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The highly anticipated BarCampCanberra event happened yesterday, with a large gathering of smart and passionate folks from around Canberra, Yass, Wollongong and Sydney discussing interesting topics such as Government 2.0, social innovation, collaboration, typography, hackerspaces and more.

For those unfamiliar with the BarCamp concept:

BarCampCanberra is a free-to-attend community-run conference where anyone can come and watch, participate or present on anything they are passionate about - either something interesting they’ve been working on, an idea they’d like to present or to brainstorm the solution to a problem with a bunch of like-minded smart people

We had over 150 people registered for the event, 46 pizzas consumed, 72 bottles of water drunk (plus the additional cups and water containers) and 39 sessions including a series of 5 minute lighting talks (I love the 5 minute lighting talk format).

The event was tweeted, flickred, livestreamed and Googled waved. We were even covered in the Canberra Times (page 8 of the Sunday 7th February newspaper).

Some of my favourite quotes about BarCampCanberra comes from @dekrazee1:

Brain is still abuzz from #bcc2010. BarCamp is the techy equivalent of a day spa. Energising and invigorating. #I<3BarCamp

@ozdj:

@RazChorev Yep. Sound ROI. That $50 of fuel (and ~8hrs of travel time) got me about $500 worth of education today. #bcc2010

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Another Oz-IA conference has passed and it was great. There were a lot of familiar faces but also a large number of new faces. The twitter back channel were buzzing with activity for most of the conference, no doubt fuelled by the on-site barista and fruit cocktail maker.

Here’s a rundown of some of the presentations. Not every session is covered.

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Canberra Girl Geek Dinner #2 was held on Saturday 4th of April 2009 at Indian Affair restaurant in Phillip. I was given the opportunity to chat about designing useful user experiences.

My presentation is titled From Apples to eye surgery: designing useful user experiences and you can catch it below:

PS: Apologies for not posting a bit more of an explanation about the presentation - I’m in a rush to pack for my Gold Coast holiday!

BarCamp Canberra #2 was yet another successful event! There was a great turnout with 71 registered users and other folks dropping in and out through out the day. We had representation from Canberra, Yass, Wollongong, Sydney and Melbourne (did I miss out any other cities?). Two streams were running simultaneousness for most of the day with great presentations running in both rooms.

Who presented?

As I have yet to master the art of splitting my self into two, here’s a quick run down of the talks I heard:

• David Page introduced us to the concept of the Yubikey - a usb key authentication system. It provides single or two factor authentication and is quite affordable. Catch The Yubikey presentation on slideshare.
• Rohan Mitchell shared his adventures in online business. My favourite slide from his presentation? Slide 18 The Learning Curve, which involves:
  1. Make something cool
  2. ???
  3. Profit!

  Catch the rest of his Adventures in Online Business on slideshare.

• One of the highlights was Pamela Fox’s presentation on making the google map for the Victorian bushfires. It was fascinating hearing about the solutions they came up with in the challenging environment, with key issues being the short time frames and lack of open data. It really highlighted the problems we face when data (particularly emergency data) is not made available in formats that enable reuse. Read more on Pamela’s blog post BarCamp Canberra 2: Mapping the Fires.
• Another highlight was Joseph Gentle’s presentation on Artificial intelligence. He took a complex subject and made it really easy to understand. Loved it.
• Craig Thomler took us through his experiences on blogging as a public servant - a very informative presentation.
• Linda Gehard ran an interactive impromptu workshop on the good and bad of mobile phone design.
• Darren Menachemson gave an interesting talk about designing out evil, complete with great graphs!
• Caronne Carruthers-Taylor gave an interesting presentation on her experiences with UX and design. Catch her presentation Change the world with UX: user experience in federal government on slideshare.
• Dean K held an interesting discussion about the No Clean Feed recent rally and opportunities to influence the decision makers. He also raised the idea that the solutions we propose need to provide a way for Stephen Conroy to save face.
• Nathanael Boehm introduced us to Resilient Nation Australia.

