ABC Future Tense – The Future of Conferences

ABC Radio National’s Future Tense programme recently invited Katie Chatfield, Beth Etling & myself as a panel for a show on the Future of Conferences. You can download the mp3 or listen online via the ABC site. Many thanks to Anthony Funnell and Andrew Davies from the ABC for their fine interviewing & editing skills.

Fast Break: Conversation

Fast Break was at Vibewire and featured 5 of us talking about Creativity, Connection, Collaboration, Commercialisation & (drum roll please) Conversation.

Here are the notes to support the slides (which I didn’t really use):

• A key challenge to innovation is noticing. Or the willingness to be surprised.
• Conversation plays a key role here – in conversation we can allow ourselves to be surprised.
• Lovely quote from Theodore Zeldin’s book Conversation: The kind of conversation I like is one in which you are prepared to emerge a slightly different person.
• Finally, 3 suggestions to improve the process:

1. Find people who are not like you to converse with. The more alien, the better.
2. Listen as well as talk.
3. Do something about it afterwards.

Wiki Wednesday: Disposable

This was a presentation that I gave at Wiki Wednesday on 6 May 2009. Here are some notes:

1. The style of these slides is a blatant steal from Jye Smith’s current presenting style. Jye – sue me.
2. Slide 2 is a drawing that appeared in an edition of 70s punk fanzine Sniffin’ Glue. The metaphor here is that social software is basically punk rock and that punk emerged in opposition to the world of prog rock. Many Flash-based web sites feel like 10 minute guitar solos – i.e. technical masturbation.
3. You don’t need to be able to code to create a web site with a wiki. You can just do it.
4. Slide 4 is a picture of Indian tea cups. Some are made of clay. You drink them and then throw them away. They are designed to be disposable. They have a built-in obsolescence. On the other hand, plastic cups persist in our environment. Many corporate information environments seem to be full of trash that won’t go away.
5. We need to design our environments with this obsolescence in mind.
6. Example 1 – built very quickly, iteratively and now no longer used.
7. Example 2 – built very quickly to prototype an idea.
8. Example 3 – built very quickly, adapted and still in use.
9. 5 simple conclusions. The last point seemed to excite most interest  so the discussion focused on information lifecycle issues rather than the rapid prototyping thing.

NSW KM Forum: Thank You For Your Feedback

This was a short presentation that I gave as part of the NSW KM Forum Future of Conferences event (background & presentations). I was talking about feedback.

The 3 questions that I asked everyone at the start were:

• Who here likes getting positive feedback?
• Who here likes getting negative feedback?
• Who here thinks that feedback is important?

Then I talked a little about the rationale behind the Rate My Speaker experiment. And then I talked a little bit about Twitter, with specific reference to this experiment by Andrew McAfee.

My final three suggestions were:

• We have to get better at giving feedback.
• We have to get better at receiving it.
• Feedback is not an end in itself but a platform for co-creation.

UPDATE: The video is now available courtesy of Oscar Nicholson.