Anyway, when I arrived, I had feared that the location – down in Hobart – may have detracted for attendance, but that was not the case. While the code sprint on the first day was a little quiet (they normally are), a few hundred of the faithful descended by Thursday morning ready for the full conference.

Getting ready for Day 1 of talks

The conference location was pretty damn good, with some amazing views of the Derwent River and harbour from most of the rooms. A perfect spot for two days of Drupal and all related things. There were four simultaneous ‘tracks’ running, plus a birds-of-a-feather room and workshops, so always plenty to choose from, but I was happy with what I ended up seeing.

The view from one of the conference rooms

Things got started on Day 1 with Margery Longman talking about migrating 14 Dept of Finance websites into GovCMS SaaS and the data migration challenges with that … and importantly, dealing with usual considerations that come with Government projects. Next up was the totally excellent Nick Schuch, who explained how Kubernetes could be used for Drupal hosting better than anyone I’ve heard speak on the topic before. He also went through a lot of gotchas and talked about Skpr, a management tool that can better manage SysOps.

Nick Schuch explains how he uses Kubernetes in Drupal hosting

Next, is, well, me. I decided to ignore my track chair Janna Malikova’s kind offer to take a good photo and took a selfie with poor focus to mark the occasion .

Looking cool and calm before my talk

Despite the poor photo, my talk went really well. Great audience, great questions, and I was really happy with the presentation. I had to cull half the content of my talk after I timed it in practice, but I left in all the theory and considerations. Everyone loves theory!

After the morning and lunch, we had our first keynote Mish Manners, GitHub Community Manager – an accomplished public speaker – who talked about Open Source more generally and what GitHub has available to facilitate the wider Open Source community. As Drupal is firmly partnered with GitLab, it was great to hear from other providers about what’s shaking in that major platform and how GitHub is working in the wider community.

Michelle from GitHub delivers the first keynote

Then came Josh Waihi from Acquia who gave one of my favourite talks of the conference, and something super topical in the community – when to decouple and when to stay with the older style server-generated theme pages. It’s something we as a community have talked about a lot and Josh reminded us all that just because ‘decoupled’ (like a React front-end over JSON API talking to Drupal) is a newer approach, doesn’t always mean it’s best. He talked about some great ways to determine when to go server-generated, when to go fully decoupled, and when to go partially decoupled.

Josh Waihi talks about when it’s time to decouple

Next was another favourite of mine, ‘the 45-minute site audit’ with Scott Anderson. This showed us how to spend 45 minutes strategically and thoroughly auditing a project, so that you know what you are taking on when you inherit a project or program of work. Some great advice right there …

Scott Anderson introduces the ’45 minute site audit’

At this point in the blog, it’s important to remember the stunning natural setting in which Hobart is situated. It’s pretty special – this is a nice little snap I took on the walk to the conference on the second day:

The views in Hobart… what else can be said

Day 2 continued the trend of great talks. This kicked off with Toby Bellwood talking about GovCMS tooling, and later in the morning I ran a workshop to ‘how to run a site accessibility audit’.

We then received our second keynote from Neil Drumm who spoke about how Drupal.org is run. Some big numbers on that site … like 140 million pages and 2 million unique page visits per month. It was really interesting to hear how they keep the whole thing together and some of the innovations they have developed to deliver to the community and keep the site responsive.

After the keynote I attended Karl Hepworth’s talk on Automated Auditing, with a focus on GovCMS PaaS and using the Drunity tools for auditing in federal government PaaS sites.

Karl Hepworth presents Automated Auditing on the GovCMS platform

And lastly, Jess XJM gave the final keynote and the highlight of the conference, explaining the coordination of security releases, dependency management and the release path for the future.

Her talk showed how difficult it is to manage big Open Source projects that ‘swim’ in a sea of dependencies but also need to support large codebases, upstream users with different release cycles, the need to support versions (e.g. PHP or jQuery versions) much longer than other packages, and so on. I do not envy her job to keep all that together (but am extremely grateful she does it so well!).

