The Story of Stuff

It all started with a trip to the iRise blog to read about Made to Stick, which was very intriguing and made me want to write about usability and stickiness all over again, but I took a side trip to the Made to Stick blog which led me to the Story of Stuff. It’s such an impactful video, I’ve got to say, it’s changed my whole way of looking at life. Talk about usability done well! The simple, stick-people graphics in this video combined with the passion and common sense of Annie Leonard are so incredibly well-done. They even split the video up into chapters so you can watch the whole thing, or you can skip to or re-watch portions of it. And at the end of the video, they provide a link to what you can do–a clear call to action. They did everything right, and it’s a good thing because this is a message that needs to be heard.

I e-mailed it to all of my friends and made a mental note to write it up on my blog and everywhere I went I started challenging the way I was doing it. I ran across another blog entry this morning about Water Bottle Guilt (with entertaining diagram!), which reminded me I GOTTA blog about this!

We detoxed our home a couple years ago, switching all our cleaning products, personal care products, etc. to Melaleuca. I’ve been sharing the “get-rid-of-toxins” message with people ever since then. But now when I go to the coffee shop, I order my coffee in a washable mug, rather than a throwaway cup. (And next time I need it to go, I’m gonna bring along my own travel mug to put it in!) My friend had given me a reusable shopping bag over Christmas, but I kept forgetting to use it, until I saw The Story of Stuff. I’m finally refusing to use plastic bags at grocery stores–either I bring my own bags (I got lots of “love your bags!” comments when I used my bright green “Live Green” bags yesterday at the store!) or I just carry my items. “Don’t you want a bag?” they ask. No, I don’t. I am against using them, against our whole consumption-oriented society. It’s insane how much waste we generate every day, and we all need to take steps to stop it and create a sustainable system that won’t destroy our earth. I’ve also decided that when we go to the convenience store for fountain pop, I’m gonna reuse the cups we bought last week. I’m not buying the plastic bottled pop anymore. These are just some little steps I’m taking.

My daughter and I are going to get together and brainstorm some more ways we can help save our planet together. She’s really excited–and so am I!

Where’s your journey to helping sustain the earth going to take you? I hope you will start by watching the Story of Stuff.

(By the way, I did notice sometimes that the Story of Stuff web site has trouble loading. I think it’s getting a lot of traffic. If it doesn’t work the first time you visit, reload the page and try again. It’s well worth it!)

What government agencies oughta do …

I chanced upon a couple interesting blog entries up on Ogle Earth today about “closed” geo-portals offered by government geo-agencies–like France’s IGN Geoportail and the UK Ordnance Survey’s Explore. France’s portal offers 2D and 3D views, while the UK’s Explore portal allows users to share routes.

A quote from OgleEarth (Stefan Geens):

Géoportail certainly is much more impressive that the UK Ordnance Survey’s “outreach” effort, but both are just as closed in a time when everything online is moving towards open, interoperable, mashable standards. KML is now an OGC standard, most recently embraced by Microsoft. Where is the support By IGN and OS? Why can’t I export anything to mash up? Where are the APIs? The USGS, on the other hand, gets it. …

… National GIS agencies should concentrate on getting the best GIS content, acting as a repository for it, and making it accessible to all. Competing with Google and Microsoft to provide end-user services based on this content is a waste of public resources, especially as Google and Microsoft will always do it better.

Stefan has a good point: have the government agencies considered what their people want to do with the data? Should government agencies focus on creating new user portals for viewing data, providing collaboration portals, or should they be trying to make their data more open and “mashable”, taking advantage of Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards and best practices? Also, do government agencies inevitably produce inferior interfaces? Should they even waste taxpayer money on developing custom mapping interfaces?

I would argue that both openly accessible data distributed via open methods like KML and a usable government access portal (that includes open features like GeoRSS feeds) are needed. There are developers and dataheads who will want to mash up data with other data sources, but the vast majority of the world doesn’t have a clue what a mashup is, so they need that friendly portal. 

I agree with Stefan that Microsoft and Google are always going to “do it better”–that doesn’t mean government geo-agencies shouldn’t provide a public portal to access the data. What it does mean is they should take advantage of APIs and other resources offered by Google et al. in building those portals. By using commercially-developed (free), industry standard mapping APIs and by paying attention to usability, perhaps they can avoid experiences like Stefan described when he tried out the UK’s Explore tool:

A couple of things quickly became evident. The mapping area is really small. The maximum scale is much lower than what we’re used to elsewhere. Map drawing tools are very rudimentary, and you can’t edit submitted routes. You can’t import routes. You can’t export routes. By-now standard web-map conventions such as using the scroll wheel to zoom aren’t supported. Mapperz has his own list of limitations.

In sum, if this were a private initiative, I’d refrain from reviewing it, as it would compare unfavorably to the competition. But this is tax-payers’ money at work, so the larger question needs to be asked: What is a government agency doing entering a market niche that is serviced much better and for free by the private sector?

Good question, Stefan.