upcoming area events

Some of our readers might be interested in a couple events happening Tuesday, February 27th
Small Business: In a Nutshell brought to you by the Southeast Michigan STC chapter
at Creative Solutions, 7322 Newman Boulevard, Dexter, Michigan
Christopher Juillet - attorney, writer, publisher, and consultant - will give a brief introduction to small business, including business entity (corporations, LLC, and such) issues, as well as employment contracts, non-compete/non-disclosure agreements, vendor agreements, a few Internet issues and an overview of how to work most efficiently (and economically) with attorneys.

and a meeting of Michigan's Interactive Designers and Software Development
at Frenchie's, 56 E. Cross Street, Ypsilanti, MI

IUE2007 is this week

A note from one of the organizers of Internet User Experience 2007 :

Internet User Experience 2007 (IUE 2007), a conference spotlighting methods for dramatically improving today's web site user experience, begins this week. This year's program includes two core days of presentations and two days of tutorials. IUE 2007 will showcase a number of before/after improvements to existing web sites along with the methods that were used to achieve them, and will cover most aspects of web site design and strategy including user experience design, graphics, branding, marketing message, effective web writing, and enhancements that drive customers to a site.

Tutorial spaces are still available, we have added two Lunch Mini-workshops (usability labs and prototyping tools), and a number of companies seeking employees will be on-hand.

Discounts and special pricing are available to UPA, CHI, and STC members and to full-time students.
Details and registration at www.miupa.org and www.internetuserexperience.biz
Whether you come for a half-day tutorial, the Main Event, or the entire conference, make sure you spend some time here next week to learn, network, and be a part of this exciting and educational event!
-Dave Mitropoulos-Rundus, Michigan UPA President

for the love of Spam

Nathaniel Borenstein gave a great MOCHI talk last night on the intractable problem of spam. He provided a brief overview of the huge impact spam has and will likely continue to have (ex: it costs around .01-.5% of the GDP of developing countries, depending on who is estimating). He then described the landscape of spam management approaches. A theme of his talk was that all of the rich sea of ideas for spam management will be needed to make a dent in spam, and even then, spam will remain an issue. Ultimately, he said, spam is a social and legal problem. Laws won't stop it, but technologists haven't done enough to further legal and social controls.

The discussion with the audience was interesting. Ed Vielmetti mentioned the observable behavior of people leaving a channel of communication when spam gets to be too much. This brought up the question of whether email should just be abandoned and replaced by something else - a question which Dr. Borenstein gets a lot - to which he noted that no one has come up with a better solution for what that "something else" would be. He also noted that email is something of a common denominator of a communication channel, and that taking it away could be just as bad as the initial problem. Also, that when people flee to less noisy channels, the spammers simply follow. And with the rise of internet telephony, we are likely to see great problems arise around phone spam.

There was a nice energy to yesterday's talk, as Dr. Borenstein has been working on email for 26 years - so he takes spam as something of a personal offense.

the socio-technical walkthrough

Thomas Herrmann, from the University of Bochum in Germany, gave an interesting presentation to folks gathered for the joint CREW & MOCHI talk last night. We had to move the location of the talk because a water pipe had broken in the building (West Hall) and a very loud alarm was going off. We quickly found another meeting location in the Shapiro undergraduate library and had about 20 people in the room, thankful to be out of the very cold weather.

Professor Herrmann described work his group has done on techniques for improved communication support during the description of technical systems that are embedded within social processes.

His group has developed a semi-structured visual modeling technique, as well as a method for working with stakeholders that are involved in the situation the technical systems are being made for. The method is called the socio-technical walkthrough (STWT). It takes an initial version of the current processes, expressed in their modified process flow diagramming language, and during a series of short workshops, iteratively walks stakeholders through the processes - step-by-step - and enables discussion of how a technical system might better support those processes.

For more information, please see http://www.imtm-iaw.rub.de/home/aktuelles/index.html.en