• Audio recording of session
• Presentation slides
• Transcript and additional resources
• Session description
• About Mike Kuniavsky

Presentation slides

Session description

Let’s start with the assumption that computing and networking are as cheap to incorporate into product designs as plastic and aluminum. Anything can tweet, everything knows about everything. The cloud extends from smart speed bumps to exurban data systems, passing through us in the process. We’re basically there technologically today, and over the next [pick a date range] years, we’ll be there distribution-wise.

Here’s the issue: now that we have this power what do we do with it? Yes we can now watch the latest movies on our phones while ignoring the rest of the world (if you believe telco ads) and know more about peripheral acquaintances than you ever wanted. But, really, is that it? Is it Angry Birds all the way down?

Of course not. Every technology’s most profound social and cultural changes are invisible at the outset. Cheap information processing and networking technology is a brand new phenomenon, culturally speaking, and quickly changing the world in fundamental ways. Designers align the capabilities of a technology with people’s lives, so it is designers who have the power and responsibility to think about what this means.

This talk will discuss where ubiquitous computing is today, some changes we can already see happening, and how we can begin to think about the implications of these technologies for design, for business and for the world at large.

About Mike Kuniavsky

Mike Kuniavsky is a designer, writer, researcher, consultant and entrepreneur focused on people’s relationship to digital technology. He cofounded Adaptive Path, a San Francisco design consulting firm, and ThingM, a ubiquitous computing design studio and micro-manufacturer. He is the author of ‘Observing the User Experience,’ a popular textbook of user research methods, and ‘Smart Things: ubiquitous computing user experience design,’ a guide to the user-centered design of digital products.

Follow Mike on Twitter: @mikekuniavsky

• Audio recording of session
• Presentation slides
• Session description
• About Grant Young

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Session description

People are redefining the relationship they have with the organisations they interact with, empowered by social technologies. They are seeking:

• Human-ness: as organisations have grown in size and become more and more depersonalised, people are wanting more human interactions and personal response
• Trust: from greenwashing to the GFC, the market’s trust has been eroded — people are looking for organisations to say what they mean and mean what they say
• Co-creation: people are taking a more active role in developing the products and services that they use. And if they don’t find what they’re looking for, they will often create it themselves
• Responsibility: people want to engage with organisations that are genuinely addressing the complex issues of sustainability and wellbeing

Building a brand, service or product offering that resonates in this new “economy of meaning” requires a rethinking of an organisation’s relationship to the “market” — their customers, stakeholders and the environment.

In this presentation Grant Young will examine how innovative organisations are using social technologies and design methods to create multi-dimensional value — both for the organisational and community — and will explore the themes that underpin the examples with a view to applying them in your context.

About Grant Young

Grant is founder of social innovation consultancy Zumio. In this role he combines his 15+ years' experience in online and social technology with his passion for sustainability to help organisations harness these increasingly prominent market forces.

Zumio helps its clients — spanning the commercial, government and non-profit sectors — build platforms for social engagement that simultaneously deliver organisational value while increasing societal wellbeing and sustainability. Zumio has recently undertaken projects for the Cancer Institute NSW, the Inspire Foundation, VicRoads and Saasu.

Prior to founding Zumio, Grant produced projects for award-winning sustainable design agency Digital Eskimo and managed online communications and social media strategy for conservation organisation WWF-Australia, including for the inaugural Earth Hour (2007). He has also developed web applications for the business sector in the areas of financial and carbon accounting (Saasu, Climate Friendly).

Follow Grant on Twitter: @grantyoung

• Audio recording of session
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• Session description
• About Laurel Papworth

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Session description

It’s not true that there are no proven monetisation models for online communities; in fact, there are distinct revenue streams that have been successful over many years. This session looks at the soft returns on investment for engaging with user generated content, communication and collaboration with the consumer and then moves into how social networks earn money for their investors and developers.

The aim of this session is to limit the slapping of banner ads on every niche community online — you might be surprised to learn that the least profitable revenue model is… Advertising! Come, spend an hour on the Dark Side, and find out which social networks are making money, how much and by what means and learn about the business models in this growth industry.

About Laurel Papworth

Laurel teaches social media and marketing and public relations courses at Universities and Colleges here in Australia and overseas (Saudi Arabia). She also runs workshops with major media companies such as publishing houses, television and music companies on their social network strategies. Laurel consults with companies ranging from global electronics companies to dating communities to Australian Government departments on all things communication, collaboration and community.

• Audio recording of the presentation
• Presentation slides
• Session description
• About Grant Young

Presentation slides

Session description

With so many social networks blooming, all with different participants and methods of interaction, it can be hard to determine where to invest your energy, time and $$.

The session will provide ideas and a “background briefing” to help you answer the question:

• why is social media important to my organisation?
• what is the ROI for social media?
• how can I evaluate which approaches are right for me/my organisation?
• what sort of activities can/should I undertake in these spaces?

This is not a technical session and although we will briefly touch on some popular sites, the focus will be on how you and your organisation can effectively and authentically engage participants in the social media world.

About Grant Young

Grant has worked for over a decade in web and media roles, more recently focusing on social media and networking opportunities for non-profits. Grant recently founded Zumio, a consulting business with an emphasis on online strategy development. Since starting Zumio earlier this year Grant has advised a number of organisations including WWF-Australia (Earth Hour 2008) and Amnesty International on social media and campaign development.

