Roo Reynolds - What’s Next?

Current Cost presentation at Open Tech 2008

Here’s the presentation Nick and I gave at Open Tech 2008 yesterday.

| View with comments at SlideShare

I really enjoyed the whole event and will try to put up some notes up about it tomorrow.

LEGO is full of WIN - my Interesting 2008 talk

Here are the slides and audio for the talk I gave at Interesting 2008 yesterday. 30 slides in 3 minutes.

| View

I’ll post my notes on the day later when my brain recovers a bit more. Rest assured it every bit as interesting as last year. Update: my notes are here.

For now, see my Flickr set, interesting2008 on Flickr and
interesting2008 on Technorati.

Update: the Guardian are hosting a series of videos of the Interesting 2008 talks. Here’s my talk.

The Backchannel

I’m presenting at the Meeting Professionals International event in London in April: the Europeans Meetings and Events Conference. (Yes, the meta-ness of speaking at a conference about conferences is not lost on me).

I was invited to do something on Web 2.0 and ‘where is technology headed’. After some thought, I’ve written up some notes about social networking, user generated content and virtual worlds in relation to presentations, conferences and events. Inevitably, I ended up thinking mainly about the Backchannel, in its many current forms. Much of that is catching up with what’s been going on in the past few years.

Photo of the Academy Workshop at the Annenberg Center for Communications at the Unversity of Southern California by Justin

Some of this goes back a long way. In 2003 the New York Times quoted a number of internet thought-leaders…

Some people, of course, ignore speakers entirely by surfing the Web or checking their e-mail — a practice that has led some lecturers to plead for connectionless auditoriums or bans on laptop use. But others are genuinely
interested in a lecturer’s topic and want to talk concurrently about what is being said. They may also like to pass around links to Web sites that relate to, and may refute, a speaker’s point. For them, wireless technology allows a back channel of communication, a second track that reveals their thoughts and feedback and records it all for future reference.

“We’re just moving the corridor into the room and time-shifting it by 30 minutes,” said Mr. [Cory] Doctorow, who takes notes and posts them to his Weblog, or blog, during conferences, enabling people to follow the
speaker and Mr. Doctorow’s take on the speaker at the same time.

“To me, it’s a little irritating, frankly,” said Stewart Butterfield, chief executive of Ludicorp, a company that is developing [Game] Neverending, a multiplayer online game [which would go on to become Flickr]“

Joi Ito: ”I want to make something that I can put in a suitcase and take to conferences,” he said. He describes it as a subversive device that will get people thinking about the significance of the back channel. From the chat
room, he said, ‘”you could send something like, ‘Stop pontificating.’”

That NYT piece also quoted Clay Shirky on in-room chat as a social tool. He has a great paper on the subject on OpenP2P.com from December 2002:

“once the meeting got rolling, the chat room became an invaluable tool”

“Group conversations are exercises in managing interruptions. When someone is speaking, the listeners are often balancing the pressure to be polite with a desire to interrupt, whether to add material, correct or contradict the speaker, or introduce an entirely new theme. These interruptions are often tangential, and can lead to still more interruptions or follow-up comments by still other listeners. Furthermore, conversations that proceed by interruption are governed by the people best at interrupting. People who are shy, polite, or like to take a moment to compose their thoughts before speaking are at a disadvantage.” … “The chat room undid these effects”

One of the interesting things about Clay Shirky’s work on in-meeting chat was the large shared screen showing the chat to everyone (in addition to the personal window into the chat.) Here we see that happening at a Le Blogs 2.0 panel…

Photo of on-screen backchannel at Les Blogs 2.0 by Bjoern.

Turning the backchannel from a private thing into a public part of the event is something Cote thought about when blogging about the use of Twitter at conference:

“Things get fascinating when people project that backchannel in a public place,if not right behind the speaker. The idea is to weave the “front-channel” and backchannel together as needed. In doing so, the hope is to add even more value to the talk and conference. This kind of thing freaks the crap out of some (most?) presenters, while others are neutral, and some like it.”

