Webstock 08
Webstock08 was held in Wellington from 11 - 15 February 2008. It was attended by over 500 people and consisted of three days of workshops followed by two days of the conference proper. Plus of course, the usual Webstock merriment!
Nat Torkington
Nat has chaired the O'Reilly Open Source Convention and other O'Reilly conferences for over a decade. He ran the first web site in New Zealand, co-wrote the best-selling Perl Cookbook, and was one of the founding Radar bloggers. He lives in New Zealand and consults in the Asia-Pacific region.
Molly Holzschlag
Molly E. Holzschlag is a well-known Web standards advocate, instructor, and author. She has served as Group Lead for the Web Standards Project (WaSP), is an invited expert to the W3C, and has written more than 30 books covering client-side development and design for the Web.
Currently, Molly works to educate designers and developers on using Web technologies in practical ways to create highly sustainable, maintainable, accessible, interactive and beautiful Web sites for the global community. She consults with major companies and organizations such as AOL, BBC, eBay, Microsoft, Yahoo! and many others in an effort to improve standards support, workflow, solve interoperability concerns and address the long-term management of highly interactive, large-scale sites.
A popular and colorful individual, Molly has a particular passion for people, blogs, and the use of technology for social progress.
Shawn Henry
Shawn Henry leads World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) education and outreach promoting web accessibility for people with disabilities, and holds a research appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Prior to joining the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), she consulted with various organizations to optimize user interface design for usability and accessibility.
Shawn focuses her personal passion for accessibility on bringing together the needs of individuals and the goals of organizations in designing human-computer interfaces. Her recent book, Just Ask: Integrating Accessibility Throughout Design, advocates including people with disabilities in the design process.
Rachel McAlpine
Rachel McAlpine's current project is Contented: web-based training for people who write web or intranet content - whether on purpose or accidentally. The title of her latest book, Better Business Writing on the Web, indicates her main area of interest since 1995: improving the intranet and web content of government, business and academic organisations. In New Zealand, the Write Group provides Rachel's Quality Web Content Workshops under license. Her primary web site: Contented.com.
Rachel's other books include Web Word Wizardry, Crash Course in Corporate Communications and Global English for Global Business. She is also a poet, playwright and novelist.
Simon Willison
Simon Willison is a freelance client- and server-side Web developer and the co-creator of the Django Web framework. Simon's interests include OpenID and decentralised systems, unobtrusive JavaScript, rapid application development and RESTful Web Service APIs.
Before going freelance Simon worked on Yahoo!'s Technology Development team, and prior to that at the Lawrence Journal-World, an award winning local newspaper in Kansas.
Simon maintains a popular Web development weblog at http://simonwillison.net.
Peter Morville
Peter Morville is widely recognized as a founding father of information architecture. He co-authored (with Louis Rosenfeld) the best-selling book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, and has consulted with such organizations as Harvard, IBM, the International Monetary Fund, Microsoft, the National Cancer Institute, and Yahoo!.
Peter is president of Semantic Studios, co-founder and past president of the Information Architecture Institute, and a faculty member at the University of Michigan. His work has been featured in many publications including Business Week, The Economist, Fortune, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. Peter's latest book, Ambient Findability, was published in 2005. He blogs at findability.org.
Cal Henderson
Cal Henderson has been a web applications developer for far too long and should really start looking for a serious job.
Originally from London, England, he currently works at Yahoo! Inc, as the Director of Engineering for Flickr, in San Francisco, California. He's been working on Flickr from the day it started development (on his laptop) to the present day (where it's now the "Offical website of the Internet"). In 2006, he wrote the book Building Scalable Websites for O'Reilly Media.
Before Flickr, he was the technical director of Special Web Projects at emap, a UK media company. By night he works for a whole slew of web sites and communitites, including the creative community B3TA and his personal site, iamcal. In his spare time, he writes windows software, develops web publishing tools, and writes occasional articles about web application development and security. And writes biographies in the third person.
