About | Designing Change I’m a design thinker who believes we can change ourselves, our organizations, our communities, our governments, and the world by design. I work at OpenText as Director of Customer Experience. My current focus is on defining what it means to deliver holistic, intelligent experiences throughout the customer lifecycle. Experiences that change minds and spark action. I’ve been immersed in the world of enterprise software for over 20 years. I grew up on the Canadian prairies, studying political science and communications at the University of Alberta, graduating with B.A. in Canadian Studies in 1986. I currently live in Kingston, Ontario, although I’m still a westerner at heart. “My job was to be loyally subversive.”
15 free tools for better online storytelling | News Designs Whoever said “practice makes perfect” was a liar. Human beings have been practicing storytelling for over 35,000 years (that we know of), and there is still plenty of room for improvement. For all intents and purposes, storytelling is the art of making people interested in what you have to say. If you can get them to remember what you’ve said … bonus points. Early storytellers quickly learned that a tale could be far more riveting (and as result, more enduring) if it captured one’s imagination and invoked thought. Every time the skies open up and a new technology arrives on the scene, we take a stab at reinventing one of the oldest traditions known to man. Just like the early storytellers of our past, we have stumbled onto a new way of capturing imagination and invoking thought. The invention of the internet, and the tidal flow of information that followed, has equipped us with a way to tell stories that Neanderthals would have drooled over. Here’s my collection so far:
Automated argument assistance As part of the ITeR project I have been working in, I have developed several experimental systems for automated argument-assistance. Argument-assistance systems are aids to draft and generate arguments, e.g., by administering and supervising the argument process, keeping track of the issues that are raised and the assumptions that are made, keeping track of the reasons adduced, the conclusions drawn, and the counterarguments that have been adduced, evaluating the justification status of the statements made, and checking whether the users of the system obey the pertaining rules of argument. Argument-assistance systems should be distinguished from the more common automated reasoning systems. The latter automatically perform reasoning on the basis of the information in their 'knowledge base'. In this way, an automated reasoning system can do (often complex) reasoning tasks for the user. Currently the following experimental systems can be downloaded: Argue!
5 Creative Uses for Crowdsourcing When Jeff Howe coined the term “crowdsourcing” in a 2006 Wired article his examples were mainly “labor markets for specialized talents,” like iStockphoto, iFilm, and InnoCentive. But the business model of outsourcing to the crowd has grown (as has Howe’s article — he published a book on the topic in 2008). As open-source software developers learned long ago, asking a pool of people to create something can be faster, cheaper, and more accurate than putting a project in the hands of individuals. 1. Traffic jams are one place where you can count on people having unexpected free time. Even when out of a jam, just having the app open adds map and traffic information. The automated system isn’t perfect, but drivers can flag errors, like missing roads, for people to correct online. Waze also provides an opportunity for individuals to earn online fame. 2. Many professionals have a presence on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. 3. 4. 5. More social media resources from Mashable:
20+ Free Press Release Distribution Sites Following up on the advertising toolbox, you also need to let the media (oh if only there was a site about web 2.0 and social networking where you could get covered...) know about your new venture. We've gathered 20+ sites that will help you with getting your press release out in the world for free. And don't forget to check out our post where you can suggest future toolbox topics! 24-7PressRelease.com - Free release distribution with ad-support 1888PressRelease.com - Free distribution, paid services gives you better placement and permanent archiving. ClickPress.com - Distributs to sites like Google News and Topix.net, Gold level will also get you to sites like LexisNexis. EcommWire.com - Focuses on ecommerece and requires you include an image, 3 keywords and links. Express-Press-Release.com - Free distribution company with offices in 12 states. Free-Press-Release.com - Easy press release distribution for free, more features for paid accounts. PR9.net - Ad supported press distribution site.
