Get to know the basics of Legal Observing and use these skills in your own organisation.
Legal observers monitor human rights at public protests and rallies concerning environmental, well being and social justice issues.
Legal or human rights observers can document breaches of human rights, be a point of accountability for police behaviour, and can provide a sense of comfort for people who may be intimidated by a large police presence.
Pretty cool stuff.
Register here
All sorts of weird and wonderful things happen in Melbourne. This event just goes to show it.
Surveying. Not a career prospect I’ve ever given much thought to. But. If I wanted to, today would be my lucky day.
Have you ever wanted to give land surveying a burl? RMIT is offering you that very chance.
To book click here
Added bonus: You get to see all the current surveying equipment used in the industry including a digital level, total station, GPS and a laser scanner.
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This was the question posed at Deloitte Australia’s ‘Conversation – Designing the Interface of the Future’ event, hosted in conjunction with ‘Disruptors in Tech’, a Melbourne based MeetUp group.
I have to admit, quite what a brand sounds like isn’t something I’ve ever really thought about before.
Close your eyes for a moment.
Imagine a world in which every product in the shop is blaring about itself in natural language. Possibly, even holding a conversation with you, calling you by name, fielding your questions and answering them based on preferences it gleaned from the data that you verbally offered up; your smart devices silently told it (your GPS, purchasing and browsing history); your loyalty accounts, biometrics and even the embedded chip in an existing purchased item that you’re currently wearing, that is interfacing via Near Field Communication, informed it about, all serving as context.
It’s not that far-fetched, but it’s hardly everybody’s idea of Utopia.
I instantly assume that every spokesperson, every brand ambassador and every voiceover talent who ever carved out a career is facing becoming automated, and that an audio apocalypse of the kind ‘Minority Report’ foreshadows is on the cards.
On reflection, I fervently hope that the option to switch to classic mode, by which I mean ‘return to mute’ isn’t overlooked, or else that I can default everything to Patrick Stewart or everyone’s favourite meerkat, Alexsandr Orlov.
(I’d be pretty keen for it NOT to sound like Microsoft Catherine.)
Currently, I’m mid way into a two part webinar, learning how to structure and design text based chat bots, with Microsoft Worldwide online, so this long-ago lecture, (which pre-dates the blog, and is one of its three inspirations,) is starting to resonate with me, but in a way that makes the chat bot idea seem a little bit old fashioned.
Ha!
In my humble opinion, text bots take up far too much on-screen real estate. Especially on mobile. And I say that as someone who loves writing and reading, (but not chatting or instant messaging,). Since I’m on a roll, for the love of all that is good and worthwhile, if I’ve just agreed that your site may install a cookie, my dear UX designers, please don’t follow that up a split second later with a request to take a survey about my experience of the site.
Blink.
You know that I literally don’t have any experience with the site yet, don’t you? I mean, you just installed a cookie a second ago, so it invites the question, complete with raised eye brow, “what experience, prithee?”
For the UX and CX designers confusing metrics with success; high pressure tactics with what people want; bells and whistles with colour and interest; and making account closure more than a two-step process, peppered with mildly threatening, condescending “warnings” that imply I don’t know what it is I’m really doing, I do not need yet another reason to switch to a low footprint lifestyle.
Capiche?
Getting back to the subject at hand….
I think it’s self evident what a Rolex watch would sound like (Roger Federer, obvs.) But what does an Australian shiraz sound like? How about the bus stop timetable? And will the bot have a name, or will it be openly robotic? Devoid of personality?
This event is one of my favourites.
It’s so good, that it’s taken a few weeks to process and decide how to best present it.
This edition of Disruptors In Tech was held at National Australian Bank’s 700 Bourke Street outpost, (not to be confused with its dockside 800 Bourke Street headquarters, or its two or three other Bourke Street properties which, although equally imposing, are also the utterly wrong address for this particular event)* showcases the bank’s thought process and design considerations as it prepares to launch a chat bot.
A bank bot?