Liz Danzico
Liz Danzico is equal parts information architect, usability analyst, and editor. With nearly ten years of experience as a user experience professional, she makes information useful, usable, and delightful for websites of all shapes and sizes.
Liz has organized information for sites across a variety of industries, including retail, publishing, media and entertainment, nonprofit, and financial services and is presently information architect for Happy Cog. She also oversees the editorial team and process for Rosenfeld Media, a publisher of user experience books, and is editor-in-chief for A Brief Message, 200 words or less about design.
Liz teaches design at the New School University, the Fashion Institute of Technology, and Columbia University. She's been editor-in-chief for Boxes and Arrows and the board of directors for the New York chapter of AIGA, the professional association for design. In the past, Liz directed experience strategy for AIGA, where she was responsible for the national web presence and all online and New Riders publications. Before that, she directed the information architecture teams at Barnes & Noble.com and Razorfish New York.
Jill Whalen
Jill Whalen, a pioneer in search engine optimization, founded High Rankings in 1995. Today High Rankings has grown to be one of the pre-eminent SEO companies in the United States. Over the past 12 years, High Rankings has worked with hundreds of clients across more than 40 industries to enhance their online presence through proven and dynamic search marketing strategies that repeatedly lead to increased traffic, more conversions and enhanced sales.
The company is dedicated to educating its clients and sharing its knowledge with the industry at large through the High Rankings Advisor Newsletter, the High Rankings Forum and High Rankings Seminars. Jill Whalen is a sought-after speaker at national and international conferences and events and she is often called upon by the media for comments on SEO industry trends and issues.
Education-oriented, transparent, community-minded and expert are hallmark characteristics of Jill Whalen and High Rankings. The company is committed to helping small to mid-sized businesses understand and implement techniques that maximize the potential of their websites, so that these organizations can fulfill their mission, meet the needs of their stakeholders and contribute as worthwhile members of the Internet community.
Kelly Goto
Kelly Goto is currently a principal at Gotomedia, an online consultancy for user experience and interaction design, Kelly continues to focus on developing new techniques for collaborative development in digital media. With over 15 years of experience in the advertising, design and interactive industry, Kelly bridges the gap between utility and aesthetics.
Formerly an award-winning Creative Director at Idea Integration Kelly successfully managed the redesigns of many sites ranging from independent to corporate levels. In advertising and commercial design since the late 1980s, Kelly has acted as creative director, designer, and producer for many high-profile clients including KPMG Consulting, Compaq, IBM, Warner Bros., National Geographic, Adobe Corporation, Paramount Television, Macromedia Corp., and Sony Pictures.
Kelly is the co-author of the highly acclaimed book "Web Redesign: Workflow that Works".
Michael Lopp
Michael Lopp designs software and manages people at Apple and is consistently surprised by how much those two jobs intersect. Prior to Apple, he worked for Netscape, Borland, Symantec, and a start-up he'd rather not mention.
When he's not worrying about staying relevant, he writes at the popular technology/management weblog, Rands in Repose.
All of this work resulted in the publication of a book titled "Managing Humans", where he explains that while technology is cool, it's the humans that build it who are really interesting.
Michael surfs whenever he can because staying sane is a full-time job.
Jason Santa Maria
Jason Santa Maria is a graphic designer from sunny Brooklyn, NY. He currently works as Creative Director for Happy Cog Studios and Art Director for A List Apart Magazine. He maintains a personal site where discussion of design, film, and sock monkeys can often be observed.
His work has garnered him awards and pleasantries ranging from firm handshakes to forceful handshakes with a little hitting. Ever the design obsessif, Jason is known to take drunken arguments to fisticuffs over such frivolities as kerning and white space.
Sam Morgan
Sam is Wellington born and bred. After attending school in Wellington and a brief but unsuccessful stint at university, he started his career as an IT consultant for Deloitte Consulting.
