Design-Led Tuesdays at UNSW Michael Crouch Innovation Centre

On By Kate CarruthersIn ideas

Have been meaning to post about Design-Led Tuesdays at UNSW for a while now.

Selena Griffith, Martin Bliemel, and I kicked off Design-Led Tuesdays as a new initiative between UNSW, ENACTUS UNSW and Social Innovation Sydney.

Tuesdays at UNSW’s Michael Crouch Innovation Centre this semester are all about design thinking for innovation. The Design-Led Tuesdays program runs for 10 weeks across Semester 2, 2015, with lunchtime and evening events.

12 to 2pm: Design for Innovation
These Tuesday ‘brown bag’ lunchtime workshops are for UNSW students and staff who want to learn and collaborate by ‘design doing’ and design tools for innovation.

ENACTUS UNSW and Social Innovation Sydney have designed a ten-week series of workshops to help you cultivate all the design tools you need to realise your innovative ideas.

The workshops will be very hands on – lots of ‘design doing’!

Places are limited to 30 people each week, so booking is essential: RSVP details here

Call for papers: Design for Disaster Response Conference #d4dr15

On By Kate CarruthersIn ideas

A colleague and I are co-chairing the Design for Disaster Response cross disciplinary conference to share research and actions around approaches to preparing for, and delivering responses to, disaster. We recently issued the following call for papers. More information will be available on the #d4dr15 conference website.

Date and Location

Date: Friday November 13, 2015

Venue: UNSW Australia Michael Crouch Innovation Centre UNSW Sydney, Australia

Conference Chairs

  • Selena Griffith UNSW Art & Design
  • Kate Carruthers UNSW School of Computer Science & Engineering

Conference Themes

The goal of this conference is to share research, actions and approaches to preparing for, and delivering responses to, disaster. The themes below are indicative but papers, posters and roundtables will be accepted on any disaster related topic.

  • Disaster Response
  • Disaster Recovery
  • Disaster Resilience
  • Humanitarian Disaster
  • Environmental Disaster
  • Medical Disaster
  • Engineering for disaster response and resilience
  • Technology for disaster response
  • Open source technology solutions for disaster response

Abstracts

Abstracts will be peer reviewed and full papers will be published in the conference proceedings. Selected papers will be double blind peer reviewed and published in full in the First Issue of The Asia Pacific Journal of Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Proposal ideas that extend beyond these thematic areas will also be considered.

Abstract Submission Process

Your abstract should be submitted via email using Word or PDF format via email to Selena Griffith by 6th September 2015
  • Your abstract (300-500 words, not including references)
  • 3 key words to help describe your paper
  • 2 references
  • A personal biography for up to three (3) presenting authors (50 words per person)
  • Email and phone contact details for all authors

Abstracts are accepted on the following conditions:

  • Papers must be presented by the authors. Proxies will not be permitted except in an emergency such as illness or misadventure.
  • The Committee reserves the right to accept or refuse any paper, symposium, workshop, or Poster.
  • The Committee reserves the right to allocate a session time or presentation type, which differs from that applied for.
  • Do not include tables, diagrams or graphs in the abstract.
PLEASE NOTE that only the first author will be advised in writing with regard to the acceptance or otherwise of the abstract submission. The first author (as given in the abstract submission) will be the main contact for correspondence about the presentation, however please also ensure that all co-authors/presenters’ email addresses are supplied.

Abstract Submission

Please send your abstract using Word or PDF format via email to Selena Griffith by 6th September 2015

Conference Timeline

  • Call for papers and posters opens August 6th 2015
  • Call for papers closes September 6th  2015
  • Notification of acceptance September 15th  2015
  • Full papers due October 30th  2015

Navigating the social media maze for academics

On By Kate CarruthersIn ideas

Life for an academic these days seems to be getting more complex. In addition to the traditional tasks – teaching, researching, and publishing – the job has expanded to include endless grant applications and the need to develop a public persona to publicise their work. All of this is in addition to having some kind of personal life and human relationships.

The advent of social media has made life for academics more complex and has opened up new ways of publicising their work.

