Across Weirdish Wild Space

From JK Rowling of Harry Potter fame, speaking at this year’s Harvard commencement speech about working at Amnesty International :

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

It’s an excellent address in total to be honest, dwelling on the value of failure and imagination and well worth the time to read or watch.

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

Mike Cohn basically invented the idea of Agile User Stories which is what we’ve started using at Amnesty on specific projects for our Agile development. It’s definitely paid dividends though, like any new introduced technique, has had a few growing pains as we’ve learned new things.

We do have some of the issues he mentions in Prioritizing Your Product Backlog in our agile development, and I’d have to say we don’t spend enough time “grooming the product backlog.” We do spend a good week between iterations, thinking of the focus of the design goals of the next iteration and writing new user stories.

Interestingly, we have noticed as well, the difficulty in prioritizing at the story level rather than epic or theme level so I thought this was a pretty nice presentation.

Really liked the idea of Kano analysis as an additional screen on the product backlog : exciters/delighters, and mandatory/baseline. Particularly the idea of driving that via a simple survey of just a few tens of users – a functional questioning asking how people feel if it’s present and a dysfunctional question asking how people feel if it’s absent.

Bit long, but definitely worth your time if you’re using doing agile development and working with a product backlog (doubly so if your backlog is more of an attic that never gets looked at). Weird little thing, note the slides appear below the video of Mike doing the hand waving and talking which makes full screen not so useful on it. You’ll miss important stuff… so maybe move the browser down 1/8 of the screen before starting the presentation.

(via someone, but I don’t remember who… =< )

As people who tune in regularly to the blog may be aware, the main site for Amnesty International was completely redesigned last year and launched on Dec 10th human rights day.

Since then, and with the advantages the underlying Drupal, CiviCRM and Alfresco core technologies have given us (though we’ve had quite a few problems with alfresco since launching), we’ve been able to do quite a bit more than we were ever capable of doing before with the old platform and made some fundamental gains with the site.

But like everything, new technologies and capabilities mean a bit of learning and some of the things we tried didn’t work exactly as planned, and some initial assumptions about the way the site would be used and our audience didn’t turn out as we expected.

So, the web team and our excellent tech partners, CivicActions have been working hard on making improvements particularly in the areas of layout design, information architecture, usability, landing pages (one thing we found is that the main landing page is not necessarily the only landing page due to google’s near pervasive ability to have people jump to places in the site from search results) and improvements to impact both searchability, cross linking and ultimately SEO to make thing easier for our constituents and the people we are trying to reach to find. There are also a few technical improvements on the end to make things run faster and more reliably.

It’s a big piece of work and a lot of sweat and negotiated has gone into the improvements and carefully thought-out trade-offs.

A big, big hand to the web team and our Civi partners for some great work done and getting it up and out the door.

Contrast the new :

with the original launch :

Would love to hear (constructive) comments back. We’ll be doing a big usability push and working on some persona-based design work in the coming months to carve out the future direction of the site and its focus.

The Human Rights Action Center in NYC just put up a fantastic animation illustrating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the observation of which being one of the cornerstones of what Amnesty works towards, for the 60th anniversary of the document on the 10th of December this year.

Utterly fantastic job in tone, animation, simplicity and even the music.

The action centre has also given over their home page to it in a full browser high fidelity version which looks amazing. Probably won’t be up forever, but looks great if you go there now.

via Cool Hunting

Just a shoutout to my favourite Rails ninjae here in London, the bambinos at New Bamboo(disclaimer: they’re working on projects with both AI UK and with us at the Secretariat right now), who just launched AI UK’s new Protect the Human site after partnering up with Made by Many.

Very nicely executed social networking site based on activism, sharing and discussion. Just wondering what they used to get the base done. Inososhi ? LovdByLess ? They even managed to incorporate the new visual Global Identity and reconcile it with AI UK’s current visual scheme.

Well, couple of bumps getting it out the front door, as well as having to deal with a killer 6 am launch time to coordinate the global media strategy, but the mighty mighty AI web team managed to get the annual report out into the wild and into everyone’s browsers in the wee hours of the morning and well in time for the first of or media blitz interviews with CNN. People still face torture in 81 countries around the world, unfair trials in 54 and cannot speak freely in 77 countries.

Massive props to the early morning hours crew that did the final push to get it out as well as all the people throughout the Secretariat and DUs who made it possible. I think it’s difficult for anyone outside the organization to understand what a massive undertaking this is or how many resources are involved in bringing it to fruition.

At some point, I hope someone is going to feed me and let me go home to sleep…

[Update: 7.22 AM BST – We just moved up to the most viewed story on cnn.com and this articlejust made the home page. The Beeb also gave us a high profile mention as well.

Update 2: 2.52 PM BST – We also managed to get mentioned in the NYTimes and the Guardian Online.]

Hard to watch but important to see.

I’m in Southern Turkey at the moment to audit a site technically for our 2009 international congress. So, it’s a bit strange. I’m at a place where the majority of people are 50+ and into golfing. It feels a bit strange to say the least, but the conference centre here in pretty unbelievable. Their technology infrastructure is on par, if not better than, what I have at head office.

The stranger thing is that I’ve come to a place where, even though I’m on the cusp of Europe, the languages alone make it feel like I’m definitely not in Kansas anymore. Besides Turkish (which thankfully I took some lessons in before I left), the dominant languages amongst the well-heeled holiday crowd here seem to be German and Russian (and other ex-Soviet bloc languages). So, even though the staff virtually all speak English very well (and are floored and amused _and_willing to work with me on my speaking Turkish), it does feel like I’m at the edge of the world I’ve known.

Weirdly, for some reason, and perhaps it’s the unbelievable hospitality and friendliness of the people here, the place seems much nicer than any five star resort I’ve ever stayed at. The smiles are more genuine, the apologies more sincere and the people more open to talk honestly about their lives than at other places I’ve been (admittedly, I haven’t been at that many five store resorts for me to say).

Still, I always feel a little uncomfortable at these places as I feel more at home talking to the staff than the management, and even while people are sunning by the pool and heading for the greens can hear the song of the open road as a low hum in the back of my mind. It can be quiet cause it always knows it’s going to win.

So, it’s my last day here. I’ll be heading to Antalya next and from there slowly drifting westward into the age of antiquities and the wonders of the ancient world…

It’s hard to express how huge a project Amnesty has just pulled off re-architecting its vanguard internet presence, CRM and document management library at the same time, but well… we just went live late yesterday evening in the GMT with the new amnesty.org. We wanted the launch to coincide with International Human Rights Day this morning on December 10th.

The site is totally run on free and open source software and consists of a Drupal and CiviCRM backed main web presence that can feed off our shiny, new open source java-based Alfresco document management system. It sports completely redone Information Architecture and User Experience for ease of navigation and to help specific audiences find what they need and get stuff done and the site also incorporates Amnesty International’s new global visual identity to attempt to unify the organizational brand around the world in the 70+ countries we operate in.

Technically, the project has been one of the most ambitious the organization has ever undertaken and we’re hoping the architecture is the blueprint for a much stronger platform for human rights impact on the web for many of our sections. We’ve got big plans for it (insert maniacal evil supervillain laugh here)...

Honours and tips of the hat to all the organizations that helped us with this : CivicActions, Fortune Cookie, Eva A and finally ImportantProjects. The internet and tech crews at Amnesty have expended an absolute herculean effort on this project for months now and have been like tireless, unthanked superheroes driving this thing through to completion. I’m stoked as to the possibilities we now have before us. We have a really great foundation to build on which is a huge leap forward from the system we’ll now be slowly decommissioning.