Enterprise Communities of Practice

Many of you probably already know that the Call for Proposals for the 2011 Human Factors Conference in Reno, NV has been published. As ITG Program Chair, I would like to encourage everyone to submit their latest research, case studies, opinion pieces, or other ideas for our program.

Also, I am putting together a panel on Enterprise Communities of Practice (company- or discipline-based social networks that link professionals to facilitate collaboration and problem solving). If you are interested in being part of the panel or know someone who would be a good addition, please let me know. I have just started organizing the panel, so there are several open slots available.

Thanks.

Marc Resnick
ITG Program Chair
mresnick@bentley.edu
(305) 443-3765

IEA Call for Papers

CFP:

Call for Abstracts and Proposals for the 17th Triennial Congress of the International Ergonomics Association, IEA 2009( http://www.iea2009.org )

The Online Communities Technical Committee (OCTC) will begin accepting submissions for the IEA 2009 Congress in Beijing, China. The OCTC is calling for proposals for symposia, panels, workshops, field applications and papers that address current or emerging issues related to online communities. The content of these proposals could include case studies, reports of field or laboratory research, reviews of field methods or applications, conceptual models, evaluations, implementation approaches, usability and user experience analysis or design, or other proposals that centre on online collaboration and community environments.

In particular, the OCTC seeks proposals that address core issues, including:

· Efficacy and qualities of online communities versus face-to-face communities
· Understanding and supporting collaboration processes
· Building and developing online communities
· Maintaining an online social presence
· The role of specialised communities
· Delivery mechanisms of educational content online
· Methodological issues in the study of online communities
· Physical and psychological wellbeing related to online communities versus face-to-face communities

Please feel free to contact the OCTC Chair, Andrew Thatcher, andrew.thatcher@wits.ac.za or the Congress Secretariat: Phone: +86-10-8280-1728 Fax: +86-10-8280-5315 Email: iea09secretariat@bjmu.edu.cn; Post Address: Chinese Ergonomics Society Peking University Health Science Center Beijing, 100083, China

Deadlines:
Abstracts and proposal submissions: November 15, 2008.
Acceptance notification: January 1, 2009.
Camera-ready for conference proceedings: April 1, 2009

Submitted abstracts will be peer reviewed by at least two reviewers. The review will support the selection process of those that will be accepted for their presentation at the conference, as well as those to be selected for their publication in IEA endorsed Journals.

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copyright 2004 ITG membership. all product names, websites, brands and articles referenced are the copyright or trademark of their respective owners.

Internet TG at the HFES

Thanks to everyone who participated in the ITG at this year's Internet TG and program at the HFES. Times Square was a great place to have a conference, wasn't it ?!?!

The idea to co-sponsor our sessions with Computer Systems worked out very well. It increased our sessions and our attendance. We plan to do it again next year.

At the business meeting, we brainstormed some ideas for next year. The topics we liked best are:

• design patterns
• Web 2.0 design and testing
• using virtual worlds for training and education
• agile design process

If anyone would like to chair a session, present a paper, or sit on a panel on any of these topics, please let me know. As always, you can reach me at resnickm at fiu.edu
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copyright 2004 ITG membership. all product names, websites, brands and articles referenced are the copyright or trademark of their respective owners.

New Job posting

I hope everyone is planning on coming to the HFES conference next week!! We will be holding the ITG Business meeting there as well.

Here is a job posting, courtesy of Gavin Lew at UserCentric

“We are looking for talented people…”

It seems that every third job posting for user research or user interface design starts with this statement.

User Centric is looking for talented people. But instead of posting a traditional job listing, we want to take a different perspective and write about what it is like to work at a company like User Centric and hopefully you’ll realize it is where you want to go with your career.

Our goal is to affect positive change in the user experience. User Centric is a company that is privileged to have projects where the outcomes can influence the lives of millions - or sometimes just a handful. What we do has meaning and it begins with a desire to understand how people interact with technology.

In any given month at User Centric, you might work on a project that will make daily tasks easier for 40 million users… and then switch gears to then work on a different project where a user will thank you because this product will “change the way my kids will look at their mother”. This doesn't happen every day, but many days are truly great.

Opportunities like these frequently emerge at User Centric is because we work on a diverse set of experiences and technologies. We apply our knowledge, methodologies, and skills toward many different types of products across different environments. At User Centric, you will find yourself applying design and user experience techniques to small screen interfaces, mobile devices, in-vehicle applications, health care products, voice interfaces, business applications, and consumer products. Technology is converging, so the domains we work on are also converging.

When it comes to understanding user experience, there is no perfect approach in design or single way to capture and measure the experience. We continue to evolve our practices and techniques with each and every project. and encourage our team members to learn and educate their colleagues.
Ultimately what allows us to enjoy our work the most is our team. Our team at User Centric makes all the difference. We have found we’re more insightful and creative practitioners when we can leverage the experience and intellect of a team.

