox. It goes to show how wrapped up you can become in your community. I know nerds and creative types who use Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari – and all love to hate Internet Explorer. However, Internet Explorer has saturated the Danish workplace. Outside the world of geeks, people probably don’t care about browsers and are probably not even conscious of what a browser is! They just want to book a ticket, pay a bill, read the news, and so on, and they are not thinking “I am doing this thanks to my browser”. I took this bit of information as yet another reminder to never ever ever make any assumptions about how other people use computers and software! We had a nice little discussion on this point.

A mention of Mozilla Labs, where they experiment with crazy and not-so-crazy ideas, wrapped up Mike’s talk and this season of Talk IT. I look forward to the new season next Fall.

Kudos to Jesper, Rikke, and David for a second successful year of Talk IT at Copenhagen Business School.

Today’s webcast was valuable to me for my life outside work. When I am not at the day job that puts bread on the table and provides fun challenges for a technical communicator, I am the “SIG Advocate” for the leaders of all the special interest groups (SIG) in STC. We are spread across 9 time zones and have different areas of focus. All our activities are volunteer – no one gets paid. So how do we manage ourselves and each other and get the job done?

When I saw that today’s topic was “Leading Virtual Teams: Managing When People are at a Distance”, I had to sign up to pick up some tips. We are all intelligent and independent adults, and we all lead busy lives and have diverse interests. How can we best share our knowledge and experiences as SIG managers to benefit the members of our SIGs and encourage more technical communicators to join STC (and our SIGs) to discover the benefits that we can offer? That does take coordination. It also takes time and care.

The topic was presented by Jessica Lipnack of NetAge, Inc. If you are interested in virtual teams, networks, and collaboration, I encourage you to hop over to that site and start poking around. The site contains material that was in today’s presentation. Go look at the methods, or learn the four common network principles (the Why, When, How, and Who).

Best of all, the second edition of Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps’ book, Virtual Teams, is available for download for those eager to dive into this topic. This is complements my other book on the same topic: Managing Virtual Teams: Getting the Most from Wikis, Blogs, and Other Collaborative Tools by by M. Katherine Brown, Brenda Huettner, and Char James-Tanny.

There is a lot of input from the webcast that needs to settle in my brain. I picked up lots of ideas that I can apply to our monthly conference calls, use of email, and the use of our wiki. I can’t say what those ideas are exactly right now. Lipnack presented ideas, which I sense are worth investigating and discussing with the SIG leaders. The title of this blog entry comes partly from the title of the topic, partly from something mentioned in the webcast. We are moving into, or are already immersed in, an age of complexity. To cope with whatever challenges this new age brings us, we need new behaviors for the groups that we formed and reformed for various purposes during the last 10,000 years or so. Antiquated structures and behaviors for our teams or networks won’t cut it anymore.

I encourage you to visit the AMA site and find out whether there are upcoming webcasts that cover your interests and needs. I learned about them in early September in time to catch tips about distraction and how to find focus in a hyperkinetic world. I’ve been hooked ever since! Today’s webcast will be available in about 3 days in an audio file on the AMA site.

And now for some dinner…