Categories: Announcements, Rants, Wish list
Wed 24-Feb-2010
Webstock has 3 places you can learn, in addition to the celebration that is The Onyas.
- Workshops - Monday - Wednesday
- Presentations - the 2-day conference
- Networking
I didn't go to any workshops this year. In hindsight there were a few I could have benefited from, though as a business analyst I don't see myself as the typical Webstock attendee.
The 2-day conference has been covered in earlier posts, day 1 and day 2. Some of the presentations allowed time for questions form the audience; this added to their value.
Networking is an optional extra of Webstock. The ability to meet people with a like mind. There were a few unofficial fringe events to help this, the games and the tweetups, in addition to the breaks and the official end-of-day events.
Thursday had cocktails in the West Wing of the town hall. Friday had cocktails in the Renouf Foyer prior to The ONYAs. Both were places I got to meet people.
When it was discovered there was no official Webstock Trading card game this year, a couple of groups sprung into action to create games.
- The Webstock Game – Organised by those responsible for The Case of the Midnight Note.
- Webstock Bingo – Credit has to go to @wrumsby and @johubris for the work they put into this at the last minute.
These games encouraged participants to talk to other attendees; including those not playing. I had a reasonable go at Webstock Bingo, but felt there was too much in The Webstock Game to be successful in.
The Case of the Midnight Note was a 3-week long noir mystery culminating with a fund-raising tweetup evening on Jan 28. I went along to the Midnight Note tweetup; I wanted to see how it ended. Dame lied, guns applied, Betty died, Sammy cried, drinks arrived, what a ride!
The tweetup on Wednesday 17 started the networking for me. The games started that evening too. I saw some people I hadn't seen for a year, or since the Open Govt Data barcamp.
Thursday, after cocktails in the West Wing was another tweetup. Originally organised for Southern Cross it moved to Mighty Mighty when Kevin Rose, not knowing about the plans, stated his intention to go there. In between cocktails and Mighty Mighty, I had dinner with 6 others, including a couple of presenters.
I handed out lots of business cards and Moo cards.
Photos
I took a few photos; nothing exceptional, but they can be found here on my Flickr page.
Other, better, photos can be found on Flickr tagged "Webstock".
Closing
In summary I'd like to thank the sponsors for supporting Webstock; my boss, for letting me go; the presenters, for coming to this part of the global village and sharing their experience, and Mike and Tash, for organising such a great event. One of the speakers (I can't remember who) said that Webstock is a highly regarded worldwide for web conferences. I'm glad it's local and I hope to be back next year.
Day 2 of Webstock - Friday 19 Feb. I saw the following presentations:
- The Lean Startup
- Iterative Design Strategies
- Double-Click to Edit
- When Your Idea Doesn't Suck
- Designing for Participation
- 10 Tips For New Web Entrepreneurs
- Elements of a Networked Urbanism
- How the Web Works
- Dense and Thick
I'm sorry for the length of this post. I wrote it to reinforce what I learnt at Webstock. I hope you'll read it anyway.
The Lean Startup
Eric Ries (@ericries) said there's three things you want to do in a startup:
- Change the world.
- Build an organization of lasting value.
- Make customers lives better.
Most startups fail, but it doesn't have to be that way. With better practices, they can succeed.
A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under condition of extreme uncertainty. It is this extreme uncertainty that means general management techniques are not the techniques you need for entrepreneurial management
Successful startups strip away the bad ideas, letting the good ideas flourish. These good ideas are not necessarily the ideas considered when starting out. Rapid iterations are necessary to do this.
Failure in startups can be caused by "shadow beliefs", which are never stated:
- We know what the customers want. Value is in the eye of the customer, but startups don't know the customer.
- We can predict the future. Waterfall software development works when the problem and the solution are both known. Agile works when the problem is known and the solution is unknown. Startups deal with the situation where the problem is unknown and therefore the solution is unknown.
- Advancing the plan is progress. The biggest waste of startups is building something that customers don't want. It doesn't matter if it's on schedule if no-one wants it.
The short iteration time is essential for a successful startup, but the time to optimise this the complete feedback loop, (Learn → Build → Measure → Learn) not just one part. Continuous deployment works by:
- Deploy fast.
