The emergence of content management systems (CMS) many years ago made it easier for institutions to manage their public information, as the web shifted away from direct file manipulation to database-powered dynamic websites. But while the web 2.0 has seen many innovations, from easy as pie blogging software to URL shorteners, content tagging and commenting, automated RSS feeds and “pretty urls” (via a so-called rewrites), many companies and institutions kept their expensive and unwieldly web 1.0 CMS. The idea behind CMS is to disconnect content from design, design from structure and structure from content. They allow publishing and modifying content from within a web browser, changing the look and feel of entire web presences with the click of a button and the modification of the whole concept without touching each of its contents and modules. In theory, CMS are a huge innovation in web publishing and in workflow management. No longer does a programmer have to come in, modify a html and picture files, and re-upload these to a web server. Now, everyone with a log-in to a designated section of the web presence could modify that on their own. But for bureaucracies this innovation meant learning yet another tool, and the painful adjustment process, along with the expensive purchase of often proprietary (or enterprise-grade open source) CMS software, made further change and progress hard to come by. As the amount of information published grew, and the areas covered by these web presences, they increasingly started to mirror the very institutions behind them. Often times two or more navigation menus lead to further sub menus, URLs started looking like this “http://nouvelles.gc.ca/web/article-fra.do?crtr.sj1D=&mthd=advSrch&crtr.mnthndVl=12&nid=502819”, where they used to look like something.gov/utilities.htm and the amount of text, PDF links (worst case: not even PDF) and side bars or information boxes experienced an inflation.

This has to change. As overlooked as the usability and content management aspect is in contemporary government 2.0 discourse, as important it is to the public. Ultimately, the bulk of government’s “customers” are not the gov 2.0 geeks who can spot the software used by taking a quick look at a home page. The average Joe & Jane are the target audience, and if they don’t find what they are looking for, if they feel overwhelmed, these web presences have failed the test. On top of that, horrible URLs, lack of semantic structures and insufficient adherence to technical standards make them virtual dead ends, with the information not shared, not found, not distributed and impossible to subscribe to or even read on devices other than discounter laptops with windows XP and Internet explorer 7. What public institutions, just like other big bureaucracies such as universities and corporations, need to learn, is how fast the web evolves and of how little use websites are to a variety of target audiences if they are badly designed, horribly implemented and built like Microsoft Word 2000′s document source code. Websites are not on-line versions of 20th century office correspondence, they are not a tree-structured pile of text and the CMS installed in 2002 does not provide adequate tools to publish content on the web by anyone’s standards.

There are encouraging examples where we see top notch design and implementation of really useful websites, that are in no way lacking behind more advanced tech community products. The principle “less is more” applies to website design just as it does to structure and content. Don’t overwhelm the reader with text and menus before he even found what he or she was looking for. Why spend thousands on expensive customized solutions if easy to use tools do the trick? The bulk of website out there realized with swiss-army-knife types of software could easily be realized with Word Press as well. Whitehouse.gov runs on Drupal. But look at utah.gov, etc….. there are positive examples and one has to wonder why so few follow suit, especially in continental Europe, where your government’s website hardly looks more inviting than the waiting rooms of their bloated bureaucracies.

This blog post is inspired by What’s in an URI? and 12 Worst Government Websites

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But that is not really what I want to write about. I think instant messaging has gone undercover and does not get the appreciation it deserves. I think two developments are responsible for this. One is the lack of interoperability between the protocols, which have forced less tech-savvy users to install several clients and in the end give up on instant messaging or lose interest in it. The other is social networking, whose platforms are more and more incorporating instant messaging capability, such as Facebook Chat (even though it is possible to use Facebook chat from a client such as Pidgin). This development is disappointing, as I believe the technology despite its age has not lost its clear benefits and offers many advantages in all sectors.

Imagine a bureaucracy, where employees constantly send letters via in-house snail mail or faxes, run down hallways to ask for things, or pick up the phone just to find the other end busy. Instant messaging can reduce these communication costs dramatically and free up resources. Want to know whether Report X has reached Department X? Double click on the Dept. X Contact in your buddy list, write “has R.X arrived yet? Let me know when.” and minimize the window. Dept. X will reply when they can and you have the reply blinking as a message on your computer, which is not an envelope you have to open, or a ringing phone to answer, or someone knocking at your door.

I think the release is one of the best in a long time, it offers a nicely polished interface, a decent set of applications (and a user-friendly online store to install additional applications as needed) and adequate hardware support. It shows the additional effort into usability that has been made in the last few months, even thought it looks more and more like a Mac. My main gripe? The whole boot process, which was supposed to be super fast and smooth and beautiful now with “plymouth” still looks shitty and doesn’t work well, even without proprietary graphics drivers (which don’t support so-called “kernel mode setting” required to make the boot process pretty). For most of the time you see a dark screen and when the nice boot splash finally comes up, the system has booted enough to go to the login screen, so you only get to see it for a second. The whole point was to show the splash screen instead of the black screen or not? Additionally, hibernate (a key feature for laptop users) still doesn’t work well. They dropped Gimp, the major Photoshop-replacement, which isn’t a bad thing, but they also went for Empathy as the default instant messenger, which is a ridiculously shitty and non-customizable application, and they stuck with Evolution, an Outlook-replacement which hasn’t changed since 1990 and isn’t half as innovative as Thunderbird, but more stable. All in all, I wished they had spent a few more months fixing bugs and polishing, working on the hardware support and giving third party developers more time. Some of the decisions (Empathy, etc) are clearly a step backwards and will only annoy advanced users. Also there seem to be no major under the hood improvements in terms of energy usage and performance other than the system being just overall more stable. Verdict: Best Ubuntu so far, but still a long way away from perfect

http://www.faz.net/s/RubDDBDABB9457A437BAA85A49C26FB23A0/Doc~E9F73DC4F0C444FE4BA1181212F925369~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html

