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More than we can chew? Taking on TEDxCanberra

Stephen Collins — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:22:01 +0000

As a TEDster, the emergence of the TEDx events gives us the opportunity to share the TED experience with our friends, colleagues and interest groups in a smaller, more intimate, less big bang (and definitely less expensive) setting.

At acidlabs we’re incredibly proud to announce that TED has granted us the right to host the very first TEDxCanberra!

This is big news for us, and we’re hard at work (it’s not like we weren’t already busy) in the early stages of pulling the event together.

Our aim is to attract enough support to ensure that TEDxCanberra is free, or as close to free as we can make it. To do this, we’re going to need a small army of volunteers to help us make it happen. If you’re interested in helping out – time, sponsorship, in kind assistance your business or organisation can give – we’d love you to get in touch.

TEDxCanberra will be held on Saturday 23 October 2010. Follow along at the TEDx web site to make sure you hear all the news.

Browsers, URLs, Facebook and expectations

Stephen Collins — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:48:49 +0000

By now, many of you will have seen the ReadWriteWeb confused as Facebook saga.

It’s an object lesson in the capabilities and expectations of everyday web use. And it’s one that we who make our livings by purporting to understand people and the way they use the web and other technology ought to be both abundantly aware of and keep frequently in mind.

Most people using the web aren’t especially technically capable. They don’t understand the difference between the search box and address box on the browser they’re using (one of the smartest people I know constantly frustrates me by using the search box to go to sites and declares it “easier” as I vent). They don’t know what a URL is nor how it works. Nor do they even understand what a browser is. Let alone that the web isn’t the Internet.

I used to be very much in the “well, they just have to learn” camp. These days, I’m very much the opposite.

As experience designers (or whatever we’re called these days), it’s very much our job to design to the capabilities of the people using the things we help build. At the same time, we should seek to educate them just a little bit, incrementally building their skills through our designs.

Most people using the web are not us. It’s our job to build to their skills, needs, mental models and expectations not their job to meet ours.

For us to expect the people using the things we build to have the desire to learn technical things like URL manipulation, or that Google, Facebook, or whatever their favorite site isn’t the web itself is a pretty selfish notion. This is all actually Communications 101. We speak to and can expect understanding from those we communicate with only when we communicate with them on their terms in their language. To expect anything else is distinctly inward focussed and will not result in the best possible experience for them.

Over at his blog, UI and US, my friend Keith Lang has written yet another useful piece of thinking on this issue. I recommend you read it.

Help improve Australian passport information and applications

Stephen Collins — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 07:31:28 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Want to help improve passport information and online passport applications in Australia?

We are working to help the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and their service providers to improve the service offered by the Australian Passports web site. Your input to this research will have a measurable effect on the conclusions we draw and the advice we give.

If you’ve ever used the passports.gov.au web site, researched information there or applied for an Australian passport online, your input will be valuable.

If you’d like to contribute, please respond to the short survey we have. Or, of you’d like to, tell your story in the comments below or send us an email.

Off to the Growth Summit

Stephen Collins — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 02:03:53 +0000

Next Thursday, I’m speaking at the Technology to Drive Growth workshop at the National Growth Summit conference in Sydney.

I’ll be doing a short presentation entitled Cluetrains, Conversations, Trust and Openness that I hope will open some eyes to the opportunities businesses can realise if they deal with their customers and stakeholders as their principal concern and communicate openly and authentically.

I’m sharing the stage on the day with a bunch of other smart folk that I really respect, including:

Rob Manson from MOB
Kate Carruthers from DBG, and
Mick Liubinskas from Pollenizer

There are a bunch of others who are all likely to have great insight into building your business.

We’re also running a series of short roundtable discussions, including mine, which will be on the topic So, why wouldn’t you ride the Cluetrain?

As a special deal, you can access a half-price ticket to this event by downloading the registration form or registering online with a promo code you can have if you DM me on Twitter.

The event details, in case you want them quickly are:

Technology to Drive Growth Workshop

When: Thursday February 18th, 8:30am – 4:00pm

Where: Sydney Convention Centre

Three thoughts on social media for 2010

Stephen Collins — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:45:14 +0000

The hype around social media continues unabated – business, marketing, government, NFPs; everyone is getting involved. But to my mind, we’re still somewhat missing the point. Making it a part of our lives in a way that avoids the hype and adds real benefit to our own lives and the lives of others will be the the real tipping point of the acceptance of social media in business and amongst those who are still cautious about its adoption or perceive no need for it in their lives.