And we have fun together! There is a tremendous energy that comes out when our teams work on user research and interface design projects.

User Centric is looking for people who want to make this kind of difference - people who want to work on more than just one type of product and learn about multiple knowledge domains. You will never be bored at User Centric because projects are so diverse.

We are looking for:

• Smart, passionate, articulate, and dedicated individuals who get really excited when working with new technologies and are also
• Looking forward to contributing to insightful, creative teams and
• Think that the ideal job would let them learn something new almost everyday

If you are a user experience researcher, human factors engineer, ethnographer, user interaction or interface designer, cognitive engineer, information architect, usability specialist or something similar, contact us to learn more about opportunities at User Centric.

We will be interviewing at the HFES meeting onsite from Tuesday Sept 23- Wednesday Sept 24. Look for us in the Career Center (and bring your resume)!
www.usercentric.com

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copyright 2004 ITG membership. all product names, websites, brands and articles referenced are the copyright or trademark of their respective owners.

News from the HFES Annual Conference

For anyone who was not at the HFES conference last week, you missed an excellent event. The Internet session on Tuesday morning was a great set of five talks. The extreme gaming session was also very interesting, and in fact is a model for what we want to do going forward (see below).

ITG Business Meeting:
Our incoming Technical Group Chair, Ania Rodriguez, led a discussion on what ITG wants to be and how to focus our activities to achieve this. We had a long discussion on what to do with the TG web site and how to grow the technical program for future conferences. More specifically:

1. The most important thing is next year's technical program. We had one lecture session and one special session this year, as well as several posters. All were very high quality. The number of sessions is a function of the number of submissions, so we can get more sessions if people send in more (and high quality) proposals. We plan to co-sponsor more sessions next year with other TGs, especially computer systems. And I can imagine some good titles with health care, systems development, and others. The idea is to create some unique and innovative panels that will draw in a diverse crowd. There were over 1300 people at the conference, so it is a great opportunity to share ideas with a broad cross section of HF professionals. Ideas suggested at the meeting and afterwards include social networking systems, large-scale military systems, and several others.

Note - the deadline for submissions is January 28th, so start thinking now. The call for proposals will be out next month. The conference will be in Times Square, so it is also a great place to go for other reasons (vacation and professional).

2. Please send me articles for the rejuvenated ITG journal (resnickm@fiu.edu). We haven't named it yet (it used to be called Internetworking), so you can recommend titles as well. Anything related to internet human factors is fair game. Articles should be 2-4 pages long and will be peer reviewed.

3. Please send in URLs for your favorite internet human factors resources. We will be putting up a link farm on the site so that the site becomes a useful destination for good content. We discussed the fact that there are already several of these around, but we will keep this one small and focused as a contrast to the others that seem to have links to everything.



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copyright 2004 ITG membership. all product names, websites, brands and articles referenced are the copyright or trademark of their respective owners.

HFES Conference 2006

Guess what everyone?!?! It is time to start planning the program for the 2006 HFES Conference to be held next Fall in San Francisco. This is the 50th Anniversary conference, so it should be the biggest one ever, with the most parallel tracks, the biggest keynote speakers, and the most attendees.

So, if you ever thought about submitting a paper, panel, debate, poster, etc, now is the time to start putting it together. The Call for Papers will be out soon and the deadline for proposals will be in early March.

You can check out the ITG priorities in the minutes of our 2005 business meeting (in the Human Factors Conference Report posted a few months ago in this blog). But feel free to propose anything you want. Also, if you are interested in being a reviewer, let me know. I will start contacting last year's reviewers in February or so to verify your interest in helping out again.

If you have any questions, suggestions or comments, please don't hesitate to contact me through this post or directly at resnickm@fiu.edu or (305) 348-3537.

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copyright 2004 ITG membership. all product names, websites, brands and articles referenced are the copyright or trademark of their respective owners.

Pawan's input and suggestions

Pawan had sent his input and suggestions during the HFES meeting. I realized that we did not get a chance to review all of the items during the ITG business meeting. I am reproducing part of his email below -

For the ITG meeting, I'd like to propose the following:

1. Get nominations for the following positions: ITG president, Program Chair, and Newsletter Editor. I'll set up the Website to do a vote next month. And I'd like to nominate Gavin Lew for the ITG President position.

2. If possible, I'd like to see if anyone is willing to sponsor the ITG conference. We haven't had one in a while... and it'd be good to get started again. My company would be willing to co-sponsor it if we can find another co-sponsor.

3. I am still spending a few hours every week to post the jobs on the Website. Currently I post at least 5 positions a week. I am hoping to spend some time in a few weeks to automate this.

4. People are still registering on our website... I have stopped keeping a count! I will formalize it a little more, if we find a need.