Earlier today I saw an interesting interchange among some science researchers on Twitter. The conversation was inspired by Cameron Webb, a.k.a. @Mozziebites on Twitter, who posted on his blog about Putting a value on science communication. The conversation then moved onto how challenging it can be to manage multiple social media and media channels and how best to collate and curate these. Here’s a few of the tweets:

Many people working in universities tell me that social media just seems like too much on top of an already busy schedule. They ask me how it is possible to fit more into their limited spare time. The trick is to create content once and reuse it across social media platforms, it is also to share other people’s work to build your online communities and networks.

Some ideas for managing multiple social media platforms with minimal effort

Use tools

Merely using the native Twitter or Facebook apps is neither efficient nor effective. Consider using a tool that enables easy cross posting between social media platforms. There are a number of free or low cost tools that serve this purpose. Examples are Hootsuite which gives a dashboard for sharing context to social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn; or Buffer which schedules posts to various social media sites.

Find a place to save interesting links and posts

It is worth finding apps that you like to collate the links you find in your travels across the internet. For academic items I tend to use Zotero, for general links I use Pocket, and Feedly to track websites that are worth regular catchups. Both Pocket and Feedly apps enable sharing of the content that is bookmarked across other social media sites.

Collate interesting content from yourself and others for future reference

It is not sufficient to spread your wit and wisdom across the social media universe, you need to collate your own and others’  content for future reference. This is where tools like If This Then That (IFTTT) come in handy. This free site enables you to create simple processes (called recipes) to share information between various applications. There are many pre-built recipes to use or you can create your own recipes. It is a very powerful yet simple tool for curating your own and others’ content. For example it is easy to create a recipe that automatically posts any items you have favourited via Pocket to Buffer for scheduled posting to Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Some handy  IFTTT recipes include:

  • Archive your Instagram photos in an Evernote notebook
  • Save your Tweets in a Google Spreadsheet (which archives your new tweets to Google Drive)
  • Create link notes in Evernote from Feedly articles saved for later
  • Post new SoundCloud tracks to your WordPress Blog

Invest your time parsimoniously on social media

This is a really useful post by Kevan Lee that outlines how you can spend 30 minutes per day on social media to good effect, it’s worth reading:  What’s the Best Way to Spend 30 Minutes of Your Time on Social Media Marketing?

Work out which social media platforms are worth investing time in & which you can simply cross-post to

I spend a lot of time on Twitter because I enjoy the open conversational nature of the platform. However, for academics there are a few other ways to share information and build a public profile you might not have considered:

  • Setup a public profile page on Facebook so you can share professional information separately to your personal profile (it is much less annoying for family and friends)
  • Setup a LinkedIn profile and cross-post interesting articles and information there (I rarely log into LinkedIn and use Buffer to post links there)
  • Don’t forget the emerging academic social media networks, such as Academia or ResearchGate – by posting your published materials to these kind of site you can boost citations and downloads of your work. They can also be handy for asking questions and finding new collaborators.

 

Disclosure: I am an Adjunct Senior Lecturer in School of Computer Science & Engineering at UNSW Australia and publish in academic journals from time to time

Sir Nicholas Winton: saviour, people smuggler, hero?

On By Kate CarruthersIn ideas

The sad news of the death of a great and humble man came out overnight:

“Sir Nicholas Winton, who organised the rescue of 669 children destined for Nazi concentration camps, has died aged 106.

Sir Nicholas, then a stockbroker, arranged for trains to carry Jewish children out of occupied Prague.

Via BBC

He, like others during the 1930s and World War Two period, took action at great personal risk to aid refugees in fleeing persecution by the Nazis.  And he did this at a time when countries all around the world were rejecting Jewish refugees and returning them to persecution.

People of all stations in life assisted Jewish refugees. Even HRH Prince Philip’s mother, Princess Alice, gave refuge to a Jewish family in her own home in Athens during the war at great personal risk.

I honour Sir Nicholas and people like him who faced up to a great moral challenge and who took action. They are heroes and deserve our admiration.