Additionally, there’s a large part of the world that simply doesn’t share our echo chamber. In the developing world connectedness is critical, as we continue to see in the management of disasters around the world (as in this great presentation from BarCamp Canberra 2010 by Shoaib Burq showing the massive increase in data available about Port au Prince since the earthquake) and in the continuing emergence of mobile data driven innovation in SE Asia and Africa. But for these folks, iPhones, Nexus Ones and iPads are still part of a distant future. Even a decent desktop PC may not be a reality. Rather, a grey-screen Nokia phone may be their tool for connectedness. We must engage with them on their terms.

So, here are my three big ideas for social media in 2010, distilled into some quick thoughts

We are still a long way from social media use in business as a given. Large numbers of businesses altogether and many more people within businesses of all sorts do not understand social media and perceive no value for it in their lives, the lives of their staff or their work. Education, valid, real case studies rather than theory, governance, mentoring, support from leadership are all critical factors in its success and as practitioners and consultants, we must enable that by speaking the language of business.

The developing world is yet to discover social media in the way the developed world has. And they may not want to. We must engage with the developing world to enable connections to happen and create great social innovation where infrastructure and tools may not be a rich as we have.

There will always be people for whom social media is not a priority. We must find ways to engage with them on their terms and integrate it with the things we are doing.

So, in the spirit of my last post, what do we DO from here to progress these ideas and the actions that can make a difference from them?

The next step

Stephen Collins — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 03:51:33 +0000

An emergent theme of my posts of late has been change. Whether that’s technology, user experience, reform of education, public sector and government, conferences or business (including my own), it’s a constant.

: Image by trib via Flickr

Equally, I’ve had many conversations in physical and virtual environments about change. Those conversations, to my very great benefit, have been with smart, motivated, interesting people – friends, peers and those I look up to.

Just yesterday, I was able to get deeply buried in several conversations about change at BarCamp Canberra 2010. This third Canberra BarCamp was far and away the best yet. Very balanced in its participant-generated program, issues of technology, the web, education, public sector reform and social innovation were openly and actively discussed. There’s no right or wrong, just great ideas (many available now on SlideShare).

One thing that emerged strongly from the sessions I was involved in – largely those on reform and social innovation – was raised in the first session of the day, Matt Moore’s deliberative democracy discussion on wicked problems. That problem is what I’m choosing to call next steps.

We all know it’s incredibly easy to discuss wicked problems. Equally, it’s near trivial (on a grand scale) to come up with solutions to them. We can define people, ideas, resources, finance and economics, social reforms and any number of other matters that will require resolution to solve these problems. It’s the next thing that’s the hard one, as I said in this tweet to Havas Media Lab director (and HBR blogger), Umair Haque.

It’s the next step, the tangible action, that’s wicked about all of these problems. And it’s next steps that we lack in solving all of the big problems we face. And it’s incumbent on all of us, in the sense of the Builder described in Haque’s The Builders’ Manifesto, to take next steps rather than simply engaging in conversation.

BarCamps, expos, conferences, summits. They’re all excellent places to begin solving the wicked problems. But we must take next steps.

For me, the biggest take away from BarCamp Canberra 2010 was DO. We must not just talk, we must be prepared to DO.

How it’s done

Stephen Collins — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 06:59:10 +0000

This is how you do a public service announcement. It’s a part of the Embrace This campaign.

They’ve extended to other social media as well, including Facebook.

It hits all the right notes – family, love, fear, death, safety. There’s no way you can’t engage. Their research and audience focus work must have been amazing. I’d love to know the evolution of this.

Well done Sussex Safer Roads.

Conferences, inspiration, value

Stephen Collins — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 05:26:13 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

This post started as a comment on my pal, Linda Johannessen’s blog post about TED and conference organisers. Then it got long, so I figured I’d bring it over here. Not least because I want to discuss conference models this weekend at BarCamp Canberra 2010.

I’ll start with a story.

Attending something like TED is about as far from watching the videos (which are inspiring enough) as you can get. Spending a week in the company of a group of people for whom “impossible” is not an option and there is always a viable answer to any problem if the right people and resources can be applied to it is the most inspiring thing.

For a person like me (I’d almost call myself a card-carrying atheist, only I don’t think there’s an actual card), TED is the closest thing I’ve had to a religious experience. That week, of long, long days, inspiring talks and even more inspiring face-to-face interaction with other attendees is singularly amazing. So much so that attending has changed the way I think and act about many things in life and work.

As a living example, we all attend conferences, meet interesting people and say we’ll stay in touch. It never happens (or rarely at best). Of the many, many people I met at TED in 2009, I think I’ve had at least one conversation with almost every one of them in the year since. For some, it’s been many conversations and for those in Australia and NZ, more than one coffee meeting or meal. The community of TEDizens, is incredibly close-knit.

