| | | | | | . | | | web marketing, web project management, user testing, search engine marketing (paid and organic), developing web policies and procedures | | | . | Tim Lucas showing all the cool little websites he's built, the process he goes through etc | I can do a workshop or presentation on JavaScript Unit Testing; lots of designers, ux, and ui people write lots of JavaScript but very few know how to write tests, nor do their JavaScript dev using TDD. | | Dr Nic Williams | drnicwilliams@gmail.com | . | Derek Featherstone (especially if he comes dressed as a Jedi)
Doug Bowman
Andy Clarke
Mark Pesce | | UX
RoR | | | . | I'd love to see some West Australians speaking! There are a few good speakers in WA; Nick Cowie, Myles Eftos and Richard Giles to name a few. | | More business topics - leading creative teams, how you built a successful web company, selling web standards to clients, etc. | | | . | Some of the bloggers I read regularly that would be great to see speak:
Scott from wishingline.com
Jon Hicks - Could talk on anything from design to cheese (Like a live Rissington podcast)
Roger Johansson - Alway a good source fro accessibility tips
Cameron Moll
Dave Shea
Jeff Croft
Veerle
and those guys from campaign monitor (One of my fave WD talks) | | Advanced CSS
Style sheet order
History of AUSTRALIAN web design
Going alone - Starting your own web design business | | | . | | | Ruby on Rails
Postgres
Agile development techniques for smaller development houses - how to quote/estimate and still use Agile
SEO for developers
| | | . | Mark Pesce | | Future of web technology - especially swarms and their impact on structures in our society. | | | . | | I have been working on a project called OurPatch. Our aim is to build a network of communities in rural and regional Australia. The challenges of the technical platform, search engine optimisation, tight budgets, shortened timelines are interesting. As someone doing cororate web work for nearly 15 years doing something grass roots is an interesting insight into the real truth, | | Simon van Wyk | simonvw@ourpatch.com.au | . | I would really love to hear Dave Shea present on CSS | | | | | . | Joel Spolsky.
Cal Henderson.
| No thanks. | | | | . | | I can also run the Ruby on Rails Introduction workshop (20+ attendees last year) again. That was definitely worth the effort for everyone. | | Dr Nic Williams | drnicwilliams@gmail.com | . | Perhaps one of the guys from Campaign Monitor to speak about HTML email and the Email Standards Project | I've been focusing on ways to better manage my team (total staff of 8, myself included) so that may be of interest (see my previous comment)
Also, we're starting to hack Wordpress a bit more than normal so we can use it as a CMS for all of our clients. I realise that's not groundbreaking, but I might be able to go through the plugins we've used and the ones we're developing and how we went about it...? | Project management for small business and small teams. Specifically private enterprise - no government or public sector stuff!!
Also - with the cost of Adobe software these days maybe a topic on Photoshop and Dreamweaver alternatives and what they can and can't do? | Jason Foss | jason@almost-anything.com.au | . | Andy Clarke was very good last year, I would certainly be lining up for his presentation again should he be returning. | | Although I work in the government and may be a little biased, some discussions on web sites for public sector would be useful. In any market in the world, a significant percentage of users will be from the public sector and realising the best way to reach this section of the market is of high importance. I will be attending the Gov Web Directions conference in Canberra, but delivering these messages to a broader audience could be useful. | | | . | Sorry no names, but would love to witness a couple of sessions with people who are beyond experts in the use of javascript and actionscript... | not for this audience, thanks | a couple of sessions with people who are beyond experts in the use of javascript and actionscript... | | | . | Stamen design
Dan Saffer (adaptive path)
Adam Greenfield (nokia)
Tom Coates (yahoo)
Matt Jones (dopplr) | Next year yes. | Ubi comp
Data visualisation
Physical Computing | | | . | Heather Solomon (MVP sharepoint design and branding - http://www.heathersolomon.com) and or someone from HiSoftware concerning Accessibility Kit for SharePoint (AKS). | No | Accessibility for SharePoint and how to accomplish it. | | vanessa.lollback@workcover.nsw.gov.au | . | Myles Eftos
Jared Spool
Jonathan Snook
Jeffrey Zeldman
Simon Willison
Kathy Sierra
Richard Giles
Ruth Ellison | | Using Open Source the Reality (Myles Eftos)
UI / UX is it that hard (Jared Spool)
Air just hot Air (Jonathan Snook)
Microformats, web3.0, semantic web, meh!.. whats next
Business design reality, the reality of churning out sites for clients.
Why version control is important.
Is the government really listening (no!)
OpenID and decentralised social networks (Simon Willison)
The dark side of usability and UX, making the user do what you want...
Selling Web 2.0 (Richard Giles)
UX and Government (Ruth Ellison) | | | . | Cyan Ta’eed or someone else from Freelance Switch.
Cory Doctorow
Mark Hurst
Derek Powazek
Kevin Kelly
Malcolm Gladwell
Seth Godin
| I'd love to but I haven't worked on anything interesting (unless you want to hear about what it's like to be a Gen Y worker and resigning every time someone annoys you.)
| - Freelancing and setting up your own business
- Customer experience (customer service is the new marketing, Zappos philosophy, etc etc)
- Advertising and marketing side of the industry - who is doing great work, what you should avoid, how not to be evil, etc.
- DRM and other copyright issues, what we can do
- The "arty" side of the web, so more about photography, design, typography, etc.
