[ session description ]

Presenter(s)

(lots)

Date

16 March 2010

Tags

#interinfo

Sites

Livefyre Conversation

Flowing Data

GOOD

walkingpapers.org

Hans Rosling

Eye Candy

Information graphics force their meaning upon us. Any time a graphic can use data to tell a wonderful story is much more compelling than simply arranging data in traditional ways. Collecting large datasets is pointless unless you can transmit something compelling about the data.

Infographics bring a story out of large sets of data; do infographics inadvertently obscure other stories? How do we know we are getting the right story out of an infographic? Live data infographics can help people find the emerging stories as they are happening as the data is unfolding, as well as after-the-fact analysis. You can examine how events may have impacted or interrupted other events by analyzing datasets during the same time period (phone calls, stock trades). You can also go literal and mine social media in the moment (twitter trending, twitter during superbowls, etc.).

Tag clouds based on twitter/facebook traffic can be represented by size of images related to stories (luge death at olympics). Geolocation data tied to tweets brings location in space tied to time and context, obvious uses of Maps mashups.

Presenter(s)

Mike Arauz

Bud Caddell

Date

16 March 2010

Tags

#webvideothunderdome

Sites

web video thunderdome tumblr

Internet fame is a social phenomenon, not a magic trick or a viral, purchasable service. Brands suck at making web video. But they’ve come a long way in the past year. There’s nothing “in” the video that will guarantee something will be spread across the internet. It’s whether or not someone will choose to pass it along, purely social, not viral.

So why do we share? 1) To strengthen my bond with a group of people, 2) define our collective identity between insiders and outsiders (the stuff we think is funny is the reason we are “in”), 3) give me status in my community.

The Lessons

The internet is not like any other media. Each individual decides what their internet experience is going to be. The web wasn’t built with advertising in mind. No commercial breaks. Every click you make on the internet is a vote for a brand. Brands have to earn their place on the internet.

Be remarkable

If you are going to do something, do it VERY well. “What is going to work” is absolutely unpredictable, so you must be doing something special.

Play on past successes

Look at what spiked on the web and do something new with it.

Use the web to tell more complex stories

You can use the web to tell stories that couldn’t fit inside a 30 second commercial. The best advertisers tell really great stories. Tricks can catch people’s attention. When you combine those two things, magic happens.

Collect your fans

Use the web to grab an audience and keep talking to them without having to put together another buy. Don’t stop talking! It’s a commitment to open a channel and keep the conversation going. This takes time, but the exchange is a solid foundation. The moment you have people caring about what you are doing next is critical.

Invite participation

The ability to remix, mashup, and recut videos is becoming more ubiquitous. Viewing, rating, commenting, sharing, copying, and performing.

Start small riots

Find communities that feel passionate about something and build content for them (e.g., people who like to watch really bad auditions for American Idol). Court communities like constituencies: recognize who they are, understand what they care about, their motives and interests, and what their social currency is.

The Awards

Does a brand idea pass the “i’d rather be looking at kittens / porn test”?

Spokesman

Gingers do have souls v. The man your man could smell like

Cute kid tricks

The “I’m Yours” ukulele kid v. Evian roller babies

Instant Smiles

Surprised little kitten v. VW piano staircase

Song Parody

college humor: I gotta feeling parody v. The muppets: bohemian rhapsody

Lifetime Achievement

Hitler reacts to …

Video of the Year

epic beard man v. pants on the ground

[ session description ]

Presenter(s)

Andrea Hill

Michael Krotscheck

Date

15 March 2010

Tag(s)

#forgingidealcareer

This is a core conversation, so I put up the computer and conversated.

When you are managing teams, your job is to make people successful.

[ session description ]

Presenter(s)

Andre Gaulin

Date

15 March 2010

Tag(s)

#damngoodmanager

Site

damngoodmanager.com

What makes a good manager?

