• Audio recording of session
• Presentation slides
• Session description
• About Paula Bray

Presentation slides

Coming soon.

Session description

The Powerhouse Museum has been working towards making its digital initiatives widely accessible and to a broader audience, online and onsite, to enable a connected digital future. With a blossoming of blogging, significant Flickr and Facebook presences the Museum has been developing great connections with a new audience that has led the institution to rethink access with an emphasis on the importance of community connections and participation. This thinking has had an impact on the Museum’s Strategic Plan and several digital initiatives are now driving change within the organisation.

The Museum has experienced incredible connections, citizen research and innovative digital outcomes such as MOB’s augmented reality mobile app using geo-located historic images from the Tyrrell collection, Paul Hagon’s Google Street view mashup, Digital NZ’s integration of related items from the Museum’s collection and the Powerhouse Museum’s collection download. Releasing data and images under a Creative Commons license has allowed the Museum to make the collection available for use and re-use. Social media initiatives are being adopted and aligned to the right platforms for appropriate audience effectiveness for exhibitions like ‘80s are back’ and ‘Trainspotting’ exhibitions. All these digital projects are allowing the Museum to evaluate, experiment, learn from and progress future initiatives leading to a connected digital future — as well as change the DNA of the Museum itself.

About Paula Bray

Paula Bray is the Manager of the Visual and Digitisation Services department at the Powerhouse Museum that includes: Photography, The Image Resource Centre, The Photo Library and Rights and Permissions and Audio Visuals. Paula is responsible for managing the digital collections to the highest standard whilst coordinating photographic and AV projects for exhibitions, publications, events and the website. Paula runs a blog for the Museum called Photo of the Day and manages the Museum’s two Flickr accounts and numerous public groups.

Paula has also worked as a photographer in the Arts for many years including: the Art Gallery of NSW, The State Library of NSW and The Australian National Maritime Museum. Paula has worked as a freelance photographer and had several exhibitions of her work including a solo show at Blender Gallery in 2007. Her work has been collected by the College of Fine Arts and private collectors. Paula studied photography at the College of Fine Arts for 5 years doing a Bachelor of Art and a Master of Art whilst also receiving the Agfa Gevaert award for the most innovative use of photography upon graduating.

Follow Paula on Twitter: @paulabray

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

Presentation slides

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

• Presentation slides (synced with audio)
• Audio recording of session
• Session description
• About Jeremy Yuille

Presentation slides (synced with audio)

Session description

When visualization is coupled with collective intelligence it becomes a very powerful tool for making sense of the data that is now an increasing part of our personal and organizational experience. But how do you design social web applications so they can use visualization effectively?

In this session I’ll present a model for using visualization on the social web; discussing why social settings are a great match for visualization and how more general UX ideas can be applied to the design of social visualization. I’ll also describe 5 interaction design patterns that will help designers and developers make the transition from theory to practical application.

About Jeremy Yuille

• Audio recording of session
• Presentation slides
• Session description
• About Deborah Schultz

Presentation slides

Session description

The most interesting problems on the web are social, not technical. Once the open, social stack moves into wide use, the real work is going to be on us to create ongoing experiences that inspire, inform, evolve. Avoid this talk if you want to hear about monetizing community, gaming the newest social site for a quick spike in your user numbers, or how to get a [insert cutting edge social platform] strategy for your brand.

Instead, we’ll diagram (sentence-like) real examples of marketing and revising (reviving?) web products for connected consumers. Think of it as Mind Hacks for Web Marketers. We’ll show you how sites like Dogster, Etsy, Moo, Photojojo and others parlay initial passions into deep, sustained, active communities. People-powered thinking extends well beyond messaging. Instead, we’ll preach a connected style of marketing that addresses a range of operational areas, both coming & going. We’ll pay particular attention to what happens after launch, as we think an attentive to and fro is the intimate secret of success.

