Between the dozens of panels, talks and conversations that happen every day during South by Southwest (SXSW) and the ensuing parties and networking opportunities each night, there was quite a bit to take in in Austin last week. Yesterday I shared some of the highlights and trends that I observed at SXSW 2010, but for me the real reason for attending SXSW is having the opportunity to hear some truly inspiring and fascinating people who work in Design speak in person.

Dan Roam on Visual Thinking

One of first few talks I attended was by Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin, a bestselling book on how to think and express ideas visually. Dan took the last five minutes of his excellent hour-long session to summarize what visual thinking is, and used it to illustrate the history of humanity. Dan has an extremely engaging way of speaking that is enhanced by the live sketching on his slides.

Peter Molyneux on The Emotion Engine

Peter Molyneux is a game maker and the founder of Lionhead Studios and creator of Populous, Black & White and the Fable series. Although Molyneux is often critiqued for not delivering on his visionary ideas that go into each of the games he makes, I’ve always admired his ability to engage players emotionally in gaming experiences, and to challenge their moral views. At SXSW, Molyneux spoke chiefly about the emotional side of gaming, particularly with regard to his upcoming game Fable 3.

He also described the concerns and excitement Microsoft’s new controler-less motion tracking interface dubbed “Project Natal” poses to him as a designer. I could instantly relate to the duality Molyneux expressed around anxiety & excitement when faced with a platform that forces us to re-think how we design. Over the past few years, platforms of like the iPhone, Microsoft Surface and iPad have definitely left us with no shortage of design challenges as we explore all the design possibilities inherent with their form factor.

Wired Magazine on the Tablet

Wired hasn’t been shy about getting into the Tablet space. While I was at first excited to hear about magazines and other publishers getting on board with the iPad and other touch devices, I can’t help but be underwhelmed at Wired’s design execution. Their demo at SXSW with a rep from Adobe felt like a magazine crammed into a tablet, as opposed to content designed specifically for the form factor. I absolutely admire their visual design work in print and am a regular subscriber for that reason, and can understand their desire to reuse content and design from print to web and tablet.

However, their “one size fits all” approach to designing the tablet version in Adobe Air, and attempting to force it into other platforms like Android felt cheap and rushed (and borderline unreadable, from what I could see). Other publishers are sparing no expense to provide readers with a truly new experience, suited for the form factor and taking advantage of the device’s ability to provide rich animations and interactions.

I’m fresh off the plane from South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive 2010 and still reeling from some of the amazing people I connected with and talks I checked out in Austin, so I thought I’d share some of my thoughts of some of the top trends and highlights of SXSW this year. This year saw a record number of attendees – I heard as many as 17,000 (a 50% increase over last year’s 11,000) and you could see the difference everywhere.

Panels on user experience and social media were often at capacity, with long lines of people hoping to get in to catch the high-paced hour-long talks. SXSW’s notorious parties hosted by Foursquare, Gowalla, and Mashable and more saw the same surge in people, many even braving the rain on Monday night at the many outdoor venues to get a chance to network and, of course, get in on the open bar.

SXSW panels can be hit or miss. It’s a very loosely organized conference, where you can walk in (or walk out of) any session you’re interested in – no registration required. There’s over 400 sessions to choose from, and I typically had 5-6 really interesting panels to decide between in each time slot.

For me, this year saw a marked increase in the quality of panels I was able to check out. SXSW can be a good barometer for what types of things we can expect in the User Experience and Interactive worlds over the course of the year. It was most famous for the launch of Twitter several years ago, and startups have since capitalized on the massive event to make a major launch event, marketing push or announcement. Our local friends at Freshbooks and Rypple even got in on the action.

This year, at a keynote with Evan Williams, Twitter announced its @anywhere platform that will integrate Twitter into sites in a similar way that Facebook Connect does today, allowing users to more easily register, login and otherwise extend their social presence online.

Apart from this, several trends in the UX and Interactive spaces began to emerge several days into the conference.

Geosocial Apps

Foursquare and Gowalla, the geosocial applications that both used SXSW 2009 to launch, saw a huge surge in adoption at this year’s conference. They were initially met last year with a good deal of confusion, and the web app implementations made them difficult for users to grasp. I remember walking away with a green Gowalla t-shirt last year not really even knowing what it was (but admiring the cute line-drawn kangaroo they use as a logo).

This year, however, both companies launched new iPhone apps just days ahead of the conference with enhanced UI and interactions supported by specially designed badges and achievements for SXSW. Users signed up in droves and not an hour went by where you didn’t hear the words “check in”, “unlock” or “badge”. Attendees were often seen slinking over their iPhones, scrolling through their list of friends to see what sessions they were checking out, or the trending places as hundreds of people made their way from party to party after 5pm.

The rivalry between the two companies was clear even before the conference began. The feature sets of both have been enhanced and each has copied one another to a certain degree, so for me the deciding factor comes down to the user experience. Although Foursquare certainly has gathered a more solid critical mass of users, Gowalla was the standout for me this year, offering attendees a nice welcome banner the moment they touch down at Austin’s Bergstrom International Airport with links and locations to key SXSW events including badge pick-up and upcoming panels & parties (as shown above). Not so shockingly, SXSW awarded the the crown to Austin-born Gowalla over Foursquare at the SXSW Web Awards on Sunday night.

Neither application had been particularly useful for me at home here in Toronto up until SXSW, but that changed in Austin where they were great in tracking down friends and getting a sense for what was worth checking out at the conference and beyond. This worked only because I was a part of a very similar set of users with aligned goals, motivations and contexts for using the apps. I’m not so sure the usefulness of Foursquare/Gowalla will extend beyond SXSW unless you live in an urban area with a wired population; Like all social media, they won’t take off until your friends are on board.

They also have the not-so-simple task of assuaging users concerned with privacy that Danah Boyd so eloquently made a great case for in her keynote early on in in the conference. Provided Foursquare, Gowalla and others can address these issues, the opportunity for these companies to add the ‘where’ to our vocabulary of ‘who/what/when/why’ established by Facebook and Twitter presents an interesting opportunity to make more serendipitous social discoveries.

Content Strategy

As Dave pointed out yesterday, Content Strategy (CS) is seeing a major push as the “next big thing” in User Experience. A relatively new niche in UX, a Content Strategist ideally is brought in early on a project, working in tandem with the client and Information Architect do to audit what type of information a site will contain, and what forms it will take on. This Content Strategist has attributes of both an Information Architect and a Copywriter, and has the ability to weave a brand’s story into the structure of a site through different forms of content, including text, images, video, infographics and more.

How do you plan for the future if you don’t know what you currently have – or need?

It was clear at SXSW that this was a subject that was close to many of our hearts. Content Strategists Margot Booomstein (slides), Rachel Lovinger, Karen McGrane, and Kristina Halvorson (slides) collaborated to present three separate panels on the subject, ranging from why you should invest in a dedicated CS resource to how to implement it in your organization. The need for a Content Strategist became clear in these sessions, as they can offer clients predictability, reduce unnecessary whitespace and prioritize communication goals while reducing costs – words will always be cheaper than design comps, after all.

We’ve always made pretty bold proclamations in this industry that Content is King, but it really hasn’t been. Content is all too often considered as an afterthought after wireframes and design comps have been presented to and approved by the client. Relegated to boxes as placeholders and Lorem Ipsum, too many of us take a “do it later” approach with what is most important to the user. People aren’t visiting your site to look at colours and boxes, they’re there for a purpose, and the content should be at the core of any design.

Wireframes and design concepts are much more believable when populated with real content, both to the team creating them and the client reviewing them. Speaking from experience, the worst thing that can happen to me as an Information Architect is when I’m asked to design an experience without any content provided up front. It’s like building a house without having any clue how many people will be living there and decorating it without any regard for the resident’s taste; Ultimately, you’re going to end up with a pretty dry experience, a lot of filler and too much empty space.

Persuasive Design

Persuasive Design, like Content Strategy, isn’t a new concept, but is seeing increased focus by designers trying to motivate Web users down a path to take a desired action. It’s the use of tried, tested & true psychological techniques to take advantage of our innate subconscious wills and desires as humans. What it comes down to is taking advantage of concepts like sensory integration (providing a highly rich experience for many senses), social proof (when we’re influenced to follow the behaviour of others, like lining up in a queue), and scarcity principles (offering limited access to a beta or limited editions of a product).

There are many, many more biases and concepts that can be used to enhance Web design. In his panel on Persuasive Design (slides), Andy Budd calls them Cognitive Biases. Stephen Anderson called them Seductive Interactions, and handed out a sample set of cards he’s working on that he calls Mental Notes (see photo above) to help inject psychology cues into Web design.

Many of the examples Budd and Anderson used involved introducing concepts of gaming to give the site or service a sense of playfulness. As humans we inherently are drawn to play and challenges. By making tasks (even menial ones) seem more like a game, we’ve seen user uptake and productivity increase significantly. Take Google’s Image Labeler for example, which lets you play with a random partner online to assign matching words to an image. Google builds up its image search keyword descriptors, and it’s surprisingly fun and addictive to play.

Having started in to this industry by way of my love for games, I’m excited that to have started incorporating some more playful elements into projects here at Teehan+Lax that will benefit both our clients’ objectives and be fun for users. Look for more on that in a future blog post.

More to Come

Having sat in almost 20 sessions in about 4 full days, there’s a lot more to share from this year’s South by Southwest. Over the next week or so, I’ll be rounding up some of my favourite video highlights from the conference. Did you attend SXSW? What was your sense of what made waves of the conference, and how was it for you? Let me know in the comments.

Content Strategy has recently emerged as “the next big thing” for digital designers and marketers. More than ever, businesses and brands are seeking to provide utility to customers, prospects and partners in the digital channel. At the same time, the proliferation of the mobile web and social media are redefining how we access, consume and engage with content online. As a result, there’s been a collective awakening to the importance of defining, designing, delivering and maintaining compelling content on the web.

Content strategy often requires a systems approach, emphasizing the structural whole as well as the sum of the parts. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy or standard way to express this organizational structure. We can outline the high-level goals of the content strategy, and we can enumerate the necessary constituent parts (the content itself, people, processes, resources, etc.) But we don’t have a good way to document and describe how these parts relate to each other and the overall goals of the system.

The Content Flow Diagram (CFD) is a modelling technique designed to fill this gap.

Download CFD Omnigraffle Stencil Here

Basic Elements

CFDs can help us visualize and think about a strategic content system’s macrostructure. There are 5 basic elements:

Entities (box) — the content itself, e.g. articles, media, collections

• Actors (stick figure) – e.g. users, content producers, editors
  
• Processes (circle) – e.g. publish, approve, rate and review
  
• Resources (document) – e.g. ontologies, attribute sets, guidelines
  
• Connectors (solid and dotted line) – directed paths and references

The primary structure of the CFD is the flow, consisting of a subject (usually an actor), a process, and an object (usually an entity), connected by a path. Here is an example of a typical flow:

Notice that in this case the process Create references Guidelines as a resource. This convention is helpful because it shows who will be using a given resource and for what purposes.

When a flow maps one entity onto another (i.e. there isn’t an actor involved), the process encapsulates a functional requirement for the underlying system:

It is often useful to show how resources are generated and maintained. This is achieved by designating a resource as the object of a flow:

Additional Elements

Although the five basic elements outlined above are sufficient to describe a wide range of strategic content systems, there are a few additional elements that can give us even more descriptive power.

• Goals (cloud) help us capture the underlying motivation and intent of the various actors involved. By including goals, we state our assumptions about strategic rationales behind the flows captured in the CFD.
  
• Portals (trapezoid) indicate what channels, platforms and points of entry actors use to access and manipulate content.
  
• Systems (cube) are essentially non-human actors. Content strategies often incorporate various proprietary and vendor-based solutions to facilitate community, search, data-flow and processing functions, etc. Incorporating these into the CFD helps us capture functional requirements for these systems and understand how they fit into to a larger operational strategy.
  
• External links (bracket) indicate where organizational boundaries lie and allow us to embed external resources and entities.
  
• Areas (rounded rectangle) show contextual groupings of flows. These groupings help readers parse more complex CFDs and understand the contextual domains that exist within the overall strategic content system.

It is also possible to layer on other dimensions of information through visual cues like colour, shading, line weight, etc. For example, one might use colour to indicate update frequency—e.g. evergreen content vs. responses to social media events that occur regularly.

Here is a more comprehensive example showing one possible (and fairly basic) content strategy for enabling online customer support (click to view larger version):

Conclusions

Content flow diagrams help us apply systems thinking to our content strategies by standardizing notation and making things visual and concrete. This modelling technique can be used casually—as in sketching ideas out on a whiteboard—or as a formal mode of documentation.

Content strategists should try to make their CFDs as intuitive and simple as possible, in order to promote collaboration. However, the CFD is a network diagram that can very easily grow in complexity. Therefore, it is often wise to break the overall system into logical pieces and model these separately, noting external connections where appropriate. Additionally, we can keep CFDs simple and purposeful by focusing on three primary questions:

• where does the content come from, and how does it lives and flow through the system?
  
• what are strategic resources necessary for and how will they be used?
  
• what are the major operational dependencies and responsibilities?

The CFD is one tool among many within the broader practice of content strategy. For example, one might conduct research, define high-level goals, generate resources such as templates, guidelines, policies etc. before or along-side the CFD. That said, the fact that content strategy is so multifaceted and multidisciplinary makes a systems-focused tool like CFDs even more necessary and helpful.

I hope that others find our contribution to this topic helpful and look forward to further improving and refining this technique.

With the news last week that Facebook visits have topped Yahoo! visits (via Compete), it’s seems to be increasingly clear that our social networks are becoming our new “web portals” for finding relevant news and information – the difference being that instead of being corporately-curated, they are peer-curated.

What makes Facebook so successful as our new “portal”?

In my view it’s that it’s not actually a portal at all, it’s a hub.

It’s not a means to capturing the Internet in one place, it’s about capturing your friends in one place. It’s about the connections that make up the threads of our digital life – our events, photos, contact information, birthdays, interests, entertainment, all as a personalized experience that we can expand or limit as we see fit. Facebook will continue to grow as more of our social lives move online, and migrating people away from the system where we have invested years of time and content will prove increasingly difficult for web properties that don’t tie-in with our existing networks.

What’s the missing link (so far) in tying our networks together?

A personal CRM and curation system. The ability to tag, categorize, link, promote/ demote, and import from various social systems to truly personalize the relevance of our contacts and their content together. We’ll need more signal than noise to be able to keep up.

While things will continue to happen in real-time on the web, human evolution does not happen in real-time and being able to manage our ever growing connections and interests without separating or limiting our profiles will be mandatory.

Will Facebook do it, or will a new start-up, or traditional media company, take the reins and migrate people away from the walled garden into a new hub?

(h/t Mitch Joel)

I had the pleasure of speaking at the Acuity Forums “Executing Social Media” conference today in Toronto about corporate reputations in our hyper-digital age (aka social media). It’s a variation on a talk I’ve given a couple of times over the last few months that seems to resonate with a lot of marketers and customer service folks as they try to navigate the new reality of the social web and “always on” communications.

The event this morning was sold-out but for those who missed it (and wish they hadn’t) we’ll be doing this again in early March. There are a few tickets still available. If you’re planning on attending make sure to say hi!

My slides (minus my witty chatter around them) are available to check out as well:

Now that Apple has officially released the iPad we want to start designing for it. While Apple’s interface builder is great, it doesn’t really allow us to create custom UI elements on the fly. We decided to take a page from our iPhone GUI PSD and create one for the iPad.

The PSD was constructed using vectors, so it’s fully editable and scalable. You’ll notice there are a few new UI elements as compared to the iPhone interface. The workable screen design is formatted to 768×1024 so anything you design in the Photoshop file can easily be brought over to the SDK.

It’s 1.0 so I’m sure we’ll notice missing elements as we begin to use it. We’ll perodically update it to include new elements as we notice them or as they become available through any SDK updates.

If you like it or use it, help us out by retweeting it.

Download The iPad GUI PSD Here (24MB)

(Thanks to Finn O’Hara for the photo)

Last year, I gave a presentation at MeshU that took a behind the scenes look at how we arrive at design decisions. We’ve since taken clients through variations of this presentation, which is always evolving because it corresponds to such a perennial and fundamental question in our field.

I’ve always appreciated it when fellow UXD practitioners talk candidly about what works and doesn’t work for them. Insights and methods pioneered by others have helped us improve our process here at T+L a lot. Maybe our spin on things will be helpful to you and your team.

Here’s the presentation

During a recent pitch, one of our clients asked us to come back and explain how we “bridge art and science” when making design decisions. I think this is an intriguing way to pose the question (and it speaks to how clients are becoming more engaged and sophisticated in what they’re looking for from a design shop).

Let’s start by defining our terms (Slides 1 through 20). Here are a few conventional ways to differentiate between art and science when it comes to user experience design (please note that I’m speaking in stereotypical terms here): In terms of focus, an artistic process is concerned with issues of look-and-feel, whereas a scientific approach focuses on deeper, more systematic issues like underlying architecture. In terms of methodology, art relies on intuition and experience, whereas science depends on rigorous investigation and analysis. In terms of validation, an art-led process often rests on subjective or personal evaluation, whereas a process that’s grounded in science relies on rigorous testing using quantitative metrics.

Although perhaps a helpful starting point, this model doesn’t tell the whole story. In fact, we can flip things around (Slide 8) and take a look at the other side of the coin: over the last 6 years, some of the most influential academic research in HCI has demonstrated the importance of emotional, relational and aesthetic affordances in design; when you factor-in experience, intuition is often an important check on incomplete or distorted data that might otherwise mislead; and there is certainly an “art” to testing in appropriate and productive ways.

In other words, rather than this binary opposition of art vs. science, a better model is perhaps something more like a continuum. There are two extremes we want to avoid. At one end, we have deterministic design—the idea that we can be entirely predictive, almost in a Newtonian physics kind of sense, mapping out causality for everything, no matter how complex or layered. At the other end we have open-ended design—where decisions are more or less arbitrary. The first alternative has turned out to be pretty unrealistic; the second is just a cop-out. We’ve tried to strike a balance between these two extremes and have gravitated towards evidence-based design as our happy medium.

Evidence-based design (EBD) is a term that comes from the medical world. Evidence-based medicine is the “conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients.” Transposed into our context, we like the idea of EBD because it acknowledges the fundamental reality that design is about making choices, and that the goal is to do this on an informed basis. We don’t have to maintain the pretence of a magical process that guarantees optimal results, but neither are we given free license to design whatever we want: our decisions become accountable to the best available evidence whenever possible.

EBD is not just about gathering up data at the beginning of a project: it’s about infusing design decisions with data-driven insights throughout the entire process. Slides 16-20 visualize this goal in terms of a typical agency process (actually, our process). In practice, there’s typically a gap between the define (or research or discovery or whatever you want to call it) and design stages. This is a fundamental challenge—you can have the best researchers on the planet, but if their observations and insights don’t carry over to impact and influence design decisions they’ll do you little good.

So how do we bridge the gap? For us, the secret has been to build our process around a rhythm of open exploration and refinement. Slides 22-28 visualize this approach (thanks to Brendan Schauer et al. from Adaptive Path for the inspiration). We oscillate between a ‘go wide’ mode where we investigate, explore and experiment, and a ‘refine down’ mode where we focus and prioritize. When this happens over and over again, we get these critical points of inflection that keep us grounded (evidence-based) and moving forward (design).

OK, let’s take a look at a real life example. Slides 29-48 provide a glimpse behind the scenes of our work on thestar.com redesign. We start by going wide and essentially scavenge for as many design inputs as possible. These vary project by project, but at a minimum we’ll need to get a handle on demographics, psychographics, behavioural profiles for target users; a concrete understanding of what is and isn’t working on the current site; business goals, needs & requirements; and a comprehensive competitive analysis.

All we have at this point is raw data—we need to turn this stuff into evidence and insights we can actually use. Borrowing from Subject to Change, we believe that inputs become evidence when they are durable (you can kick them around and mash them up), actionable (there are clear implications for design), and impactful (they actually start to change the way designers think about the problem itself). So how do you get there? This is where the art part comes in…

In the beginning, we aggregate stuff in one place, organize loosely and share it among the team. Tools like wikis are good for this exercise. Next we start to look for patterns and find corroborating data—multiple pieces that tell a coherent story. We then construct and test narratives for things we heard from stakeholders. These narratives help us get at the context behind the requirements. We then create focusers—models (visual, conceptual, personal etc.) that help us focus and filter. Two focusers that we often use are personas (architypal users) and design principles (mini mission statements). Focusers are important because they allow us to find the signal in the noise, develop a common language and conceptual framework, and make our assumptions explicit. Because they’re so elemental, they can inform design decisions on a case-by-case basis throughout the entire process.

Sketching has always been central to our process, but we’re starting to formalize this step and make it more collaborative and inclusive. In the case of The Star, we generated about 150 initial sketches (going wide) for 10 key templates (which we refined down in detailed IA). Prototyping is another technique that allows us to explore and test ideas and assumptions. Critical and complex elements in the UI make great candidates here.

Finally, we need to develop a plan of attack for knowledge gaps or areas of uncertainty. For example, with The Star we noticed some anomalies in the analytics data. When we took a look at the competitive set (with a little help from Image Spark), we didn’t see very much alignment in how other media outlets were using certain areas on the page. So, we developed a fairly wide-range of alternative modules for split/multivariate testing.

So there you have it: a relatively geeky look at the case for, and our approach to, evidence-based design. I hope that some of these ideas and examples ring true with you. What do you think? I’d love to hear what others are doing in their design practices and processes.

We wanted to take this opportunity to give everyone an update on Element. What started out as a simple Photoshop mockup has become somewhat of a thorn in our side and an obvious point of frustration for those waiting on it. Before we give the update we’d like to simply apologize for its continued delay. We weren’t trying to overhype it, we just made the mistake of sharing delivery dates given to us by someone outside of our company. We really should have just sat tight until we had an actual release to share.

Some background. We never had any intention of actually building it until Saurik, the creator of Cydia, gave us a call and told us he wanted to build it for us on a new platform he’d created called Cydget. Needless to say we got pretty excited about the fact the lock screen would soon be a reality. He figured it would only take a week or two to actually build. It wasn’t long after that we began to see some pretty serious set-backs. The first of which being that he got very ill and had to put the project aside until he recovered. Thankfully he’s okay but that set us back well over a month.

We eventually got word that he was still developing it but had to tweak the framework to which it was being built on. A few more weeks passed. It was on December 9 when we last officially heard on its status. He had everything working but SMS and weather but wasn’t quite ready to show us a package yet. Since then the only thing we’ve been able to find out is from his twitter account on December 24. It stated that he now had everything functioning except weather and that he was working on optimizing it. That takes us to today.

We aren’t holding back info or trying to mislead people. The simple fact is that everything is in Saurik’s hands and he is working on his own timetable. Saurik will let everyone, including us, know when it’s ready but at this point we have no idea when, or if, that will be.

The Movie Network (Astral Media) hired us to develop an online-focused campaign to launch their new High Definition programming. We created the “More HD” theme that was used across all media. A series of rich IAB ads featured an HD movie carousel that updated dynamically from the Astral server. We also created video ad units (with purpose-built movie trailers) and an HD Movie microsite that featured the entire library of HD Movie Network titles. The microsite makes use of Flash 10 to create a smooth and engaging 3D environment. This site is also deployed as embedded content across affiliate and marketing partner sites.

By working closely with Media Experts we were able to identify media partnerships that were eager to create campaign destinations within their sites, notably, Heavy.com and GorrillaNation. Heavy components included a first-of-its-kind homepage zoom takeover, embedded deployment of the HD Movie microsite inside the HD movie trailers section, TMN sponsorship of various sections within the site, video channel content and Heavy blog editorial content. A branded TMN YouTube channel also features TMN HD movie trailers and exclusive online video content.

Visit the site jointhemovienetwork.ca

At this weekend’s Digital Media Camp one of the most interesting topics was proposed by Justin Kozuch of Refresh Events.

He asked what, as a community, we could do to assemble quality data on the Digital Media industry in Toronto? There is currently no good accounting of how many companies exist in Toronto or how many people work in the field or what value we are adding to the economy.

He cited A List Apart’s survey as an example of the type of information we require.

Why is this important?
So first off why would we bother trying to assemble this data?

For one, we need to understand what impact we have on this city’s and province’s economy. While we may have been a cottage industry in the past we are a legitimate industry now. We create jobs, we support local landlords, local suppliers like ISPs and computer retailers, we need to quantify this.

There is currently no good information on this. StatsCan data is terrible and trying to get the government to collect it will take forever.

If we are able to quantify this, we can begin to have a voice in shaping policy on issues like Net Neutrality, HST and other issues that affect us as an industry.

Once we know how large we are and what we are comprised of we can begin to align together. One of the mandates of Digital Media Camp was to identify “How can we work together to propel Toronto’s technology, content and design communities into the future and make Toronto a globally competitive hub of digital media entrepreneurship and innovation?” Arguably this is impossible without being able to actually identify who the community is.

What are the barriers?
The most obvious barrier to me is how we self identify in this community. For example, is someone at IBM in the same industry as someone at a 3 person open source based dev shop? We may not identify cleanly with each other. I know whenever I have to pick from a list of StatsCan industries I can never figure out where to put us. Are we marketing, are we technology are we content? This is a big issue that needs to be defined.

DigitalMediacamp defines us as…

Digital Media is most simply defined as any information that is created and shared virtually, rather than physically. It has growing applications in all industries, including:

Uhm, not sure about this definition as it is extremely broad and our company would not fit cleanly in those examples. Some work definitely needs to be done on this issue.

Next steps
I slipped out before the end of the session on Sat but I’ve heard there is an action item which is to continue this discussion on Jan 18th in Toronto. There will be info forthcoming.

I believe this is an important issue that we need to take care of as a grass roots initiative. It is up to us to stand up and be counted.