Gotze.eu

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  • Danish elections

    In case you missed the news, last Tuesday the Danish Prime Minister called for general elections on 8 February.

    One of the features of the campaigns is the increased use of the internet. Blogging has taken on: Venstre (the ruling Liberal Party) has turned their website into a blog. The leader of Socialistisk Folkeparti (the Socialist People’s Party) has started Holger K’s blog, a standard TypePad-blog.

    Walgblog, one of the independent election blogs, monitors the use of blogs in the campaigns, and counts 28 blogs out there by candidates, so it is far from widespread, but significant enough.

    I have started an election blog too: IT i valgkampen (IT in the election campaign). Although it is tempting, I will not make any personal/political/professional comments there. I guess that’s one of the rules in the life of a civil servant …

    So, leaving IT-politics aside for a while, my general feeling about the general elections in general is such that reference.com doesn’t have words enough to describe how bellicose, bitchy, brusque, cantankerous, churlish, contentious, contrary, cross, disobliging, disputatious, eristic, grouchy, ill-natured, irritable, nasty, obnoxious, offensive, peevish, pettish, petulant, querulous, rude, snappy, surly, twitty, ugly, unfriendly, ungracious, unlikable, unpleasant, uptight, waspish, and whiny the overall campaign has been so far in some areas (culture, environment) or how atrocious, cruel, demoniac, devilish, fiendish, impious, monstrous, nasty, serpentine, shocking, unhallowed, unpleasant, vicious, vile, villainous and downright wicked it has been in other areas (integration, employment, etc).

    440hz
    440hz.dk: “Denmark’s First Non-Partisan Election Movie”.

    Technorati Tags: , ,

  • Personomies and folksonomies

    Everyone is talking and tagging about Folksonomy these days. All my tagging experiments show that I too have jumped the bandwagon.

    So, we have taxonomies and controlled vocabularies, lots of them (and soon even more of them), but we also have folks, who can’t be bothered to use them, but actually do want some order in the chaos, and then we get folksonomies.

    A folksonomy represents simultaneously some of the best and worst in the organization of information. Its uncontrolled nature is fundamentally chaotic, suffers from problems of imprecision and ambiguity that well developed controlled vocabularies and name authorities effectively ameliorate. Adam Mathes (2004) Folksonomies – Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata

    I am close to getting to a state where I am satisfied, for now, with my GotzeTagged, in which I make use of folksonomies (fetches del.icio.us content etc.). As I worked on GotzeTagged, and tried to describe it as something more exciting than a link index, it just cried out being called a . I have no idea where that came from, but I like it 🙂
    Google shows that someone has registred the domain name, but also that nobody has written about personomy. Until now.

    A personomy is “my folksonomy”: Here’s my del.icio.us personomy (‘all tags’). I guess there can be big and small personomies. I also guess that the Zeitgeist has a huge influence not only on the folksonomies, but also on our personomies.

    Why personomy?
    So when
    Tim Bray     asks:

    What am I doing categories for? What is anybody doing categories for? What is everybody doing categories for?

    The answer is: It’s all about our personomies.

    Liz Lawley notes that Clay argues that detractors from wikipedia and folksonomy are ignoring the compelling economic argument in favor of their widespread use and adoption, and concludes:

    Perhaps. But I’m arguing that it’s just as problematic to ignore the compelling social, cultural, and academic arguments against lowest-common-denominator classification. I don’t want to toss out folksonomies. But I also don’t want to toss out controlled vocabularies, or expert assignment of categories. I just don’t believe that all expertise can be replicated through repeated and amplified non-expert input.

    I agree.

    Louis Rosenfeld describes folksonomies as metadata ecologies, and rightly advises not to take an either/or perspective on folksonomies and taxonomies (more controlled metadata vocabularies):

    Please don’t; they are simply two of the many useful approaches to helping users find information.

    I now sit here and wonder how much the concept of personomy can be seen as a useful approach to helping users find what they are after.

    The architecture astronauts tend to be very much “either/or” when relating to folksonomy-taxonomy.

    Personomies and personas
    We have long known that architects can get a kick out of thinking in terms of Personas and Use Cases. Architects talk about persona-influenced design perspectives, the customer decision-making process, and prescriptive user engineering. Important stuff. But is it enough? Well, enough for what?

    Use cases are like chocolate: They’re delicious, but probably not enough to live of.

    Personomy is about using a empathetic focus on personas.