- An expert on writing for the web. (Not from an SEO persepctive but from a writers' point of view, so narrative, flow, etc)
| Cheryl Lead | chezza@gmail.com | . | Aaron broodman | Yes, since I attended the 06 conference, I was inspired, and have been developing a javascript application framework, with some unique features. I would love to demonstrate the new techniques and ideas in the framework; it would easily cover 50 minutes.
| Google gears and how it can be used cross browser | Mikkel | bergmann@gmail.com | . | From an international standpoint, most definitely Sir Tim Berners-Lee. You never know your luck. Other than that, someone inspirational like Jeff Veen. Anything that can equal or go above the bar of Mark Pesce last year would be an excellent benchmark. In fact, get him back! | | Practical mobile development would be good, but only by someone that knows what they're talking about and has something worthwhile to add - seen too many disappoinitments on that front. Cameron Moll did a good preso at @media a couple of years back. Personally something about .NET would be good but I'm not expecting it.. | | |
|
| | | | | | . | Jeffrey Zeldman | | | | | . | Get Adrian Holovaty back... and get the Google guys to send in someone with more knowledge than the guy who was there last year | Maybe, possibly in a panel like described above, as I've set up the technology for an online publishing business (APN Online) and BigPond new product sets. I think I would like the speakers to have a lot of practical experience, instead of having these guys who ponder a lot and provide armchair expertise like we heard at AdTech... | I think it'd be great to have a panel of people talking about practical experiences, how they have set up the technology in their businesses, what tools they use, what's inspiring them, how they broke business models (or invented new ones), what they think makes it and what does not... a general know-how session | Anna Cicognani | acico@ieee.org | . | Adrian Holovaty, Sebastian Chan, Andy Budd | | Real-world scalability (Tom Kleinpeter from http://www.spiteful.com/ ?)
News and news reporting on the web, citizen journalism, mashups | | | . | - someone from Open Street Map.
- someone from Google Android/Mobile web, maybe Mike Pegg, formerly of Google Maps Mania - I think he's now in the thick of google's mobile web initiatives.
- Cal Henderson (?) of iamcal.com - behind flickr and b3ta, gotta be one of the most clicked programmers on the web and certain to have some fun stories. | | mobile web, usability and CSS, usability and forms, html5, maps and mashups | | | . | | I suspect this may be slightly off-topic but just in case it's not; I thought some people might be interested in hearing about Amazon's EC2 platform.
Off the top of my head some of the things I (perhaps with another speaker) could discuss are:
1) A basic overview of the EC2 platform
2) A summary of reasons why we chose this platform.
3) An outline of benefits in terms of performance, availability & cost.
4) How our development environment & processes changed to accommodate EC2
5) The steps we took (and challenges we faced) in moving from a traditional 2 server (web & database) setup to a scalable distributed high-performance environment.
I'm happy to flesh this out a bit more if there's interest. :) | | Lucas Chan | lucas@sitepoint.com | . | Adriana Lukas - often blogs about the fact most online business plans are dead in the water, so I'd love to see her speak about what comes next.
Hugh McLeod (Gaping Void) and/or Randall Munroe (XKCD) - both have built a large online identity and associated community from a quirky cartoon (as if there was any money in that... ;)). What would they have to say about building communities?
Jens Meiert – assuming Jens does speaking gigs of course.
Whatever happened to Jeff Veen? :) | I hear a lot of people say how they go home from conferences, all fired up and ready to go, but The Monday Morning After The Conference can be a lonely and daunting moment. Where to start? Been there, done that, have some suggestions :) I'd also love to cover some reasons why we shouldn't set W3C standards as our goal; and what we should do instead to achieve the result we really want. Let's face it, we have the technology - it's the people we need to work on. | Maybe a panel on "standards vs. business", there are plenty of us around the traps dealing with business requirements/locked in code AND trying to build with standards :)
General topics... accessibility, advocacy, progressive enhancement... not to mention how does any of that fare with new technologies like Air and Silverlight. Are we going forwards or backwards? It's not progress if we lose accessibility! | Ben Buchanan | h7mmuyg02@sneakemail.com | . | Kathy Sierra
Matt Mullenweg
Jason Santa Maria
Andy Clarke (yet again but I can't get enough)
Dan Cederholm | | | | | . | | | I'd like to hear about the experiences of other front end developers within a creative web agency environment. Talking about the trials of dealing with designers who aren't developers and backend developers who have no regards for standards compliant markup.
I also want to hear from designers in the web agency world. Designing for Flash vs Designing for XHTML/CSS. | | | . | The ABC web team (abc.net.au) -- it ain't perfect but it's a great job
James Robertson or some other CMS guru -- I haven't seen one I like yet but there are far too many to have used them all and good ol' "everyone" knows you need one (not true, in my experience of websites up to tens of thousands of pages -- once you do, you're tied to a single DB forever it seems)
Gerry McGovern | No, sorry, my current job could only be presented as a case study in how not to do things (bad assumptions, poor scope, project divided in two with no-one responsible for making them meet in the middle, subsequent finger-pointing, late, over budget, etc). I swear most of the mistakes were made before I got here but I'm going to remain anonymous! | I still think content and 'managing up' (ie, getting management support) are the keys to web success, much more than the technology you're using | | | . | | | - John Musser: john at programmableweb dot com
- someone at http://www.uxmag.com/
- someone eat http://www.thinkvitamin.com/
- Kathy Sierra of http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/
more overview big picture stuff from folk who see 'it all' every day. May be a lot more on User Experience and interaction design. | | | . | Doug Bowman
Khoi Vinh
John Hicks
Emily Boyd
Cameron Moll
Veerle Pieters
Roger Johansson
Previous speakers (eg. Dave Shea, Mark Pesce, Andy Clarke, Jeff Veen, Jeremy Keith, etc)
Basically, passionate people!
| Not sure I have that much to put out there. :) | - current/emerging patterns/ideas/concepts in parts of the web design/building process (programming, workflow, planning, design, collaboration, testing, source/version control, etc)
- design inspiration and personal insight. Andy Clarke's talk last year was awesome.
