WebVisions Portland 2008: Wrapup
A few weeks ago I offered to blog about WebVisions 2008, an annual web conference held last week in Portland. But then two things came up that prevented me from blogging live. One was some uncertainty about some news I was hearing from UW concerning shifting priorities. The other was my personal computer’s laptop battery decided that 2 hours life was enough, and that’s enough to drive you bonkers when you take notes.
I did try to take notes when I could, though. Rather than giving a rundown of all the talks, I thought I’d give two overaching themes that came up again and again in conference sessions.
Social Media
Social media is what’s hip this year. Twitter, Facebook, BrightKite, it’s all about the social. My favorite twitter from the conference:
With that in mind, I attended Erica O’Grady and Kelsey Ruger’s workshop on social media, only to discover they were trying to pack 3.5 hours of content into a 2.5 hour timeslot (thanks to miscommunication by the conference organizers). The good news, though, is on the school level I seem to be doing the right things — thinking about Twitter, plotting our plans for Facebook, recruiting students for blogging. The bad news, though, is there are still no easy solutions for my problems (and the problems of so many others on campus): No content, no one to create content, no money to hire content creators. I’m torn between a desire for edited content that looks as polished as a general’s shoe and what a drunk web producer once confided to me over her third vodka tonic — it doesn’t matter that it’s not polished because it will find an audience (thanks to Google).
O’Grady suggested for content that you find the people who are passionate about your organization and get them blogging. Passion transfers well in a social medium. Finding those people here is easy — they’re everywhere in Public Health, and I’m willing to bet everyone on campus knows at least one person who loves what they do or loves to be here on campus. But when will they get the time to write? If you figure you need three posts a week to keep your blog reader minimally satisfied, that’s 1 1/2-3 hours a week of writing.
Another question that came up that remains unanswered is whether it’s right to chase people across social networks. Facebook could be tomorrow’s Friendster; BrightKite could be tomorrow’s Facebook. And if social profile portability is “the future,” does the school/university also become portable?
One last point she brought up is transparency — you must embrace it. In social media, having transparency and abiding by ethics online will gain you a reputation of being an honest player in the social sphere. Opacity and dishonesty, though, will sink your efforts faster than a pair of concrete overshoes. One of UW’s greatest struggles right now is making things more transparent and trying to just be honest and ethical in “meatspace,” and it’s a struggle that plays itself out in the media with complaints about how this organization operates and the occasional ethical breaches that get splashed all over front pages. Transparency can only come through open, honest communication. In a sense, social media is both the problem and the solution for UW — you give up control of your message (and the last thing anyone wants to do around here is give up control), but at the same time pushing your message out into social media could reward you with a far better relationship with your core constituents. It means that the university communicates directly, honestly, and forthrightly. Are people ready to do that? Can we find people who can communicate that way, and can the do so without certain higher-ups and lower-downs freaking out about whether the message is “consistent?”
The social is already on campus. How will we respond?
The future of web development
I’ve never had one of those “mind-blowing” talks at a conference, with radical alterations of reality. But David Verba’s “Faster, Cheaper, Better” did make me tear up an e-mail I’d been writing and get me thinking about the problems of web development on the university level. His premise was simple — it’s getting easier and cheaper to do web development (he worked on the ill-fated Whole People project that turned into a $20M writeoff for Whole Foods; today the same project would probably top out at $1M), people can put together projects with incredibly small and cheap teams (the “give us a weekend and enough beer” philosophy), and APIs, frameworks, and libraries mean there’s much less actual code to write. Meanwhile, though, there are still “hard” things in development — the sheer complexity of larger projects still requiring huge teams (e.g. writing flight software for an F-22), the need for open communication on teams, and the tension between agile development’s bias towards “throwing it up there” and user-centered development’s bias toward “doing right by the users.”
It got me thinking, though, about how we do web development here on campus. We still do things with larger teams and a top-down approach. We build assuming something needs to last forever, because in all likelihood it will be up forever (or at least 10 years). The concepts of “agile” and “user-centered” haven’t really impacted this campus yet.
But as the older, larger teams get cut down to size by layoffs and shifting priorities, there’s still a huge amount of web development to be done on campus. Agile teams with fewer members, a focus on frameworks and DRY methodologies, and a de-emphasis of “build to last” code would be incredibly effective at dealing with the small, local issues people have here on campus. User-centered teams with strengths in usability and accessibility, a sense of consistency, and a similar emphasis on frameworks and DRY would be just as effective in dealing with global web design and development issues that have bedeviled this campus for years.
But I wonder if this campus can make that shift. This campus is highly decentralized. What’s needed is a team that can move quickly, partner with school and department web people, and focus on deliverables in a timely manner as cheaply as possible. And it would be constantly iterative, constantly user-focused, and constantly repeatable.
Verba made one point clear — the days of the large web team are over. The days of the small, nimble web team loaded with brilliant specialists and flexible generalists is here.
Is this campus ready to make the switch?
I’ll dump my unedited notes for all the sessions into a future post.
Tags: webvisions, wv08
June 2nd, 2008 at 10:42 am
Interesting post- I think the next couple of years will be a time of change around here- small and agile are definitely the future…
July 18th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Twitter is very useful when you need to promote stuff on other social media, like Digg.