Grab the quicktime version from the Revver page.

[tags]barcampottawa3, olpc, onelaptopperchild, 100dollarlaptop[/tags]

Jess’s talk from this years Information Architecture Summit. LukeW took some good notes.

[audio:http://www.thechickentest.com/vid/IASummit2007/ProjectTouchstones-JessMcMullin.mp3]

Download the MP3 of the presentation ( 23 megs )

Other recorded talks from the 2007 IA summit

• Backcasting: or how I learned to stop predicting and help my clients – Sam Ladner & Matthew Milan
• Enterprise IA methodologies: starting two steps earlier – James Robertson
• Systems Thinking, Rich Mapping and Conceptual Models – Matt Milan & Gene Smith
• Using Search Analytics To Diagnose What’s Ailing Your Information Architecture – Lou Rosenfeld & Rich Wiggins
• Real information Architecture – New Mighty Deeds – Margaret Hanley, Lisa Chan, Tom Coates and Matt Biddulph
• Information Architecture and Ethical Design – Olly Wright

This session will explore principles for creating effective project touchstones with a mix of grounding theory based in framing and boundary objects, pragmatic real-world examples, and how-to guidance. By focusing on creating touchstones early in a project, IAs can build buy-in, avoid wasted effort, increase their influence with their teams, and make a more meaningful difference with their work.

[tags]IASummit, IASummit2007, InformationArchitectureSummit, JessMcMullin[/tags]

What is Nakama?

Nakama lets you share pictures and videos from your phone with your friends on the web, and on their phones too, and there’s nothing to download or install.

What can Nakama do?

Want to post your pictures straight to your MySpace, Flickr, Blogger, MSN or other gallery or blog? Send a picture or video from your phone to go@nakama.ca and we’ll post it for you. Ever taken a great picture or funny video? Send it to your friends! Nakama lets you send it to ALL their phones in one step. It’s that easy: no more fighting with your phone or spending a lot to send it to each friend.

I’ll have to get a phone that lets me take pictures and video.

So one week later I thought I would talk about what a great experience BarCamp Ottawa was, I hope to do more events with the people from Ottawa [BarCamp Montreal : The Invasion] ;-)

I think the most valuable thing I took away from Ottawa (besides all the new friends) was a greater understanding of development beyond my software service industry world. I’ve got a taste of that in Toronto through TorCamp but the fact is that servicing government, financial institutions and other major corporations is still the driving force of the software industry in Toronto, IMHO. I was talking to my friend Jason who is an Ottawa ex-pat and he told me that he read that tech industry jobs are back to the levels they were at during the boom, but instead of these jobs being with large corporations (Nortel, Corel, etc.) these jobs are now dispersed over many small firms and start-ups. Getting to interact with the people who work in these companies and people who work for the federal government was tremendously insightful.

Bryce and I got to run a BoF (birds of a feather) session titled “Beyond Software – User/Domain Research as a Strategic Asset for a Organization”. We are going to run Part II at BarCampTdot2.0.

It was also really nice to see Derek Featherstone again. He is a cool guy who does amazing work that I have always admired. He said it was nice to go to an “un-conference” in his own town where he didn’t have to present. :-)

For more info on the event you should check out all the postings by Alec, Craig, David and James. I’m sure there are others so you should search for entries marked BarCampOttawa or check out the photos on Flickr.

So we got back from Ottawa and we moved right into DemoCamp5 (superCool) but I’m not going to talk about that ;-) …

Vanity thy name is Rooster

Peter Hum and Bruno Schlumberger spent the day observing and participating and that turned into a piece for the Ottawa Citizen Techweekly section. Bruno took a lot of pictures of me and the big guy but the caption for the photo in the paper was, “Bryce Johnson and his Chicken”! I was wearing a huge nametag, people! W.R. It’s pretty easy. Since when is Bryce the draw? Seriously, everyone know that I’m the star. :-)

[tags]BarCamp, BarCampOttawa[/tags]

The only thing that I’d like to comment on is ICT Toronto’s completely naive views on offshoring. How can they support a firm like IBM (not that IBM isn’t cool) offering consulting services in Toronto when their blended rate is supported by offshore development. Native Toronto firms will need to outsource to compete with these large American, offshoring firms and ICT Toronto should help Toronto firms establish relationships possibly by starting sister city relationships.

[tags]cluster, creativecluster, Ontario, talent, technology, Toronto[/tags]