- concepts/ideas that push against the norm/grain/established. I have heard so many references to Mark Pesce's talk from last year... witness local Meraki growth!
- stuff that *excites* people. That's what gets other people revved up and excited to push the web forward. :) | Steve Dixon | steve@rotassator.com | . | - John Musser: john at programmableweb dot com
- someone at http://www.uxmag.com/
- someone eat http://www.thinkvitamin.com/
- Kathy Sierra of http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/ | | more overview big picture stuff from folk who see 'it all' every day. May be a lot more on User Experience and interaction design. | | | . | Richard MacManus of http://www.readwriteweb.com/ | | | | | . | Invite Chris Saad to speak about DataPortability. | | - OpenSocial
- APML
- DataPortability
- Web sites as services, not destinations (like, say, Twitter)
- The semantic web
- Android (I think this is semi-relevant, something about the distributed, localised web)
- The process of starting a web startup, maybe, or something discussing the particular setbacks of trying to be a big web2.0 player from Australia
| | | . | Dave Shea
Cameron Moll
Roger Johansson
Kay Smoljak | | User centric design, especially in its application to existing non-user centred sites
Starting your own web development business - first hand experience about the hurdles faced, attracting clients and building reputation (Kay Smoljak - Creative Starfish might be good choice here)
Trends in web design
Content Management System selection | | | . | Andrew van der Stock (of OWASP) on WebApp security,
Billy Hoffman on securing Ajax,
Luke Wroblewski on forms,
John Resig on jQuery and JavaScript,
Cameron Moll on Extensible CSS,
Jeffrey Zeldman,
Douglas Bowman,
Jason Santa Maria,
Veerle Pieters on Graphic design (and because she's Belgian),
Kathy Sierra,
Kelly Goto
(more women!) | In my dreams, in front of a naked audience | Web App security (XSS, Ajax, Google hacking)
Developing open source (JavaScript) libraries/platform/API's
| | halans@gmail.com | . | | | content content content - could we have more about user-generated content, content management systems, style, content and accessibility considerations, working with clients to make them content managers, content and IA - ground up segmentation and working with topic experts and stakeholders to establish inventories and structures and site features etc
content content content | | | . | I second the person who said to bring back Mark Pesce. Even though he was here last year, I've never been so inspired. :) | | | | | . | Gus Gollings - Common Ground, Melbourne
gus@commonground.com.au
http://commongroundpublishing.com/people.html#golgus
Semantic Web/Future of Publishing
Tamir Berkman - Digital Strategist at FRANK Media, Melbourne
tamir@frankmedia.com.au
http://frankmedia.com.au
Media and Marketing in Web 2.0/Virtual Worlds
(I heard him speak at enterprise 2.0 in Sydney and he was good)
Tom Heath - Social Network Researcher at Talis, UK
tom.heath@talis.com
http://www.talis.com/
Social Graph and linked-data
(I have met him in Korea and heard him speak, excellent speaker, very likeable, very smart)
| We are working with climate change research groups to improve communication and situational awareness in major events (flood, coral bleaching, etc). We are using semantic technologies along with Web 2.0 social networks to make this happen. | Semantic Web, linked-data (in light of the Yahoo! SearchMonkey announcment)
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/03/14/preparing-your-sites-for-the-data-web/
Next generation SEO
http://www.chiefmartec.com/2008/03/seo-semantic-we.html
| David Peterson | david@boabinteractive.com.au | . | Kelly Goto
Myles Eftos
Miles Burke
Ruth Ellison | Implementation and effective use of the Design Authority role in both large and small organisations.
The Visual Design Authority role variant (there are three) being the most relevant to software development which is a highly strategic role that is typically responsible for delivery and ongoing management of the design strategy.
Because the role is an emerging one outside of the originating programme management definition, it's an excellent opportunity to push boundaries and implement new ways to break conventions of typically over controlled and constraining approaches to design management.
Effective use of the design authority role can yield great results for government, development houses, smaller teams and even private development companies, through various aspects including:
- design consistency
- development reuse leverages
- quality assurance in terms of addressing of clients requirements
- preservation of design integrity over dispersed or large teams
- persistence over time and
- consistent and strategic evolution rather than organic uncontrolled evolution.
Design Authority roles are becoming more and more common in large enterprise because of their value to all levels of an organisation. Being able to effectively describe and implement the role has a lot of genuine value for many different dimensions. | Anything about management aspects, actual management and how to execute quality delivery of web products.
