Since well before 9/11, GISMO, the NYC region’s oldest GIS interest group, has been working on advocacy initiatives to improve the way New York City collects, stores, shares and manages Geospatial Data and the processes and strategies around the City’s Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and related functions. Beginning in 1996, the City’s first GIS Director, GISMO member Alan Leidner, held this role until his retirement from civic service in 2004. During his tenure, Leidner oversaw NYC’s emergency mapping program in one of the country’s most complicated rescue and recovery operations, the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center.
Just two years prior to 9/11, the City had launched a common base map for all agencies to use in GIS applications. Prior to the 1999 base map, there was little coordination between agencies on the underlying coordinates of various features on maps. As a result, data such as street center lines (which were available from the US Census though not always accurate) and building footprints would not match up with the level of accuracy needed for an effective response in an emergency situation. As City agencies created their own maps and datasets, using proprietary systems and software whose license agreements precluded data sharing, it was becoming increasingly difficult to form a common operating picture. This created difficulties for routine maintenance projects like coordinating access, excavation and repair of street corners and threatened larger operations. After the World Trade Center attacks, when visible landmarks were no longer available, the new base map saved time, money and lives.
But things have changed since 2004. When Leidner retired, a new GIS Director was appointed, but he was not given the same level of responsibility and did not get the assistant commissioner title the post had carried previously. Laws providing the public open access to a multitude of agency datasets created a market for public information and tools created taking advantage of them. Mayor Bloomberg wrote an executive order that created the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics, but the mandate did not cover the kind of sensitive data that would be required to handle multi-department programs and, crucially, emergencies. As a result response to events like Hurricane Sandy was fractured, affecting the ability of emergency services, DEP, MTA, ConEd and other entities to coordinate their activities.
GISMO recently published Guiding Principles and Policies for New York City’s Geospatial Architecture outlining its position on the role of geospatial technology and governance in NYC government. It presented the Principals and Policies work at a public forum at Hunter College in April 2018. GISMO further pursued its position that NYC must have a GIS Director and coordinating committee made up of GIS leads at all city agencies and is recommending a Charter amendment or legislation to make this happen.
GISMO posted its introductory statement, video and written testimonies regarding the proposed amendments to the New York City Charter at http://www.gismonyc.org/events/amend_nyc_charter/. These testimonies were delivered to the New York City Council Charter Committee on April 30, May 2, May 7 and May 9, where several GISMO members, including myself, testified at the public hearings.
Through this Charter initiative we have advanced the cause of GIS in NYC by bringing our demands for better governance into the public forum. GIS saves lives, protects infrastructure, supports planning, improves City services, increases tax collections, and enhances economic development. We estimate that GIS at least doubles the analytic powers of traditional IT. We call on City government to recognize these facts and act accordingly.
If you are interested in learning more about GIS governance in New York City, contact GISMO at info@gismonyc.org or contact your New York City Council representative.
THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR: A monthly column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below are questions I answered in February.
Why are UX advocates very picky about the difference between UI and UX?
UI is the part of the experience the user can directly manipulate. UX is much more. Consider an elevator.
UI is the elevator panel: Floor buttons, open/close buttons, key override, emergency call button, stop mechanism, etc.
UX is where the elevator is in the building. How high does it go? Should there be a button for the 13th Floor? How many people does it fit? Should there be more than one? How close is it to the exit or the mail center? Should there be an express elevator to higher floors to help with traffic? Will the elevator have a digital display? Will there be a TV screen? A mirror? A camera? Who lives in the building? Do they have pets? Does the weather outside get messy? Will it need mats? Is the elevator going to be used for people or freight? Will it occasionally be fitted with wall protectors? What are the safety mechanisms? How will the elevator be equipped in an emergency? What is the safety code for elevators? How fast should it be? Does the building even need an elevator?
Should I go to college for UX design or be self taught?
The question of degree vs self teach is a common one. A degree is still a standard for employability, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it should be a UX labeled degree. There is an abundance of opportunities for self-learning including online courses, Meetups, Slack networks, boot camps and university club activities to help you learn UX on your own and/or in addition to a degree.
