D. of T. report, March 2004

Hi everyone,

My March involved a lot of small, boring little housekeeping-type
tasks, and a few interesting ones. Some of the interesting ones
include:

DONE IN MARCH:
+ Commission Voting
This got underway in March and other than a dumb error in the very
beginning, I have not heard any reports of technical problems with the
system. Whether voting is successful in a social/aesthetic sense is a
much more important question, and I think that remains to be seen.
Since we're still in the process of voting it wouldn't be appropriate
for me to say much now, but when this is all done I'll be writing up a
report for perusal & discussion, which will help us refine, change, or
scrap the experiment for the next time Rhizome does commissions.
http://rhizome.org/commissions/

+ Browse artworks by keyword
You can browse artworks in the ArtBase by keywords now! This is the
first (and easiest) step in the ongoing process to make searching the
website easier.
http://rhizome.org/fresh/artworks_by_keyword.rhiz

+ Minor gender corrector
This is barely worth mentioning, but I switched the order of "female"
and "male" in the dropdown on the user demographics page. Mostly I was
taking a cue from Danah Boyd's off-hand comment about how interaction
designers almost always put "male" first without a good reason. (
http://www.misbehaving.net/2003/10/social_construc.html )
Of course, now that I look at the page again I notice how "in progress"
slips out of order and that I'm not really certain how to treat that
since I suspect that most people who chose that option are joking. Or
the fact that gender is largely a social construct and that even the
basic designation of "in progress" would seem to imply that any state
of in-betweenness–whether you're talking about hermaphroditism, drag,
metrosexuality, or just dykes on bikes–is inherently unstable and that
the only genuine options are those proscribed by heteronormative
binarism.
Yes, I know that the field's optional, and that I'm thinking too much
about it.
http://rhizome.org/preferences/user.rhiz

IN PROGRESS:
+ ArtBase revamp
The ArtBase revamping is getting started slowly. My general plan is to
introduce this in small stages from end of the process to the front, so
that artists who are going through the process will move forward out of
the old system into the new system without any interruption. Currently
I'm working on a user-friendly central control panel that tells you
"These are the artworks you have in the system; you have to take
actions on these pieces, but not these pieces." I'm also building a
message-tracking system (inspired by various tech-support systems) that
will centralize all correspondence about a given artwork. ( There's
also a process-phase abstraction that would only really interest a
hardcore object-oriented domain modeling geek. )

+ Hiring
I've also been interviewing for a part-time, short-term consultant to
help me with the programming, mostly for ArtBase and search. More on
this is it develops.

Francis