FeedForward

Presenter: Scott Wilson (CETIS)
Feb-12-08, Birkbeck, London
http://legolas.cetis.ac.uk

• Funded by JISC Innovation part of the repositories programme

• Comes from work on personal learning – PLEX

• Information mgt, personal inf mgt strategies

• Information search – not explicitly looking for particular info items; more that info is constantly being delivered to us. We do delivery before we do work. We put up antennae to pull in relevant content. [CH comment: Can this be characterised as expert behaviour - what are the limitations to this description with respect to the majority of users?]

• Personal info flows are v complicated and go in both directions

• Things are starting to converge that makes this easier to manage – ATOM, RSS

• Configuring these services is still difficult and users need support

What’s changed since origin architecture plan? SWORD, TiCToCs, OAI-ORE?, OAI-PMH?, XSPF (shareable playlist for audio), Intute?

Desktop app.
LH bar – aggregator-like thing (cf. Dave Winer – ‘river of news’)
Group feeds into input categories – equaliser-inspired. Easily configurable! To reflect mood, work focus etc. Can save settings as presets (as with an audio app).
When offline, it remembers things looked at recently (does not cache the whole internet!)
Different styles – ‘visual’ view, iPhoto style
Can drag and drop items to work on them– caches items so they are avail offline
Works with many feed types (inc. Connotea), configurable by little wizards

Demo: sending an RSS feed cache to IntraLibrary repository by dragging/dropping onto SWORD protocol, generating IMS content package on the fly, throw at Intralibrary!

Can push info OUT as well as pull IN:

• Send feeds to a blog…
• Share via Connotea…
• Send to a Fedora repository…

Advantage – user does not need to worry about underlying protocols/standards
Still quite tricky configuring some services – auto-discovery not fully implemented yet (SWORD still developing)
Thinking about developing visualisation capability / storyboarding information/organising info in visual ways

Next release due end April.

Tech specs:

Written in Eclipse/SWT. Uses Rome, Rome Propono, Nebula widgets, leftover bits of PLEX, RELOAD etc. Heavy use of Eclipse async job API. SVN with MIT style license
Deals with rights issues by posting references, not content – caches a little bit of content for local use, but deals essentially with references. Detects when item on desktop is a file transfer (when transferring own data object).

CH comment: FeedForward’s view (or visualisation) of information flow has aspects that are clearly “portfolio-like”, or that point to aspects of data curation / personal information management that have been addressed differently in the e-portfolio context (select, organise, pull, review etc) – and the reflective aspects of this. The difference is that FeedForward is designed to be dynamic; it is designed to enable individuals to filter their content continuously (‘filtering’ or adjusting the sources that content comes from, the ways it can be viewed/managed; and the destinations to which content is ultimately ‘pushed’)