There is no set or accredited UX curriculum that I am aware at the undergraduate level, of so most “UX” degrees could begin to look dated after a few years if their focus is on current practices (like Sketch and similar tools). And because there is no real agreement of what a UX degree program should include, it would be difficult for recruiters to understand exactly what you know unless they are knowledgeable about the various programs.
You should go to college and study an area that interests you, making sure that you can also include design, psychology, anthropology and intro programming classes. Some UX designers will debate whether programming classes are necessary. My take on it is that the procedural logic and data structure foundations in computer science courses help a lot when mapping out a digital experience, particularly as more AI is integrated into digital spaces. Even library science courses, which are traditionally user focused are requiring some programming related subjects, if not outright coding.
It’s important to pursue an academic subject that you are passionate about or at least can really dig into. There are digital spaces in every field, even in the humanities, so there will always be a need for people who can design those spaces. You may as well enjoy the content of your experience by majoring in an area that appeals to you.
I hope this helps.
Where do I find and hire freelance UI/UX designers?
TL;DR: UX designers often pass on any job description that says “UI/UX”. Don’t use it. Instead use a title that describes what the person is actually going to do.
For hiring designers, I’ve had good luck with TopTal, but I prefer to go on Slack groups and get out to meetups to really get to know people I want to work with. I don’t like Dribble or Behance for UX people. It’s typically a lot of eye-candy that shows very little of the designer’s process. If there is a designer I like who has a portfolio there, I’ll look, but I wouldn’t start there from scratch.
A good UX designer will show their process: the methods they use, the choices they made, even the designs they discarded. A good portfolio give you a sense of the problem space and challenges and will have a clear description of the person’s role. You can’t tell any of this from a glossy, finished product photo.
I strongly suggest that you not use the term “UX/UI” in the job description. As others have stated (and noted in a the first question above), it is too broad to really be meaningful. Most User Experience people will see that and read “visual design” which may or may not include everything from graphic design, animation, typography and stylesheets. Some good candidates may assume you want a front-end developer, and give the role a pass, because developers typically don’t do UX.
It’s better to use a title that describes what the person is actually going to do.
UI people typically are front-end designers and often are expected to know how to code. While UI fits into the UX umbrella, most UX Designers will be focused on user journeys, personas, user advocacy and may or may not do research. UI people use research, but don’t necessarily produce it themselves and may be a step or two removed from the user research process.
There is a rather hot debate going on as to whether UX Designers should know how to code. Most designers and researchers that identify as “UX” people do not code. I’m from the camp that says it helps, but if they are mostly coding (unless it’s to put together prototypes for testing and they don’t have devs to do that for them), they’re probably not a UX “designer”.
Bottom line: You need users to do UX design. You could make a case for researching logs and customer support database, but since it’s after release, that’s really user acceptance testing, not UX Design. The user experience design process starts with user testing way before you release a product and occurs along with development, launch and beyond. And if you aren’t applying user research and integrating users into your design processes or at least talking to them, it’s just not UX.
What what projects did you create at a hackathon? How hard was it to create it in a limited time?
Working within constraints is an important skill of any good product designer. At a hackathon, your constraints include time, of course, as well as available data, resources and the knowledge and skill of your team members. I try to join diverse groups that include at least one person who understands the underlying subject matter and available data, one strong open source developer and one designer/researcher type (usually that’s me). If you use and understand open source data and tools you likely have access to more resources than other teams, so unless the hackathon is restricted to proprietary tools and data, it gives you an edge.
Hackathon projects I’ve done:
The Nature Conservancy Stormwater Challenge: I hosted a service design hackathon with the goal to encourage private property owners to implement Stormwater mitigation technology.
United Nations Hack For Humanity: I co-chaired a weekend hackathon with the goal to create anti terrorist projects. The winning project employed machine learning to disrupt terrorist networks. Other submitted projects included a stateless e911 network and a SMS based marketplace for emergency supplies.
NYPL Open Book Hack: I went twice. The first year, my team created a poetry recommendation tool. Based on poems and genres a user likes, it created a booklet with twenty poems. The next year, my team created a PDF to ePub converter for Supreme Court opinions.
NYPL Open Audio Hackathon: created a tool to add multimedia content to audio podcasts.
Empathy Jam: My team created a prototype job training platform.
