Monthly Archives: March 2013

How Car2Go ruins Car2Go

So let me start by saying, in theory, I LOVE Car2Go. The service has helped prevent me from buying a car and has been indispensable in opening up more of Vancouver to me.

For those not familiar with Car2Go, it is a car sharing service where the cars can be parked virtually anywhere in the city, so when you need one, you just use a special card and pin number to access it, drive it to where you want to go and then log out of the car leaving it for the next person to use it. All this at the affordable rate of 38 cents a minute. It’s genius.

So what’s the problem?

Well, in practice, I’m having an increasingly worse experience with Car2Go, particularly when I’m most in need the service. What’s worse, the reasons are entirely within the control of Car2Go and specifically how it designed its app, its workflow and its security. My hope is there are lessons here for designers and anyone who is thinking about online services, particularly in the mobile space.

Let me explain.

First, understand that the Car2Go’s brand is built around convenience. Remember, the use case is that, at almost any time, you can find a car near you, access it, and get to where you want to go. Car2Go is not for people planning to use a car hours ahead (you don’t really want to be paying 38 cents a minute to “hold” a car for 3 hours until you need it. That would cost you $68!). Indeed the price point is designed to discourage long term use and encourage short, convenient trips. As a result ease of access is central to the service and the brand promise.

In theory here is what the process should look like.

Fire up the Car2Go app on your smart phone and geolocate yourself
Locate the nearest car (see screen shot to right)
Reserve it (this allows you to lock the car down for 15 minutes)
Walk to your car, access it using your Car2Go card and pin number
Drive off!

Here is the problem. The process now regularly breaks down for me at step 3. At first blush, this may not seem like a big deal… I mean, if the car is only a few blocks away why not just walk over and grab it?

Alas, I do. But, often when you really want a car someone else does too! This is even more the case when say… it’s raining, or it’s the end of the business day. Indeed, many of the times when you would really like that car are times when someone else might also really want it. So being able to lock it down is important. Because if you can’t…? Well, the other week I walked 12 blocks in the rain trying to get to 4 different Car2Go cars that I could see in the app but couldn’t reserve. Why four? Because by the time I got each of them, they were gone, scooped by another suer. After 30 minutes of walking around and getting wet, I gave up, abandoned my appointment (very suboptimal) and went home. This is not the first time this has happened.

The impact is that Car2Go is increasingly not a service I see myself relying on. Yes, I keep using it, but I no longer think of it as a service I can count on if I just cushion a little extra time. It’s just… kind of reliable because the split between really frustrating outcome and totally delight, is starting to be 40/60, and that’s not good.

But here is the killer part. Car2Go could fix this problem in a day. Tops.

The reason I can’t reserve a car is a because the Car2Go app forces you to log back in every once and a while. Why? I don’t know. Even if someone stole my phone and used it to reserve a car it would be useless. Let’s say they managed to also steal my wallet so had my Car2Go card. Even now it doesn’t help them since without my pin they couldn’t turn the car on. So having some rogue person with access to user’s account isn’t exactly putting Car2Go in any danger.

So maybe you’re thinking… well, just remember your password David! So here’s a big user moment.

I WISH I COULD.

But Car2Go has these insanely stupid, deeply unsafe password rules that require you to have at least one number, one letter and a capitalized letter (or a special character – god knows if I remember their rules) in your password. Since the multitude of default passwords I use don’t conform to their rules, I can never remember what my password is, leaving me locked out of my Car2Go app. And trust me, when you are late for a meeting, it’s raining and you’re getting soaked, the last thing you want to be doing is going through a password reset process on webpages built for desktop browsers that takes 10 t0 15 minutes to navigate and complete. Many a curse word has been directed at Car2Go in such moments.

What’s worse is there is evidence that shows that not only do these passwords rules create super crappy user experiences like the one I described above, they also user accounts less secure. Indeed, check out this Wired article on passwords and the tension between convenience and effectiveness:

Security specialists – and many websites – prompt us to use a combination of letters, numbers, and characters when selecting passwords. This results in suggestions to use passwords like “Pn3L!x8@H”, to cite a recent Wired article. But sorry, guys, you’re wrong: Unless that kind of password has some profound meaning for a user (and then he or she may need other help than password help), then guess what? We. Will. Forget. It.

It gets worse. Because you will you forget it, you’ll do something both logical and stupid. YOU’LL WRITE IT DOWN. Probably somewhere that will be easy to access. LIKE IN YOUR PHONE’S ADDRESS BOOK.

