Mobile Cloud Summit video
A couple of weeks ago I ran a panel at the Mobile Cloud Summit on Evolution of the Mobile Cloud, which looked at the impact of Mobile Cloud on User Experience. I really enjoyed the panel and its participants, which included Windahl Finnigan from Cap Gemini, James Clarke of Thin Martian, and Jules Ehrhardt of ustwo.
Apart from the fact I quite obviously need to go on a diet and get to the gym, the panel was engaging and the participants engaged and quite obviously experienced.
And now I see what people mean about my accent. Doesn’t sound quite American… oh well.
I hope you enjoy watching the panel: http://vimeopro.com/quadriga/mobile-cloud-summit-in-tech-city/video/30120511
UserZoom UX Seminar Series: The Evolution of Mobile from a User Perspective
On Tuesday, 4 October I’ll be on a Mobile Surgery panel at the UserZoom UX Seminar Series: The Evolution of Mobile from a User Perspective. Other speakers at the event include: Carina Hoogeveen, Account Director, UserZoom, Arthur Moan, Country Manager UK Ireland, UserZoom, Anders Rosenquist, the ZAAZ Head of Mobile, David Murphy, Editor, Mobile Marketing Magazine.
The event takes place at one of my favourite haunts, The Hospital Club, located at 24 Endell Steet, London WC2H 9HQ, from 2pm to 6pm.
To book the event go to: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/2139617654
Mobile Cloud Summit
On 21 September, 2011 the Mobile Cloud Summit will take place in Hoxton.
It is a one-day event that will focus on how cloud-based applications delivered via smart mobile devices are transforming business and society. It will also focus on the Mobile Cloud investment opportunity and will be an opportunity for leading IT companies, investors, entrepreneurs, and the tech media to get together and discuss.
I will be moderating a brand new session at Mobile Cloud Summit called The Evolution of the Mobile Cloud.
For more information on the event, visit the Mobile Cloud Summit website.
You can also track the event on Lanyrd.
Hack Days: What expectations do they set?
I love Hack Days.
I love them because of the anticipation, the spontaneity, the community and the creativity. They generate energy – if for a short time – around the issues they are organised to expose, and for a brief moment overcome the inertia that most people come to dread within large organisations – like Government.
I say ‘expose’ because in my experience of Hack Days often people come to ‘show off’ their skills, ‘show’ the organisations or sectors whom they are targeting ‘how to do things better’, and ‘show’ each other what they are capable of.
None of which is bad. But all of which worries me slightly.
While those coding and participating in the coding teams, at some level, understand that not all digital development projects are the same, not everyone who attends a Hack Day necessarily ‘gets’ it.
I think Hack Day participants break down into several categories. These include (but are not limited to):
- The organiser. These are the people who run the events. They are often bright, dedicated, and clever. They also often have an agenda. This agenda can include trying to show up the organisations or sectors at whom the Hack Days are targeted. This is fine, but is not always clear to the people on the street.
- The hacker. These people vary in age, are often male, are sometimes a bit disgruntled with the idea of ‘large agencies’, and almost always feel they can develop better than the organisations or sectors they are targeting for their Hack Day.
- The business constituent. In most cases, representatives from the organisations are in evidence to view the proceedings. They vary from the technical to Marketing and PR types who want to be present to understand the outcome of the event. Not all of them want to be here – they were sent to observe.
- The public. Individuals from the public range from the inexperienced, to the professional – they are all linked by some desire to come and view and see what this thing is all about. They do not always fully understand what is happening.
- The press. Many Hack Days get little to no coverage. Some Hack Days, particularly ones focussed on the Government, get more press coverage – the angle is usually ‘hackers outshine Government…’
My worry really centres on the business constituent and the public. These are often the ones who come away incredibly inspired and often believe that if hackers can do it in a period of 1-5 days (depending on the length of the hack sessions), then why can’t their organisations do it?
I say this because in my experience, having run a successful digital product design agency, these prototypes – and that is often what the applications developed are – can give the false impression of fully developed, functioning and robust services.
They create a sort of illusion that feeds the myth ‘if it’s digital, it must be fast to develop’.
I worry that many inexperienced people who attend Hack Days may:
- Expect that ALL digital services can be built quickly, and cheaply
- Be ill equipped to differentiate between simple standalone development/enhancements and large-scale systems integration
- Perpetuate within their organisations a false sense of expectation
- Drive forward projects without understanding the needs of the organisation and the users
- Simply fail out of ignorance
These may seem like harsh things to say. And they are not exclusive to Hack Days. In my twenty-two years of participating in and running technical and digital projects I have seen these issues occur all too frequently to believe it is a limited phenomenon.
However, with respect to Hack Days, I hope that as these types of events progress and mature that they will find some balance between showing spontaneity and creativity, and informing those attending that there can be a vast difference between what they see and the digital service or product idea manifested in the real world.
It feels a bit too much like the pendulum has swung from projects taking many months to several years, to whacking something together and launching it.