In 1999, Sam founded Trade Me - New Zealand's most successful Internet business. Trade Me operates successful businesses in auctions, dating, automotive, real estate, recruitment, online maps and school reunions and accounts for over half of all of the locally served traffic on the NZ Internet. Sam sold Trade Me to Australia media giant Fairfax for $700m in 2006.
Sam continues as CEO of Trade Me, but is also active as an investor in early stage businesses and as a social investor.
Recent early-stage investments include iVistra, Sonar6 and Opdo. Sam is also a shareholder and director of Xero which has recently listed on the NZX.
Sam's social investments include funding the development of affordable medical devices and providing capital for a successful microfinance operation in Samoa.
Sam's ventures are all known for their common sense solutions, great usability and connecting with consumers.
Rowan Simpson
Rowan Simpson is an experienced software developer, business person and investor who is passionate about creating great products which people love to use.
Rowan is currently Head of Product Strategy at Xero, an online accounting solution for small businesses and recently joined the advisory board of PlanHQ. He is involved in several other start-up businesses either as an advisor or investor.
In 1999 Rowan built and launched flathunt.co.nz which was later acquired by Trade Me and is now part of Trade Me Property. Rowan worked at Trade Me from 2000, and saw the site grow from 10,000 members to over 100,000 members in just over 18 months.
At the time he was the only employee who didn’t share a surname with founder, and old school friend, Sam Morgan.
After spending time living in London and travelling in Europe, Rowan returned to Trade Me in 2004 to lead the growing software development team and, later, the product team.
In 2006 Trade Me was itself acquired for NZ$700 million, by Fairfax, a publicly listed Australian media company.
Prior to all of this, Rowan completed a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Victoria University of Wellington and then worked as an IT consultant for Accenture.
Rowan proudly lives in Wellington, New Zealand with his wife and two sons.
Russell Brown
Described as a web entrepreneur and a mediaphile, Russell Brown is the mastermind of PublicAddress and the voice of HardNews. He's a blogger, a journalist, an "internet specialist", a columnist for the Listener and several other publications, and an authoritative media commentator.
Tom Coates
Tom Coates works for Yahoo Brickhouse where he develops new concepts in social software, future media and the web of data. He focuses on the shape of the web to come and how to make things that thrive as part of it.
He's worked for many of the UK's most prominent web companies including Time Out, UpMyStreet and the BBC where he ran a small near-term R&D team for the BBC exploring media navigation, annotation and distribution.
A regular speaker at conferences including ETech, XTech, IASummit and The Future of Web Apps, Tom also writes extensively at plasticbag.org as well as running the experimental online community barbelith.com.
Luke Wroblewski
Luke Wroblewski is a Web strategist, designer, and author. He is currently Senior Principal of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc. and Principal of LukeW Interface Designs, a product strategy and design consultancy he founded in 1996. Luke works on new business ideation and conceptualization using design methodologies, skills, and principles to create and refine the strategy and design of new or existing products.
Luke has authored a book on Web interface design principles titled Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability and numerous articles on design methodologies, strategies and applications including those featured in his own online publication: Functioning Form. He is also frequent presenter on topics related to Web strategy and design and a former member of the board of directors of the Interaction Design Association.
Previously, Luke was the Lead User Interface Designer of eBay Inc.'s platform team. At eBay, he led the strategic and interaction of new consumer products (including Kijiji and eBay Express) and internal tools and processes including design pattern and creative asset management systems. Luke also taught interface design courses in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and worked as a Senior Interface Designer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), birthplace of the first popular graphical Web browser, NCSA Mosaic.
Craig Nevill-Manning
Director of Engineering, Google New York.
Dr. Craig Nevill-Manning founded Google's software engineering center in New York City in April 2003. The office was Google's first engineering office outside its headquarters, and now employs hundreds of computer scientists. Google New York is responsible for developing products including Google Maps, Google Finance, Google Spreadsheets, and many important features in web search and advertising. Craig joined Google in 2000 as a Senior Research Scientist to develop more precise search techniques. In particular, he developed Froogle (recently re-named Google Product Search).