Previously Grant held the role of Online Communications Manager at WWF-Australia, and worked as Senior Producer at award-winning design agency Digital Eskimo. In these roles he advised on and produced projects incorporating a variety of social networking tools and approaches, including weblogs, wikis, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook.

Grant has also developed web applications for the business sector in the areas of financial and carbon accounting. He presented on the topic of social media in the financial services sector at the Investor Weekly Branding conference in March 2008.

• MP3 of presentation
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• About Angela Beesley

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Session description

Wikipedia has brought the concept of a wiki to many people’s attention and now Wikia is aiming to broaden that concept. If you think of Wikipedia as the encyclopedia, then Wikia is the rest of the library. Wikia hosts 3000 openly editable wikis that are built up by communities of fans who are passionate on topics that range from solar cooking to Neopets.

In this session, Angela Beesley will explain how Wikia is not only hosting but actively developing wikis and creating hundreds of thriving communities. The methods and processes that have led Wikipedia to be the world’s largest encyclopedia can be adopted for any type of wiki use, including educational and business communities. Using examples from successful online wiki communities, Angela will explain how to enable a wiki community to manage itself, and how to minimise the common problems that wikis have, including ways to deal with unhelpful or unreliable information, lack of adoption of a wiki, and the problems of malicious edits on open wikis.

About Angela Beesley

http://wikiangela.com/blog/

• MP3 of presentation
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• Session description
• About George Oates

Session description

If there’s one thing about Web 2.0, it’s that we’re realising that there are actually people using the internet. It’s no longer about Human to Computer interaction, but rather Human to Human. Discover some of the user experience ideas and strategies behind the design of flickr.com, one of the richest Human to Human places on the web today.

About George Oates

http://abitofgeorge.com/

• MP3 of presentation
• Session description
• About Laurel Papworth

Session description

It seems that everyone is talking about user generated content and online communities these days. But how will citizen journalism, user-generated content, the Blogosphere, tagging, ranking, and Wiki knowledge reshape branding and your business? How do you manage and scale this community and then hand control to your users (and how do you explain to the boss what you’ve just done?). Gain an understanding that dialogue is the new content and learn how to maximise the benefits (and minimise the pitfalls) of creating online communities in this presentation.

About Laurel Papworth

Laurel Papworth runs a consultancy specialising in maximising value from establishing online communities.

Back in the nineties she had key roles in major projects such as NewsPro (digitising Fairfax Newspapers in 1994) and Optus Networker (the first WAP product in Australia in 1999). As part of establishing Optus Convergent media, she managed optus.com and optus.net editorial and technical teams. The last 10 years have been spent outside Australia, working for such major players as Telkomsel Indonesia, UUNET Europe and Cisco Asia.

Laurel is a leading expert on user generated content. She set up an online community for Cisco using user generated content from project managers to manage knowledge transfer across Asia. She’s also been an administrator for Stratics.com, a massive MMORPG site that handles the official online newspaper, forums etc for Ultima Online and others.

Excited to be back in Australia, her current projects include consulting to a major international studio and entertainment group in preparation of the launch of a children’s TV program across AsiaPacific that addresses childhood obesity and health combining animation with online communities.

• MP3 of presentation
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• Session description
• About Mark Pesce

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Session description

The collection of social and information technologies informally known as Web2.0 have created a rich universe of applications — but a scattershot one. We plug lots of our information into websites everywhere — MySpace and Digg, Friendster and Yahoo!, and everywhere, Google, Google, Google. Yet it’s as if we’re spending all of our time building information silos; piles of data which are essentially unconnected. It’s getting dull. How many times do I need to list my friends, or my contact information, or my favorite bands?

We know why it’s happening: commercial interests are overruling the natural pooling and sharing of information that would actually bring some utility to this mountain of data we’re generating about ourselves. Yet the pressure to share is building up: the recent explosive emergence of mash-ups, which juxtapose two or three or more services in unique and valuable ways shows us that the hybrid always trumps the thoroughbred. And that’s just on internet services. Very few of us control the mountain of data we generate as we pass through this world — everyone wants it (for their own purposes), yet we — who are creating it — never have access to it.

It’s time to revisit the entire philosophy of interaction design on the Web, time to move the focus away from the site-as-resource, toward an idea of the site-as-personal-enabler. What we each bring to a website — or rather, what we should bring to a website — is a wealth of information about ourselves. This is the real resource of Web2.0, and the next place the Web is going. The exuberance around social networks shows us that people want to connect — it’s time for designers to build the tools which will truly enable that connection.

About Mark Pesce

Known internationally as the man who fused virtual reality with the World Wide Web to invent VRML, Mark Pesce has been exploring the frontiers of media and technology for a quarter of a century. The author of five books and numerous articles, Pesce has written for WIRED, Feed, Salon, PC Magazine, and The Age. For the last two seasons, Pesce has been a panelist on the hit ABC show The New Inventors. From 2003 to 2006, Pesce chaired the Emerging Media and Interactive Design Program at the world-renowned Australian Film Television and Radio School. In February he received an appointment as an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney, and has gone on to found FutureSt, a Sydney media and technology consultancy.