David Stillwell, Science Director, Cambridge Personality Research
 Azeem Azhar, Founder & CEO, Peer Index
 Martin Talks, President, Digital, Draft FCB.
 Nathalie Nahai, Digital Strategy | Web Psychology, The Web Psychologist

It was a highly interactive session, becoming a trending topic on Twitter and ending up as one of the most talked about events of the week, with Nathalie Nahai winning speaker of the week award. Gabrielle Laine-Peters has curated an excellent storify of the event which gives an overview of what was covered, and the video of the session is now on YouTube:

David talked about the impact of personality type on our on-line behaviours,  Nathalie introduced neuroesthetics, Azeem shared insights from PeerIndex and Martin was our caveman-in-residence. With cognitive, experimental, applied and evolutionary psychology covered, I threw in some social psychology: Should we consider groups as a unit of influence, rather that individuals? We often think about influence as an end point, but we’re constantly influencing and being influenced. It is a networked effect, at least in what we see in the work we do here – a business is built of influences working together and against each other, shaping opinions, making things happen, blocking things. Messages flow across the network, spreading, branching and interrupting.

It was very interesting that the lean methodology came up during the session. Want to test a new product? Create a Minimum Viable Product, test it and adapt it. Even the experts find it very hard to predict behaviours. Sometimes a good old-fashioned experiment is the fastest way to find out what will work. Decision making is a complex process, involving emotional factors that lead to “evidence” gathering to  justify the decision rationally. The over riding evidence is that we aren’t as rational as we think we are (although not totally unpredictable)!

Nathalie has posted her slides and has a book coming out soon, and Martin has posted a podcast of interviews. And, if you missed it or want more, keep your eyes peeled – Chinwag has a longer half-day event in May – more details soon.

The short answer to the question is that the transitions happen badly today. The keyboard still remains the primary interface for converting off-line conversations into on-line knowledge. Of course, it isn’t really the keyboard, ultimately it’s the human that makes the conversion between the two worlds take place. That brings a good deal of fallibility to the process, but it is also what makes it inherently personal, human and social, and what makes social software so well suited to tackling the issue.

Blogs and Wikis have long been used to capture the essence of meetings and events, to make them more broadly available to the organisation – although I continue to be shocked by how few meetings are minuted, or even have actions recorded (as Penny was). Milestone Planner has made that process a habit for me – typing a line of text and clicking on an avatar is all it takes to record an action. The simple act of creating a digital record of the off-line event has a dramatic impact on the likelihood that it will be followed up and actually happen. When that action is ‘socially’ accountable – by being made visible on-line to others – the likelihood goes up even further (that’s one of the main concepts behind Milestone Planner).

The interface between on-line to off-line data has also been a narrow one. The office printer is still the main way that digital assets get back into the physical world. There is the occasional nod to the meeting room projector, that makes our PowerPoint creations appear as a fleeting flash of light, but the piles of printed paper that seem to gather by any office printer bear testament to the device’s dominant role in creating ‘real’ things from our digital machinations.

The narrow paths between on-line and off-line in the business world seem ridiculous when you look at the technology we actually have at our finger tips: Phones to capture pictures and video, or even audio, conference call systems that can record and transcribe speech, virtual world environments, speech to text software, augmented reality, … the list goes on. Many business folks are already using these tools – mostly the ones that move in social media circles I note! – but they are a tiny minority in a sea of literal monotony.

Mobile devices, be they phones or tablets, have a central role to play in smoothing the transition between the on-line and off-line lives of business data. That is partly due to the amount of technology they pack into one space, but it is one of the things to fall out of the inherently personally nature of the interface between the two worlds: Mobiles are inherently personal, privatised and individual. We keep them with us, much more than laptops, and they have a much better sense of our place and identity, through features such as GPS, and their ability to create and store video and photos that represent our daily experiences.

Unsuprisingly then, mobile devices have lead the charge in enabling better ways of switching between the two worlds. Possibly one of the most clunky ways this is happening is in the use of QR codes, little square of digital magic that can be printed, then viewed by reader software and used to jump to a web page. Though many question their usefulness, 14 million Americans in the month of July used a QR code – that’s a lot of interactions. Where do they fit into the business process? How about putting a QR code on a meeting room door, with a link to the on-line booking system, or adding them to your meeting documents to give attendees a link back to the project plan or documentation? Although they are effectively a progression from bar codes, they don’t have to be boring. The built in error correction allows marketers and designers a lot of creative freedom.

