Paul Fenwick, a consummate and hilarious presenter at past BarCampMelbourne events, lived up to his reputation and had the audience in stitches with his talk on ‘Hacking other peoples’ brains’. The entire premise of his talk is that as geeks, we need to translate inter human communications to some form of protocol – like TCP for Humanz

Using The Sims as an example, he explained how to get better outcomes when communicating with people, we need to understand how they think and feel – what their ‘status bars’ are and how people are motiviated. As Paul explains – happy people are more likely to give us what we want. This is why people are more likely to say ‘yes’ when you buy then a coffee or bring them chocolate A lot of the content in Paul’s presentation boils down to common sense – such as trying to create a win-win situation – if you are helping people fulfill their goals and desires, then they are more likely to assist you in return.

A key point of the presentation was that people are more willing to help if they are made to feel that what they’re doing – and hence themselves – are important and valued – which is why recognition should never be overlooked. If this means telling their manager’s manager about what a great job they’ve done – then do it!

Paul recommended HiveMinder.com as a great tool for collaborative to do lists.

Brianna Laugher, the President of WikiMedia Australia – a not for profit organisation dedicated to promoting access to and participation in free cultural networks, presented on ‘So we ruined the encyclopaedia – now what?’.  Her talk first posed the question of whether the encyclopaedia really was dead, and concluded that printed forms of this media are not dead, but are now a niche market rather than a mainstream method of accessing information. The Wikimedia model of user-submitted and user-reviewed content had caused a paradigm shift in the industry – with encyclopadia manufacturers such as Brittanica now moving to a model of reader contributed content. Brianna questioned how long the current business model of enclyclopaedia producers such as Brittanica and Funk & Wagnall would be sustainable given that their product now has only a niche market.

Brianna then explored what had really been ruined with the introduction of Wikipedia and user-contributed content. In short, the quality of content had been diminished – the ‘brilliant prose’ of thick tomes replaced with brief, to the point articles on a much wider range of topics. But, Laugher posed, “is that enough”? Do people still need (or even want) the long-winded entries of Brittanica? In our just-in-time, instant gratification society, a two paragraph overview may be enough to answer somebody’s question.

Brianna went on to outline how the quality control standards at Wikipedia are tightening over time – with the marking of articles as requiring citations, introducing cross-linking so that articles are hyperlinked, and the introduction of ‘featured articles‘ which provide exemplars of the content standard that should be aspired to by budding Wiki-authors.

Challenges with the editing community that supports Wikipedia were also addressed in Brianna’s presentation – such as the high turnover of good editors, and the need to train and attract high calibre volunteers to the project. These are hurdles faced not just in the open source community, but also in the corporate and government sectors.

Brianna’s talk is available online.

Jodi, who has recently completed her Masters in interactive gaming, started her discussion by exploring what pervasive gaming meant to different people. It was clear that while there several gamers (both hobbyists and hardcore) in the audience, there weren’t a lot of people with a lot of experience in this field. From the discussions it was also apparent that the phenomenon had a larger following in Europe and UK rather than in Australia. It is not currently clear whether this is a cultural issue – or driven by the physical environment. For instance, it is a lot easier to undertake pervasive gaming in a built up area as there are more people and locations to interact with.

Part of the discussion focussed on an emerging trend whereby the traditional boundary between ‘game play’ and ‘real life’ is blurring so that real life and in-world activities may be undertaken at the same time. A similar parallel is that of work and leisure time becoming more blended – this just takes it one step further.

One of the challenges Jodi mentioned preventing wider uptake of this hobby is reliability of technology – many games are GPS or mobile depdendent and if there are reception issues gameplay is inhibited.