Ignite Boston 6

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I went to Ignite Boston 6 last night. If you’re not familiar, the Ignite format, as described by their website is a “five-minute presentation using a slide deck that auto-forwards every 15 seconds, whether you’re ready or not.”

I’ve been following the videos of previous Ignite talks online for the last six months or so. They’ve all been really cool, so I thought hey, there’s an Ignite Boston, I should go!

The verdict? Was it cool? Was it entertaining? Well…I was only mildly entertained. The challenge is, it’s a crapshoot–how “good” the event is depends entirely on the speakers and their topics. And while I *know* that the online videos show the “best” presentations, it’s hard not to set that expectation for all of the talks.

Here’s a recommendation for all folks that do give presentations. As yourself the question, would thousands of others find your topic and “show” entertaining, fascinating, useful or important enough to watch over and over again on YouTube or iTunes or O’Reilly’s Ignite site? Oh and for heaven’s sake, don’t read your presentation! It’s a show!

It takes a really good show to wrap that all into a 5 minutes.

Here’s what I found interesting from the speakers:

• MassDOT (we’ll that’ll be their name soon) is opening up statewide data about transportation so folks can mash it up, visualize it and build cool apps around it. Clearly useful/interesting to all the geeks (well really everyone) in Massachusetts. The ideas don’t have to be global, local’s ok, but they do have to be powerful.
• Speaking of Act Local, Get your Neighbor On. “Connect to people who live, work and serve in your nieghborhood and discover and organize around common interests.” Check out the stealth video.
• Tom Tullis from Fidelity talked about the impact of photos of people on websites. There’s been a trend to humanize websites with photos of people. But are they effective? Does it matter if the subject looks forward or at the text of the item they’re “pitching”? (Fidelity’s doing this to help drive users to read more about the products and services they offer, say for retirement accounts.) Or is it better to leave the faces off all together? The answer is it depends, though I think where he ended up at the end is that most of the users in their studies avoided looking at areas of the screen with photos–users thought that they were ads and immediately discounted the area around them. The use of faces in the attempt to build “trust” often backfires. I hope video on this presentaton gets posted, I’d like to take a look at the results again.
• Agile programming…deliver often…”fail” earlier. That’s a horrendous summary of the talk, but it’s the point that I’d like to get across to the teams I work on. Continuous development and delivery of software products/websites. Let’s do it. Let’s not do the single launch everything at the end. Let’s iterate. Examine. Fix. Update. Test again. Oh, and let’s know when to pull the plug; and let’s not wait forever to do it!
• What might be useful right away to the teams I work on (and for my friends that are software engineers) is the Clickframes framework. From their website:
  

  Clickframes provides self-coding documentation. From a Clickframes XML spec, software developers can generate fully-functional, enterprise-class MVC code that’s easy to evolve as the project proceeds, and eliminates a lot of the tedious coding usually needed to get the app running and to provide minor changes in functionality.

  –Clickframes.org

• CookingForGeeks.com is a forthcoming O’Reilly book on the same subject. Jeff Potter got everyone in the audience to taste test Phenylthiocarbaide to see if they’re a “super taster”.
  

  Cooking For Geeks is a guide to the kitchen for the analytically minded to help spark that magic. Why do some meals turn out great, while others fail? If you’re already handy in the kitchen, what scientific principles and tools can help guide you in creating new, memorable experiences? And how can you have more fun cooking for friends, coworkers, or a date?

  –Jeff Potter, CookingForGeeks.com

• “Collaborative Marketing” we could probably learn something from this in academia and for academic software.

Hrm, when I summarize it this way, it seems I got a lot out of it. Though I think I stand by it wasn’t quite the “show” I was hoping for.

Oh, and thanks to Twitter #igbos6 for helping me remember some of this!.[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]