Elizabeth Lane Lawley describes herself as a Backchannel Queen:

“I like the IRC banter—and not just for its entertainment value. I find that particularly when a presentation might be rough, or something I’ve heard before, that the feedback loop provided by the other participants, snarky or
not, often helps me see the content in a new light, and immediately increases the value I take out of the experience.”

Teachers are getting into backchannels too:

“The backchannel has really become my favorite tool of choice when I’m presenting. I’ve purchased an inexpensive ad-free chat room at Chatzy that is password protected and use it for my backchannels when I present. I like to find two people to help: one to serve as Google Jockey (a/k/a Link dropper) and another to serve as a moderator — posing questions to me”

All of which brings us nicely up to date. I won’t be quoting all of that in the talk, but it’s now safely in my head. For the glimpse into the future, I’ll be bringing in virtual worlds and and their use in the backchannel (and more) too, but that’s a conversation for another post.

Can the Third Sector use Second Life and Other Social Media?

A presentation I gave recently for a British charity. Ren Reynolds (no relation) suggested an alternative title for it, “Third Sector in Third Spaces”. That’s much better and I’d use something that next time.

| View

I’ve trimmed it down to an hour, but included most of the Q&A/discussion at the end, which included:

• How to virtual currencies and real money interrelate?
• How did IBM get started in virtual worlds
• How do virtual worlds compare with teleconferencing and videoconferencing?
• What do you think we should be focusing on in the next 12 months? What kind of applications?
• User generated content vs keeping control

My talk at Online Information 07

I presented on Thursday morning, followed by Ewan McIntosh (who was also chairing the session) and Mary Ellen Bates, who has a link to her slides online too.

It’s a slightly re-worked and reduced version of the Warwick one, with a (tiny) bit of the CIO 2010 Outlook mixed in for good measure.

| View

I also recorded the audio for the rest of the session. I really like how the various parts fit together. Here’s the whole thing:

• Enterprise 3.D - Roo Reynolds [slides and audio also embedded above]
• The Bebo Boomers - Ewan McIntosh [audio]
• Connecting with the Millennium Generation: how will information centres respond? - Mary Ellen Bates [audio] [slides] [blog]
• Panel Q&A with the three of us [audio] [blog]

Ewan invited questions from audience via a roving microphone, but also while the event was still happening, via Twitter and comments on his blog. Ewan was, I think, the only session moderator to try this, and as far as I could see it really worked. It was fun, and I’d like to do more of that sort of thing. Thanks Ewan.

IBM’s CIO 2010 Outlook

I’m going to be in Zurich for a few days, presenting at the 6th Innovation Forum. I’m actually giving two presentations. On Tuesday I will (of course) be sharing IBM’s interest in virtual worlds, but on Monday I get to deliver the IBM 2010 CIO Outlook.

| View

“IBM’s workforce is transitioning to a new network generation that is facile with email, IM, blogs, feeds and social software like Facebook and My Space. This generation assumes transparent and accessible data, fluid connections with colleagues and a commitment to their work above that of the organization. We also face the loss of institutional and process knowledge in the heads of retiring ‘Baby Boomers;’ many of whom are not as comfortable with collaboration and sharing.”

"It sounds obvious, but we continue to communicate permission to experiment and extend our environment. … For most it is an opportunity to let our early tenure employees show us the way towards more natural collaboration."

Warwick University - What’s IT All About?

I presented at a careers fair at Warwick University yesterday.

| View

I actually gave the presentation twice, once in the morning and once in the afternoon. The audio on the above presentation is spliced from the two, partly to aggregate the questions from both versions, and partly because the first time through the battery on my laptop died halfway through the talk, which meant I improvised the second half and went remarkably off script. This was actually quite a lot of fun, and made me realise how little I need the slides at all, other than the obvious reason of keeping people’s eyes entertained. SlideShare (or the Internet Archive, I’m not sure which) has, as usual, truncated the last few seconds, but you only miss me wrapping up.

It’s blatantly a merge of my 2 or 3 recent presentations, but combines things in a new order and is probably an improvement on what I did for the IET. I’m wondering if I have tome to come up with something totally new for the IBM iForum next week (and Online Information 2007 the on the 6th December).