Previously, Craig was an assistant professor at the Computer Science Department of Rutgers University, where he conducted research in data compression, information retrieval and computational biology. Before that, he was a post-doctoral fellow in the Biochemistry Department of Stanford University, where he developed eMOTIF, a software suite used by pharmaceutical research laboratories to identify the role of particular proteins within cells.
Craig has published 44 research papers, and was the recipient of several National Science Foundation grants, including a CAREER Grant. A native of New Zealand, he earned a BSc in Computer Science from Canterbury University and a PhD in Computer Science from Waikato University.
Amy Hoy
Amy Hoy is a user interface nerd-designer-writer-educator, programmer-photographer-hyphenator extraordinaire. As half of Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm Hyphenated People, she gets to help cool companies kick ass every day and thinks that's just the best job ever.She also likes to think of herself as an infamous author of humorous treatises about design and programming, but this might not actually be true.
Her web site can be found at slash7.
Dan Cederholm
Dan Cederholm is a Web designer and author living in Massachusetts. He's the founder of SimpleBits, LLC, a tiny design studio.
A recognized expert in the field of standards-based web design, Dan co-founded the wine community site, Cork'd and has worked with Google, MTV, ESPN, Fast Company, Blogger, Odeo (and others), as well as collaborating with Happy Cog on selected projects. He embraces flexible, adaptable design using web standards through his client work, writing, and speaking.
Dan is the author of two best-selling books, Bulletproof Web Design, Second Edition (New Riders) and Web Standards Solutions (Friends of Ed). Dan also runs the popular weblog SimpleBits, where he writes articles and commentary on the Web, technology, and life. He also plays a mean ukulele and occasionally wears a baseball cap.
Chris DiBona
Chris DiBona is the Open Source Programs Manager for Mountain View, Ca based Google, Inc. His job includes running the Summer of Code and releasing open source software on Google's Code website.
Before joining Google, Mr. DiBona was an editor/author for the popular online website Slashdot.org and He is an internationally known advocate for open source software. He co-edited the award winning essay compilations "Open Sources" and "Open Sources 2.0" and writes for a great number of publications. He was briefly the Linux guy on TechTV and speaks on a variety of open source issues internationally.
Scott Berkun
Scott Berkun is the best selling author of The Art of Project Management (O'Reilly 2005) and the recently released The Myths of Innovation (O'Reilly 2007). He worked at Microsoft from 1994-2003, was a manager on the Internet Explorer team (contributing to v1.0 to 5.0).
Since leaving Microsoft in 2003 he's works as a public speaker and author. He teaches a course on creative thinking at the University of Washington, runs the sacred places architecture tour in NYC, and writes about management, design and innovation at www.scottberkun.com
Damian Conway
Damian Conway is known as the "Mad Scientist of Perl". He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science
A popular speaker and trainer, he is also the author of many infamous modules including: Parse::RecDescent (parsing without lexing), Lingua::EN::Inflect (English transformations without a dictionary), Lingua::Romana::Perligata (Perl programming without English), Class::Multimethods (polymorphism without objects), Quantum::Superpositions (quantum computing without tears), and Coy ( error messages without karma). A three-time winner of the Perl Conference's Larry Wall Award, Damian is now banned from future competition
He is a former columnist for The Perl Journal, and author of the books Object Oriented Perl and Perl Best Practices.
Damian is heavily implicated in the design of Perl 6, where his job is to tempt Larry with evil ideas, and to explain Larry's apocalyptic visions.
He also runs an international IT training company - Thoughtstream - which provides programmer training from beginner to masterclass level throughout Europe, North America, and Australasia.
He lists his technical interests as: programming language design, teaching programming, object orientation, software engineering, natural language generation, synthetic language generation, emergent systems, declarative programming, morphing, human-computer interaction, geometric modelling, the psychophysics of perception, nanoscale simulation, and parsing.