Stupid password rules don’t make users create smarter passwords. It makes them do dumb things that often make their accounts less secure.

The result? Car2Go’s design and workflow creates a process that suboptimizes the user experience, all in an effort to (I’m guessing) foster security but that, in reality, likely causes a number of Car2Go users to make terrible decisions and make their accounts more vulnerable.

So if you are creating an online service, I hope this cautionary tale about design, workflow is helpful and password authentication rules. Get them wrong and you can really screw up your product.

So please, don’t do to your service what Car2Go has done to theirs. As a potential user of your product, that would make me sad.

Call For Interest: Toronto Negotiation Unconference 2013

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This is cross-posted from a site my friend Misha Gouberman’s created to explore an idea. We’ve been doing some very light scheming thinking about the following event. What follows is a piece he wrote that I’d love to get thoughts or reactions about from friends in the GTA…

A one-day event for people who work in negotiation, ADR, mediation, conflict resolution

Interested? Get in touch!

This post is a call for interest, to see if there are people out there who would like to take part in a one-day event in Toronto to assemble people who work in fields related to negotiation, alternative dispute resolution, mediation, and conflict resolution.

If you’d like to know more, send me an email at NegotiationUnconferenceTO@gmail.comand I’ll keep you posted about the project as it moves along. The event will only take place if people get in touch, so if you want this to happen, send me an email!

***

Why I’m doing this: I want to be part of community of people who share these interests

As part of my work, I teach classes to the general public through the Barnicke Gallery at the University of Toronto, in negotiation and difficult conversations. I love this subject. And my students are great. But I want more colleagues – I want to meet other people who share this interest, so I can learn about how other people are thinking about these subjects, how they’re applying them, and generally to feel more connected to a broad community of people working on this stuff.

My hope is that there are other people out there who want this, too.

A one-day unconference

To help create this sort of community, I’d like to run a one day unconference in Toronto for people interested in these fields. An unconference is a sort of highly-participatory conference, where participants get to define their own agenda. At an unconference, you spend most of the day talking about the subjects you most care about with people who share those particular interests. It’s an event specifically designed to allow people to learn from each other, to create meaningful connections, and to ensure that people who really need to meet can find each other.

These events are often organized in a grass-roots sort of way, by the people who want to take part in them. I’m hoping to organize a conference in this way. Working as a facilitator, I’ve organized a lot of unconferences like these for clients. People who come to these events generally really love them: the unconference structure is great at generating exciting conversation, serendipitous discovery, and connection. After years of running unconferences for clients, I’m excited to organize one motivated by my own interests.

Who’s behind this?

I’m Misha Glouberman. I’m the author of The Chairs are where the People Go, teacher ofHow to Talk to People About Things at the Barnicke Gallery at the U of T, and a few other things.

My friends Peter Hiddema and David Eaves are involved in the planning, too. David is a public policy entrepreneur, open government activist and negotiation expert. Peter is the CEO of Common Outlook Consulting and has taught negotiation skills in numerous countries on five continents.

How much would it cost, when would it happen, where would it take place?

These are all the things we’ll be figuring out as we go along. I’m eager to have the event soon, maybe as early as May of 2013. I’m hoping it wouldn’t take place any later than September 2013. If we can assemble sponsorships, the event might be free to attend. At most, there would be a nominal fee to cover the basic costs (venue rental, lunch, etc.) The event will take place in Toronto, but the venue is still to be decided.

Interested? Get in touch!!

My first step in this project is just to see if there are people out there who might be interested in this.

This event will only happen if people get in touch to express interest. So if this sounds good to you, drop me a line at NegotiationUnconferenceTO@gmail.com. I’ll email you any news as things move ahead.

Open Data Day: Lessons for Hacktivists

Build Community

From the beginning our goal was simple. It wasn’t code, or even opening data per se. It was about community.

We wanted to foster a friendly event where anyone would feel welcome to participate. The team in Ottawa had, in particular, done great work in reaching out an engaging new people in previous hackathons, they’d have a wealth of non-software developers and even full families attend their events. This was as much a hackathon as it was a community event.

So Open Data Day was always meant to serve as a catalyst for community and network creation. Yes, creating, adding to or working on a project was strongly encouraged, but the real output to help open data advocates find and connect with one another, as well as grow the movement by engaging new people. An effective community was always going to be the core ingredient for petitioning a government to make data open, teaching students or policy makers how to use data or have a group of developers launch a project. While we wanted to create cool software, visualizations and analysis, what I wanted even more was to foster local leaders, champions, social glue and community hubs.