    Personomy is like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re going to get.
    –Forrest Gotze

  • Tagging Patterns

    My friend Steven Clift of DoWire.Org is working on Unique keywords for the e-democracy field. He reacted to my tag-proposal for eGovernment, and noted that he has been using “e-government” instead of “egovernment”. We’ve landed on a compromise: Steve will swap to “egovernment”, but I must use “e-democracy”. Done. Mind you, it seems MovableType excludes the “-” in the category names, so I don’t know what Technorati will pick up.

    Recommended tag:
    Deprecated tag: edemocracy

  • Tagging EA

    GotzeTagged: Enterprise Architecture.

    I use the tag , and the category Enterprise_Architecture (which itself becomes a tag then, and, I think, the tag I send to del.icio.us when posting to GotzeTagged.

    Again, we see some ambiguity in the tagging approach. Examples:

    Del.icio.us: Enterprise+Architecture and Enterprise_Architecture?
    Technorati: enterprise+architecture or enterprise+architecture?

    Tags should be one-word constructs, I read on del.icio.us. Does that mean that Enterprise+Architecture is the tag construct to use?

  • Tagging eGovernment

    ‘Tags’ have become popular with services like del.icio.us, and now Technorati Tags ( explained). This has prompted me to play around with tags (GotzeTagged, below).

    Tags
    A tag is here understood as a simple category name, or a bit of metadata about whatever it is about.

    With del.icio.us and the likes, tagging becomes a social activity, and that is what makes these new services interesting. And challenging …

    For example, which of the following tags is “correct”: , or ?

    I’ll be using egovernment. This is the name of the relevant blog category here, with Dave and with Phil.

    If your blog tool/CMS does not support categories/tags, include the following code in your blog:

    <a xhref="http://technorati.com/tag/egovernment" mce_href="http://technorati.com/tag/egovernment" rel="tag">egovernment</a>

    GotzeTagged
    I have been running GotzeLinked for quite a while (since 1997 or so), so I have been “tagging” the web for quite a while. One of the lasting challenges is about the choice of categories, and the relations between the categories. One of the most recently added categories is GotzeTagged: eGovernment.

    GotzeTagged makes use of various external services, such as del.icio.us, MSN News, and Amazon (UK). I’m still working on some improvements to the user interface.

  • EAxam

    My EA course at ITU had exams today/yesterday. Some (fortunately most) performed very well, but others didn’t do that good at all (one failed). Surprisingly, we did not have any in between. I guess one could crudely conclude that either you get it or you don’t. But as I reminded some of the students who didn’t do well, EA itself is not “binary”. Maybe, however, studying EA academically is more categorical, or at least, writing a relatively short, yet substantial, academic report for the exam is somewhat of a craft that you need to learn. Several students are practitioners and very experienced, also in the architecture field, so they faced the challenge of “being academic” (more refective) about their own situation.

    In the coming semester, T8 Spring 2005 will be offered as normal classes on a weekly basis. The netbased format proved too challenging for both students and the teacher. In additon to the classes, I will use my wiki/blog-solution.

    I have revised the list of course material, but will continue using Carbone as the main textbook. In addition, some Zachman, Herzum, Hagel and more, almost ad libitum. I use to tell the students that one of the challenges enterprise architects face is that they are easy victims of information overload, so they might as well get used to it …

  • GotzeTWiki

    Phil Windley opens 2005 with the launch of Windley’s Techometria. Technometry is the ‘measure of a skill or art’.

    Like Phil, I’ve been spending some time on getting ready for next semester’s teaching. I will introduce the students to the T8 Blog and the T8 Wiki. I will use the blog as a news feed, and the wiki as an open platform for everyone related to the course, but of course mainly the students. I will ask the students to use the wiki to present their projects, and share thoughts and ideas.

    I have also opened a wikiweb for my thesis students. We are going to arrange some seminars, and I thought the wiki would be a good addition.

    I will keep the wiki open for anyone. I do request registration for contributers, in the hope I can avoid wiki spam. I think I will use the wiki for a few other purposes …

  • 2004 – a year in review

    About a year ago, I predicted that the 2004 eGov challenge would be digital identity management. According to Digital ID World Magazine, digital identity management did indeed hit the fast track. That it’s been a “hot” issue became clear when the Gillmor Gang got geeky with Phil Windley over it. Also in eGov, we have seen a growing interst in the field, but it has not been singled out as much as I had expected in the eGov domain. I’m sure it’ll come in 2005.