Hmm.
I’m unfamiliar with any scenario where I might be so caught up that I have to make an urgent bank transaction and my hands won’t be available, but OK. People do strange things when they’re in transit.
Lessons learned:
1. Designing a conversational user interface (CUI) is more fraught than you think.
Lesson 2: personality is hard to do.
As it happens, creating a bot with a flat personality, or no personality (and no name) is just as complex as its alternative. In having no personality, the bot still has a personality. Just not a very sassy, cool or chatty one.
Compound the problem with an assistant that has to flatly, blandly and consistently cover multiple divisions and myriad product lines of a newly agile, complex business, (with the added bonus that the bank is currently investing its time in realising that being complex is not an excuse for not being a disreputable corporate citizen) and this makes for an interesting case study.
Have they got it right?
Lesson 3: Spoken word is a different animal to text.
Human conversation is less formal, more shorthanded and incomplete than dialogue. As a result, conversation bot chat shouldn’t aim to replicate, or in any way be substantially based on, text.
(The sound of a low flying sunk cost whooshes by, while the trumpet heralding a serious new overhead plays.
Choose your interface wisely.)
I have to say, this is kind of a bummer for enterprise if they jumped on the wrong bandwagon and are being leapfrogged, but it’s a boonoonoonus for those who write and script for a living, because if you installed a chat bot: the kind that pops up in a window, asking “can I help you?” (a bit like Clippy used to do,) under no circumstances should you use it as the basis for your new conversational interface.
If someone is calling about their home loan, you can’t just text-to-voice your website or ‘play to end,’ as that’s not how people converse.
This is because even the punchiest of chat bot text comes across as stuffy and long-winded.
NAB’s bots triage and escalate non-self service problems to actual humans, on the fly, whether the channel is text or voice, ensuring that you don’t have to repeat yourself once you and you’re compound issue are connected.
Lesson 4: Testers will be jesters
The bank found that in testing the feature some customers could not help but test the limits of the bot to answer non-banking related questions such as “how tall is a horse?”
The flat answer this bot provides to such fodder is that it cannot assist with the question, but in principle it could be programmed to answer all questions put to it, one day, once the basics are covered and are up and running beautifully.
End scene.
I’ve just discovered that October is officially “Buy Nothing New Month.”
No longer devoted to simple beer drinking or mega rock concerts, and consistent with my budget bottom line at the moment, it’s not so much a celebration, as a question of what can you do? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Quite a lot as it turns out.
As always, these hacks are free, but you do need to register and you should only do that if you really are going.
Instead of Oktoberfest, you could try Winefulness. You heard correctly. Learn about wine from a VinoMofo expert and kill two birds with one stone. 3 October, 6PM. It’s free wine and mindfulness.
Friday 12 October Portable, our friends in Collingwood have another of their super cool catered ‘introduction to’ sessions this one on empathy in human centred design and what it means.
Can’t give up your fashion habit? Into upcycling? Take a squizz at the North Fitzroy Clothing Swap
Frock up for free film as part of the national seniors festival. Melbourne Libraries is hosting ‘Iris‘ the Albert Maysles’ documentary about New York fashion doyenne and art collector Iris Apfel.
On October 30 there’s also lunch with an entrepreneur discussing ‘the truth about early stage tech startup investing.’
All this and more in the Tech and the City Calendar.
My theory that everything you wanted to know will eventually be offered as a free event in Melbourne is proving true. You *could* go to The School of Life, and splash a bit of cash, or, you can sign up and meet the researchers at Unimelb.
Register here
Get help scanning your photos and documents
Want some one-on-one help with scanning your old photos into digital files you can store or share online? Book a librarian for a twenty minute appointment and we’ll help you save your photos to a USB stick. Please bring a USB stick of your own for saving the images.
(You do not need to bring a physical ticket with you to this event.)
For those of us following the Haynes Royal Commission and wondering just how badly off things might be, unimelb has a recorded a lecture all about that.