Talking with Rob over tea today, we got rather excited about the idea of a camera pointing at a whiteboard (streaming live video to a screen rather than pre-prepared slides), with physical props, and bits of paper, and ARTag style augmented reality, and and and…

Now I’ve said it, I have to make it happen. It may require buying a better webcam though, so perhaps it’s something for next year.

Mountbatten Lecture video up on IET.tv

The video from my recent IET lecture is now (update: new URL…) online at IET.tv. That is all.

IET Mountbatten Lecture 2007

Last night I deliverd the 30th annual Mountbatten Lecture for the IET. The Mountbatten Lecture has been around for 1 year longer than I have, so it was quite an honour to be invited to speak. It was lovely to have some friendly faces in the audience (thanks to IBMers Ian Smith, Andy Piper and James Taylor for coming along) and I was pleased to see they met up with Adrian Trenholm. I was also able to invite Ren Reynolds (no relation) and my wife Rachel, both of whom also came along to the formal dinner after the event.

Here are the slides I used for the lecture.

I covered how people are already using virtual worlds to work, learn and play.

I quite enjoyed it (with the exceptions of a couple of brief moments when I totally lost the thread of where I was going). A few things I’d have done differently:

• I could have used some live demos, rather than just pre-canned video clips. This is a tough call, but by avoiding the risk of live demos I probably missed out on people really getting a sense of how a virtual world really feels. (The other reason I didn’t give a live demo of a virtual world was not wanting to show just one, and not having enough time to show 3 or 4. Hmm.)

• I spoke for (I think) about 55 minutes, and had about 10 or 15 minutes for (encouragingly lively) questions. I wish I’d left even more time for questions, because that is usually the bit I enjoy more, but also the way that people get to hear what really interests them.
• I totally forgot to record the audio (something I’ve become quite good at recently). In the rush to get ready, I forgot to even take the mp3 recorder out of my jacket pocket. D’oh. Oh well. At least the IET captured the video. It will be avilable via http://iet.tv in a few days (I’ll update with a direct link later).

Given how broad the audience was, it was always going to be quite a basic introduction to the space. The best feedback I recieved afterwards was from non-technical people who enjoyed hearing an introduction to virtual worlds they could appreciate. That was always the aim, so I was happy with the evening.

Update: video now available via IET.tv

Virtual Worlds Forum 2007

The Virtual Worlds Forum is in full swing. There was a pre-event workshop on Tuesday, at which I presented “Building a [virtual] community within a (big) company” for the first time. The audio is now attached (lots of background noise, sorry). For your viewing and listening pleasure, here’s what you missed.

Of course, with it being the first day back, I was still pretty tired, and there were definitely a couple of things I missed, but I think I just about managed to share the points I wanted to get across. It included some holiday snaps from Iceland which I slipped in on the train on the way to the workshop. Some of them (such as slides 9, 22 and 23) were pretty subtle, while everything from slide 26 onwards were shoehorned in around some points I thought I should make (under construction and controlled vs freeform particularly).

Yesterday’s agenda consisted of an impressive array of speakers, but unfortunately I only managed to catch the very last session, an interesting panel on “social networking meets virtual worlds” consisting of Adam Pasick (moderating), Meg Pickard, Cory Bridges, Aleks Krotoski, Cory Doctorow and Giff Constable.

As well taking part in lots of press interviews it was a great chance to catch up with old friends, make new ones and (significantly) physically meet many people face-to-face in the real world for the first time. David Orban, Chris (’Satchmo’) Carella, Alice Taylor and Aleks Krotoski have all been internetfriends for a while, so it was wonderful to put faces to names. There’s something quite exciting about meeting people you already know. Lots of people commented on the excited “it’s you!” moments, and Aleks wanted to check I really was as tall as she’d thought. I really am.

I’ll be leaving a little early today to get to Derry (via Belfast) for the Serious Games conference there tomorrow. Reykjavik, Southampton, London, Belfast, Derry all in one week. I am really looking forward to Sunday.