MissingLink Blog

Over the winter holidays, we’ll be working on a series of Flash demos to aid training on MissingLink.

You can view the demo prototypes below…

Navigating a MissingLink Event Archive

—–+—–

Creating Your Own Events

Providence, Rhode Island
Oct. 4-5, 2006

This conference features the personal stories of innovators from across the country who are redefining the rules of innovation and transforming how value is delivered in every arena.

At the conference, Peter Durand of Alphachimp Studio Inc. presented the caveman’s story of “innovation”.

In a career limiting move (CLM) Peter Durand did a shoddy impersonation of Richard Saul Wurman, host of the conference and revered graphics guru. (See the terrifying video. And, yes, my skin really is that white!)
Nevertheless, the new browser-based software MissingLink was announced to the world…

http://alphachimp.missinglink.biz/business-innovation-factory/bif-2

Camden, Maine
Oct. 19-22, 2006

One opera house, 3 days, 500 participants, hundreds of “dangerous” ideas… this was Pop!Tech X.

As official Pop!Tech artist, I built out a mobile paint studio, perched up in the loge box above the opera house stage. I managed to crank out 36 paintings totaling 43,200 square inches of art to give form to the ideas propagated by the superstar speakers.

The amazing roster included musician Brian Eno, futurist Kevin Kelly, science fiction writer Bruce Sterling, military strategist Tom Barnett, historian Juan Enriquez, culinary scientist Homaro Cantu and the long tailed Chris Anderson.

The original works (all 30″ x 40″ acrylic paintings on archival poster board) are up for auction to raise money for the Pop!Tech Scholarship Fund. This will enable more students, women and minorities from other parts of the country and the world to attend this amazing event held each year in Camden, Maine.

HP was one of the corporate sponsors and a team of writers and designers were on-site to compile a 300+ full-color book incorporating photos, artwork, scribbles, post-its, wiki posts, blog posts and random submissions. The book is currently printing and will reach each of the 500+ participants at their homes within 3 days of the event’s conclusion!

I used our new web-based tool for capturing events, MissingLink, to publish the results in almost real time.

Pop!Tech site: http://onsite.poptech.org/
Pop!Tech photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/poptech2006/sets/
See MissingLink archive: http://alphachimp.missinglink.biz/poptech/poptech-2006-dangerous-ideas

As we flesh out the help documentation and guides to using MissingLink, we’ve been making some Quicktime videos to help. These demonstrate some of the basic tasks invloved in setting up events:

• Sign-In Process (5MB)
• Event Setup (17 MB)
• Building Breakouts (1 MB)
• Creating Teams (2.1 MB)

From one of our private beta-testers, Jody L.:

I love new tools and toys, and ML is a great one in both camps. Even though I am running trailing-edge Internet Explorer, ML was a champ — I have never been able to so easily report out the results of a meeting in such a cool format. Background on the engagement: 50 Director- and VP-level folk from a division of a large US bank; a three-day gathering; four half-day sessions: two devoted to World Cafe-style rotating conversations, two devoted to LEGO SERIOUS PLAY; three report-outs, two large-group de-briefs. Lots of photos of work-walls, lots of photos of LEGO models, mind-maps of Big Ideas, audio files of LEGO stories — generated about 70 MB of raw “stuff”, and I uploaded probably 65% of it to ML.

The setup of people and the agenda was possibly the most useful piece of ML — the client design team loved being able to move people from breakout to breakout to get just the right mix. Uploading an Excel file with the participants’ names, emails, etc. was easy and slick — something that can be said for a lot of the ML interface. Putting the foundation pieces in place ahead of the event revealed some potential land-mines, and made populating the report-out content much more efficient and organized than my typical late-night, bleary-eyed, recreate-the-wheel-every-time efforts.
The different ways to report content — images, files, pages — are robust and easy to use. Jason from Gradient Labs told me that the interface inspiration is Google, and I think ML would make Sergey Brin & Co. proud — it’s elegant, uncluttered and WAY slick. Parts of it are maybe too uncluttered: some of the iconography is not as self-explanatory as it might be, but a useful Help function is always available in the right-hand frame.

In the midst of all its general greatness, “Tags” are potentially the most amazing piece of ML. If you can avoid the temptation to check in on your Tag cloud until you are finished uploading images, files and pages with the proper amount of meta-data, what emerges out of the cloud will instantly show you the terms and threads that were most prevalent. And the mondo-cool feature I love to show off is the Images page, with its thumbnail collection. Pretty slick on its own, but then ML adds in the list of Tags to the right: when you mouse over a tag, the Images with that tag are highlighted. *huge* WOW! factor!

I have already gone on and on, and I got more, but Peter asked me to do a “short” blog entry…

Working with these guys has been amazing, and it is clear from its ease of use that ML has some seriously heavy lifting behind the browser. Its clear content organization, elegant interface and robust reporting make it a must-have tool for facilitators & consultants who want to do less and accomplish more (seriously, my reporting time was cut by a third) while adding value to their clients with a cutting-edge, professional and *living* record of their work.

Wish list: an offline version of MissingLink so I can finish this thing on the plane home…!

We updated ML with a huge set of changes last night; I’m calling this version .7.5. I will post a detailed list of changes later today, but you’ll see lots of fixes for the nagging problems like the IE glitches on the team matrix page. You should also notice a pretty significant speed improvement. Several pages have had their logic refined so they’re retrieving less information, and we’ve installed “eaccelerator” which improves the performance of PHP. We’ve tested thoroughly, but as always please keep an eye out for any unusual behavior.

Image upload has gotten a nice new feature to watch out for: when the images have uploaded, the agenda or session page will automatically update itself with the new thumbnail, so no reload is required. File upload also uses the same feature.

-Jason

The issue with adding participants one at a time is that at least one of those “roles” (participant, presenter, external guest) must be checked, otherwise ML doesn’t know to actually attach the person to the event. We’re going to change it so Participant is checked by default. Until the next major update, which we are still doing final testing on, please watch out for this and make sure you’ve checked a role. - Jason

Adding participants individually (rather than through the Excel import) is broken right now. They are being created correctly, but not attached to the event. We expect to have this resolved today (Tue Sept 19), but we have to test a whole host of interrelated improvements before we can deploy the fix. Sorry for the inconvenience; you’ll need to just use the Excel import if you need to create participants today.

Also, Peter has pointed out that any participants in the Excel sheet without email addresses are not created.  An email address is stated as a requirement in the text on the import page, but we are going to change this since there do seem to be situations where creation without email addresses needs to happen. Just be aware that until they have an email address added, the person obviously can’t login to the site, and won’t be emailed if you use the “Email Participants” page.

-Jason

The short explanation: the tag page speed is fixed.

The long explanation: most of the time you care about tags as they relate to individual events, but ML will also let you look at all of your content, across all events, by tag. We’ve chosen to emphasize the most common case of looking at the tags for an event and simplified the way the application determines what you see.

The side effect of this is that your main tag page now shows all of your tags to everyone. Previously, it was doing quite a bit of sifting to determine which tags you could see based upon which events you could see. HOWEVER, the content attached to those tags is of course still protected by permissions. Users can only access content for an event if they are a participant, or if the event is public.

We’ll turn the tag filtering on the main tag page back on when we can optimize it so the performance is acceptable.