Overall, an amazing conference. Great talks, great new innovations and really happy that I could part of this meeting of like-minded people.

Feel free to drop me a line to ask about Drupal, accessibility or anything related, or start a conversation with us on social media via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Morgan

The post DrupalSouth Hobart 2019 reflections appeared first on Gaia Resources.

So if you are interested in the topic, and have 45 mins to spare, I invite you to watch my talk.

If you happen to be at the conference, I’ll be running a workshop on Friday 29 November on using accessibility testing tools and conducting an audit.

Otherwise, feel free to drop me a line to ask about Drupal, accessibility or anything related, or start a conversation with us on social media via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Morgan

The post WCAG 2.1, Web Accessibility and Drupal 8 appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The Friday was a code sprint, where the group worked on some problems… It was pretty much that open, someone would suggest a module to be worked on, a problem to solve, or an approach to collaborate on, and we worked on trying to solve them.

I decided to try and tackle writing a user guide for the new Bootstrap 4 theme, this is a lighter weight alternative to Barrio, which also uses Bootstrap 4, but is a more opinionated implementation. Bootstrap 4 just uses the Bootstrap CDN, has a small number of pre-defined content areas and allows you to get moving quickly. There’s a plan on the roadmap to include SASS compiling in the module, which will be very cool.

I’ve written the user guide, but I don’t quite have the user credits on Drupal.org to contribute it to the official documentation page. I’ll work on getting my score up so I can push that out…

The second day had a great program of talks:

• Building a Slack ChatBot – Eduardo Garcia
• Backdrop CMS: 4 years after the fork, is this still a thing? – Greg Netsas (unfortunately Greg was delayed, so Vladimir Roudakov filled in with a spontaneous talk – Gitlab for Developers)
• How to create custom fields? – Jibran Ijaz
• WCAG 2.1, Web Accessibility and Drupal 8 – Me!
• Theme with Bootstrap: how awesome it can be – Janna Malikova
• Make it extensible! Using PluginCollections so others can extend your module – Saul Willers
• Writing code that doesn’t suck – Cam Green

During the second half there was also a workshop room, so you could attend the talks, or learn about Backdrop. Backdrop sizes up as a good alternative for those who cannot, or don’t want to fully migrate off Drupal 7 when support finally ends at the end of 2021.

All the talks were excellent, with a big shout out to Janna and Cam for their amazing sessions. Janna for bringing a focus to how we can make front end development so much easier by considering how design patterns in Bootstrap can empower excellent user experiences when planned with a technical focus. And Cam, for taking the last session of a big weekend, and talking about pragmatic approaches to coding to make the world a better place for those who need to work with what you’ve written.

I gave my standard Accessibility talk focused on WCAG v2.1 and the differences to 2.0; standards talks are always the most exciting straight after lunch!

One very interesting development though, was on the morning of the talk I downloaded the release candidate of Drupal 8.7 (now fully released) to try out the new Layout Builder and its accessibility features. When I heard of layout builder my immediate reaction was its probably an over-engineered site builder tool, not really required when we can solve many problems already with Display Suite, or TWIG, or some other module. Or worse, a copy of the Gutenberg style editor from WordPress (side note – accessibility not as bad as mostly think it is on Gutenberg). But, I was actually super impressed with Layout Builder, not just the accessibility (which does a damn good job of making the drag and drop possible on keyboard), but also how good it is. It’s really actually very, very good. I tried to incorporate that brand new review into my talk during breakfast to *mixed* results.

After the talks, we went down to the excellent Stone and Wood Brewery to ensure good code and good company finishes with good beers.

I’m proud that Gaia Resources sponsored the event, as being part of the Open Source community doesn’t just mean code contributions, it means contributing the community of collaboration and developing software that we all benefit from. And this camp certainly delivered on that front… now time to get internal score higher so I can get the code sprint documentation into the official pages!

