I went to Infocamp at Seattle University on Saturday and Sunday October 2-3. I saw a sign or something about this conference – I am not sure what I saw, but I had never heard of it. It was $50 for two days and the website seemed to have a lot of community input on it, so I thought I would check it out. It turned out to be one of the best conferences I have ever attended in terms of organization, attendee involvement, and speaker presentation skills.
People who work in software and information science have the best slideshow presentation skills I have seen among any demographic I can name. Years ago I found this advice for making good presentations (10 slides, 20 minutes, 30pt or larger font) and it seemed that almost all of the speakers at this conference naturally followed this. The format of the event sounds bizarre when compared to typical conferences – there is no preset speaker schedule except for the keynote speakers. The day started with lots of snacks, then a keynote speaker, then a call for people to come to the stage and make a proposal to the crowd for 45 minute breakout session. There was space for 9 breakout sessions, and in two days, there were seven of these sessions. I think in total about 55 sessions were offered, and almost all of them interested me a lot. It was difficult to choose the right one. Between every session the snacks and drinks were freshened, which is absolutely necessary to keep up energy levels. I hate attending conferences with lousy food or not enough drinks or speakers who go on for too long with no breaks! In an all-day conference it is not fair to have anyone other than the main speaker keep people in their chairs for more than an hour!
Some of the speakers prepared in advance and others just organized sessions spontaneously. The rules were that no one could be promoting a commercial interest. The theme for Infocamp is information sharing, usability, collaboration, and general community building. There were lots of Microsoft and Google guys here and they were great, but still most of the world’s work gets done by small companies whose names are not known and hearing their best and brightest was an opportunity I could only enjoy at a conference like this.
The first big speaker was Aaron Schmidt of walkingpaper.org. He is a librarian for city libraries and has interest in the strategies which various libraries around the world are using to promote themselves as community centers. He absolutely understands the big problems in modernizing libraries to take advantage of new technological resources, and said “I want libraries to be the number one pick-up spot.” I agree that the library is a natural place for people to fulfill their information needs and it would be a natural place for people with similar interests to be able to meet each other. He supports the nonprofit organization Geek the Library, and said that he supported acts of civil disobedience like some libraries’ usage of services like Netflix to provide video content to patrons who otherwise would not have access to media until better media distribution infrastructure is developed.
I went to a session on QR codes put on by a librarian. She was doing the things one might expect, but she said she got into using the codes because of Ethical Bean coffee. She said that Ethical Bean gets coffee from many different growers, and in order to give credit to the growers, they track their beans to the consumer level by putting QR codes on the bag so that coffee drinkers can read about all parts of the production process. It struck me that this would be a good way to track any kind of product with individual variability.
I went to a session by a podcast promoter, and she just said what I have heard before – that podcasting is great for anyone who wants to do it and can get an audience. I am already assured of an audience, and I really want to start making audio products with Nandan.
I went to a session with an advertising algorithm designer. This was a guy who contributed to the development of pricing models for online advertising. He said what I already knew but it clarified the process to me – ads art queued based on the bid, click through rate, and quality of linked content. Google and others have a process for judging the quality of page content, and better sites pay less for advertising. Ads which users click more also pay less. And of course, bidding more can override the other two.
I went to a lecture by this Google guy named Ario. He was one of the designers of Priority inbox, which just came out a few weeks before this conference. He talked about how it worked and how Google teams do this stuff and it how Google does a lot right, but I already knew that.
The other keynote speaker was a Samantha Starmer from REI (a major outdoor recreation equipment manufacturer which happens to be in Seattle), who was a user interface designer who had a lot of the programming team with her. Mostly they talked about how what they were doing amounted to groundbreaking fundamental research, and made believers of the whole audience regarding the difficulty in sorting a large commercial website’s products in such a way that customers can find what they want to buy. Also they talked about the need for standards so that the work they were doing does not have to be done everywhere repeatedly forever, so API and RDF, which are terms I know but do not intuitively understand. They also described how they use scrum to do all their work, and they described how demanding software developer rights both got them deserved recognition and kept inept management away from them. She also recommended http://uxmag.com/.
David Sherwin is an employee for Frog Design, a multinational design company which develops protocol infrastructure and software solutions for the developing world. They have an office in Seattle. Frog was a contributor to project masilukeke, which is an effort to encourage HIV testing. The way the project worked was that they set up a phone counseling system in a rural African location where there were not many medical or social services but where people had access to cell phones. They also prepared HIV home testing kits with pictorial instructions which could be understood by illiterate people. After this was prepared, they used a partnership with Nokia (the local cell carrier) to send an unsolicited ad for free anonymous home HIV testing to anyone who called a number. Persons who called the number got the kits, then could mail them back and call in to get results. Frog designed this process, so they directed the other partners to donate their resources according to a certain protocol. To develop this protocol, Frog collected data, sorted it into four categories (user behavior, competitors, cultural trends, and tools), then wrote a process, then proposed it to the partners, then tracked its efficacy for every step (call backs, kits requested, kits sent back, number of follow up results calls). David Sherwin told me that the protocol for this is available for use by other efforts.
Rupa Patel is a UW PhD student in biomedical and health informations. She gave a presentation about some current proposed mobile software solutions for health problems. She said that a big problem with mobile software solutions are that they are a manifestation of an in-person service, and often managers direct software developers to copy the service even when the service is flawed. What should happen, she said, is that developers should get managerial and legal support for using software to make the best service, not a copy of an existing service. She then mentioned some specific applications: Erik Arsand at UW designed FewTouch, a smartphone app for managing blood glucose. SIMpill is a pillbox which sends SMS reminders if it is not opened at certain times. Sweet Talk is a text messaging system which reminds young teenagers with diabetes to take certain action. Ubifit is a project where a person wears a physical device which tracks physical activity; this device sends info to the person’s cellphone and changes the background image of the phone’s screen in response. In the example given, the phone’s screen was an empty garden, and when the device detected the person did a workout, a flower would grow. If a person does exercise daily, they had a garden; if they skipped exercise, they would see a dead garden every time they looked at their phone.
I met some other people. Julie Ratner of Iterative Design who works at Big Fish wanted to talk with me about casual gaming as a method of behavior modification therapy. Ahsan Kabir of orgastronomy.com wanted to hear what I had to say about software needs in India. Sameer Halai was Bombay guy interested in the gay Indian scene and the magazine Bombay Dost. Brian Rowe of Jigsaw Renaissance said he knew someone who did book photography for archiving content, and also does other freedom of information things.