Tweak the tweet: a lesson in standards development
This should be interesting for all those interested in standards development. Standards development for me is all about consensus building (to state the bleeding obvious) but the way consensus (or at least more or less general agreement) is reached on many of our standards can take months or years even. A justification for the standard may be developed, use-cases created, issues are examined in intricate detail by experts. There can be 'raging' academic debate over minor nuances in terms and expressions. Email lists play host to (sometimes) furious and boisterous? discussions between leading proponents of obscure points of view. Drafts are published, votes are taken, there may even be a face-to-face meeting in some exotic location. Editors are engaged to produce faultless works of academic excellence and the standard may eventually be published (with an appropriately important looking version number) to some obscure website tucked away behind a payment gateway and safely out of reach of its intended audience.
Actually, some standards are even open (need to carefully define what open means here) to the 'public' - or at least free to access if you can find them. Using, or implementing them can also be a major challenge. The pursuit of academic excellence and absolute correctness leaves us with documents that are incredibly difficult for us mere mortals.
OK- enough of the satire, but hopefully it illustrates a point or two. Many of our standards do take quite some time to develop and experts have to be employed to ensure that this often difficult work gets done correctly. Usability is also a concern for some of us who have tried to implement various (not all) standards and specifications.
Now, getting to the point of this post - crowdsourcing and the 'wisdom of the crowd' is becoming quite well accepted. The ability to get things done very quickly using the power of the Web and the enthusiasm of the crowd is amazing to watch. What has this got to do with standards?
Well...take a look at what is going on over at Project Epic. From their website, Project Epic are:
information scientists, computer scientists and computational linguists at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of California, Irvine. We specialize in societal transformation in conjunction with technology use; computer-mediated communication studies; software engineering and architectures; information security; network security and computational linguistics with a deep commitment to understanding the domains for which we design and study.So what are they up to and what have they done? The ReadWriteWeb blog has this great post on Project Epic's 'Tweak the Tweet' initiative where they have got together with a bunch of hackers from around the world to create a new hashtag syntax for Twitter for use in emergencies such as that in Haiti. From the RWW post, the syntax is pretty easy to learn and gives a few examples:
Every tweet should contain at least one main tag like #need [explain need], #offering or #injured [name]. You can find a full list of main tags here. In addition, tweets can also have data tags like #name [name], #loc [location] or #contact [email, phone etc.]. These tweets can also contain often used keywords that don't need the hashtag sign like food, supplies, road, hospital or help. Examples Here are some real-world examples of this new syntax being used in Haiti: * #haiti #need security #loc General Hospital PAP #contact @thehatian * #haiti #need water #loc Orphanage Foyer de Sion #contact @robinbauer #src @AnnCurry * Can you deliver beans rice water to orphanage? #Haiti #Need Food #Contact: @childhopeintl #Loc: Delmas 75, Rue Cassagnol #14, PaP BLESS YOUThe Project Epic website has more details on the initiative here. This 'standard' of course is not a real one as it hasn't gone through all the ratification processes by formally recognised standards bodies yet, like many other examples, may become a defacto standard - one which the crowd actually intentionally uses. The Twitter hashtag itself and other elements of Twitter (eg DM, @ etc) are other great examples.
Now, it should be said that we use standards and specifications all the time without even knowing it - I wouldn't even be able to count or identify the number of standards in place to support the writing of this post for example - but I am not intentionally using all of them. Like many great standards they are just there, implemented somewhere in the background enabling me to post something that could be read almost instantly in almost any place in the world. However, in writing this post, I have only used two bits of a standard (I should say that for this post I am not distinguishing between a standard and a specification) intentionally and overtly - the rest are behind buttons etc in my wysiwyg HTML editor. They have been the italic tag and the break tag in HTML.
Back to the twitter tags, something has to be said about the willingness of the crowd to intentionally and quite willingly use those 'standardised' tags, and that is their simplicity and usability.
'Tweak the Tweet' looks like a great initiative and it will be interesting to see how it is adopted. In a disaster situation it will be interesting to see if those involved have the poise to remember its syntax when they are sending out their tweets. I guess the real use will be by applications that may be developed to support their use. They have been developed so that computer applications can easily interpret the tweets so we need applications that can support both the creation of the tweets and the reading of them (I feel an iPhone application coming on).
So now to the really important point of this post - how long has it taken to develop this 'standard'? Really it has happened 'in the blink of an eye' when compared to general standards development. Likewise with Twitter tags in general. The crowd is able to build consensus incredibly quickly when the need arises and as can be seen, it is quite good stuff. It is relevant, easy to use and can have amazing adoption rates. The RWW post even mentions the word 'metadata' - Amazing! Normally I would expect any standard or specification involving 'metadata' would take an age to develop. There are some important lessons to be learned here for standards developers. While many standards and specifications require enormous amounts of rigour and examination, it is interesting for us to look at what can be achieved in a very short period of time when the need arises and we have a motivated 'crowd'.