Anything about design, particularly in terms of how to better address gaps between developers and designers. | Ben Winter-Giles | benwintergiles@gmail.com |
|
| | | | | | . | Allen Chang, Alistair Kearney and Scott Hughes from 21degrees, the creators of Symphony, a standards based CMS product.
Ruth Ellison on accessibility, and communicating its importance to the deaf (business reps). | | Entrepreneurship that sits outside Web 2.0 type applications. | ben ryan | turnover@cue-the-sun.com | . | I'd be interested to hear from people who are pushing the boundaries of 'citizen journalism' rather than just blogging. Sorry - don't have any particular people in mind, but maybe people who straddle the 'real' media world and the internet world... | I'm currently doing a lot of work around how to get people involved in the political process through new media and the internet. I work as a communications advisor to an Australian Greens Senator, and have previously worked on a variety of emerging media projects. Yeah, I think I'd be interested in giving a talk. | Social inclusion, personal politics, ethics | Tim Norton | tim@anewleaf.com.au | . | Brett Solomon director of GetUp! internet-based political activists http://getup.org.au/ interested to hear about the ideas, technologies, from kernal to fruition of the online campaigns.
Marc Lehmann - from http://www.saasu.com speaking about the experiences setting up the NETaccounts web based financial software and the concept of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
Mark Boulton http://www.markboulton.co.uk/ We were lucky to have him speak at a Port80 Ideas night when he was making a social visit to Perth. Fabulous presentation on grid based design. Love to hear him again.
Paul Cleghorn http://www.tioti.com/ "web 2.0" UK success story. Interested to hear about TIOTI.
| No thank you. Maybe in about 5 years! ;-) | I love hearing about developments in microformats.
Possibly something more about CSS tables - along lines of Kevin Yanks recent post:
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/02/28/table-based-layout-is-the-next-big-thing/
I love the presentations where design meets the web - such as Andy Clark - with real world project examples. Eye candy plus mind candy.
Using XML - would be interested to hear Kevin or another Sitepoint person talk about the actual process Sitepoint use to publish books - from writing, editing to publishing the whole process is web based from start to finish it is fascinating. | Rosemary Lynch | | . | I was impressed by Henry Jenkins keynote talk at SXSW in Austin, TX this past March on new media. He would probably make a great speaker at Web Directions! | Yes, I would be interested in speaking on Web Accessibility and the new Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) specification that is coming out from the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) group. Microsoft recently announced support for this specification in IE 8 so that will certainly help push it into the mainstream. ARIA really helps make Web 2.0 type applications accessible for assistive technology users. I have been working on ARIA since its inception and have also implemented accessibility in the core widget set of the Dojo Open Source Toolkit using ARIA techniques. By this time of this conference there should be increased use of ARIA and better support for it by assistive technologies, thus there will be new demos and information to share.
Sofic Celic attended a presentation I gave at the Web4All Conference in May 2007 in Banff, Canada on Web 2.0. I think she already mentioned me as a possible speaker to the organizers of Web Directions.
| Where social networking is going, how is it useful, etc.
Web Accessibility (but I'm biased - see below) and usability. Would also like to see more about accessibility of video and multimedia since its usage is increasing so much on the Web. I | Becky Gibson | gibsonb@us.ibm.com | . | | | Ben Buchanan recently presented at the WSG in Sydney on w3C standards and documenting internal standards. I found that really interesting and inspiring, and think it would be beneficial to take to a wider audience beyond the developers.
I am interested in usability and accessibility issues: how to sell this to your company (which is why I found Ben's presentation so relevant), progress of WCAG, accessibility beyond HTML/CSS. | | | . | | | Web application design (as compared to website design)
Javascript Framework/Toolkits comparisons - a bakeoff between dojo, Yui, prototype/scriptaculous, ExtJs etc
The politics of Usability/User Centred Design - how to increase your orgs usability maturity, tips to aid the adoption of ucd as an embedded part of design/development.
| | | . | Oh, a lot of people, actually:
• Jason Santa Maria
• Roger Johansson
• Jeffrey Zeldman
• Tantek Çelik
• Mark Boulton
• Dave Shea
• Andy Clarke
• Dan Cederholm
• John Resig
• Mark Pesce
| Yes, vector graphics on the Web would be a nice topic, I reckon. Also I can make advanced JavaScript workshop. Dreams, dreams… | I personally like technical topics: JavaScript, XSLT, CSS | Dmitry Baranovskiy | Dmitry.Baranovskiy@gmail.com | . | Kelly Goto
Mark Hurst
Peter Morville
Liz Danzico
| Yes, please - I would like to speak with my colleague Ken Wong to share our techniques and approaches by presenting a case study of how we worked on the upcoming new site for the youth market. The site is going to be launched in April (that's why I can't name the site yet). | User Experience in the Media industry
Emerging technologies that we should be aware of
| Elizabeth Pek | epek@fairfaxdigital.com.au | . | Jeffrey Zeldman
John Allsopp
Jeffrey Veen
Doug Bowman | Yes and Yes.
Currently working on the redesign and development of News Digital Media's stable of over 100 Local and Community newspaper websites nationally.
