Melbourne: The Platform

Cities such as New York and Palo Alto have begun to strategise their development by considering the merging of the physical and the digital, ‘phygital’ if you like a trendy portmanteau.

The City of Melbourne has also taken on this approach, seeking to explore how digital technology can help keep Melbourne one of the greatest places to be today — at work, at play and at home. Check it out here!

Some of the Precedent team including myself were invited to kick this off with an event last month: CoMConnect. We quickly realised this event developed into a collaborative forum. All partaking groups united to help figure out ways digital technology can improve Melbourne at work, play and home.

In other words, CoMConnect was an open discussion between the City and certain key audiences: community leaders, thinkers, designers, technologists, researchers, urbanists and makers. This format was in an ‘unconference’ format, great fun and definitely worth trying for anyone interested in trying out variations on the ‘open space’ method.

I thought it was really important to talk about “UX, Community engagement, and experience mapping”  so facilitated a session around that. The discussion suggested methods the city could use to engage with their audiences, both digitally and in analogue forms, as ways of understanding the publics’ needs. 

I put forward recommendations such as more unconference style events, whiteboards in city squares, using existing communication channels. Another key for a better understanding of who the cities audiences are is to create personas. Like every story, you need characters; and characters, or personas, help with personalisation and prioritisation of communications.

Participants’ ideas were shared, recorded and developed over the event, and eventually made out for three separate themes:

 
Theme 1 — Long-term projects: changing policy & infrastructure to be able to respond better to technological advancements, such as opening up the huge amounts of data sets a city possesses
Theme 2 — Short-term projects: quick win projects and conversations which the council can pick up and move forward with
Theme 3 — Tools: localised search, leveraging NBN, ethnography, gamification and crowd sourcing

Word cloud of all the data captured over the event 

Crucial to the success of this great venture is to combine the three themes. This will make open data and progressive policy allowing groups to collaborate and use tools to improve the lifestyle of Melbournians.


Over the last few weeks I’m keen to see how the city is moving forward, tackling the following goals:

- Identify and prioritise the long and short term themes
- Support short-term projects 

- Work towards long-term goals
- Continue to engage, and with a wider audience


In short, I think the answer is to think big, start small and act quick.

Digital down under

So, as many of you know I'm off to Melbourne on Saturday.

My bag is packed, my meeting diary is already very busy & I can wave goodbye to this frankly judgement day weather (except it's lasted for months).

Getting to grips with the digital sector in Melbourne and Australia first-hand is a challenge I'm relishing, along with establishing Precedent's operational base in Melbourne itself.

With 11 days to prepare, pack up and say my goodbyes, things are happening at a lightening pace, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

I'm going to post up here my experiences, work and personal for those that need to fill the gap between TV programmes or tube stops.

Cheers!

Responsive design in the social space

Responsive design is something I've been really interested in for a while now. It has it's champions and detractors, I spoke in February at Social Media Week London on it, and even since then the sands have shifted. What I've tried to do here is give a high-level run through of the approach and where it's headed.

Thinking back to how people used the web 10 years ago, people would make a conscious decision to sit in front of a desk/laptop and surf the net. Now, with the proliferation of different platforms, the net has become so much more accessible and part of our daily lives.

Now people are accessing the net across platforms as varied as mobile, tablet, and now the Kindle Fire too. This means that a company that doesn't have a solution that optimises their site for these platforms is losing out on potential customers. It doesn't need backing up with figures any more, if you don't have a site that is at least optimised for mobile, you need one - now!

For companies that use social platforms as part of their marketing strategy, being aware of 'mocial' is key - the using of social platforms on mobiles. The figures speak for themselves:

Having a site optimised for this market is crucial, and the figures are set to only increase into 2012.

So, what is responsive design and how does this help address the issue?

“A method of designing and developing websites to cater specifically to the medium they’re being delivered to”

Generally, responsive design scales to fit three main platforms: desktop, tablet and mobile.


As the platforms screen size reduces down from a desktop, so does the design. The flagship, and first main site to be designed responsively by the godfather of responsive, Ethan Marcotte, was the Boston Globe's site. Here's a quick snapshot of how the content and images reduce down across the three main platform sizes:

When seeding links across social platforms, to provide a link to a site that isn't optimised for mobile is a major fail. Be it an offer, a link to an article, any call to action that takes a mobile user to a site not set up for the user should be addressed.

The other options when targeting content at mobile users are dedicated mobile templates, or even an app. They offer, from an accessibility and experience-rich angle, a better solution, albeit often more expensive in development.

