My Ignite talk, Grasping Social Patterns
Originally uploaded by duncandavidson.
Here are my slides.
UPDATE: and here’s some YouTube video shot from the audience (the very beginning of my talk is cut off):
At the IA Summit a week ago in Miami, I co-taught two full-day workshops (on patterns with Erin Malone and Lucas Pettinati, and social design with Christina Wodtke and Joshua Porter), moderated a panel (on presence and other aspects of social web architecture with Gene Smith, Wodtke, Andrew Hinton, and Andrew Crow), and gave a presentation with Austin Govella from Comcast on designing with patterns. (Phew.)
I finally got my slides posted to slideshare today from the panel and the presentation. (Eventually, if and when audio becomes available, I’ll sync them up.) You’ll notice if you look at my recent talks that I am remixing a lot of the same points. I am trying to learn to be more shameless about this, since the material is usually fresh for each new audience until it’s fully distributed.
In that same vein, if you’re in SF you can find me at Ignite SF tonight doing a five minute talk (yes, covering some of the same ground as my BayCHI talk in this case) on the topic “Grasping Social Patterns.” I’m nervous as hell, not least because the lineup of other speakers is so incredible. So even if I bomb, you’ll get some pretty inspiration stuff from the likes of Kathy Sierra, Annalee Newitz, Lane Becker, and others.
For now, here are my summit talks:
and
At South by Southwest, Ted Nadeau and I led a “core conversation” on the topic of reputation, identity, and presence. Ted is great at questioning basic assumptions and had this idea of handing out placards an audience of participants could use to signal their reactions to what was being said to them.
We imagine double-sided signs on sticks to hold up, sort of like the Roadrunner does, but we settled for handing out cut paper. We’re still working on the mechanics of this, *and the whole thing is Creative Commons licensed, derivs-allowed, attrib-required, I think (it’s in the fine print), but even now at version 1.0 of this Reaction Deck, I think Ted’s really onto something:
Started off Saturday morning with Kick ‘08.
Namedropping: Talked to George Kelly, Erin Malone, Anil Dash, Jessamyn West (yay!), Simon Willison, Owen Thomas, Hugh Forrest, Micah Alpern (briefly, passing on the escalator), Janna Hicks DeVylder so far….
If you’re interested in social web design, how to model identity, presence, and reputation, and how to create and align incentives with the behaviors you wish to encourage in your online community, then join Ted Nadeau and me for a Core Conversation on the topic of “Online Identity: And I do give a damn about my bad reputation” at South by Southwest interactive this March, in Austin, Texas (of course).
UPDATE: Alex Lee in the comments asked me when my talk is scheduled for. It’s on Tuesday, and I think it’s in the morning but not sure about. Will update with exact info when I have it.
UPDATE II: It seems that we will be doing our core conversation in a late slot (5pm) on the last day (Tuesday, March 11) of the interactive portion of the conference. I say if the conversation is good, let’s continue it into the evening over food and libations. Maybe we’ll even launch a startup over beer and barbecue.
At BarCamp Block I first heard about plans for She’s Geeky, a tech (un)conference for women by women. Immediately, I was intrigued. It sounds like a great idea, I love the title, and the organizers are some of the coolest folk I’ve met on the geek circuit.
One of the prime movers is Kaliya Identity Woman Hamlin, a strong advocate of the OpenSpace unconference model for events.
She’s Geeky takes place October 22 and 23 in Mountain View, CA (near Palo Alto). Here’s a description In their own words:
This event is designed to bring together women from a range of technology-focused disciplines who self identify as geeky. Our goal is to support skill exchange and learning between women working in diverse fields and to create a space for networking and to talk about issues faced by women in technology.
Kaliya goes into some more detail about here “motivations and hopes” on her IdentityWoman blog, and addresses any concerns folks might have about exclusivity (which is a good thing, because even in this male-dominated tech world, I sometimes get that twinge of entitlement when something is for me, about me, catering to me and my ilk, etc.), saying, “My motivation is not to create an event that is ‘exclusive’ but to help create a space for women who some times are very isolated in different niches of the tech world. One women I spoke with yesterday recently found herself being one of only 12 women at a tech conference of 600.”
I have no doubt that She’s Geeky will be a watershed event and I look forward to reading about it and studying its impact.
I regretted not being able to attend the first-ever IDEA conference last year in Seattle and I was thrilled when the organizers decided to hold the second IDEA conference in New York City, my home town, at the legendary Parsons School of Design.