Also teaching web standards at UNSW (Learn4Life). I started the courses in 2003. I think they may have been the first of their kind! Well, that's what I tell myself :)
Can relate current work to presentations on process, strategy, web standards, usability, accessibility, SEO, etc... | Theory, mobile web, innovation, the future. Something different. | Robert Love | robert@signified.com.au | . | I forgot to give some feedback when I suggested Chris Saad earlier. He's an Aussie who spends most of his time in the US now and is the spokesperson for DataPortability - kind of a big deal seeing as the group has singlehandedly managed to get Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Flickr to agree on this open standard. | | | | | . | | | standards compliance
accessibility
This may not be a complex enough "topic", but as a TAFE teacher planning to go to the Canberra conference, I would love to know the web team skills that government departments have on their wish list for new employees. | | | . | - James Cameron, OLPC developer/tester (http://www.olpc.org.au), speaking about the tech behind OLPC mesh networking
- Chris Messina of Citizen Agency (http://factoryjoe.com/blog/), speaking about social network interoperability, OAuth and such | | - OAuth
- Online Identity
- Mesh networking
- More open API usage, promotion of same, demonstrations of their use | | | . | Jeremy Keith
Aral Balkan
... on development
Jon Hicks
John Gruber
Jeff Veen
Derek Powazek
Andy Clarke
...on design | | Design
Javascript
CSS
Interoperability
OAuth
OpenID
OpenSearch | | | . | Tantek Celik
Doug Bowman
Mark Pesce (was fantastic last year, bring him in again!)
Chris Saad | | | | | . | Tantek Celik, Cal Henderson, Dan Cederholm, Mark Pesce, Jonathon Snook, and Jeremy Keith. | I think I'd like to speak, but only once I overcome my fear of public presentations :) | - More developer stuff
- RoR
- Scalability
- Advanced Javascript | | | . | Ian Hickson, Maciej Stachowiak, Steve Faulkner, Ray Ozzie | | * Web apps - The Emerging Technologies (eg. HTML5 & Web Forms 2 , overview of the state of the AJAX frameworks, ARIA etc,... sounds like a whole track?)
* WCAG 2 for for dummies - what's changed & what's new
* IE 8 Roast - Expert Panel review of its (the most recent build) standards achievements & failures
* Browser Rendering Engines - How they work and what they do & why don't they all work the same?
| | | . | In no particular order:
John Allsopp
Seb Chan
Stephen Collins
Myles Eftos
Ruth Ellison
Lisa Herrod
Laurel Papworth
Mark Pesce
Chris Saad
Rob Manson & Alex Young (another hands on what is the current state of play with mobiles)
Tara Hunt | Yes, if you would have me ;-)
Just need to find a suitable subject to educate, entertain and/or enrage the audience. | Adoption of web2.0 technology by big business and government inside and outside the firewall.
OpenAuth
Data portability
Current state of play of mobile web in Australia
Stuff that will inspire me | Nick Cowie | nick001@nickcowie.com | . | Tim Berners-Lee (of course) - by the way my aunty works for him at the University of Southampton on the Web Science Research Initiative - okay so probably difficult and/or expensive to get him but it could be interesting to here from one of the other professors - I don't want an academic presentation but its interesting to here from that side of things, if interested maybe my people can speak to your people etc. ;)
Okay lots of people have suggested but I have to agree: Jeffrey Zeldman
I thoroughly enjoy hearing anything Cameron Adams has to say,
And also Bert Bos was quite fascinating to listen to. | Yes. I have so much going on the though thing would be to pick a focus!
By the time the conference comes around I should be well into our corporate site redevelopment so the most interesting topic to non-government and gov people would be:
CMS versus custom:
How to work WITH your CMS not against it in a multi-authoring environment;
realizing the boundaries of your CMS and when custom is better; evaluating the business implications of going custom; successfully combining all your systems to present one streamlined web presence, and the procedures you need in place to ensure your online presence grows with grace. - or something along those lines!
I would use Cultural Awards as an example of success with a custom site over cms generated one, among other examples I'm working on.
- there's other things that might become more relevant but that's the topic I would probably be able to give most in-sight into with real examples of success and failures.
| - One thing I noticed wasn't a topic exactly covered last year is Design, I mean creative design, the process you go through to make a successful design that is not only functional, and meets all those needs in terms of accessibility and usability but is also really beautiful. I say this because i always want to create beautiful websites but struggle sometimes to see past the technical restrictions, which results ultimately in me being less creative. Not sure of a speaker, maybe Cam?
- Video and audio streaming and making it accessible (where possible) without spending loads of money - I am knee deep in this at the moment and seems to be no clear answer on how to go about it, although by the time its September I should be an expert!
- Developing effective knowledge management structures for corporate wiki's, again I have to figure this out now so maybe I will be an expert on that too! gosh.
- Also someone talking from the project management side of things? techniques on how to speak management talk and not be seen as the nerd in the corner, how to demonstrate your point without going over peoples heads and generating enthusiasm in a non-web-enthusiastic environment (like I have to).
| Diana Mounter | diana.mounter@lgsa.org.au | . | | | Content Management Systems: Joomla.