5. We need some passionate members to revive ITG. I just started my company about 2 years ago... and we're growing, so I am quite occupied and don't have enough bandwidth to do a good job! But I'll continue to support the website and the job bank.

6. I think the blog was a good idea, but I don't see a lot of activity. Please e-mail me the details and I'll post it on the ITG Website... perhaps that will get us some traffic to the blog.

7. We need to revive the newsletter... and need a good newsletter editor. I can help in putting it up on the Website, but need someone to take the lead in putting it all together. I'd like to Nominate Marc Resnick and/or Ajoy for the position.

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copyright 2004 ITG membership. all product names, websites, brands and articles referenced are the copyright or trademark of their respective owners.

ITG Brochure

I noticed that ITG did not have a brochure for distribution at the HFES Central booth. I spoke to Marc about it, and volunteered to draft something up. I'll post it here for review and edits in a few days.. I'm hoping we can get it done and sent on to HF as soon as possible.

Ajoy
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copyright 2004 ITG membership. all product names, websites, brands and articles referenced are the copyright or trademark of their respective owners.

isn't networking great !!!

Isn’t networking great? When I got to the Human Factors Conference last Monday, I accomplished more in the first 24 hours than I usually do in a month. For example:

1. I bumped into a usability engineer I had met at a previous conference and got a lead on a consulting gig for his company.
2. I met an old colleague who is writing a book and we discussed me perhaps co-authoring it with him.
3. I met a contact from NASA who may be able to use my help on a project in January.
4. I bumped into a usability engineer who I have known for several years and mentioned that I would be in his city next month. He asked me to give a presentation to his group, which could possibly lead to a future collaboration.
5. I met a Canadian consultant who may be able to introduce me to some Canadian companies with expertise that I need.
6. In a hallway discussion with my grad school advisor, he gave me the contact information for a Korean lab that is working on something I am also trying to do. I never even thought to ask him.
   

I also helped out a few people:

1. I found out a student chapter needed help creating some marketing materials and I offered to help.
2. I asked a colleague to apply for a job at my institution, and he decided to apply.
3. I found a summer internship for one of my students.
4. I helped a student at another school decide on a grad school to attend.
   

And all this was just on the first day!! On the other hand, there are some things that go nowhere. At one lunch I attended, I spend 90 minutes talking to a guy about a potential project and he wouldn’t even give me the time of day. And who knows what will happen with the 10 items listed above. But it was worth the five days in Orlando if even one or two come through !!

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copyright 2004 ITG membership. all product names, websites, brands and articles referenced are the copyright or trademark of their respective owners.

Human Factors Conference Report

At the Human Factors and Ergonomics Conference, the Internet Technical Group Business Meeting was held and we discussed a bunch of issues related to the TG. Here is a brief summary of what was discussed. I hope that we can generate some strong interest in submitting content for next year's conference. It is a great venue (see below).

1. We had a small, but high quality program this year. The papers were all excellent. I recommend to anyone practicing in the area of Internet HF to read the papers in the Proceedings.

2. For next year, we are currently soliciting submission proposals. The conference is in San Francisco, so it is convenient for you west-coasters and a great place to visit for us in the East or Central. There are a wide variety of submission types (lectures, panels, demonstrations, etc). One of my jobs for the conference overall is to re-engineer the submission types to be clearer and to make them better fit what people want to submit. I will keep our discussion at the TG meeting in mind as I do this.

2a) Lectures - these can be research studies, case studies, new tool descriptions, field studies, or really anything else you can talk about in 15-20 minutes.

2b) Full session (90 minutes) submissions. These can be panel discussions on a general theme, invited addresses of very prestigious people, demonstrations of new technologies, poster presentations where you can interact with other attendees, or special meeting requests where you want to create a real work product like a book outline or a grant proposal. Since next year is the 50th Anniversary of the Conference, the powers that be are hoping to get more of these. So feel free to be creative and submit something innovative.

2c) Workshops or Tutorials. These are half- or full-day sessions that you get paid for. They are supposed to teach a valuable skill to attendees.

As part of our discussion, we talked about co-sponsoring with other groups on content that is in another domain but using the Internet channel. For example, Internet-based health information systems or web-based education. If you want to participate in this, let me know.

Another specific request was a session on email types (mobile, web, corporate). If you or someone you know can talk about the human factors of these, let me know.

Another final specific request was for usability of document types (PDF, MS office, etc) for sharing information. Again, let me know if you want to participate or know someone else who may.

One last thing we talked about was strengthening our mailing list. Please send Pawan Vora (pawanvora@msn.com) to get your email added. This is a great resource for us and we should use it more.

If you have any questions about anything else related to the ITG, please let me know. You can reach me at resnickm@fiu.edu or (305) 348-3537.


Marc


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copyright 2004 ITG membership. all product names, websites, brands and articles referenced are the copyright or trademark of their respective owners.