Workshops
Webstock 2009 will consist of three days of intimate hands-on workshops with industry leaders, followed by two days of action packed, talent-laden, 26-sesssion conference proper.
Mastering CSS and XHTML - building elegant websites
When: Monday 16 February, 9:00-4.30pm
Where:
Civic Suite, Wellington Town Hall, 111 Wakefield Street
With: Russ Weakley, Mark Up Maestro
Register now! ($600 if attending conference / $750 if not)
Over a full day you will build detailed websites layouts from the ground up - starting with page layout, navigation and form design; and ending with clean markup and elegant styling using XHTML/CSS.
Who it's for:
Designers and developers with a basic knowledge of CSS who want to take it to the next level.
What you'll learn:
- An overview of CSS basics such as rule sets, selectors and floats
- How to style elements such as form, legend, fieldset, inputs, labels
- How to overcome some of the harder aspects of form styling such as column layouts, floating in forms and positioning legends
- How to write efficient CSS
- How to use CSS sprites and sliding door techniques
- How to deal with browser issues including specific browsers such as IE5, IE6 and IE7
- How to create CSS for printing and hand held devices
The workshop will be hands on. We will start with a graphic mockup and gradually build an XHTML page before styling each of the layout components. Along the way we will deal with forms, browser bugs and overall strategies.
What you'll need:
A laptop with at least one browser and some sort of text editor.
Designing and Sustaining Creative Communities
When: Monday 16 February, 9:00-4.30pm
Where:
Civic Suite, Wellington Town Hall, 111 Wakefield Street
With: Heather Champ & Derek Powazek, Community wranglers
Register now! ($600 if attending conference / $750 if not)
The web's greatest gift is that it gives everyone a voice. But how you design and manage community features will determine if you get a chorus or a cacophony. Creating and sustaining community online is a delicate balancing act of interactive and visual design, social psychology, and practical moderation techniques.
Join the husband and wife team of Derek Powazek (author of Design for Community, creator of Fray, consultant to HP Labs' MagCloud) and Heather Powazek Champ (Flickr Director of Community, creator of The Mirror Project) for a holistic look into the design and management of collaborative online environments of all shapes and sizes.
In this day-long workshop, we'll cover the visual design of community tools, how interaction design influences participation, moderation techniques for managing community, the legal requirements for user-created content, and a look forward at the future of participative media. The workshop will include practical tips and tricks for how to create positive participation on your own site, and plenty of stories of success and failure to learn from.
Who it's for
Anyone working on a site with community features, especially sites that are primarily powered by their members.
What will they learn
- How to design community tools that lead to positive contributions.
- How to avoid the common pitfalls of enabling community features online.
- How to craft a robust set of community guidelines and maximize your legal protection.
- What to do, and what not to do, when things go wrong.
- Tips for staying sane in the process.
What you'll need
Nothing, but good questions and a sense of humor are always appreciated.
Presentation Aikido
When: Monday 16 February, 9:00-4.30pm
Where:
Civic Suite, Wellington Town Hall, 111 Wakefield Street
With: Damian Conway, Presentation Sensei
Register now! ($680 if attending conference / $850 if not)
The best, most effective presentations capture the audience quickly, hold their interest effortlessly, educate and entertain them in equal measure, and sometimes even inspire them. This day-long tutorial explores simple and effective techniques for achieving those goals in any kind of presentation.
What you'll learn:
The morning sessions focus on preparation, content selection, delivery techniques, and handling questions (or the lack thereof!)
The afternoon sessions will be run as a workshop. Attendees will have the option to give a short presentation they have previously created, after which we work through it together to improve its design and delivery. Those attendees who prefer not to present during the workshop will still benefit from the observations and suggestions made to other participants.
Designing Balance Into Your Agile Process
When: Tuesday 17 February, 9:00-4.30pm
Where:
Civic Suite, Wellington Town Hall, 111 Wakefield Street
With: Jackson Wilkinson, Agile Design
Register now! ($600 if attending conference / $750 if not)
Agile methodologies have been all the rage in development circles in the last couple years, and they've yielded great results since being applied to the rest of the project cycle as well. However, Agile can yield frustration for designers, product managers, and others concerned with how the process and its tight timelines seem to starve a user-centric design and research process.
User Experience Strategist Jackson Wilkinson has been working on the front lines, helping shape the processes at his and other agencies to balance the needs of designers and developers alike, whilst keeping project managers (mostly) sane. He'll share tips, tricks, and methods to apply to your process to help you achieve that same balance.
Who it's for
This workshop is designed for anyone looking to improve the way they do work on the web. It applies to designers, developers, project managers, and anyone already employing an Agile process or looking to learn more about it.
What you'll learn
You'll learn how to separate the dogma from the pragmatic aspects of an Agile process, and how to shape your process to embrace the parts that are most effective for you, your users, and your client.
Data-mining and machine learning for social data
When: Tuesday 17 February, 9:00-12:30pm
With: Toby Segaran, Data Magnate.
Where: Civic Suite, Wellington Town Hall, 111 Wakefield Street
Register now! ($300 if attending conference / $375 if not)
Techniques for finding meaning in big messy datasets have existed for a long time. Unfortunately the books and classes usually don't involve enough code or examples that people find interesting. This workshop will focus on how you can get fun datasets from social networks, blogs, dating sites, review sites and other user-contributed content , explain techniques you might try to analyze them, and finally give you real code to actually implement the techniques. There will also be chocolate.