• Helping people find the awesome in themselves.
• Think of people as really skilled individuals instead of “resources”.
• Remember what it was like to be a “doer”, and find a way to be connected all the time, and be brave enough to say ‘No’ to a client.
• Delegate: Trust your team to get the results you’ve clearly defined for them and coach them through the process; delegation does not mean you remove yourself from the task.
• It’s not about you.
• Bridge the gap between clients and team members and advocate for your team (even if that means you’re not loved by everyone because you have to say ‘No’).
• New hire: Focus on what a person wrote in their cover letter, get to the conversation of an interview as fast as possible. Always think about what impact this one individual could have on the dynamic of your team. Remember that you aren’t buying a product or service from an employee, you are dealing with individuals who must work together.
• Set professional and personal goals so you are working with people who are becoming better people, not just better workers.

Transition from attendance-based to results-based compensation

This is a culture change. Give people autonomy to do your job as long as the work gets done, the results happen. Instead of work being a place you go, work should be something you do. In a ROWE, each person is free to do whatever they want, whenever they want as long as the work gets done. Pay employees to get an outcome, instead of paying them to “do a lot of stuff” and not get an outcome.

As the job market starts to improve, people are going to changing jobs during a time when people are focusing on happiness; finding work that is important/personal to them. If organizations want to keep their people, you need to think about the way your employees work. ROWE is here to stay!

[ session description ]

Presenter(s)

Alexandra Levit @alevit

Cali & Jody @caliandjody

Jeff Gunther @jeffgunther

Jessica Lawrence @jessicalawrence

Date

15 March 2010

Tag(s)

#rowewhyitworks

Site

ROWE

The employee’s most prized asset is his/her brain. It’s a knowledge economy now. ROWE can be measured all the way to the bottom line. What the company owns is your work, not your face. Traditional work time is wasteful and prevents employees from living their lives now, which in turn reduces the value they can bring to the workplace. The key here is to let organizations get what they need out of their employees. The current work environment is so broken that people don’t give all that they could give. Organizations are missing out!

Sludge – Judgment about how other people spend their time.

How do organizations retain the top talent? Not with cultures where the employer does not trust the employee. All employees. Period. Otherwise, organizations are hiring people they don’t trust. Why would you do that? That culture teaches people to be mindless followers instead of the people who can innovate and bring true, lasting, and continuous value to the workplace. Move from a permission-based system to empowering your employees.

Implementation

Take three months to work in the new ROWE, and then write “results” so that the results are based on the new work environment, not the traditional way of thinking about work.

• Shift to using laptops.
• Tracking hours is closer to actual work done.
• Gen-Y employees are already habituated to be able to work anywhere.
• Cross-training actually starts to make sense, because any type of ways to work becomes possible

Metrics – How do you measure your ROWE implementation? Does anyone leave? How happy are employees? Productivity?

Employee

Successful employees will be those who can solve problems in the most effective way. Write expected results tied to company goals, with measurable objectives of what work they actually did. Measure the hell out of how well you are meeting expectations. This requires active, planned communication.

Employer

Integrating this is a leadership challenge: leaders who understand that giving up control can make a company better. But giving up control isn’t the same as giving up involvement. In fact, it requires a lot more communication between managers and employees regarding clear expectations. Everyone must be aligned to the goals and expectations.

Start with a baseline of “everyone can be trusted”. Give new hires the opportunity (via clear goals and expectations) to be accountable for getting results. Audit your policies to see where they are not based on trust, and re-write policies from the standpoint of “trust first”. Managers need to change the approach to communicating what they need from employees.

Challenging the Status Quo

Once you have objective results by which you are measuring people, there is the reality that some people will not perform and will need to be let go. This is where the rubber meets the road. This creates new HR issues to deal with: work-a-holics can be adversely affected because they work all the time instead of benefiting from traditional work boundaries and get burned out. Must counsel work-a-holics on how to not work that much (great problem to have!).

Should we drop the term “Semantic Web” and replace it with “Computable Web”?

[ session description ]

Presenter(s)

(lots)

Date

14 March 2010

Tag(s)

#beyondalgorithms

The semantic web connects literal semantics with intent/knowledge. The idea is to build systems that can understand user requests with natural language and connect people to the “rest of the stuff”.

“For the first time, computers are starting to ‘understand’ what people are asking them to do… and the context surrounding the information” … in a super-literal / abstracted way. How do you use the entire breadth of knowledge, data, and facts to solve people’s problems?

