In late March, I presented to about 150 attendees of the HighEdWeb New England conference at Mt. Holyoke College. My topic: how to plan and run an effective livestream fundraising event. This is something we’ve had a chance to do at Bates for the last two years, and it’s been very successful for us. It […]
A couple weeks ago, Bates College was on The Simpsons. I found out on a Sunday evening via Facebook, where a friend mentioned he had just seen the show poking fun at Bates. Next, I checked Yik Yak, where some of our students were talking about seeing it as well. Because Simpsons episodes and clips […]
Watching a tragedy unfold from the other side of the world can at once be deeply moving and terribly frustrating. It can be hard to know what to do, how to react. Even if the events have no tangible, concrete effect on your day-to-day life, the urge to express empathy with the victims can be […]
What makes a particular design successful can be hard to define. Elegance and intuition can take a variety of forms, and all kinds of different interfaces can get the job done well. Plus, what works for one person may be totally inaccessible to another, which is why the process of iterative design and testing is […]
The more I’ve thought about Citizen Experience — with its goal of reconsidering and improving the experience citizens have when they interact with government — the more I find myself coming back to the same thought: we really need a list of all those points of interaction. This would include everywhere that public institutions and […]
Data: It’s for Yuppies and Hipsters. That’s the message I’m hearing lately from more than a few companies that deal in data. It seems like more often than not, the messaging around data is, frankly, elitist — based on an assumption that data is something for people of means. Because I’m a sucker for a good […]
Last week, Google unveiled its much-anticipated social networking platform Google+ (pronounced “Google Plus”). Clearly Google wants to compete with Facebook in this sphere. A lot of details need to be ironed out before we know how successfully it will do so — including at what point people will actually get to join the service — […]
Keeping this on my desktop for high five emergencies:
Tonight, the moon is at its closest — and brightest, and biggest — in 18 years. I think this photo from NASA of its rise over the Lincoln Memorial captures the majesty of this phenomenon pretty well.
I’ve attended a few conferences in my relatively short career so far, and while some have been more useful than others, candidly, none has really struck me as having been a more productive use of my time than being at my desk. That is, until the 2011 Government Web and New Media Conference, which took […]