My presentation

I did a light hearted presentation on The Uncanny Valley:

Find out what else happened

Didn’t make it to BarCamp Canberra #2? You can:

• Watch the presentations on slideshare
• See the photos on flickr
• Find out who came to BarCamp Canberra #2
• Catch the twitter stream
• Visit the websites mentioned in the presentations, tagged in my delicious bookmarks

Thanks

Thanks to the unorganisers (Andrew Boyd, Stephen Collins, Simon Pascal Klein, Nathanael Boehm, Craig Thomler, Rae Buerckner, Darren Menachemson) for putting together a great event and the sponsors (acidlabs, Five Senses Coffee, UX Australia,
Keith Lang, Australian Anthill, Electric Shadows Bookshop).

Can’t wait for BarCamp Canberra #3!

It’s Ada Lovelace Day - an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.

From the Ada Lovelace Day pledge site:

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.

I have many female friends who are doing wonderful work in the technology industry - too many to name but here’s a few Aussie females that I’ll like to sing out about.

• Donna - she is a great information architect, the Queen of Card Sorting and contributes much of her time to the web community. She’s always happy to share her knowledge and experience.
• Caronne - I love her passion for the work we do. She’s an extremely supportive person and manages to balance work, life, web community stuff and life with two teens. She does amazing stuff with advocating great user experiences in Government agencies that many people don’t hear about!
• Susan - one of the many challenging things of being a women is the ability to juggle multiple stressful components of our life. Susan is amazing - she loves the work she does and some how, manages to balance work, family, photography, blogging and web stuff!
• Viv - a special person I used to work with who is passionate about accessibility and user experience. She’s a solid rock for any team that she’s on and is always quietly working away in the background getting stuff done. It’s people like Viv who work so hard and never seem to get recognition for the hard work they do - so here’s my shout out to you Viv!
• Lisa - is amazing. She knows a lot of things about accessibility, usability and user experience. We have a very similiar approach to the work we do. She’s a very calming influence and I admire her passion for the work we do.

There are many other females out there who also doing great work (I’m looking at you Teresa, Amie, Suze, Lana!).

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

The No Clean Feed Canberra rally is finally happening! Unfortunately we won’t be around to take part in the Canberra rally as we will be in Sydney (and aiming to be at the Sydney rally) but if you’re in Canberra, please show your support for the No Clean Feed issue by attending the rally. If you can’t, please pass the message on so people are able to make an informed decision about the issues surrounding the mandatory internet filtering plan proposed by the Australian Federal Government.

The Canberra rally will occur this Saturday 13 December from 12pm in City Walk. The full details of the No Clean Feed Canberra rally is available at the Facebook event page. If you can’t access the Facebook page, check out this alternate page instead.

Need more info?

• Get informed - http://www.nocleanfeed.com
• Get involved - http://nocensorship.info/forum
• Official petition - http://www.wakinggiant.org/au_censorship.htm

One of my favourite sites about the mandatory internet filtering issue is Think of the children!

Photo credit: Nathanael Boehm

Web Directions Government started with a very fresh morning, complete with frost on my car that took ages to defrost! My car told me that it was zero degrees when I left the house… Anyhow, Web Directions Government is the first Web Directions conference to be held in Canberra, targeted specifically at the Government sector. Here’s a quick run down of the day:

• I started the day with Jason Ryan’s breakfast talk about Government 2.0 - The public challenge. I really enjoyed Jason’s talk about the challenges with Government 2.0 with the key themes of Change, Strategy and Control. Key ideas included encouraging everyone to engage, have a good understanding of your people and of the environment. Key quotes from the session, “most importantly, you have to trust your staff”, “when it comes to engagement, mediocrity is not an option” and “just bloody well do it!”.
• eGovernment by José Manuel Alonso - “removing the e from eGovernment”. He talked about the challenges facing Governments doing business online and the need for participation and transparency. Check out eGovernment at W3C.
• Real world web standards by Scott Gledhill - a case study of the redesign of News.com.au and associated websites. Interesting learnings about the need for clear communications and established rules, even in a team full of people who know their stuff.
• One paper clip, a box of matches, and some JavaScript by Patrick Lee - Patrick covered lots of examples of using JavaScript in the real world. Love the MacGyver references!
• Usability: more than skin deep by Lisa Herrod - I heard this at last year’s Web Directions South but it’s still as enjoyable the second time round. Lisa is always a great speaker to listen to and I love how we have a very similiar holistic approach to our user experience work!
• ABC’s election site: making the most of dry data by Andrew Kesper - Andrew covered a range of design decisions taken for the ABC election site. Very interesting look at the various technologies involved, especially the interactive maps.
• The essential elements of great web applications by Robert Hoekman Jr - a great presentation to finish the conference. Robert covered his seven key principles for great web design, including my favourite, “reduce, reduce, reduce” (minimalist designs appeal to me both online and in the real world).

