Re: Convincing ordinary people

Hiya,

On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 7:01 PM, Simon Grant <[email protected]> wrote:
> Just how can we establish an easier pathway for more ordinary people?

Who's ordinary people?

> Can we assess whether a person is "ready" to grasp the concepts at
> any particular level? What might the developmental steps be?

All interesting questions. However, if someone needs to be assessed
"ready", then I think the technology has failed. It needs to be so
simple that anyone can "get it." I've talked about this before;
holding simple ontology sessions with people makes everybody go
"a-ha!" and they realize this stuff is simple, they eagerly jot down
ontologies, think in terms of roles and associations and types, and
then ...

... well, then come the technologies and software that's supposed to
support this process. And frankly, I've never used an easy-to-use TM
system. The UX of them sucks (and *please* point me to some that are
easy!), because most of us are geeks who gets off on back-end
technology. Yeah, yeah, a few exceptions here and there, but as long
as the community is busy talking about technical implementation the
swath of "ordinary people" gets forgotten about.

Topic Maps is a superior technology, I think we all pretty much agree.
Some of our back-end systems are great. But our front-end, our user
interfaces into the concepts we love, suck. It's been said before, and
needs to be said again; when your user interface works great without
ever mentioning topics, types or associations, then you're on to
something. But we laden our systems with such heavy vocabulary that's
it's a too steep ladder for most people to climb in order to even do
the simplest thing.

> To restate the main point, not immediate appeal (it doesn't) but as the
> staged outcomes of a structured educational/developmental process; and not a
> single week's course (though nothing "wrong" with Ontopia's past approach)
> but as a series of steps, each of which is motivating in that it gives
> people some useful outcome, so can be spread out, giving people enough time
> to adapt their ways of thinking along the journey.

Why aren't the community just talking about simple ways of getting
Topic Maps into web pages, simpler constructs that people can use
straight away, without knowing all the nasty details of the various TM
models? People were happy with XTM 1.0 for faaaar too long, and our
thinking in the popular fields have always been slow.

> Maybe that's the challenge. If we want adoption of the technology, we need
> people to understand it, but understanding it takes actual change in the way
> people think, and that takes ... time!
> I hope this makes sense and is helpful. I'd like to work with others to
> think though what might be involved.

Always helpful. A lot of talk in the past have gone along the line of
a simplified TM data model (no variants, merge subject identifiers
with internal identifiers, simpler ways of doing binary associations,
auto-assumptious association role types, and a few others I can't
remember right now, but I'm sure it's a healthy debate ... there was a
little bit of this in regards to the XTM 3.0 proposal as well, a lot
of which I liked)

As to real ways forwards in the hopes of better take-up, I'm not as
positive as some people. Some will say that we shouldn't even sell TM,
but sell solutions to complex problems that perhaps RDF(a) and its ilk
makes a mess out of. Others say, simplified (but mostly compatible)
data model, yet more say to keep going the way we are, some mention
better in-sale to larger companies (and adoption to follow through
that ... there were some Microsoft rumors a fe years ago that got some
excitement in the community, but fizzled out as nothing) ... I don't
know. Old Topic Mappers who used to be rather representative of the
community is completely gone (even the creators of it have
disappeared), which is terribly sad, but in lieu of the exhaustive
work of getting TM going it's also understandable.

It could have been different, though. What if early on WordPress used
TM as part of their data layer? Or WikiPedia used TM for all
relational data? Or Joomla had a TM plugin that did something
interesting? TM people have been early adopters of TM technology, but
not very good at integrating it with other highly used technology
(where the exception is in Sharepoint integration, and that's going
quite well as far as I know?)

Anyway, sorry for rambling, that's my contribution. :)


Regards,

Alex
-- 
 Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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