The experiences of those persecuted by the Nazis in World War Two led to the establishment of the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention.

This Convention established the principle that people might seek refuge when facing “a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular group, or political opinion. ”

Yet today people, like Sir Nicholas, who seek to assist refugees in fleeing persecution would be called people smugglers.

Australia seeks to reject asylum seekers who arrive by sea and has even established a punitive internment camp regime as part of a series of deterrent measures.

It is interesting to consider Australia’s response to asylum seekers and refugees in the light of the following definition of ‘concentration camp’:

“The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy. ”

Via Holocaust Encyclopedia

With refugees and asylum seekers today we seem to be repeating the sins of our forebears. This is a tragedy for the human beings who are suffering, and for our national conscience in the face of this moral challenge.

It is clear that local solutions will not suffice and that coordinated measures are the necessary and humane requirement.

 

Mobile and social media – what it means for business

On By Kate CarruthersIn ideas

Mobile and social media have created a new business landscape

If you’re not already working out how to disrupt your business and your industry then you will be disrupted…

The web 2.0 revolution and social media changed the game for business. At a basic level brands discovered the notion of customer ‘conversations’. But for the most part this was not  strategic, rather it often consisted of random tactical efforts.

It is amusing to see that even in 2015 many brands are only just now discovering the notion of metrics and measuring their online activity:

“…many brands moving towards measuring audience impressions, clicks, and thinking cross-platform”

– Tania Yuki , Shareablee CEO and Founder

Then we often hear statistics like this:

“…Instagram delivered these brands 58 times more engagement per follower than Facebook, and 120 times more engagement per follower than Twitter.”

The real question to ask about all statistics like this is “so what?” What does that engagement translate to as business outcomes?

“There is no ROI in anything if you don’t learn how to use it.”

– Gary Vaynerchuk, Founder VaynerMedia

The simple fact is that hardly anyone is driving direct revenue from social media, and many businesses are not optimized to sell via mobile. And the big question for businesses is what is the goal for their social and mobile activity?

But now all business online presence must be mobile friendly – Google and customers will punish businesses that do not embrace this. Increasingly users are accessing digital  content via mobile devices, and this means that businesses need to ensure a good quality experience.

Social media was only phase 1

Social media was phase one of the new digital revolution, next coming is the collaborative economy and internet of things ( IoT).

The present of social is mobile. The future of mobile is IoT and wearables. and these offer huge  monetization opportunities:

Cisco [former] CEO John Chambers Values Internet of Things at $19T #CES2014

People

People, both customers and staff, now have a default position that assumes access to any resources they want. And they want it online, on demand, real-time, anywhere, and on any device they choose.

This is all part of the democratisation of communication enabled by the digital revolution. It leads to an inversion of power relationships and puts the means of production for communication in the hands of the populace.

It leads to opportunities and growth in peer-to-peer and mobile. Kevin Kelly sums it up nicely as:

“…a shift towards the individual as the centre of a network of relationships mediated and enabled by technology…”

The shift is from customer channels to a customer continuum mediated by social and mobile.

This means that businesses need to connect social media activity to purchasing activity, they need to make it work on mobile and tablet. And it must be friction-less.

Changes to team and organisation structure

In a fast moving context like this command-control management is dead. This is because the operational tempo of a digital business is not days or weeks or months; it is minutes and seconds.

To support this shift in operational tempo we need employees with skills to work in a social or collaborative context. We need team members who can deal with ambiguity and a fast pace.

To support customers who do not have patience with internal silos businesses need to move towards integrated teams. This means using ideas like DevOps and agile to support cross-functional teams to meet customer needs and deliver across organisational silos. To achieve this all parts of the business will need to bring together expertise:

  • Tech
  • Marketing
  • Sales
  • Operations
  • Customer service

Workforce changes mean that new ways of working will emerge, such as co-working and collaboration. These will lead to increased decentralisation of the workforce and be accompanied by much shorter change cycles.