QR Codes are just one way that the divide is being bridged, there are plenty more exciting ones. On one side, virtual reality systems have been building out from the virtual world, on the other, augmented reality systems have been building out from the physical world. The main thrust of a recent Digital Surrey event at CSC’s offices was that the two will become increasingly blurred. Businesses like Layar have be creating digital layers of information over the physical world, so that you can interact with information around physical objects. You might already have seed the Arcade Fire video, that has a great example of using video and HTML 5 to create a personalised video that draws in the physical world. Another example is Blue Mars Lite, a 3D virtual world platform that draws on Google’s street view data. It enables you to gather people into a virtual space, based on a real world environment, and chat and explore that space online.

Social technology, and the developments around it, can blend on and offline, easing business processes and making them both more human, and less fallible. So much valuable business information is still transient and offline – corridor conversations, customer meetings, conference calls. The majority of that information is undiscoverable , unsearchable, and ultimately lost - those who couldn’t be right there, right then, loose the benefit of the interactions, often resulting in repeated conversations and decisions made with inaccurate or out of date knowledge. To paraphrase an old sci-fi programme: We have the technology to fix this, we can rebuild it. The barriers are not the technology any more, they are resistance to change, and a lack of application.

There is a lovely video from Microsoft doing the rounds, which paints a picture of better ways of interacting with devices:

I have to admit to being a bit disappointed to see a QWERTY keyboard in the video, but other than that, it is an exciting vision.  As Steve commented during the event “Providing a friction free way for teams to collaborate significantly increases likelihood that they will do so.” - We are already starting to experiment with the ways touch can be used to create better business applications, and in the next few weeks we’ll be adding QR code support to aspects of what we do here. There is much to be done!

Before the event, we surveyed some of the participants using our on-line survey tool. Here are some highlights of what we found, taken directly from the survey report:

length of time on twitter

Whilst the majority of people there had been using twitter for over 3 years – almost as long as it has been around, there was also a significant spread of newer users, including some who were very, very new to Twitter. The range of experience lead to a very broad range of discussions, from the basics of how to use Twitter, to in-depth discussions about how it has changed as it has grown.

Hoping to meet someone in real life

Emphasising the way in which connections on Twitter have a habit of moving into the ‘real world’, three quarter’s of the attendees said that they hoped that tweetcamp would allow them to say ‘Hi’ to someone in real life that they already knew through twitter, and there seemed to be plenty of opportunity to do that during the course of the day, with a large open area and sessions in 8 or 9 breakout rooms. There were conversations everywhere.

What do you want to talk about?

People came with a massive range of things to talk about, as evidenced by this word cloud from the answers to one of the survey questions.

The thing I took away from this Tweetcamp, much like the first one in 2009, is how much services like Twitter are changing the way we work and live. The immediacy, the fact that everyone can now have their own platform to shout from, the speed at which news travels, and just how connected we all are, all add up to a rapidly changing world that the attendees at Tweetcamp were keen to discuss and debate. Today’s web is both real-time, and personal.

David Thornton from RIM very kindly gave me an overview and demonstration of the device – I like what I heard and saw!

Last week, while I was in Austin, Texas, for South by South West Interactive (probably the world’s largest festival of digital media technology), I finally gave in. Apple, never one to miss a PR opportunity, had established a ‘pop up’ store in the centre of Austin. With 40,000+ geeks in town, and timed to directly co-incide with the iPad 2 launch, it was like shooting fish in a barrel for them. Every single day, from launch, the store (which only sold iPad 2s!) sold out.

By day 2, surrounded by swarms of excited new iPad 2 owners, my will power finally gave out. Well, actually, I decided I really ‘needed’ one for development purposes… Apple made the purchase process almost dream like, with a dedicated Apple employee guiding you through the choice of product, recommending apps to install on it, and helping you choose an oh-not-so-optional cover to go with it. Even posing for photographs. Here I am, 10 minutes later, unboxing the iPad 2:

So, what does this have to do with what we are doing here at SocialOptic? Well, a couple of things. Firstly, we are seeing more and more iPads, and other tablet devices, in use in business, and are being asked to develop applications for them, which we are doing. The mobile version of Milestone Planner already works on the iPad, but we are now investigating how we use its capabilities to enhance the Milestone Planner experience on tablet platforms. The combination of a touch interface and a handheld format make it a very compelling platform for updating plans in real-time during meetings, and the 3G functionality means that you can have access to your plans from anywhere.

