Pride of Szeged

It's been weeks since I've been able to get any sort of post up here, but it hasn't been for lack of things to write about. In that time we've been to the ICKM Conference in Charlotte, NC, and UNC CAUSE in Wilmington. The time in between these events has been busy as well, with us catching up on editing concerns and trainings.

The ICKM was truly international – we met people from all over the world, and most of them were academics. We met people working on ways to share agricultural knowledge among farmers in India, and others trying to find ways to use KM to develop collaborative online communities. The approach at this conference was often less than practical ("is it 'Strategic Knowledge Management', or 'Knowledge Strategic Management'? Hmm…"), yet I heard many good ideas over that week.

While ICKM was international, CAUSE was completely local- many of the folks there were from our own school, and all of them were from the UNC system. Our interactions with them felt familiar; these were our counterparts from all over the state, dealing with the same needs and barriers that we do, and eager to share solutions. Our presentation on our 'Information Commons' project and the 'Knowledge Base Suite' was very well received, and I think we have a lot of interest in our plans to develop a collaborative KM solution.

Although it's too much effort to try to report on everything we heard and did during those conferences, I've tried to list some of the highlights below. Ultimately, I think the most substantial benefit from going to them is that we've learned that we're far from the only people working on these sorts of problems (managing institutional knowledge), and in many cases, we're ahead of the game. It's good to see the many ways in which these ideas and technologies are being put to use, and that our ideas of the best way to do KM (open-source technologies, standards compliance, structured information, collaboration) are turning out to be considered 'best practices' from professionals from all over the field.
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A large part of today's seminar was given over to a presentation on "Information Visualization" by Xia Lin on Information Visualization. There was also some initial feedback on the KMT, which I'll summarize again later when more comments come back.

An important point occurred to me during this class, as we discussed relevance feedback, and why users generally don't use it. It's not because it's not effective, but more because they can't be bothered.

I pointed out that it's important for designers to avoid the trap of thinking that this is because users are lazy or stupid. Instead, users are (for the most part) busy and distracted by a dozen different systems with which they have to interact (email, word processing, browsing, etc.). They are actually fairly smart about how to prioritize their time and attention on each system, and they tend to avoid spending more time on one (such as to learn easier/better methods) than absolutely necessary.

The critical bit here is that users don't have time to invest in a given system, so the interface had better draw on their previous experiences to cut the handling time and make more efficient use of the time they do spend learning to use it.
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During the seventh HCI class, I presented the Helpsite and KMT to the group in brief, giving an overview of the goals of Knowledge Management team and the structure of the tools. I asked the group to participate over the following weeks by using the KMT to contribute documents and provide feedback on their experience with the UI.

One of the points I tried to make followed up on our discussions of the essential problem of wikipedia- how to allow for community-based contribution without sacrificing the quality of the content? In the case of the KMT, I argued that overly-strict quality controls in our original design created a bottleneck that was reducing the freshness of the knowledgebase and the usefulness of the tools.
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Week Six of HCI saw a presentation by Cathy Marshall on digital interfaces and archiving, and some general discussion about relational browsing and how to best give users access to enormous numbers of documents (such as on the BLS website, with 17k documents). One attempted solution that we looked at is the RAVE "relational browser" developed at SILS, which uses rollover behavior and scripting to do on-the-spot queries behind the scenes to modify the presentation of the content.
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Week five of HCI class. I left a bit early today to attend an ITRC meeting, so I missed the latter half of the class. Nonetheless, I talked to Marchionini about presenting the KMT and Helpsite to the class, and potentially setting them up as a test documentation group so that they might offer their feedback on the interface. In addition, if I treat this as a user study, I might be able to get Marchionini's feedback on that process, for future testing with students, faculty, etc.
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On this fourth day of HCI, we spent a good deal of time talking about how to organize a great deal of data on a website, and the best methods for allowing users to retrieve that data.

While Marchionini's research suggests heavy linking at the top level to avoid "unnecessary clicks", this strikes me as the web equivalent of horror vacui and a little maddening to the average user.
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The third Day of HCI class focused on how user interfaces are essentially collections of "views" of the content, and that the perspective, detail, and control of those views determines whether it is effective or not.

Included at the bottom of my notes are a number of somewhat-random thoughts I had during the discussions that pertain to our KM development.
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Despite the title, this is the first post about the HCI class. I missed the first day due to a scheduling problem. The following is a rough list of notes from the class, highlighted with areas of possible interest in our development of KMT2.
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