The starting point “We used to call them users” set the motto for a great presentation. The title was a clear reference to the ‘OLD’ web, where people’s role weren’t anything more than mere spectators of the whole business. The web we live in today if far different, since much of it is actually based in Action, web2.0 brought in personalization and customization, users stood up and embraced the role of actors! Which for companies actually meant more work or at least they couldn’t just count on users eating all the PR jargon they meant them to take. Users got a voice!
According to Bruno, users can be more or less involved along time with a company or product, but they tend to follow a specific path of engagement:
witnessing
sharing
conversation
collaboration
action
At first, we’re all mere spectators, witnessing whatever happens around us. Nothing new here, or by that matters with the any of the following states. The only difference is that with the advent of web, the power and time by which this all process happens is amazingly fast, meaning I can progress from the point where I’ve witnessed something to the point where I decide to engage some action about it in a fraction of the time it used to happen.
For companies this brought in the need for them to engage users in all this different mind settings. And basically you have two options about it: retreat or engage the conversation. Bruno and the portuguese bloggers that joint the conversation seem to have an agreement that if you’re 100% into it, it’s probably better not to jump into blogging at all, since the side effects of poor communication (blogging in this case) can be as worst as traditional communication.
On the other side, for the companies that actually engage the blogging as a communication process, there are clear advantages. Users will always talk about a company products, so if a company does provide their customers with a place for open discussion about their products, they somehow control or at least have an active part in that discussion. Anyone barely involved in PR knows how much better that is
Plus, and this was something I haven’t heard during the general conversation, people bond with brands, it’s a natural happening, the difference this days to me is that people don’t expect to be mass-branded any more, so the closer they feel to a brand, the more personal the experience gets… and experience is everything in there days.
I personally thing that this theme is amazingly important in the Portuguese context, and I’m not complaining as usual to the fact that Portuguese companies tend to be 2/3 years far behind the rest of Europe/World! But by seeing so many companies PR’s in that room and see them taking part of the discussion and acknowledging the importance of the blogs in their communication as a way to increase their users satisfaction and have closer control how their brands are interpreted by their customers it’s already clear the importance blogs will have in the future or traditional public relations.
One last note, for the Unicer team who organized this all event, congratulations to them all, I’m truly inspired and admired with the concept.
It’s true, SHiFT is back!. We almost died on our first ’round’ in 2006 but we decided to do it again and today we just gave the first (public) step towards it: we’ve unleashed the dates - set your calendars:
A lot of work, discussion and planning will take place in the coming months, so EVERYONE is invited to help and participate in the discussion! We haven’t closed down the speakers list and there will be space for the community to vote on who gets to go up on stage later on, but if you know an exciting speaker or you’re just wishing your secret hero to be there, don’t be shy and let us know!
Pop us an email over at speakers@shift.pt.
Don’t forget to keep an eye on the official Blog, or subscribe SHiFT’sTwitter / jaiku feeds.
Following my first day short notes and even now that I should probably be sleeping before my early flight back do Lisbon, I couldn’t resist and put up some more of my rought-notes about LIFT’s second dayt.
Disclaimer 1: I just wanted to confess that I was quite tired which implied that my attention span was, hum… somehow less than ideal. I didn’t even listened to all the day presentation’s somehow Skype back-channel seemed so cosy!
Disclaimer 2: as all personal notes, this ones also reflect my own thoughts about some of the conference presentations and as such they shouldn’t be taken literally!
Holm Friebe and Philipp Albers
I had met them the night before as we seated on the same table during fondue but it was not until they’re presentation that I actually knew they were LIFT speakers! I really enjoyed our conversation during those cheesy hours, so it came to no surprise that they’re presentation on the Hedonistic Company felt so compelling! Holm and Philipp created the socialistic-capitalist joint-venture Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur in Berlin as a way to showcase and experiment on new forms of cooperation and collaborative in work environments. They’re Hedonistic Company is grounded by 7 simple, yet powerful, principles:
Rule 1: 7 NO’s
no office
no employees
no fixed costs
no pitches
no exclusivity
no working hours
no bullshit
Radical, hein?
