Just a quick note to mentioned I’ve posted the slides from my presentation today at the Enviro 2010 conference over at Slideshare. I’ve uploaded with associated notes as a document to provide a bit more context for each slide.

In the presentation I mention Clay Shirky’s concept of the “cognitive surplus” – for those that are interested, he provides a great introduction to this concept in his recent TED talk (embedded below for quick reference):

Next Wednesday is the opening of the Enviro 2010 conference at the Melbourne Exhibition and Conference Centre.

I’m presenting there Thursday in the 4:00pm – 5:30pm session, on the topic of Social Design for Sustainability. In the presentation I’ll be looking at online social networks, the underlying trends that they represent, the importance of these networks in moving towards sustainability, and how “social design” (design thinking) provides a great toolset for organisations wanting to benefit through engagement within the context of these trends.

It’s been an interesting process pulling together the presentation, which ties together a number of the threads I’ve explored previously here in the blog, so I’m looking forward to seeing how it all goes on Thursday.

It’s also perhaps serendipitous that the conference coincides with the State of Design festival which has the theme of “Change by Design”. Hopefully my contribution to the Enviro 2010 conference will provide a nice tie-in between the two events.

Just a quick note to mention that I’ll be participating in the panel at July’s IF Talks, on the topic of “Sustainable Future & Pure Living”:

Our environment is currently facing huge obstacles that have the potential to seriously disrupt our future and the future of our shared environment. Whilst there is speculation, the current apocalyptic predictions for our planet tend to paralyze people rather than motivate people to take action.

However this is changing and Australia is home to some of the world leaders in environmental, sustainable and pure living methodologies, practices and knowledge.

IF set out to find the innovators who seek to create a better future for humanity by improving our shared environment. Be it through design, business, collaboration or strategic thinking and action.

This IF talk is an enthusiastic and informed look and discussion around the future of pure living, why, how and more importantly, how business, corporations and organisations can and should be applying this type of thinking to modern companies in the immediate future.

The Eventbrite page for the event has more details about the event (and you can also purchase tickets there if you’re interested in attending). All profits from IF talks are donated to STREAT to help provide homeless youth with a pathway to full time employment.

As I mentioned in my last post, I presented at the Essential Media Communications Summer School last Thursday. My topic was social media for social change – looking at the principles of engagement with a specific emphasis on achieving social outcomes.

As happens with most presentations I do I was tweaking my slide deck right up until the last minute. The Summer School last week was no exception, so the version of my slides that was distributed to attendees at the conference is slightly out of sync with my actual presentation.

Thus here’s a PDF of the slides (6.24 MB) with my associated notes (which are also updated slightly from the distributed version).

From the conversations after my talk, there seemed to be a lot of interest in the diagram about different participation levels. While all this is included in my slide notes, I thought it worth noting that the diagram was conceived by Nicholas Street in response to a couple of reports, most notably the Participate Online research report (PDF 815 KB). It seems the diagram is no longer published on Nicholas’s blog – so I’m reposting it below for reference:

Around the time I came across Nicholas’s post I documented my thoughts, with an emphasis on my experience of Earth Hour 2007 – but have since expanded on them based on conversations with the Social Tech group.

While I still think the concepts are useful to consider, the Participate study is getting a bit long in the tooth now, which is why I didn’t spend a lot of time on that slide in my presentation. Seggr’s post on What social technographic are you? provides some more recent commentary to Forrester’s updated Social Technographics Ladder – both worthwhile references for those of you that are considering different types of participation.

The Pyschology of Influence and Sharing came across my Twitter stream while the Summer School was transpiring, which adds another perspective.

Thanks to everyone who attended the presentation, for the challenging questions at the end of the talk and for the kind words some of you shared with me afterwards. And thanks to EMC for inviting me to talk.

Just a quick note to mention a few up-coming events that I’ll be attending.

Essential Media Communications (EMC) Summer School

I’ll be presenting at EMC‘s “Summer School” program this coming Thursday 18 February. The two-day event is mostly a hands-on practical event, exploring campaigning tactics on a demonstrative campaign. (Disclosure: EMC is one of Zumio’s clients)

My keynote will kick off the event looking at how participatory activism (including social networks etc.) presents great opportunities, but requires a different perspective to traditional tactics to make the most of it.

This is an invite only event, but Gemma at EMC, who is co-ordinating the event, tells me that there are some spare spaces for participants from NGOs and non-profits – so get in touch with Gemma if you are interested: gemma AT essentialmedia DOT com DOT au.

Social Innovation Camp

The team at the Australian Social Innovation Exchange (ASIX) recently announced the successful ideas that will be developed at the up-coming Social Innovation Camp being held in Sydney 5-7 March.

I’ll be attending the event which I hope will be a great couple of days. Zumio is also providing consulting services as part of the prize for the winning idea at the camp – more to come on that front soon.

Enviro 2010

In July I’ll be attending and presenting a short talk at the Enviro 2010 conference in Melbourne.

I’ll post more about the topic a little closer to the date, but in essence my talk, which is scheduled for 22 July, will be looking at how applying the principles and tools of design practice and social networking to sustainability challenges presents opportunities for innovation, along with other benefits.

Just a note to say “thanks!” to Lisa and the organisers of World Usability Day Sydney – it was a pleasure to speak and I hope that it added constructively to the day’s dialogue.

The slidedecks from the two presentations are provided below both as a Slideshare presentation and as a PDF download which contains my notes, links to further information and image credits.

Usability in a sustainable future

In this presentation my aim was to provide an overview of how usability and user experience design practice can play a positive role in achieving sustainability outcomes. It proposes we extend our concept of usability to include pre-use-ability and end-of-use-ability, considering design, packaging, materials, re-use, recycling and disposal, demonstrating the concepts with recent examples.

Usability in a sustainable future slides with notes (PDF 1.65MB)

Exploring the Human Habitat

This presentation focuses on the research process behind the redevelopment of the Future is Man Made (FiMM) site that I managed while working at WWF-Australia. The site as outlined in the presentation was launched just prior to Earth Hour 2007, and the research informed the approach to social media engagement for Earth Hour as well as the FiMM site itself.

Human Habitat slides with notes (PDF 1.59MB)

I’m delighted to be presenting as part of the UPA activities for World Usability Day in Sydney on 12 November.

The theme is something close to my heart: “Designing for a Sustainable World”. I’m presenting two short talks at the Blacket Hotel, King Street Sydney:

Usability in a sustainable future

[4:40pm] Usability and human-centered design practices are likely to play significant role in the success of sustainability initiatives. This talk will review some of the connection points between these two disciplines, illuminated by examples of usability in sustainable projects from across the world.

Exploring the Human Habitat

[4:00pm] Ethnographic and contextual inquiry research techniques can provide valuable insights that inform sustainable practice and communications. This talk explores the process employed to develop the second version of WWF’s “Future is Man Made” sustainable living site (currently in it’s third evolution) which utilised “mobile diaries” among other techniques to gain a deeper insight into participant behaviour to inform the site’s design.

I’ve been informed by the organisers that there are a few presentation spots still open on the day, so if you would like to speak, or know someone that may be an interesting addition to the program, let me know…

UPDATE 2009-09-07: CeBit (Hannover Fairs) have since turned down my pro-bono offer of services to run this workshop – so the information below is no longer relevant/accurate.

I’m excited to announce my participation in the up-coming CeBit Gov 2.0 conference, my first public engagement as part of Inspire Digital.

The conference will be taking place in Canberra on 19 October and I’ll be participating both in the panel discussion before lunch and also running one of the evening workshops. The current (somewhat “beta”) blurb for the workshop is:

Getting buy-in for your social media initiatives

In this interactive workshop, we will move beyond the introduction of social media platforms in Gov 2.0 and will focus on providing participants with the necessary tools to develop a plan to achieve buy-in for social media initiatives within the organisation. The focus will be on how to get ideas across the line with key stakeholders in your organisation and how to tackle the concerns that are often raised, including:

• linking initiatives to your organisation strategy and objectives
• potential risks surrounding engagement
• ROI measurement
• resourcing

This is a new workshop that has evolved from my key learnings during the past 12 months of delivering presentations and workshops to a variety of folks wanting to learn more about engaging social media & networking. It’s honing in on the “next steps” to take once you’ve got an idea that you think might be worth pursuing. My aim is for it to be complementary to the conference program – hopefully we’ve achieved that objective.

That program is looking pretty good too – if you’re interested or working in Government 2.0 (I’m personally not a fan of the term, but it seems to have stuck) it’s well worth checking out. I’m looking forward to checking out a number of speakers on the day in addition to the sessions I’m involved in.