IDEA has already in one year established a reputation for bringing big-idea folks together to share their ideas about design, architecture, shared information spaces, visualization of dataa, and what it means to be human in an internetworked machine age. I expect this year’s conference program to be every bit as stimulating.
IDEA stands for Information, Design, Experience, Access, and its presented by the IA Institute, an organization on whose board I have the privilege of serving at this time. My involvement in the conference planning has been focused on getting the website up and recruiting volunteers for the technical tasks required (my portfolio, as it were, on the board of directors of the IAI is technical matters). Events director Sarah Rice, IDEA founder Peter Merholz, and volunteer event coordinator Greg Corrin deserve the credit for pulling this year’s conference together.
Technical volunteers Beck Tench, Chi-chi Oguekwe, Grace Lau, Susan Wong, and Gordon McLean have all chipped in to build and maintain the site, with very little supervision or input from me, so they deserve a great deal of credit as well.
For anyone attending (or thinking of attending) IDEA this year, consider signing up in addition at the Crowdvine social networking site. There’s still time to register (the conference runs on October 4th and 5th, with an optional pre-conference event on the 3rd), and if you do manage to come to New York, look me up at Parsons and say hi.
Here’s my obligatory plug for my South by Southwest proposals. I’ve got two panels in contention at the cool-but-unwieldy Panel Picker, so I thought I’d provide some shortcuts here. A lot of folks feel that there are too many panels at SXSW and not enough solo presenters. I tend to agree, but I think the problem is really panels that are underprepared or have too many participants. After moderating a panel with five participants last year I’ve decided that that’s too many for a 45 or 50 minute slot. I think four (including moderator) is the max, and three or even two is probably ideal.
The first panel I’m proposing pertains to my ongoing book project (working title: Presence of Mind), on the subject of online/digital identity, reputation, attention, privacy, trust, and presence. Last year, my panel, Every Breath You Take (podcast, my slides) seemed to go over fairly well, despite the gawdawful 10 am but really 9 am because of daylight savings Sunday morning slot (you must recall that Saturday night - and, really, every other night - at SXSW involves a lot of drinking for most attendees.
I took to heart the positive and negative feedback and so the sequel this year will feature just three participants: myself, Ted Nadeau returning from last year, and Andrew Hinton, whose presentation on communities of practice at the IA Summit this year was such a huge success. We’re going to strive to go beyond the typical talking-head panel format and enage the audience in innovative ways. We’re also going to try to take the conversation past the grounwork-laying, high-level philosophizing of last year and hand the attendees some practical tools for building on what we’re tentatively calling the “human operating system.”
If this sounds appealing to you, please go vote for Online Reputation: And I Do Give a Damn about My Bad Reputation.
My second proposal draws on my experience running Yahoo!’s Design Pattern Library and moderating a mailing list for pattern authors. I’ve recruited Jenifer Tidwell, the leading figure in UI patterns; Austin Govella, who can talk about implementing a pattern library in a commerical context at Comcast; and James Reffel, also now at Yahoo!, who will share what he learned getting eBay’s pattern engine off the ground.
Luke Wrobleski’s talk on patterns at SXSW last year filled a large room and generated a lot of interest and I’m hoping to serve that same constituency by sharing practical experience and advice in our panel Design Patterns: the Devil’s in the Details, which we described this way:
Patterns ground frameworks like Rails and Django drive libraries like Prototype, and enable rapid product development at companies big and small. But what happens when patterns go wrong? How do you know when a pattern is right? We’ll examine common issues facing groups who use design patterns and share our experiences at making sure patterns go right.
There are a lot of other great proposals. I kind of wish I could sort my existing votes into star order to remind myself of the ones I’ve already deemed must-sees, but here are a few I’ve been able to recall or find.
Hit me up in the comments if you’d like to recommend another panel or presenter as well.
Two years after the first BarCamp (an ad hoc unconference formed initially in response to O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, I’m finally planning to make it to one, this weekend’s BarCampBlock, headquartered at SocialText’s offices in Palo Alto.
According to what I just jotted on the Sessions page on the wiki, I’ve just volunteered to lead or participate in discussions about portable social networks, identity, design patterns, particularly social-media related design patterns, and the gift economy.
I don’t know if I’m qualified to talk about all of those things but when has that ever stopped me before?
