In any event, I’ve been getting some requests for copies of presentations, so as long as I was mucking around in all my directories looking at old powerpoints I threw a few up on slideshare, from talks I’ve given externally.

Psychology of Social Media:  Implications for Design

An overview of a social psychological approach to the design of social technologies, with design principles and a brief review of how I applied these principles to several R&D projects in the past few years.  This presentation was given to the Seattle chapter of IxDA and at Frog Design in October/November 2009.

Online Community Matters

Ten minute presentation discussing to role of community attachment in building loyalty to “host” of online communities.  Presented at the International Association of Business Communicaters, 2009.

Social Networking and Partnering for Startups

So you are new to the startup world, well here are some tips for networking with the startup community.  This presentation was given at Seattle 2.0’s StartupDay, 2009.

Designing for (Local) Community

A review of literature and technology to provide guidelines for designing online communities with an emphasis on local communities and neighborhoods.

Observation of Katrina/Rita Groove Deployment:  Addressing Social and Communication Challenges of Ephemeral Groups

In disaster environments, relief workers have a have strong need for ad ho communication and coordination, but are in an extremely challenged communication environment.  This presentation summarizes findings of a study of a peer-to-peer communication technology (Groove) used by relief workers following Katrina, and based on results makes design recommendations.  Presented at ISCRAM 06.  A few years old now, but this project had a big impact on my thinking about community tools.

My new buddies are all the Yahoo communities/social applications –  Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo Answers, Yahoo, Email, Flickr, Delicious, Profiles, Y!OS etc.  There’s a lot that’s social that’s happening here, so I’m pretty excited to sink my teeth in.  I’ve spent the past few weeks really “studying” Yahoo, meeting people from various groups to help shape my research agenda.

What does this mean for Waggle Labs?  Well, with Peter still working full time with Pathable, and me now at Yahoo, we are no longer engaged in social media R&D consulting.  However, the site will live on as the home of our personal projects and blog.  We still have plenty to discuss, regarding social media, community, and technological art.  We’re still working on MyTwee, a twitter visualization/game that promotes green behavior, in our “spare” time, and of course we have our art/geek projects including Steve the Robot Head to talk about.  See http://heaid.com to learn more about that. 

We’re spending most of our time down in the bay area now, so if you are in the area, look us up!

I posted some frayed wire pictures on flickr here.

Introductory slides for Frayed Wire are here, provides some background on who was there and our goals:

We had a *great* set of speakers and workshops, and people had a lot of fun making stuff out of the items from Junque Exchange in the open lab, and there was a very well attended discussion of how to incubate art/technology in the Pacific Northwest.  There were a lot of volunteers to whom I am very, very grateful!  Thanks Dorkbot crew, 911 Media Arts center, Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, and Ignition NW!

Here’s the abstract of the paper described in the talk:

Professional networking is a primary goal of people attending conferences and events. Over the past year we developed a social networking and community tool for events, Pathable, to help attendees meet the right people. Pathable provides an online directory of profiles, communication tools, and a recommendation system optimized to help people meet based on commonalities. We performed a deployment study and found that quality of conversations and sense of community were strong predictors of who said they would return. The more people used Pathable to meet others at the event, the greater their event attachment and sense of community.

It was a great event.  Very academic, small number of attendees, but all first tier researchers in the field.  Had a lot of great conversations.  Using community tech for social participation, civic intelligence, and social advocacy were the hot topics.

I read a book a while ago by Scott Berkun, Myths of Innovation, where he noted that inspiration is much more social than you might expect. “Group Genius” similarly reviewed recent research highlighting when groups can perform collaborative creative feats beyond the possibility of any individual.

That really got me thinking about how creativity plays out in my own life. Over the past ten or so years, I’ve been actively involved with community based creative projects on many levels: technology innovation teams, Dorkbot, throwing elaborately decorated fundraising events, large scale art installations, Burning man theme camps.

I decided to share some of the lessons I’ve learned through my reading, and working with community collaborations, for the Ignite audience because it is comprised largely of people for whom creativity or innovation is an important goal in their lives. Here is the verbage that went into the talk:

****** IGNITE April 2006: “Community Genius: Leveraging Community to Increase your Creative Powers.”

Raise your hand if being creative or innovative is an important goal in your life. [many raised hands]. Welcome to the creative class! Today I am going to be talking about how you can use your community to increase your creative powers. [Intro slide 1]

What is community? Community is a web of relationships with an ongoing exchange of information and support. Communities are characterized by a feeling of belonging or identity with the group as a whole. [Slide 2]

You don’t tend to think of community from a sociobiological perspective, but just as the feeling of love can lead to babies, so can a feeling of community lead to social capital — your access to social resources that help you thrive. [Slide 3]

Community groups are unique because they enable transitive relationships. That is, whether or not you know someone, by virtue of your common membership in the same community they are likely to trust you and share resources. [Slide 4]

Similarly, they can help you with the creative process. Creativity is much more social than you imagine. Think of it as taking a whole bunch of different ideas from the people around you, throwing them all into the air together, and then seeing if they land in an interesting pattern. Which leads me to the first tip. [Slide 5]

Tip #1. Seek diversity! To really leverage your community, you want to find people who are NOT LIKE YOU, they are groups or individuals with very different ideas or approaches to things. [Slide 6]