It was an honor and a joy to serve as the Experience Director and impromptu panelist at The 20th Information Architecture Conference this past week in Orlando. Jorge Arango in a blog post described members of the panel on the history and future of information architecture as “luminaries” and while I appreciate the recognition, I am truly humbled to be named among Louis Rosenfeld, Stacy Surla, Jesse James Garrett and Jorge Arango. These are each incredible people who have lit the path for me in my own professional journey.
THE OCCASIONAL MENTOR: A monthly column based on questions I’ve answered on Quora, heard on Slack groups, and other career advice I’ve given over the prior month. Hope you like it, but feel free to challenge me in the comments, if you have a different experience. Below are questions I answered in September.
Can a professional with a background in journalism follow a career as a UX/UI designer? What steps should he take?
I wouldn’t let the previous answer about programming scare you. UX designers rarely need to program. It helps to have some understanding of programming capabilities to communicate with developers on your team, but UX designers are more focused on the user. As such they are focused on user stories and there is where a background in journalism (or fiction writing or film or philosophy) really pays off.
What is the user’s story? What is their motivation? What problems do they need to solve?
You can’t create an effective solution without understanding how the intended user expects a product to work. To do that, you have to observe, ask questions, get an understanding of their mental model, really put your ego as a designer aside and focus on what the user needs. Journalistic training is excellent for this process. Interviewing skills, truth-seeking impartiality, storytelling.
Too many people create a Dribbble portfolio with a lot of pretty pictures but don’t explain the rationale behind their decisions and why the pretty finished product was the right product.
It is also impossible to know from a finished app or website exactly what you did and what other people on the team did. Without that story it can seem like you are taking credit for all of the work your team did.
Don’t just show the end product. Explain who the users are.
What problem does your solution solve? What questions did you ask to discover that the solution you envisioned was the correct one?
Where were you wrong and where did you change direction?
Who else did you work with? Developers, stakeholders, visual and graphic designers, UX researchers? How were you able to negotiate your vision or incorporate theirs into the design?
Was the client satisfied? What do you see as the next step? Is there more work to come? Etc.
If I learn UI and UX online, will the skills I learn apply directly to websites?
Much of what you will learn in an online UX design course will apply to all types of products including physical and digital products such as websites, as well as services.
Understanding who the user is, what problems they need to solve and whether a digital product or some other solution will serve them is a big part of what you learn. How to plan and create a digital solution comes out of UX and UI design, UI being more about the actual product interface, ie the digital components that the user interacts with.
That said, for an online course, you aren’t going to find users to interview in the course materials. You’re going to have to find them out in the real world.
You also won’t learn a whole lot about what it is like to work on a team, especially if it isn’t group oriented such as a video course, or if group activities are asynchronous, such as a message forum. A good online course will have real-time, group activities and use virtual white-boarding/sticky notes. It will encourage discussion and positive design critique of other classmate’s work.
But still may not get the same kind of energy and feedback that you would in person. If you can do a class with a group of people or find people in the class who are in your area to do exercises with in person, it helps a lot.
And one more question for fun…
How do you make the crust of the pie when you don’t have enough butter?
Joy of Cooking has one of my all-time, favorite recipes. It’s a chard tart with an olive oil crust. The crust recipe is essentially two cups flour, half cup olive oil, half cup water and a dash of salt. It’s a very soft crust so you need to press it out directly in the pan with your fingers. No need to grease the pan. It’s super flaky and the taste is divine. Works well for savory or sweet dishes.
I answer questions about UX, Information Architecture and other topics on Quora. A selection of these answers will be reposted on Medium with occasional, minor editing for clarity. I took a break in from posting in January. Following are selected questions I answered in March.
Is it useful/worth getting an MFA in Communication Design to become a UX designer in the USA after years of internet industry experience in China?
In the USA, a MFA is often a minimum requirement for teaching the arts full time in higher education. Many programs require a PhD. There are many successful UX designers with master level degrees in film, psychology, media/communications, digital design, business, library science and other disciplines. Salary surveys do show greater earning power for those with masters level education. But I would agree with the other answers here that experience outweighs the degree, particularly for entering the field.