And these changes will all lead to issues with boundaries between public and private; between personal and business. With this blurring between roles it will be increasingly difficult to establish role clarity. And this means that team members need to be able to manage through ambiguity and across functional lines.

Risk and governance

In the fast-paced world of digital business we still need to consider how to manage risk and how to enact effective governance.  Some factors to consider in this regard include:

  • Monitor your business online
  • Assign responsibility for online channels
  • Include social & mobile in digital strategy
  • Link digital strategy to marketing strategy
  • Ensure cross media planning in place
  • Develop mechanisms to track progress
  • Create and manage loosely connected networks
  • Grow a business in a networked world
  • Engage people and garner advocates for your business
  • Focus outward while protecting your brand

Top 10 checklist for digital business

  1. Digital strategy: is just part of it, includes websites, email marketing, etc.
  2. Tactical plans: For implementation of campaigns
  3. Resource plan: Social is not free, it needs people and tools
  4. Tools: Required to enable management, tracking and monitoring
  5. Metrics: Need to be decided prior to implementation to enable effective reporting
  6. ROI: Need to track investment and results
  7. Reporting: For good governance
  8. Roles & responsibilities: Defined and clear to all parties, in particular governance + cross-functional teams
  9. Cross media plan: Integration with other digital and marketing activities
  10. Risk management: Includes social media policies and procedures and crisis management process

LinkedIn and the power of networks

On By Kate CarruthersIn ideas2 Comments

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I used to think of LinkedIn as a boring but worthy social network for business contacts. But I was wrong.

Over the years it has become a critical B2B social network, with multi-million dollar deals often being done via the platform.

LinkedIn has also disrupted the recruitment business and reshaped the way people find jobs. It changed the power dynamic in recruitment by enabling the jobs to find people. Clever recruiters embraced LinkedIn early. The rest clung to their clunky old proprietary resume databases.

With the recent acquisition of Lynda.com, the reach of LinkedIn looks like growing into training and education. This is a more interesting play than MOOCs from an education perspective.

Remembering my LinkedIn story

Last night I caught up with a longstanding buddy, Des Walsh, as he visited Sydney. Des is a doyen of social media in Australia, as well as being a passionate networker and executive coach.

As we chatted I finally remembered to tell him the story of how one of his ideas helped me to get a great job.

LinkedIn ’30 day blitz’

Back in late 2012 Des contacted a diverse bunch of folks who were active on social media, noting that LinkedIn was our ‘orphan’ social network. He was right, most of us were enamoured with other sexier social media platforms. We were all members of LinkedIn, but at that time none of us were particularly active there, nor were our profiles up to date.

Des setup a social network challenge for November 2012, rounding up a diverse group to take part in a month of LinkedIn activity.

The concept was simple – “A collaborative project, in which each participant commits to take action on his/her LinkedIn presence and activity, over a 30 day period.” – 30 Day Linking Blitz.

I signed up for the blitz, and started with updating my LinkedIn profile with previous work and a decent profile picture.

The results were immediate

Almost immediately after that I was contacted by a recruiter. The recruiter had been trying for almost a year to find a candidate for a role that called for a diverse mix of skills. She explained that my name had popped up in her LinkedIn search that morning.

The rest is history. I interviewed for the role at UNSW Australia, where I’ve been working happily since then. All thanks to Des and his 30 Day LinkedIn Blitz.

Leaders, problems, and action

On By Kate CarruthersIn ideas

“We measure a leader, not by the absence of problems, but how he or she confronts those problems and takes action.”

– Rosabeth Moss Kanter


There has been a long and largely unprofitable debate in management circles about the difference between management and leadership. Over the years I have come to a realisation that management and leadership are inextricably linked and that they are defined by actions.

In the long run it does not matter what is said. The finest words pale into insignificance beside our actions. What we do defines us.

The true test of leadership is when problems arise. And the actions taken by the leader in response to problems are the measure of their leadership.

The leader needs to embody the values espoused by the organisation. The actions taken by the leader enable their teams to see how they too can respond to problems facing the organisation.

Good management goes hand in hand with good leadership, and it is how efficient and effective processes are put in place to support the business, its customers, and its staff.

