Should you post about your work?

If you have worked in any large organization for a long period of time then you have lots of stories about what can go wrong and hopefully quite a few about how to do things right.

You can talk about people making decisions based on gut feel rather than facts and the times when this was successful and when it was a disaster.

You can talk about failures to communicate and (perhaps harder) when a message was shared well.

But all the stories are about real situations and real people, even if you disguise the story it can be very obvious who you are talking about, especially in a small industry and these days everything is a small industry.

Posting real stories is fraught with difficulties, they may make your company look bad but worse may make individuals look bad (or perceive that they look bad).

So what's the solution?
Wait till you move on?
Change the story so it has little reality left in it?
Become a consultant and work with multiple companies and blend the stories?

I don't know. So far most my postings and comments on others' postings have been pretty generic so I'm still playing it safe.

Any thoughts?

Augmented Reality Presentation

I attended the BCS Glasgow Branch tonight for a presentation on Augmented Reality given by Yolande Kolstee, who is the project leader of the AR+RFID Lab, a collaborative initiative of the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague and the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft).

before the meeting I had been following a couple of keen AR people and had retweeted the odd message about things that had taken my interest.

But everything I had seen before was about static AR, whereas Yolande's team seem mainly to be looking at mobile AR, effectively like next generation virtual reality (except its not because it mixes in reality rather than being all virtual). They also use RFID tags to enable the user to interact with many objects and the systemm to know what's going on.

Some interesting bits of art, interesting ways of prototyping new furniture, but it still feels like it has the same problems of practicality of the hardware, immersion helmet style.

She also demonstrated some static AR, particularly things they have done for a museum where they have digitized ancient pottery and when you look at the page in the "catalog" you see the pottery in 3D, with music of the era, etc. Those were wow displays and maybe that reflects the areas where AR will make a huge impact over the next decade.

Do you need a strategy for friends on Twitter?

When I started using Twitter I believed the hype.
Everyone is using it.
You just log on and search on your interests and you will find a huge wide circle of friends without doing anything much.

But that's not the reality I found.

If we exclude the celebrity gossip then probably 80% of the traffic seems to be from people and organizations trying to sell something and a huge proportion of the followers are coming from bots that are linked to the organizations that are trying to sell something.

So there are a huge number of tweets and tweeters the vast majority of which are just noise.

Sounds dreadful, but it isn't as bad as that.

A fair proportion of the automated following (i.e. I mention a keyword and someone starts following) are from people I would have wanted to follow.

Some of the best (professional) contacts I've got so far have been people I've come across through meetings, magazines articles, Linked-In and then starting following them and checking out who they are following.

So where does this leave me?

The random way I have identified people to follow gives me a mostly useful stream, but not as wide as might be ideally.

Equally increasing the number I follow into the thousands would give a lot of noise and swamp the whole process.

I'm planning to start a new strategy for 2010, I'll do much wider hunts for contacts and store them in lists (and also checking out the lists of people I follow) and review the lists on a periodic basis to find the best of the lists and start following them.

Any other suggestions?

A bit more on Pairwise testing

I tweeted yesterday about how i wished I had known about pairwise testing earlier, so perhaps a little explanation would help.

I attended at Scottish Test Forum event yesterday in Glasgow.
One of the presentations was given by Stephen Allot from Electromind and covered pairwise testing. Presentations will be available at http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=nav.9979 in near future.

I hadn't come across it before and basically is a technique that assumes that almost all defects are due to one error or a combination of two errors and so we can apply the mathematics of pairs to reduced the number of tests required.

So if you are trying to test a situation with a number of parameters each with different possible values then the total possible combinations multiply up to huge numbers which become impossible or at least impractical testing, but pairwise can reduce that to much smaller and achievable numbers of tests needed.

The mathematics of pairs is well known (well its well known to mathematicians ;-) ) and goes back to Latin squares and orthogonal arrays and all that.

Once you've decided to use pairwise, there are lots of tools available (easy to find try Wikipedia or http://pairwise.org/ or http://www.satisfice.com/ etc.) that can take your parameters and produce the lists of tests. Some are freeware and some cost, the benefits of paying being that you can get better lists (shorter and with illegal combinations excluded).

An example of this is that if you had 10 parameters each with 10 values then the free tools would give you 177 tests to execute, whereas the paid-for tools could reduce that to 140. However if you compare that to the total combinations of 10 billion, then the difference between free and not is minor.

So at this point its a wow, what great reductions, but where did that assumption come from?

We are that assuming that almost all defects are due to one error or a combination of two errors. the answer I got was that it was all based on engineering and medical experience. Wikipedia showed the way to an IEEE paper that brought the research together
http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/acts/documents/TSE-0172-1003-1.pdf
The conclusion was that testing single errors only covered 68%, covering for pairs of errors covered 93%, triples covered 98% and quadruples 100%.