As with most things, there is a happy medium that will ensure digital services and products are developed in a way that meet the needs of the organisation and users, and can also take advantage of technologies and methodologies that ensure we are not constantly building more or taking longer than we need.
In the interim, I do believe that Hack Days are an important and vital step in the transition we need to make from ALL technical and digital services needing to be large-scale infrastructure projects, to developing a more discerning view of building ‘just enough!’
I welcome your thoughts.
FutureGov feat. Measurement Camp
Today I attended the FutureGov meets Measurement Camp session held at Edelman in Victoria. It was a mix of some of the usual (and always pleasant to see) faces and a lot of faces I didn’t recognise – always a bonus! And Edelman provided a pleasant space and plenty of tea and coffee to keep us going.
The first 2/3 of the afternoon was a mix of talks given by Dominic Campbell of FutureGov, Will McInnis of Nixon McInnes, Steph Gray of BIS and Ingrid Koelher of IDeA. There were also the obligatory sponsorship presentations by Lithium showing off their Social CRM suite and Brandwatch who gave an interesting intro to their Council Monitor beta. Certainly I could see the nodding heads of interest from several Local Authorities who were present.
The final third broke down into small barcamp-like spontaneous sessions on such subjects as ‘How to get senior management buy-in’ and ‘Internal comms’. I wandered about and listened to some of the sessions before heading off for the day.
The idea of measurement of social media and Government digital engagement is an interesting one. One participant from a Local Authority said to me they hadn’t considered measurement – they were so focussed on how to implement digital engagement that they hadn’t gotten as far as how to measure it.
Thinking about my days of FMCG campaign work, I can’t help but think how can you develop a campaign without knowing if it’s for building awareness or increasing acquisition? How can you not have a set of targets in mind to report back on the success – or failure – of a campaign?
But social media isn’t really like a campaign, is it? It’s about building relationships (which campaigns should be but are often too short in tenure to really achieve anything so complex as a relationship). That’s why we talk about measuring social perception and reputation. Believing there are some simple truths, Will McInnes made an interesting point that we cannot discount academics. There is, after all, a great deal of historical rigour in research techniques that should be leveraged in our work in analysing the impact and effects of social media.
It’s easy when you work in digital to think that we are inventing everything for the first time. But in fact, apart from the medium, we are actually talking about how people communicate with one another, engage with brands and react to content and products. Historical techniques give us not only a good starting point, but also a good foundation of research theory that can teach us how to interpret the effects of our efforts – and set and measure the metrics of success and failure.
I think part of the issue is not so much with developing research models, but more of understanding how to use existing ones and develop tracking technologies that give us useful and useable research data that will help us to understand the effectiveness of our social media work. I think more thought needs to be given to what data we need to collect and then reverse engineer technology to give us the data we need to understand effectiveness.
I also couldn’t help but think – as the sponsors were presenting – about how today measuring reputation and perception is not just a brand thing – not in the traditional sense of a brand as a company. It’s as much an individual thing. There were certainly people in the room who are their own brands in the social media space.
Measuring one’s personal brand, while inherently narcissistic, is also a gauge of a new social era, where individuals can rise above the crowd while hiding behind a keyboard, creating a measurable reputation and perception wholly independent of those they work for – but which can enhance or detract from the reputation and perception of those they work for. It creates a new social dynamic and certainly a new set of issues for companies and organisations who spend a great deal of effort and money to manage their brands.
I’m looking forward to seeing more about some of the tools shown today and hearing about how people take what they heard back into their organisations. I think some of these event mash-ups are a great idea and hope to see more of them this year. I certainly think some public/private sector event mash-ups would give everyone a lot more to think about.
UK Govcamp was good fun. What happens next?
I’ve obviously waited a couple of weeks to write this. I suppose I didn’t want it to feel like a recap of the event by writing it within a day or so, or something that followed on the heels of a torrent of blog posts over the following week – some of which I’ve read, and some I haven’t.
I enjoy going to the Government barcamps. They give me a chance to see friends I worked with in Government, put a face – and voice – to twitter folks I follow and have the odd disagreement over blog posts we’ve all written.
As I wandered around attending sessions and talking to people – and before the day had even ended – I found myself wondering the same thing I did at last years Unconference (and the many other Government unconferences and events I’ve attended since) – what happens next?
I came away from sessions I attended feeling somewhat unfulfilled – not because the sessions weren’t interesting – they were. But because before the sessions ended I knew that there would be no actionable items for the attendees to take away with them, no driver to say ‘by the next time we come together we should have accomplished x, y or z’.
Note: This may have been a symptom of the sessions I attended and so I fully understand no one else may have had the same exact experience – as was pointed out in a blog by Public Strategist about the event.
While some of the sessions were engaging, it was actually the conversations I had between the sessions where the most interesting opportunities and issues presented themselves – with some actionable items.
These conversations hold the tangible things I’ve taken away from this year’s event.
It reminds me of literary theory I’ve studied where individual texts provide a rich canvas of insight into a subject, author or set of events, but the comparison of two texts and the analysis of the interstice between them often provide the deepest insights.