- Identify bad changes.
- Revert bad changes (after human review).
- Work in small batches, no items more than 3 days work.
Iterative Design Strategies – Embracing Evolution
Daniel Burka (@Dburka) says to take chances and release your product. Don't try to predict everything your product will do. See the 'desire paths' of users and build with the expectation of change. Subtraction is iteration too. Don't be afraid to remove a feature useful by only a few users
Listen to your users, both explicit and implicit feedback.
Recommended reading: How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built
Double Click to Edit - Shift+Cmd+R: Hard Refresh Your Design
When? If not now?
Amy Hoy (@amyhoy) told us that no-one is going to invite us to be great. We have to build your own greatness. Creating an iphone to-do app, or an RSS reader is not going to be great, they all have a sameness. Understand how someone uses their tools and what their needs are, as opposed to just copying others.
Affecting (and improving) the quality of someone's day is the highest of arts.
When Your Idea Doesn't Suck: How to stop working for clients and launch a startup
Mike Davidson (@mikeindustries) asked that his presentation not be blogged.
Designing for Participation
Bek Hodgson (@bekini) said "curate by the community". Changing from taxonomy to folksonomy allows the community to curate the way they understand, making it useful for everyone.
Accept that user generated content may not suit the palette of your site.
Consider how your site will look like with a little or a lot of content, such as a user's profile page.
10 Tips For New Web Entrepreneurs
Kevin Rose (@kevinrose) detailed 10 useful points.
- Go build it
- Build and release
- Hire your boss
- Raising money
- Go cheap
- Connect with your community
- Hack the press - ways to get free PR
- Advisors
- Leverage your user base to spread the word
- Analyse your traffic
Elements of a Networked Urbanism
Adam Greenfield (@agpublic) reminded us we have no privacy is public, to assume any camera we walk past in public is on.
Computing devices are becoming more and more ubiquitous, we need to consider the social and ethical consequences. We are all surrounded with a network of things that know what is going on in their environment, and our actions are being shared, with someone.
Migration from small communities to a city, or from one city to another used to provide anonymity; but not any more.
How the Web Works
Jeff Veen (@veen) talked about the historical progress, from ice to refrigerators. Some industries transition, some don't, so get it out there.
Speed of iteration beats quality of iteration. As you release iterations you can get consensus from users as to what you should be providing.
Dense and Thick
Mark Pesce (@mpesce) reminded us, that like at primary school, sharing something makes it more valuable. He talked about how the web has revolutionised the world, and the next revolution could be anywhere. The future is in our hands, and the world is clamouring to get into cyberspace.
His words are available here.
These last three presenters covered a lot of material, too much for me to make good notes, which is why these are so sparse. I look forward to the videos of the presentations being released.
More coming soon. What was your experience of the Friday speakers? Is there someone else I should have seen?
Tue 23-Feb-2010
Day 1 of Webstock - Thursday 18 Feb. I saw the following presentations:
- Opening
- Web Design that Grabs People
- Brian does the Andrew Sisters
- Designing for Diversity
- Building The Open Web
- Security-Centered Design
- Fostering Personal Connection to Place
- Building Social Software for the Anti-Social
- Please, don't let it be interactive
- The Word Wild Web
Day 2 coming soon.
Opening and welcome
Mike Brown (@maupuia) opened Webstock 2010 by reminding us that we love working with the web, and that we fall in love with things made from love.
Web design that grabs people
Scott Thomas (@simplescott) was the design director for the Obama campaign. They wanted to use images people can be proud of, and to unify the design of the print and web media. A consistency and balance needed to be established in the messages, which had to be clear and concise. E.g. they focused on "We" rather than "He".
They made sure supporters could get everything they needed. The mission of the home page was to persuade people, but it also needed to make it easy to get localized information. As the campaign progressed the message of persuasion changed to fit the needs of the campaign.
Analytics are essential to understand how people are interacting with the site.