So, which solution is right for you? Well, it depends. You need to know what your audience wants, what content you need to surface, what the journey is. Play that off against the business benefit angle, and you should be able to make the right decision.

That is now, but it is important to keep one eye on the future. As we see increasingly faster phones and the advent of HTML5, it is arguable that we are heading towards an app-like experience available in the browser.

Then there's the proliferation of platforms to consider, with social TV setting up to be one of the major tech breakthroughs of 2012...

Big data & the battle with creativity

Big data has been sashaying around the VIP area for a while, courted by all and sundry as one of 'the next big things'. Alas, she's not quite ready to go out and hit the dance floor and mingle with the mainstream; her make-up isn't flawless, and the dress doesn't fit properly. Yet.

Big data isn't new to the scene though, In 2001 Doug Laney published a report that formally addressed the rise of data velocity, volume and variety.

11 years later, Gartner has now placed big data at #7 on it's strategic tech trend prediciton for 2012:

With potential to help address issues with the health and socio-economic circumstances of states and institutions who can harness it, unsurprisingly the major advancements have been made in leveraging it for business.

There's a slight problem though - as I said the make up isn't flawless and the dress doesn't fit. Translate that from tedious analogy-land to plain English: companies are still battling to harness the data and leverage it to add value.



Harnessing it

The usual mix of established corporates and start ups are flying around trying to figure up the best way to capture, package and break up the vast swathes of data that is mined from us everyday by various consumer application APIs such as Foursquare and Facebook. Some of the players in this arena are companies such as Oracle, with a multi-platform offering, and MapR Technologies with it's Apache Hadoop project.

However, it's not only tech companies developing solutions. It's also a top 3 priority at Walmart and Intuit. This is highlights how seriously it's being taken, with the accepted wisdom of it becoming part of a business infrastructure. With much of the recession being blamed on CDO's (Collatoralised Debt Obligations), perhaps we will see a new type of CDO help us out of it as Michael Vizard asks, "Is it time for CDO's (Chief Data Officers)"?



Leveraging it

It's all well and good with the infrastructure level platforms mentioned above being able to harness that data, but the biggest challenge is to make sense of it. This is where I think start ups can play a key role in creating apps that can crunch the data and make the data valuable to business.


Companies such as the mysterious Continuuity (founded by former Yahoo VP Todd Papaioannou) and Wibidata are looking to address this. However, most of the companies looking to leverage the data are still in their infancy or not quite there yet. Some are working well in their sector such as Runkeeper and 100Plus but in the main, Gartner's prediction that we're 2 years away from the mainstream is (unsurprisingly) true to the mark.

Killing creativity?

The question that interests me the most however, is how big data will affect creativity. Will it mean original ideas will get forced off the dancefloor and kicked out of the club via the back door? Will we see the two enhance each other?

I asked this question a while back on Quora and got some great responses. Felix Velarde, MD at Underwired, noted that, " The best creative ideas therefore enable splintered expression, based on the recipient/electee's understanding of and motivations in relation to the brand".

A fellow veteran of the digital world, Trevor Chambers also commented that, "data needs a start point, an idea doesn't." He goes on to say that "at some point in the near future, every brand will know everything about everyone, data will no longer be a big advantage. At that point the only difference will be originality, creativity and ideas."

For me, there is a battle to be fought between creativity and big data as creatives grapple with ideas and concepts that fit into a more individually targeted approach than ever seen before. Over time, this meshing together will smooth out and a by-product will be what Tom Cunniff calls, "Big magic" becoming more prominent. Tom explains it as follows:

"With the pressure to be accountable, many of us want to be smarter than magic. We want to crush problems with the weight of our frontal lobes, with the elegance of our algorithms, with the sheer bigness of the Big Data in our Big Spreadsheets. 

What lies beyond data is something bigger and harder to explain, but immensely more valuable. So our real job is to keep looking for magic. And when we start to feel magic happening, our greatest contribution is to get the hell out of the way and let it happen".

I do believe that taking into account all of the above, we'll see some creative ideas falling in step with a more segmented approach to marketing whilst 'big magic' will too have it's role to play. But when that time comes for big data take to the mainstream dance-floor, I think we'll find her taking the slow jam at the end of the night with big magic, wandering off in Web 3.0 harmony.

The first of few

HELLO!

This blog will aim to chunner out my thoughts on the following topics:

- digital
- politics
- comms
- big data
- communitarianism

I'm hoping to provoke some discussion, debate and disagreement.

Disruption & discourse works for me...

So does alliteration; apparently.



George


Also find me on Facebook, twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn