PEOPLE
The psychology, philosophy and sociology behind a rich and meaningful communication experience between people.

USER INTERFACE
The fundamental principles, best practices, explorations and other lessons about designing the user interface to bring communication to life.

TECHNOLOGY
Understanding and leveraging the software, hardware, and services that enable and enhance communication for work and play.

More info on the Seattle World Usability Day 2010 Event at http://www.microsoftwud.com/

Having a website people can easily navigate is common sense. It can save taxpayer dollars and help your agency achieve its mission. Here’s how to dramatically improve your website by focusing on your customers’ needs and adopting some basic usability techniques.

How To Increase Usability Of Government Websites and Boost Your ROI on Howcast is a very good video. It is easy to understand, the tasks they layout are simple and straight forward to implement. Check out the page to see the steps written for reference.

Now that that has been said I can tell you the picky grumpy problems that I have with it :-) It’s so simplistic it obscures the reality that some of these tasks are hard and need specialists and real buy-in from all the members of the team. Their ROI calculations are ridiculous vague and if this is the kinda logic that our government uses I think I understand why we are in trouble.

Still it is very nice, well put together introduction that I think every government site owner should look at.

These concerns will have to be addressed for wide adoption of social software on the Enterprise; I’m not going to even get into Software as a Service (SaaS) because honestly that is a whole other conversation.

Large corporations need to keep their information secure to earn and maintain the trust of customers, regulators and business partners.

The issue is though that information needs to be available and easy to access when it is needed. As a third stage Guild Navigator says, “the spice must flow” :-P

A companies employees, customers, and business associates frequently use information on the enterprise to conduct their business. If access to relevant information and systems were interrupted, they would be unable to conduct their business properly.

I once talked to a team that was working on an extranet for an institutions board of directors. So while this was a simple information sharing extranet they had INSANE security requirements. Each board member had to remember 3 unique login credentials: one for access to the network, one for the extranet, and one for the document level security on the encrypted files.

So the problem was that this information was extremely sensitive and needed to be protected but board members had difficulty using the system because they had to remember three sets of login information and it was not like they were accessing the extranet every day. The board members said that the system was too hard to use so the team had to address this while ensuring that the corporations information remained secret. We went through many scenarios and technologies to try to solve this difficult problem and I left before the project really went anywhere.

Making sensitive information available while at the same time protecting it from unauthorized access and inappropriate disclosure is, of course, a delicate balancing act. The basic idea is to give authorized individuals access to the premises, systems and information they need, while keeping the unauthorized people out. These are difficult issues and one that the enterprise 2.0 community will deal with soon, but it will be a rough ride. — I’m looking at you Vista ;-) which isn’t really enterprise 2.0 but a upcoming thorn in my side.

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Oh I found this in my training and I found it kinda funny in a Lord Nikon, Angelina Jolie kinda way. From Social Software to Social Engineering

Social engineering – what is it?

Social engineering is the process of getting sensitive information, such as passwords, access rights and other sensitive information, by tricking employees.

Social engineers will use many different ways to get sensitive information from you. The best way to defend against social engineering is to ensure that you can recognize potential threats when they are happening and know how to deal with them.

Some of this stuff is a little awkward in hindsight but I still think there is some interesting stuff in there.

The report is a PDF that is in a ZIP archive.

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]

Here are some pictures from our November 3^rd get together.

Geir Arne Brevik is Daniels’ friend from Norway who was a competitor in the Rock, Paper, Scissors – 2005 International World Championship.

Here is the illustration of our conversation, “The web browser market as a high school party“