Feel free to drop me a line to ask about Drupal, accessibility or anything we related, or start a conversation with us on social media via Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Morgan

The post DrupalCamp Byron Bay 2019 appeared first on Gaia Resources.

https://www.canada.ca/en/heritage-information-network/services/collections-management-systems/collections-management-software-vendor-profiles.html

The review was not meant to be an endorsement of particular packages, more an appraisal of what’s on offer so that museums could take a look at what works best for their needs.

Considering Gaia Resources does quite a lot of work in this space, I decided to take a look at this significant review and see what it might mean for our existing and future customers in the museums space.

First up, this review included the following vendors and packages:

• Axiell (Adlib)
• Gallery Systems (TMS and eMuseum)*
• Keepthinking (Qi)
• Lucidea (Argus)
• Lyrasis (CollectionSpace)
• MINISIS Inc. (MINISIS)
• PastPerfect (PastPerfect 5.0)
• Re:discovery (Proficio)
• SKINsoft (S-Museum)
• Vernon System (Vernon CMS and eHive)
• Whirl-i-Gig (CollectiveAccess)

* Note, only a survey was done for TMS and eMuseum, no product review was performed.

You can read all the detailed reviews and vendors response on the site, but as there is no executive summary (well, none that I could find), I thought I could add something to produce a summary of each vendor evaluation done by CHIN.

From my reading of the review, this was my take home for each of the packages:

Axiell (Adlib)

Keepthinking (Qi)

Lucidea (Argus)

Lyrasis (CollectionSpace)

MINISIS Inc. (MINISIS)

PastPerfect (PastPerfect 5.0)

Re:discovery (Proficio)

SKINsoft (S-Museum)

Vernon System (Vernon CMS)

Vernon System (eHive)

Whirl-i-Gig (CollectiveAccess)

It is clear a lot of work has gone into this review, and I highly recommend checking it out for yourself. Overall, the reviewers seemed to give S-Museum and CollectiveAccess the most positive reviews, but for smaller institutions something else might be more appropriate.

I can only recommend reading all the reviews for yourself and seeing what is the best fit your institution via the link at the start or contact us via email.

Morgan

The post CHIN Collection Management System review: our summary appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The spreadsheet that was presented at the ASA Conference (click to open)

Back in October 2018, Piers presented to the 2018 ASA Conference with Bootstrapping small archives. One of the key artefacts from this was an Excel workbook that could be used to help describe your archival collection in line with the concepts that underpin the Australian Series System.

In my blog, I want to go a step deeper and look at the process describing the attributes you might want to keep at the item level.

As a TL;DR version of the workbook created for the conference, you have groupings of records (Series) which have timebound relationships (Relationships) to organisations or business units that may have created or administered the records (Agencies), which also have time bound relationships to what that Series represents or the Agency did (Functions) at that point in time. Inside a Series, you have lower level objects (Items), that you may wish to describe in a variety of ways, but represent the things within the archival holdings or collection.

It’s beyond the scope of this simple blog (and my knowledge) to look at the intellectual underpinnings of how you might define an item – such as whether you separate descriptions from the object, or treat Series as parent objects, or items with partials and child relationships. That is all for overall management strategy. Rather, this blog is just presenting some questions you want to ask yourself about what data you want to capture at the lowest level of description – however you’ve chosen to define it.

Perhaps with these thoughts you might wish to grab the Excel workbook, and change up some of the column headers in the ‘Item’ sheet to match the considerations below, or that match what data or information you are already capturing.

I’ve put these questions into some broad categories of the types of data you might want to capture, and some thoughts about how you might want to move forward once answering the questions.

• Naming – what identifiers do you want to use, and do you need to retain external / alternative identifiers? Do you want to inherit some related areas into the name to give a shorthand way of understanding the context – like the Series of current storage location? Do you want a human readable title as well? Depending on these questions you might be able to just use a system generated ID, or you might need additional fields for context.
• Dates – do you split Start Date and End Date or can you support Date Ranges? what date qualifiers do you want to use? How close can you get to ISO-8601 standards or extensions of the standard? Be careful with your qualifiers and try to use as few possible, maybe just something along the lines of circa, and be consistent. If you’ve got nice clean date data, a date range could be ideal, otherwise splitting start and end dates and keeping qualifiers in another field could be more useful, so it can exported and dealt with in another system.
• Relationships – what needs to be related, and what can be inferred? It’s nice to draw out what the relationships are, and if there are cases where there is always a consistent relationship, eliminate it from being explicitly expressed so it does not need to be maintained (e.g. if all items in a Series are related to an Agency, then you can infer the relationship between Agency and Item via the Series and you do not need to maintain that relationship). Often this is not possible, but worth considering.
• Description – what data needs to be captured at the item or record level vs what data you might want to consider holding at the Series level? Do you want a set of descriptions with each one having a specific meaning or context? Thinking about the data you want in this description layer/s may have implications for how you describe your items or how you might use controlled content fields for different parts of the description.
• Type – what is in the collection or holding and how is it classified? Do you need a controlled vocabulary (e.g. paper, maps, microfilm, digital files)? Do you need to describe partials (e.g. part of another item)? If the collection or holding is homogenous maybe a simple text description suffices, or maybe you might need relationships between items, or you might even need descriptive fields on the type (e.g. size, weight)
• Change history – how do you track changes? will a “last changed date” and “last changed by” suffice? If not, you might need some more comprehensive software that can track all log changes.
• Containers – where are the records held? Do you just need a reference to somewhere else? Or do you need track movements? If you need to track movements you may need to keep that as a separate description and link to it.
• Restrictions / preservation – should the data have any usage restrictions? Such as personal data, or preservation problems? If so, is it the metadata or the item? How long should it be restricted? If there’s preservation problems, when should you re-examine the record? If all of these are relevant considerations you may need to describe each, if none are relevant, you may not need to describe any.

All or some of these questions may be excessive for a small archive. Nevertheless, it’s not a bad idea to ask them, and think if the item data fields you have are capturing all the details you may need.

Hope it helps!  If you have any queries, then feel free to drop me an email, or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn,

Morgan

The post Describing items for small archives – a practical set of considerations appeared first on Gaia Resources.

While the project is still very much under way, we thought it was time to introduce you to the work we’re doing, and share some insights we’ve gained in the project that may inspire some others looking at archival data management.

Why CollectiveAccess?

Whenever you choose or recommend a system, the first question people usually ask is “Why choose System Y”, or often more frequently, “Why not choose System Z?”. The answer in this scenario is that CA is highly configurable. It has a base of 11 content bundles that can be re-purposed into managing all kinds of data models and configurations. Importantly, configuring these bundles to match data requirements does not cause issues with version updates. Further, it has a web services API that means it can interact with other systems quite easily.

The data model we are supporting is novel and the system has to be interoperable with a range of other specialist systems. For these reasons, we believed CA was the best fit of the available packages that we often recommend to archives.

Preparing yields dividends

What makes this project so exciting for us is the preparation that’s gone into it from the client side. A lot of time and effort had gone into thinking about how they manage data, what the future requirements are, and what each system in their digital archive needs to perform. As a result, it’s a well-defined program of work. This project sees us working in the Archival Management System (AMS) space so we have a clear idea of what it needs to do, and how it needs to communicate with other components.

The preparation on the client side has included assessing the purpose of all individual data fields, what additional data needs to be captured into the future, and how to retain legacy data. This high level of preparation has greatly assisted the project run smoothly, and in creating a logical plan for approaching the migration and configuration of the system. In short, a huge thanks to PROV for all the planning and foresight!

Entry to the Victorian Archives Centre in North Melbourne

Rapid iteration to build a base profile, iterate on top of that

One way we’ve got the process moving quickly was to develop a draft, “rapid build” installation profile (this contains all the information about the fields, relationships, displays, report templates etc), and iterate against that on a content type by content type basis. The initial rapid build was very rough, probably a lot rougher than our team was comfortable with (sorry Mieke), but it allowed us to get moving quickly and have a base that covered the entire data model within a few weeks of starting the project.