Three things are wrong with an URI like that. 1) it is too long for no good reason 2) it makes no sense to a human and 3) it is systematically unsustainable. Let’s continue this little survey through the German newspaper landscape. The other major newspaper is the “Sueddeutsche Zeitung”.

This article about the upcoming Afghanistan conference is a step ahead of the FAZ:

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/,tt3m1/politik/790/501051/text/

It is considerably shorter, and the “/politik/” tells the reader just from the URI which section/topic he might be dealing with. But still the majority of this URI’s elements make little sense and one wonders why there is a comma in it for example, the FAZ’s URI even had a “tilde” (~), which I thought went out of fashion at the end of the 90s. Kudos to the “TAZ”, which comes close to a URI that I would not complain about, in an article on the world social forum:

http://taz.de/1/politik/amerika/artikel/1/verfechter-des-diffusen-und-bunten/

The URI makes sense to a human, is (aside from the two 1s, which I cannot explain) free of any shenanigans and is bearably short. The Financial Times Germany (“FTD”) leaves mixed feelings, in their article on Lafontaine’s latest career choice:

http://www.ftd.de/politik/deutschland/:lafontaines-rueckzug-eine-chance-fuer-links/50064665.html

I have no problem with the length, or the human-readability here, but what is the colon doing there, and why does it need the file ending and those random numbers? Let’s look at magazines or weeklies, and why not from the “Spiegel” on the same topic:

http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/0,1518,673667,00.html

Quite short, tells me it’s on domestic politics, but the rest are random numbers, commas and a file ending. Again: why? Spiegel’s competitor “Focus” is hardly any better:

http://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/lafontaine-rueckzug-linke-muss-sich-neu-sortieren_aid_473483.html

It has “aid” (which I assume means article ID) and a random number in it, which makes me wonder if they assume they will have the exact same identical headline some other time that might conflict, and the file ending, which the user just plainly does not need, not to mention the fact that the majority of internet users probably have not a clue what “.html” means.

Why am I writing all this? It bugs me that user-centricity seems to bear of little concern to an industry which like few others struggle so much with their very existence. Newspapers are losing readers almost every month, pushed aside by blogs and other sources of information. The newsPAPER’s future, is not on paper, yet not only do most newspaper websites look far from up-to-date, nor do they seem to care about the “average joe” surfer. For newspapers to surround their customers with an aura of comfort, visual appeal and interest, they need to rethink very simple and basic things such as the irrelevance of a file ending in an URI, the lack of prettiness of special characters and the inpracticality of very long links. You do not have to have a computer science degree to use mod_rewrite on your server, and a “pretty” URI like

http://www.newspaper.de/yyyy/mm/dd/headline-of-my-article

should really not be too much work.

Sven Welters and I are working on the ideation platform for the participatory budgeting project for the City of Erfurt, as well as a website for a publishing house. Both projects I will post once they are completed. Additionally, I am trying to set up a twitter/blogging documentation platform for the upcoming Government 2.0 Barcamp in Berlin, which is happening in close association with the German Ministry of the Interior and spearheaded by Philipp Mueller and the CPMG. Then I’m also revamping the website of a really good friend of mine who’s also a political consultant, lobbyist and advocat, Wolfgang Gruendinger, who just released a new book which is causing white a noise in the media. Yes there’s also another research project and memo in the pipeline, the semester just hasn’t ended yet, and they just officially renamed the school I’m stying at from Erfurt School of Public Policy to Willy Brandt School of Public Policy (at the University of Erfurt), and we’re going to move to a new building and we will get a new website (where I’m hopefully involved in).

While doing all that, I was transferring most of the websites hosted on my old server to my new one, with a little accident happening in the middle of it, so the whole endeavor was not quite so successful. But all that is of course part of a whole other thing that has been occupying me for the last months: tomorrow’s theatrical release of Quentin Tarantino‘s new movie Inglourious Basterds, a movie that is already highly acclaimed. I was quite busy reporting on the film, attending the Berlin premiere, and doing lots of little maintenance work on The Quentin Tarantino Archives, my website started in 1999 that makes this all possible. The website has since spun off two sister sites, The Spaghetti Western Database and The Deuce, both of which are quite successful and famous as well. Between the three, visitor numbers are probably going to approach 10.000 by the end of the year, if I do a good job with marketing and improving these sites.

That’s it for now, it was about time for a little update. I might do more work on this website this fall.

Update: Both entries are now live, and I’m also working on a blog post about the “feed back culture” which I will also post on Philipp’s blog.