That’s the experience I want from the conferences I speak at and attend. Amazing inspiring events with great speakers. Outstanding organisation and production. Organisers who care passionately about the event. Meeting other attendees who I can relate to, share a meal and a story with and want to maintain a connection to after the even (and then actually do so).

One thing many folk aren’t aware of is that the big price tag to attend TED is actually used to fund the good work done by the Sapling Foundation that runs it. It’s not a profit-making business. Depending on which event you attend from 30-50 per cent of the price tag is a donation to the foundation. That’s pretty amazing considering the production values present at TED itself, which is far and away the highest quality conference production you’ll see anywhere. No other conference I’ve been to comes close (and I’ve been to many).

Now, that all sounds like a bit of a TED fanboy blast. Not so. Yes, TED is inspiring. Yes it’s amazingly well-organised. But it’s not perfect. And yes, it’s very expensive. But TED does in many ways demonstrate the counterpoint to what’s wrong with many conferences and their organisers.

The current conference model everywhere I’ve seen is fundamentally broken – (supposedly) professional event companies organising events for which they have little or no passion, charging attendees high fees to attend what turn out to be average events, boring, bland catering, not paying speakers who spend many, many hours to prepare the best work they can (on average, a conference talk takes me an hour of preparation for every minute of presentation time).

It all strikes me as driven by profit (which is fine by me, businesses have to make money) but at the expense of producing amazing events that really strive to give attendees value. How many truly amazing events are there?

Image by trib via Flickr

Of course, there are some exceptions to this. From my own experience or that of friends, Web Directions in Sydney, Webstock in Wellington (which I’ve not been to, but plan to for 2011), UX Australia, many of the BarCamp-based (there are lots of variants now, for almost any sector) events, TED itself. And anecdotally, a number of the “big thinking” events like The EG and Defrag. I’m sure examples exist for industries and interests I have no idea about.

But the fact remains, many conferences are underwhelming, low in attendee cost-benefit and not well organised. It could be so much better. Here are a few ideas:

conferences should be organised (or at least advised) by people passionate about the subject matter (like the UX Australia team)
conferences should seek to add value to the attendee experience beyond simply showing up and listening in
conferences should be costed in such a way as to make adequate profit for the organisers (if profit is a motive) without knifing attendees, rather than being crazily overpriced
conferences should pay speakers where appropriate, especially if they are taking time out from their businesses to attend and speak

It’s not a revolution unless something changes

Stephen Collins — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:17:11 +0000

Image by takomabibelot via Flickr

My daughter begins high school next week.

And as she does, the Federal government and the various state governments continue to trumpet their triumphs in their so-called Building the Education Revolution plan. As yet, I’ve seen no revolution from this program, and little evolution. Mostly just reactionary, frightened implementation of the laptops for high schoolers program and the building of so many Julia Gillard Memorial Halls.

Once my daughter gains access to this program, I will be asking her school directly whether the hardware, software and data access they are providing students are open and uncensored, giving kids access to all the information and context their rich 21st Century education requires. If not, why not? What’s stopping them? Who’s stopping them? What’s the evidence they’re being given to restrict kids’ access to the single most important tool for collaboration and the finding and sharing of knowledge since the printing press? I don’t blame the schools. They too have masters.

If the tools she has access to are restricted and locked down, I’d rather refuse to take them and provide her the open, unrestricted access to tools and information she deserves and needs. Or show her myself how to hack (though I’d not suggest she actually did) whatever she’s given so she does have open access to information and tools.

I’ll also be asking directly whether their educators and curriculum encourage open questioning of teachers and of the subject matter at hand. Whether dogma of any sort is openly challenged. Whether the right to be wrong is encouraged and used as a learning opportunity – both for teachers and students. Whether teaching is customised to each student’s strengths and weaknesses so the dancers and the liberal arts kids and the mathematicians are afforded the best opportunity to shine. And again, if not, why not?

Furthermore, tomorrow, the MySchool site goes live with what is ostensibly useful comparative data about school quality across the country. The feedback I’ve received from a number of senior educators I know is not complementary. As I suspected, data is decontextualised and badly open to misinterpretation. And misinterpreted it will be.

Many parents will not take the time to understand the data nor engage in deep analytics with it. They will glance at it askance and make profound educational decisions about their children, the future of this nation, on a few seconds look at some table that suggests School A (well funded with good NAPLAN results and in a strong socio-economic suburb) is infinitely better than School B (maybe not so well-funded or with great test results but ideal for their child because of a particular teacher, or program that isn’t addressed in the data). Consequently, understanding of the data and likely media coverage of it risks casting some schools in a light they likely don’t deserve.