What’s next

Presentation Engine – Google does a great job of understanding what I’m asking, but the presentation of the answers (long list) is not optimal. Aggregation and post-processing search results to make the results more useful to humans. Exact/pure answers with option to dig deeper. The result presentation should match the question/circumstance/context.

Command Engine – It’s no longer about information retrieval with a universal search box. The computer should understand what you are trying to do. Search is one type of command, what are other kinds of commands you can ask “the web” to do? Fully complete the task. Guide me through the contextual tasks. Relative task completion/guidance and get to know me (social networks the key to getting to know me?). Databases with APIs are starting to work together to let this happen.

Discovery Engine – Less searching and more proactive push of relevant information. This requires the ability to extract entities from data.

[ session description ]

Presenter(s)

Sara Summers

Date

14 March 2010

Tag(s)

#designprocesskillingyou

Dr. Stuart Brown – Institute of Play. A strict no play no friend upbringing removes the ability to have empathy, trust, health, joy and mastery. Instead it brings depression, rigidity, disassociation. Play prepares us for the unknowns in a changing world. It helps us to adapt quickly. It’s intuitive. Play helps us to master something new while driving novelty and newness.

Tina Seelig – Standford Technology Ventures Program.

Exercise: What’s the best business idea you can think of? Worst start-up idea?

Robert Epstein’s Shifting. Period of individual ideation, followed by group building and generation produces significant improvements in ideas. People react to draft ideas with more passion than coming up with an idea as a group where it is more about challenging and shooting down an idea.

Kaycie Kinzer. Tweenbots. People want to help each other if nothing else gets in the way.

Antonio Damasio. Gambling test. Emotions play a critical role in social cognition and decision making. To create rational design, you must feel.

Nancy Marguiles, Mapping Inner Space.

We need to talk about this because of issues with performance and optimization, the MVC model spaghetti code failure (outputting html if a condition exists: the mixture of model code inside view template, too tight coupling between presentation layer and model layer), “don’t repeat yourself” (DRY: repeating code over and over again, i.e., duplicating validation in the client and the server, “any time there is more than one copy of something, one copy is always wrong”), and role separation (wearing multiple skillset hats and mixing contexts–markup/css switch to javascript switch to backend app–without being able to focus on one context at a time).

This isn’t another framework, it’s an optimized/reworked “alternate pattern” of MVC in an attempt to solve some of the weaknesses/problems of MVC. Can we decouple the view from the existing architecture stack?

CVC + JavaScript puts the power of UI architecture in the hands of front-end engineers.

[ session description ]

Presenter(s)

Kyle Simpson

Date

14 March 2010

Tag(s)

#frontandbackofit

#jsarch

Sites

Getify

Demo of HandlebarJS

Speaker Feedback

BikechainJS

HandlebarJS

Traditional: CVC

The MVC model doesn’t have a clear space for client-based JS app (a JS version of the app that is not just the presentation logic, but a representation of the app inside the client).

New: “Clients Views Controllers” (CVC)

Application Layer (black box): doesn’t do anything with the presentation layer, no markup; only concerned with state management/session records and representing the data in a standard format: JSON API. Multiple other layers can talk to JSON API, so make it primary communication interface with application layer.

Web Server Layer: translates protocol request to hand off to rest of stack.

UI Controllers Layer (server): written in javascript, takes care of url routing, data validation. Allows more reuse of code/less rewriting in server/client layers.

View Layer (server/client): written in javascript, view engine decoupled from application, portable to client because of JS to run in browser.

“look up state, hands off to controllers, choose a view”

Clients

Everything is a client of everything else. Each layer is decoupled, modular, scalable.

Views

Templating, portable, DRY, platform agnostic, uses core web tech.

Controllers

Task oriented. Controlled by front-end engineer. Less dependence on backend architecture. Small, independent.

JavaScript on a Server

node.js is a wrapper around the V8 JS engine. Some Python dependencies for build, but not for execute. V8 is just a shared lib. a different way to process web requests: asynchronous events instead of firing a thread for every request. narwhal is a wrapper around the rhino JS engine. Others: javascriptcore, spidermonkey.