    To round up 2004, here is my personal list of highlights in e-government and enterprise architecture, and a few more general ones:

    eGov question(s) of the year

    Are leaders of governments losing interest in e-Gov and its government to citizen, government to business, and government to government objectives. Is the job so complex that it will take another 20 years to reach the end state; and, if so, who has the staying power? Is the energy of the last six years escaping like the air in a leaky balloon? From Frank at i-gov

    Good questions, Frank.

    eGov programme of the year
    Canada’s Business Transformation Enablement Program (BTEP), which does not brand itself as an eGov programme per se, but is exactly the kind of programme that takes us from eGov to iGov. Well done, Gary and Neil and all.

    As much as I like the Canadian GSRM, however, I take advantage of the fact that I do this list, and give my office and the Danish e-Government the prize for the eGov reference model of the year with our Interoperability Framework.

    eGov memorandum of the year
    Swedish Statskontoret’s Public administration in the e-society, a shortened version of Den offentliga förvaltningen i e-samhället.

    eGov advertisement of the year
    FirstGov.gov’s Uncle Sams TV Public Service Announcement

    Boldest move by a new EU member state
    Poland and Wlodzimierz Marcinski, the Polish Minister of Science and Information Technology, for standing up against software patents. Thank You, Poland.

    eGov survey of the year
    The UN Global E-government Readiness Report 2004. Denmark comes in second (to the US) in overall readiness, and enters the top 10 on e-participation (whatever brings us there, I wonder). Other suveys during the year are also noteworthy: Accenture, that said that Denmark has reached a plateau, and IBM/Economist, where Denmark is also found to be the e-readiest.

    EA book of the year
    Jane Carbone‘s IT Architecture Toolkit is my new favorite book on enterprise architecture.

    IT governance book of the year
    Peter Weill and and Jeanne Ross brought us IT Governance: How Top Performers Manage IT Decision Rights for Superior Results.

    EA article of the year
    Ruth Malan and Dana Bredemeyer: Guiding Principles for Enterprise Architects.

    Best EA-student blog
    Signe Wagner. I’ve suggested all my students to run blogs. Signe has taken up this challenge, and has created a beautiful blog.

    Takeover of the year
    There were many mergers and acquisitions in 2004. To close the year up, Gartner buys META Group.

    Browser of the year
    I’ve rediscovered the web with Firefox.

    Email service of the year
    Gmail. Google’s email service is not only a killer app in itself, but also a taste of what we can expect in terms of rich web environments.

    News aggregator of the year
    Bloglines. My subscriptions.

    Most annoying trend on the internet
    Spam. Blog comment spam takes the special prize. It is sad that innovations like Trackback are suffering.

    I have reopened for comments here in the blog, but have taken several measures to avoid spam. Let’s sse if it works.

  • Where’s the best e-democracy project or strategy?

    My friend Steven Clift has launched a new initiative: E-democracy Best Practices – Submit, Draft, Discuss. On this new project site you can:

    1. Recommend an E-democracy Project or Strategy (Best before 31 DEC 2004)
    2. Commend an Online Feature or E-democracy Practice (Best before 24 DEC 2004)
    3. Nominate “Most E-democracy Enabled Governments”
    4. Nominate “Most Wired Politicians”
    5. Share a Local E-Activism Story
    6. Join the E-democracy Best Practices Leadership Team
    7. Help draft or comment on Briefs and Case Studies (Honorariums available for accepted topics)
    8. Get a preview of the new DoWire blog and wiki system

    In particular, Steve is looking for “undiscovered” e-democracy projects outside the UK with relevant lessons for the UK local authorities. Steve has earlier identified the leading e-democracy practices, and found that most projects don’t make a fuss about themselves, perhaps because those closest to innovation often don’t realize they are ahead or in fact innovators. Help Steve uncover the stories and case studies to be told: Submit suggestions.

    For updates on this UK Local E-democracy National Project-funded exploration of global e-democracy best practices, as well as other e-democracy projects around the world, join the 2800+ member Democracies Online Newswire e-mail announcement list and new blog. Also note these UK-based projects:

    For more information on the UK Local E-democracy National Project, watch these sites.

  • Search and suggest

    If you read any news or blogs around, I’m sure that you’ve heard of Google Suggest. Yet another feature in Google. In contrast to the feature offered in our browsers where it remembers our own searches, this is a server-based feature, that sort of captures the zeitgeist, and for example (try it) shows that scaringly many spell egovernment as “egoverment“.

    I’m happy now to introduce a new feature in GotzeLinked: Gotze Suggest. The search form shows previous searches and the number of results. Should work in most browsers. It is not quite a fast as googlesuggest, so have a bit of patience.

    Thanks Yogi.