Wisdump

Dumping wisdom on design and the web

Holding a Conference? Spice It Up With These Geeky Ideas

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The mark of anything well-made is found in the details, and when it comes to geeky conferences for designers and developers, organizers are coming up with geeky new ways to spice up the offline event experience.

Badges

Gravatar-enabled WordCamp Badges

Gravatar-enabled WordCamp Badges

Let me first say that Gravatars, or globally recognized avatars, should be a staple in every social network or web app that lets uses upload avatars, because why upload one everywhere when it can be pulled from a centralized location?

Now combine Gravatar with sister application WordPress, specifically its conference WordCamp, and you’ve got brilliant automated way to print photos on conference badges. The best part is you can download the source code!

Creative Mornings Q&A Badges

What would make you a good client?

This one’s not so high-tech, but a neat little idea nonetheless, especially for smaller, more frequent gatherings such as Creative Mornings. In place of names on the nametags, participants have to fill in the blank with an answer to a certain question.

Past sessions have asked questions like “What would you like to redesign?”, “What can you teach me?”, “What would you do if you had your own storefront?”, and “What would make you a good client?” Cheap, easy, and an instant icebreaker.

Crowdsourcing

dConstruct Time Capsule

dConstruct 2009 Time Capsule

With the theme of dConstruct 2009 being Designing for Tomorrow, it makes total sense to come up with a Time Capsule competition, where the best entry wins free passes including hotel accommodations and a seat at the speakers dinner.

The question is simple: “What do you see that you would like to preserve for the future?” but it also underscores how important understanding the past and present is in order to build for the future. Especially when it comes to the Web.

SXSW Panel Picker

SXSW PanelPicker

For such a massive event as the South By Southwest (SXSW) Conferences and Festivals, tapping into the wisdom of the masses makes sense. Not only does the SXSW PanelPicker increase interactivity by letting the participants vote for the talks that will go live, but it also builds extra buzz as the speakers themselves campaign for their own panels.

Twitter & Co. Mashups

MIX09 Flotzam

MIX09 Flotzam 6

These days everybody is contributing to the coverage of any one event, and it’s even more awesome to experience that collaboration during instead of after the fact. Mashups such as Flotzam grabs streams from Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Digg, Twitter, and the blogosphere. This one looks especially nice with the Tetris skin, which was originally built for Microsoft conference MIX09.

Read more about the process here. Grab the .NET and Silverlight source code here.

Carsonified @HelloApp

Carsonified @HelloApp

@HelloApp, which debuts at the Future of Web Apps – London 2009, lets conference-goers meet new people via Twitter. First you tag yourself during check-in, earn badges and points for meeting new people and completing certain tasks, and browse the seating chart according to professional background (design, development, PHP, Rails).

A perfect blend of socializing and tweeting at the same time. Read how Carsonified created it.

What’s your great idea?

Got a great conference idea already executed, or still brewing? The moral of the story here: don’t leave your geekiness behind when you go offline. Embrace it, because it makes things a hell of a lot more interesting.

Will Twitter avatars render Gravatar irrelevant?

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Twitter Images & Gravatar avatar services

I can’t help comparing Twitter Images (tweetimag.es), which extract a user avatars with just a URL to the more established universal avatar provider Gravatar, which is dependent on an email address.

While there are certainly more email users than any web service out there, Gravatar isn’t quite as buzzworthy as Twitter; it’s a more specific service after all. However, because of this Twitter Images service, extracting an avatar is much easier than Gravatar’s implementation and could gain more traction as a legitimate avatar solution on blogs. I won’t be surprised if Twitter scooped up this little project for itself.

On the other hand, being dependent on Twitter—whose popularity still causes downtimes to this day—may not be such a good idea for critical endeavors, and it may be more advisable to go for the service whose sole business is avatars (or if possible, identity management).

Gravatar and Twitter don’t have to be adversaries. I’d want Gravatar to take the high road and embrace all the popular identity channels, be it Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, MobileMe, OpenID, etc. Or should one leave the multiple avatar sources feature to the developers just like you can have different login and identity options on blogs and web services? Perhaps Mix Online’s Incarnate is the right way to skin the cat.