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(This is an extended version of the minispeech I gave at BarCampLondon2, "Being understood", and here are the slides just in case you're willing to see some bullet points goodness).

We are failing to make ourselves understood. We can be speaking the same language as our listeners and failing miserably in communicating even simple concepts properly.

I'll show you a couple of real life examples, taken from a web design and development forum:

1. Thread A: New website by xyz.
   When approaching a new website by xyz announcement, different people pay attention to different stuff. Designers which need to work with HTML tend to focus only on the design and the flashiness of the end result. On the other hand, developers and people which are really involved with the bare bones web tend to look minuciously at the implementation details and the use of technology, kind of ignoring the end users of the websites.Hence, you get answers like these ones:
   • Designer: it's so cool! I like the design!
   • Concerned-with-standards person: it sucks! they use tables and it is not valid! they should use layers and CSS only!

   In truth, that website was visually great but the implementation was a terrible abomination.

   Normally there are lots of lurkers in the forums and they tend to read way more than they write. Occassionally, someone which is just starting in web development read this thread and got confusing information, which led to the next thread:

2. Thread B: Help with a CSS design!!!
   I'm trying to do a CSS-with-layers-only design but I'm stuck on something. I'd like to show a list of prices, it should be something like this:

   LOREM	IPSUM
   Dolor	10
   Amet	12

   I thought of solving it with something like this:

   <div class="table">
   	<div class="first_cell">
   		<div class="blue_3px_border">
   			LOREM
   		</div>
   		<div class="blue_3px_border">
   			IPSUM
   		</div>
   	</div>
   	<div class="row">
   		<div class="value">
   			Dolor
   		</div>
   		<div class="value">
   			10
   		</div>
   	</div>
   	<div class="row">
   		<div class="value">
   			Amet
   		</div>
   		<div class="value">
   			12
   		</div>
   	</div>
   </div>

   … but I'm having some problems for getting it all well aligned…

   Obviously someone got terribly confused here. There are real examples, like the main page of any forum using phorum's default skin, which is built using div's instead of using a table for what is a good table use.

And then we also have the magic word: accessible. That word. Each time it's used nobody gets its meaning right. You can find discussions like this one:

• this site is not accessible
• … but I can access the site, what's wrong with it?

… which should start ringing all the bells in our brains but instead of stopping and trying to clarify things before it's too late, we just contribute to increase the uncertainty and fear with more misunderstandings, like for example these ones which are very common:

• cookies will steal all the data from your computer
• javascript will steal and publish your compromised pictures in flickr
  • and tag them
  • and geotag them
  • and send an e-mail to all your friends
  • …
  • ok, just joking!

There are multiple sources of confusion for each person, even technically savvy ones. While browsing any website, we get bombarded with lots of acronyms and terms which not only can be completely unknown to us but also increase the probabilities of misunderstanding the rest of the content, because we get confused and our brain is still trying to figure out what those terms mean. Think of things like:

• RSS
• CC
• XFN
• ATOM
• Tag cloud
• XML
• AJAX
• Web 2.0
• W3C
• WSG
• WAI
• etc

Is this something to worry about? I would say deffinitely YES, specially if we look at some absolutely subjective facts that I've come up with:

• Only 5% of sites do not make my eyes bleed when looking at their source code
• 60% of people claiming they follow standards do not really understand what it means
• Is the result of trying to follow standards worse than a step backwards? Look at all the cases of:
  • divitis < div class="table">< /div>, because someone understood he should just use div's in a tableless design
  • classitis < h2 class="title02"> < /h2>, < div class="h2"> </div>, because people don't understand html semantics nor css really
  • self proclaimed "valid html generators" CMS's and alike, e.g. Joomla!/Mambo, Postnuke, vBulletin, phpBB, subdreamer, etc - the default template from each one of them may pass an automated test but it's not "valid HTML", and not semantic HTML either (which I believe is way more important than passing an automated test). Unfortunately, people with limited technology knowledge may choose one of these believing they are doing the right thing, thus contributing to the global disaster.
• W3c icons are perverted. Most of the times you find them in sites generated with the aforementioned CMS's, when not in governmental websites, and a simple test shows zillions of errors, which creates these two feelings amongst concerned users:
  • they are kind of useless
  • they guarentee nothing

  Ultimately, non-technology people do not have a clue about the meaning of those icons, which are part of the confusing elements I referred to before

So what can we do?

I think we, as technologists, need to take a different approach. Although we are responsible for building the www, it's not us who are going to use it most of the times. Common people are going to enter the content, to play with the systems, to use them, and maybe extend them. If we don't make ourselves understood and aren't able to educate them on how to do things properly, we are failing.

We need to think out of the box, putting ourselves in their place, and trying to understand their goals and concerns. And while some of their concerns may look ridiculous to our eyes, we must be patient and not overreact. It's like the "THIS SITE SUCKS" response to a posting in a forum. It doesn't help, it's not constructive, and just produces frustration.

But convincing people to use something abstract is very, very hard. Nobody's going to take your new and shiny standards-based approach if they have something which works for them and you just have philosophy and words theorising about the benefits of standards and all that stuff. You need to demonstrate movement: be an early adopter, stop theorising and start building practical solutions right now. Show real applications of standards which give real advantage over the old practices.

(Obviously, you'll need to assume risks but that's part of the game.)

Finally, the most important rule of all is: be accessible - yes, YOU! Do not scare people away with a cloud of meaningless (for them) words when they come to you, and speak their language, not yours.