I would like to learn how to use this system and other CMS's efficiently and effectively. | | | . | | | be interested in hearing from folk who have set up web agencies and made successes out of them (be nice to get some tips!) | | |
|
| | | | | | . | Chris Moeller, Director of International User Experience Design, Yahoo! Inc. | Yes, we would
Peter Marshall – User Experience Design Manager, Yahoo!7
Hilary Cinis – Senior User Experience Designer, Yahoo!7
Jennifer Reddington – Consumer Insights Manager, Yahoo!7
We’d like to present all or some of the following topics:
- Reconciling advertiser needs with business and user needs, defining the “compromise zone”
- The Collaborative Design Process
- Comunicating research and/or testing results
- Finding the right research/testing supplier for your project
| An open floor discussion of impact/rise of the “vernacular” on the concept of a “professionally” designed site. With the rise of UGC, mash ups, facebook/myspace pages etc who now “owns” the design - the user? the designer? the brand guardian? the advertiser?
| Hilary Cinis | hilaryc@yahoo7.com.au | . | Jeremy Keith, Mark Pesce, Tim Lucas, Josh Susser, Coda Hale | I would love to speak. I am currently building from scratch a Rails website (with one other developer) that is aiming to be of the stature of Seek (but in a different market segment). It will certainly be Australia's biggest Rails site if all goes to plan. We have totally relied on an agile approach (no interest from "management" in time spent creating specifications!) and we've learned many, many lessons over the last five months. Loads to share...
Based on this one gig I could address issues to do with: building a team from nowhere, agile methodology in the real world, Rails, wrestling extremely heavy duty JavaScript, project management without a Gantt chart, yadda yadda.
I haven't yet had a chance to structure this experience into a talk but I will be doing that post launch - probably in June - when I can breathe again.
Love to talk more about doing this!
Chris | Practical website building realities (too many "tutorials", not enough real lessons from the trenches).
Rails, JavaScript. | Chris Stephens | chris@elucid.com.au | . | Definitely want a mix of international and local. We have such great talent here that sometimes you wish that the big names didn't overshadow the locals. But if there were no big international drawcards I would be disappointed too.
If I had to name names, I reckon someone like Seth Godin could be good. Jeff Veen is always a laugh. Leisa Reichelt has great insight to share. Someone who went through the pain of a start-up and made it is always fascinating. Why not Jeff Zeldman too?
Locally, if you can convince Shane Morris to NOT talk about bloody Silverlight etc he has good stuff to say. Maybe a panel of lesser known local talent. Crack developers whom everyone respects and goes to for answers, but perhaps wouldn't be the sort to do a preso on their own. There are some great guys floating about the industry and it's rare you get to tap their knowledge (unless you happen to work with them).
Or maybe some people from the agency side of life. Many people in 'digital agencies' don't participate in the "web" industry as we know it. We can bring together two universes in the Seinfeldian sense. Someone like Kieran Ots at Leo Burnett knows his shit, but wouldn't participate in something like WD because it's not in 'ad agency land'. | Sure would. Not sure on what yet, but given the above rant on holistic-ness I could discuss user experience and IA and how this fits in with strategy as well as the other end of the process (implementation). And how collaboration and mentoring can fit into this.
Or a case study of sorts could be good too. I have many different projects I could leverage to start a discussion on lots of different topics.
And there's still that intranet thing I'm trying to sell :) I would like to try and convince web designers and developers that intranets are not evil and a waste of time. | More holistic discussions. Yes you can talk about CSS or microformats or usability or whatever else but, at least where I am at, it's important to pull it all together and recognise that very rarely to any of these elements happen in isolation. Most web projects will involve all the aspects and fields of speciality, and the collaboration and compromise that come with it. | Patrick Kennedy | pat@gurtle.com | . | Tangler boys, Simon from Whirlpool.net.au, Jodee Rich from PeopleBrowsr, anything by bloody Pesce :P | I'd like to present on revenue streams and business models in social networks - there are about 13. but most companies focus on advertising. Or else say "we'll build it (product dev), they will come (user aquisition) then we'll work out how to sustain it (monetisation)". By giving a brief overview of a particular network - it's salient selling features - then explaining the business model behind it, the income streams and actual figures (cyworld makes $7 per member per year (no ads), MySpace $2.17 per member per year (only ads) and Habbo $16 per month (no ads) and then give an overview of the industry growth and economics as a whole. Would that be interesting or is it too business/marketing for WDirections? <3 Laurel | privacy and portability in social networks. | Laurel Papworth | lpapworth@gmail.com | . | Gary Hayes, guy behind ABC Island, Telstra Big Pond (2nd most visited site in SL) and Australian Film and Television School classes in Second Life. He doesn't just speak on Second Life but also the new opensource virtual worlds. | | | | | . | Steve Yegge, Guy Romain - two inspiring programmers with very thought-provoking blogs - who've done some stunning presentations in the past. | | Steve Yegge on being a language geek. Guy Romain on making things look beautiful. | | | . | Kevin Yank
Miles Burke
Ben Winter-Giles
Sitepoint people? | No thanks | Starting a web company, or going freelance - the benefits, pitfalls, etc. | | | . | Mark Mansour from Sensis (previously RedBubble)
Anthony Baxter from Google AU (on Python)
Doug Crockford from Yahoo (on javascript security)
| I can talk about;
- how we build sites at Yahoo!
