Keynote Speakers

2008

Eric Meyer: The Emerging Profession

Ask ten web professionals to define their positions and you will hear ten different answers (and probably ten different job titles). As a field that grew out of the collective efforts of millions, a formal description of the “web professional” has never solidified. However, there are certain characteristics that professionals in the field share.

What are the hallmarks of a true web professional? How can we (as individuals and as a community) develop these important, shared strengths? How do we work to influence the use of best practices amongst our colleagues, administrators, and people just entering the field?

Drawing on nearly a decade and a half of experience in the field, Eric will sketch the emerging outlines of the web professional, and how the underlying principles of the web standards movement, as well as the technical design of the web itself, provide a frame for that outline.

Amy Kristin Sanders: Internet Law & Liability

Like new communications technologies in the past, the Internet and World Wide Web have resulted in new ways of creating and interpreting laws. And just like print technology resulted in the creation of copyright law, Internet technology is now challenging these traditional notions of copyright…and may very well result in a new paradigm of what defines intellectual property and its protection.

Toss in issues about First Amendment freedom of speech and press protections, privacy issues, and thorny technical issues like accessibility, and there is now a broad landscape of Internet law that is being reshaped and reinterpreted by our nation's courts.

How do Internet law issues shape the way that Web Professionals do their work? Are there issues of liability that should concern us? What are the top Internet law issues that affect our emerging profession, and how should we be paying attention and reacting to them?

2009

Doc Searls: The Intention Economy

Today we’re living in a Web 2.0 world that feels empowering at so many levels. We can write, share our photos and music, and update our personal status, all online and socially, using a variety of web tools that are almost free. Yet in many ways, the critical data and service agreements involved in these processes are almost completely beyond our control—so is this really “free”? We are forced to store and share personal data according to the guidelines of companies instead of our preferences, and required to check “Agree with Terms” to sign up for a new service—but we didn’t write any of the terms! What would it mean to instead have an intention economy, one in which the needs and preferences of customers are sought and received by companies, and we are in charge of our data and transaction terms? What does it mean to have the customer truly be free, and have influence in the relationships with organizations and companies?

Bruce Schneier: Web Culture & Privacy

Web culture is changing web privacy. While increasing numbers of internet users share their unfiltered lives on the web, an equal number of bosses, school administrators and corporations are watching. Schneier will examine the future of the conflict between expectations and realities of privacy on the web.

2010

Kristina Halvorson: Let’s Hug It Out: Design, Code…and Content

Watch Let’s Hug it Out on YouTube

Wendy Chisholm: Inclusive Universe

Watch Inclusive Universe on YouTube | Inclusive Universe slides as PDF

2011

Luke Wroblewski: Designing for Today’s Web

Watch Designing for Today’s Web at Vimeo

Nancy Lyons & Meghan Wilker – The Geek Girls: Revenge of the Nerds: People, Culture & Innovation

“Revenge of the Nerds” keynote video at Vimeo | Slides for “Revenge of the Nerds” at Slideshare

2012

Whitney Hess: What’s Your Problem? Putting Purpose Back into Your Projects

“What do you do?” has become the standard opening line for getting to know someone. But if you were asked, “Why do you do what you do?” how would you answer? We are too narrowly focused on developing solutions for problems that we don’t understand, don’t care about, or worst of all, don’t actually exist. Life is too short to waste our time expertly creating something that matters to no one. Learn to find your “why.” Discover interviewing techniques to build greater empathy with your users, synthesizing techniques to uncover their underlying inefficiencies and frustrations, and tips to continually draw inspiration and long-term product vision from their lives.

John Moe: Broadcast Spectrum: a great big complicated physics issue that just so happens to hold the key to the future of everything

Spectrum is both one of the least covered stories in technology and one of the most important. John Moe, host of American Public Media’s Marketplace Tech Report, walks through some of the most pressing issues and biggest stories related to the dividing up of the broadcast spectrum, as wireless carriers, the GPS industry, the military, and the media attempt to position themselves to be heard and profit in the age of ubiquitous instant communication. Fortunately, Moe will explain all this in a way that doesn’t require a physics degree to understand.

2013

Veronica McGregor: Sociable Science & Armchair Astronauts

As the Curiosity Mars rover touched down on the Red Planet, the teams at NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory were sharing the historic event on Twitter, Facebook, Ustream, YouTube, Google+, Xbox Live, mobile apps, and in-real-life landing parties. The Mars Science Laboratory mission propelled the interest and attention of the nation back onto the space program at a time when many thought the curtain had fallen with the last flight of the Space Shuttle. And while the social media campaign—one that showed a hipper, more accessible NASA—became an “overnight success,” it was in fact an ongoing effort that began four years earlier when NASA took its first steps into social media. For NASA and JPL, building a vibrant community of enthusiasts through two-way communication channels has become an integral part of every mission’s success.

Brad Frost: Beyond Media Queries: Anatomy of an Adaptive Web Design

Media queries may be responsive design’s secret sauce, but we know there’s a whole lot more that goes into crafting amazing adaptive experiences. By dissecting an example of a mobile-first responsive design, we’ll uncover the principles of adaptive design and highlight some considerations for creating contextually-aware web experiences. We’ll go over emerging mobile web best practices and responsive patterns that can assist in our journey toward a future-friendly web.

