Last week we noticed that the Webstock 2008 site’s been nominated for the DINZ Best Design awards which is nice. In fact, not to blow our own trumpet, but the Webstock 2008 site received quite a bit of nice feedback in its time including a mention on the esteemed ilovetypography.
A number of people were involved in the making of that site – most of whom did so in their own time, out of the goodness of their own hearts and haven’t been publicly credited for their contribution.
So without further ado, the Natasha Hall Award for Excellence and Awesomeness in the field of Webstock Website stuff goes to:
Ben Lampard for all his strategy and site planning. Here’s a guy who makes wireframing sexy
Kat Elam, Cam Trollope, Lucy Sellars and Amanda Nilson at DNA for taking what we gave them and turning it into something tres tres chic
Mike Brown for his kick-ass html+css skills and indulging me in my request/demand to change the site considerably two days before launch
Miraz Jordan, for being a technical wonder
Tim James, interaction design extraordinaire, for his invaluable advice and guidance which helped tie everything together
Webstock is a truly collaborative effort. While we have a very clear vision of what we want and how we want it (and thus can be incredibly demanding/anal/obsessive compulsive), we’ve been extremely fortunate to work with certain uber talented people who’ve helped us have that vision realised and even taken further.
Congratulations to all those nominated for the Best awards, including our friends at Origin and Alt Group. Beautiful work guys!
ps Eight sleeps to go till the launch of Webstock 2009!
Tuesday, 9 September, at the Paramount theatre in Wellington is the place to be! We’ve got a great Webstock mini planned and will be launching Webstock 09. Speakers are Jonathan Mosen (blind accessibility advocate and much more), Jefferson Fletcher (Senior Product Manager working on Internet Explorer) and Kris Sowersby (font geek).
We’ll also be announcing the speakers for Webstock 09 and giving away a free ticket to the conference. All this, plus food and drink for only $50. More information and bookings here.
I would like to learn from the Master of Presentation – honestly, I would imagine it’d be a totally different experience to learn directly from Garr than from his PZ book and website. I also look forward to meeting with the like-minded (creative, cool!) people at this Webstock workshop.
I spend a lot of time standing in front of people talking – I present design ideas to clients all the time, present at lots of conferences and am teaching more and more full day workshops (I have at least 5 more this year). Although I’ve had lots of practice and think I’m a good teacher, I know there are always things I can learn. But I do have quite a high standard – I’m not going to give my money and time to just anyone. I’m not sure why, but when I saw Garr’s workshop outline and read some of his blog posts, something clicked and I felt that this workshop would be good for me. So when I had a decision between travelling to Sydney for a 2 hour seminar or travelling to Wellington for a full day, it was a no-brainer – if I learn just a few tips that help me present better it will have been worth it.
After I read Presentation Zen I changed the way I approached all my writing and training. The techniques I learned in the book transformed a recent conference Keynote address from simply informative to influential and inspiring.
Presentation Zen doesn’t just add a few skills it introduces a whole new approach. When I saw that I could learn directly from Garr Reynolds I immediately signed up for the workshop. I expect to learn to *wow* my readers and live audiences.
To develop a great websites you often have to stuff your brain with a whole lot of research to achieve the big “ah ha!†moment (which is more like “aaaaaaaaaaaaaa ha!â€). Then to sell the strategy you have to boil this long story down to a short one. In Garr Reynolds words, you must “…pass the ‘Elevator Test'” I found the book, Presentation Zen inspiring (on so many levels beyond presenting strategy), and am doubly looking forward to workshopping the key messages in person.
Elyssa Timmer
Boulder Services Ltd
I subscribe to Garr’s blog, I’ve read his book, I’ve watched videos of him speaking. This is a person who has thought deeply about the art of presenting. So his workshop is going to be an unmissable opportunity for me to gain more of his insights.
I’ve been a follower of Garr Reynolds work for some time – primarily through his blog – and think the way he uses presentations to communicate ideas and information is inspirational and powerful. The opportunity to work with him in person is literally TOO good to miss!
Sustainable Future is in the middle of a two year project, called Project 2058, which explores New Zealand in fifty years time. From Garr we hope to learn how to communicate our findings in an effective and thought provoking manner.
I founded a website called BPIR.com which helps organisations to learn from best practices in business. I give presentations and demonstrations of the website all around the world and realised that even though i was promoting best practices my own presentations weren’t best practice! Therefore over the last year I have been trying to correct this though learning from Effective Speaking and now from Garr Reynolds. Hopefully he will not only provider pointers for presentations but also on how to clearly communicate messages through website design
So, there’s been some changes going on at Webstock and we thought we’d tell you about them by way of telling you where we’ve come from.
Webstock didn’t start as Webstock. It started from Russ Weakley and Peter Firminger’s Web Standards Group mailing list and the idea of holding city-based meetings for people interested in web standards. This was in the days of battling over web standards, the days where you felt alone as a proponent of “standards-based” web development and needed all the support you could get.
I had the idea of seeing what interest there might be in a Wellington web standards group that met occasionally and so, late in 2004, emailed everyone I knew in Wellington to see who might be interested in a meetup. There were 70 responses to the email and around 40 turned up to meeting in December 2004. There was initial help from Terry Wood, who spoke at that first meeting, and also from Signify, my employer of the time, who generously allowed me to spend time during work hours on Web Standards Wellington and Webstock up until 2006.
It seemed at the time that we uncovered a need for people to get together and talk about this stuff. There was a buzz at that first meeting and even more so at the second one I organised in early 2005. We brought over Russ Weakley and John Allsopp from Australia and Jonathan Mosen up from Christchurch and had 75 people attend to hear them talk. In the true traditions of these things, a committee of myself (Mike Brown), Natasha Hall, Ben Lampard, Miraz Jordan, Siggy Magnusson, Elyssa Timmer and Susan Skelton was formed and we set ourselves up as Web Standards Wellington and then Web Standards New Zealand.
Through 2005 we ran a number of evening events, with speakers presenting on topics as diverse as a case study of the weta.co.nz site, data tables, social media, writing well, usability and government web standards. We really didn’t have any plans beyond this, although did look a little enviously at the Web Essentials conference that had been started in Sydney in 2004. We approached the organisers of this – Russ Weakley, Peter Firminger, John Allsopp and Maxine Sherrin – and asked if they might be interested in running the conference in Wellington immediately after it was held in Sydney. Or if that didn’t work, perhaps allowing us to approach some of their speakers to stop off in Wellington after the conference.
The word I’m searching for is rebuffed. We were rebuffed in those attempts and in true “screw those Aussies” fashion, we thought we’d have to do things ourselves. And so Webstock was born.
See, we’ve always been fans first and foremost. Perhaps the main motivation for Webstock was that we realised we’d never see or meet so many of the people who’ve inspired us unless we ran a conference and asked them here. Webstock literally started one evening when Tash turned to Ben and myself and said, “let’s just run our own conference and let’s invite Tim Berners-Lee to speak at it”.
We had no experience in running a conference. We had no money. We had no track record. Luckily, and amazingly, GOVIS provided us with a promise to underwrite any losses up to $10,000, and armed with that and our naivety, we started asking people to come to New Zealand and speak at our conference in May 2006. And they said yes.
Our first budget for that conference had a expected attendence of 150 people and we were going to hold it at the Paramount Theatre. That was the budget, but we always kinda knew it would be more successful than that, so we quickly moved venues to the Town Hall in Wellington. Some 400 people attended that first conference.
I remember calculating I had two weeks of buzz and walking round with good feeling from that conference before the grind of everyday work took it away. That’s completely meant as a compliment to how good the first Webstock was. Through the remainder of 2006 and 2007 we ran a series of Webstock Minis and one-day workshops. And planned for Webstock 08 in February of this year. The core Webstock team for that conference was myself, Natasha, Ben, Miraz, Siggy and Debbie Sidelinger. We ran it as volunteers, outside of work hours and, again and mostly, as fans. Around 500 attended in February, and again it had a wonderful feeling of community and being part of a wider New Zealand web industry.
What became clear to us after February though, was that things weren’t sustainable under the same model. Webstock had become too big, there was too much work involved to keep things running as they had been. What also become clear to both myself and Tash was that Webstock is where our passion lay.
So in the last month we’ve both quit our jobs to work on Webstock. Well, Webstock and whatever else is needed to keep us afloat, but in principle on Webstock!
What changes will this mean? Well, one is that we can now run a conference every year instead of every two. Aside from that, we hope not a lot. At least not in how we operate and what we stand for. If our passion for Webstock, and the community and the industry in New Zealand dies, or if we ever stop being fans and excited to bring really interesting people over to New Zealand, just tell us. We’ll either change or stop the whole show.
It’s an exciting time for us personally, but more importantly for what we hope Webstock can achieve and mean. We really hope you’ll enjoy the results.
The following email has come into our possession. In the public interest, we publish it in full below.
From: Webstock organisers
To: Webstock powers-that-be
Date: 9 June
Subject: Progress report
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Planning is going smoothly for the Webstock 09 conference. We’ve booked the Town Hall venue in Wellington again for the week of 16th – 20th February 2009.
We’re working on the format for Webstock right now, but it’s likely to be similar to this year – workshops and a two day main conference. Our aim is to raise the bar yet again in terms of quality and presentation and we’ve got a lot of ideas on how we can make this happen.
Budgets are fun as always. It looks like we’ll be able to keep costs at a similar level to this year, subject of course to there still being oil around so we can fly people here!
The hard part is choosing speakers. We’ll be bringing some back from this year, but we’re always conscious of the need to widen the net and bring in new people. Our aim of constantly trying to inspire, educate and delight the web industry in New Zealand remains our key focus.
All is on track for an official conference launch in August. It’s important to keep our plans “under the radar” so we can surprise people. Remember – loose lips sink ships.
