Taking part in working groups both at ICANN, ISOC, but also IETF, I spend a fair amount of my time in conference calls.
Each organisation has its own preferred tool for online collaboration. Whilst some of them involve contracts with a commercial provider, others are "free" - as in they might be test systems or freeware. If all else fails, we sometimes use Skype. But finding a proper tool that can let you share documents and presentation material, speak to each other in a meaningful way, interface with the real world, as well as allow for simultaneous text input is easier said than done. The bottom line is that we've *always* has a problem with communications.
The VMEET working group at IETF has been formed specifically to find a solution to this problem, whether it is evaluating what's out there, or drawing up specifications for a new set of tools. Its findings risk being very helpful for other organisations, since an increasing amount of collaborative work is required if the Internet model of governance is to be sustained. For more information on this exciting challenge, go to: https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/vmeet
That said, Google seems to have come up with its own version of online collaboration. Not quite ready yet, but there's a preview on:
http://wave.google.com
It looks like it has potential, especially with extensions, since it follows the Open Source concept.
Showing posts with label KM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label KM. Show all posts
Sunday, 9 August 2009
50 great examples of data visualization
The following link is a particularly well researched/documented blog entry about data visualization.
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/50-great-examples-of-data-visualization/
It has links to many very interesting visualization engines and concepts. If, like me, this sort of this fascinates you, I recommend setting aside a few hours before you embark on looking at this page. :-)
Visualisation is, of course, a major part of our cognitive processes and we, as humans, will probably require increasingly complex visualization tools to enable us to make a more complex world easier for our limited minds to understand. But looking through many of these examples, it also struck me that a great deal of analysis often took place before visualization was even possible, and I wonder whether some of the examples are not merely enabling our mind to understand, but also open the door for machines to understand each other.
How? By searching for ways to format data in a form which can be read and displayed by a machine (after all, graphical display tools are run by computers), we are stumbling on the possibility of that formatted data to be used in other ways than just being displayed on a graph.
Another thing which struck me is the worth of data visualization in reminding us of the past. I had lunch earlier this week with a French philosopher who advised me that unfortunately, one common human trait is the ability to forget the past too easily. As a result, mistakes are repeated and only a fraction of knowledge is transmitted in the long term. Trend patterns are completely obliterated.
Take a piece of software like "Flare", for example, used by some of the data visualization examples above, but not directly referred to by the article I point to above. One example which I was particularly impressed about was their "Job Voyager":
http://flare.prefuse.org/apps/job_voyager
Can you see which jobs you should avoid because they are, literally, dead ends? :-) Yes, reminding us of the past can point us to the future.
I hope you enjoy the visualizations.
http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/06/50-great-examples-of-data-visualization/
It has links to many very interesting visualization engines and concepts. If, like me, this sort of this fascinates you, I recommend setting aside a few hours before you embark on looking at this page. :-)
Visualisation is, of course, a major part of our cognitive processes and we, as humans, will probably require increasingly complex visualization tools to enable us to make a more complex world easier for our limited minds to understand. But looking through many of these examples, it also struck me that a great deal of analysis often took place before visualization was even possible, and I wonder whether some of the examples are not merely enabling our mind to understand, but also open the door for machines to understand each other.
How? By searching for ways to format data in a form which can be read and displayed by a machine (after all, graphical display tools are run by computers), we are stumbling on the possibility of that formatted data to be used in other ways than just being displayed on a graph.
Another thing which struck me is the worth of data visualization in reminding us of the past. I had lunch earlier this week with a French philosopher who advised me that unfortunately, one common human trait is the ability to forget the past too easily. As a result, mistakes are repeated and only a fraction of knowledge is transmitted in the long term. Trend patterns are completely obliterated.
Take a piece of software like "Flare", for example, used by some of the data visualization examples above, but not directly referred to by the article I point to above. One example which I was particularly impressed about was their "Job Voyager":
http://flare.prefuse.org/apps/job_voyager
Can you see which jobs you should avoid because they are, literally, dead ends? :-) Yes, reminding us of the past can point us to the future.
I hope you enjoy the visualizations.
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