Having a base to iterate from means that instead of trying to perfect the data model and migration scripts for a big bang release and testing round, we constantly re-run migrations and do minor changes so we are constantly building and improving. Within a week we might be able to re-run a full content import of a data subset, make half a dozen changes to the fields and layouts after that import, and re-run the import incorporating feedback at the start of the next week. All the while, the system remains up for testing and everyone can see all the changes happening as we implement them.

To support this workflow, we’ve introduced a technical process that logs incremental changes to the data model so we can build “mini-profile” updates and not need to re-install the system and re-import the data each time we make a significant change (though this is sometimes still required). I personally recommend this approach as it allows feedback to be reported and implemented in extremely tight feedback loops and ensures that assumptions or issues are uncovered very quickly.

Above I’ve shared a few brief insights into a project that’s now well underway. I do look forward to writing a few more as the project progresses and we get into the meaty components of the big item level imports and configuring the displays of relationships between all the content types.

If you would like to know more about how Gaia Resources can help you with your metadata or with system choice, design and implementation, then feel free to get in touch with me directly via morgan.strong@gaiaresources.com.au, or feel free to start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Morgan

The post Managing archives with PROV appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Without going into the requirements (or more importantly the implementation) too much, there was a heavy need for: publishing and publications management; groups and moderation workflows; distributed authorship; content taxonomy and classification management; consumption by multiple devices; and most importantly, low cost of development and ongoing management.

Sounds like heaven?

At Gaia, we’re technically agnostic. While we have certain preferences, we implement what’s best for the client. In the two years I’ve worked here, I’ve worked on Drupal, WordPress, Magento, CollectiveAccess, Artefactual Atom, Archivematica, Angular Single Page Apps (SPA), Knockout SPA, and investigated a range of other technologies, like Static Site Generators (SSG), before making our recommendations. The point is, we make an analysis, and choose what we think is best and can support in an ongoing fashion.

This blog will go into why I recommended Drupal 8 and the factors we considered to come to that decision.

Firstly, we deal in Open Source and the client did not have a licensing budget. So goodbye Adobe Experience Manager, SiteCore and other admittedly very good, but expensive publishing platforms and web content management systems.  Realistically, we still needed a Content Management System (CMS) at the core of the project, but a CMS that could publish to multiple consumers. That included quality open source CMS’s like Drupal and WordPress, as well as SSG’s like Jekyll combined with search-as-a-service, like Algolia.

Looking at the publishing requirements, I believed relying on markdown or similar would make SSG a bit hard to manage for the client, but more importantly, they probably didn’t have the ecosystem of plugins / modules required to keep the build costs down.  Similarly, building a nice Javascript SPA site or Javascript powered CMS site like React Static, certainly sounds exciting, but I think the decoupled approach (at least in the short-term) was probably overkill.  In short, I believed that a traditional CMS with lots of modules and plugins was the best fit, ideally one that could progressively be decoupled if needed in the future.

So, next came weighing up the best-fit CMS. I am familiar with both Drupal and WordPress, but no so much Joomla!, Type3 or the multitude of other free CMS platforms that do a good job at managing content. To minimise development costs, sticking with my familiar platforms made a lot of sense. But even more important than that familiarity, WordPress and Drupal are the world’s 1 and 3 most used Content Management Systems, and there are sufficiently massive ecosystems of plugins and modules to ensure we could keep development costs down.

At this junction it became a choice of WordPress vs Drupal 8.

So why did Drupal 8 win out? The short answer was the site requirements were sufficiently complicated in terms of publishing content that it lent itself to the more powerful, albeit somewhat more complicated Drupal 8 platform. WordPress could do it (and we know it well as it powers our own site), but I thought Drupal could do it better.