If you do choose to pursue masters level education, look for a program that provides hands on project work or practicum training. Many boot camp programs specialize in helping students develop a portfolio, but you should have a clear understanding of the reputation of the program in the city where you want to work as they vary greatly and can be expensive.
Update (05/27/2018): Another consideration to think about is that, as a foreign national, having a degree from a known US institution could be an advantage. But because it is such a large investment, it would make sense to do research to see if it makes a huge difference in salary and employability.
Is the BCS Foundation certificate in user experience recognized in the USA?
I had never heard of this certificate either, but it doesn’t mean that it has no value. There are numerous certification programs in the US and throughout the world. Some have more name recognition than others and depending on the reputation could be a plus. It could be of interest to a hiring manager if you are transitioning from another field, because it would demonstrate a commitment to learning the basics. It can also give you confidence in understanding the tools and practices of the field. If you are considering a certicate in lieu of a degree, that would be another story. Many if not most junior level UX positions require at least an undergraduate degree and some work experience.
Here’s where it gets kind of fun. Really, there is no UX certificate that is a definitive, required program in the US. While there are competing programs out there, many are expensive, meant for higher level employees or are competitive and have very limited seating and availability. There are tons of other programs at universities, boot camps, conferences, one day workshops and even books, online classes, videos and tutorials.
Pick what works best for you:
Do you like a classroom where you can meet with a real instructor and other students to work on group projects?
Would a virtual setting with a real instructor and real student partners be OK?
Or are you fine with picking up a book or watching video tutorials by yourself? If so, pick a tool that looks fun and do their tutorials.
Either way, read books and blogs to get familiar with UX concepts and strategies. Medium has a lot of good UX content. Also check out the content libraries at User Interface Engineering, Interaction Design Foundation or UXMatters.com. Rosenfeld Media is a good source of UX books. New Riders from Peachpit Press also has many good titles like Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think. Be sure to join a meetup or Slack group that discusses UX or the tools you like and see what people are doing with it. Look at people’s portfolios and read their stories.
Then write your story. A good UX Designer is a good story teller. Think about why you want to be in this field. What have you observed in your life that could be part of that story? What is your own user journey like? What have you noticed that could be designed better? What pain points do you wish you could fix? Show through these stories how you think through these problems from the user perspective.
It’s that time of year again: Open enrollment for marketplace health plans, and the choices are no less daunting this year. If you recall last year, Decision Fish published an article, Health Insurance Enrollment: A Superhuman Decision in which we noted that people tend to respond to the choice and information overload presented by this type of decision with (biased) short-cuts (heuristics), procrastination and a general feeling of unhappiness.
This year’s decision is exacerbated by a much shorter enrollment period and uncertainty regarding subsidies the government would make available to insurance companies, which in turn led companies to price their plans without a clear picture of the actual costs. Insurers are passing along that uncertainty to subscribers in the form of much higher premiums. In our case, our current plan has been eliminated and the closest plan for 2018 is going to be about $600 more per month in premiums, albeit with a slightly lower deductible.
If you are purchasing a health insurance plan for 2018 through a State or Federal marketplace, open enrollment is November 1 to December 31 in most areas. Where we live in New York, enrollment was extended with a start date of November 16.
The NY State of Health marketplace websites lists 23 companies and 48 pages of plans. At ten plans per page, that’s nearly 500 options. If you are purchasing a family plan with a subsidy, your choices narrow to seven pages, but that is still 70 plans to review.
For most people a much shortened period, compared with last year, as well as additional barriers such as mandatory maintenance of the Federal Healthcare.gov site on most Sundays during the enrollment period, means subscribers have less time to evaluate an increasingly complex set of services and much more chance of succumbing to cognitive biases that can impair an optimal choice.
So, how does one make an effective choice?
We recommend following a similar process outlined in last year’s article. We were somewhat gratified that our 2017 plan was discontinued as it likely mean we picked one that favored subscribers. But even if it hadn’t been eliminated it makes sense to re-evaluate our situation based on our expectation of upcoming expenses.
Consider changes in your personal and family makeup, such as a new job, new baby or a child entering college that can affect your coverage needs. As can reaching the age 50 bump which means fun new tests or treatment (colonoscopy, anyone?) or reaching an age where Medicare becomes available.
