Integrative Workshop, Spring 2011

School of Information @ University of California, Berkeley

Course Schedule

1) January 24.  Introduction.

Overview of the workshop.

The student team will present the case.

Please read beforehand the student final project report: “Observations of Daily Living” (ODL), by Abrahm Goffman, Matt Gedigian, Annette Greiner, James Tucker, and Nat Wharton (Spring 2010).  Available at;

Observations Of Daily Living Project

2) January 31. The business side (Professors Hansen and Weber).

Business model analysis. User adoption.

Business models. How can this idea be turned into a business and what would be the business model? We will discuss the various options and their pros and cons.

Adoption. How can the startup team get traction on this business—get adoption and diffusion? Getting initial traction and users is often difficult and doom many startups. How do you sign up as many users as possible, given limited resources?

Please read the following two articles on business models and adoption:

“How to write a great business plan,” by William Sahlman, Harvard Business Review, July-August 1997. (Focus on “The Opportunity” section, pages 101-104).

“Reinventing your business model,” by Mark Johnson, Clayton Christensen, and Henning Kagermann. Harvard Business Review, December 2008. (Concentrate on the sections “Business Models: A Definition” and “How Great Models are Built.”)

For the session, the class will be divided into teams. Each team needs to develop a business model and a plan for user adoption, then present in class (see separate assignment sheet handed out on Jan. 24).

Reflections

3) February 7. The user experience side (Professors Parikh and Van House).

User needs, Usability, User interface.

User needs: How can we understand, engage with, and represent users in the design process?  What are the salient aspects of the context of use?  How do we learn more about these aspects?

Design: How can we rapidly develop prototypes that allow us to learn more about our proposed solution?  How do we evaluate these prototypes with actual users?

Methods: Collecting information from and about these groups: assessing and evaluating alternative methods, given the constraints of the project.

Analyzing and presenting this information: summarizing findings, and assessing confidence in their validity.

For each of these categories, what’s your evaluation of the “Observations of Daily Living” project?  What would you have done differently?

Pre-reading:

http://www.usability.gov/methods/index.html Go through both the links to steps in a possible project along the left, and the specific methods linked in the table.

Winograd, T. (1996) Intro. and Ch. 1 in Bringing Design to Software

Rheingold, H. (1990) An interview with Don Norman

Houde, S. and Hill, C. (1997) What do prototypes prototype? From Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction

Photos of class

Reflections

Find the lecture slides here.

4) February 14. The service design side (Professor Glushko).

Eco-system, platform, design stack, two-directional channel.

This session will address the service design strategy and choices for the Observations of Daily Living (ODL) project.

Service System Orientation:

1) How can we analyze the ODL project as a “multi-context service system” and what are the benefits of doing so?

2) How is value created in each of the different contexts?

3) How is this value propagated to and amplified in the other contexts?

The Service  Ecosystem:

1) What other service systems currently intersect with the ODL service system?
2)  What other service systems potentially intersect but currently don’t?
3)  What can ODL do to ensure its successful evolution and growth in its service ecosystem?

Pre-readings:

  • Glushko, Robert J. “Seven Contexts for Service System Design,” in Maglio, P. P., Kieliszewski, C, & Spohrer, J. Handbook of Service Science, 219-249, 2010

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~glushko/glushko_files/SevenContexts.pdf

  • Fall 2009, ISSD Final Paper (Nikolai Kirienko, Christian Schraml, Ayush Khanna): Crohnology.MD

Find the lecture slides here.

5) February 28. Legal assessment (Professor Carver).

Terms of service, software licensing, and forming a business.

1) Terms of Service

Read: Ed Bayley, The Clicks That Bind: Ways Users “Agree” to Online Terms of Service, EFF Whitepaper (Nov. 2009), available at https://www.eff.org/files/eff-terms-of-service-whitepaper.pdf

Discussion Questions:

  1. 1. In working on this project, how many terms of service, terms of use, or other similar agreements did the team likely encounter and (potentially) agree to? Make a list of these.
  2. 2. Can you imagine ways in which one or more of these agreements might limit or interfere with the team’s plans? If so, what should they do?

2) Software Licensing

Discussion Questions:

  1. 3. In working on this project, how many software licenses, open source and otherwise, did the team likely encounter? Make a list of these.
  2. 4. Can you imagine ways in which one or more of these software licenses might limit or interfere with the team’s plans? If so, what should they do?

3) Forming a Business

Discussion Questions:

  1. 5) In working on this project, the team created software, graphics, and potentially trade secrets, patentable inventions, and trademarks. Who owns these and who has a right to use them after graduation? What could the team do in the early stages of the project in order to avoid potential disputes about these issues later?
  2. 6) If the team wants to deploy this project with real users, do they need their own terms of service, privacy policy, and/or software license(s)? How should they handle these?

Please also read:

Storing Our Lives Online

Summary of Health Privacy Provisions

6) March 7. The system design and architecture side (Professor Wilde).

Data model implementation, service implementation, platform strategy.

While a good business model and good service design are necessary requirements to implement a successful information-oriented project, implementation issues still can have a great impact on the chances of success. Implementation issues cover questions of data model implementation (which metamodel is used, what are the planned extensibility and openness points, how well is extensibility and openness planned and supported in both the data model and the code base), service implementation (what is the service implementation technology, what are the implicit assumptions about technologies that have to be supported by any user of the service), and platform strategy (what is the server-side platform, what is the client-side platform, what are the exit strategies for those platforms).

After analyzing the project with regard to design patterns and implementation issues (and looking at some alternatives), we take a more general look at information organization systems, design patterns for them, resulting constraints of the created system implementation, and a possible way for how to make more informed decisions in this complex space by using a number of (mostly qualitative) facets that can be used to describe design patterns and their implementations.

Preparation questions:

  1. What would have been different (better/worse) if the project would have chosen to design and implement their system using semantic web technologies as their back-end? specifically address questions of extensibility and data mining.
  2. What would have been different (better/worse) if the project would have chosen to design and implement their system using XML technologies as their back-end? specifically address questions of extensibility and data mining.

Here is the link for the slides source. You can download them from here.

Pre-reading:

* Cesare Pautasso, Olaf Zimmermann, Frank Leymann: Restful web services vs. “big” web services: making the right architectural decision. WWW 2008: 805-814. http://www.jopera.org/docs/publications/2008/restws

* Cesare Pautasso and Erik Wilde, “Why is the Web Loosely Coupled? A Multi-Faceted Metric for Service Design”, 18th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2009), Madrid, Spain, April 2009. http://dret.net/netdret/publications#pau09a

* Erik Wilde, “Linked Data and Service Orientation”, 8th International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC 2010), San Francisco, California, December 2010. http://dret.net/netdret/publications#wil10a

7) March 14. Workshop summary.

You will be assigned to teams. Each team needs to develop a coherent alternative way of doing this project/creating this idea. You need to decide on

  • – business model and adoption
  • – user interface decisions
  • – service design
  • – data model and service implementation
  • – legal approach

The key here is to make sure that this is a consistent plan—all pieces will work together.

You will need to show how that is accomplished.

Download the assignment from here.

Find the lecture slides here.