Create the Future

UX Camp Edmonton

So it seems I'm a bit behind in my blogging (to put it lightly, ha).  I'm hoping to blog more frequently, however I always seem to say that and it has yet to happen, oi.

I've been organizing an event here in town called UX Camp with Jess McMullin from nForm and it's going to take place this Saturday (July 18th) starting at 9:00 at MacEwan in the Robbins Health Centre room 9-202. 

It's going to be very similar to BarCamp, only based around user experience and design.  We've structured the day around the "USE" UX cycle:

• Understand
  How to your define the problem you face? How to you generate empathy and insight? How do you use tools like observation, interviews, and field research to inform design and strategy? How do you understand the hopes, needs, dreams and desires of people? (both users, and business stakeholders). Where are there opportunities for innovation? What will create value?
• Solve
  Once you’ve defined a problem, how do you solve it? Lofi sketching & prototyping? Modeling? Flows? Wireframes? 37Signals Getting Real? Agile? Or does Agile suck? Let us know in a Solve Session.
• Evaluate
  As you come up with solutions, how do you tell if you’re on track? Design Review & Critique? Usability testing? Web Analytics? ROI? Pure gut feel & intuition? How do you know your solution works? How do you know where you need to do better? Do you have a product or design you want evaluated or reviewed? This is the place for that (and we’ve got some ideas for providing UX feedback for more than just one or two products, too).

It should be an interesting time and hopefully will start to bring together a bit of a UX community here in Edmonton and expose some more people to what user experience design is.  The event is going to have a combination of panels that we set up ahead of time and traditional open "un-conference" type sessions where attendees will be able to lead their own session.  The plan is to end the day with a design slam type session where people will be able to collaborate and use some of the ideas that they heard throughout the day.

There is a limited number of spots left If you are interested in attending you can sign up at: http://uxcamp.ca/register

DemoCamp Edmonton 6

Okay so I'm a bit behind my other postings on this but...

DemoCamp Edmonton 6 is in the pipeline.  DemoCamp Edmonton 6 is going to take place on March 11th at 6:30.  It is going to take place in ETLC Room E1-013.  If you would like to demo please sign up on the DemoCamp wiki (if you have any trouble let me know and I’ll enter you in).  Also if you are interested in attending you can check out the wiki, facebook group, or the blog.

As always please help us spread the word and let people know about DemoCamp.

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At # pkn Edmonton

Edmonton PKN 3 February 5th

The third installment of Edmonton's Pecha-Kucha Night is going to be held on February 5th at the Matrix Hotel.  Doors open at 6:00 and things get rolling at 7:00.  Tickets are $6 and can be bought from Tix on the Square.

For those of you who haven't made it out to a PKN or are unfamiliar with what Pecha-Kucha is; the way it works is that presenters have 20 slides, set on 20 second auto advance, to talk about the project that they are working on.  This keeps presentations, short and makes speakers get to the point.  It's a fantastic format as ideas get boiled down to their basics and if there is presentation that doesn't interest you it'll be over in under 7 minutes.

Thanks to Elicia, Cary and the PKN team for getting this rolling, the first events were great and I'm pumped for this one.

Closing Out 2008

Closing out 2008 it is interesting to look back at what happened through the last 12 months.  For the most part I'm happy with 2008 and what was accomplished during the year.  BarCamp and DemoCamp Edmonton were both started this year and saw a lot of growth.  We went from 65 people in the basement of the Business building at the U of A, to having 100 people at BarCamp, and close to 150 people at our last DemoCamp.  Overall it has been great to see the tech community as a whole grow this past year.  The crazy thing is that after a year of so many people getting together every week I meet/find out about another company or person doing something cool in tech in Edmonton.  I'm really stoked to see the tech community continue to grow in 2009 and learn from and support each other.  Mack Male has a great post on many of the awesome tech happenings that took place in 2008 if you are interested in seeing an even bigger run down.

Personally 2008 was a crazy year.  I starter the year in the WestLink program working with ThinkTel Communications and as of August began working as the Product Manager at Nexopia.  Working with the Nex team the last few months has been great and we're looking forward to what 2009 holds for us.

There are so many people I need to thank for all the work, advice, opportunities, support, etc. this past year that I'm worried if I start to thank some of them I'm going to leave way too many out.  You know who you are, THANK YOU very much for everything this last year.  I'm pumped to work with everyone again more in 2009.

One of my goals for the year was to blog a lot more, I pretty much failed at that, and hopefully 2009 will see more action on my blog.

DemoCamp Edmonton 4

It's DemoCamp time again in Edmonton.  DemoCamp Edmonton 4 is scheduled to take place on October 29th at 6:30 at the U of A ETLC room E1-017.  It will be great to have the community together again and see some more great things that are going on.

As a part of the community building process, we're looking for people to help spread the word. We'd like to challenge everyone to tell a few people about Democamp and physically bring at least one new person to the event.  Additionally we're looking for volunteers to help us target different groups of people in a more organized fashion. If you want to help us spread the word to schools, media, demoers or service providers, let us know. We really want to grow a focused team of people to make democamp Edmonton the best it can be.

If you are interested in attending or demoing or helping,  you can find out more information and sign up on the wiki at www.barcamp.org/DemoCampEdmonton4

If you have any questions feel free to fire me off an email.
See you there...

Semanti Demos at DEMO 08

Edmonton Startup Semanti Corp. took their place on stage at Demo 08 in San Diego.  Semanti is a Firefox plugin that sits on top of Google allowing users to search based on word's semantic meaning, the results are shown in a box above your google search results and are based on what other sites users have said belong in those categories.  Check out their presentation at DEMO 08 (embeded below).
Check out www.semantifind.com to sign up for their beta.