PragmaticPixels.com

Traci Fenton - WorldBlu

• 73% of US workforce is disengaged (butt in seat base minimum of what you need to do; all input, no output)
• 1 /4 fee they work in a dictatorship, 80% felt more freedom would mean more productivity

10 principals of a democratic organization

• focus
• transparency
• dialogue and listening
• fairness and dignity (fairness != sameness); rankism is bad, abuse of title
• accountability
• the individual & the collective
• choice - of: working hours, projects
• integrity
• decentralization
• reflection and evaluation

Open discussion

• Open salaries - this would be spectacular in a car wreck, natural disaster sort of way at work
• no real research on doing X thing democratically and getting X amount of money as a result
• plan workspaces democratically
• coworking: like working at home but with pants
• We live in a “democratic” society, why do we work in such structured and rigid companies?
• Forget about guerrilla change, you need the buy in of the folks at the top… viva la revolucion?

Though I doubt anyone is reading this I just thought I’d mention that because I forgot to charge my computer last night all my notes for the morning are on paper. I’ll transcribe them at my leisure.

Bruce Sterling - Awesome and brilliant dude

• Bruce Sterling rules. That is all.

Kathy Sierra - CreatingPassionateUsers

Incremental vs. Breakthrough

• incremental == arms race; quality, features,
• getting through the wall: breakthroughs
• word of mouth vs. word of obvious
• change the way you help people make a breakthrough with your product, don’t just change your product
• ask: what superpowers would you give your users? how would that change how you do things?
• increasing productivity = broccoli

things

• 2.) Superset game ( (you)  (competitor)             bigger/cooler thing        )
• 3.) Shortcuts - 10k hours to be a master; learn the patterns, shorten the duration
• 4.) Kicking ass in < 1k hours with deliberate practice; after 1-2 years experience is a poor predictor of performance expertise; offer things that build on users strengths
• 5.) Make the right things easy and the wrong things hard; make it easier for users to have a breakthrough than to stay where they are
• 6.) Get better gear (and offer it) - have to help them justify though. Find, make, offer high-end “gear” that bumps them to a new level
• Reading: The Cluetrain Manifesto
• 7.) Be dumb?
• 8.) Total immersion jams: 16 hours in 2 days or 16 hours over 2 weeks
• Check out: Ad Lib Game Developer Society
• 9.) Change your perspective - don’t make a better X, make a better user of X
• 10.) What movie are your users in? What movie do they want to be in? (and don’t forget the soundtrack) Who are your users allies and mentors? Your tech support, Aragorn or Jabba? Your company is to your user as _____ is to Frodo.
• Check out: Roomware
• 11.) Want breakthroughs? Don’t ask your users. Users = incremental improvements (which are bad). Graph: The Featuritis Curve. Ask other peoples users.
• Read: Hugh McCloud, Ignore Everybody
• 12.) Be brave - Death by risk aversion: Fantastic idea -> fear happens -> crap output
• 13.) Rethink deadness - Henry Ford: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said faster horses.” Etsy, Make Magazine
• 14.) Change the EQ - don’t just change things (move the sliders), add new things (new sliders)
• 15.) Don’t mistake narrow for shallow
• Check out: http://www.passiveaggressivenotes.com/, Literally, a Web Log, The blog of uncessary quotation marks,
• 16.) Be amazed

James Powderly
Virginia Heffeman

• Dept. of Homeland Graffiti  (Graffiti Research Lab)
• openFramework
• Fat Lab
• Making open source cool
• Release early, often, and with rap music
• Music - Large Professor, MC Yan (Album: Lazy Muthafucka)

• No single majority browser, platform wins
• IE guy: “My wifes computer got hacked” Mozilla guy: “What browser was she using?”

An interesting talk but overall not much to take note of.

Nate Silver - Founder & President of http://fivethirtyeight.com

• Polls were too much of the narrative
• Too much generalization of demographics driving the narrative
• Can’t treat groups as being too monolithic
• Demographics are dead -> behavioral tribes
• Patterns don’t explain everything