So a combination of pairwise testing plus defined test cases for known corner point issues should get pretty close to complete coverage with a fraction of the testing.


However the basis is all empirical so you will always have people saying its not applicable, and even the IEEE paper ends with "many more empirical studies of other classes of software are needed to evaluate the applicability of combinatorial testing for other classes of systems" so you must use the technique with your brain switched on.

Thoughts on the future of Twitter

Three separate tweets arrived today. And I felt they could be combined to paint wildly different possible views of the future of Twitter.

First of all, came the thought that Twitter would be sold next year for up to 2 billion dollars (@Twitter_Tips Microsoft or Google Will Buy Twitter in 2010 http://j.mp/5nKRij). I find that a bit hard to agree with as without hard data on the usage and a real monetization plan, then what would they be buying. On the user count front almost every day you will see comments about the number of users on Twitter rising or falling, but there are no hard facts behind the discussions so everyone brings their own baggage and jumps onto their hobby horse. The variations of usage of web vs api vs whatever means that the numbers that are available need to have so many assumptions and caveats applied then you could argue anything with them, but the shift in demographics from older to younger users does seem to suggest a change in usage at the very least).

The second tweet suggested that Twitter is a giant pyramid scheme with risk of collapsing (@Twitter_Tips If We All Quit Listening & Only Broadcast, Is Twitter A Giant Ponzi scheme? http://j.mp/5maN4U) as users don't post and get fed up of the marketing being published at them. Again I don't totaly buy it, however as a relative newbie I have been shocked at how few people actually tweet and how their geographical distribution is uneven to say the least, so I don't think there is a firm foundation.

But surely Twitter couldn't have any real problems.
Look at how many users and traffic it has.
Which brings me to today's third tweet about the problems of the former darling of social networking MySpace (@bcs MySpace must 'regain its mojo': 23/11/2009 http://bit.ly/08B6cei).

so where does that leave us?

Twitter could have a bright future with funding from a giant, or it could disappear perhaps in the undercurrent from Google Wave. The concept of microblogging is great, however most of the tweets don't stick to the 140 characters, they refer you to a "proper" blog with the complete story. So if Twitter isn't for telling people what you are doing and is just for pointing you to other information, then what is its killer app reason to exist?

And at this point I have to say I don't read Hello and if the killer app is just to find out what the celebs had for breakfast then maybe its a club that I wouldn't want to be part of ;-)

But in the meantime I'm getting real value from the tool and pleasure from the wide range of tweets I see and have managed to miss most of the mass-marketing and DMs that other users complain about.

Free Conferences

Earlier today I was reading the Financial Times (unusual for me, but I found that the Saturday paper is a good read).

One article that caught my eye was Mike Southon's Take the free and easy route
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/130b6ddc-d5fa-11de-b80f-00144feabdc0.html
where he looks at the concept of “free” business models especially in relational to conferences.

His conclusion was that the approaches to use were things like that
- specific free offers to drive business for his members:
- congress centres could offer unused space to the local community;
- or hotels and venues could waive charges on marginal items, such as wi-fi.

The International Congress and Convention Assoviation (ICCA) uses free models to good effect, offering one free congress registration to all first-timers in the year they join, an extensive PR kit with details of more than 350 media organisations and an online destination comparison system.
Which led to a 20% increase in attendees.

But I felt that Mike missed the point. The free business model concept of "offer(ing) everything for free first and build a business model later – as Google, Facebook and YouTube have done" takes you to a different place.

The real free conference approach would be focused on removing conference fees and so increasing attendance. As the attendee volumes should be higher, the charges for commercial exhibition space could be higher which could cover the fixed conference charges.

Obviously the topic has to be something of interest.

But I've seen this work on things like the cloud computing conference Cloud Scotland, OK on a small scale but it could work on a bigger scale as well.

Its a different sort of conference and must be considered valuable to be successful, so there is a real balancing game to play.

How do you find free events?

Well, its a follow up question to the last one.

how did you find out about the seminars in the first place (i.e. where did you look or hear about them in order to sign up to attend)?

So I guess its all part of the networking stuff.

I am a member of the BCS and attend its branch meetings.
I'm also a member of a reasonably number of LinkedIn Groups and connected to over 200 people on LinkedIn.
And an alumni of Glasgow and Strathclyde universities.

Because of those contacts I get a continual stream of emails coming through.
The local ones I check carefully for what's on, the Linked-In updates will also show events that contacts are planning to attend.

And then I have a diary, when I hear about an event I'll look it up on the web and if remotely interesting write it down in the diary. As we get closer to the date I'll check if there's anything else conflicting and book in.

Another way to find events is when you find a new organization (for instance Scottish Developers) look up their events list, look up their links to other organizations. And if they are using a local booking tool (like eventbrite or something like that) then see what other events are available.

There are events on LinkedIn, but I've not found that too successful.

And once you've found an interesting source, keep checking it.

John