And that’s what we got.

One of the strengths of Open Data Day is its incredible decentralized nature. I blog about it to encourage people to organize and help moderate a mailing list, but beyond that everything is done by local volunteers. From a capacity building perspective, it is an incredible event to watch unfold. I’d like to think Open Data Day has played a helpful role in connecting local stakeholders and even knitting them together with regional, national and international peers.

While I believe that a beautiful piece of code can be critical in making policy makers, the public or others see the world in a different light I also think that building community and developing allies who can share that story of that code with leaders and the public at large is, depending on the breadth of your goals, equally important.

What Works for Communities Can Work for Governments

Almost immediately upon launch of Open Data Day, government officials began showing up at the hackathons. Some came unofficially, others officially, and in some places, the hackathons were invited to take place at city hall. Because we set a venue Open Data Day created a predictable publicized space where governments that were curious, reluctant, eager or cautious could come and engage at a speed that worked for them.

When you build a safe place for a broader community – if your event has more of the feel of a public consultation or community meet-up than a gathering of subversive technologists – you can create space for governments. More importantly, the one thing that characterizes most open data hackathons I’ve witnessed or investigated,is that the participants share a desire to make their community better. That is something most government officials can easily wrap their heads around.

Thus, in a way that I don’t think anyone planned, Open Data Day events have become a place where governments want to understand more of what is possible, learn about the community that is interested in data and wrestle with how open data can change the way they work. What began with a few pioneering cities three years ago has evolved where now places like the Victoria Palace in Romania (the seat of government) and the White House in Washington DC are hosting Open Data Day events.

This type of engagement creates new opportunities, and new challenges, but that is exactly the type of progress many movements would like to see.

Plant a Flag

Setting a date and having people around the world step up and embrace had another interesting impact. It created a deadline not just for community organizers who were organizing their local open data day event, but also for governments that want to engage these communities.

Indeed in the past it has been amazing to see how many governments now see Open Data Day as a deadline for launching open data portals or releasing additional data sets. This is a fantastic outcome as it creates subtle pressure on governments to act.

This year was no exception. I heard of governments around the world releasing data sets in anticipation of Open Data Day. In particular there was a flurry of activity from European governments and agencies. Indeed the European Union chose to launch its open data portal in time for Open Data Day. But there was also much activity across the continent. This included that launch of data portals for the Building Performance Institute Europe, the Italian Senate, the city of Venice , the city ofTrento, the region of Puglia in the south of Italy, and the province of Bolzano. But the practice has become widespread. I was particularly happy to see a city a few kilometers from my home town do the same: the City of Victoria, BC launched its Open Data portal for the day.

These announcements show the amplifying effect of getting organized across geographies. The advocacy work of a group in one country helps reinforce a message that benefits advocates in other countries. This is pretty basic stuff — political advocacy 101 if you will — but it is a reminder of why congregating around a single date, and meeting in person still have value for those who are unpersuaded.

Ultimately Open Data Day is important because it serves the needs of local advocates and activists wherever they are. That means keeping the event coherent so that it can continue to be a global event that people understand, yet flexible so that it can satisfy local needs and desires. For example, the event in Manila focused on poverty while in Washington DC it focused on building community and capacity. These types of events are not, in of themselves, going to completely solve a problem, but I do believe that they are part of a broader political effort that activates a community, engages government and creates pressure for change.

How Hackers Will Blow Up The World: China, Cyber-Warfare and the Cuban Missile Crisis

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I have a piece on TechPresident I really enjoyed writing about how certain technologies – as they become weaponized – can in turn become highly destabilizing to global stability. The current rash of Cyber-Warfare, or Cyber-Spying or Cyber-crime (depending on the seriousness and intent with which you rate it) could be one such destabilizing technology.

Here’s a long excerpt:

This would certainly not be the first time technology altered a balance of military power and destabilized global political orders everyone thought was robust. One reason the world plunged into global war in 1914 after a relatively minor terrorist attack — the assassination of Arch-Duke Ferdinand — was because the hot new technology of the day, the speedy railway, caused strategists to believe it would confer a decisive advantage on those who mobilized first. The advent of nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles of the 1950s had a similar effect, with fears that a first strike “decapitation attack” against Moscow from Turkey, or against Washington from Cuba, could preempt a counter attack.