Rule 2: Work-Work balance
This is a particular interesting rule, since according to this guys we MUST engage client work and self-induced projects with equal energy and effort, knowing that some of the client’s work isn’t always as dear as we wish you shouldn’t really let them take over our energy and attention, meaning that you should somehow balance your client work your other personal projects in an attempt to not let any of them fall short or be corrupted by the other
Rule 3: Instant Gratification - ¥€$
Money is an incentive, but they suggest a less traditional approach to it’s ‘use’, reuse the money of each project immediately, use it as a direct incentive to your collaborators right after the project finishes, pay all the bills there’s to be paid and reserve 10% for the ’cause’. They’ve actually made a very clever suggestion regarding those pesky yearly bonus: no bonus at the very end of the year! The end of the year might fall short if you consider employee motivation, when the bonus arrives he might had just left
Rule 4: Pluralism of Methods
engage your company in trying different approaches to everyday work, experiment, tweak and perfect each ‘modo operandus’. Use collaborative platforms, online and offline and find technical solutions for social barriers/problems within the ‘company’. Real Life Meetings are so last century, take your teams to the next level online meetings!
Rule 5: live up to your intellectual obsessions
I sort of lost my self at this point… but in the end I suspect what they meant was allow and support everyone’s intellectual obsessions. We all have them! They’re a BIG part of our inner self and assure our inner balance. By supporting your teams intellectual needs, you’re in reality helping raising the integration and acceptance levels of people within and towards the ‘company’. More Motivation => More Results
Rule 6: Responsibilities without Hierarchies
There’s no eternally assigned boss, each project needs to have someone in charge, just make sure that everyone gets a seat every so often. Foster off-site team reunions!
Rule 7: The Power of Procrastination
Don’t exhaust yourself in trying to be too efficient for it sometimes has the downside effecting of reduce productivity for all the effort that goes into CONTROL! As all things in nature, so will good ideas adapt and catch on even if you neglect them for a while.
Your best advertising is NO advertising. Good products, services and ideas market themselves. No PR! Let you and your team be the best possible PR’s
Henriette Weber
Henriette is a long time friend and still my favorite Danish girl we sort of share a peculiar set of special Brainwaves (more on this on a next post) as I joked about, so I’m pretty aware of her ideas on chaos… anyway I’m drifting… Henriette managed to be selected to present a short open-stage at LIFT and as expected I thought her message was not only compelling but also impossible not to overlook again and again at this current times.
Enjoy the Chaos was the motto for the conversation, according to her we’re all part of a silent revolution, the fact is that in a consumer world, much of us (including myself) don’t fully grasp the dimension that consume has in our lives… even if it clearly isn’t making us more happy! So in the end we’re witnesses of a new reality pop here an there about where people opt-out for less as a way of becoming not only more free, but essentially more happy.
According to Henriette the same is happing in business and in particular in marketing these days and it’s of vital importance to them. The normal business approach, of business is business doesn’t seem to apply all the time anymore. But why are the companies so afraid of introducing more chaos on their processes? Aren’t they leaving out the creative revolutionaries at door?
People want relationships, a one on one relationship, whether it’s with a brand, a product or a service, so new forms of dialog are needed, the internet has surrounded us all and we simply cannot afford to leave that proximity goes by untouched.
Robin Hunicke
Robin Hunicke is both an academic and practitioner and works for Electonic Arts, it’s hard not to listen when a girl talks passionate about gaming, right? But besides being currently working on BOOM BLOX for the Nintendo Wii and having worked on My Sims, Robin pretty much took us on a journey about the Playfulness of Games and Apps.
When designing a game, a program, a Webapp, some sort of social networking platform or pretty much anything this days, it’s impossible (or should be) not looking at the importance of the Real vs Non-Real. How many games/apps have made us feel like we’re loved, important or helped us show our love with someone? Well in fact, not many according to Robin Hunicke, but at least some, being the top example of one that does: Facebook!
Facebook is a GAME! Facebook is:
Chatty:
Social:
Automatic:
Selective:
Quick:
Repetitive: adding friends, chatting with them, adding friends, chatting with them, …
Rewarding: what are the rewards? more friends? gifts? hugs? stars?
for all the above reasons, Robin stated and I could only agree that Facebook is indeed one if not the biggest social online game ever! Facebook works on rewards: lets me decide how to use it, which rewards I might wanna collect, by using it I’m bringing it more and more closer to reflecting my which makes the game in a sense pretty much about ME, like a one-on-one game and not about US or the rest of the crowd. People keep jumping into the Facebook bandwidth because of personal interest not in the interest of others. Facebook makes us feel like:
“I am a person living a fun life and i am LOVED” - Robin Hunicke
One peculiarity in Facebook and on all the so called social apps, or social networks is that is about the people that use it and not about who designs or owns the platform, pretty much reminding me my own quote on the workshop whether when me, you or someone is developing an online community, we should focus on facilitating the conversation and not controlling it in any possible way! The conversation should flow within the community freely at any given stage, for not guaranteeing it would be to sentence it to a time-delayed killing.