Given the uncertainty of the healthcare market and the uncertainty of our own earnings for 2018, we selected the least expensive plan that will cover all of the likely procedures and doctor visits we expect for the new year. This frees up funds that we can invest or have on hand for emergencies and allows us to afford an occasional out of network visit, if needed.
I answer questions about UX, Information Architecture and other topics on Quora. A selection of these answers will be reposted on Medium with occasional, minor editing for clarity. Following are selected questions I answered in November.
What are the best, most credible, and reliable online resources for accessibility and UX/UI best practices?
Because federal websites in the US are required to design to strict accessibility rules, Usability.gov is an excellent resource. Simple layout with best practices for accessibility. The Interaction Design Foundation has Accessibility resources (What is Accessibility?) that are more international in scope.
I believe it depends on the role. Most of the positions I’ve seen that require a PhD tend to be more quantitative or have a data science component where a PhD would indicate competence. These positions pay higher salaries because of the quantitative requirement. For positions that’s do not have a heavily quantitative role, subject matter expertise or teaching experience from a PhD program could qualify you for higher pay or a more senior role.
There are several salary surveys which may indicate a base salary for UX designers with various degrees. These should give you a starting point.
I answer questions about UX, Information Architecture and other topics on Quora. A selection of these answers will be reposted on Medium with occasional, minor editing for clarity.
One of the things that makes a very good UX designer is developing empathy not just for the user but also for your entire team. Knowing what the user and your teammates can and cannot do, what frustrates them and how you as the designer can make their experience easier or more enjoyable is a key part of UX. What I have been doing to advance in the field is start to expand my professional development beyond the usual design conference or Agile sprint Meetup. I have started to attend conferences and networking meetings outside my specific field of IA/UX. With a mentor’s encouragement, I have even begun going to the kinds of events that may seem a little scary to the average designer, like cybersecurity, cloud computing and semiotics/philosophy groups.
My approach to these events going in is understanding that much of what I will see be gibberish at first. I once attended a “search engine usability” event at Columbia Business School that was literally Greek to me: slide after slide of computational algorithms peppered with Greek letters. At first I admit I felt way out place, but I decided to just absorb the atmosphere and observe the people in the classroom. A different feeling washed over me as I stepped into that observer role. These were people who quite literally speak a different language than me and who may have a similarl, “fish out of water” experience at a design-oriented Meetup. I once met a female programmer at a design sprint event who claimed to “think in code” and admitted that the sketching part of an exercise was difficult for her. I think she was doing a similar observation technique as the one I used at the Columbia lecture. That kind of self-reflection about your own experience versus the experience of those who are more (or less) comfortable in a given context can be useful when working with team members or users whose context may be equally foreign to you as a designer.
I’ve had similar experiences attending financial and human resources related events in my role as COO for a financial wellness startup (although these were at least usually in English). Being able to step into the role of an ethnographer or anthropologist without entirely objectifying the experience and humanity of the subject group–in this case fellow conference attendees–is a great way to develop as an advanced UX professional.
Another thing you can do to develop as an advanced UX professional is to mentor another designer. I started mentoring in my local UXPA program after having been a mentee in the same program last year, which has been very valuable and rewarding. I don’t believe I was consciously trying to experience mentoring as a user of mentoring services when I joined as a mentee. I had real needs for which a mentor would be valuable. But the experience allowed me to feel empathy for the mentee when I became a mentor myself.
The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY is pleased to announce the full lineup of its thirteenth annual PRELUDE Festival. Dedicated to artists at the forefront of contemporary New York City theatre and performance, PRELUDE 2016 features an array of artists working in theatrical and interdisciplinary performance. The festival gives audiences and artists a survey of the current moment in New York via in-process performances, conversations, and workshops.
The themed portion of PRELUDE 2016 will focus on the theme of failure. “Failure has long been a crucial element in experimental theater, dance, and performance of all kinds,” said PRELUDE curator Tom Sellar. “How are New York City’s progressive stage artists thinking about the ethics and applications of failure given today’s economic pressures? In a highly polarizing election season, how are theater-makers engaging with broader systemic failures of national institutions and political systems?” Performances, conversations, and workshops will explore these questions.