Since the moment that Liz Henry and Tara Hunt tipped me off to this event, I’ve had the feeling that this was an important one not to miss. So soon after my wedding and honeymoon and with a rapidly filling-up fall conference schedule, I could have been tempted to let this one slide by, but I have a strong intuition that many of the people I consider friends, heroes, and inspirations will be there and that I’d be kicking myself if I let another Bay Area BarCamp go by without joining in on the fun.
I’ll blog from there if I can find the time between no-spectatorin’ and schmoozin’ and gettin’ things done.
If you missed Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Privacy, and Reputation last March at South By here’s your chance to hear me, Ted Nadeau, Kaliya Hamlin, Mary Hodder, and George Kelly take on these topics, very early one Sunday morning after an untimely daylight savings change and, for many people, a night of carousing and drinking free drinks sponsored by startups and web behemoths.
These slides are only minutely useful as they are nearly all images without any notes or bullet points. When the podcast comes out I will work on synchronizing my remarks with the slides.
I’ll be posting Ted Nadeau’s slides next. His were much more content rich.
Update: Here are Ted’s slides:
Last day of interactive. Laughingsquid party at Ginger Man by far the best of the whole session.
last night was insane. at some point i should write about some panels. Leisa Reichelt is a sweetheart.
I must be getting old (duh) since by then end of a half-hour fascinating conversation I no longer remember the name of the person I just met and it’s too dark and rainy to discreetly look at their badge to refresh my decaying braincells, so apologies in advance to very cool people (you know who you are, even if I don’t) who I haven’t captured on my stupid list:
Also, didn’t meet but very much enjoyed the stand-up comedy slash storytelling stylings of Todd Levin at Fray Café.
…but were afraid to ask:
Great talk! Very thorough. Making me, helping rethink my upcoming Mobile IA presentation at the IA Summit. Here are my raw notes. Apologies for the stream of consciousness nature. You may be better off with Brian Fling’s slides.
Who is Brian Fling? dir of strategy for blue flavor mobile designer since 2000, first wap phones worked with all tier 1 and maj or tier 2, carriers are behemoth rollingstone, napster, & espn dotMobi Developers Guide (yet to be released)
part 1, why the mobile web important part of everything we should be doing lot of sabre rattling in the space
mobile web concept, vs. desktop web (vs. one web) retrieve on a mobile device
how big is the mobile web
bold prediction: mobile will revolutionize the way everyone gather and interacts with information within the next three years
LBS - location based services GPS chip in recent phones (Sprint)
preciipice of next gen of the web
data ARPU doubling year after year
golden triangle tech biz user goals
3 c’s Cost Content Context
Part 3 Mobile Information Architecture nobody spefcialized in it A Bad Mobile IA
Limit categories to 5 Limit links to to 10 No more than 5 levels dee at least one content item per category prioritize links by activity or popularity
give a taste of what will be cliked
much less complex ia
to get simple info, like contact info, office locatioh don’t port over every page goals, cost, content, and context
clickstream crucial deliverable creating the optimal deliverable
mobile service requires clickstream diagrams
“be prepared to invest some time or hire an IA to do that for you you’ll spend more time on that than on the actual design”
more compatible vs. richer experience (tradeoffs)
ideal in the middle XHTML and CSS
layers mobile device, mobile web browser, service provider portal, your design
anybody can publish to the mobile web you can bypass this….
200 x 250 pixels, recommended max size
(all teh different layouts…)
feature phones, smart phones, pdas
majority of people still have smaller screens
orientation the D pad (up down left right)
think vertically avoid too many links stacked horizontally
canvas not as robust but has potential needs designers forces you to think in terms of the user
mobile web standards: w3c initiative
XHTML-MP part of WAP 2.0 old WAP bad, new WAP good XHTML Basic and XHTML-MP pretty close can use dreamweaver, mobile dev aspect TextMate
Wireless CSS most if not all doc styles vs. style sheets
W3C mobile web best practices MobileOK Device Description
OneWeb misunderstood, misused term should be one web not multiple webs same info and services for mobile phone not: desktop web and mobile web identical not: just use css mobile stylesheet that ignores context example, phone numbers are links
correct encoding and doctype well formed code
accesskeys in primary navigation (numbers)
link limit of no more than 10 per page, really only 5 or 7 max primary navigation points
use ordered lists instead of unordered listes to automatically show the numbers
doc styles to avoid flash of unstyled text but larger sites use external style sheet ref maybe use embedded on the home page
link phone numbers <a href=”tel:+19995551212”>+1 999 555-1212</a>
xHTML-MT and W3C and other standards bodies
use few or no forms, entering data so hard
wiki publishing how to get them to the site
SSR, Reformat, Stylesheets, Mobile Specific Site
SSR (small screen rendering), do nothing Opera, Treo’s Blazer, re-render on the fly Programmatically Reformatting (as with PHP)
those don’t address the mobile context
Stylesheets, use handheld styleheet to do adaptation on the fly Or to create the mobile specific site, best scenario for user, you might have to manage two different sites.