Tablet devices help staff work ‘outside of the box,’ breaking down the barriers that make many business applications boring, hard to use and non-intuitive. With tablets, the style of interaction is fast, intuitive and rewarding. That becomes even more powerful when real-time collaboration is involved. Watch this space, as they say. We are loving the magic.

Milestone Planner running on the Nokia N900

The power of mobiles for productivity is the way they allow you to use the interstitial time in the day – A few spare moments waiting for the train, stuck in a lift or running between meetings – It’s all time that can be used to check in with your team, shoot off updates and re-plan on the fly. I found running Milestone Planner on the N900 a handy complement to planning sessions with a big screen and the laptop. The high resolution screen (for a mobile) and touch interface turns out to be a nifty combination for jabbing at Milestones and dragging things around. We’re building a list of things to do to improved the mobile experience. Not all handsets are able to fully run Milestone Planner, which takes me on to the sticky world of mobile application development…

On the web or on the handset?

For a long while I’ve strongly believed the future of mobiles is web-based applications (long before it was fashionable). In the past the glue of the web (HTML) was extremely limiting when it came to developing rich internet applications (RIAs) like Milestone Planner. However, this isn’t really the case anymore. With the advent of HTML5, and phones that run Javascript applications with decent performance, things are starting to change. There is something even bigger happening too: Flash is coming to the mobile screen. Nokia high-end handsets have had Flash for a while, and Andriod is joining in too. We might have a bit of a bias (the main timeline view in Milestone Planner is built in Flash), but it is a powerful way to build apps with rich user intefaces. Don’t think of those silly splash screens landing screens you get on marketing web sites, or the flash games that proliferate across the web, think serious business applications – Things like Milestone Planner, where there are hundreds of objects on the screen you can interact with. Apple might hate it, but flash is big news.

There is still a case for on handset development. If you use specific features of the handset, it’s the best way to get to them. I was at Nokia’s Ovi Developer event yesterday, and it was a good reminder of just what can be done on a handset. It’s something we’re still thinking about – e.g. integrating with the address book and calendar, and using sensors, location or messaging features in the phone. It’s a little less binary than just ‘on the handset’ versus ‘on the web’.Nokia positioned three sorts of mobile apps: Web Apps, Java Apps (on the phone, cross platform) and Native Apps (designed for the handset).

It’s a confusing world, but at the end of the day, what you want is something that works, where you are, when you need it. The mobile phone has a great opportunity to eat into the traditional domain of desktop computing. Many of us are ‘mobile in the office’ – meaning we aren’t desk bound – so even within the four walls of the office, mobile apps are important. So, rest assured, you’ll see more mobile features for Milestone Planner. The web interface already works with most mobile web browsers, and phones like Nokia’s can run the full app as it is today.

I’m in Amsterdam, at Orange Business Live 2010 – An event Orange Business Services runs each year, looking at the challenges and changes in the communications space. At the pre-event evening event one thing that really struck me was the value in networking and networks. Not just the global data networks that have been built (and many of which Orange Business Services run), but the human networks that drive business, and the value of person-to-person communication.

The activity of meeting industry peers, exchanging ideas, and sharing experiences and challenges, is an intensely valuable one. It’s an interesting time for the CIOs here. While there is conversation about the place of machine-to-machine communication, the bigger buzz was about building the “human network” within the business, enabling people across the globe to work as if they were standing side-by-side.

Business agility is a key theme here. The speed of change today is phenomenal, to borrow an example from Helmut Reisinger, Senior Vice President Europe, Orange Business Services: ”Days to a million” is shrinking. Apple took 724 days to sell a million devices with the first iPod, 74 days for the first iPhone, and just 3 days for the iPhone 2. Business has to move faster, react faster, make decisions faster. That means getting information around the organisation more quickly, but meaningfully.

“Gen Y” is becoming an increasing percentage of the work force, brining with them new expectations about connectivity and communication. A new generation of IT users is coming into the work place, and for them their first experience of IT was their mobile phone. It’s something that’s true from India to Europe.

