Nick Balestra Personal Blog

Input Date - A quick UX exploration

During the past days we tried to understand how to put together the best UX for inputing date and time online. While this may sounds easy few thing are to be taken into account:

1) People is used to the calendar methapor for inputing dates

2) Time format differ from Europe vs States

3) In our scenario the starting and finishing date/time just tell you about When of an event and as you can tell it in a single phrase, you should be able to input it on a single line too.

The above image is our solution to the problem and is about a mix of what @brianteeman, @rpijpers and @HilsCheyne also suggested via twitter chat about the topic. Also thanks @epic_bagel for linking me to the 37 signals article about the exploration due-dates in the to-do list in base camp.

A) Date: as in our scenario when people start an event they already know the date for it - thats why we kept the date picker calendar as minal as possible to quicken the process of input your desired date (for example no week, days labels)

B) Time: instead of going trough multiple drop downs, as you see mostly out there, we thought that a masked form (hh:mm) will be the fastest way to input the time, no clicks just type it! This allow to quick input time up to the minute ( if this have to be done through drop downs means a 60 element list just for the minutes ).

C) As not everywhere people use the same time format, we will show to the people in the countries that use the 12h format a drop down to select Am / Pm. All the other visitors won’t see it and are then just free to input the time in the 24h format without having to care about the am-pm.

This solution works really nice in our usecase-scenario and we are pretty happy with the outcome. Thanks to our awesome UI/UX designer @jonnotie to have putted together such an awesome solution and to everyone of you who discussed this on twitter. This quick post is a feedback in that direction.

If you have any thought just get in the loop: @nickbalestra

Experience Events through a remote Event POD

There are events you can attend live, there are events you can attend remotely through the net, there are hybrid events you can attend both live or remotely and there are event PODs! Event PODs, are sub events dislocated around the globe and attached to the main event. Event PODs are a new experimental way to enable to live attend events through a remote location. If you still not clear about what an event POD actually is, read “What the heck is an Event POD” by Samuel J. Smith. I’ve recently took part on the eventcamp POD in Switzerland, Basel. This article is about my POD experience, the outcome, the potential and it’s possible applications.

The Usecase: 

Event Camp twin Cities is an event about inspiring you to try new communication and collaboration paradigms at your events. An international event made by event experts around the world, coming together to share and experiment in order to push the envelope in the meetings and events industry. This year, thanks to Ruud Jannssen, an eventcamp POD was organized in Basel, Switzerland. Eventcamp is born online, you can read more about the history of eventcamp here.

The Basel POD took place chez Café Tacuba, a really cool spot in the old Basel Town, which provided a confy room, plasmas, beamers, interconnectivity through free wifi and great food!

The setup provided a front channel stream (sync slides, and video) through sonic foundry service, that I have to say provided an amazing quality. On the back of the room there were some 27” imacs with skype to provide the back channel to the event, it was a little like watching the event in Minneapolis from behind the scene. Then On a third wall a projector was showing the tweet channel trough the use of a dedicated twubs, and also functioned as our stage, where Elling Hamso did his amazing Pecha Kucha presentation about event roi. The presentation was not only for us on the pod but also back streamed to the minneapolis mean event attendees!

A total of 11 pax was attending the basel event camp POD.

During the whole event there were interaction among the pods and the main event hub trough the use of different technologies like google moderator, twitter, audio and video (skype). Presentation in minneaplois also addressed remote and PODs attendees with group sessions, Q&A, and feedback gathering. 

The Experience

• The overflow of information trough the many channels coming in at an event POD, can be quite overhelming. Being able to pay attention to the slides and stream coming through the front channel, following twitter discussion and real time discussion happing among us at the POD was quite hard to manage for anybody. The need of a socialmedia DJ should be encouraged for such events. The idea is that the SM DJ can mix and match information coming from various channel, select and present them in a single stream, experimentation in this area is of course needed to adjust this issue.
• Non-stop connection to the main event was also something not that easy to manage as climax were different. The main program should fix and schedule those interaction and connected moment. and a small area where the non stop streaming of the real event should be provided so that POD attendee could just sit there, plug their earphone and follow sessions or presentation happening on the main event and vice versa, attendee at the main event could select to watch and follow parts and sessions happening at the PODs. Think of POD’s like rooms of the main venue, where sessions happens that goes altogether on the global program. People should be able to select which session they are interested and would like to attend both on the pods or on the main event venue.
• PODs should also have session and speaker attending, as they are not just a virtual conference, but are part of the event itself. So presence of speakers is highly suggested. Because of the remote dislocation of pods, more international speakers can be involved. 
• Number of Poeple attending a pod should be between 10 to 20 maximum as small group works better then big ones, in case more people are interested in remote pods, more of them could be organized, differentiating  the session offer, guiding attendee to the pods that more fulfill their interests.
• PODs could be very heterogeneous in how they are setup and in what they provide as program, so that more practical ones with hands one session could co-exist side by side with more classical presentation conference styled ones.