This too is not revolutionary, but simply poor politics pandering to a lowest-common-denominator demand for something that will assure votes at the next election.

If we want a real education revolution in this country, we need to teach to the needs of the 21st Century.

The 21st Century requires a new kind of education and a new approach to understanding it. Education must be empowered by technology not restricted by it or restricting of it.

It must be rich, contextualised, open, questioning, multi-disciplinary and relevant to the world.

The classroom itself must change as it currently remains solidly in the 19th Century.

This new education must encourage students to be creative over producing the expected, innovative and expansive in their presentation and thinking, critical thinkers who question rather than accept, solvers of problems, communicators with their peers and teachers, collaborative in class and life, fluent in assessing the variable value of information which they are presented and highly literate in all aspects of technology.

It requires that educators and particularly government agencies managing education look at pedagogy differently. Many teachers in my experience already do, even if they are hobbled in their attempts to teach differently by bureaucrats fearing change and tightly controlled access to the best tools and information.

It requires a strong stance of providing open access to information and an approach that teaches good digital citizenship to our kids. Of course, not all of them will learn from such an opportunity, but that is no reason to not provide it.

We must have no more History Wars nor anything like them in other fields. Nor locked-down systems. Nor one-size-fits-all curriculum. Nor standardised tests that prove nothing beyond an ability to pass on the day (as an example, one of the most inspiring and intelligent people I know, cannot pass such tests).

I’m no expert on education. But I understand technology, collaboration and the benefits of open organisations and I have a pretty good idea of what it’s going to take to be capable as a participant in the 21st Century. I’ve had words to say about this subject in the past, and while nothing substantial changes, I’ll keep at it.

EDIT: Darcy Moore, an educator and high school administrator explains why MySchool is a problem, with some history, and how innovative approaches elsewhere have been successful.

Big Iron at the Australian Open

Stephen Collins — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 19:59:55 +0000

: Image by trib via Flickr

On Monday this week, IBM flew me to the Australian Open for a day at the tennis and a behind the scenes view of the technology they provide to this and other events in their role as the key technology provider. It was all done under the aegis of my being a part of the Insight 10, a small group IBM are looking to to help them understand how they, as a company, can better support and service small and growing businesses.

Of course, a day at a major sporting event, particularly one as high profile as a tennis Gran Slam, is highly enjoyable. We got to see two significant matches in the round of 16 – Verdasco vs Davydenko and Stosur vs Serena Williams. However, the ostensible point of the day was to see scope of the collaborative tools and technology that it takes to get an event like the Open up and running smoothly.

And believe me, there’s some data being crunched! Here are just a few of the highlights:

scoring from all courts is effectively live, with governing systems to overrule anything from either the match referee’s chair or the tournament director bunker
the same data is used to feed the web site, player and officials’ systems, match stats, television and other media as well as IBM’s Seer app that runs on Android and is built on the Wikitude engine
it takes three fixed data centers to manage this data (they aren’t dedicated, they do other things as well)
web site traffic, reputation and sentiment of relevant online content and energy burn are all monitored in real time and issues can be addressed should something go pear shaped
the infrastructure is only in place for a few weeks a year, as IBM flies it all in in containers, sets up, collaborates with event tech staff, makes everything run smoothly (and smooth it is, because you just don’t notice it) and then packs up and heads off to the next event (all the tennis Grand Slams, the Tony Awards and the US Masters Golf)
inter-team communication is dependent on time and place. Sometimes it’s face-to-face, or IM, or email or the phone. Smart. One solution is never the only solution

The five of the Insight 10 that were in Melbourne all attended the tour and were, given we probed hard enough, given the chance to ask some tough questions of the public facing web team. Given my fellow Insight 10er, Tom Worthington and I were particularly interested in issues of accessibility, we asked and were given straight answers about the standards to which the Australian Open site was developed. We particularly asked about vision impaired users and keyboard access.

While a site of the scale and dynamicism of the Open web site is no doubt a challenge to develop in such a way as to ensure the best possible of accessibility, the team assured us they looked to achieve the best possible outcome. On my testing, and that from Tom, it doesn’t appear to bear out in reality. That’s a pity, because it’s a significant blip on an otherwise excellent experience for a web site that has constant changes.

Overall, a fun and interesting experience. But obviously some significant work needs to be done to mitigate the accessibility issues of the site (and, given the same engine runs them, all the other sites IBM manages with this team).

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