From a SocialOptic perspective, this is not news. Milestone Planner has always been about building human networks with plans and people as nodes in that network. We’ve seen how rapidly human networks build, and how effectively information travels when it traverses across social graphs (human networks again!) rather than org charts. What is news it quite how quickly the shift is happening. You can see it in people’s faces as they interact with the blogging team. There’s curiosity, and less caution, about understanding social computing and what it can do for business.

Data networks’ value is in supporting the human network, and the most valuable software is that which joins the human network to the global network. Now, I might be a bit biased in that, but I challenge you to tell me that that isn’t so!

The general consensus was that we do communicate differently. Comms are more direct and real-time, and more public and discoverable too. It is also, arguably, more cautious because of that.

Milestone Planner gives us an unusual perspective, sitting both within businesses and across them. Early on we saw a pattern that the best external users of Web 2.0 and social media were also the best internet uses – or visa versa. It’s something that Lee Bryant of Headshift talked about at Being-Social, and has blogged about as well: Social on the outside needs social on the inside. Effective communication is as much a cultural thing as a technological one. Of course the right tools help, and can accelerate the cultural change – I guess we would say that wouldn’t we! Here’s what Lee has to say:

The session that most stuck in my mind was ”Do The Right Thing: Building Respectful Software”, hosted by Matthew Rothenberg and Gavin Bell. I caught up with Gavin at the Digital Mission stand later, which was a great chance to chat about his new book, “Building Social Web Applications” – available on Amazon UK,Amazon US, or O’Reilly. – and to talk social software.

Building web-based applications in a responsible fashion is much harder than it seems at first glance. From privacy issues, to sensible default settings, “doing the right thing” isn’t always that easy. The session was a useful chance to reflect on many of the recent changes to Milestone Planner, and where we go next, from the names used in projects, to how the RSS and calendar features work.

When we added RSS and Calendar support to Milestone Planner, we went for the most secure option available. Secure RSS feeds aren’t that common or well understood. We use them because we want to keep people’s project data as secure as we can. When you login to Milestone Planner, via the web, and choose a project and you will see an RSS Feed icon in the window. If your browser supports it, you will also see it in the menu bar. The first time you select the RSS feed, depending on your RSS reader, you will need to sign in again. From an application point of view, this is ‘the right thing to do’ as each one application uses a seperate copy of your user ID and password, so that you can control access by application. From a user perspective, it seem a little bit of a hassle, but from a security perspective, it is the right thing. The alternative is to leave RSS feeds open, or protect them via a ‘feed key’ which is publicly visible.

Once you add a project feed to your RSS reader (or email client – both OS X’s mail.app and Microsoft’s Outlook can read Milestone Planner’s RSS feeds), you are good to go. You can choose to authenticate the RSS feed once or every time. The settings are controlled by your RSS reader, not Milestone Planner. Whenever someone updates a project, you will get an update via the RSS feed – very handy!

Calendars have their own interesting twist. When you click on the calendar icon in a project, it will fire the a calendar feed. This is a dynamically updated calendar, which you can sync to OS X iCal, Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird’s calendar or any app that supports the web calendar standard. Whenever a milestone moves, the calendar feed is automatically updated. Just like RSS feeds, you will need to login to the calendar feed separately. If you allow your calendar program to store the login details, you only need to do this once. Remember to set the calendar to auto-update – not all calendar clients do this by default. Even though the standard allows us to specify the default refresh time in the feed, sadly many of the Calendar applications tend to ignore this. That’s definitely not doing the right thing!

We have also added Gravatar support. If you have one, you already know what it is. Very simply, a gravatar is a Globally Recognised Avatar – a nice picture of you that can be used (in a project) to identify you. It is more recognisable than the email address on which it is based, and better represents the social nature of Milestone Planner. If you don’t have a gravatar Milestone Planner generates an icon for you, which you will see in the people bar at the top of the page. Setting up your own Gravatar is very straight forward.

We hope you enjoy the new features in Milestone Planner. Here is a request from us: If you see a place where you think we might have set the defaults wrong, or things could be better, let us know. Milestone Planner isn’t just a team-based tool, it’s a team effort, and we’d be very glad to have you on the team!

