Open Source

Non-Responsive Design

Posted on by John

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the “Responsive Design” approach, and how the problem is we’re still thinking of it as an approach, as though the alternatives are equally valid and universal. There’s “regular” design or “responsive” design.

What if we started just calling the set of techniques we’ve been calling “responsive” plain old design, and came up with an alternative label for what people used to do? (Ok, my own sites aren’t all responsive, but they will be whenever I next get around to it – the point is that new designs should all be done this way).

So I took to the twitter stream for inspiration. Storify below, enjoy.

Conference/Open Source

Digital Strategy at New England Give Camp

Posted on by John
New England Give Camp

This weekend I had a chance, thanks to Ian Muir, to present at New England GiveCamp. GiveCamps are an international phenomena, in which developers and designers (and marketing and strategy folk) get together with non-profit organizations over a weekend to build or enhance sites (happily, many on Drupal and WordPress) for those charities.

New England GiveCamp ran all weekend (May 4-6) at the Microsoft NERD Center in Kendall Square, and feature 29 different non-profits and over 110 volunteers. You can read more about it on their news feed which is also frequently linking to blog entries by attendees.

I hope next year to be able to attend and do some development, not just drop in and chat about strategy, but it was great to be able to be involved.

Here’s the deck I used to drive the conversation.

Digital Strategy 101

View more presentations from John Eckman

Conference/media

Minds for Sale: Crowdsourced Surveillance?

Posted on by John

While flying down to Denver for DrupalCon, I finally caught up on some of the videos in my queue optimistically labeled “watch later.” I put videos (or sometimes podcasts) there when they seem compelling but are too long for the commute or for sitting at the laptop watching.

Often these are from the Berkman Video Fishbowl or other Boston area events that I wasn’t able to attend in person. (As I’ve written before, Boston is an embarrassment of riches from the point of view of interesting events). The video below isn’t from the fishbowl, but is from iLaw 2011. In it, Jonathan Zittrain gives an updated version of a talk he’s given multiple times (Google turns up many videos from the last 2 years) called “Minds for Sale,” in which he examines “the consequences of crowdsourcing, economically, legally and socially.”

It’s a fascinating talk, though it may start out a bit slow if you’re already familiar with the basic terrain of crowdsourced labor online, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and the like. When he starts to get into the notion of crowdsourcing the identification of protesters in photos, though, it starts getting really provocative as it pushes on our tendency to call for a hands-off when it comes to ‘net regulation.

Continue reading →

Conference/Higher Education/media

Heading to Denver for DrupalCon

Posted on by John

Next week I’m off to Denver for DrupalCon 2012. Since DrupalCon 2008 (which was in Boston) I’ve done both SXSW and DrupalCon each year, but that was proving to be a bit of an overload, so this year I’ve dialed back, skipped SXSW, and chose DrupalCon instead. I’ve found it consistently more useful.

I’ll be attending the Drupal in Education Unconference Monday, and then the main conference Tue-Thurs. (See my schedule of sessions).

I’m most looking forward to:

Though like all good open source conferences there are many time blocks where there are 5 or 6 sessions I’d like to attend.

It will also be my first year at DrupalCon as an official CMS Myth Mythbuster – looking forward to bringing some Drupal community perspective to myths about CMS.