Science and Industry

I took part in University of Helsinki’s Windows Phone 7 code camp. The aim was to develop applications quickly, in one week, and demonstrate them. And naturally learn something from C# and Windows Phone 7 platform. Yep, unluckily we didn’t have the newer Mango-release in use, so some of my comments might already be deprecated.

My uttermost experience is that the platform is still half way there. The API access is not so good that I wished it to be, and actually my initial application idea cannot be implemented in Windows Phone 7 as I don’t have access to data. Let’s just hope that there will be significant progress in this area. For this post, I share some of the core experiences.

Launchers and chooser kill innovations

Microsoft has decided accessing core mobile phone functionalities, such as sending a SMS or picking a contact, must be done via openers and choosers. The main argument for this design decision is security, this way 3rd party application developers can’t do anything nasty with users’ data or use costly features.

I accept the security comments, however the problem that this practice means I don’t control the interaction flow and in the end it means I cannot create a holistic experience. As an example, an application that would send an SMS automatically is impossible, you need to use a specific launcher and wait for user’s to press send button. However, for a taxi ordering application I would make the user flow so simple that user just needs to press one big button. You know – Friday evening and you’re hardly standing…

Second comment for this is, that the choosers and openers may be designed for a specific purpose only and not kept in mind we, the developers, might want to do hacks and things like that. Here a good example is contact chooser, or as they put it: EmailAddressChooserTask or PhoneNumberChooserTask. What if I would want to use the profile icon from contacts? Why isn’t there just a ContactChooserTask that would return me a contact object?

C# has inconsistencies

One thing I observed was language inconsistencies in C#. This sounds like a small thing and surely it is a minor detail. However, let me just pinpoint this, as I got some gray hairs from this:

Let’s assume you want to disable a button. It’s done by button.IsEnabled = false;
Now let’s also assume you want to make the button invisible. How would you do it? button.IsVisible = false; would be my first guess, but no. It is button.Visibility = false;

Gimme beautiful and powerful UI widgets!

However, syntax is always syntax. Let’s not worry about that. However, based on my experience, making a beautiful interface with fancy animations and nicely shaped elements requires “a few” additional steps. And, unluckily these additional steps meant for me that there were no fancy effects or dialog box or anything else cool. If you wish to get some deeper understanding, look at iOS guidelines.

Conclusions: Quick and Dirty

Based on this experience, the toolkit allows quick and dirty applications, but building “a proper” application might be more complicated. There’re cool ideas, such as the application being just XAML pages and that data can be binded to interface.

However, the overall experience is that things are dirty hacks that are kept together with glue. And, it’s not a good feeling for serious application developers.

As promised earlier, I return to present some of the early findings of my Master’s thesis. I did already discuss the easy part, social media’s effect to participation, and concluded it seems to have a positive effect. Nevertheless, it must be said that most organizations seems to use social media tools not as a participatory media but as a new way to approach citizens with their own view. Using Chadwick’s and May’s (2003) framework, this is in best case consultative.

But, let’s return to the topic of this post. Previously I promised to return to my first research question, which claimed that

the institutionalization process of the hosting organization creates less participatory environment in the organization. This will also affect the web presence, making it less participatory.

Based on the analysis of two newer organizations in my dataset, ATTAC and Roska päivässä-liike, mixed evidence appears. There have been minor shifts in ATTAC’s online presence, which went from participatory to non-participatory, and then again participatory due to the rise of the social media. In Roska päivässä-liike, this pattern can’t be observed; the site has remained the same.

As said, the evidence is mixed. Also considering the amount of variant in the participatory approach in the older organizations, there seems to be another factor than the institutionalization process, which determines how participatory the web presence is.

Well, this is a somewhat disappointing result. However, this already indicates a major problem, or as they say in the academia, an opportunity for further study, in my research. Currently I have only used external data sources of the organization. This study should be continued with interviews and other analysis of the decision regarding the online presence. In this way I could tie certain interesting patterns in the web sites, such as turning blog commenting on and off, into the organizational context.

I’m currently working on my master’s thesis in political science. My topic is the examination of ten non-governmental organizations’ (NGOs’) web presence from 1990’s to 2011. This research is motivated by Stein’s (2009) and Brundin’s (2008) research, which indicate web presence is more formal one-way communication, not participatory two-way communication. However, two-way participatory communication would have several democratic effects such as empowerment of citizens.

Stein and Brudin both use only one time slot in their analysis. Still, the online media has evolved and is constantly evolving. Also, the NGOs evolve and may change their online strategy. Thus, one must use longer time span to also see the evolution and the changes.

As said, the evolution of web presence is constant and there are several factors that affect the online presence. For example, the changing role of online media, which is now media of the masses, may affect this presence. It may also be technological advantages on the media itself or the trends and styles of online media in any given time. Or, it may be changes in the hosting organization and their thinking and acting.

Here I limit my research to only two questions:

1. The institutionalization process of the hosting organization creates less participatory environment in the organization. This will also affect the web presence, making it less participatory.
2. The mega-trend of Web 2.0, meaning here the focus on user generated content and platformalization of this media, in means such as blogs or social networking sites, creates demand for participatory approach. This also means that due to platformalization the more participatory channels are available for NGO use.

Based on my analysis of ten NGOs, I can now focus especially on the second hypothesis and later report on my findings with the first one. It seems that even while the Web 2.0 has an effect on NGO web presence, we may not conclude that the sites as such are participatory, focused on dialogue between NGO and citizens. It seems that the change has made it possible to comment and react to NGO’s actions and views. However, the agenda is set by NGOs’ themselves.

Secondly, based on this sample it seems that most of the organizations don’t participate in the dialogue even while it has been made possible for citizens. This is a classical and well-reported problem in e-democracy domain, which may lead to frustration and therefore decreased motivation to participate.

As said, these are early results that still require more analysis and further thinking. Unluckily, my master’s thesis is written in Finnish, but those who want may follow the development of weekly snapshots.

One may question the practical use of this research. Even while I have analyzed NGOs, the same results may be applied to governmental organizations and businesses. Thus, one end result of my master’s thesis is hopefully a set of recommendations on the creation of a participatory online community.