About Deborah Schultz

• Audio recording of session
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• About Lynne d Johnson

Session description

Lynne will set the tone of the conference this year with insights into the future of media drawn from her wealth of experience in business, media and online communities as Senior Editor at Fast Company.

About Lynne d Johnson

• Session transcript
• Audio recording of session
• Presentation videos
• Session description
• About Mark Pesce

Presentation videos

Opening video:

Video introducing part 2 (at 9:30 minutes in):

Video introducing part 3 (at 19:32 minutes in):

Session description

This is what it feels like to be hyperconnected: a new kind of community – pervasive, continuous, yet strangely tense and tenuous, like a balloon inflated to the point of bursting. The limits of the neocortex meeting the amplifier of the Human Network. That creates unique opportunities: we can come together at a word, self-organize around or against a blog post, a live-streamed video, an automated reply from a faceless, rent-seeking organization. Nothing can stop us. We can’t even stop ourselves. But what do we want? And the other thing? You’ll need to be at Web Directions South, for the closing keynote, if you want to find out.

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 three 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.

• 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.

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• About Matthew Hodgson

Presentation slides

Session description

The world is abuzz with social computing: Facebook, My Space, YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, blogs, wikis and other spaces powered by Web 2.0 technology. It’s a social revolution, empowering individuals to communicate, share what they know online, and help others locate information that is important to them in both their private and working lives.

Some see all this as a big waste of corporate time, but is it? Is there value in handing over control of collaboration and sharing knowledge to individuals, rather than hoarding it in records systems, knowledge systems, and thousands of network dive folders? Is there a way you can harness this social revolution to help improve our organisation’s knowledge management practices? Is there actually a solid business value proposition for social computing?

Matthew will look at knowledge management in modern organisations, and how you can benefit by learning from the principles of social computing and Web 2.0 technologies. Matthew will introduce two case studies in government that demonstrate successful and not-so-successful ways of employing social computing tools, the factors that contributed to their success, and the pitfalls to watch out for. In particular, he will look at the issues in relation to corporate culture by drawing on recent research in blogs and wikis based on work in organisational psychology by Hofstede.

About Matthew Hodgson

• MP3 of presentation
• Session description
• About Anil Dash

Session description

You know what blogs and wikis are, and you know your YouTube from your Facebook. But do you know how to make a compelling business case for these technologies? Social media and social networking tools are poised to have as much of an impact on business as they’ve had on the way we communicate with our friends and family online.

Anil Dash, a blogger since 1999 who’s helped thousands of businesses make use of social media through his work at Six Apart, shares real-world examples of how companies are using social media to build their business. Six Apart is the world’s biggest blogging company, behind such platforms as Movable Type, LiveJournal, Vox, and TypePad.

And even more important than where technology has been is where it’s going: Learn about cutting-edge technological initiatives like OpenID and OpenSocial, and how these aren’t just about new ways to poke your Facebook friends — they’re business opportunities.

Finally, no change this big happens without thinking about the social and political realities of the business world. What works in convincing your company, your coworkers, or your boss to spend their time and money trying new things? This session will lead a conversation to find out.

About Anil Dash

• MP3 of presentation
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• Session description
• About Sebastian Chan

Presentation slides

Session description

More than ever before there is an enormous amount of publicly held data about our community, our culture, and citizens. How can government respond to the opportunities of Web 2.0? How can government websites and databases become more citizen-centric, and more responsive by leveraging social media?

In 2006 the Powerhouse Musuem, a NSW State Government institiution, opened its core information asset — its collection and research database — to public tagging, and dynamic user-driven recommendations. In the same year the Museum launched a range of public-facing blogs, inviting comment from visitors and audiences. Sebastian Chan will discuss why the museum has made these very successful forays into social media, and how a small in-house web development unit was able to push through and launch a project which is counted among Australia’s top web 2.0 applications. If you work in a large organisation and have dreams of social media, do not miss this session.

About Sebastian Chan