- Web services / REST in general
- using HTTP caching to build sites
- activity in the IETF HTTPBIS WG
- using Atom for building sites and exposing services | Scaling sites
How / why / if standards are important
Declarative vs. imperative
building social networks / services / communities
innovation / startups / growing Web businesses in Australia | Mark Nottingham | mnot@mnot.net | . | | Not this year but am gathering my courage to offer to present to this daunting audience of knowledgeable people in the future. | Explore & discuss case studies of success in incorporating user-centred design, user experience and usability (incl accessibility) into Australian government agencies; particularly in the project management methodology & software development lifecycle. Discuss how UCD is a very new concept for most stakeholders in govt agencies & ways of overcoming this. Also reference to how this fits with the methodology of large companies who often win the strategic partnership or project management of large bodies of work, such as IBM and Accenture. Discuss this in relation to 'Rapid Application Development' - one organisation is using RAD with 2 week sprints & developers (not UX) in contact with users to get feedback. | | | . | No one in particular.... | | Multi-lingual websites that are centrally hosted yet globally managed remotely. | | | . | Mark Pesce | | | | | . | | "How Website Planning makes your life easier" The new field of Website Planning - bringing together web design, development, marketing, business and customer needs, usability, project planning. Starting with the end in mind. | | Megyn Carpenter | megs@webcoaching.com.au | . | Jeremy Keith, Dr Nic Williams, Joe Hewitt, Michael Koziarski | Thinking about it, I could talk about OpenID and OAuth - I'm implemented both and actually have a few ideas for killer apps for both. | Some hard core tech! OpenID, OAuth, stuff that glues the web together... | Myles Eftos | myles@madpilot.com.au | . | Mark Boulton
Jeff Croft
Roger Johansson
Khoi Vinh
Kay Smoljak
Kelly Goto
Donna Maurer
Russ Weakley (total legend!)
John Allsopp (brilliant mad scientist/genius)
Maxine Sherrin (inspiring women everywhere)
Laurel Papworth (her entry sounds excitingks!)
Hakon Wium-Lee
Joe Clark
Jeremy Keith
Tantek Celik
Ian Hickson
Lachlan Hunt
Anne van Kesteren
Simon Hackett (the Internode guy)
Mike Moran
The Yahoo Guy (entry 69: Mark Nottingham)
Paul Boag and Marcus ? from Boagworld
Someone from QuickFlix? (That is a very cool service that is sort of swept under the carpet)
Someone from Nokia/mobile web area explaining the support of CSS print levels and the future (what is the point of creating handheld stylesheets if no one supports them anyway?)
Dmitry Baranovskiy
Nick Cowie | | CSS Grid Design (how to achieve)
Use of SVG in web design
Security (Web Apps)
Online marketing
Unit testing
Versioning control systems (eg. subversion)
Semantic web (what the heck it really does mean and when we are likely to see it)
RDF
W3C WAI ARIA
Air
Incorporating Microformats into your CMS
Design borders - borders of design between web, print, industrial and fashion
Web App Design/Frameworks
MVC
OpenSocial
What the Goverment's broadband plans mean for us | | | . | please *not* the usual suspects, *not* the "cool" people, there are lots of inspiring people doing great stuff out there that don't blow their trumpet all the time, they're the people who I want to hear more from! But only if they can give an insightful presentation of course :)
Mark Pesce, an update from the previous two years' presentations.
Antony Loewenstein on citizen journalism. This could also be a well-timed talk given his stance on human rights in China and The Games.
How about Kay Smokjak to speak on Women on the Web in Perth? There's a lot we could learn from her mob.
Organisations that are using the web to create social or environmental change, a few have already nominated themselves in this survey. There are so many ... a panel might be a good way to get a few perspectives in a short period of time (or have a double session panel).
Freshview guys on email bulletin best practise or email platform issues or something really useful like that. | | I reckon some of the people that started coming to this conference back when it was born are moving on into management positions (or will be soon). So while keeping the focus on the usual hands-on stuff like IA / design / code, I think it would be great to have a session on management of a web team / getting senior management buy-in / other issues around selling to internal stakeholders.
I agree with Pat's comment above: more holistic discussions please !!
Hitwise, Netratings, Google Analytics and a smaller player talking about their perspectives on site analytics (because I'm sure they will all have quite a different opinion on it ... I want to see an argument!) | Priscilla | | . | That nice Craig Sharkie fellow? Maybe John Resig, but only if I get to hang out :) | I'd love to chair/MC that idea I mentioned to you.
I'd spruke the benefits of JavaScript libraries - non-denominationally - and we'd have a series of developers on stage racing each other to achieve tasks in different libraries.
I'd approach the local communities to find local advocates and the libraries themselves for support.
The tasks will be vetted such that the strengths and weaknesses of the libraries will be highlighted and even pure library free JavaScript will get a guernsey. | JavaScript
APIs
The DOM
Mashing
AIR - actually an AIR workshop might be nice? | Craig Sharkie | craig.sharkie@gmail.com | . | Me :)
Ben Buchanan, talking about the work they have done at the Australian. | I'd love to speak. I've worked on accessibility and HTML 5, new web APIs for richer web apps, implementing accessibility in the browser, and a very cool but top secret topic that should have a release by the time the conference comes around... | Accessibility (especially ARIA) in mainstream projects (Google Reader, AOL mail, etc) | Charles McCathieNevile | chaals@opera.com | . | Grant McCracken, Jan Chipchase or someone else who has an athropology background talking about how observation should affect design, or someone like Jon Kolko, talking about the philisophy of interaction design. | I'd be sort of interested in running a workshop on how to do basic observational research / ethnographic inquiry ... but i'm not sure I'd get it done for this year :-) | Better ways to understand more about the people we are designing for. Different ways to embody knowledge in our interfaces and designs. | Stephen Cox | stephen@intuity.com.au | . | Alun Machin - talking about making the practice of IA accessible to clients - rather than jargoning it up :-) | | | | | . | Russ Weakley
Roger Hudson
Lisa Herrod
Scott Gledhill
| Brad Pollard (Fatpublisher) | Interface design patterns
Online video, video search, video metadata
CMS Export : There is an increasing need to provide clients with access to their data and site structure. Mobility between web design companies is important. A CMS Export Protocol is required.
