At the Inspire conference this week Simone Brummelhuis of The Next Women used one of the breaks to play “The Skill Swap” game.

Simone handed out sheets of paper where you could say what skill you need and what skill you have and your contact details. She then picked a few and asked the people to stand up and matched them with people in the audience who were happy to provide the skills needed. All in all it was good fun and quite useful. However, I considered it a bit “eighties” – especially at a conference dealing with inspiration in new technology:

• It kills trees
• Simone had to decipher handwriting (and failed at time)
• What happens to the papers with people’s contact details afterwards? This could be confidential information
• It doesn’t scale as you have only a short time to make a few matches

Instead I want to move the idea of that game to a place where it makes more sense: Twitter. For this, I’d need some test data I’d love you to provide me with.

How the skill swap game can work with Twitter

Instead of providing papers to fill out we could do simple tweets and write a small app that harvests them. The syntax could be pretty simple:

#{conference} - #sks-{have|want}-{skill}

So say you are at FOWA London 2011 and you are looking for a UX person the Tweet would be

#fowaldn2011 - #sks-want-ux

If you are an mobile startup looking for funding, you can do

#fowaldn2011 - #sks-want-funding(mobile startup)

If you are a kick-ass developer:

#fowaldn2011 - #sks-have-html5,javascript,css3

And so on. The app could then show a pool of wants and haves and the people who offer them. It could suggest pairings and show trends which are the hottest wants and needs and so on.

Let’s have a go

What do you think? In order to start with this I’d like to have some data. So let’s come up with a fake conference and send out some Tweets please.

For the conference, let’s take the name #awesomeconf – bring the data :)

@codepo8 #awesomeconf - #sks-have-html5

Things that made me happy this morning:

• Did you also think that the awesome that is X-Men: First Class had a lot of gay undertones? This is totally on purpose as revealed in a comment of the screen write on the very good X-Men: First Class, Gay Rights, and the Intelligence Community article (detail about the comment). Cool.
• Steering a wheel chair with a tongue stud – how cool is that?
• T-Mobile let people play Angry Birds in real life – it happened in Barcelona and had a cool band, too
• YouTube now features HD preview images and the option to turn off the watermark – just add a ?modestbranding=1 parameter to the URL
• This is why interactive Doodles at Google rock: the playable (and now also internationally recordable) guitar doodle in action with a guy singing “Hey Jude”
• Paul Annett has a great piece on accessibility from a UX point of view with Accessibility – you’re doing it wrong.
• Tom Selleck could have been Indiana Jones but it was too hard to remove leaves and spider webs from that moustache
• The end credits of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban showed some very close to each other feet in a secluded corner. Filth, I say!

Things that made me happy this morning (yes, it is back)

• Today’s Google Doodle is a playable guitar in honour of Les Paul (screencast)
• HTML Boilerplate makes it much easier to write those annoying HTML emails
• A collection of simple .htaccess snippets
• jVectorMap is a jQuery plugin to make simple map visualisations in SVG - for larger data sets there is GISCloud
• If you are a security company you shouldn’t leave your encryption keys in a readable folder (fixed now – screenshot)
• Great comics that never happened is an awesome series
• The Aloha Editor guys have a pretty mental CSS3 Cube Demo but awful browser detection on it
• Very cool behind the scene shots of classic films

About two years ago I had a dream and made it reality: I wanted to mix the crazy world of hackdays and unconferences and the world of accessibility.

In hackdays and unconferences developers show in a very short amount of time that they can solve a lot of problems and create great proof of concept products. These proofs can then be taken forward and changed into real products.

In the accessibility world we constantly complain that developers do not care enough about the needs of people with disabilities. We also complain about new technology not being helpful to disability needs or needs of the elderly.

I wanted to marry the enthusiasm of hackdays and the existing urge of developers to solve problems with the real life problems people who use the web have. I also wanted to dispel some myths around accessibility and show that you can be cool and innovative and also care for the needs of everybody.

Therefore I organised Scripting Enabled, a one day conference in which people with different disabilities showed the barriers that keep them from using the web and inviting a group of developers on the following day to build solutions to remove these barriers.

I was successful – I managed to pull off a free conference with a lot of attendees with only £200 out of my own pocket and caused some media attention and recorded a few good videos (which are on Yahoo Video – so I need to move them soon, drat!) raising awareness about disability needs on the web.

What I failed to do was my second agenda: to break down the barrier between the accessibility world and the development world and start a constant flow of hack and accessibility innovation.

I opened the idea of Scripting Enabled to everyone and invited people to hold their own. One other SE was held at Adobe in Seattle but that was it.

I started a mailing list and a Wiki – both dying of spam now and without any activity.

Probably this is all my fault – you just can’t start a new movement and build a community in a very saturated market like the internet is today with Facebook, Twitter, various mailing lists, Quora, Reddit, Stackoverflow and others all competing for our attention.

If I had constantly pushed for Scripting Enabled it might have hit off. I relied on the accessibility community to do that for me – alas, they didn’t and I actually have a hard time naming a working accessibility community that does not revolve around trying to push “accessible products”.

That is why I will archive Scripting Enabled as soon as I have time. I spend a lot of time deleting spam and I feel that there is no point in kicking this horse to trot on. It was a nice dream and a good first run. I am happy I did it but I don’t feel there is a point to try to repeat when there is no communication in two years.

Derzeit bin ich noch ein paar Stunden in Berlin, wo ich gestern auf der Webinale einen Vortrag ueber neue Web Technologien und deren Einsatz gehalten habe. In dem Vortrag beschreibe ich Probleme von HTML5, wie Firmen es als Marketingidee verkaufen anstatt die Technologie weiter zu fuehren und was man heute machen kann um die Evolution der Webentwicklung weiter zu fuehren. Hier sind die Slides und die Audio Aufnahme des Vortrags:

HTML5, CSS3 und JavaScript fuer alle:

Die Tonaufnahme des HTML5 talks gibt es bei Archive.org.

Die Links, die im Vortrag angesprochen werden:

• Min.us – einfaches File Sharing mit der HTML5 FIle API
• Jason Weaver – ein schoenes Beispiel von dem Einsatz von Mediaqueries
• Media Events in HTML5 Video – ein Beispiel des W3C
• Indiana Jones Karten in HTML5
• This Shell – ein Musik Video als Puzzle Spiel
• GitHub als schoenes Beispiel fuer History Pushstate
• D3.js um Datentabellen zu visualisieren
• HighCharts fuer Graphen
• Google Body Browser und Pepetz als WebGL Beispiele
• 3 Dreams of Black das neue interaktive Google Musik Video
• Kkrieger ein 96K 3D Ballerspiel
• Ben the Bodyguard ein schoenes Beispiel von CSS3 Animation mit schlechtem Markup
• HTML5 fuer XP
• The State of HTML5 Audio erklaert HTML5 Audio Probleme
• Vid.ly fuer einfache Videokonvertierung
• HTML5 Boilerplate um mit HTML5 als Project anzufangen
• Modernizr um Browser auf HTML5 Kompatibilitaet zu testen
• PhoneGap um mobile Applikationen zu erstellen
• YouTube HTML5 um YouTube umzustellen
• Madimation als Beispiel fuer gute CSS3 Animation mit sinnvollem HTML und Animatable als Tool um solche zu erstellen
• CSS3 Animation mit dem Handy
• HTML5 WOW Praesentation von Google IO
• ButterApp um Videos und Webinhalte zu synchronisieren
• Mozilla Demo Studio fuer Demos und einem Demo Wettbewerb