Category: Misc

Local elections are happening in New Zealand in a few weeks. As part of it people from the parties are active online.

On September 6th a wikipedia account called “manamangere” created a Wikipedia page for James Papali’i who is standing for Auckland city council seats on a Mana-linked ticket (Mangere is the suburb of Auckland near the Airport).

However a regular New Zealand Wikipedia editor made this edit to the article who linked back to a 2006 conviction that Papali’i had received for fraud.

“manamangere” is now asking that the article be removed since if it includes the fraud conviction it does more harm than good. In reality it will probably be removed since Papali’iis below the level of fame that usually gets an article.

 

Making infographics that don’t suck – Mike Mike Dickison

• www.numberpix.com
• Didn’t have a chance to take notes cause it was so full I couldn’t sit down

Gather on mass – featuring Rowan Simpson, Karl von Randow and Penny Hagen

Rowan Simpsons

• Developers + designers + dictators
• Poster Boy Dictator = Steve Jobs
• change made by people: who care, have authority, take responsibility
• Careful about words they use – Don’t use “they” , careful how you describe colleges, other teams, “the business”
• Domestics – members of cycling team supporting head rider
• Focus – we all know it is good but it is uncommon.
• Opposite of focus – Don’t get bored, don’t flail
• You don’t have to invent you just have to leverage these and execute
• Innovation just one action, execution requires you to keep going though many steps
• MVP – whatever you can sell
• Sales – How will overcome your obscurity?
• Be a polymath – what else are you good at? where is the intersection?

Karl van Randow

• Focus on design – how it looks and how it works
• “NASCAR fans” – generic term for customers
• Team in NZ, USA and Europe. ichat and skype
• Camera+
• Changed from “shoot and share” to “post-processing app”
• Lots of mockups, iterative design
• Initial startup page had animated viewfinder, launched with but removed after 6 months
• Custom typeface, skewed thumbnails, etc makes app feel unique
• Release to correspond with WWDC keynote, competition to give away $10k of camera gear. Lots of public charts of sales ( with nice infographics) to attract attention

Penny Hagen

• Design in the Wild.
• Iterative, largely private within company/studio at the start
• Few users at the start in house, but only a few testers.
• Beat blurs private/public
• Crowd sourcing – get ideas from public – cars, nightclubs, ACC ideas
• Open Design – Normal process but all phases open to public and takes input from public – eg Drupal website redesign ( 1600 people participated )
• Emergent Design – Initial design and then evolve final design from there. Patchwork prototyping ( start with existing software product and patch )
• DIY Design – Ponoko – Build a platform and let end users design
• Constant Design – ongoing conversations
• Potential / Challenges = mass distributed participation – transparency – everyone becomes a design
• Questions – who, how, why? – who owns ideas/IP? – who decides what is good/right – what tools? – what is designers roles? – why aren’t more people doing it?

 

Automating things – Mal Curtis

babushka – http://babushka.me

• nested dependencies.
• useful to define what software you need on a system as well as configuration
• similar to puppet and chef
• each dependency has a url to grab it from and a .app which list install defaults, configs, dependencies,
• server config just has a bunch of dependencies listed

Vagrant – vagrantup.com

• Automate process of creating virtual machines
• Runs program like babushka once machine is live

Capistrano

• Code deployment

Jenkins

• Continuous integration
• hard to setup – look at “go ci” instead perhaps

 

Powering a Mt Eden Cafe – Nate Dunn

• Tuihana Cafe in Mt Eden Rd
• Runs 3bits design setup

Chellenges

• Highly competative industry
• Tight margins
• Advertising doesn’t work very well

Get the basics right

• Clean, bright warn environment
• extraordinary staff and passionate staff
• Great coffee and food with plenty of choices ( but not too many options )
• Look after your regular customers

Clever Technology

• eftpos over broadband, with nfc
• naked DSL and VOIP – phone lines expensive, no need to dialup always on, have to have broadband for Free Wifi anyway, VOIP really cheap and works whereever you are
• coffee ordering via sms, email, twitter. Twitter DM -> Custom Windows App, 2N cellular gateway on vodafone prepay -> nice printout + reply with confirmation of email/sms/twitter. SMS is most popular method. Inspired by subway’s system. Commercial SMS gateways too expensive at their scale just $10/month for prepay acct.
• Learnt – word numbers not important, customers don’t read messages, some will register & never use, novelty for most, must-have for core group
• NFC – visa paywave + mastercard paypass – quickest way to pay. Few people have cards or know how to use
• Snapper not supported since they are with eftposnz and didn’t work with paymark eftpos provider
• Free Wifi – expected by most customers, just works having codes too complicated, rate/protocol/time limited . Extremely rate limited on all ports except 80/443 , time limit to 1h. Seperate SSds for customers and staff. Powered by mikrotik
• Google Alerts – looks for reviews anywhere, all sites. Put all reviews on our feedback page. Have a unique name so easy to find.
• foursquare – not heavily used, has 2 offers but rarely redeemed
• Only 150 followers, broadcast platform. DM ordering only used by a few
• Facebook – most customers on it, best bang for a buck advertising, good analytics. Take the good and the bad facebook posts. More people will see facebook post and come in than will like.
• custom facebook app checks twitter feed every 10 minutes and posts ( grabs photos off yfrog if linked ). People see posts of food and come in to buy
• Blog – facebook don’t like pulling RSS feed so have custom app to pull facebook notes and post to blog

 

Official Information Act requests – fyi.org.nz

• Need to be specific
• Ombudsman office a bit slow. Some problems with lack of “case law” from them
• Charges usually not a problem
• Over 3000 government bodies listed, around 2000 of them schools
• Bulk questions are discouraged, limits, has been abused overseas
• Even the GCSB respond to OIA requests
• Police and some govt departments require requests directly
• Information include Police interrogation manuals!