Visualising global credit risk
Sunday 9 September
Midday til 3 pm
United Pop presents a free workshop on how to be a photographer. The site’s a bit low on detail but for two hours and no money down what are you waiting for?
Register here
(As with most of these events, you’d have to assume that they are a sales feed or else why would people run them? Be prepared to be asked to sign up for something more.)
Did somebody say Free UX workshop?
They sure did.
UX stands for “user experience” and it’s all about how to plan better services by making the experience of navigating them easier or more enjoyable for the person at the receiving end. That person could be a customer or they could be a citizen. Or they could be your Mom.
Couple this with beers at one of Melbourne’s most venerable pubs and you have the makings of a memorable Melbourne after work lesson and everything you need to anaesthetise your aversion to IT acronyms.
Book here
All sorts of weird and wonderful things happen in Melbourne. This event just goes to show it.
Surveying. Not a career prospect I’ve ever given much thought to. But. If I wanted to, today would be my lucky day.
Have you ever wanted to give land surveying a burl? RMIT is offering you that very chance.
To book click here
Added bonus: You get to see all the current surveying equipment used in the industry including a digital level, total station, GPS and a laser scanner.
Return to Home
Moduware
My quest to attend as many cool tech events in Melbourne as I can brings me to WeWork, Collins Street, following a mad dash from RMIT Swanston Street, and the ceramics department’s annual auction of student works.
(Incidentally, I won one of the pieces that I bid on. So, it’s been a productive night.)
I’m with a friend, who may be many things, but a coder or programmer are not two of them. I tell him that I don’t really know what to expect from tonight, but a last minute check of the details of my MeetUp suggests that we’ll be sitting this one out, as I was meant to bring a lap top, as well as my smartphone, and we only have our phones.
Oops!
No biggie.
Alex Chernov is our host and there are three reps from Moduware, all keen to feed us pizza and to chat. One of them, Cato, mentions that he thinks you could eat for free in Melbourne every night, if you wanted to, at events just like this one. I agree, and I will nevermore to wonder whether I’m the only person who suspected this. They absolutely do!
I tell the Moduware crew that I think Melbourne has more, and more interesting, tech events than anywhere else in the world, (although admittedly I didn’t do the tech geek thing in Berlin or London, as I was too busy doing the ‘grown up gap year’ thing, and hanging out with friends I hadn’t seen since I was in my twenties, as though we were still in our twenties.) This left very little room to get to Berlin’s FabLab. I was too busy tracing David Bowie’s footsteps.
I tell them that Menlo Park and San Francisco’s dearth of interesting MeetUps really shocked me, and that it’s not my imagination that my hometown has some cutting edge events, and thoughts, and agendas that I never expected it to have. At least, not in a competitive / comparative sense, As any number of Americans and Europeans pointed out, Melbourne is the arse end of the arse end of the world and ‘so very far away.’
Ugh.
Alex wants to know how much I understand about the subject matter, and I tell him I know more than people give me credit for.
As a middle aged woman, without a tech degree, (thank goodness) I understand the assumption, but we have laws against that kind of bias for a reason. These days I may look like the Mom from ‘The User is My Mom‘ but that belies the reality that I was there when the Privacy Act was a bill being read in the Parliament (the legislative equivalent of being a twinkle in your Dad’s eye) and I’m an expert in electronic transactions in ANZ. Not to mention, that I influenced HL7 messaging and ePrescribing globally and am likely the reason that you can even debate whether to opt in or out because that isn’t how it was originally going to be. To show I don’t need to resort to irrelevant boasting, I mention that I taught myself HTML when MySpace was a thing. So, there’s that.
My credentials are dead set bona fide, but my colleague’s are doubtful. I let them know that we are fine with just looking over someone’s shoulder thanks. (If hacking into HTML taught me one thing, it’s that I don’t want to be a coder. I just want to understand how coding happens, in java, and see how this new vertically integrated programmable Scala jewellery works.