————————————————–

Some context:

This was inspired by an article which Ricardo wrote, "The accessibility is inaccessible". After lots of comments and the discussion which followed outside the blog comments, and reaching a point in which I was almost getting angry I realised there was something very wrong about the whole discussion, and the "Think outside the box" sentence made me understand why me and the rest of the people which was against Ricardo had got it wrong, because we were failing to think in "non developer terms". Extrapolate it a bit more and you've got a fantastic source for a BarCamp talk :-)

And I was there to listen to him! Although I don't have any picture as I forgot the camera and I didn't take any note as I didn't bring a ballpen (or a laptop, as the modern speech-attendants do), I'll try to summarise here the best points of the talk.

The event was held at Westminster University, on the New Cavendish St Campus. It was the first time I visited an english university so I was quite curious about how the ambience was going to be, the installations, etc. It looked all quite modern and a bit posh, but without being overhelming. Our place was the big Lecture Theatre, and it actually resembled a lot all of those american classrooms which I only had seen in the movies. It had that feeling…
Jeff was actually a very nice person, quite accessible and open to any questions and feedback. He promised to transmit all of the feedback to the working team at Amazon, as seems like these speechs are used as a source of feedback from active developers. Something like a pool of ideas for everybody. So the event was more of an open discussion between developers than a university lecture. This wasn't an inconvenient at the beginning, since the seats seemed quite comfy even if they were the austere style of classrooms seatings, but at the end after almost two hours being there my back really hurt and I was willing the people to stop asking questions and allowing me to go home! (This sensation is specially more intense if you just have been sitting all day long in work).

So now to the speech itself… he gave a good overview of how he finished working in what he works and he was quite honest "I really didn't believe I was the best person for my job". After that he introduced Amazon briefly and later, each one of the technologies which Amazon provides to the developers, either paying for the use or not. Obviously that was the longest part of the speech. I loved this sentence: "We want to open up the creativity of the developers". That is quite nice! So, the system roughly works like this: we offer you some information in a way that we both can benefit.

Allow me to remind you that I didn't take any note and my memory is not really reliable so maybe some of the names aren't exactly ok. If in doubt you'd better go and get some info by yourself!

These are the main services that Amazon offers (and I remember):

1. ECS (E-commerce Services). That allows you to retrieve data from Amazon store products. And when they say "data" they are referring to lots of data! Even images. You can then do whatever your creativity allows you in what regards to showing that information. For example as you can track the price variations in the products, there's people which has built like an Stock Market with Amazon product prices. Other people has built an application in which you add something yo tour wishlist and when it reaches a given price (or less) the system sends you an email.
2. Alexa services. You can access Alexa data. This is what is done for example in webs like alexaholic. You can evey buy your own search engine using Alexa services. He explained how this is done, in a way that your code is converted into parallelised code and sent to the search engines, and then you're invoiced depending on how many resources you used with your search engines. This is interesting since it allows you to have a certain functionalities but without having to invest in all the infraestructure and maintenance needed. Terms like Return of investment arise quickly here…!
3. Mechanical Turk. I hadn't listened about that before. It's like a way to use Distributed Human Intelligence. You create "Human Intelligence Tests" (HITs) and put a price and a maximum number of replies. Then people around the world which participate in the project decide to answer your question, being payed the amount you specify. Although this looked stupid at the beginning if you think later is a very powerful medium to get massive results without having to invest in infraestructures. He put an example with image recognition: create a HIT for classifying pictures distinguishing between them having a human face on them or not.
4. S3. I'm pretty sure everybody has listened about this storage service that is provided by Amazon. He did show us some examples built upon it, even applications which run entirely on the client side and have only persistence in S3 servers (an impressive javascript wiki).

Of all of them I would say the one which impressed me more is the Mechanical Turk! I still can't think of an immediate application for my ideas but it left me mumbling around it, which is very cool.

Also somebody asked about accessing imdb data (which Amazon owns too) but Jeff said that although it's been asked more than once, they don't have plans to allow access to that yet.
If you want to find more about all of these services you just need to have a look at Amazon Web Services. There's also the Amazon Web Services blog, which is written by Jeff, where you can find lots of examples to sites which use them, and finally Jeff's blog which obviously is more personal.

I would like to thank Dean Wilson which organized everything. It was a very nice evening :)

UPDATE 23 may 2006: Steven Goodwin provides some pictures of the event. Thanks Steven!

Bueno, finalmente todo acaba saliendo a la luz, que se suele decir… Los chicos de euskadigital han puesto online la conferencia que dí acerca de trackers en la euskal 12. Está codificada en un formato del cual no había oido hablar antes (el Speex) pero ha quedado bastante bien. La parte de música queda un poco saturada y distorsionada, pero… ¿qué le vamos a hacer?, ¡es un codec para voz! En la web de enredando encontrarás instrucciones acerca de cómo descargar la conferencia, instalar plug-ins o lo que haga falta… Y mi conferencia está en otras temáticas, la última de todas :'( (bueno, también puede ser porque fue la última conferencia de la euskal xD).
Si me animo a lo mejor la cuelgo en esta misma web, que está muy mal hacer enlaces a otras páginas (podría haber sido peor: podría haber hecho un hotlink de ésos… o sea, que aún me he portado bien).
Por otra parte, las slides que utilicé también están disponibles para ver (o descargar si utilizas el mítico guardar destino como…, esta vez desde esta misma web, en formato flash mx.

En fin, que las disfrutéis y no os asustéis mucho si a mitad de conferencia paro y se oye la megafonía de la party llamando a control a los jugadores de warcraft 3 xDDD