Open Search Engines : Google is not forever.
| Brad Pollard (Fatpublisher) | |
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| | | | | | . | Geoff Bowers (aussie developer). Have seen his talks on "Taming the Client" and "Taming the Code"; these are project/code management topics. He is a seasoned speaker, very polished.
Mark Neely writes in a few publications about the business end of the digital realm. He always has interesting opinions on trends. | | A session on IA, but not simple fundamentals. | | | . | • Dave Shea
• Tantik Celik
• Andy Clarke
• John Allsopp
| Yes, I was inspired by many of the speakers at last year’s conference and would like to speak about how I applied some of that knowledge to making user-centred design and development a routine practice within web application development at Suncorp.
Some of the topics I could cover from this experience include:
• Achieving design and standards consistency with the development of application page framework using CSS Grids.
• Embedding Design/Usability practice into local and distributed Agile Software Development.
• Designing to leverage re-usable front-end and back-end components.
• Enhancing the customer collaboration process with electronic prototypes.
• The challenges of designing complex data entry forms.
| What topics would you like to see covered?
• SVG
• Microformats
• Content Management Systems
• Mobile Web
| Teale Shapcott | teale.shapcott@suncorp.com.au | . | Merlin Mann | I’d love to speak on any number of subjects. Off the top of my head, I’d love to discuss and demonstrate page layout techniques with CSS tables and inline-blocks, support for which will finally be in all major browsers with the release of IE8. | | Kevin Yank | kevin@sitepoint.com | . | I'd love to see Hugh Macleod or Seth Godin presenting on the future of marketing. I find both of their blogs exceptional value. I also think Joshua Porter (Bokardo) would make an excellent presenter on a range of social media topics. And Dana Boyd would also be an awesome addition to the lineup. | I've been working a lot this past year+ on social media strategies for organisations - not so much the what, but the why and the how.
I've presented on the topic both internally to organisations I've worked for and also at events focused on the financial services sector, and would be interested in expanding on those initial talks in a forum such as Web Directions.
Most recently, I've just completed a strategy planning exercise with a non-profit that gave me the opportunity to pull together a number of ideas about the social media space. Although I wouldn't be able to present that strategy directly due to client confidentiality, I feel I could develop a presentation that would provide value to the management/strategy stream Web Directions audience. | The mobile stream last year was quite interesting and I'd like to see that continue into this year's program. Stephen Cox's talk last year on research methods was excellent, and I'd love to see that topic expanded. Identity is a hot (and growing topic) so it'd be great to hear from some of the folks working on Open ID and/or Open Social (or just innovative thinkers in the identity field) also. | Grant Young | grant@zum.io | . | | | I'd be interested to see real-life, practical case studies and examples of the EC2/S3 + Google App Engine platform. These new platforms seem to be really amazing, but it can be hard to picture how they all fit together and how much work is involved in setting them up. | | | . | Vivienne Browne (youth participation model) and Luella Paine (web manager) from 2. | Web 2.0 meets Victorian Government for the first time...
We are finding the use of social and rich media features is increasingly triggering discussions with our clients about redesigning their websites.
Development of the new Premier of Victoria website - www.premier.vic.gov.au, is the first Victorian Government website to be redesigned with the key aim of embracing Web 2.0 functionality to provide visitors with new and more ways of engaging with Ministers and the Premier.
The website includes the design and development of the following new social and rich media features:
* Setting up a YouTube Channel to showcase video content and provide wider access to content. Go to www.youtube.com/premierofvictoria.
* Making use of a YouTube Channel as a cost/time effective way of managing videos ongoing. YouTube can also easily compress videos, so there is no need for expensive setup and processing of streaming servers.
* Alerting users to the latest news, audio, video via RSS feeds, mobile alerts, toolbar/gadget download and email subscriptions. Go to http://www.premier.vic.gov.au/newsroom/subscribe-to-feeds-subscriptions.
html.
* Ensuring all video and audio content is transcribed into text to meet accessibility requirements.
* Designing content and functionality to provide several avenues for online consultation and e-submissions. Go to http://www.premier.vic.gov.au/your-voice/your-voice.html
* Web broadcasting as either webcasts or embedded video content.
Also the site encourages people to contribute ideas across the site via "Share your ideas" about Building Victoria, "Ask the Premier" and "Your Say" which allows people to comment on proposed legislation.
| Anything new in the web world especially in terms of IA and content, information and new models for content development - user generated content beyond blogs.
Sophisticated, tested content models actually based on user participation - eg Youth Participation Model - used for www.youthcentral.vic.gov.au. Don't know of any others. | Chris Sampson | chris.sampson@parisfirst.com.au | . | | I would be particularly interested in presenting on the usability of search. I am presenting a workshop at the Enterprise Search Summitt in New York in a couple of weeks and would look forward to sharing my presentation and learnings. Happy to provide a full outline. | | Rebecca Rodgers | rebecca@steptwo.com.au |
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