Wikipedia, Design, and Consensus

Co.Design has a short piece on the attempted redesign of Wikipedia. The team was open and transparent, and the reactionaries poured out of the woodwork. It's an object lesson in collaborative design work.

The Hazards of Open Data Exceptionalism

The prospect of funding cuts for e-Gov initiatives like data.gov, USAspending.gov and friends is worrying. Everyone should join the Sunlight Foundation's effort to Save the Data. At the same time, this is a good opportunity for reflection. There's no doubt that the proliferation of Open Government websites has been a great first step for transparency … Continue reading The Hazards of Open Data Exceptionalism →

Good design is hard on all of us.

Tim Lee is, for my money, one of the most reasonable and thoughtful tech policy essayists we have. His latest, "Open User Interfaces Suck" got my attention, because he hits me right where I live. In his usual, respectful, level-headed way, he claims that open systems (like the open source development process I love so … Continue reading Good design is hard on all of us. →

Flatten PDFs almost painlessly.

I do a lot of presentations. When I export to PDF from OpenOffice, things usually work great. When I do these presentations online, though, the web tool will sometimes wreck the design: fonts get dropped, transparent backgrounds turn white... it's a mess. So I need a way of turning each page of the PDF into … Continue reading Flatten PDFs almost painlessly. →

Beautiful drop shadows now bow before me.

I got a lot of compliments on the design of the ignite session I did for Mil-OSS. Part of what made it work so well, I think, is the drop shadows, like you see here: For a long time, I did these using the Gimp. It's kind of a tedious process, especially if you are … Continue reading Beautiful drop shadows now bow before me. →