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Broadcast news campaigns against cable outlets - Los Angeles .Broadcast producers hope to capitalize on the aversion many viewers have to the nonstop punditry on cable news. “All of us at CBS and NBC and ABC are . Together, Fox News, CNN and MSNBC — which usually attract audiences a fraction of the size of their broadcast brethren — got nearly as many viewers as . The cable channels showed clout during the party conventions, but ABC, CBS . But cable network executives argue that it’s only a matter of time before .
Bryce Johnson is giving a talk about unconferences, what they are, how they came to being. He starts off his talk about barcamp and how that spurred the first generation of unconferences. He went on to explain TransitCamp, etc. “Open Space is a technique and unconferences are an interesting way for collaboration.”
Organizing – InfoCamp spent 6 months organizing event. While Bryce believes this because some people like to organize events. He asked me about Refresh Seattle and how much time I put in to it a month… about 2 hours for me personally. This is mostly because its a well-oiled machine and we keep it simple, for example the Refresh Seattle website is basically a single web page.
Space – Getting spaces can be tough. Multi-floor spaces are bad because you should be able to get up and go to another session. Multi-floors work against that. Most open spaces are in a single room. Attendees are sharing their experiences of organizing and attending barcamp events and the spaces they were held. A common space is very critical to the success of the space. Barcamp Seattle, Barcamp Portland, Barcamp Toronto.
Grid – The Grid should be flexible. The grid is the schedule. Time going down the grid, rooms across the grid. You should have the ability to negotiate the grid if someone wants to see two sessions at the same time or if two talks cover similar ground. “One of the best Barcamp/Open Space experiences I ever had we only had 40 people show up but those 40 people were hardcore and really engaged. Since then I haven’t been so worried about the number of attendance.” Corpru is talking about why the dinner and lunch are important. Introductions of sessions to all of the attendees prior to the session is a good idea. Participation is critical to the success of this kind of event.
Food – Bryce says He is not a fan of the catering because it doesn’t keep it simple. It is important but there are some issues with food. Everyone hates pizza but its so easy for everyone. You remember the buffet but the logistics of getting thru the line. You have to have food available all the time, not just at breaks. You can buy a lot of food at Costco for minimal cash. Discussion about zero footprint events.
Swag – “T-Shirts are awesome but I don’t know if you need them or not. I am never unhappy when I get a t-shirt, but do I need it?” Swag should not be crap. Small thumbdrives are useless, large ones are expensive. Corpru talking about the effort for the tshirts this year at InfoCamp. The people who are obsessed with marketing and branding in their real jobs did the marketing and branding.
After – Document the ideas and notes and make them available. If people are going to take notes and attend they should put that online or on the wiki and make them available. “After the event is done how do we keep it going? What’s next?”
The open space format you can scale it down you can scale it up. You can spend months or very little time. In toronto they started doing it a lot more for civic groups like TransitCamp, etc. And now all kinds of cities and towns are doing it. “In terms of community organizing, I have personally never experienced anything more powerful than this type of format.”
Live: InfoCamp 2008 - Unconference: Using openspace for collaboration
So I wasn’t able to live blog my own session, so I am blogging it after the fact. I did a talk about simply what it takes to get a job in UX. I decided to start out and talk about my experiences and how I got to where I am today, specifically my experiences of working in-house in a tech/web company, working in-house in a non-tech company, working as a freelancer, working as a contractor, and working at an agency. I asked for questions during the session but no one really had any until about 1/2 way thru. While I could rehash all that was said here, I am going to focus on the questions that came up. Those questions are:
- Does a freelancer need to setup a business?
- What if my previous employer won’t let me put those projects in my portfolio online?
- How do I build my portfolio if I haven’t had a UX job yet?
- If I am getting a student visa and I can’t accept payment on work while here, how do I build a portfolio?
- What do I put on my resume, does it need to be one page?
- Is it important to list all of my past employers on my resume?
- What kind of stuff should be on my resume?
- What kind of skills should I learn if I want to be doing Interaction Design? Is XHTML /CSS important to know?
and so forth. If you attended this session and didn’t get your question answered please feel free to leave a comment hear and I will get back to you. If anyone wants to explore this topic more, there will be another session at 4:00 that goes into more detail.
Live: InfoCamp 2008 - Interviewing and Getting a UX Job