Let’s look at a few of the aspects I considered, and a caveat, this was a lens specifically about this project: these observations are not necessarily generalisable to other projects:

• Security: much as been made of the recent Drupal vulnerabilities, however, the security team is proactive, and assuming you stick to supported modules and follow the security advisories, you have excellent security. WordPress has automatic security updates to core, but there’s no control over what contributed module authors do. If you stick to core, WordPress is a clear winner, but Drupal 8 is certainly a safer bet (the devil you know) when it comes to the module ecosystem. In this case, I’m personally going to say Drupal is slightly ahead.
• Workflows: this is something managed well in both platforms, moderation, approval queues etc. can be supported easily. No real winner in either camp here.
• Theming: WordPress has an amazing and beautiful ecosystem of themes out there that require only minor theming. This is an important requirement when you are trying to reduce costs as a lot of time can be spent theming. Drupal has some good themes, but usually more time is required. This factor was a consideration strongly in favour of WordPress.
• Maintainability: WordPress is easier. You can generally update from within the admin interface, and as long as you have a good backup procedure, it’s an easy process. Drupal really requires use of Drush and increasingly Composer, which really requires a developer. In terms of developer community and agency support, although Drupal has a big community, WordPress is much larger. This is another one in favour of WordPress.
• Groups and community pages: the “default” community pages in both WordPress (Buddypress) and Drupal (Organic Groups), didn’t really fit the requirements. With further investigation, the requirements were probably simpler than what either of these modules offered. So really, some simple modules and permissions managed what was needed here. No real winner in either camp here.
• Content classification and data modelling: in my opinion, there’s no comparison here and this is what pushed Drupal into the winning position. Building managed taxonomies of content, creating content types, sharing elements between content, and using tools like Drupal Views to expose data, has no comparison. Combined with the ease of creating these custom content models, easily publishing content types APIs for reuse, how you can use search index weighting for aspects within the content types, all combined to push Drupal 8 to the winning position. This was the most important requirement of the project, and thus was the winning factor that overrode WordPress’ other aspects.
• API first: though not required yet, important to be ready for the future. Both platforms support API and progressively decoupled systems. No real winner in either camp here.

This was a bit of a summary of the process I went through to decide on Drupal 8. We’re now in build, and I look forward to sharing the results of the build process in coming months.  If you want to know more about Drupal, our processes, or any of the techs that I mentioned, send an email to morgan.strong@gaiaresources.com.au, or start a conversation with us via our social media channels – Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Morgan

The post Fit-for-purpose for not-for-profit appeared first on Gaia Resources.

I took over the group back in September, and since then we’ve run five meetup events and held one additional meeting in partnership with UX Brisbane. As of March, we now have a permanent home at the ABC in Southbank. Ash Kyd, one of the Web Developers in the ABC and strong accessibility advocate, has organised for the ABC to host us on the third Tuesday of each month. This support ensures we can keep hosting events for free and keep a recurring and regular time to keep advancing accessibility causes.

Last night (Tuesday 17 April), I spoke about my experience road testing the new AWS Transcribe service, as well as leveraging the Google’s Web Speech API.

The purpose of this talk was to see if we can reduce the cost of creating accessible resources. The cost of transcription is very high, if it can be reduced, then more resources can be made accessible, and if many of the manual tasks around transcription can be automated, then time can be focused on quality and correction.

If you’re interested in getting the notes from my presentation, you can get them here: Transcription on the cloud [PDF 2.9mb].

But in short, I found the AWS Transcription service, although it made many errors, extremely useful. Effectively it gave you a circa. 80% accurate transcription that could be manually corrected in a fraction of the time that it would take to manually create a transcription. Also, it gave you confidence rankings on a word-by-word basis, which is very cool:

But perhaps its most powerful feature was the ability to add an external vocabulary. Some words that you use are technical, rare, have heavy accents etc. The ability to load these in with a CSV vocabulary means the machine learning algorithm is ready for them, and you don’t have issues with obscure and incorrect matches on these words.

One disadvantage was that all words are wrapped in individual timestamp ranges; they weren’t grouped into sentence clauses. Which is required for creating confidence ranges on words and applying the external vocabulary, but it also means making a usable *.srt export for captioning would still be a fairly manual process.

On the other hand the Google’s Web Speech API had amazing real time processing of speech. Like, really, really good. It also had a much better handle on the Australian accent. There are some tools out there like Speechlogger (which leverage that API) that allow you to manually override the transcription on the fly and build sentences and paragraphs. This allows you to create good, reliable *.srt exports, and process them as it transcribes speech. Live. In real time. I didn’t see ability to load in external vocabularies like you could for AWS Transcription service, but I didn’t road test this service as heavily.

I didn’t test either in a noisy environment, so I can’t comment which would be better in that very common scenario. My tests were for me talking directly to each service, with one speaker in a fairly quite room.

In short, both services offer real accessibility benefits, and the potential to make things like conference presentation transcriptions (both for recorded video and live captioning) a lot more accessible and cheaper to produce. So an exciting area of development.

If you do live in the Brisbane area, and would like to get involved in the accessibility Meetup, we’d love to see you and you can get involved via our Meetup page.  Or, drop me a line at morgan.strong@gaiaresources.com.au

Morgan

The post Testing automated transcription appeared first on Gaia Resources.

Our little display at the event

This was genuinely a great event, and fantastic to see so many vendors and suppliers doing interesting things with open data. Perhaps just as exciting was seeing loads of people interested in what companies like us are doing in this space.

We showcased our Discovering Queensland Proof of Concept to various people, and was really good to get feedback not just on the work was performed, but ideas about how it could aggregate other data sources, and other use cases for the applications that I’d not even thought of. Was also great to bring to light what an amazing resource the Queensland State Archive’s historic photo collection is, and how as an open data resource, it can be used in new and interesting ways.

An audience that was very interested in open data 

But back to the event. The purpose of this event was threefold: to celebrate the Open Data Institute Australia Network’s (ODI) outgoing CEO Maree Adshead achievements in starting the ODI in Australia; as Brisbane’s celebration for international Open Data Day; and to showcase the great work happening in Brisbane for applications and technology utilising Open Data. And on all fronts, this was a success. Held at the Precinct, there was a strong turnout from across government and the private sector who attended, and around 10 companies showcasing software and products and use open data.

All of the exhibitors got a lot of interest from the audience afterwards

We were positioned next to Max Kelsen, who are doing some amazing work in the big data and machine learning space, and was (although this is a slightly parochial* viewpoint) wonderful to know that such an innovative team was based here in Brisbane. But across the showcases and the attendees there was an interest and commitment to Open Data and Open Source. Good times.

We’ve got some ideas in the works for the future of Discovering Queensland, but if you’d like to know more, or to get in touch with us about open data or open source in any form, contact me directly via email, or start a conversation via our Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn feeds.

Morgan

* Editors note: Does this means we can now officially call Morgan a Queenslander?

The post Open data and innovation in Queensland appeared first on Gaia Resources.

The brief was bringing the archival collection to life. Easily said, but the barrier to entry to explore archival series and the like for non-archivists is fairly high. And another part of the brief was to enable a platform that allowed contributions from the community. Easily said, but we wanted to do something a bit more dynamic then allowing comments and social sharing.

The TWiG program also brought with it a structure to develop our product – that is 6 x 2 week sprints, with a public release at the end of each sprint. This meant lots of rapid development, and being comfortable releasing something that is not always finished with engagement and participation from the community.

This rapid release and engaging the community to feedback and help shape development is a cornerstone of Agile development, but something is a bit new to many GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums) institutions – Agile development and software creation might be common, but releasing two-week old prototypes is something new entirely.

But it proved to be the projects greatest strength. It meant that we got feedback on decisions almost immediately, and it showed that you can still deliver evolving projects early (rather than completely finished projects) as long as you take the community with you.

The cornerstone of the project, was the “Now and then” concept, which came out of the first sprint, and was validated quickly with user research. Essentially, it allows photographs to be organised into time, space and categorised, and then the location of the image draw upon the Google Streetview API so that you can see a modern view of that image.