Ok, so it’s not wearable. That doesn’t make it a bad analogy…
Tonight’s event is the first in a series designed to foster a Moduware user community in Melbourne.
It’s LED night, and I’m immediately drawn to the ‘disco’ sequence, with my friend about twenty seconds ahead of me in doing the exact same thing.
The lag is caused by his Moduware base unit being on already, and my needing to locate the on switch for mine, which I establish by a process of elimination.
The ‘on’ switch has to be here somewhere…
I press all the bits that look like buttons, before finding a panel the size of a phone nano sim card, that doesn’t really scream ‘pick me’ but proves to be the key to the castle.
Success.
I’m in.
Future events will centre on the other tiles that Moduware have developed.
Next month’s will look at the thermostat function, for example, that isn’t a thermometer but can tell ambient and surface temperature, up to a point. (Word of caution. It will melt and isn’t waterproof. So, it has some limitations.)
The breathlyser, digital projector and conferencing tiles; barometer and measurement tool, which I’m told can size up the dimensions of a space, and measure distance, without you needing to get up from your chair sound very promising.
I suggest that if it can do this, then it might be useful to helping one triangulate how best to pocket a billiard ball. This is met with an eyebrow raise but the theory is not disputed.
I’m urged to go on Github, which I do have a registered account for, but have never accessed.
I’m not sure this it the exact right tipping point for me. I don’t play billiards all that often.
Moduware started life as a simple power pack, and it still serves this purpose. The product evolved from a phone case that proved to be nonviable, due to the rapid fire evolution of smart phone design, and the variety of brands in the market. It’s explained to me that the tiles augment one’s phone with hardware, the way that an application augments the phone’s existing functions with new software.Wireless speakers are the most relatable example of this in real life already.
When we open the packs, I notice that they are all named after Star Trek ships and this impresses Alex. So it should. He mentions that the product intent is to be a tricorder and I can see the potential, although it rather reminds me of a Sony Walkman and that is never a bad thing. (Retro tech is an emerging trend in my GenX opinion. Speaking as someone who collected vinyl in the 90s when everyone was chucking it away. )
WeWork takes up several levels of 401 Collins Street. It’s a co-working space with locations scattered globally.
I can see why digital nomads might not choose to come to Melbourne, given this prime CBD location. I imagine that cashed up millenial entrepreneurs and people wouldn’t travel to Melbourne if they had to co-work out at Maidstone or Boronia.Ballarat, Bendigo or Macedon might manage to pull it off.
Confusingly, there is no signage in the lobby or the lift telling us how to get to reception, so that’s a bit of a design fail.
When we do get in, (with Moduware’s help,) the look and lay out is uncannily familiar, largely because I spent a month at WeWork’s Medellin location, as part of grown up gap year. It’s dream like in some ways. Everything is here, but in a slightly different place.
WeWork offered free beer on tap in Medellin but only during business hours which I think says a lot about the Colombian work ethic. I don’t ask if they do that in Melbourne, because I don’t drink beer.
On reflection, I’m hard pressed to think of any multi-storey places that would fit the bill in St Kilda or Carlton or Fitzroy, so the CBD may have been the most obvious choice of location. WeWork inhabit nine storeys. About the same number as they did in Colombia. It must be the way we work works.
Moduware is hoping to develop a developer community however it’s also conducting market research.
Influencing how tech companies develop new things is right up my alley so I am in my element.
My friend and I are interviewed separately and we are also filmed, responding to questions about whether we would use the tech, how much we would pay and what our ideas are for future developments.
Now you’re talking!
One of the motives behind the blog and this my TechPol renaissance is a quest to understand the future of work and how to influence technology and its ethical development. What better way than to do this than to meet with developers? Or be a developer?
There is a github for this, but on reflection I would like:
People who attend a Moduware workshop at WeWork receive a discount code and have the option of picking up their product from the office, thereby saving on the purchase of their Moduware and the shipping.
https://brickset.com/sets/theme-Scala/subtheme-Jewellery
Tech and the City 
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