It was a far cry from the ‘fluffy’ end of Social Media, instead the conversation was grounded and practical. It was fantastically well run, with a format that mixed presentations with panels, lunch-time discussions and theopportunity for one to one discussion. It even managed to highlight a number of local charities in the format. A huge amount came out of the day, but for this post I’ll focus on the things that most directly impact what we are doing here at SocialOptic. Much of the press coverage around social media has been on the consumer space, so it was refreshing to have a lunch hosted by Madlen Nicolaus of Kodak that focussed on social media in the field of Business to Business. With people like Stuart Baines of Futurity Media, Yann Gourvennec and Adam Tinworth around the table, ideas flowed. Three key bullet points for me were:

• Think about your use case. Are you looking for new uses for an existing product, or new customers? They require different strategies.
• Social media can be used to augment market research, but what people ask for and what they will buy are very different. The need for product management skills has increased, not decreased.
• Is your business the right focus for building a customer community? Sometimes it is better to support an existing topical community and be part of that. Any one product is just a small part of a business person’s life.

Something that, for me, there isn’t enough discussion about is using Social Media inside of the business, and as part of the business processes for internal and external communication. I might have a slight bias (given that we see Milestone Planner as social software), I think it provides one of the biggest returns for business. Olivier Blanchard’s keynote: ‘Integrating People-to-People’ did an excellent job of providing an integrated look at a potential operational framework for social media, which Olivier has blogged about here. I joined Oliver for a panel, moderated by Andrew Gerrard, with Steve Bridger, myself and Gabrielle Laine-Peters. It was interesting that, while we all have wildly different perspectives, our thoughts and conclusions were broadly the same. The key notes for me were:

• The age of Social Media means thinking differently about who you hire. On the one hand, as I often repeat, we are all in PR now, and on the other, collaboration trumps management in an innovative business.
• Social Media isn’t just about marketing, it is about all forms of communication, from customer service to facilities management. Tactical use of the technology can miss the major benefits.
• Leaders need to give staff ‘permission to act’. Demanding that employees use social media, while punishing them for doing so, is never going to have a constructive outcome.

There is a long way to go in understanding how the use of social media is changing employees expectations around communication, and a huge depth of opportunities for the use of the technology. Like Minds provided a great framework to think about both of these and some steps forwards. I am sure it will be driving many of the milestone updates in our plans, and posts on our internal blog for a good while to come! Thank you to Scott and Drew, the attendees, those that watched on line and to the speakers and panellists.

Q: If you gave an infinite number of  monkeys an infinite amount of time, would they reproduce the works of Shakespeare ? A: Now we have the blogosphere, we know that they won’t.

The Internet, or more specifically the Web that runs on top of it, has given hundreds of millions of people the ability to share ideas and thoughts with each other. We are seeing what that means in the public, consumer space, but what does it mean for businesses?

Enter Jemima Gibbon’s new book “Monkeys with Typewriters – Myths and realities of social media at work” . I had the pleasure of being at it’s launch last night, in a packed lecture theatre at Cass Business School. Jemima (@JemimaG) was joined by a panel featuring Euan Semple / @euan, Luis Suarez / @Elsua, and @Suw, chaired by Clive Holtham / @bunhill and with Jemima of course.

The panel was presented with a series of questions, followed by a Q&A with the audience, then a vote on the question – a kind of wireless quiz show for grown ups. I’ll go through the questions, with points from the panel that struck me, and a few points from my own perspective.

Does online social networking during office hours waste valuable working time?

This one is almost an old chestnut. Euan pointed out that we focus on social networking and social media, but don’t question other wastes of time like meetings that don’t come to a conclusion, or time spent writing unused reports. Then there’s the motivation problem, as Suw put it, if employees are wasting time on Facebook, you don’t have a social networking problem, you have an employee engagement problem.

Luis made the business case for social tools in the workplace:  What about wasting time trying to find the right expert? He said that in IBM they found that it could take 2-3 hours. With social networks, they are able to find the right expert in less than 5 mins.

The questions from the floor were pretty supportive of social networking. I actually voted “yes” to the question, simply because the tools are used to waste time – there are employees who will make recreational use of social networking. That doesn’t mean that it should be banned or that the tools are a waste of time, rather that employee engagement should be looked at, and people taught how to use the tools professionally and productively.

Vote Result: 83 Votes with 47% Yes / 53% No.

Is email the best way to share information and ideas?

