I’ve been thinking about how you might go about taking the free-form nature of barcamp and merging it with ’static’ industry-expert panel discussions.
Very much in response to discussions after Chinwag’s measuring social media event on Monday.
So…
How about a panel event where there is a set subject and fixed set of panellists - but the areas of discussion are worked out on a wiki by the attendees in the run up to the event?
The agenda would have to be managed to the extent that there could only be, say, 4 or 5 areas of discussion in order to stick to the time frame. You could open up the wiki for general suggestions and comments and then a week or so before the event someone arranges the suggestions into logical groupings in order to form the agenda. (For the panellists’ sake you’d probably want to fix the agenda about a week before the event.)
What do people think?
Popularity: 37% [?]
I collated some brief thoughts about last night’s Chinwag Live: Measuring Social Media and was going to publish them this evening.
Thought I’d check the blogosphere first to make references n’ dat and found that most of what I was going to say had already been articulated far more effectively by considerably more intelligent people than me.
So (in true social-media-analytics styleee) here’s the Google blog search results. The rest is up to you!
My tuppence worth: reckon a social media metrics hack day might be in order.
Popularity: 51% [?]
I regularly come across people who are used to not being able to use things. They’ve learnt to accept it. The answer to not being able to perform a fairly simple task is to refer to a manual, or book a training session.
This isn’t because these people are stupid, it’s because the designers of the interfaces they are using made them so difficult to operate sometimes the only way to figure them out is with expert help.
One of the exercises I remember most clearly from my design degree is a time we had to specify all the steps involved in making a cup of tea. It proved - for us usability novices - to be a brilliant example of how apparently simple tasks involve some fairly complex steps - and more steps than you might initially assume (I feel a little competition coming on…!).
My reason for mentioning that is because a lot of the time the tasks we perform on screen are akin to tasks we perform in the real world. And this is (still) so often forgotten by interface designers.
I once filled out an online job application. I spent about a week pruning my CV as the form fields only allowed a very small number of characters. The evening before the deadline I was finally at a point where I’d squeezed pretty much everything into the minuscule text areas and I hit the ‘Submit Application’ button.
To my horror, the page that loaded in front of me said (words to the effect of): ‘Now please specify how your skills and experience are suitable for this role’ - in 2000 words! There was absolutely no indication that this part of the form existed!
In the ‘real world’ I can easily ascertain the size of the form by the number of pages it is printed on. I can have a quick scan of the entire form before filling it in by turning it over in my hands. I can easily and quickly plan what I’m going to write about in each section. If the designers of this particular online application had spent a bit of time considering the real world equivalent it could have saved me a whole load of frustration and panic!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against user manuals or training sessions, they are sometimes necessary for more complex tasks, but interfaces should at least fundamentally make sense in the first place.
This is especially true the more complex the process. For example, I would like to think that the interfaces used by workers in nuclear power plants are simple enough so that when the big red warning light starts flashing they don’t have to look out a manual to figure out what it means.
Popularity: 29% [?]
As it’s Valentine’s Day and in response to Valleywag’s ‘Who’s the hottest tech bachelor?‘…
Question: Who are the most eligible men in UK tech?
Nominations (and phone numbers ;) ) in the comments box please!
:D
Popularity: 22% [?]
There have been a couple of posts commenting on the apparent uselessness of web 2.0/social media web apps recently.
Mike Ellis commented that:
None of these tools (Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr etc) actually adds anything… All of these tools do add huge amounts of noise, but to me none of them add signal… they’re not doing anything useful for me.
All noise, no signal. Lifestreaming is a timesink
And then godofbiscuits79 commented that Google Reader is ‘not bad though fairly pointless’.
The last comment I’ll put down to web 2.0 naïvety (godofbiscuits79 is my little brother - it would be wrong of me not to take the opportunity to tease him a little about this) but both these comments got me thinking.
Genuine human relationships are essentially useless. Most of us don’t form connections with people because of a transactional value (apart from some business contacts perhaps). My relationships with my friends are based on shared interests or opinions or outlook on life. Sure, some of those relationships come with benefits (like knowing music industry people who can source tickets to sold out gigs ;) ), but these relationships still only last if there is some genuine connection between the parties involved.
At the moment, most of the ‘friends’ I have in online social networks fit into the description above - they are people I share interests, opinions or outlook with. This means social media for me is essentially useless as it facilitates relationships that are essentially useless. But that’s what I like about it the most.
Popularity: 53% [?]
First I was a web designer at a startup, then I ran some arts events.