Reference implementation: BikechainJS is Kyle’s wrapper around V8. Loads modules to create a hosted environment to run JS. HandlebarJS is a templating engine that uses text/html templates and accepts JSON data input where you cannot call any methods/math. The only logic you can do is to use application “state” for template selection. Compiles templates into JS the first time a template is parsed. Environment agnostic (server or client).

Standards

How do I read/write files, i/o, execute processes, conduct network requests? CommonJS is a standards community. Very young.

11th hour copy. Fix-it-later launches. Our users deserve more than the last-minute content we often get stuck with. And you have the power to change the game. Learn how to introduce (and sell) content strategy into your web design process.
[ session description ]

I have a feeling this presentation is going to make the best podcast to listen to. Kristina is awesome. She’d better put this on slideshare.

Presenter(s)

Kristina Halvorson @halvorson

Date

13 March 2010

Tag(s)

#contentstrategy

#csftw

#contentstrategyftw

Books

Content Strategy

If content is king, there sure are a lot of kings that smell bad. When content helps me, answers a question, allows me to complete a task, it’s the best experience. Social media allows us to share those gems when we find them with others.

Content strategy forces organizations to take a hard look of what it is they are doing and why they are doing it. We build things to house content, yet most of the workflow of design is focused on the house not the content.

Content Problem

skillset.org diagram interactive project process

Web writers are often isolated. Projects kick off without really talking about the content: what content do we have? how do we take care of it? All that “can be taken care of later.”

Lies we tell ourselves

Lie: We already have the content. We can just get it, fill in later. It’s just writing, we can always write more. The client will take care of the content.

Truth: That’s copywriting. Not content. Content requires auditing, analysis, strategy, categorization, structuring, creation, review, approval, publication, updating, and archiving/expiration.

Timeline

• Richard Saul Wurman coined the phrase “information architecture”
• Edward Tufte “Envisioning Information”: you can use design to communicate information that is more powerful than just explaining it in text
• jesse james garrett synthesizes user experience. Site objectives/user needs. Functional specifications/content requirements*, interaction design…

* The mistake is to begin to think about content the way we think about features. We focus on the vehicle and its features that houses the ghostly content. But we never engaged the people who were thinking about the website three years from now.

Content is not a feature

It’s something that changes all the time. Reject the status quo of just accepting that content will always be late in the process due to silo.

Content Strategy

A strategy is a plan for obtaining a specific goal or result. Content includes text and data, graphics, video and animation, and audio (“anything you can access online”). However text and data is more dynamic than video/audio products. Text is page copy, articles, links, labels, flash elements, alt tags, error messages, task instructions forms, search results, metadata … All of it.

Messaging

The understanding that we want to impart upon our users as they interact with our content. What is it that we want them to know after they are done reading/interacting our content.

Requirements

Audit your organization’s content and ask: Does this help us to achieve our business objectives as well as meet my users’ goals? Every piece of content should map back to those two things in some way. The creation of this kind of “mapped” content should have editorial guidance and a schedule (editorial calendar).

Structure/Workflow

Without a content strategy, a copywriter will try to accomplish everything in text because they don’t know what we’re trying to accomplish or why people came to a page or what a schedule / ownership for a page is.

Reality

1. Audit. You must know what you have on your site, on your blogs, on your social media channels. Map the terrain so you can create a map to where you want to be. Content Inventory (braintraffic.org). If you have a large site, pick a source of pain that is highly visible to administration, and audit that area. Anything that is Redundant, Outdated, or Trivial can go.
2. Ask. It’s not just the “what”, content strategy is the why, how, for whom, by whom, with what, when where, how often, and what next.
3. Analyze. Look at the value of content, as well as the ecosystems (seo, government, social, geographical) that surround your content. Pay special attention to the internal ecosystem: content ownership, skillsets, politics, campaign portfolio.
4. Align. Content strategy is a plan for creation, delivery, and governance. A strategist is involved in every step of the total product process and helps to keep the organization involved in the product aligned around a lifecycle (create, deliver, govern).
5. Assume Responsibility At the end of the day, you are a publisher. Participate.

What’s the win? Happiness.

• Better user experience
• Greater brand consistency
• New operational efficiencies
• Better risk management through better controls
• Improved seo/analytics
• More effective personalization and targeting

What are our key performance indicators?