Beginning Wednesday October 5, PRELUDE 2016 will feature more than 30 artists and companies.
I was honored once again to represent Wikipedia at the 2017 Information Architecture Summit team is in Vancouver last month. The IA Summit is an annual conference of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). It was hosted at the Hyatt Regency Vancouver on March 22-26 where I led two Wikipedia sessions. On Saturday afternoon, March 25, I presented a talk called Diversity and Inclusion in Wikipedia which was aligned with the conference theme of diversity in information architecture and UX design. Then on Sunday, March 26, I hosted a Wikipedia IA Edit-a-thon during the lunch session.
View of Vancouver from my hotel
Prior to the session, my husband and I did some sightseeing to take in the diversity of the city. After breakfast in Gastown Friday morning, we stopped at the Vancouver Police Museum, which is in a poor neighborhood, with remnants of women’s residences and SROs, soup kitchens and storefront churches. The museum is located in the former Coroner’s Building, next to an active police station. We almost didn’t go into the museum, due to a homeless man sleeping in the entrance, with his blanket and the remains of a meal from the prior night. We wondered if maybe it was not open that day, but as we were turning to leave, a docent arrived with the keys to open up. She later told us that the man has been a regular feature at the museum for about three years. They do what they can to make sure he is safe and warm, she said, but the city is unfortunately seeing an epidemic of drug use and homelessness, and has been forced to become very creative in addressing the problem.
Inside the museum were exhibits on confiscated weapons, youth gangs and unsolved murders, and a preserved coroner’s exam room with two examining tables and a bullet hole in the window over one of the sinks. The story behind it was classic gangster: Someone didn’t want evidence revealed, so they tried to assassinate the Coroner while he was performing an autopsy. The Coroner survived and the shooter was charged.
As interesting as that was, I was there to explore diversity so I turned to the exhibit on youth violence. Many groups were represented including (Southeast Asian) Indian, White, First Nation and other groups. The exhibit addressed the challenges of policing in a diverse community and offered ways to promote dialog between youth and law enforcement. It was a thought-provoking display.
[quote align=”center” color=”#999999″]Not all people who self-identify or are identified with the same group share he same outlooks, values or ideas.”[/quote]
I found the following panel which provides good insight for being sensitive to diverse populations, and which I mentioned during my talk, since it calls to mind the sensitivity needed when describing people or groups in a Wikipedia article.
Image by Noreen Whysel. March 24, 2017.
After the Police Museum, we took a walk around Vancouver’s historic Chinatown, led by tour guide Robert Sung, to learn about one of the many diverse groups who have made their home in one of the Pacific Northwest’s most diverse and beautiful cities. During the tour, which included Dr. Sun Yat Sen Garden, pastry and BBQ pork shops, an herbal remedy store, a Buddhist temple and a master tea salon, we learned about the community’s quest for balance between older ways and assimilation with BC culture. Our guide described not only the Chinese population but also the population of addicted drug users living in the neighborhood. At a statue commemorating the Chinese participation in the railroads and World War II, an older Chinese woman approached us, smoking marijuana. She smiled and greeted us, politely tapped out her joint, placed it in a container, and proceeded to explain her point of view as to what British Columbia owes to the Chinese settlers. Our guide thanked her for offering her point of view, and we went on to get dim sum.
Back at the Hyatt the next day, and setting the stage for my presentation was a very interesting panel discussion, Indigitization: Supporting the Digitization, Preservation, and Management of Indigenous Community Knowledge, discussing the University of British Columbia’s Indigitization project, an effort to preserve fragments of indigenous community knowledge on rapidly deteriorating magnetic media. Panelists included Alissa Cherry, research manager at the Audrey & Harry Hawthorn Library & Archives at the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, Sarah DuPont, Indigitization project manager and Aboriginal Engagement Librarian at UBC Library, and Indigitization project technology lead, Gerry Lawson, a member of the Heiltsuk First Nations and coordinator for the Oral History and Language Lab, at the UBC Museum of Anthropology.
Image from Twitter by Marianne Sweeny, used with permission. @msweeny: “Helping cultures preserve their assets is a critical role for IA, UX and content as well @IAsummit @asist_org” March 25, 2017.