The sessions for me were those texts, and the conversations that occurred in between them the interstice where the real insights came.
Still, I look forward to the next event!
Las Vegas industry event – or London data store launch?
On Thursday, 7 January we experienced a bit of both. Ostensibly, most of us in London turned up for the official launch of the latest in Open Government efforts, the launch of the Greater London Authority Data Store – an effort not unlike DataSF, the Guardian Open Tech Platform or the UK Government Open Data initiative.
The event, CES Government 2010 (#cesgov10 for those on twitter), was styled around a Skype-provided video link-up with Las Vegas, which reminded me of why businesses still avoid extensive use of videoconferencing. The link was unreliable, and had to be re-established so many times that momentum of the event was difficult to maintain.
Even so, the early third of the event was interesting, featuring London Mayor Boris Johnson, and Deputy Mayor Sir Simon Milton. Boris was entertaining – and to be fair handled the vagaries of the video link with his affable humour and aplomb. I think he’s to be congratulated for opening such a ‘geeky’ event and I welcomed his comments.
Sir Simon handled the detail of the announcement and drove home that London is committed to transparency and would work hard to deliver in its data release. Of this I had no doubt going into the event. There has been a general movement towards transparency and open government and from the GLA’s initial session with the development community three months ago until now we’ve seen – in Government terms – substantial progress and commitment.
In Las Vegas, Aneesh Chopra, the CTO for the US Government consistently implied that all of the UK’s efforts followed suit from President Obama’s initiatives – a point that Carol Tullo, Director for OPSI was quick to correct when she had the chance by touting the UK’s ongoing efforts in this area and around open data in general. I would echo that by saying the Power of Information Taskforce report released in draft this time last year already extensively spoke of open government and free data.
The line-up of speakers included a representative from NASA (who seemed completely out of place), Gerry Pennel, London 2012 CIO, Ailsa Beaton London Met Police CIO, and a panel with Chris Thorpe from Guardian Open Tech Platform, Tom Loosemore from 4ip and Carol Tullo from the Office of Public Sector Information (OPSI). Expertly moderated by Professor Jonathan Raper, this panel could easily have lasted three times its allocated slot.
Tom Loosemore, in announcing 4ip’s ‘challenge’ to apply for potential funding, made a clear point that it would not be individual developers who received funding but companies who came up with good ideas and plans for developing sustainable services. This last point is one I’ve sometimes gotten into trouble with the development community for making
And while I wanted to talk about utility apps and mobile here, I think Chris Thorpe’s blog post on this event has already done a fair job of it. Suffice to say that I agree with him that apps that represent utility will be the ones that provide the most benefit and see the most success.
While much is said about transparency, openness and releasing mountains of data, I can’t help but think about all of the companies I’ve watched in my 16 years in digital, who collected data and analytics – and then couldn’t figure out what to do with it all.
There is so much pressure on Government at the moment from the press, developers and rights activists to release data that I can’t help but wonder how the average Joe on the street will benefit from it all. This is best summarised by an observation I made attending the Young Rewired State event last year. A group of 15-18 year olds came together for a 2-day hack event held at Google in London.
Somewhat different to the Rewired State held earlier in the year with adult developers, I felt the young hackers were more interested in solving problems:
- What is my safest route to school?
- Can I carry identification that simply states am I legal/not legal for purchase?
- How many minutes away is the bus – or have I missed it?
I guess this last bit is what I am waiting for. With so much data being released and on the verge of release (note the UK Government open data initiative) what problems do people need solved that they will find acceptable in a digital environment, that is useful and usable, and that we can source the right data to help solve the problem?
I found the CES Government 2010 event worthwhile and progressive. I think that the simple work is done, and that Emer Coleman and team – who did a magnificent job in pushing this effort forward – now has the difficult work of delivering on Sir Simon Milton’s promise that ALL GLA data sets will be in the site by the end of this month – and in maintaining momentum beyond the end of the month.
I think the battle with Tfl, the Met Police and others will be an ongoing one, and the only real proof of success in this effort ultimately resides in whether the average Joe on the streets has a need that is being successfully met using applications that are built using the data.
12/01/2010 – Video of Sir Simon Milton
Upcoming speaking engagements
5th Communia Workshop: Accessing, Using, Reusing Public Sector Content and Data
On 26 March 2009 I will be speaking at the 5th Communia Workshop: Accessing, Using, Reusing Public Sector Content and Data held at the New Academic Building at London School of Economics.
I’ll be speaking during the 14:30-16:00 session titled “Getting the right tools for the job: technology and communities”. I will be talking about innovation and data use in government. Be sure to register early for this event.
OpenGov
On 22 April 2009 I will be speaking and participating in OpenGov taking place at Boston Computer Society. This is a 1-day conference to discuss and debate the challenges and opportunities in using digital technology to enable transparency, engagement and collaboration in government.
I will be speaking and participating throughout the day. Be sure to register early for this event.