10 tools that can help data journalists do better work, be more efficient It’s hard to be equally good at all of the tasks that fall under data journalism. To make matters worse (or better, really), data journalists are discovering and applying new methods and tools all the time. As a beginning data journalist, you’ll want to develop a sense of the tools others are using to do the work you admire. You won’t be able to learn them all at once, and you shouldn’t try. More immediately, though, choose one or two tools and make them part of your DNA. 1. Almost every data journalist begins with the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is a nearly universal data format, particularly if you save your data as a plain-text delimited file, such as a comma-separated values file. There are several sites and courses available to help you develop spreadsheet skills. After a while, you may begin to feel the pinch from the limitations of spreadsheets. Here’s a tutorial to get you started. 3. All data sets are “dirty.” 4. Visualization is not decoration. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
The Best Data Mining Tools You Can Use for Free in Your Company Data mining or “Knowledge Discovery in Databases” is the process of discovering patterns in large data sets with artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics, and database systems. The overall goal of a data mining process is to extract information from a data set and transform it into an understandable structure for further use. Here is a simple but fascinating example of how data mining helped dissipate wrong assumptions and conclusions about girls, and take action with tremendous social impact. For long time, the high rate of dropout of girls in schools in developing countries were explained with sociological and cultural hypothesis: girls are not encouraged by indigenous societies, parents treat girls differently, girls are pushed to get married earlier or loaded with much more work than boys. In western countries and in Asia, companies and governments are using data mining to make great discoveries. 1. 2. 3. PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. 6. 7.
Jeff's Search Engine Caffè: Java Open Source NLP and Text Mining tools See my related post on Open-Source Search Engine Libraries. Here are some of the open source NLP and machine learning tools for text mining, information extraction, text classification, clustering, approximate string matching, language parsing and tagging, and more. I've tried to roughly group the tools. However, the categories are quite loose and many of the tools fit into multiple categories. Machine learning and data miningWeka - is a collection of machine learning algorithms for data mining. Apache Lucene Mahout - An incubator project to created highly scalable distributed implementations of common machine learning algorithms on top of the Hadoop map-reduce framework. NLP ToolsLingPipe - (not technically 'open-source, see below) Alias-I's Lingpipe is a suite of java tools for linguistic processing of text including entity extraction, speech tagging (pos) , clustering, classification, etc... OpenFST - A package for manipulating weighted finite state automata.
Investigative Journalism Manuals Looking for tips, tools, and tutorials? The below guides focus on investigative journalism and provide case studies and examples from around the world. Most are available for free, unless indicated otherwise. You can also find our guide to the guides in Chinese and Spanish. Have an addition that you'd like to share? Investigative Journalism Digging Deeper: A Guide for Investigative Journalists in the Balkans: This guide published by BIRN and available for purchase, the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, focuses on how to dig up records and data in the region. Follow the Money: A Digital Guide to Tracking Corruption: This free handbook is published by the International Center for Journalists. Global Investigative Journalism Casebook: This casebook accompanies Story-Based Inquiry (see below). Global Investigative Journalism: Strategies for Support: A survey and discussion of the global spread of investigative journalism by GIJN's David E. Data Journalism Teaching and Training
A journalist's handbook of tips and resources - John Tedesco Web searches / Breaking News / Newspaper, Blog Searches / Opbreaken Records / People Finders / Backgrounding Tools / Experts, Issues / Campaign Finance / Business / Nonprofits / Government / Cops, Courts / Medical / Military / Environment / Crashes, Disasters / Libraries/ Reference/Stats / Maps / Smart Phone Apps, Software / Databases, Visuals / Writing Tools / Daily Checks For journalists — students and professionals alike — it’s easy to get lost in all the tipsheets, books, articles, conferences, and blogs that discuss the latest ways to conduct research and find people. And it’s easy to forget the old-school methods that faded from memory, but might work just as well as the newest trend. There’s a way to keep track of it all. Create your own system, your own tipsheet, in the format that works best for you. Refer to your checklists when you’re working on a story. You can use your checklist throughout your career. Web Searches and Strategies Web strategies: Breaking News Open Records Business
drewrwilson/toolsforactivism: growing list of digital tools for activism things