Evilrooster Crows - Abi Sutherland's Blog

Making Light: Holed up in the mall

Posted by Abi on Tue 29 June 2010 at 20:08 | Comments (4) | Web

The official story is that Making Light is down because its server is down. Patrick is SpeakerToHostingProviders in this context. All will be well, and updates will appear here in a calm and controlled manner:

3:25 pm EST: Per Patrick, the server crashed. Hosting Matters is doing a disk check and will bring it back "soon".

4:14 pm EST: And we're back. It was all a dream. Honest.

But, dear reader, I can reveal to you that this is all a cover-up, because the officials don't want you to know the truth: the Zombie Apocalypse has come, and our beloved Making Light is trapped inside a mall.

For the latest updates, check out the Making Light Twitter feed. I'll repost them in the comments as well, and any suggestions for what our beloved website can do are most welcome.

Semi-Occluded Light

Posted by Abi on Wed 17 February 2010 at 06:08 | Comments (23) | Web

That collection of abstractions bound together by a mental model* that we usually refer to as "Making Light" has got back-end troubles. Although it does not reflect the underlying reality, feel free to think of it as the result of an enormous office party by the comment approval gnomes. That's much more entertaining than "too many connections".

The upshot is that you must treat what already sits on the site as a perfect jewel. Feel free to admire it, but you may not at this point add to it. Commenting is broken.

A support ticket has been raised with the host, but until we get this fixed, feel free to chat here.

Further bulletins as events warrant. The final update will mention a murnival.

Further Bulletin One:
The error message all the cool kids are getting has moved from "too many connections" to "Can't call method "created_on" on an undefined value."

* Or rather, a coalescence of multiple mental models which mostly† manage to intersect into a single consensus reality‡. I would never expect that anyone else's mental model is any more than functionally equivalent to mine.
†in this context, possessing an outlying model is symptomatic of trolldom.
‡ I can't believe I just used "reality" as a synonym for the internet.

Biking at Making Light

Posted by Abi on Fri 18 September 2009 at 21:54 | Comments (1) | Web, Who can categorise everything?

I've been trying to write about my life as a bicycle commuter for a couple of years now. I've touched on specific aspects, both here and on Making Light.

But a lot of the ways that biking to work matters to me really are not verbal, so I've struggled to phrase things in any useful or meaningful way. I knew what I wanted to say in the middle of the post (what routes, how far, how long it took) and at the end (thinking as I ride). But how to begin?

My sordid history as a Rush fan came to the rescue. The immediacy of the lyrics of Red Barchetta was exactly the tone I was looking for to pull the reader into the experience.

The result: My own personal Rota Fortunae.

Not dead, nor yet a zombie

Posted by Abi on Sun 6 September 2009 at 19:07 | Comments (2) | About Me, Politics, Who can categorise everything?

[insert typical "sorry I don't blog here more often" paragraph]

The fact of the matter is that I am still writing, rather a lot, over at Making Light, a blog owned by my friends Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden¹.

This is kind of unfair to everyone who keeps looking here for news of me. I know this. I'm going to start doing pointers to Making Light when I've posted something there that people here might be interested in, and hanging out here for people who want to talk about those things with me rather than a large crowd of strangers².

My most recent post is about the quilt that I made this spring: Works and Days of Hands. It's also about the process of making something like that, and how process and design mirrored each other for me.

Another post I really enjoyed writing was Op anger tale, which is an exploration of the relationship between a particular Dutch dialect and Wikipedia.

One thing I've been talking about over there, rather a lot, has been the US health care situation. The conversation can get quite heated from time to time, of course, but that heat has certainly caused me to clarify and reaffirm my own beliefs in this matter.

That phrasing makes it sound like we were friends, and then I pitched up on their blog. Really, it was the other way round.
Though many of my friends here are also friends on Making Light, it's a smaller group.

How to sour a community, in one easy lesson

Posted by Abi on Sun 12 April 2009 at 13:32 | Comments (8) | Web, Work

Simple. Tell them that they're not one.

It won't destroy it, of course. Wherever a group of people collaborate for a common endeavor, there we find community.

But communities come in different flavors. My favorite kind includes a substantial amount of trust among the community members, and between them and their leaders/moderators. They are often powerfully goal-oriented, whether the goal is to build something or simply to have good conversation. These ones are electrifying to be a member of. Shared endeavors and a sense of shared ownership seem to actually create energy.

