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

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

I am a lucky, lucky man. I do the job I love and I do it from where I live. Well, technically – with my travel schedule I mostly do it from hotel rooms, airport lounges, trains and coffee shops. In any case though, I am lucky. My company supports and pays people who do not work in an office with everybody else. Even more astounding – my whole team does this: six people in six time zones.

At a meeting we all had we discussed that phenomenon a bit and my boss gave a quick internal lighting talk on the subject of working remotely. We also had quite a few conversations about this when we had our 1:1 meetings and I want to share a few of the observations we both had.

A lot of companies don’t like people working remotely as it is disruptive to a normal office schedule. It can also breed jealousy in the people who have to commute every day to the office. When you offer the option to people though it is amazing what can happen if you play your cards right:

• More output – I find myself constantly feeling guilty of not doing enough (and that is a common feeling). Being visible in an office and available for quick meetings gives you a false comfort of having achieved something. You might not have – you have just been busy. If all people see is what you produced (this could be code, documentation, emails or whatever else) you concentrate much more on the production rather than the talk about it. True, this might mean that things get written that are not 100% what is needed, but at least things get done.
• More documentation – as everybody is distributed and not on the same time zone it becomes much more important to document what you do. This leaves a trail of what has been done before that can be used to hand over work to others if a person gets sick or leaves the company.
• Efficient use of communication tools – instead of meeting in a room at a certain time or impromptu the channels of communication of the web become much more important to have a quick chat. In Mozilla we use Skype, IRC, various messengers, phones and video chat. Again, as we are relying on these for information and communication we use them more sensibly than you normally would. Your status on a messenger is a very important tool to tell your colleagues what is going on and avoid them asking for help and not hearing anything for hours. Messaging evolves from a distraction into a lifeline.
• Collaborative writing – we tend to use Etherpad before and during our meetings to take care of deliveries, goals and actions. By having everyone edit at the same time you collect an amazing amount of information quickly without having a single “meeting note taker” and then hope people will read it. When you were part of the process you are much more likely to read up later on.
• Sequential production – being in different time zones means you can work on the same product in sequence. I can write a text in London in my morning and send it on to my colleagues for review in the afternoon. They can hand it on to another person to add more content and I can finally review it the morning after and put it live. By the time the whole of Europe has tweeted, talked and commented on it the US uptake will be much higher because the content already comes with better reputation.
• Independence and trust – when you are not sitting next to another you are much more empowered to work on your own terms. This can be in a cafe, in your bed or on a train. As people can not look over your shoulder and constantly see what you are doing it breeds a culture of trust. You just expect your colleagues to do right as they are mostly reporting to their own peace of mind.
• Life is less disrupted – companies spend a lot of money on on-site restaurants, gyms and dry cleaning. All things to keep people locked in a golden cage and make their lives easier although they have these things at home. My favourite example is missing deliveries when I am in the office. Not every company delivers to addresses not connected to a credit card. So many a time I missed a “9 to 5” delivery of some product as I was at work and had to wait till the weekend until I had time to pick it up from the depot. Now I just work and get things delivered without me chasing after them.

Jason Fried covered a few of these things in his “Why work doesn’t happen at work” talk and while a lot of it should be taken with a grain of salt, I for one am very happy with what I am doing right now.