Cyber warfare may be evolving into a similarly destabilizing type of technology. Prior to the 21st century, cyber attacks were relatively localized affairs. People imagined the main threats of a cyber attack being with virtual thefts from banks, identify theft against individuals and even industrial piracy. Serious problems to be sure, but not end-of-the-world stuff. Even when targeted against the state, cyber attacks rarely pose an existential threat to a country. The loss of state secrets, the compromising of some officials could, cumulatively, be corrosive on a state’s ability to defend itself or advance its interests, but it was unlikely even a combination of operations would shake a mature state to its core.

Two things have changed….

You can read the full piece here. Always love feedback.

Open Data Day 2013 in Vancouver

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Better late than never, I’m going to do a few posts this week recapping a number of ideas and thoughts from Open Data Day 2013. As is most appropriate, I’m going to start the week with a recap of Vancouver – the Open Data Day event I attended and helped organize along with my friend Luke Closs and the very helpful and supportive staff at the City of Vancouver – in particular Linda Low and Kevin Bowers. I’ve got further thoughts about the day in general, its impact and some other ideas I’ll share in subsequent posts.

Vancouver! 2013!

What made Open Data Day in Vancouver great for me was that we had a range of things happen that really balanced time between “creating” (e.g. hacking) and engagement. As a result I’m diving this blog post into three parts: setting the scene, engagement and outcomes as well as sharing some lessons and best practices. My hope is that the post will make for fun reading for regular readers, but the lessons will prove helpful to future open data day organizers and/or plain old hackathon organizers.

Setting the scene

Despite competing with a somewhat rare sunny day in Vancouver at this time of year we had over 80 participants show up at City Hall, who graciously agreed to host the room. Backgrounds varied – we had environmentalists, college and university students, GIS types, open street mappers, journalists, statisticians among others. In addition, the city’s administration made a big commitment to be on hand. Over 20 staff were present, including one of the Deputy City Managers and a councillor – Andrea Reimer – who has been most active and supportive on the Open Data file. In addition we had a surprise guest – Federal Minister Tony Clement, who is the minister responsible for Open Data with the national government.

Our event was fairly loosely organized. We had a general agenda but didn’t over script anything. While Luke and I are comfortable with relatively flexible agenda for the day, we knew the unstructured nature of the event was a departure for some from the city and were grateful that they trusted us both with the format and with the fast, loose and informal way we sought to run the day.

Here are some high level lessons:

When Possible host it Somewhere Meaningful. City Hall is always nice. Many attendees will have never engaged with local government before, this creates a space for them to learn and care about municipal government. It also reaffirms the broader culture changing and social/change oriented goals of an open data hackathon. Besides, who isn’t welcome at City Hall? It sets a great tone about who can come – which is pretty much anyone.
Give the Politicians Some Room. Don’t be afraid to celebrate politicians and leaders who have championed the cause. Hackathons are about experimenting, not talking, so Andrea’s five minute talk at the beginning was the right mix of sincere engagement, enthusiasm and length.
Don’t Only Attract Software Developers. Vancouver’s event was in part a success because of the diversity of participants. As you’ll see below, there are stories that emerged because we tried hard to engage non-software developers as well.
Transit. This may sound obvious but… if you want to attract lots of people make it convenient to get to. We right off the subway line – City Hall is pretty central.
RSVP. We did one thing wrong and one thing right. On the wrong side, we should have allowed more people to register recognizing that not everyone would show. We’d turned people away and ended up having room for them because of the no shows. On the right side, we blasted our list to see if anyone wasn’t going to come at the last minute and, got some responses, which allowed us to re-allocate those seats.

Engagement: Open Dataing

The one thing both Luke and I were committed to doing was getting participants and city staff to talk to one another. Building off an idea Luke witnessed in Ottawa we did 45 minutes of Open “Dataing.” During this period city staff from about eight different departments, as well as Minister Clement, staked out a part of the room. We then had people cluster – in groups of about 5-7 – around a department whose data or mission was of interest to them. They then had 10 minutes to learn about what data was available, ask questions about data they’d like, projects they were thinking of working on, or learn more about the operations of the city. In essence, they got to have a 10 minute speed date on data with a city official.

After 10 minutes blew a whistle and people went and clustered around a new official and did it all over again. It was a blast.

Key Lessons:

Open Dataing is about getting everyone engaged. Helping public servants see what citizens are interested in and how they can see technology working for them, it’s also about getting participants to learn about what is available, what’s possible, and what are some of the real constraints faced by city staff
I wish we’d had signs for the various departments being represented, would have made it easier for people to find and gravitate towards the issues that mattered most to them.
This type of activity is great early on, it’s a way to get people talking and sharing ideas. In addition, we did the whole thing standing, that way no one could get too comfortable and it ensure that things kept flowing.

Outcomes

After the dating, we did a brief run through of projects people wanted to work on and basically stepped back and hacked. So what got worked on? There were other projects that were worked on, but here are the ones that saw presentations at the end of the day. There are some real gems.

Bike Parking App

The Bike Rack app came out of some challenges about data gathering that Councillor Reimer shared with me. I suggested the project and a team of students from UBC’s Magic Lab turned it into something real.

The city recently released a data set of the locations of all city owned bike racks. However, the city has little data about if these locations are useful. So the app that got hacked is very simple. When you arrive at your destination on bike you load it up and it searches for the nearest bike rack. For the user, this can be helpful. However, the app would also track that lat/long of where the search was conducted. This would let city planners know where people are when looking for bike rack so they would start to have some data about underserved locations. Very helpful. In addition, the app could have a crowdsourced function for marking the location of private bike racks (managed by businesses) as well as an option to lat/long where and when your bike was stolen. All this data could be used to help promote cycling, as well as help the city serve cyclists more effectively.

Homelessness Dashboard

My friend Luke connected a Raspberry Pi device to one of the giant TVs in the room where we were working to share the work he had done to create a dashboard based on the city’s rental standards database. Luke’s work even got featured on the Atlantic’s website.

Crime mapping – lots of quality questions

One great project involved no software at all. We had some real data crunchers in attendance and they started diving into the Vancouver Police Department’s data with a critical eye. I wish the VPD could have been there since their conclusions were not pretty. The truth is, the Vancouver Police department makes very little data open, and what it does make, is not very good. What was great to see were some very experienced statisticians explain why. I hope to be able to share the deck they created.

Air quality egg

A few weeks prior to Open Data Day I shared that I’d be launching a project – with the help of the Centre for Digital Media – around measuring air quality in Vancouver. Well, the air quality egg we’d ordered arrived and our team started exploring what it would, and might not, allow us to do. The results were very exciting. Open Data Day basically gave us time to determine that the technical hurdles we were worried about are surmountable – so we will be moving forward.

Over the coming months we’ll be crafting a website that uses Air Quality Eggs to measure the air quality in various neighborhoods in Vancouver. We have a number of other community partners that are hoping on board. By Clean Air Day we’d love to have 50-100 air quality eggs scattered across various neighborhoods in greater Vancouver. If you are interested in sponsoring one (they are about $150) please contact me.

Youth Oriented events RSS feed

One intrepid participant, also not a developer, got the city to agree to create and share an RSS feed of youth oriented events. This was important to them as they were concerned with youth issues – so a great example of a community organizer getting a data resource from the city. Next steps – trying to get other organizations with youth organized events to agree to share their program data in a similar data schema. What a great project.

Provincial Crowdsourced Road Kills and Poaching Maps

I was very excited to have to participants from the David Suzuki Foundation at the hackathon. They worked on creating some maps that would allow people to crowdsource map road kills, and instances of poaching, across the province of British Columbia. I love that they had a chance to explore the technical side of this problem, particularly as they may be well placed to resolve the community building side that would be essential to making a project like this a success.

Neighbourhood quality Heat Maps

Another team took various data sets from the Vancouver Open Data portal to generate heat maps of data quality (proximity to certain services and other variables). This prompted a robust conversation about the methodologies used to assess quality as well as how to account for services vs. population density. Exactly the types of conversations we want to foster!

Figuring our how to translate all of the data.vancouver.ca datasets

Another participant Jim DeLaHunt – put in some infrastructure that would make it easier to translate Vancouver’s open data into multiple languages in order to make it more accessible. He spent the day trying to identify what data in which data sets was structured versus unstructured human readable text. And… much to his credit he created a wiki page, the Vancouver Open Data language census to update people on his work so far.

Live Bus Data Mapped

Another team played with the local transit authority’s real time bus data location API. It was pretty cool to see the dots moving across a google map in real time.

Their goals were mostly just to experiment, play and learn, but I know that apps like this have been sold into coffee shops in Boston, where they let customers know how far away the next bus.

Open Street Map

A Open Street Mapper participant spent the data getting address data merged with OSM.