Handheld stylesheet requires one line of code in your markup Hides content but user still downloads (and pays) Unless really tricky with markup, can’t address mobile context of user
Mobile-specific site best for context (but least “elegant” -xian)
start by experimenting with stylesheets
supporting devices & browsers
don’t test all 50 browsers Focus on Five devices most devices are derivatives of other devices Razr pretty much same as Motorola v600, v505, 500, 400… 100
your phone plus four friends
Nokia series 40 (candy bar) Razr anything given away (LG, samsung) test on Treo, smartphone, windows phone - bigger screen
domain names manually enter a mobile-specific url
example.com/mobile mobile.example.com
detect mobile, redirect to user specific location user enters example.com
use mobile spceific top-level domain example.mobi
use WAP push, use a short code that returns a url work for deep linking, promotions, etc. (but fill out signup forms evil, right? —xian)
Device Detection Dilemma • Simple device detection - one mobile website for everyone ⁃ .mobi or detect on user agent profile (tricks to avoid huge inventory of profiles) • Advanced detection - you deliver the best possible code and markup (requires massive inventory of user agents, costly to keep on top of)
Adaptation customized to the screen
Testing can start testing on a desktop browser browser tools - opera and firefox tools emulators - allows for desktop verification without loading onto a device device testing - focus on five usability testing - early and often, field tests, casual usability testing formal testing slows down development time, likes to be more agile
.mobi Mobile Ready Report helpful tool for tuning your site
MobileDesign.org - mostly a mailing list now, but articles coming
Q: question about voice recog: A: give “say or press the number” getting better
Q: strategies for maintaining multiple copies of the site if there will be a separate mobile site A: movable type to publish static pages, multiple archive types django also does some cool things
Q: iPhone will use Safari, etc., to view regular websites, will detract, slow-down the inertia? A: iPhone will be a revolution in the mobile industry Safari’s been in the Nokia for a year and a half wifi, will make getting web content more easily text, readability boost I fear, we’ll all get iPhones, design for them, forget about “regular” people, majority, people in the developing countries, Africa provides top amount of mobile traffic to the BBC
Q: int’l market. Presentation US-centric? A: Yes, my experience has been in North America, some experience with operators in Japan and Europe but most of my focus has been in the U.S.
Q: any value in .mobi versus just creating a host m.example.com A: Is some advantage for some people. A lot of controversy. They really don’t care. Just want people to develop for the mobile web. They’re heavily involvedi in the W3C mobile initiative. Just another tool in the toolchest.
Q: panel on tuesday, Mobile Web doesn’t exist or does it…. I work for vodaphone. I work in Europe. A: Only a few browsers support Ajax on a mobile device today. The big problem is javascript. It drains batteries very quickly
Met (and saw) fewer new people today, but spent time with some of the same folks from yesterday, and hung out a lot with Ted and Kirsten:
Links are people I talked to. Nonlinks are people I spotted but didn’t talk to. I know I’m leaving people out from Break Bread with Brad at Buffalo Billiards. I didn’t always get everyone’s name and by then my beer-to-food ratio was really out of whack (had only southwest peanuts all day until George kicked me down some chicken tenders, Sarah shared her salad with me, and sixth street forked over a mediocre slice of pizza on a pretty good wheat crust):
Life's been a little crazy for personal journaling lately, but the pent-up urge to blog is reasserting itself. I flew into JFK on the jetblue redeye last night and have been holed up in the family compound in Manhattan today drinking liquids and recovering.
Tomorrow I'll check out the Tank and the other liberal bloggers covering the convention. I wasn't tempted to venture out into the protests today. It was too hot and I was too headachey and sleepy.
Haven't eaten all day but not sure I actually need to. A little coffee helped the headache. Time for another glass of water.
While waiting for my luggage to emerge at Logan I paid $7 or 8 to get the wifi access I'm using to post this relatively content-free entry.
It's only 4:15 California time, so I'd better sleep at some point today.
There is a get-together for bloggers tonight in a bar but my friend has Yankees - Red Sox tickets. Sorry, other bloggers. See you on Monday!
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