Brian does the Andrew Sisters
Brian Fling (@fling) gave a disappointing presentation. Communication 101 says that if the listener/reader doesn't understand then the speaker/writer has failed to communicate successfully. Brian's presentation covered the things he could have talked about; some of which looked very exciting. Sure, they were presentations he'd done before but they were new to most of us. Brian is clearly very articulate and knows what he talks about, but this presentation jumped everywhere and didn't allow any idea any depth. The bits I did get were:
- Focus on a single platform. The cost of supporting different devices is expensive.
- Build cross-platform mobile web applications. This lets you support a single framework.
- App stores like churn. To sell things you need to drive the viewers' attention.
Designing for Diversity - Inclusive Design & the User Experience
Lisa Herrod (@scenariogirl) reminded us design needs to cater for more that the obvious audience; shallow personas often miss accessibility characteristics. (I wish I got to use personas more, they're an important overlap with business analysis and design.)
Lisa also pointed out designers needs to work ethically. Without doing so, user experience is missing opportunities to be an inclusive experience.
One way to make the WCAG2 easier to apply, is to break the components down into the roles needed to perform them. A back-end developer doesn't need to know some of the elements a designer needs, and a front-end developer has a different set too.
Note to self: find out ways a business analyst can convince stakeholders that accessibility is an important quality-of-service requirement.
I got to talk more with Lisa over dinner that evening; Lisa, Lachlan, I, and a few others all went to La Casa Pasta for dinner before going on to Mighty Mighty.
Building The Open Web
Lachlan Hardy (@lachlanhardy) started by reminding us what "open" means in relation to the web; that it is royalty and patent free; that it is supported by more than one vendor or provider; and that there is public involvement in the specification. Lachlan warned us to be aware of "open washing", the presentation of something as open when it isn't Open.
Lachlan then pointed out things become simpler for user when there is greater implementation of open technologies. An example is the linking of webfinger to OpenID to make is simpler for users to benefit from OpenID technology. I'll be adding webfinger to this domain.
People are able to implement these open technologies as if they are pieces in the puzzle. We don't know which pieces are missing, bus as these talk to each other gaps will be noticed. This is a good thing.
A big question raised with open technology is the issue of money. Lachlan reminded us that using open lets companies focus on the things they want to do, and not have to write security code to implement good security. The other advantage of open is not needing to pay the creators for their expertise.
Open can be profitable too, look how successful SilverStripe, a Webstock sponsor, is.
Security-Centered Design: Exploring the Impact of Human Behavior
Chris Shiflett (@shiflett) spoke about change blindness and ambient signifiers. Our brains are wired up to receive a lot of information, and to filter it down to the essential items. Change blindness is our inability to notice a change; our brain doesn't register it as important enough to focus on it. Ambient signifiers exist to bypass this blindness and let us know something has changed.
An example of an ambient signifier is a particular tune playing as the train pulls into each station. Travellers become familiar with the different tunes as their train passes each station, and are more aware of their stop.
This can be used online to improve web security by accommodating users' expectations and tendencies without trying to modify them.
He demonstrated the Colour-changing Card Trick. It's awesome.
Fostering Personal Connection to Place
Shelley Bernstein (@shell7) talked about making the Brooklyn Museum more accessible and understandable. They did this by
- Posting interesting content on the blog, with multiple bloggers providing content.
- Interacting with people via twitter and social media.
- Providing a kiosk enabling recording and uploading of comments to youtube.
- And learning from the feedback provided by visitors.
Stack Overflow: Building Social Software for the Anti-Social
Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) had a few points to make:
- Know your audience (programmers)
- Know your Topic (software code)
- Understand people's motivations (reduce bad code)
Rather than saying whether you can complete a task, ask yourself if you are motivated to do it in the first place. This is "Work" (paid for) vs. work" (inspiring to do).
Please, don't let it be interactive
Regine deBatty (@wmmna) took a very different direction to the other speakers, but considering her website looks at art using technology it was not surprising. Her main point was that interactivity in some art adds no value.
The Word Wild Web
Rives entertained us with his performance poetry and stories. From Kite, to the end, by way of explaining the selling of stolen wind chimes for Rubiks cubes; filming dancers; climbing cranes over New York; and other stories.
You should check him out at TED. The emoticon story is one he retold for us.
Day 2 coming soon. What was your experience of the Thursday speakers? Is there someone else I should have seen?
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