I’ve got some new presentations and workshops coming up over the next few months. The team has been working on some great projects which all will start going public soon – some of which have had a greater level of hush hush than would usually be the case. So in some of these presentations the lid will be lifted on some new material.
As I know there are many international readers of Fresh & New, if you happen to be in attendance at any of the following then do come up and say hi (at least tweet me to say you’re in the same room!). If not then rest assured I will be blogging them to keep everyone up to speed with what is going on.
In the UK on September 5 I will be blogging dConstruct in Brighton. This is a really amazing web developer event and as it coincides with a trip to the UK, dConstruct was a must-attend event. I’m looking forward to Josh Porter expanding on the material in his book, Designing for the Social Web; and Matt Jones and Matt Biddulph exploring the notion of “Can you build a successful website that nobody ever has to visit?” and designing for distributed data and users.
A couple of days later on September 8, Culture24 has asked me to run a day-long seminar/workshop for the UK cultural sector exploring the use of tactical social media with a particular focus on collections. As the UK has been moving forward in leaps and bounds recently, this is a great opportunity for collaborative knowledge sharing and exploring, in depth, some of the topics I touch upon in this blog. The workshop is running at the Dana Centre in London and you can find out more at Collections Link and is copresented by the Collections Trust and the NMSI.
Back in Sydney on September 17-19 I am speaking at the Marketing 2.0 conference at the Vibe Hotel. I am the only speaker from the non-commercial world and I will be paying particular attention to new ideas and strategies that emerge from the other sessions. My presentation focuses on the importance of ‘listening’ in developing online campaigns and marketing strategies – and I’m hoping it will emphasise the importance of long term brand strategy over a short term commercial focus.
I was originally planning to be back at Web Directions South again – they’ve got a great lineup this year. I was especially looking forward to hearing Jeffrey Veen, Jeff Croft on Django, David Peterson on the semantic web and climate change, amongst the regular gems. Hopeflly one of the team will attend, take copious notes, and blog it.
Instead I am going to be speaking at Picnic Festival in Amsterdam which unfortunately clashes with Web Directions South. Picnic (September 24-26) is a sprawling and epic event. Amongst the overall focus on creativity, media and technology, there are going to be some amazing sessions and workshops. There’s a cluster of interesting sessions on multi-platform media as well as clusters on applications for location-aware technologies, augmented reality, social gaming, and much more. I’m looking forward to expanding the brain in many directions – and I will hopefully catch Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina (here’s a satirical piece of his from Granta> who is part of a whole day event called ‘Suprising Africa’ along with Ethan Zuckerman.
the N8 group is running a Picnic Special called Open Museum. Here’s a slice of Juha van’t Zelfde from N8’s description of the Special.
Recent web developments have given museum upgraded tools to explore their roles in society, leaving their buildings to inhabit media space for immediate use by (new) audiences accustomed to the digital infrastructure of the 21st century. This new web, characterised by interaction and participation, can introduce new forms of acquisition, conservation, research, communication and exhibition. It can present museums outside their walls and inside networks with common interests. What if the Amsterdam City Archives would geo-tag all their images and would share them via Flickr on the iPhone? Instead of visiting the museum, the museum would visit you, using GPS-navigation (like a car using Tom Tom). You could see all the images from the archives at the place they were taken. Instead of watching you, Big Brother is giving you the tools to watch yourself.
Then at the end of November I’m over in New Zealand for the annual National Digital Forum organised by the National Library of New Zealand. This year it is being held in Auckland and the theme is ‘Creating value in a digital New Zealand’. The NDF is an excellent event and in 2006 I was fortunate to attend, present and end up meeting many people who since have become friends, and learning about some of the initiatives that are putting New Zealand firmly at the front of large scale digitisation.