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"A central theme in much of my research and advocacy is ensuring attention to ethical values becomes an integral part of the conception, design, and development of information systems. Various frameworks have been developed to help pursue this goal (ie, value-sensitive design, values at play, critical technical practice), which can collectively be termed Values-In-Design (VID). Broadly, VID seeks to broaden the criteria for judging the quality of technological systems to include the advancement of moral and human values, and to proactively influence the design of technologies to account for such values during the conception and design process. VID has been a motivating factor in my research on vehicle safety communication technologies, Web search engine privacy practices, and book digitization projects, just to name a few examples, and my commitment to achieving VID has also lead to explorations of some of its challenges"
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- No, this doesn’t fit our priorities. If it is early in the project, you should make the argument for why the current priorities are good, but hear people out on why other priorities might make more sense. They might have good ideas or need clarity on the goals. But do force the discussion to be relative to the project priorities, and not the abstract value of a feature or bug fix request. If it is late in the project, you can tell them they missed the boat. Even if the priorities suck, they’re not going to change on the basis of one feature idea. The later you are, the more severe the strategy failure needs to be to justify goal adjustments.
- No, only if we have time. If you keep your priorities lean, there will always be many very good ideas that didn’t make the cut. Express this as a relative decision: the idea in question might be good, but not good enough relative to the other work and the project priorities. If the item is on the priority 2 list, convey that it’s possible it will be done, but that no one should bet the farm assuming it will happen.
- No, only if you make <insert impossible thing here> happen. Sometimes, you can redirect a request back onto the person who made it. If your VP asks you to add support for a new feature, tell him you can do it only if he cuts one of his other current priority 1 requests. This shifts the point of contention away from you, and toward a tangible, though probably unattainable, situation. This can also be done for political or approval issues: “If you can convince Sally that this is a good idea, I’ll consider it.” However, this can backfire. (What if he does convince Sally? Or worse, realizes you’re sending him on a wild goose chase?)
- No. Next release. Assuming you are working on a web site or software project that will have more updates, offer to reconsider the request for the next release. This should probably happen anyway for all priority 2 items. This is often called postponement or punting.
- No. Never. Ever. Really. Some requests are so fundamentally out of line with the long-term goals that the hammer has to come down. Cut the cord now and save yourself the time of answering the same request again later. Sometimes it’s worth the effort to explain why (so that they’ll be more informed next time). Example: “No, Fred. The web site search engine will never support the Esperanto language. Never. Ever.”
Master the many ways to say no
Sometimes, you will need to say no in direct response to a feature request. Other times, you’ll need to interject yourself into a conversation or meeting, identify the conflict with priorities you’ve overheard, and effectively say no to whatever was being discussed. To prepare yourself for this, you need to know all of the different flavors that the word no comes in:
"n 1958, a small group of wildlife biologists first began studying this predator prey system, using the island's seclusion to study population dynamics as new creatures rarely make it to the island and fewer leave. For more than 50 years, these biologists have been continuously studying the island's creatures by enduring the harsh cold and snow and venturing out to survey the island by helicopter. Their findings have changed how we view wolves as random killers, have given unique insight into the social dynamics of predators and are helping us understand the causes for arthritis."
"In my experience, most people are hesitant to adopt a power hitter approach to their projects — be it in academia or elsewhere. Assuming you have a fixed amount of time to dedicate to projects, you can either use this time to produce a large amount of solid work or a small amount of great work. To most, the first option seems safer, easier, and more satisfyingly productive.
The more I ponder Lieberman, however, the more I think that he’s stumbled onto a key insight: our hesitation about a big swing approach to projects is flawed. When you understand the true calculus of impressiveness, as I suspect Lieberman does, taking a small number of big swings becomes the only strategy that makes sense."
Just make it up.
Yep. As some high profile product says, just do it.
This is surprisingly easy, but there is a dependency. You need information. You need to understand what you are trying to achieve, what users of the service need and know, and you need to know the content well. If you don’t have these things, it will be hard. But if you do have them, pulling them together into a first draft is surprisingly easy.
links to a number of magician websites, and magic projects online, including my lovely assistant
Adafruit Industries is a small company that sells kits and parts for original, open source hardware electronics projects featured on www.ladyada.net as well as other cool open source tronix that I think are interesting and well-made.
The Arete Initiative at The University of Chicago has launched a $2 million research program on the nature and benefits of wisdom.
The Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group has been established to develop strategies and materials to increase awareness among the Web community of the need and benefit for the Semantic Web
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