Too often we see a combination of poor leadership with an absence of good management. This makes for an organisation with unhappy customers that is a horrible place to work.

And it is easily changed. Good leadership and good management will fix it. It can be surprising how quickly appointing an effective manager can turn a dysfunctional team into a functioning team. And to effect this change it is often how the leader confronts the challenges facing the team that causes a cascade of behavioural change among the team.

A good leader is a catalyst for new ways of being and of thinking for the team. As mentioned previously, the good leader embodies new ways for the team to be and gives them permission to act differently.

As managers we must give sincere thought to our role as leaders. We are the ones who set the tone for the team. For good or ill, leaders set the scene and signal the boundaries of acceptable and desirable behaviour.

Annual Global CIO Survey 2014

On By Kate CarruthersIn ideas

The annual Harvey Nash CIO Survey launched in Sydney in early December 2014.

This is a long running CIO survey with responses from more than 3,200 CIOs and technology leaders globally.

It was interesting to join the panel at this event for a lively discussion of technology and business related matters.

My fellow panelists were:

We had a wide-ranging discussion including: big data (and its friend little data); the importance of good alignment between IT and marketing for the business; and the need for a new kind of IT that is freed up from legacy systems and closely aligned to the business.

Some of the comments are documented here.

Why privacy on the internet of things doesn’t scare me

On By Kate CarruthersIn ideas

The debate about the internet of things often centres on privacy, but here is why privacy on the internet of things doesn’t scare me as much as digital rights management.

I tend to suspect that issues relating to privacy on the internet of things will be sorted out as a result of consumer and government expectations enshrined in privacy regulations.

A key capability that is enabled by the internet of things is that vendors can keep charging us for services related to their device. One reason why businesses are so excited by the internet of things is it allows them to move from selling a device as a one-off sale and towards ongoing fees for services associated with that device.

This phenomenon will enable internet of things companies to increase their revenue streams and to drive sales of additional services. Thus the value of an internet of things device is not so much in the hardware as in the software and services.

Take the pacemaker as an example. If you have a pacemaker installed and the vendor decides to charge a monthly service fee to keep the device going, what happens if you miss a payment? If the vendor has, very sensibly, implemented digital rights management on your pacemaker service then they will be able to turn it off if you miss a few payments.

If this sounds far fetched, it’s not, it is already here. Last December I test drove a new electric car, the Renault Zoe, at a conference in Paris. This car has implemented digital rights management.

If you do not pay the ongoing rental fee on the battery for your Renault Zoe then you will not be allowed to recharge the battery.

Also, chipmaker FTDI,whose chips are found in many consumer electronics products, recently announced that they will kill third party chips remotely via driver updates. This will likely render useless the devices that consumers have purchased in good faith which have counterfeit chips installed.

This is why digital rights management scares me more than privacy in the brave new world of the internet of things.

Welcome to the digital revolution and our networked future.

 

 

Internet of things, data security and privacy

On By Kate CarruthersIn ideas

I’ve been attending the 36th International Conference of Privacy and Data Commissioners in Mauritius, presenting on the Internet of Things (IoT) privacy and security to the attendees.

Kate Carruthers
Pic of Kate Carruthers by John Edwards, NZ Privacy Commissioner

It has made me very conscious of the tension between privacy/security and the drive to bring products to market quickly.

Further, it seems that the challenges of data protection have not been fully considered for many Internet of Things products and services.

An important realisation has been that we are building the Internet of Things on the somewhat rickety security foundations provided by the existing internet. We face a situation where many devices cannot apply security patches because source code is not available.

Finding way to build a safer and more secure Internet of Things and to ensure that we do not increase risk for business and consumers is critical.

An interesting approach to privacy is that taken by the Apple privacy team, who had some people in attendance at the conference. Their inclusion of privacy engineers into development teams seems like a good approach. The idea of privacy by design seems like a useful and pragmatic way to ensure that privacy is not a mere afterthought in the design and product engineering process.

Will post my slides on SlideShare shortly.