CETIS MDR SIG notes, and thoughts on FeedForward

Detailed notes from yesterday’s Metadata and Repositories SIG Meeting at Birkbeck are now available on Wetpaint. My post yesterday forgot to thank organiser Neil Fegen and the team from Heriot-Watt, who ended up having a nightmare journey from Edinburgh down to London when their plane was cancelled and re-routed to a different airport! They heroically managed to arrive in time for the afternoon’s developer demo session.

The standout presentation for the meeting, for me, was Scott Wilson’s FeedForward. Lots of reasons why, but basically, I think Scott “just gets it” with regard to personal information management needs, and he’s an excellent visual communicator. (Best visual metaphor of the day: Scott’s slide of a cricket with raised antennae, representing the researcher constantly scanning his/her environment for information). Basically, FeedForward is a desktop application that lets individuals manage a huge variety of information “streams” – borrowing from Dave Winer’s metaphor of the “river of news”. These “streams”, or “feeds”, are not necessarily RSS/Atom feeds, however; they can be a wide variety of digital docs/objects. The beauty is that all this is designed to enable “push” as well as “pull”: users can pull in a specific feed, and then re-publish it to an external location (such as a blog, or even a repository). The team has placed great emphasis on usability, having taken the decision to hide as much of the details of “how the system works” from its users as possible. Good call. That said, the FeedForward interface is not without its quirks (including quite a few control conventions borrowed from audio systems - lots of “slider” buttons), but their very familiarity lends them an intuitive quality that is helpful. I was intrigued by the way you can catch glimpses of this project's debt to the previous PLEX project, and by the similarities / differences in approach to personal information management between FeedForward and e-portfolios. FeedForward expects -- and is structured to enable -- users' dyanamic interaction with information.