Other communities, however, just depress everyone. A group of rules lawyers, whose shared energy is absorbed in the feeling that bad behavior is punished but good actions go unrewarded, is still a community. It's just not a very pleasant one. One doesn't go out and evangelize for such a community or for what it does. One doesn't hope that others will come join it.

(There is a third kind of community to be mindful of, of course. A mob, like a depressive community, is a common failure mode of an energized community.)

The breakdown of trust is of course the most common reason that the first kind of community turns into the second. It's easy, particularly as a leader or moderator, to feel betrayed by everyone when the crowd goes in a direction that you don't want it to. And the fear of the mob is a powerful motivator. The temptation is to lock everything down, pretend that there is no community ethos but the one you provide.

But people don't work that way. Clamp down on a community, and it turns sour; the community spirit becomes one of grumbling and nit-picking conformance to the stated rules. Spontaneous action for the common good, being unrewarded, goes away.

I've seen online communities go completely sour at this point, as the members in their turn feel betrayed by the moderators. Subsequent events just confirm the mutual hostility. Eventually many of these things break up completely.

This isn't universal; sometimes the shared endeavor of the community is motivating enough to overcome the mutual mistrust. Gradually, a new balance is found; member behavior builds moderator trust and moderator trust reduces member resentment.

Communities may recover in time, but it's not a pleasant process.

This rather discouraged rant has been brought to you by the letter M and the number 2.

Alex deduces

Posted by Abi on Sat 27 December 2008 at 09:09 | Comments (5) | Family

Yesterday, Alex turned to his dad and told him there was no such thing as the Tooth Fairy.

Apparently, lying in his bed the night after Christmas, he had started thinking. He knows fairies don't exist¹. The Tooth Fairy is a fairy. Therefore, she doesn't exist.

But he didn't stop there. He went on to consider the problem of the exchange of teeth for money. Was there a more plausible agent than the now-deprecated fairy? Of course there was; he knows that I creep into his bedroom every night after he's asleep to give him one last kiss and tell him that I love him.

So he reckoned that Martin or I would exchange the tooth for money in the night.

Coincidentally, he lost a tooth yesterday evening. He considered setting a booby trap to catch whoever was doing the money exchange³. But he forgot to put the tooth under his pillow last night. I'd left it on the shelf in my bindery.

*** ⁴

This morning, I was in the bindery getting a hair stick. I called him in and pointed to the shelf where his tooth had been last night, and where a nice shiny Euro coin was now sitting.

He laughed and laughed. He accused me; I said I'd left a tooth there the night before and there was a coin there now. He reckoned it was his dad instead.

He won't take the coin, either. Principled little guy.

Why? I told him, in the context of Lady Cottington's Pressed Fairy Book, and it accords with his very good reality/fantasy distinction²
Unlike his reality/science fiction distinction, which is weak
He's capable of it; he has a couple of kiddie spy kits that have motion sensor alarms.
This is a Murder of Roger Ackroyd reference, if you are familiar with the book.

Alex's First Day at School, Take Three

Posted by Abi on Thu 19 June 2008 at 20:13 | Comments (8) | Family

For the third time in less than three years, Alex spent his first day in a new school yesterday.

Take One

The first time, he was a five year old in a necktie, starting Primary 1 at Gilmerton Primary School in Edinburgh.

He loved his time at Gilmerton, though we didn't fit into the primarily working-class community. We also had occasional differences with the school administration, but we kept them away from Alex. He learned to read that year, and discovered a real love of maths. But he knew that he wasn't going to stay; we were up front with him that we were moving to the Netherlands after that first year.

Take Two

The second time was last autumn, when he started school here in Holland*. We weren't sure how we were going to handle this, since he came here speaking virtually no Dutch at all. After discussions with the schools in our area, we found ourselves with two choices:

Drop Alex back a year to playschool-type schooling in the local village school, so that he could spend the time working on his language skills. All being well, he could then skip a grade and be back with his contemporaries. The American family† in the village did this with their eldest a year before we arrived, and found it a successful strategy. Unfortunately, we knew that Alex would be bored senseless by a return to playschool after a year of sit-down learning.
Put Alex into a school a little further away that specializes in teaching foreign children Dutch in a year, while continuing their ordinary education. (Kind of the reverse of an international school, basically.) Demographically, the school is very different than our village, drawing much of its student body from people who live in the city.