Who it's for:
People who have websites that collect data and want to understand more about their users or build recommendation systems, and people who want to collect data from other sites to learn more about other people. It will be mostly targeted at software developers, but those who can't yet code will learn something too.
What you'll learn:
- Places to get social data
- Techniques for scraping data
- Machine learning methods like collaborative filtering, clustering, decision trees, bayesian filtering, independent feature analysis
- A little graph theory/network analysis
- Python code for implementing these techniques, and some freely available libraries to use for analysis
- A short introduction to Map-Reduce and how to parallelize some of these algorithms
What you'll need:
Laptops would be good, but if you don't have one, then it's not really a problem.
Frontiers of Javascript
When: Tuesday 17 February, 9:00-4:30pm
With: Cameron Adams, Javascript junkie
Where:
Civic Suite, Wellington Town Hall, 111 Wakefield Street
Register now! ($600 if attending conference / $750 if not)
In this full day workshop, Cameron Adams will share his love of playful code and explore the latest developments in the field of JavaScript and interface design. Bring your own laptop and at the end of it all you’ll be playing with JavaScript like a master as well!
Who's it for:
This workshop is designed for those with a strong grasp on the basics of JavaScript. You should already have a working knowledge of:
- Modifying the DOM
- The browser event model
- Making basic Ajax calls
What you'll learn:
- Have a knowledge of the pros and cons of different libraries such as Prototype, jQuery and Dojo
- Be able to work with real-time data formats such as XML and JSON
- Create mashups using APIs
- Work with browser-native vector graphics (SVG/VML & Canvas)
- Pick up advanced code tips
- Understand why coding JavaScript is so darn fun!
The workshop will be mostly practical (on your own laptop) so you'll be able to immediately apply the skills you have picked up throughout the session, with tips and immediate assistance from your host.
What you'll need:
A laptop.
Social Design: From Strategy to Interface
When: Wednesday 18 February, 9:00-4.30pm
Where:
Civic Suite, Wellington Town Hall, 111 Wakefield Street
With: Joshua Porter, Social design ace
Register now! ($600 if attending conference / $750 if not)
Are you building a social web application or adding social features to an existing application but aren't sure where to start? Are you unsure of how to define and implement a social design strategy? In this workshop, Joshua Porter will show you how to identify your social design strategy and then translate that directly into screen design.
Who it's for
Interface designers, product managers, project managers, design strategists
What you'll learn
This hands-on workshop will be organized around several exercises:
- Identifying and choosing a social design strategy
- Defining core activities, objects, and product features
- Designing for reputation, a core driver of participation
- How to measure and improve over time
During the workshop teams will mockup actual screen designs. Even if you're not an interface designer, this workshop will help you get your team on the same page with the same priorities.
During the day, Josh will share stories from Facebook, Digg, Amazon as well as lesser-known social applications, showing you how their interfaces have evolved over time according to lessons they've learned. He'll help you avoid the mistakes that have plagued the early innovators in social design.
After attending this workshop, you'll be able to identify your social design strategy and then design interfaces that directly support it.
What you'll need
Yourself!
Real World Accessibility for Ajax and Web Apps
When: Wednesday 18 February, 9:00-4:30pm
With: Derek Featherstone, Accessibility Expert
Where:
Civic Suite, Wellington Town Hall, 111 Wakefield Street
Register now! ($600 if attending conference / $750 if not)
Your reputation—and the reputation of your agency or company—depends on bulletproof, functionally elegant web apps that will work now and in the future. Using your application shouldn’t frustrate users; their experience, regardless of who they are, should be effortless.
Want a truly usable, accessible web app? Learn from a world-class teacher how to harness Ajax, break out of your usual development routines, and build intelligently, using the technologies you really need.
We won’t just be covering the basics or theoretical situations. We’ll be examining original research conducted by Derek’s company and real-life test cases. You’ll see assistive technologies and prototypes of new techniques in action. During this intensive workshop we’ll even put a selection of existing web apps through their paces — zeroing in on how well they meet the needs of people with a variety of disabilities.
Who it's for:
To get the most out of this workshop you will have some experience hand-coding (X)HTML AND CSS, and know at least the basics of JavaScript and general web accessibility practices.
What you'll learn:
By the end of the day you will be able to:
- grasp the difference between accessibility for web apps and for websites
- build intelligently – plan for accessibility from the outset of a project
- understand the significance of Javascript and how to use it wisely
- implement simple HTML techniques that help ensure accessibility success
- recognize the impact of Ajax and dynamically-generated content on people with disabilities – and know what to do about it
- create an effective strategy for building more accessible applications that work with current assistive technology and anticipate future developments
- see how various assistive technologies interact with modern web development techniques such as DOM Scripting and know how to make developmental decisions based on this first-hand experience
- define best practices for testing the accessibility of your own web applications
Managing Humans
When: Wednesday 18 February, 9:00-12:30pm
With: Michael Lopp, Manager
Where:
Civic Suite, Wellington Town Hall, 111 Wakefield Street
Register now! ($300 if attending conference / $375 if not)
In this workshop, we're going to explore the problem of people. Your company is full of them. They're in meetings cluttering your agenda with their confusing and colorful personalities. They're wandering your hallways with their endless list of questions. They're sitting in your office and they're not happy; they're angry and it's your job to help.
The role of a manager and of leader to is manage these humans. In this half day workshop, we're going to dissect and analyze the worst meeting you've attended. We're going to talk about strategies for managing the hallway. We're going to take a close look at conflict and discuss not how to avoid it, but rather how to surf it.
