2 responses to “People Powered Plings!”

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  Tim Davies June 24th, 2008 at 19:04

  Another interesting plings experiment

  One conceptual question: Should the plings site, when it aggregates data, be allowed to ever be wrong?

  Where should the data quality bar be set? And how can that be presented to users?

  A youth worker or information officer may well give out of the odd wrong bit of information – and that odd mistake would probably be accepted as just that, the odd mistake. But it seems there more of a problem if mistakes are published and aggregated.

  (It seems we treat information differently when it is a stock, and when it is in a flow… perhaps the challenge is working out to pursuade plings users to treat it as a flow of information, when many people’s mode of accessing content on the web is still to treat it as a stock).

  Ok – getting too conceptual here – so I’ll stop trying to form this line of thinking into a clear question – but at a sketch, the key issues of accuracy and accountability for sharing (potentially fallible) aggregated content from others are interesting ones in this situation.

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  stevieflow June 26th, 2008 at 16:35

  Hi Tim

  Thanks

  Yes – a good point – especially when considering aggregating information about activities that people may attend.

  Indeed , I wrote a paper (that I will post up) around the issue of Quality in the provision of youth activity information. In this, I highlighted that whilst getting the information “together” is one great thing to do, there are then various factors of Quality (and I use a capital Q) that should be considered – such as:

  - Completeness – ie: why is the postcode of the venue missing, and there no information on end times?
  - Accuracy – ie: is it up to date?
  - Clarity – ie: who really is responsible for that activity

  (there were a few other factors – Ill post it all up somewhere!)

  This should be considered when looking at any source of positive activity information – whether online or printed in a summer activities booklet.

  The fact that with Plings we are proposing to aggregate and distribute this information would not alter these parameters. Indeed, I would hope that the potential for further reach and wider feedback would encourage those preparing the information to consider such aspects in more depth perhaps.

  I guess the second aspect would be that the nature of aggregation and syndication means that a corrected mistake can quickly be rectified and circulated, rather than be condemned to print..

  Finally – with the Plings page so far we have concentrated on aggregating different sources and types of information – links, volunteering, positive activities, news – so the value of these to people would be a factor that would be self-determined. Turn off the news if you don’t want it!

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