Book Review - Designing Social Interfaces

I have chosen a new book (2009) from the field of interface design and in more detail about designing social interfaces - “Designing Social Interfaces – Principles, Patterns and Practices for Improving the User Experience” by Cristian Crumlish and Erin Malone.

The book provides the reader with a collection of features and functions used in social interfaces. The functions are grouped together according to their type – profile related, organising and presenting created content, contributing etc. All functions are described in turns of why, how and where to be used.

Patterns are defined as “Common, successful interaction design components and design solutions for a known problem in a context.” The aim of patterns is developing a common language for designers and developers to produce user interfaces that provide the user with high quality user experience.

The patterns have detailed descriptions on when and how to use each of them, why is it used and examples are presented from known popular networks. For each pattern, other related patterns are named, so it is very useful for finding the best solution among similar ones.

The book is organised growing from explaining what are social patterns to going mobile with it. The authors start with historical overview of network development and analysing the activities around them – forums, blogging, tagging, linking, etc. The second section describes everything that has to do with defining the users personal identity and visibility – signing up, profile, friends and network, testimonial etc.

Third section goes with user's desired objects and activities for that – collecting data/objects and organizing them via tagging or news feed, bookmarking, blogging, feedback opportunities, communication and collaboration between users, following and filtering interesting objects and users. Fourth part is about the relationships between the users and managing groups. Fifth section is about making business with social interfaces, application programming interfaces and going mobile.

In my opinion, the book could be beneficial for people studying social interface design, starting or already developing a social network or an extension to one. Authors describe the social objects (some media objects or things like calendar events) and the activities people can do with these objects or with one another, through social interfaces. I see it more as an encyclopaedia type of book used to find information about certain feature than a linear book.

In comparison to "Don't Make Me Think!" and "About Face 3", this book is more detailed about one certain field - the features and patterns. Therefore it seems to be a great addition or extension after reading the others.

Review of blue team

For reviewing the blue teams work I have browsed their campaign files and trac communication. It seems they had well organized work and comments on it. Their graphics were close to ours in the meaning they were processed images not created artwork for wesnoth criterias.

From the copyright problematic they had with the names of characters, I have not understood if it is a problem using existing copyrighted name but the images of the characters are perfectly fine to use. Or were those not in the category? The images are humorous as is the storyline.

Storyline and scenario use various combinations - like having a character to be used on your side if you have found it in the previous scenario or realising that one has killed a substitute to the character not the real one.

Report of Role and Contribution

Working in the red team of the open source management project was an experience that gave knowledge in variety of fields. The task was to develop a new scenario for the open source game the Battle for Wesnoth. We had a rather big group that needed strong organisation to start working and organise the tasks. The roles were divided - I was at first supposed to be one of programmers, which I chose myself. My role changed later on while at the moment our team was ready to program, I lost my laptop (it broke down) and was unable to contact the team.

So my role and contribution was mostly the design part - I was studying the way things work around Wesnoth with graphic files and I also learned the Wesnoth art and art forums, even though our characters were not done according to these guidelines.

I worked on the portraits and some icons as well as cooperated with Jindrich in the design questions while he was working on the maps. My other part of the contribution was in connection to the programmers. We were in skype conversation during the programming and I was searching for information to overcome the problems met and find solutions to the ideas we had. For that I also used browsing default codes and code of some other campaigns.

On the one hand we had complications in getting the work started and organize ourselves, but on the oher hand we finished the work and got different experiences through that. As everyone got more active we managed to divide the tasks so that the community work got better and better. Everyone worked on their piece and the collaboration was successful. So I did get the feeling of the community work as well.

Concerning the tool used - Wesnoth - I must say that I was not too exited about it, while it is a time consuming game and over all I have not been a game fan myself. I cannot bring an example but I guess there could be some alternative tool to get the idea and experience of open source management and community cooperation.

To summarize - I have worked together with the team, experienced the community cooperation and learned from both positive and negative sides of our team work organisation.

Ideastorming for Better Wesnoth Campaign Building: Artwork

The community of the Battle of Wesnoth is big and the forums have numerous topics and various subthemes. From my interest towards the graphical solutions and artwork I have searched for the ways the community works in this field. In the forums people post their artwork both in progress and finished and wait for critique towards it. There is a thorough post by development team on how to critique. I started from that and firstly would like to point out the skill set needed for being a good Wesnoth (and probably overall) designer:

(a) conceptual/stylistic judgement and design skills;
(b) a technical understanding of how to model aspects of reality eg. knowledge of human proportion, realistic lighting and perspective; and
(c) the ability to translate the concept and understanding into an artwork. eg. skill at drawing & ability to work a paint program.