How this bring archives to life is that it becomes the entry point to the government and archives – viewing the photo acts as an anchor to related links in archives and series. Rather than knowing the collection and the terminology, you explore and then find what’s interesting (e.g. colonial buildings in early Queensland history, creation of Southbank, bridge development, regional change etc).

We also saw this as a platform that in future iterations could engage the community. Rather than ask for comments and stories, we ask for the community groups to become publishers – they use their own archival photo collections to complement the State Archive’s stories and collections, and the Archive’s collection becomes the anchor for this work.  The proof-of-concept was delivered and validated, so we’re now in negotiations about taking this further which we hope to report on in the very near future.

In the meantime, I’ve taken a static snapshot of the site, which you can explore using the map below:

Some of the functionality has been turned off for now (e.g. the feedback form, search, background images for the timelines) as this is a static, archival snapshot of the project; the site would be migrated into a new platform for any future stages.

Feel free to have a look around!

Also, if you’d like to watch our succinct 7 minute presentation that we gave at the TWiG showcase back in late September, the presentation is available on the YouTube video below (skip forward to 1 hr, 4 mins, 38 secs for our part (1:04:38))

If you’d like to get in touch about this project then feel free to contact me directly, or start a conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

Morgan

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The latest Brisbane Website Accessibility and Inclusive Design Meetup

After a long hiatus, we held our first Meetup in almost 1.5 years on Thursday 7th September, where I gave an overview about the changes in WCAG v2.1 (Website Content Accessibility Guidelines) compared to v2.0.  The WCAG are part of a series of web accessibility guidelines published by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the main international standards organization for the Internet, and they’re the standards we work towards to make websites more accessible primarily for people with disabilities – but also for user agents and devices like mobile phones.

In short, WCAG 2.1 hasn’t changed a whole lot, with 3 new guidelines (2.5, 2.6 and 2.7),  4 new success criteria for Level A compliance,  9 new success criteria for Level AA, and two new criteria for AAA. I should say, this is all based on the draft guideline released in August 2017, so the numbers may well change with future drafts.   Version 2.1 isn’t really a whole different, despite the 10 years between versions. 2.1 really aims to fill some gaps in the standard, rather than re-imagine website content accessibility; so will be interesting to see how that evolves and if Version 3.0 is around the corner that may incorporate more WAI-ARIA (Web Accessibility Initiative – Accessible Rich Internet Applications) suggestions.

If you’re going to talk accessibility – may as well make your presentation accessible too!

If you’d like to grab a copy of my presentation, I’ve exported it a PDF and you can get plain text accessible version of the presentation from my website. This will explain more details about the changes.

A big thanks goes to our hosts the Console Group, who provided a venue, drinks and food, and organised live captioning for the event.  The Meetup will be monthly, and we’re already planning October’s event – get in touch with me directly if you’d like to know more!

Morgan

The post What’s new in WCAG 2.1 appeared first on Gaia Resources.

This project involved a re-skinning their current WordPress website, which was previously built on a non-standard Corpo theme, and migrated across to a much more standard base theme, and redesigned. Importantly, the new system also includes a range of membership and online payment facilities that will be launched in coming weeks, this will enable ACSA to create membership levels and create sub-groups within the site that can be used by Citizen Science groups.

The site is currently in a soft launch to publicise the Australian Citizen Science Conference: http://citizenscience.org.au/citscioz18-conference-information/ in February next year. The website will be officially launched when the new the online membership portal is publicly released.

But enough said, take a look around at the new site, and take a look at what the Australian Citizen Science Association has to offer. If you’re interested in getting involved, register your interest to become a founding member – a bunch of our team are already registered!

For more information about how we can help with your own web site needs, contact me directly, or call me in the Brisbane office on (07) 3063 0418.  Alex is the best person to speak to about how we can help with your citizen science projects, and he can be contacted via email, or in our Perth office on (08) 92277309.

Morgan

P.S. Or, you can get hold of us via the various social media feeds we operate – Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

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