member report, March 2004

Hi everybody,

Starting today I'm going to try to send out monthly reports to all the
Rhizomers, basically to give you guys a better sense of what we're
working on here in the home office. Here are some of the more
interesting things that fill our lonely days and nights:

1. Rhizome Commissions
The commissions voting process got underway on Monday, March 8, and
will last until April 19. This is a Big Deal, both in terms of 1) how
the discussion will work, and 2) how the technical backend works. I'll
be monitoring both pretty closely over the next few weeks. One note:
All the votes are logged separately, so if there's some catastrophic
failure in the software I could always print them out and count by
hand. Not that I expect to have to. No hanging chads here!
http://rhizome.org/commissions/

2. Search usability
One of the big things I'll be working on over the long-term is
improving the search engine. There are a million things I could do to
fix it, but it's important to stay focused and get the most benefit out
of the least work. So I did a quick usability test to figure out what
the biggest problems are, which gave me about four months' worth of
things to fix. Once those are done I'll run another usability test, do
another report, and keep coding.
http://rhizome.org/report/search-usability-2004-03-02.pdf (Warning!
Extremely boring.)

3. ArtBase revamp
Here in our palatial Rhizome office, whenever we sit down and talk
about the ArtBase we come up with about 20 ways it could be better –
better metatagging! collaborative filtering! free coffee! – but we're
hampered by one big thing: The ArtBase submissions system is brittle
and klugy and we all hate it. I mean, it works fine – submissions keep
coming in, and they somehow make it through our arduous system and into
posterity. But we'd really rather it work faster and cleaner and not be
such a danged headache. So another big task is for Feisal Ahmad, our
dashing young Content Coordinator, and I to work together to basically
revamp the AB submissions system until it feels not-so-squishy. And do
it in a way that it does not necessitate stopping or even slowing the
current flow of ArtBase submissions and approvals. Then we can start
talking about that free coffee.
http://rhizome.org/report/ArtBase-2004-02-25.pdf

Questions? Concerns? Comments on my personal hygiene?
F.