We’re pleased to have GOVIS on board as a sponsor as they were instrumental in helping the initial Webstock conference. We talked recently with GOVIS President, Mike Pearson.

Webstock: What is GOVIS? What’s its history and what does it do?

Mike: GOVIS was established in 1992. The catalyst for its formation was a suggestion that government IT managers implement GOSIP (Government Open Systems Interconnectivity Protocols), as a standard for interdepartmental electronic communications. At that time, GCS (Government Computing Service) had been disestablished and there was no co–ordination of IT in Government. Managing IT, particularly in a small department could be a lonely place. GOVIS was a mutual support group, so that IT managers from the Government sector could get together and share knowledge.

GOVIS Inc. exists today, to encourage discussion on IT related topics, to improve the cost effectiveness and use of government IT and to encourage a common approach to open systems. It does this by promoting an environment for the free and frank expression of opinions and exchange of information, promoting and facilitating networking, liaison and cooperation between members through activities such as a website/mailing lists, regular forums and special events, including conferences.

Webstock: The next GOVIS conference is happening in May. What’s the theme of the conference and who are some of the speakers that will appeal to Webstockers?

Mike: GOVIS 2009 will be on 20th-22nd May at the Wellington Town Hall. It is widely recognised as the premier Information and Communication Technologies event for the New Zealand government sector, and is open to anyone.

The theme for the 2009 conference is “User-Centred Government; More than meets the eye”.

The theme is based on the State Services Development Goal milestone that by 2015, New Zealanders will see increased efficiency and effectiveness throughout the State Services, with their experience transformed through technology, to be characterised by practical and personalised service delivery that meets their diverse circumstances.

Keynote speakers include:

• W. David Stephenson: A leading e-government (especially transparent government), Web 2.0, and crisis management strategist and theorist. He focuses on ways to directly involve the public in policy and services debate and delivery. http://stephensonstrategies.com/
• Tom Steinberg: The founder and director of mySociety, a non-profit, open source organisation that runs many of the best-known democracy websites in the UK. These include the Parliamentary transparency website TheyWorkForYou and the somewhat self-explanatory FixMyStreet.
• Elizabeth F Churchill: Takes a human centred approach to design and innovation, and believes that lasting innovations derive from a deep understanding of how technologies are woven into everyday lives. Her work at Yahoo! Research explores the threads of mediated collaboration, mobile connectivity, transmedia technologies, digital archive and memory, and the development of emplaced media. http://elizabethchurchill.com
• Nat Torkington: Chair of the O’Reilly Open Source Convention and a former editor for O’Reilly and Associates. He has returned to New Zealand from the USA, and is looking to build networks of open source innovators, entrepreneurs, and emerging technologists in New Zealand. http://nathan.torkington.com/
• Stephen Collins: Looks at trends in social media and networking, knowledge work and the knowledge economy and issues of management and leadership, focusing on their respective influences and applicability as we build understanding of the disruptive nature of these tools and the power they place in the hands of consumers and workers. www.acidlabs.org
• Fergus Hogarth: The Manager of Information and Knowledge Management in the Department for Families and Communities for the Government of South Australia, responsible for online services, a Geographic Information Systems Unit, two libraries and records management. He maintains a strong interest in how technology is changing the world and especially how it is being used to share, connect and engage. http://www.dfc.sa.gov.au

Preceeding the conference on Tuesday 19 May 2009 there will be a workshop series with several of the keynote speakers. Like the conference, the workshops will be open to anyone.

Webstock: How would you rate the NZ government’s use of the internet and the potential it offers compared to other countries?

Mike: Comparing our government’s use of the Internet with that of governments in other countries, is pretty much meaningless. There’s an underlying false assumption that the social, economic and political context is the same in each country.

The Kiwis Count survey found that the drivers that have the greatest impact on New Zealanders’ satisfaction with public services were completely different from Canadians. The best thing is to ignore the rankings and get on with addressing our specific needs and wants in innovative ways.

Webstock: What are the major online challenges for government departments in the next 5 years?

Mike: When we first started planning GOVIS 2009, we talked about challenges like:

• How can we shift to a State Services system that can work flexibly and effectively in networked ways across organisational boundaries?
• How can we develop more tailored and personalised services and policies by working innovatively with communities of interest in their design, development and delivery?

In light of the recent Stuff article, “Heat on public sector bosses to cut spending”, I believe the major challenge is a wetware (human) one, i.e. not enough people in this town believe that the current economic climate is an opportunity to drive innovation.

There are plenty of ideas about better ways of doing business or developing new or improved products and services that add value for New Zealanders. We need to debate these ideas, pick the likely winners and get them out in production, ASAP.

Change is not a comfortable process, but if we can cut costs by 25% or increase value by 50%, we should be be rising to the challenge. We have to do it while still raising New Zealanders’ satisfaction with public services.

Webstock: What speaker are you most looking forward to seeing at Webstock?

Mike: This year there’s going to be a lot of activity around Government Information and Data Re-use , so I think a lot of the speakers, like Tom Coates and Adrian Holovaty will be relevant to what we’re doing/thinking.

If I was wearing my “innovation” hat, then I’d say I’m most looking forward to catching up with Jane McGonigal again. Her talk at SXSW gave me a lot of ideas about making your government more fun … she does a cool Solja Boy Dance too. I hope the Webstock organisers are practising, so you can accompany her.

Webstock: Thanks Mike. I think it’s fair to say the chances of the Webstock organisers doing Soulja boy dances on stage are remote! But here’s Jane’s SXSW dance …

Jane Mcgonigal Soulja Boy dance

Damian wow-ed the Webstock crowd last year and he’s back again, this time to close the conference out. He’s also conducting a workshop called Presentation Aikido. Patently stung by his loss in Powerpoint Karaoke Idol last year to home-town hero Nat Torkington, Damian has spent the last year studying presentation skills and is here to share those at his workshop.

We caught up with Damian for a few questions.

Webstock: You’ve apparently got something to do with Perl! What is Perl? What does it do? Why is it important?

Damian: Perl is a general purpose programming language with roots in the C programming language and the Unix shell and utilities. It’s often called “the duct tape of the Internet” because sysadmins and web developers have been using it for the past twenty years to solve all those tricky “in between” problems (of patching together incompatible system components, of coordinating them, and of interconverting data amongst them); tasks for which C is too tedious and shell scripts too cumbersome.

Quite a few useful web technologies nowadays rely on Perl, including Slash, Bugzilla, RT, TWiki, ACT, Majordomo, SATAN, and Movable Type. It’s also at the core of many major businesses and projects, such as the BBC, Amazon, LiveJournal, Ticketmaster, Slashdot, Craigslist, eBay, the Human Genome Project, NASA, The Oxford dictionary, and IMDb. The PHP language grew out of a set of Perl scripts that Rasmus Lerdorf had been using to manage his personal home page. Likewise, Yukihiro Matsumoto originally developed the Ruby language as an evolution of Perl.

Perl’s major strengths are its high-level programming power, its flexibility and adaptability, and the very strong developer community it has gathered. It also comes with a huge on-line library (known as “CPAN”), which provides nearly 15,000 open source software modules ready-made to solve a vast array of real-world problems.

Webstock: What sort of “mindset” makes for the best programmers? Can anyone become a good coder with enough work?

Damian: Sure. In fact, the only way you can become a good coder is with enough work. The problem, though, is that “enough work” isn’t by itself enough. You also have to have a fundamental aptitude for–and an innate pleasure in–the art and craft of programming. That is, unless you actually enjoy spending your time in the (often-tedious) activity of software development, you’ll never have the incentive or motivation to put in the “enough work” needed to become good at it.

That’s the only mindset necessary, but it’s an uncommon and self-contradictory one. You need the passion and unreasoning optimism requisite to any act of creation, combined with the practicality, patience, and dogged attention-to-detail necessary to convert your grand vision into a set of accurate instructions. You need to be at once in love with the notion of magicking useful tools out of nothing more than clever arrangements of language, and at the same time be dedicated, persistent, and sceptical enough to arrange that language with sufficient care and precision so that it actually works.

It’s that all-too-rare combination–of romantic and pragmatist, of wizard and engineer–that makes for the very best programmers.

Webstock: When the list of great presenters is made, it would be fair the say that computer scientists and programmers are not going to be over-represented. And yet, here you are doing a workshop on “Presentation Aikido”. What’s been your journey? How have you become a great presenter?