Tip #2. Seek a high rotation in weak social ties. It is usually through the social weak ties that you’ll be exposed to new ideas. Make a hobby out of continuously meeting new people. [slide 7]

Tip #3. Develop friends and colleagues with good “flow”. These are people who engage and challenge you, but are not threatening. You can completely lose your self-consiousness and immerse yourself in the creative experience. [Slide 8]

Tip #4. Get a whiteboard, and put it in the most social room in your hourse, which is often the kitchen. Stick to the #1 rule which is that anything can be erased at any time. You want to always leave room for new ideas! You can document by taking pictures. [Slide 9]

Tip #5. Play different roles, whether it’s passive observer, active participant, or leader. You will always get so much more about of a community by playing the role of leader, but you don’t have time to be a leader for more than one or two groups or projects. Nonetheless, you want to participate at least at the level of learning observation with a few groups. [Slide 10]

Tip #6. Play nice! Information spreads like wild-fire through community groups, so if you don’t play nice you’ll sour the whole community experience for you. It’s okay to be less active, but don’t over commit and then flake out. [Slide 11]

Tip #7. Hang out a lot in bars. Seriously. Conversation is the vehicle to innovative ideas, but you need conversation over time. Give yourself the opportunity to build on ideas through relaxed, casual conversation over many occasions. [Slide 12]

Tip #8. Give Away Ideas and Knowledge Freely. Tim Sanders wrote a book called Love is the Killer App, and suggests we all live the Love Cat Way. Essentially, the point is that the more you share, the more you get back, and you get it back exponentially as you empire of relationships grows. [Slide 13]

Tip #9. Play the “Yah and…” generative idea game. This is the game where you are brainstorming ideas, and rather than trying to replace or better the previous idea, you *build* on it. It is through the unique *combination* of ideas that innovation happens. [Slide 14]

Tip #10. Generate many ideas, but pick only the good ones to execute. You have been actively engaged in generating a lot of ideas, but while fun they are not always feasible to execute. Pick the ones that really combine your skills and passions in a unique way. Pick the ones that take into consideration your time and resources. [Slide 15]

Tip #11. Have a place. Once you have picked an idea, figure out a place where you can work together to make it happen. There’s a special magic, and an acceleration of ideas when you are in the room together. [Slide 16]

Tip #12. Have a project day. These are regularly scheduled days when you will all be there at the same time. You can’t rely just on serendipity to make sure you see each other often enough. I had one group called “art day”, where each month a new person would host an artistic medium in their house: we rotated through painting, wire sculpture, electronics, and so forth. It was great! [Slide 17]

Tip #13. Give up control. If you are successfully leveraging your community’s creativity, the ideas and projects will evolve in a direction you would never have developed in isolation. Embrace it! [Slide 18]

Here are some suggested groups and event as the intersection of creativity and technology. My favorite (aside from Ignite, of course) is Dorkbot. I highly recommend going to Burning Man at least once, think of it as a “creative communities boot camp.” [Slide 19]

This summer, we (dorkbot and friends) are hosting a one day event called FrayedWire: a mix of presentations, workshops, and discussions for people at the intersection of art and technology! This will be a great opportunity for you to meet and be inspired by the creative tech community. [Slide 20]

My first exposure to differences in attitudes was someone in the hallway saying to me “well, we’re not trying to make money”. Soon thereafter I accidentally stumbled into a rant against the term “Web 2.0”, rendered meaningless, it was being argued, as the new buzz word in the popular media. When I tried to defend the term, clearly defined I thought by Tim O’Reilly and readily available in his blog, my assailant said to me “yes but no one *knows* what it means”. My weak attempt to say “well, I do” were soundly overspoken.

It is true that the majority of the crew at E-tech is comprised of practitioners who work in the context of companies trying to make money. Yet, they have a strong open-source aesthetic, an undertone of the moral imperative that the world is a better, more innovative place when you make knowledge and code freely available. My picture of that crowd is of a bunch of well-meaning technology creatives stumbling over themselves hurtling collectively towards The Next Big Thing.

At CHI, the pace of innovation is more deliberate. They are a solid year behind in awareness of what’s “cool and new”. For example only the younger graduate students are trying to nudge Twitter into the consciousness of their advisors. (Although I am happy to report the emphasis has clearly leapt off the desktop and into more mobile and embedded devices.) Yet, they are making forays in directions not seen at e-tech, because academic research *is* less constrained by the need to make money.

In addition, I have to say I am appreciating the greater intellectual rigor that is here, and this is what I think it comes down to: the main difference is in the measure of quality. At an event like e-tech, presenters are selected based on who’s a prominent blogger, who’s making the most money, who’s likely according to some big picture thinkers to have big picture impact. This makes for flashier presentations that are more entertaining to listen to. At CHI, for the most part presentations are selected by peer review of papers submitted for publication in the conference proceedings. This makes for extremely well thought out work that builds on the twenty years of history in the field, documented across these years through research publications. Everyone here is an originator of new knowledge and/or new technology, no one is rewarded for an ability to synthesize other people’s work. I love E-tech, and I don’t think the academics should dismiss the important role the O’Reilly crew has played in accelerating innovation in their own field. However it’s nice, to be surrounded by people who think more like me, people who are a little suspicious of technology fad-ism, who want to see design grounded in theory, and who want to see the data.

Mostly, though, I’m just amazed there isn’t more cross over…