We chose Option 2, and Alex had a fairly intimidating first day at the Kernschool last autumn. He's a trouper, though, and plunged in wholeheartedly. He worried a lot at first, unsure if he was learning well enough or fast enough, but found his feet academically after the first term. But he never settled socially, making few friends and struggling with the fairly rough and tumble school culture. He has, however, learned a lot of Dutch, and is about half a year ahead of his age group in maths.

Take Three

The Kernschool's program is designed to slipstream the children into their local schools, once they have the language skills to cope. This meshes well with the local school's program of settling new children in with their class groups before the summer vacation. So yesterday, Alex went to the village school for the first time, for a half day of sitting with next year's classmates. (Wednesdays are short days in Dutch schools).

He was nervous before he went in, worrying about his hair and his appearance. I helped him peer into Fiona's classroom as we went to his (she had no special Dutch training, but started school normally in January; youth is an indisputable advantage to language learning). When he went into the room and his teacher began to speak Dutch to him, I felt a lurch: I didn't follow everything she said to him. But he did, having already surpassed me in learning the language.

Apparently, he came out triumphant and ecstatic, declaring the new school "super cool". He liked his classmates, enjoyed the academic work, and had no trouble talking his teacher's ear off in Dutch. He can't wait to start.

And then he woke up at 11:30 at night, desperately missing Scotland. I lay in bed with him for half an hour, talking about homesickness‡ and the delights of the Netherlands.

* Pedantic note: Although Holland is not actually a synonym for the Netherlands, we live in the province of Noord-Holland.

† By this classification, we are the English family in the village. It is really not worth trying to correct this.

‡ A matter close to my mind at the moment, since two of my colleagues went to San Francisco last week. One of them even went across the Bay to meet my parents and see my dad's printing press. My thoughts were often with them, and the world I had left behind to come to Europe.

Ink, turpentine, paper, water

Posted by Abi on Thu 29 May 2008 at 21:43 | Comments (7) | Testing, Work

For at least 1500 years, Japanese artists have practiced suminagashi, the art of marbling paper with ink floating on water. The marbler uses brushes to place alternating drops of black calligraphy ink and turpentine on the surface of a full basin, then lays a sheet of paper down to capture the resulting patterns. They look like clouds, or smoke, or the grain of twisted trees. Each pattern is unique, unlike in Western marbling, where the creator can reproduce essentially the same design many times.

Ink, turpentine, water, paper. It seems so simple.

And it is very simple, but only after you accept one thing: you are not in control of the outcome. The ink goes where it wills, and the marbler can only follow. There are tricks to give the pattern an overall direction, such as controlling the amount of ink and turpentine or gently blowing over the surface of the water. But the heart of suminagashi is trusting what you can't predict or control.

I recently read George Oates's essay about the ways that Flickr created its community: Community: From Little Things, Big Things Grow on A List Apart. Two particular paragraphs really jumped out at me:

Embrace the idea that people will warp and stretch your site in ways you can't predict—they'll surprise you with their creativity and make something wonderful with what you provide.

There's no way to design all things for all people. When you're dealing with The Masses, it's best to try to facilitate behavior, rather than to predict it. Design, in this context, becomes more about showing what's *possible* than showing what's *there*.

Flickr's history has proven her right. There are any number of wildly varying communities on the site, many of them either accidentally or deliberately experimental. Flickr groups are even cited as a case study in Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirkey's recent book on online community dynamics.

And now it's our turn.

Last year, my company (MediaLab, which makes a library search software package called Aqua Browser Library) released our new social library software: My Discoveries.

The essence of My Discoveries is this: allow users to add information to the library catalog. Let them tag things, make lists of related items, fill in ratings, write reviews. Then let others see what they've done. Turn the patron's interaction with the library's catalog into a conversation with the catalog, and with each other.

I've been involved in both the design and testing. One of the core principles we've kept in mind throughout the process is that we cannot predict what people will do with it¹. Designing and testing in the light of that kind of uncertainty is very different, and much more interesting, than working to a known, restricted usage profile. It affects everything we do, from what characters are allowed in list names to which statistics we want to gather. How does one design metrics to detect the unpredictable?

Tags, lists, ratings, reviews. It seems so simple.

Of course, we are not so naive as to think that all the new ideas that people come up with for My Discoveries will be good ones. I moderate a web community in my spare time, so I know how bad things can get. As a result, I have put a lot of attention into the administrative interface—and I expect do more on it in the future. If we give users room to innovate, we have to give librarians the wherewithal to detect and clean up misbehavior.