Breaking the ICE

Peter Sefton at University of Southern Queensland (USQ) has developed a well-thought-out and engineered system for authoring semantic documents.  We talked earlier this year at ETD2007 (blogged). Now he writes about how to get it adopted: Breaking the ICE

Over the last couple of mo[n]ths we’ve been breaking the ICE. That is, we have been taking the big, complex Integrated Content Environment and making it easier to use just parts of it.
It’s hard not to notice that the only place where full-blown ICE is used much is at USQ, in that environment we have a hundred plus users, and growing steadily, but the external teams we’ve tried to get using ICE have all been slow to adopt it.
I have been thinking a lot about why this is.

• It’s too hard to install and set up, including the server-side components. (We’re working on making it easier, bit by bit).
• People don’t perceive a need for HTML and PDF versions of their documents (although many do, and there are some supporters out there).
• At USQ our academic staff are used to creating book-length distance-ready course content and we push hard for flexible delivery, so people do want HTML and PDF versions of content. Other places there’s not the same culture.

PMR: I know how Peter feels. Any of us who create systems that will make the world better wonder why there isn’t an uprush of people wanting to take them up. Despite the apparent mad rush in Web 2.0, Piet Hein had it right in his “grook“. In the academic world TTT – Things Take Time (reposted with affection, if not permission):

T. T. T.
Put up in a place
where it's easy to see
the cryptic admonishment
T. T. T.
When you feel how depressingly
slowly you climb,
it's well to remember that
Things Take Time.

I don’t know Peter’s colleagues in USQ (I hope to meet some in February) but I am willing to bet that he has found one or more people with the characteristics:

• they share Peter’s vision
• they have a real job of work to do for which ICE is suitable
• they know Peter well enough to trust there is a measure of stability in the system
• they share beers

Now I would like to use ICE. I think it’s the right way to go for embedding markup such as CML in documents. But I don’t have a need to use it. And I don’t have a colleague who has a need to use it. And I’m not going to rush up to an unknown colleague and persuade them to use a system that they might need just because I think it’s good.
We face the same problem with SPECTRa : Submission, Preservation and Exposure of Chemistry The system is designed for the deposition of chemistry data (crystallography, NMR, computational chemistry) in repositories. But it won’t be used unless we are able to persuade someone to change their business process and that will take time and effort and possibly investment. So it’s a selling job. How do we sell it? Stick or carrot? We have no stick (the time may come when the Research Councils mandate deposition, but we aren’t quite there yet). So we have to show a Chemistry Department (note, probably not a complete institution) that it will do wonderful things for them. Will it? Perhaps by combining it with CrystalEye – which will show the results of harvesting the departmental data. Giving a show window onto the data for both the inmates and the outside world. Making it easier for researchers to find their own data which they had untill yesterday – somewhere – until it disappeared.
So ICE, SPECTRa, etc. need lots of patience, constant improvement, gentle selling. Gradually there will be an uptake, and then at some stage it will take off. Months? Years? We can’t tell, but we have to be prepared for a long haul.