Conclusions: Potential and Possible applications

Event PODs, are a terrific way to bring people together on remote location that couldn’t travel or reach the main event location. They foster regional and local networking that can more easily be trasnlated into synergies, cooperation’s and collaborations.

I would love to see pods happening for international open-source events like international Joomla! day events. As i personally believe that community driven events are the best scenario for pods to happen spontaneously, and among people that somehow know each other around the world. This confidence among pods and events organizer is something that at this time is still needed as depending on the technologies used issues are likely to arise at some points.

In the end I would says that event PODs offer tremendous value to remote attendee as pods are what event are all about: bringing people together! The advantage of attending  an Event PODs is something that will enrich and empower the main event itself, because who said that only live attendee would have the more benefit otu of the event? PODs of course have lot them to offer to their pax. So..happy Event Podding to everybody !

Social Graphing Events

“Events are entering a new era and social media is becoming an increasingly important and visible element in the transformation of events. However, the full extent of social media’s use in events is still not very well known. Social media has greater power in events than many realize”.  From Social Media in the New Event World”

As for today,  event organizers are faced with numerous social networks that can be used to spread out and engage conversation about their events, thanks to their huge social graphs, like for example Facebook.  Although all this social networks provide really limited tools in their event pages.

I strongly believe that events are no different then social networks, in fact many organizers easily associate events to social networks because of the many social interactions and networking that occur among attendees before, during and after an event. That’s what many good companies and projects try to address, like Pathable Crowdvine, The Social Collective, and many others. Treating events as social networks is indeed a logical path nowadays, but threatening them as little isolated walled gardens doesn’t always fit a bigger picture:  not allowing the social graph they create to grow avoiding to embrace the changes that the social media is bringing in the events world. Events are not isolated islands anymore, they are all linked together, because events are made by people, and people are central interconnected nodes. Wanna see why?

(For anybody of you that don’t know what a social graph is, just think of nodes and edges that define their connections, If you put people among those nodes then you have a social graph, the more edges are created the bigger the graph it gets).

So here we are with huge social networks to be used to spread and share, social media to help and support conversation across different channels and finally online tools for the organizers to sell tickets and manage the event registration process (like for example Eventbrite, Amiando, Bookwhen and many others). The problem is that even if those event tools are starting integrating social media to their services they still based on the basic architecture of event = registration & ticketing, allowing for small social networking experience and engagement.

The result of this scenario can be seen in the explosion of event planners blogs and groups,  twitter hash tag channel and forums where everybody give its receipt of mixing and matching to accomplish something. Is so exiting to be in such an experimental and innovative wave where great idea born almost every day, where nobody is inventing anything but just thinking out of the box on how to use in a different way all this new powerful social media tools for the benefits of their events. Social media is not about reinventing the wheel is about making it spinning.

Let’s think if Facebook events will allows you to manage ticketing, adding custom event registration, managing mailing and communication, giving planners event apps to manage the social media conversations, the budgeting, and whatever kind of event apps you can think of. Think if organizers could co-organize and collaborate on this, think if speakers will not be only in a single event page but also in other events where he attended or gave notes making those events related to each other in some way trough the edges of this graph. That’s the vision we have and the reason we are building ohanah, as in such emerging landscape a truly integrated social media event platform was needed to facilitate those changes. We are not the first, Socializr from friendster founder, or Zoji , are somehow early tries of this but we think they didn’t leverage the full potential of what a completely social graph architecture can bring to an event platform.

Its hard even for us to completely draft what the end result of this journey will  be,  what we can say is that we are not focusing on making your event pages being able to have funny extravagant colors, or advanced layouts, as we think your event logo should be strong enough to represent your brand as you do with your own brand on Twitter, Facebook and so on. The more clean and enjoyable the overall experience is, the better for your event, organizers and attendees. The rest is all about the people that make your event coming alive, the social media and the generated content.

Only by having such a centralized event centric social graph system, we believe that events could discover new possibilities bringing the next event experience completely harmonious with the changes that the social media is bringing to the events world. We see Facebook as the biggest social graph placeholder where you keep in touch with friends sharing stories and picture about it,  LinkedIn, where you keep on touch with your colleagues, and where you keep your business profile, Twitter where you keep track of conversation about what matter most to you and where you spread out messages to your follower, and we think of Ohanah where everything related to your events both as organizers or attendees happen (without having to loose what you get on those other great networks and tools). Events tells a lot about you and your interests as we all are what we attend and we all attend what we are.