Luis obviously had a view on this one (Luis / @elsua is most famous for having spent two years working almost totally without email). He made the point that if you reply to emails, you only get more. He went on holiday and had only 4 emails when he came back. That sounds wonderful to me! Suw talked about the ‘interruption’ cost of email – after that ‘bing’ goes off, how long does it take to get back into flow state? We end up like little skinner rats, pressing on the lever (checking email) to see if something nice will have arrived for us with each press of the ‘check button’.

Email is seen as a proxy for productivity – if you get and send lots of email you must be busy – and Suw talked about how email is used by people to cover their rears. Euan argued that it is about self preservation – you need to learn to let things go.

Ask “do I really need to send this email?” – there may be a better way of doing it… …the more I hang out in email the less I get done for myself

Luis

I know from data collected for the Continued Communication research project that only a tiny percentage of users consciously choose what  communications channel they use – people generally respond through the channel that a message was received by: calls with calls, emails with emails. This is one of the reasons we are building tools to keep people out of their inboxes. People prefer to use email, as they perceive it to “not disturb the other person”.

Vote Result:  65% No  – 35% Yes.

I’ll talk about one more question, specifically because it has come up on the blog here before (“Hubs to meshes – Person to Person Management”):

If companies allowed employees to “self-organize” would nothing ever get done?

A wonderfully provocative question, with suitably robust answers from the panel:

“It is not a situation of will anything get done, it is a question of when can we do this across the whole organisation?” @Elsua

Luis painted a very clear picture of how knowledge management is transforming the work place, while Jemima cited the example of The Tuttle Club as a self-organising collective. Suw pointed out that small groups can self-organise easily, large ones cannot. In the end the panel and the audience made a compelling argument against a yes/no answer – it seems to be a matter of individual, role and extent. Euan raised the topic up another level, asking if organisations are tolerant enough of failure?.. One of the characteristics of long-lived organisations is tolerance.

In the end the Vote Result: 80% no, 20% yes, but with quite a lot more abstentions than the other votes!

I think there were a few moments when the audience and the questions got themselves confused between yes’, no’s and double negatives, but it made for a vibrant debate, touching on the many issues that need to be thought through. Biased as I am (I’m featured in the book), I would highly encourage you to grab yourself a copy. Jemima’s writing style is wonderfully engaging and you’ll hear opinions from a broad selection of those active in the space, including Tim O’Reilly of all things Web 2.0 , JP Rangaswami of BT and Lee Bryant of Headshift.

Pictures (CC) Benjamin Ellis

On Monday Jim and myself headed down the road to Dell’s Bracknell office for their B2B Social Media Huddle. Here’s my redux of the day, via selected highlights from the Twitter stream (Twitter search for the full set). @kerryatdell kicked things off with an energiser – hence the picture – Thanks go to Kerry and Neville (@jangles) for organising a great day focussed on social media in the Business to Business context, with speakers from across industry and a good mixture of presentations, case studies and group discussions.

As well as the Twitter stream, I’ve added links to the presentations posted to slide share, so you can browse through for yourself. Neville started the presentations with a review of survey results and an overview of  the major trends in the social media space:

Jim and I recently headed into London to join a long list of folks at Agilecamp, an unconference at the end of the two day Agile Business Conference. You can hear organiser Tim Difford’s audioboos from the event and AudioBoo developer Thomas Haggett explained how agile is used to develop the AudioBoo application.

Mark Kobayashi-Hillary then spoke about Agile Outsourcing and the progress made in working with suppliers. Mark wrote a post on Computing’s Talking outsourcing blog about our discussion afterwards, where we discussed the tricky challenges of meshing the new with the old – Thank you to Dave Evans for his insights as well.

For those new to the agile methodology, here are the main principles, the DSDM Atern way at least, based on a philosophy of Process, People, Products and Practices:

1. Focus on the business need.
2. Deliver on time.
3. Collaborate.
4. Never compromise quality.
5. Develop iteratively.
6. Build incrementally from foundations.
7. Communicate continuously and clearly.
8. Demonstrate control.

You might want to read the Agile Manifesto too:

…Through this work we have come to value:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Working software over comprehensive documentation.
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation.
Responding to change over following a plan.
…while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.

SocialOptic tools, like Milestone Planner, aren’t just built this way, they are designed to enable people to work this way. For me, the most significant take away from the afternoon was this: Traditional methods treat programming as a process of production. The future is in treating it as a creative process that results in elegant solutions to difficult problems.

More of a flavour of the event in pictures: