'Diagram of the Causes of Mortality in the Army in the East' by Florence Nightingale -- click to enlarge. Image from Wikipedia/Wiki Commons.

It’s common knowledge that in 1854  Florence Nightingale identified poor hygiene practices as the major cause of mortality in army hospitals in the Crimea. (In fact, she thought the problem was a combination of poor nutrition and over-work. A separate Sanitary Commission arrived six months later to clean up the drainage, improve ventilation and reduce the occurrence of infectious diseases. Florence became a champion of hospital hygience after she returned to England.)

Another popular fact about Nightingale is that she didn’t believe in the new ‘germ theory’ about how infections spread. (Actually, in the early 1880s she wrote an article advocating strict precautions designed to kill germs.)

Florence Nightingale became the first female member of the Royal Statistical Society in 1858. She developed the ‘polar area diagram,’ a form of pie chart, and was a pioneer in the use of what we now call infographics — visual representations of data that can be understood by non-specialists.

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References:

• Wikipedia article
• Lesson plan from the UK National Archives
• Florence Nightingale Museum
• Royal Statistical Society

[Tip o' the hat to London Daily Photo blogger Ham who photographed a statue of Florence and linked to her infographic.]

Photo, above: Delia Derbyshire in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, with Desmond Briscoe. Photo from BBC Radio 3's web site.

Today, 24 March, is Ada Lovelace Day. On this day bloggers celebrate the lives and careers of women in technology.

In honor of the occasion, please allow me to introduce you to Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram, two Englishwomen who in the 1960s bridged the gulf between science and art to create something never before seen or heard in the world, and to Meredith Brooks, one of Australia’s top audio engineers.

Delia Derbyshire

Novelist Lili Wilkinson blogged about Delia Derbyshire and the Doctor last year, and that’s a good inroduction to Delia.

Ron Grainer rightly gets credit for writing the original Dr Who theme tune, but it was Delia Derbyshire who gave it the rollicking spookiness that made the theme so distinctive.

Derbyshire studied mathematics and music at Cambridge. She was a pioneer of electronic music and sound effects. She worked in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop during the 1960s and 70s, using what we now regard as antiquated equipment to produce complex sounds that would be at home in any nightclub or loungeroom today.

Daphne Oram

The Radiophonic Workshop itself owed its existence to another remarkable woman, Daphne Oram, who with Desmond Briscoe persuaded the BBC that it needed an in-house production facility for electronic music and sound effects.

Daphne Oram in the studio - photo from The Guardian

Oram was, like Derbyshire, both a musician and a scientist who used technology in innovative ways. Oram invented a sound synthesis system called Oramics, which enabled the composer to literally draw the parameters (amplitude, frequency, timbre, duration) of the music she was creating. The marks drawn onto synchronised strips of 35mm film; a series of photo-electric cells under the film generated electrical charges which in turn produced sound.

A BBC News article called her the unsung pioneer of techno.

The March 2008 issue of Sound On Sound has a lengthy feature article on the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the innovators who worked there.

Meredith Brooks

Finally, a word of tribute to Meredith Brooks who with her partner Bill Syratt ran the Soundwarp music engineering studio in Sydney for many years. I met Meredith online in the late 1990s when we both joined the ABC’s Science Matters email discussion list.

Meredith is a woman of good humor and wit. She doesn’t blow her own horn much, but after several years I did discover that she’s one of Australia’s top audio engineers. She and Bill worked on some of Australia’s best-known (rock) music albums.

She also turned out to have remarkable strength of character and spirit: she rarely mentioned the serious illnesses she grappled with in the last several years, except when asking for help with finding practical, useful information about treatment options. Sadly, her beloved Bill succumbed to cancer in 2009.

When I wrote this blog post in mid-2010, the future of the Soundwarp studio was uncertain; Meredith was looking for a new business partner or investor, or perhaps someone to buy the studio outright.

Whatever she decides to do with the business, and whether or not she continues to participate in the online communities we’ve shared, I will always admire Meredith Brooks, both as a successful sound engineer in a business that generally undervalues women’s technical expertise, and as a remarkable human being.

Marina Gorbis has a different idea. In a short article for the Institute for the Future (of which she is executive director) she proposes a different type of business model for social-media ventures:

“Our technology tools and platforms are highly participatory and social. They take advantage of intrinsic human motivations to contribute in order to be noticed, to share opinions, to be a part of something greater than ourselves… Our business models, by contrast, are based primarily on monetary rewards. They are mostly hierarchical and non-participatory decisionmaking processes…

“If we are to truly fulfill the promise of technology tools we have created, we urgently need to design new governance models and new ways of creating value. In the least, organizations whose value derives from communities they create should incorporate the governance principles of successful commons organizations and use the same technology platforms that are at the core of their operations for governance purposes.”

Sounds familiar? David Weinberger wrote in 1999 about the World Wide Web’s effect on organisations. He predicted that companies would survive by becoming ‘hyperlinked’ organisations where hierarchies are replaced by networks of equals:

“…the Web crept into our offices under false pretenses. We thought first it was a library of information. Then we thought it was a publishing medium. Then we thought it was a toy or a dangerous distraction. But in fact it is a conversation of a new type… Conversation that understands that it isn’t a distraction from work, it’s the real work of business.

“The Web is hitting business with the force of a whirlwind because it is a whirlwind. The closely held, tightly packed, beautifully tooled pieces are being pulled apart. They are rebinding themselves in patterns determined by the conversations that are occurring in every conceivable tone of voice.

“The character of business is becoming the same as the character of the Web — an explosion reconfigured by the intersection of hearts.” (The Cluetrain Manifesto, chapter 5)

T-shirt logo for Ada Lovelace Day 2010 - click for details.

…to Female Science Professor, a researcher at a large US university who blogs about working in physical sciences, an academic field dominated by men.

…to Rachel Webster, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Melbourne, a leader of the Square Kilometre Array telescope project. Received a Nature award for scientific mentoring in 2006 and helped introduce the Women In Physics program at Melbourne, increasing the number of female students in that field. Added to the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in March 2010.

…to Elizabeth Blackburn, the Australian Nobel Laureate (2009) who co-discovered telomerase, an enzyme that replenishes the the telomere, a structure at the end of chromosomes that seems to be involved in ageing.

…and to the microbiologists, metalworkers, engineers, physicians, chemists and the many other working women listed in the Australian Women’s Register.

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This post was written for Ada Lovelace Day, 24 March 2010, an international celebration of women in science and technology. This event was founded by Suw Charman-Anderson – yay, Suw!

Portrait of Violet McKenzie in military uniform (Australian War Memorial, collection record PO1262.001)

The program is about Florence Violet McKenzie (nee Wallace), Australia’s first female electrical engineer and a driving force in establishing the Women’s Royal Australian Navy Service (WRANS).

Violet had a particular interest in signalling, and in the 1930s and during World War II her training school taught thousands of women — and Australian and US servicemen — how to use Morse code for emergency and routine communications. In the radio program, a couple of her former students recall Violet’s teaching method: the students learned by rhythmically chanting the da-da-dits of Morse code. Almost a modern version of Gregorian chant!

The radio program’s synopsis says:

“Florence Violet McKenzie was born in the years which gave rise to the first wave of feminism, apt timing for a woman who, during her long life, distinguished herself in technical fields and opened doors for countless other women to join her.

“But Florence Violet McKenzie’s quiet and independent manner has meant that her remarkable story has slipped through the cracks of history. Apart from a couple of brief biographical references, the name Florence Violet McKenzie is hardly familiar in Australia. This program pays some overdue historical attention to a pioneer in technical education for women.

“Florence Violet McKenzie OBE (nee Wallace), aka ‘Mrs Mac’ (1890-1982) was Australia’s first female electrical engineer, first female amateur radio operator, and founder of the Electrical Association for Women. She is best known for her work during the Second World War. Having founded the Women’s Emergency Signalling Corps in 1939, she campaigned successfully to have some of her female trainees accepted into the Royal Australian Navy, thereby originating the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service.

“During the war some 12,000 servicemen passed through her Morse code training school, and after the war her school was a major civilian airline and nautical signal instructional centre. The armed forces and civilian airlines relied on her services right up to the mid-50s. Apart from her successful electrical contracting and wireless supplies business between 1918 and 1934, all her work was voluntary.”

Not mentioned in the synopsis:

• she corresponded with Albert Einstein
• her free school trained more than 10,000 military personnel and civilians
• to become eligible to study electrical engineering, she needed to have a job in a relevant industry — so she set up her own business and got a contract to rewire an acquaintance’s house

My mother’s family probably owes an indirect debt of gratitude to Violet. My aunt Shirley served as a signaller in the Royal Australian Navy during the 1950s, and her brother Keith is a Colonel Commandant in the Australian Army’s Signals Corps.

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References

“Signals, Currents and Wires: the untold story of Florence Violet McKenzie”. This program in the Hindsight series was researched, produced and presented by Catherine Freyne. First broadcast by ABC Radio National on 16 March 2008. When I drafted this post in late January 2009, the program’s web page had a downloadable MP3 audio file. It also provides three photos and a short list of reference books about the WRANS, women and technology.

Florence Violet McKenzie OBE (1892-1982): biography in the Australian Women’s Register, with links and bibliography.

Peter Dunn (2006): Women’s Emergency Signalling Corps in Australia During WWII. Article on Oz At War web site, describing Mrs McKenzie’s involvement in the WESC and the WRANS.

The Australian War Memorial has two photographs:

• Portrait of Violet McKenzie in WESC uniform, undated (1940s or 1950s?) (AWM collection record P01262.001)
• Violet McKenzie aged nearly 90, at a plaque dedication ceremony in her honour, circa 1980 (AWM collection record P02722.003)

Violet is mentioned in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, in an entry about Frances Betty Provan, the first enlisted member of the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service. However, there is no ADB entry for Violet McKenzie herself.

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[This post is written especially for Ada Lovelace Day, a PledgeBank initiative by Suw Charman-Anderson. Tip o' the hat to David Weinberger for mentioning the pledge in his JOHO blog.]

These days we face a skills shortage, an uncertain economic environment and a general reluctance to take risks. The HR priority for employers, argues Matt Moore in a recent article for Human Capital, must “shift from attraction and retention to include productivity — a rewnewed focus on what people do and how they do it.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean reaching for a copy of Getting Things Done, or starting to track the time employees spend on personal phone calls or Facebooking. Nor does it mean spending thousands on training courses or conferences of dubious value.

Rather, Moore suggests five tactics for staff development that can build upon the knowledge and skills that already exist within the organisation. These tactics aren’t  expensive to implement; they do require commitment and participation from senior managers, if the program is to work across the whole organisation.

It is possible to apply some of these tactics, to start from the ground up, without a formal mandate from management. This is often a good way to demonstrate the value of what you’re doing, so that dubious executives are more likely to suport your more radical ideas.

Here are a couple of examples from my own experiences.

To start a community of practice all you need is two or three interested colleagues. Arrange to meet regularly for coffee or lunch — same place, same time, same day of the month — and talk about your common interests and challenges. Keep it informal.

Encourage attendees to tell their colleagues. Let word get around. As you discover others with similar interests, invite them to join the group. After a while, once you’ve established a small group of regulars, you might start an email discussion list or other online forum to continue the conversation between meetings.

Eventually the community becomes largely self-sustaining, with a larger number of ‘lurkers’ surrounding the core group of regulars. The individual members learn from each other, help each other to solve problems, undertake projects and improve their own daily work practices. Collect these stories and document them as evidence that the community has benefits for the organisation. Then you can ask the HR department to recognise participation as a factor in the individuals’ performance evaluations and professional development plans.

Similarly you might take on the role of mentor or teacher for a colleague who wants to develop her own knowledge or skills. This can be an immensely rewarding relationship for both sides, provided you establish some ground rules early.

Think about what each person wants out of the relationship, agree on some goals and a time limit. An early clear understanding about expectations can help to prevent misunderstandings arising later. Again, if you think your manager will be amenable to it, ask for the mentoring or teaching to be recognised in your annual performance review. When others notice your learning partner’s new skills or knowledge, encourage them to send a brief email to your partner’s manager: peer recognition is a wonderful incentive.

In implementing any of these knowledge-sharing tactics, there are no simple formulas for success. There are no ‘quick wins’ to be had; the benefits will emerge over time. Your experience will differ from mine or from Matt Moore’s. Given the current social and economic situation, and weighing the potential gains, there’s no harm in at least making a start on the journey.

Further reading:

• Matt Moore (2008) “Talent Management in a Down Economy” in Human Capital, volume 6 number 11, pp 38-41.
• Matt Moore’s Innotecture consultancy and blog
• Jürgen Kluge, Wolfram, Stein and Thomas Licht (2001) Knowledge Unplugged: the McKinsey & Company global survey on knowledge management. Palgrave.

The Commission delivered three key documents to the University community:

1. Final Report of the Steering Committee, describing the consultation process, summarising what we learned, and analysing the major areas of contention
2. Melbourne’s Scholarly Information Future: a ten-year strategy (“Zis iss ze big vun,” as Otto von Chriek might say)
3. Implementation plan, including a budget proposal and a governance proposal

The Final Report was noted by the Academic Board and University Council. This now becomes part of the University’s official records, providing information about why particular decisions have been made.

The Scholarly Information Future strategy was endorsed by both Academic Board and Council. This makes the strategy an official part of the University’s planning and reporting framework. The strategy describes what we want to do, and by when.

The implementation plan was presented at the annual Planning and Budget Conference where money is allocated for the forthcoming calendar year. (So yes, there is a six-month lag between approval of budget and the appearance of actual money on the (virtual) table. Previous experience has shown that much can happen in those six months — universities are very political organisations.) The implementation plan describes how we will make the strategy’s aspirations into realities; the governance model specifies who will be responsible for achieving the desired outcomes.

Decisions are made outside the committee room

Getting a new strategy, governance model and funding proposal approved is not simply a matter of writing the documents and sending them to the relevant committee secretaries. The real decisions of committees and boards are made outside the boardroom.

With the Information Futures Commission, we had the perfect project sponsor — a CEO who is adept at engagement with both ideas and people, who has a reputation for getting things done and who carries great personal credibility within the organisation.

We also had a project leader who combines expertise in her professional fields with a strong emphasis on finding the best possible outcome for everybody involved in a given situation.

Within the project team, we rehearsed many different ways of telling our story. These rehearsals influenced how we wrote the final documents, how we talked at meetings and forums, the selection of examples and anecdotes for presentations. We drew pictures on our whiteboard, we stuck flurries of Post-Its to the walls, and we talked across the partitions at least every half-hour (or whenever inspiration happened to strike). This verbal and visual creativity also provided a fair bit of laughter for the project team, and free entertainment for members of other project teams who worked in nearby cubicle pods.

Eventually some concepts and language became canonical — we reached a rough consensus about how we wanted to express our ideas to others — and this informed our discussions with the Steering Committee.

Throughout the life of the Commission, our sponsor and our leader each spent quite a bit of time and energy on meeting with individuals and groups, explaining the strategy and answering questions about what it means for the University. This intensified in the last two months, as the deadline for decisions drew nearer.

We also called on members of the Steering Committee, and other senior stakeholders, to add their voices to the general conversation — to talk with their colleagues and peers about adopting the strategy, to find money for its implementation.

A related question has come up several times in the last couple of months. When we ask a senior stakeholder for an opinion about what issues the Commission should tackle, the response is often,”Well, what are other universities doing?”

Scope of the Commission

The Information Futures Commission is developing a 10-year strategy for how the University of Melbourne deals with four kinds of scholarly information:

1. Published information and collections used by our scholars to inform their learning, teaching and research, for example library collections, archives, museum and gallery collections.
2. Materials created for learning and teaching purposes, eg course notes, presentation slides, customised ‘packs’ of selected readings for a particular subject, audio and video versions of lectures, and a range of digital objects that can be stored in a learning management system and reused in different ways and at different times
3. Information created in the course of research activities, eg numerical data collected from scientific instrumentation and laboratory work; information collected from surveys, interviews and other social studies; records of meetings and conversations between collaboration partners; models, plans or images created in the course of design, architectural or ethnographic research.
4. Research outputs such as papers, chapters, monographs, articles, letters, presentations, posters, demonstrations and speeches, processed research data, visualisations of large datasets, models, web sites and multimedia objects. Information produced for the purposes of community engagement can be considered a subset of this category.

As well as the information itself, we are looking at the technologies that we use to find, create, store, deliver, manipulate and distribute that information. And when we say ‘technologies’ we mean everything from library shelving systems to wireless Keepad clickers in classrooms.

What about those Joneses?

Some universities have rethunk their libraries recently — UC Berkeley and the University of Texas are good examples of this.

Many US and European universities are reviewing their IT functions and moving towards a shared-services model. This often involves adopting an ITIL framework for the delivery of IT services.

Support for e-research — large-scale computing, data storage and management etc — is not yet commonly tackled as part of a larger “library plus IT plus…” agenda. (Though I think Monash is leading the Australian way in how to provide information management services and support to researchers.)

As far as we are aware, no other anglophone university is looking at all four (or five) areas in an holistic manner.

Similarly, we haven’t found another library that is explicitly taking the larger organisation’s strategic/business goals as its starting point for a review. The library reviews that we’ve heard about tend to start with the observation that “library users’ practices are changing, so the library needs to change too.”

Asking the right question

Is the Information Futures Commission doing the right thing?
In the consultation phase of the project we have posed questions that are relevant to Melbourne University at this point in its history. Many of those questions won’t be relevant for other universities, because they arise from Melbourne’s particular strategic goals and ambitions.

Are we insanely ambitious? (Perhaps just insane?)

Will others follow our lead? (Do we care?)

Are we breaking fruitful new ground?

It seems there are no ‘right’ answers, no robust precedent to follow, no ‘best practice’ guidelines that we can use as a checklist for this project.

Instead we have designed a broad consultation process that seeks input from many sources and stakeholders. We will rigorously test the assumptions we make and, wherever possible, base our decisions on good evidence.

Ask me in 10 years whether we got it right :-)

We had our first steering committee meeting today.

The sponsor/chair opened the meeting.

He tabled a single printed page, an excerpt from a book: Yes Minister’s Guidelines on How to Kill or Suppress a Report (from the episode “The Greasy Pole”).

He referred us to the agenda (including item 3, discussion of the draft report), and the meeting began in earnest.

I have a feeling this project will go well :-)

A couple of weeks before Christmas, on my last day at work, an all-staff email announced an Information Futures Commission would start work in the new year. The Commission would develop a 10-year strategic plan for the University’s ‘scholarly information’ environment — libraries, information literacy, curation of data created as a result of research activities, archives, IT-enhanced classrooms and so on.

I sent a quick email to the director of the Commission, offering to take notes at meetings. A good way of learning about complicated topics and processes, I said, implying that it would be a low-cost professional development opportunity. Linda responded promptly: let’s catch up when we’re both back from holidays.

Last Tuesday, Linda called me to a meeting with herself and my boss, Donna. It lasted half an hour, and I left Linda’s office with a new job.

It’s a bit more complicated than just taking notes at meetings: instead, it’s a full-on project officer role.

Of course, there was more than luck involved.

First, there was Angela. She is Donna’s boss, and reports to Linda. Unbeknownst to me, Angela suggested to Linda that I might be a useful member of the project team. Angela is well-respected in this institution, and I’m very grateful that she used some of that whuffie for my benefit.

Second, there was history. From my previous work in the University web team, Angela  and Donna both knew that I’m a strategic thinker, well-organised and good at documentation. It probably helped that Linda had also seen some first-hand evidence of these qualities.

That leads us neatly to factor number three: provable credibility. Linda didn’t know that I have several years’ experience in committee administration work. In my December email, I shamelessly dropped the name of a well-respected senior manager who recently observed me doing such work and had commented favorably on it. The name-dropping was done in a light-hearted way, as if it’s no big deal: “Manager X will tell you I’m a demon for committee admin…”

Fourth, I showed that I was more interested in the success of the project than in personal aggrandisement. Given my current job classification, I could have asked for a senior role on the project team. Linda could have felt that I was more interested in maintaining personal status than in helping the project team achieve their goals. Instead, by offering to take minutes, I set a low level of expectation on what kind of role I might expect to fill in the project team. This allowed Linda to decide for herself how best to use my various skills.

(And I really would have been happy just to take minutes and keep the steering committee admin in order, if that’s all Linda wanted from me. Rooly trooly.)

Fifth, although there was only an hour’s notice, I prepared for the meeting with Linda and Donna.I spent that hour writing a two-page CV.

On the first page was a summary of experience and skills that I thought might be useful for a project of this kind. On the second page was a list of the various jobs I’ve held, covering 23 years of full-time employment (I left uni at 18).

As I wrote, I practised ‘pitching’ various aspects of the CV: how would I describe my skills in communication planning? What are my particular strengths? In 20 words, can I describe my style of working in a team? What specific experience-based example would illustrate the set of skills I’m writing about in paragraph 3?

Finally, there was the Donna factor. She’s a supportive and generous boss, and does her best to see that staff have opportunities to learn, grow and do good work. Awesome :-)

Like all overnight successes, this one took a while to happen. I’m glad it did: it’s an exciting opportunity, and there’s a fun team to work with. We have lots of work to do in a very short period. Six months of mayhem coming up…