Sarah Schacht the ED and founder of Knowledge As Power (KAP) was the opening keynote speaker for iEdge 2010.  Her talk was great it focused on the failed practices of government information practices.  My favorite failure is printing word docs so someone can sign the document and then scan it without OCR, Optical Character Recognition.  This process takes accessible document and turns them into pictures that screen readers can not access and web crawlers will never read or categorize.

Practical Solutions:

  • Do not charge end users for public government info, design systems that auto archive and do not need to be a revenue center
  • Do usability testing, do not try to teach the public to use an archaic system, redesign the systems so you do not have to teach people to use it
  • Make it personal especially when empowering people

The tweet stream #iEdge10 has many more comments on this talk.

Photo from Seattle IP Blog article on KAP

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