Lee Iverson

I've been asked repeatedly by students and others for advice on writing a proposal document. As with all documents, I believe that the best way to go about this is to concentrate on two things: the audience and the goal of the document. In general, a proposal is written to someone who has the ability to allow you to do something (i.e. money, resources, supervision) and your goal is to convince them to enable or allow you to do it. With that in mind, we can come up with a few guidelines.

In essence, you are trying to provide a good answer to a simple question (from the point of view of your audience): should I commit my resources to helping this person accomplish their goal? Your goal is to get them to answer "Yes!"

One approach that I really like is to concentrate on the NABC's of your problem: the need, approach, benefits and competition. If you can present an argument that accomplishes the goals described by these principles, then you're well on your way to convincing your audience.

Well, clearly you start out with some problem you are planning to solve - that has to frame everything. So So , how do these NABC's relate to the problem, and how do they answer the question for your audience? Well, I find it useful to again, think about what questions you are answering for each topic.

• Need: Why do I need to solve the problem? Who has the problem? How important is it to them? How much do they need it?
• Approach:How am I going to solve the problem? How does this approach relate to the need and the people who need it? Why will this approach solve it?
• Benefits:What will the benefits of this specific approach be to the users? How will it change what they are doing? How will the specifics of the approach affect these users? What are possible downsides and how can they be mitigated?
• Competition:Who else has tried to solve the problem? How did they do it and how successful were they? How does your solution compare to theirs in terms of benefits and drawbacks?

In general, if you get this far, then you are well on your way to making a case. If you can't answer all of these questions, then you have more work to do. Now, that said, there are definite differences in style and specifics with different audiences.

For academic research the order is usually a bit different: NCAB. You need to further justify the need and make the transition to your approach by doing a review of the work that has already been done that: makes the case for your need, either directly informs or relates to your approach, and provides a baseline to compare yourself against.

For business proposals (and the NABC is sometimes referred to as a mini-business plan), the reason you end with a description of the competition is that that also helps to answer the money questions. How big is the market for this? What impact will it have on an organization in terms of cost-savings, market expansion, or increased productivity? How is the competition selling themselves and how does that relate?

Now, as to writing style and length, that's up to you. You have to make the case. But you should be able to make it at some level in one page, and also be able to produce a more detailed proposal in 20-30 pages. In the ECE department, we limit our Ph.D. proposals to a maximum of 30 pages. If you're having trouble with actually writing the case up, I recommend an approach that I call "Structured Argumentation" that I'll write about soon (and link back to here).

Posted by Lee Iverson at 04:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Lee Iverson :: Blog is my new blog on http://elgg.net, an ePortfolio system. I'm using it for my CSCW course EECE 519. I chose it because of the combination of blogging, tagging, selective sharing, and community definition and maintenance. I also have a student studying information sharing behaviours in a community of Elgg users. Let you know how I like it.

Posted by Lee Iverson at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A simple, but important point about tagging. If a social tag is unattributed, then it is next to useless. Think of "I tag Obj with tag" as an assertion that Obj "means" tag to me (whatever tag means to me). If this is done in a social environment, then without attribution and some ability to assess the meaning or trustworthiness of my tags (from your own perspective), the information that Obj has been tagged is problematic. At TagCamp, I gave a presentation on "Why tagging works" in which I suggested some reasons for tagging's success where previous attempts at social information organization have largely failed. Now, someone added a tag facility to the Wiki for the meeting, a good idea. But it was unattributed, and showed up in the sidebar when you visited a page. Sometime shortly after the meeting someone tagged my personal page with the word "blabbermouth".

Now, I don't mind a negative tag, but this was anonymous and thus kind of cowardly. And as far as I could tell it was inaccurate. A "blabbermouth" is someone who talks out of turn or reveals information they shouldn't. I don't do that. I may be a "bore" or a "loudmouth" (I happen to think best with my mouth open), but never a "blabbermouth".

But I also found cheated out of the opportunity to engage in a conversation with the tagger. What were they bothered by? Did I offend you or prevent you from speaking? I'm left hanging (and branded) without any possibility of correcting an unintended offence...

Now, not all anonymous tagging is of this character, but it certainly does leave me hanging.

Posted by Lee Iverson at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In A social analysis of tagging, Rashmi Sinha makes a few interesting points about the transition from solitary to social with the tagging experience. I tend to agree with this, but I would like to point out a few things I think deserve more consideration. One of the main reasons that social tagging systems work is that they emulate Google's page rank algorithm in an open, browseable way. What do I mean by this, well bear with me.

One there are a hundred or thousand responses to a search engine query the primary distinguishing feature of one search engine from another (besides speed) is the ordering of the responses. The main reason Google worked so much better than their competitors initially was the PageRank algorithm. What Sergey Brin and Larry Page figured out was that how many people are talking about you and what they are saying is more important than what you say about yourself. In essence, all the search engines that preceded Google did textual and structural analysis of the web page itself and created match values with key words on the page in order to calculate the strength of match with each query keyword. Brin and Page figured out that a link is primarily used as an attestation of authority and that the description of a page near its link location is more precise and significant than the page content itself. In other words it uses the "wisdom of crowds" to select pages that best match key words.

Tagging (in the del.icio.us style) has exactly this property. The primary differences are 1) that tags are open and attributed, and 2) that tagging is easier and more dynamic than building a web page. In essence tag systems mirror the pagerank structure of Google's system, but make the internal structures browsable and viewable directly. The consequence of this, and the primary strength of tagging systems, is that tagged structures are more trustable and harder to spoof or spam than search engines.

That said, they need to get better. I need to be able to express who I trust and especially who I don't. I need to express what information I trust from these sources and again what I don't (I may completely agree with a person's perspective on technology but abhor their politics). There's so much more that can and should be done with these systems...

Technorati Tags: del.icio.us, tagging, google.

Posted by Lee Iverson at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)