[quote align=”center” color=”#999999″]“The panelists in this session share an awareness that existing information practices are firmly rooted in Western knowledge systems that are not always appropriate when dealing with Indigenous traditional knowledge” — IA Summit Featured Events email[/quote]
Image from Twitter by Jackie Wolf, used with permission. @flaxenhaircynic: “Great discussion of the archival challenges of First Nations oral traditions #ias17 @IAsummit @asist_org @xpaigen @dupontsarah @LawsonGerry” March 25, 2017.
Following this panel, my session on Diversity and Inclusion covered efforts by The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) to improve the creation and discovery of content about underrepresented groups. I spoke about WMF funded projects like Women in Red, Art+Feminism, Wiki Loves Pride, AfroCROWD, Indigenous Film and Media and Indigenous Storytellers WikiThon. I presented a deck that included many of the slides from the Art + Feminism training presentation, showing ways that Wikipedia content rules may both support diversity and inadvertently promote bias, as well as ways IA professionals can develop considered approaches to improving discoverability within Wikipedia guidelines by employing strategic tagging, categories and linked Wikidata. I encouraged participants to seek out and attend Wikipedia events in their area.
Twitter comments about the Diversity and Inclusion in Wikipedia session at IA Summit 2017
On Sunday, March 26, I hosted a Wikipedia editathon during the lunch session. While brief relative to a more traditional Wikipedia edit-a-thon, this session was meant to give attendees an opportunity to learn about editing tools that may be useful to information architects and knowledge professionals and also presented an easy way to make a meaningful contribution to the encyclopedia.
We welcomed student volunteers and facilitators from the IA community as well as the local Vancouver area to help out at the Edit-a-thon. This was a great opportunity for community engagement at one of the premier Information Architecture conferences. Unfortunately a UBC librarian (and Vancouver Wikimedian) whom I had invited to help facilitate was unable to attend due to illness. I didn’t blame anyone for not wanting to come into town, as it was a rather dreary, rainy weekend.
Image by Noreen Whysel. March 26, 2017.
Ten people attended the Edit-a-thon lunch, including three facilitators. Conference co-chair Marianne Sweeny, Veronica Erb and myself helped walk new users through how to edit and save an article, add a category and select articles to work on from the event dashboard. About half of the attendees already had Wikipedia editing experience and half were new to editing. Most understood how to make edits and were curious about Wikidata and categorization tools. Most of the attendees signed into the dashboard and assigned themselves an article. A few felt confident enough to make some contributions.
I was hoping to recruit editors for WikiProject Information Architecture, which has a dual purpose to make Information Architecture tools and processes discoverable and to offer our IA experience to the Wikipedia community to improve discoverability of topics generally. Since the session was short, roughly 45 minutes including retrieving a lunch from another floor, we anticipated mostly learning and a small amount of editing. That said, seven people made contributions to pages tagged by WikiProject Information Architecture including at least one person working offsite.
IA Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon at IA Summit. Images by Noreen Whysel. March 26, 2017.
We tried out the new Outreach Dashboard from WMF Labs for tracking Wikipedia editing events and found it to be quite simple to use, though not all participants registered and it wasn’t clear that all pages the attendees worked on were included. As an information tool, the dashboard helps keep track of who registered (by Wikipedia username), which articles they worked on, how many edits they made and the total data added in kilobytes. A full count of the impact of the session will be included on the WikiProject Information Architecture site.
In spite of being a brief session, I believe we made a strong case for bringing information architecture skills to the table, so to speak, to improve information in Wikipedia. New editors were quite interested in the power of infoboxes and Wikidata to reach beyond the encyclopedia to augment discovery of important topics. Alas, I was disappointed to find when I returned home that WikiProject Information Architecture was marked for deletion, pending an explanation and evidence for preserving these efforts. I was grateful this didn’t happen before my event, but acknowledge that it has been difficult to move the community beyond the kind of support that gets Wikipedia sessions on the schedule at a major conference toward active participation and hands on editing. My aspiration is that if I have engaged forty people to attend a talk about diversity in Wikipedia and ten people to participate in an Edit-a-thon, perhaps more will follow.