Damian: Hmmmmmmmmm. I’m pretty sure that the single most important thing is never to believe anyone who tells you you’ve become a great presenter. That’s instantly fatal. Because, as soon as you sit back and think you’re there, you’ll stop giving the 100% effort that it takes to create and deliver a truly great presentation.

In other words, the way that you become a great presenter is the same way you become a great programmer, or a great sportsperson, or a great artist, or a great almost anything else: you start with some predilection for the particular activity, and perhaps a little natural ability, and then you work like fury for the rest of your life, gradually gaining the experience and honing the skills and refining the style you need to excel.

Unfortunately, being a great presenter is exactly as Edison described every other kind of creative act: 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. Of course, when you do it for a living, you eventually discover most of the short-cuts and tricks that allow you to perspire more productively, and you develop a routine and a set of techniques that help the inspiration flow as well. And it’s those short-cuts and techniques that I’m planning to share in my “Presentation Aikido” workshop at Webstock.

Webstock: Who is going to benefit most from your workshop? And what should they expect from it?

Damian: First of all, this isn’t a workshop for those who “have to” give better presentations; this is a workshop for those who “want to” give better presentations…but who are uncertain how to do that, or who lack confidence in their abilities, or who are just downright scared of public speaking. In other words, you don’t have to be a good speaker already, or even an average speaker already, to benefit from this class, but you do have to genuinely aspire to be better. As long as someone has the will, this workshop can help them find the way.

What they should expect is a lot of practical help: that I will walk them through an effective process for designing good presentations; give them numerous tips, suggestions, and insights drawn from real
experience; sprinkle in a few cautionary war-stories; show them plenty of demonstrations and examples; and offer them lots of opportunities to ask the questions that matter to them, as well as to get one-to-one feedback from me on their own presentations and skills.

Oh, they should definitely also expect to have fun: if I’m talking about giving great presentations, you can be sure that I’m going to work extra hard to ensure that that presentation is itself great.

Webstock: What do you see yourself doing in 5 years time? More of the same, or have you got some new plans?

Damian: I still love what I’m doing now, so I intend to keep on teaching, and training, and speaking, and writing as long as people still want to hear from me. Of course, what I’ll be teaching in five years time will likely be very different from what I’m teaching now.

For example, with an entirely new version of Perl (Perl 6) likely to be released later this year, there is a whole new universe of programming concepts and techniques that I’m looking forward to sharing with the wider technical community.

But I’m equally sure that in five years time the Web will continue to be so full of bad design, poor usability, and general oppression of the ordinary user that I’ll still have plenty of targets and plenty of ammunition for those scathing Webstock keynotes I so enjoy delivering.

Webstock: Thanks Damian! And if anyone is thinking about signing up for Damian’s workshop, don’t hesitate – it will truly be a worthwhile investment.

One of the names generating a lot of excitement for Webstock is that of Bruce Sterling. It’s his first trip to New Zealand and there’s already lots of interest in his presentation. We interviewed Bruce recently, with a little help from Nat Torkington in putting the questions together.

Webstock: Did you always want to be a writer?

Bruce: No. Now that I think about it, my supposed urges to “be something” were always based in everybody around me assuring me that I had to “be” in some profession. I’m sure glad I didn’t go into any of the lines of work that were recommended when I was a teenager.

Webstock: Have you been writing as long as you can remember?

Bruce: Not really, no. I don’t do a lot of writing for writing’s sake — I’ve never been much good as a diarist. I tend to write about specific topics I find of compelling interest.

Webstock: What were the first books you fell in love with, and why?

Bruce: I don’t want to sound contrarian here, but I don’t think that my deep long-term, abiding interest in encyclopedias and reference texts qualifies as “love.”

Webstock: Any advice for those of us raising kids in 2009? What should we be fostering in them, letting them do, exposing them to?

Bruce: Well, it’s certainly important to have children. And, no matter how anxious you feel about them, it’s also important to understand that they are human beings like you, and therefore more rugged than they look.

I think you should try to set your children a good example by involving them in your daily life. They always remember that much better than they remember any “lessons” or “exposures” or “quality time.”

Webstock: What cities most embody the future, and why?

Bruce: Well, no city ever embodies an absolute future, but there are cities in certain periods that clearly embody the trends driving that period.

It’s not a surprise to tell people that London, Paris, and New York are important now, and that things
are happening there now that will spread widely.