2014

Maggie Koerth-Baker: Spock-like Things in a Kirk-like World

In retrospect, the electric light seems like an instant win. In grade school, we all learned this history as a very simple story—Thomas Edison invents the lightbulb in 1879 and, yada yada yada, success! But reality is more complicated than that. The truth is that electric lighting technologies failed for 80 years before Edison came along, and the business of electricity failed for another 40 after him. When you understand why that happened, you’ll be on your way to understanding how the seemingly rational world of tech melds with messy world of humanity to create our present and shape our future.

Lisa Welchman

2015

Karen McGrane: The Mobile Content Mandate

You don’t get to decide which device people use to access your content: they do. Today, more people access the internet via mobile devices than on traditional computers. In the US today, more than one-third of people who browse the internet on their mobile phone say that’s the only way they go online — for teens and young adults, those numbers are even higher. It’s time to stop avoiding the issue by saying “no one will ever want to do that on mobile.” Chances are, someone already wants to.

In this session, Karen will discuss why you need to deliver content wherever your customer wants to consume it — and what the risks when you don’t make content accessible to mobile users. Already convinced it’s important? She will also explain how to get started with your mobile content strategy, defining what you want to publish, what the relationship should be between your mobile and desktop site, and how your editorial workflow and content management tools need to evolve.

Steve Krug: You’re Not Doing Usability Testing? Are You… Nuts?

Anyone who’s tried doing it can tell you that usability testing is the best way – by far – to ensure that what you build (whether it’s a web site, a mobile app, desktop software, or anything else) is as good as it can be. But most people still think that usability testing is complicated, costly, and time consuming. That can be true if you hire someone to do it for you. But Steve Krug will show you that you can – and should – be doing it yourself, and that DIY testing is simple, inexpensive, fast, and most of all, effective.

Based on the method he described in his second book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, Steve’s presentation will include a live usability test so you can see just how simple it can be.

2016

Denise Jacobs: Banish Your Inner Critic

Your inner critic is an unconscious deterrent that stands between the seeds of great ideas and the fruits of achievement, keeping you stuck by telling you you’re just faking it, that others have more talent, that you’ll never achieve the success you seek. Let’s discover how to anatomize this pernicious inner force, and then learn techniques to banish this critic so that you can have the mental space and energy to let your true talents emerge — and help you be a badass with your work.

View slides for Banish Your Inner Critic

Sara Wachter-Boettcher: Everybody Hurts: Content for Kindness

We all want interfaces that feel human—where the content is friendly and everything flows right along. But being human isn’t just about being breezy. Every user who interacts with your site comes there with personal histories—with pain and problems, with past traumas or present crises. How can we take our users’ vulnerabilities, triggers, and touchy subjects into account when we don’t even know what they are? What would it mean to optimize not just for seamlessness, but for kindness? This talk will show you how clear intentions and compassionate communication can strengthen everything from form questions to headlines to site structures.

2017

Safiya Noble: What Can We Learn from Digital #Fail(ures)?

The idea that we will become free through technology is not new. However, we do not live in a world that is a blank slate. Hierarchies of power are reproduced and enacted through digital technologies. The ways in which our everyday lives are digitized into easily stored and repurposed bits of information actually heightens control and surveillance: as we are tracked and categorized, power-laden boundaries across race, gender, and class become digital enclosures.

Technology is not neutral. In this talk, Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble from the UCLA Department of Information Studies will discuss the importance of new models of intervention and resistance. By illuminating linkages to power struggles over values, particularly in the context of the digital, we can re-examine information contexts and realize we have great responsibility and the imperative to act.

Samuel Sinyangwe: Using Data and Digital Activism to End Police Violence

Data can be a powerful tool to tell the truth about urgent issues impacting communities and to identify solutions to those issues. Samuel will present how he’s used data, in collaboration with activists across the country, to visualize the scale of police violence in America and advance policy goals within the Black Lives Matter movement through the Mapping Police Violence and Campaign Zero projects. He’ll demonstrate how data can be collected, analyzed, and visualized in ways that center the communities most impacted and that empower communities with actionable information to effectively advocate for systemic change.

2018

Jade E. Davis: The Already Augmented and Virtually Real

What happens when technology and the imaginary, and all its biases collide to create the newest form of digital innovation? In this talk Dr. Jade E. Davis explores why progression that seems forward thinking based solely on technology will perpetually increase the distance between people by design. Focusing on two of the most anticipated digital technologies in recent memory—virtual and augmented reality—she will examine who digital media forget, leave behind, and push forward. She will also discuss why it’s important to close these gaps if we want to move forward as a society.

Watch The Already Augmented and Virtually Real on YouTube.

Molly Wright Steenson: Sometime to Return

As we look at the hype of AI, where did it come from, what does it have to do with UX design? Turns out, the two have a lot to do with each other, starting long before the web was a twinkle in Sir Tim Berners Lee’s eye. In this talk,I’ll blow up the history of thrilling collaborations between architects, designers, and technologists since the 1950s, future visions of what it would be like to navigate and inhabit intelligent worlds—ideas that put in place the web and how we design for it. I’ll question where we’re from as web folk and where we’re going. Or as Dave Pirner sings in the Soul Asylum single that served as the inspiration for this talk’s title:

The hourglass is draining fast/
It knows no future holds no past/And all this too will come to pass.

Watch Sometime to Return on YouTube.