He lists his personal interests as: reading, fitness, cinema, and Total World Domination.
In his spare time, he travels barefoot across the U.S. - teaching, playing his flute, having alopecic flashbacks, preaching pacifist philosophy, and generally beating the tar out of bad guys with his deadly kung-fu skills.
1...which did not prove to be the babe-magnet that the brochure implied. 2...on the grounds of being unfairly weird.
Kathy Sierra
Kathy Sierra has been applying "brain-friendliness" to everything from software to books since her days as a game developer. She designed and taught New Media/ Interaction Design courses at UCLA Extension and Java programming at Sun Microsystems. A long-time online community specialist, she founded one of the largest (and friendliest) developer communities, javaranch.com in 1997. More recently, she created (with her partner Bert Bates) the bestselling Head First tech book series for O'Reilly, and authored the Technorati Top 100 blog, Creating Passionate Users.
The 8x5 session
8 speakers, 5 minutes each. In order of presenting, here they are ...
Nigel Parker — The Internet is not private get over it
Data belongs to those that create it, just as much as you own the footprints you leave in the sand. Some say "everything a user creates, contributes, or shares is theirs, unless they have given away the right explicitly and by free choice." Others say "the Internet is not private get over it!". Language creates our existence, our ability to communicate is changing, as more data is being collected and recorded more collective knowledge is gained. Our kids grow up with cell phones that track their location, broadcast messaging like Twitter and facebook connects people over space and time much like yesteryear where sleepy town NZ grew up with gossip and party lines. Aside from the technology what else has changed?
Nigel Parker is a Web Development Advisor for Microsoft New Zealand in Auckland. Nigel has an entrepreneurial background and has numerous successful "start-ups" under his belt. Nigel leverages his experience to spend time working with developers, web agencies and on high profile web sites in New Zealand aiding them with the early adoption of Microsoft Technologies.
Brian Calhoun — What does it mean to be human?
Five minutes on being human. In the web space. In 2008. Why? There are traps to be avoided and boundaries to be crossed. The rate of change is increasing and we need direction for what to focus on when we build the web.
Brian is currently the CEO of SilverStripe where he's been working for the past year. Brian has over 18 years of software and web development industry experience mostly in Silicon Valley. For the past three years Brian has been a proud Wellingtonian. He has been involved in all aspects of software development and management for a variety of firms, from single-man startup to Oracle and Lockheed.
Brian has contributed to and implemented open source CMS products here in New Zealand and in the U.S. He has led web projects and architected sites for over 10 years, including government and commercial sites in New Zealand.
Brian leads SilverStripe in the areas of core technology direction, technical and process infrastructure, product offerings, and Agile project management. In addition, he's the go-to guy for all things grey-hair-corporate-related.
Mike Riversdale — Enterprise 2.0 - why it's scaring the pants off IT Departments
With the slow and seemingly unstoppable incursion of "Web 2.0" into organisations, from the one-man band up to the most staid and dusty Governmental Ministry's, there is one 'cult' of workers that are acting akin to the popular King Canute legend, namely your IT Department.
Mike will help you identify whether you have such an Canute-ish IT Department and even supply hints as how to help them and you.
Mike (aka Miramar Mike) has been working in, with and against IT Departments from all types of organisations in all parts of the world for nearly 20 years as he follows his passion of making information available, findable and usable. He believes information has the power to connect people - to more info, to knowledge and, ultimately, to each other. He lives his electronic life online and has completely removed the need to pay money for software and instead spends it on web features that are useful. He writes an Enterprise 2.0 (Kiwi style) blog, a personal blog, is a proud member of the Wellingtonista and has many friends, followers but only one family.