People are intrinsically and last time I read biologically drawn to games! No one likes chores, chores like the things we do everyday, wether it’s work, hobbies, house chores or even a relationship can become a sort of chore (which is obviously bad!), what’s missing in all of this ‘chores’? REWARDS! People need the positive reward, that price when they’ve reached the end of it, they’re goals!
Robins conclusions rocked actually and kind of made me envy her passion on what’s she’s working: Put people in the center of some universe, give them space to create and smile and something extraordinaire will pop up! It’s possible to smile at work! We just need to find our rewards!
Just arrived @LIFT for its second day, as expected its first day was an intense experience, coming to LIFT always has the effect of recharding another… could be for the frenetic sharing of ideas, the conversations, I honestly don’t know! But I know others that probably agree with me.
LIFT as evolved, Laurent’steam introduced a lot of changes and managed to somehow take LIFT to the next level, I’ll be posting my notes from the different talks I’ve attended on the next coming days, but I would like to highlight some of the things that really got my attention on the first day:
Genevieve Bell
GBell is an internationally recognized ethnographer, and she actually gave one of the best presentation of day, or could just be me, who am a bit biased towards her presentation subject: Secrets, lies & digital deceptions. As a society we all basically lie and we’ve managed to introduce this behavior into our online life’s.
During my workshop here at LIFT I’ve talked a lot about the role of personalization inside online communities, the importance of identity, the need we as humans have to make some sort of ‘impressions’ management and the image we try to project trough our online avatars. I’ve talked a bit how the creation of this personas empower’s us as users to adapt to specific contexts. It has all to do with Integration.
So to some extent it was nice to hear someone like Genevieve stating precisely that, how people lie to adapt, as a self-defense mechanism that helps protect our identity. At the same time, sharing secrets seems to be the base of trust, as in real life, the sharing is what brings us together, so does the same somehow happens online, the more information you share about yourself the more people somehow trust you and your avatar.
Her passionate presentation is already available on video, so take sometime, I really think it’s worth it.
Jonathan Cabiria
Still on the same line of though, Jonathan also gave an great presentation on Permeability. Permeability in the sense of what comes out of our online lives and somehow crosses to our real life and vice-versa. According to Jonathan by being in virtual worlds, people are many times confronted with hidden parts (facets) of themselves, they get the ability of trying out things they might not feel comfortable to do in real life for oh so many reasons. Jonathan also presented a study that showed how this good feelings managed to transpose themselves to the real world and have helped people suffering from depressions to recover from it by rising their feelings of integration, loneliness, isolation, pessimism and/or low self-esteem.
What I took from Jonathan’s message is that the online and real worlds are merging, we’re seeing people moving a big part of their ’social’ lives online. One interesting thought he mentioned was how many times, developers like myself don’t really grasp the entire implications of a social platform that we’ve built. The social applications of a social platform is many times bigger than expected and reaches people and highs that could have never been predicted.
Second day is just starting so for now I just leave this two very short comments on yesterday’s presentations but I promise to write a bit more as soon as I managed to digest all the input I got from yesterday.
One final note for the amazing work that Cristiana and her team from Bread and Butter produced for this year, there are a total of 10 different art projects!
Yesterday, just as I finished the workshop on Online Communities), Hamish Campbell caught me and managed to record a short interview where I’ve answered some of his pretty hard questions about the role of online communities as tools for social change…
After seeing and hearing the resulting video I decided that (even if I was really tired and my english was far from perfect) I might as well share it since I honestly believe in the power of social change through technology. I’m posting it here with the hope that anyone interested in such possibilities might enjoy building up or commenting something about my rather simplistic answers.
As promised, here are the materials from the workshop I gave out yesterday at LIFT 08 about Online Communities Design Patterns. The presentation as I’ve said before is still a work in progress since I’ve started it for Web2Expo Berlin last November, so they share quite a lot in common.