Thanks to John and Maxine and their team of helpers for putting on a conference in Canberra! I had a great time and will definitely attend next year.

The March Canberra WIPA/WSG meeting was held yesterday at the National Library of Australia, covering topics of wikis and collaboration.

GovDex: a tool to support collaboration across government agencies

The first speaker was Brian Stonebridge from the Department of Finance and Deregulation, who talked about GovDex. GovDex is a resource developed by government agencies to promote interoperability and collaboration within Government. It provides governance, tools, methods and re-usable technical components that government agencies can use to when developing information services. GovDex can be used by all levels of Government (federal, state and local) and provides the facility to have private and public sites. Most GovDex sites are currently private.

GovDex is currently secured to IN-CONFIDENCE level of security, with PROTECTED security planned for GovDex 2. GovDex is built on the Confluence platform.

Brian and his team member Rita provided some examples of the use of GoxDex. One was the Five Nationals Collaboration Workspace, which provides collaboration for meetings between five Governments around the world. Another example is the Australian Government ICT Standards Interest Group, which is used to establish the Australian Government position on OOXML (a hot topic!).

Kate from the Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts also presented a GovDex site that they’re currently using for incoming Graduates for both DEWHA and Department of Climate Change. The site is used to keep in touch with the incoming Graduates who are often spread around Australia (I reckon that there are quite a few overseas enjoying a holiday before starting work!). The site provides information about Canberra, the Department, HR information, training information etc. She provided a lot of positive feedback about GovDex but also mentioned that the uptake hasn’t been as good as expected.

If you’re wondering why there hasn’t been any big announcements of GovDex, the reason is that the Department of Finance and Deregulation has done a soft launch rather than take a big bang approach. They’re still checking for scalability issues and ironing out some usability issues with the user interface. What I found particularly interesting was Brian’s comment that he expects to see a bigger uptake of collaboration tools under our new Government. It’s interesting to see the influence of culture from top down when it comes to collaborating within and between agencies and departments. It might still take a while for it to filter across federal Government but it’s definitely encouraging.

Wikis at work

The next speaker was Michele Huston, the Director of Web Publishing at the National Library of Australia. She presented a case study on the implementation of wikis at the NLA. Michele stated that libraries, rather than being as starting point for information access like it was in the days before this prevalent use of the internet, are now just one of many nodes of information. This results in exploring new ways of managing knowledge. Hence the interest in wikis as a new way of managing information.

Wikis in the NLA have been in existence for about two years although it’s picked up a lot more popularity through out the Library over the past year. They are also using Confluence as the technological platform which had features additional to the ’standard wiki’, such as access control, a WYSIWYG (which was a key requirement from NLA) and the ability to post news items. The wiki started with two projects and was exposed to the rest of the Library via one particular project.

Library users liked the wikis and have been using it across a range of things including IT documentation, rosters, processes etc. They liked the flexibility, freedom and trust that came with a wiki. It’s not all roses though. There are some issues with the user interface, scalability, and the wiki also provides another spot to store documents. In addition, the same elements (flexibility, freedom and trust) that they liked were also the same elements that they didn’t like due to the feelings of uncertainty of some users. Michele also mentioned that what hasn’t worked is archiving of documents and publishing workflows.

What I found really interesting is the culture of trust within the NLA. There wasn’t much governance around wikis. All staff can request a wiki and all staff can edit any of the wikis. Michele has found that staff were more comfortable exploring, creating content and making edits in their own wiki space, rather than one big overall organisational wiki. She has also found that no matter how messy the content may look, staff do go back to clean it up later on

So is it a success? Michele states that it depends upon how you define success. They currently have 88 wikis which have been implemented over the past two years. The take-up within the organisation has been great. To me, it definitely sounds like a success.

Trust

So the question is whether a wiki will work in your organisation. There are many factors that will influence the success of wikis within the workspace but one of the key ones for me is trust. For wikis to work, you need to trust your staff. This is often much harder in the Government space but as long as you trust your staff to do the right thing (i.e. treat your staff like adults), this will go a long way in fostering a collaborative working environment.