Sam Farrow — News 2.0
NZPA turns 128 in 2008 and occupies a unique position at the centre of New Zealand's media industry. News production, aggregation, distribution and consumption have changed completely through the web and NZPA has clear vision to create ground breaking news and information services for New Zealand's media. The cornerstones of this vision are the principles of inclusion, interaction and engagement and the presentation will outline both the vision and the plan to start a conversation about News 2.0
Sam Farrow is an online news and new media junkie who currently manages the New Media Business at the New Zealand Press Association. Previously Sam spent four years working in the media department at New Scotland Yard and was heavily involved in transitioning media communications from telephone to online systems. This included pioneering work in the production and delivery of broadcast quality multimedia via electronic press releases.
Sam has a great passion and broad interest in online news with experience in strategic communications, content, revenue as well as the technical aspects.
Mark Zeman — The Evaporating Value of Design
Have we reached a point where design has little value to add beyond a surface aesthetic? Has the influence of graphic design diminished, as the primary influence over purchasing decisions moves from mainstream media into the network? Are we close to a point where your "reality" evaporates into negotiated digital micro transactions and dualism's bi-fabricate. You thought you were adding "value" with your pretty web graphics but really I just want a loaf of bread in a pink bag with purple polka dots and a big green digital tick. Time is not a tyranny.
Mark is a digital media researcher, lecturer and senior interaction designer. His interests revolve around the impact new web technology has on the way people communicate. This interest manifests in a range of diverse topics like search engines, game theory, performance spaces, folksonomies, mapping and models of online consumer trust.
He has an insatiable appetite for building things out of Lego, balsa, PHP, glue, Flash Actionscript and imagination. The creative process and technical challenges are like puzzle pieces to him along with personas, iterative methodologies, phenomenology, analytics and real users all informing a sustainable and cumulative communication.
Mark is currently a Lecturer and Subject Director in Digital Media at Massey University.
Mark Rickerby — Historiographica
Taking as a starting point, Richard Saul Wurman's 1976 definition of the new role of information architects to bring order to the flood of knowledge and information that defines our modern existence, Mark will take a low level dive into the history of visual communication and its apotheosis in the explosion of the world wide web. Historiographica is the bringing to light of a stream of buried or forgotten advancements by great thinkers, illustrating that the fundamental creative ideas embedded in the internet and world wide web are far older than we assume. Is information visualization the next great paradigm shift in communication, art and science, or should we ask for our money back?
Mark is a software designer and writer whose interests revolve around the bridge between art and science. Mark has worked for a number of Wellington's leading design firms including Shift, Chrometoaster, and Base2, and more recently, his manic sleep-deprived fumbling helped steer the New Zealand team to victory in the inaugural FullCodePress competition. When not racing along the rails of web technology, Mark enjoys poetry, hiphop, blues, and growing succulents and cacti.
Mark maintains a weblog discussing all aspects of design, architecture, programming and philosophy.
Tahi Tait — Naumaiplace
Tahi Tait is the Managing Director and Co-Founder of Naumaiplace.com. He has a long long history in health and social service reform in NZ ,Australia and the USA. A mid-life crises resulted in a change in careers moving from mainly Govt projects to self employment and the world wide web.
Recognising the potential of the web as a tool for connection and utilising his experience in disconnected communities, Tahi ceased on the notion of reconnecting his people through a Web site call Naumaiplace.com. "Nau mai" means welcome in Maori, and it is pronounced as "know my place". The site was launched mid 2007 as a pilot and by the end of 2007, 112 communities had signed up across the country.
Uniquely attached to the system is a commitment to walk along side these communities and provide content management training and on-line support, face to face visits, presentations and advice along with working with other stake holders. Indigenous communities demand ownership, their voice, improved access and consistency. Clearly this is more than a new social network — Naumaiplace provides the platform to be content creators, archive cultural history, build cultural capital, develop sustainable networks and reconnect us to our place.
Zef Fugaz and the Provoke team — Building High Performance Personas
Based on Provoke's research into state-of-the-art development practices of today's most successful teams, you can learn the secrets to building high performance personas within a matter of minutes. In this presentation our Experience Design experts Zef, Bob and Lulu will walk through an easy-to-accomplish plan for developing your own persona-based scenarios with role-playing.
