AN: Innovative genealogy information graphic

Yes, RootsTech was a month and a half ago, but this was important and I need to write about it.

I went to the lightning talks at RootsTech and saw a 5m presentation from Antoninus Niemiec, an MFA student from New York working on genealogy visualization. He called his presentation "Not Your Father's Chart".

With permission, here are two fuzzed views of the charts so you can get the overall picture.

Plate A is a traditional ancestry chart:


Plate B is the same ancestry, laid out in this new and innovative way:


Here is a close-up of a given family:


Antoninus presented a very innovative information graphic of a 5 generation ancestry. At a high level, his work is firmly grounded in Tufte's information graphic design priciples. There were no wasted pixels and no chartjunk, just content.

It was organized with a radial feel to it, with the descendant family clusters in the center, and ancestor family clusters radiating outward toward the edge of the page. Each family cluster was organized into two tree-rings, one for the father, one for the mother-and-children. Each tree ring meant a decade, birth and death dates were plotted on a 360 degree circle, angle determined my how far into the year the event happened.

He told me he is working on publishing this work on his website. He said he did it in Adobe InDesign using Javascript with some hand-tweaking afterwards.

This spawned an interesting conversation afterward about the possibility for a visualization challenge for RootsTech 2012:

• fixed content corpus
• released shortly before the conference
• awards in traditional media (print, web, video)
• award for most innovative visualization, regardless of format

BTW, this was the same lightning round that Tevya talked about.

Flesh pots & Resistance to change

I was reading the account of Moses leading the Isrealites out of Egypt. After all of the miracles that accompanied the exodus comes the account of the net sum response of the Isrealites (Exodus 16:2-3):

2 And the whole congregation of the children of Israel murmered against Moses and Aaron in the wilderness:

3 And the children of Israel said unto them, Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.

I'm sure that my response to inspired leadership has sometimes sounded like this. And I'm very much willing to both admit that and abandon that position.

In stark contrast, is the message contained in Pres. Henry B. Eyring's conference talk, Trust in God, Then Go and Do. In particular, another scripture comes to mind (1 Nephi 3:7):

7 And it came to pass that I, Nephi, said unto my father: I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandments unto the children of men, save he shall prepare a way for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commandeth them.

Willingness to move forward and change and follow inspired leadership is a quality that I value, and that I seek to emulate & encourage.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.7

Excited for MWRC

I am so stoked for MountainWest RubyConf this year. Last year was great, but I can feel it in the air that this year is going to be sooo much better!

Developing Organization Change Skill

When I was trying to describe what it takes to do a good rollout of something new across a larger software development organization, I came up with a chant that made a lot of sense:

Here's the old

Here's the new

Here's the difference

Here's what you can do

Yesterday, I was faced with frustration that came from feeling incapable of doing the rollout tasks that were my lot. And I wanted other people to be capable of rolling new stuff across the development organization, too.

I asked myself:

How am I going to get other people to be capable of rolling new stuff out?

That is when the idea came.

So I think that a successful rollout formula is:

1. presenting all 4 things in sequence, and
2. making it easy for people who are affected by the rollout to take the next step

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.5

Reality Vacuum

A place where people have chosen to ignore a certain part of reality, and where that choice to ignore is embedded in the culture of that place.

I know I've occupied such a space, and even contributed to the vacuum. However, once I realize what's going on, I always want out.

To some degree, each person in the world has to keep up in one way or another. Some just have a better feel for keeping in touch with current reality, and what to do when they're not.

Personally, I want to improve in my ability to close the loop better and faster.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.4

Long Term Envisioning

What do people mean when they do:

Long Term Planning

I don't know what that means.

The following are my guesses as to what "Long Term Planning" really means:

1. An exercise in stating some future desired state with no idea how to get there.
2. An explicit agreement that you will diverge from reality at some near point in the future.
3. An exercise in exploring organizational identity.

For conversation types #1 and #2, see the "Planning is guessing" chapter in Rework (p 19). OK, that takes care of 80% of the Long Term Planning situations.

I think that conversation type #3 is a very important conversation that typically gets way too little time. Devoting time to a pragmatic answer to "Why does this organization exist?" can produce a shared vision that can make everyone's work much more coordinated. See the last paragraph on page 58 of "A simpler way" (and subsequent paragraphs) for an inspiring discussion of this topic. You can search for "58" inside this book on Amazon as of Aug. 2010 and read a couple pages.

Each person's individuality can stop going in n directions and start converging on producing real stuff that satisfies the "Why?" question. If it's worthwhile to answer "Why?" with real stuff delivered to the real world, then it continues to be worthwhile to be associated with an organization.

If it becomes impossible to reasonably answer "Why?" or becomes impossible to actually deliver real answers to that question to real people, that is the departure point at which you have to start looking for some other organizational affiliation.

For me, the answer to "Why?" for FamilySearch software development is contained in Doctrine and Covenants 128:24 and continues to be a rich source of inspiration for interesting and valuable software contribution.

Playing catch-up

The world is changing all the time, which implies the requirement of constant learning to keep current. In other words, you are always behind.

If you accept the fact that you are always going to be behind, in one way or another, the problem then becomes more tractable. How, in a limited amount of time, can you bootstrap yourself into a learning environment where you can catch up enough to get something working?

The core questions are:

1. What to learn? (because of the limited time, you know you have to be selective)
   
2. How to go about it? (because of the limited time, and the constant churn, you have to be a quick learner/applier)
   

Andy Hunt wrote a book about pragmatic learning. Clayton Christensen wrote several books about disruptive innovation. The Wikipedia contributors wrote an article about the term "learning curve". The ideas in these books can be instructive.

I have my own opinion about the matter.

My answers to the core questions are:

1. Look around and get creative about how you can apply about-to-be-stable newer technology to the software problem at hand.
2. Climb the dynamic learning curve by becoming an "early adopter".

Being an "early adopter" is a productive approach to bootstrapping yourself into a rich learning environment. The key to quality learning is keeping it real & experiential. And trying new technology out and trying to apply it to the task at hand is certainly real & experiential.

The part that makes this whole learning equation possible is that the "innovators" actually need the "early adopters" in order to gain traction and stability. In an open world, that means that you can use early adoption as a means by which it is always possible to inject yourself into a rich and productive learning environment.

After I play this game for a while and become skilled at it, I'm guessing there will be a point at which I will want to have a talk with Paul Graham about a startup. Or maybe I will care about being an innovator in my family more than being famous in a technical sphere. Who knows.

Counterpoint

Donald Knuth is the classic example of someone whose life mission specifically excludes playing month-to-month catch-up. Oh, and by the way, that page returns the following HTTP header (in 2010):

Last-Modified: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 04:39:22 GMT

Even the innovation-encouraging Paul Graham wrote an article about addiction that cautions about blanket acceptance of technical improvements.