If you’re interested, you can get the FULL VERSION of the presentation in PDF or you can simply watch the Design Patterns part on SlideShare (sorry, but the 30Mb limit on SlideShare wouldn’t let me post it in it’s full extent):
I’ve also prepared a Patterns Matrix that basically categorizes the patterns in four different classes that you can use to test or plan your own community according to the patterns use or misuse:
Community Support Patterns: Registration, Login, Welcome Area , User Profile, Users Lists, Buddy’s List, Exit / Suspend;
Group Support Patterns: Invitations, Shared Artifacts, Reputation, Voting;
Communication Support Patterns: Messaging, Comments, Chat, Forums;
Awareness Support Patterns: Neighbors, Activity Logs, Interactive User Info, TimeLine, Periodic Reports, Aliveness Indicator.
Mark Kuznicki took some pretty extensive notes from the workshop, so you might as well gave them a loon if you’re interested.
One special work to the crowd that actually stood up for the 3 hours the workshop took: Thanks
LIFT08 is happening this coming week in Geneva, it’s concept is very similar to the one we tried to accomplish in SHiFT (which we hope to deliver yet again this year - three full days of workshops, talks, social activities and discussions to get a look at the most important technological trends and meet the people behind them.
After almost didn’t make it this year (time constraints and in the end Patrícia not being able to come along), in the end I’ll be in Geneva to take part of this amazing event and I’ve even proposed an an experimental workshop on Online Community Design Patterns.
This workshop is the evolution from my “Conversational Design presentation“, that I presented last november at the Web2Expo in Berlin . Back in November I tried to squeeze a lot of information in a 50 minute presentation and although the feedback was more than positive, the fact was that I had to leave quite a lot out. The initial presentation aimed to be more practical than theoretical, so in a sense the move to a workshop makes more sense, workshops enable participation and sharing, so in the end we’ll manage to hear, learn and test a lot more than my ideas on this subject.
I envisioned the workshop program into a two part program, a presentation introducing:
Social Web and Online Communities
Conversational Patterns: Conversation Maxims on online environments
Online Communities Patterns: Community Support Patterns and Group Support Patterns
and some group work involving all the participants (analyzing existing online communities of choice according to the materials presented before).
In the end the groups will share their findings with the remaining groups and I hope we managed to learn and share a bit more about what makes an online community thrive or die.
As side note about the workshop materials, I’ll publish them here after the workshop takes place. (yes.. as usual I’m still working on them)
Dopplr just openup for everyone, and pretty much at the same time they’ve published their Raumzeitgeist that translates literally as “Space Time Spirit” and that’s precisely what the image shows: where we, the users of Dopplr, travelled through space and time on our little planet last year:
DataPortability gathers existing open standards into a blueprint for a social, open, remixable web where your online identity, media, contacts and content can follow you wherever you go.
DataPortability reune standards já existentes definindo a base para uma web aberta, social e remixable onde a tua identidade, os teus contactos e todos os contéudos por ti produzidos podem seguir-te para onde quer que vás.
I’m traveling to Milan this afternoon to participate in the Microsoft ENVISION conference. (a special thanks to ‘Canoas‘ who got me in! And of course, to Microsoft for the nice Invitation and sponsoring).
Microsoft Envision is a set of presentations covering subjects around information, communication, minimal user interfaces, adaptive interfaces, emotional design and the dynamics between information and the way that we present it.
I’ll try to blog a bit about the overall event and the different presentations as soon as possible.
Anyone in Milan up for a coffee or drink?
UPDATE:
You can find my short (non-edited) notes here.
BTW, the venue for this Envision event is simply astonishing:
I personally thing that this theme is amazingly important in the Portuguese context, and I’m not complaining as usual to the fact that Portuguese companies tend to be 2/3 years far behind the rest of Europe/World! But by seeing so many companies PR’s in that room and see them taking part of the discussion and acknowledging the importance of the blogs in their communication as a way to increase their users satisfaction and have closer control how their brands are interpreted by their customers it’s already clear the importance blogs will have in the future or traditional public relations. 
I had met them the night before as we seated on the same table during fondue but it was not until they’re presentation that I actually knew they were LIFT speakers! I really enjoyed our conversation during those cheesy hours, so it came to no surprise that they’re presentation on the Hedonistic Company felt so compelling! 
we sort of share a peculiar set of special Brainwaves (more on this on a next post) as I joked about, so I’m pretty aware of her ideas on chaos… anyway I’m drifting… Henriette managed to be selected to present a short open-stage at LIFT and as expected I thought her message was not only compelling but also impossible not to overlook again and again at this current times.
Still on the same line of though, 
This workshop is the evolution from my “
