Webstock 2010 “if you’re not embarrassed, you’ve waited too long”

Webstock is a wonderful Wellington-based web and design conference which attracts leading edge international speakers (http://www.webstock.org.nz/). One of the themes running through the 2010 conference was about fast iteration and improving as you go, rather than slowly crafting perfection "“if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your product, you’ve waited too long”; another was the idea of sharing as creating value - the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. Everyone benefits. On the basis of those principles here, in very rough form, are some of the many memorable utterances I jotted down.

Day One
“we fall in love with things made with love”

Chris Shiflett Security centred design (Shiflett.org @shiflett)
Ambient signifiers
Tokoyo subway tunes for each train reduces burden on system of people making mistakes
Pave the cow paths and accommodate users expectations & tendencies – don’t try to modify them

Shelley Bernstein Brooklyn Museum
• Give up control
• Learn and adapt
• Infuse content with life
• Personal voice makes a difference
• Amplify community voices:
• Go to them
• Their terms not yours
• Understand the platform and work with it

Jeff Atwood Codinghorror/stack overflow
‘work’ is little slices of frictionless effort amortized across the entire community
Wikipedia represents 100 million hours of human thought – collective commons
Trust biased systems (i.e. not designed around the 1 bad user) high value released

Regine Debatty We make money not art

Quote from Gordon Pask re job of architect “not to design or build, but to catalyse them so they act or evolve”


Day Two

Eric Ries The Lean Start Up @ercries

• Change the world
• Build an organisation of lasting value
• Make customers’ lives better
Future of civilisation depends on entrepreneurship
Need practice and principles of extreme uncertainty principles of entrepreneurial management
Product development of lean startup where the problem and the solution are unknown unit of progress is validated learning about customers

Daniel Burka
Evolution cuts out as well as adds
How are we preparing for the unprecedented data rich environment we are approaching?

Amy Hoy @amyhoy
Paving the cowpaths is OK for today, but not the future
Thoreau ‘To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.'

Bec Hodgson
User generated curation - why have ETSY doing it where others can do it?
What’s the next area of privilege we can crack open?

Kevin Rose – Digg
Be an active participant in your own ecosystem

Adam Greenfield Do projects
Elements of a networked urbanism
Architecture from constant to variable
From latent to explicit
from anonymous to knowable
From browse to search
From expiring to persistent
From deferred to real-time
from wayfinding to wayshowing
from object to service
from ownership to use
from vehicle to mobility;
from community to social network;
from presence (pleasure) to performance
From consumer to constituent

Jeff Veen
Principles:
• Rough consensus
• Running code
• Applied to what we do everyday – learning as quickly as you can.

Reid Hoffman “if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your product, you’ve waited too long”
Velocity and responsiveness will set the tone far more than any one release
Speed of iteration beats quality of iteration

Mark Pesce Dense & thick
The whole talk was a highlight - the full text is here
- much better than my notes - ends with the possibility of Wellington as inventor & epicentre of the ‘web of things’. What are we doing next to make it happen?

We're very fortunate to have a conference of such calibre in Wellington. Big thanks to the Webstock team.

Having heard many speakers exhorting us to love the user and make the world more beautiful through better code, I was delighted with the serendipity of this quotation from Edina in Ab Fab on the window of a Wellington furniture store

“I don’t want more choice, I just want nicer things”

If anyone wants a Word 2007 copy of all the notes I took (with associated links wherever I could find them), I'm also happy to share those, but I can't attach the document to the blog. Contact me via Twitter (@stephaniepride) or via stephanie@stratedgy.co.nz if you'd like a copy.

PS Oh yes and the ONYAs were pretty impressive too!