But I would also recommend a close look at Berlin, Baghdad, Mumbai, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco,
and Mexico City. Also Dubai and Shanghai. Dubai and Shanghai are kind of the comedy tag-team of futuristic cities.

Mind you, I don’t choose to live in any of those places. Basically, I live in Belgrade, Austin and Torino. These towns don’t seem to have much in common, but they’re all the same size and rather similar geographically. I wouldn’t call them great metropolises destined to dominate futurity, but they are three places that each somehow feel like a home to me.

Webstock: We’re losing the boundary between the online and the offline worlds as more devices are networked and become sensors or displays for the Internet. If you were product development king at Microgooglehoo or one of the three-inital Chinese hardware manufacturers, what would you be creating with this technology?

Bruce: Well, you’d have to be king, because if you build anything that out-thinks the demands of the next quarter, the shareholders will kill you.

Of course, now that the shareholders are jumping out of windows themselves, maybe you have a chance to innovate.

If I really had to choose here, I think I’d go for the Google philosophy: hire many smart people, give them some free time to build anything they want, and try to ramp up the successes. Throw a bowl of cheap spaghetti at the wall, and see whatever sticks.

Of course, business-school graduates will punish you for this sensible approach, because it shows a lack of serious devotion to core competencies, and lacks a unique value proposition. That’s why those poseurs should never run tech companies. In fact at this point I’m unsure what they SHOULD run; if they all retired to monasteries, our quality of life would likely boom.

If I have to focus on one line of tech development, I’d say green energy apps. That’s very hard work, but if we don’t get there, nothing else is going to matter much.

If you give me a second choice, cellphone banking for the Third World. In fact, any kind of democratized banking that isn’t like modern banking. Probably the best place to build such a thing is in an area that has never had any banks. Someplace poor, peaceful and honest. Okay, those three social qualities never go together; you can have two of ’em, but never all three in the same place. But there’s gotta be some good locale for a useful start-up like that… use Google Maps!

Webstock: Thanks Bruce! It’s going to be a pleasure to have you here in February.

We talked with Emily Loughnan, Managing Director of Wellington based interactive media company, Clicksuite.

Webstock: Click Suite is one of the older web, or “new media”, companies around. Tell us about how Click Suite started and some of its history?

Emily: We started when Rex and I went to a television industry conference and heard about how TV would be interactive in the future. We were both blown away by what interactivity would do for audiences (removing the old passive couch-potato viewing experience and really involving the
audience).

We were so excited by this (and boring to be around because it’s all we talked about!) that just two weeks later we sent in the registration to form a company.

That was late 1993.

Since then we have lead (and followed) with a wide variety of technologies that deliver interactivity. These days the web is commonly featured in our portfolio, but we’re also doing work in digital sculptures, interactive displays, and in new user interfaces etc. It’s a VERY exciting industry to be in – it’s always challenging and changing.

Webstock: AS someone who could genuinely be called a veteran (and we mean that in the best possible sense!), what’s the current state of the NZ web scene?

Emily: I think we’re doing some great great stuff in NZ. We’ve (kiwis in general) made websites that really are innovative, there’s a lot for NZ to be proud of. I know from our own experience that we showed someone in the BBC a site we made here, and he was blown away at how much more efficiently we did it compared to one they made with similar functionality – and how much better it was in terms of quality.

That said, we need to keep innovating. To do that you need great people, but you also need brave clients, or backers. (They’re on my Santa list)

Webstock: What are some of the changes you see happening to the industry in the next 5 years? What are the sort of things we’ll be working on?

Emily: The really exciting developments in touchscreen and even gestural, or natural, interfaces means how we interact with the web is going to change. That means we are all going to have to think about a new paradigm in user experience because as the interface evolves, so too does the audience.

Webstock: Click Suite is associated with Jane McGonigal at Webstock. Tell us why you made that choice.

Emily: Well sometimes games are a great way to connect with certain audiences. We have quite a bit of experience in that space, and we are interested in Jane’s knowledge and experience. Besides, I fancy coffee with a futurist.

Webstock: This is Click Suite’s first time as a Webstock sponsor. What made you decide to become involved?

Emily: we have some serious webstock fans here. You could call it peer-to-peer pressure 😉

Webstock: Heh! Thanks Emily.