The problematics of design derived from insufficiency in one of the above mentioned fields are illustrated and divided into levels. Understand your level of proficiency and notice hwo you should or should not critique.

It sounds a bit harsh and funny the way the author states: "Who should critique?: Someone with superior skill in the pertinent area (or subarea) only. Anyone else is incapable of providing useful advice." I guess it might happen that useful advice comes from anyone, but probably the author speaks of experience and it should be followed.

From all the points listed in the post about how to critique and how to take the critique, when to do it and when to drop it, I think it is very important to give out exact info on what do you think at which stage your work is, mention the problems you see yourself and ask upfront what would you like others to comment on precisely. This all helps make the communication more clear, faster and more practical.

As a coclusion. It seems to me the community is growing and evolving. There are lots of people putting their effort to the development and the community is working its ways to create the guidelines to go to a higher level of organisation in the campaign building process.

Cory Doctorow and His Business Model

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction writer, active blogger and an author known for his attitude towards digital ownership. He finds the laws limiting the spread of works and complicating the usage of products already owned by someone (i.e installing a product to another machine). He has published his works - the first one Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom in 2003- under different Creative Commons licenses which restrict the user from commercial derivates.

In his interview with Greg Grossmeier he reasoned his choise as follows:

“Not only does making my books available for free increase the number of sales that I get, but I also came to understand it artistically as a Science Fiction writer that if I was making work that wasn't intended to be copied, then I was really making contemporary work.”

His business model of publishing his works consists of free sharing of his books and stories, gaining fame with it and earning from everything else around his works. He earns from hardcover books, films, theatrical adaption, writing columns, giving speeches and many more. In Fawny blog following to a comment Doctorow has given to The Digitalist his high total estimate of income covering years 2008 and 2009 could be $622,750 as the low estimate is above $400,000. So they estimate his average income for a year between $200,000 and $300,000.

I find the strategy very nice while the cultural product itself can be purchised for no cost. On the one hand, audience gets to experience his creation and share it freely to others. On the other hand, the producers and commercial media channels can publish his ideas and work for money and the author with principals gets his share. The author also gets to keep his non-commercial and non-economical imago.

Companies Using Open Source as Business Strategy

Case study about three companies

Companies with open source business strategy take use of open source products and either gain their profit by providing the software and side services or using it as a part of their business. Using this strategy reduces research and development costs while the open source community does a lot of work that the company can use. The company wins from using open source products and the community whereas the clients profit from the cooperation between open source product and the service provider. This kind of companies have strong belief into open source communities.

Acquia is a company providing its clients with technical support and site monitoring for sites built upon open source platform Drupal. Acquia is not building the sites but helps to get started with Drupal. Drupal is an open source content management platform that allows its users to easily manage all sorts of web sites including community sites, e-commerce applications, blogs, personal sites and many more. Acquia uses Drupal in its business and needs it to be excellent, so they also give back to Drupal through fixing bugs, implementing missing features and writing documentation. Acquia works with the community of Drupal to solve variety of problems and therefore does not need to have all the resources inside the company.

Red Hat is the best known company using open source as its main business strategy. With being a strong competitor for proprietary software providers Red Hat has gained lots of critique but also fought aggressively against software patenting. Red Hat is world's leading open source and Linux provider. Its Open Source strategy provides customers with plan for building infrastructures that are based on open source technologies with focus on security and ease of management.

Another company using free software and commecial know-how is Canonical - the commercial sponsor for Ubuntu. Its mission lies in realising the potential of free software and supporting it through high quality professional services, input to its further development and community. Canonical offers full scale of commercial services to help businesses benefit from Ubuntu and Free Software. Among all services there is custom engineering, support, training and certification.

All above-mentioned companies use open source products for their business, they also carry the mission to support and develop open source software and contribute to the communities. On the same time they make profit, help other businesses profit from their services and also work for the ongoing innovation and free development of software as they find patenting slowing down the process.

Copyleft

What is copyleft and its variants?

Copyleft is characteristic of some free licencies for software, art, music or other creations. Copyleft has different versions according to the distribution and freedom terms attached to it. The types are strong, weak and non-copyleft. Work under strong copyleft license may not be used as a part of a project or work with other type of license that is not compatible with the strong copyleft. Weak copyleft on the other hand, allows linked works be licensed under other types of licenses whereas the changes made to the work under weak copyleft must be licensed as weak copyleft. Non-copyleft free licenses allow producing proprietary work.

The best known real-life example of strong copyleft is GNU Public License. Weak copyleft licensed example is GNU Lesser General Public License and also Mozilla Public License. The first use of non-copyleft license was with Berkeley Software Distribution for the first free Unix. From there on the license is often named BSD-like free license. Under this category is also Apache License.