Arielle Reinstein

Braden Kowitz

Edward Ho

Jonathan Perlow

Todd Jackson

• photo shown: google offices. each person has a ~5 foot long desk, 2 24” monitors. open layout.
• Jon Perlow: Software Engineer, Gmail Frontend
• Best known for Mail Goggles: prevents drunken emails by testing you with math problems.
• Gmail is at it’s best when we start with something that seems crazy at the time. Not necessarily that we know how to do it. But that it would be great for the user.
• Started with…
• Email that you would never need to delete anything
• Spam filters that would just work
• HTML/javascript interface that felt just as good as desktop applications
• We didn’t know how to do any of those things.
• They asked me to implement integrated chat. Browser based chat up to that time was really clunky. if we had limited ourselves to what we knew how to do, we wouldn’t have attempted it. 
• Think about what is best for the user, and then try to do it.
• Most of the things we do fail. Lots of false starts before anything launches.
• Four years ago we worked on stuff like Google buzz.
• you keep trying until you figure it out.
• Arielle Reinstein
• Product Marketing Manager
• In charge of Gmail blog
• Gmail sticker set: you could send an envelope and they would send you stickers.
• Has to deal with outages
• With scarcity comes demand. People were selling their souls to get a Gmail invite. They thought it was brilliant marketing. In fact, it was just to manage demand. They had never had a free service with so much space.
• They focus now on how to do word of mouth. 
• Poll: who in the audience got gmail via banner ad (zero), via signing up at website (almost none), via invite from friend (almost everyone)
• They work now on generating buzz when they don’t have to manage demand.
• They have done banner ads, and PR campaigns, but in fact, that is just a drop in the bucket compared to their organic growth.
• Ed Ho
• Technical Lead for Google Buzz
• Was a founding member of Yahoo pipes
• Building an engineering team culture is at least as important as code quality.
• He wanted a super engineering team
• Team to feel like they were on a mission. they could do it, they were one team, they didn’t feel split across front-end and back-end. 
• Ideas come from everywhere. Someone else might have a might better idea. 
• I wanted lightning fast decisions, not sitting in for hours in design meetings.
• Branded the team internally. The people came from all different places. 
• We called it the Taco Town team.
• We labeled the milestones after the layers of the Taco Town taco.
• It was fun, and memorable.
• Key team things
• Started the team off by not having a regular team meeting. Didn’t focus on any metrics. Instead we did demos. 
• Focus team on execution.
• Not on what you might do, what you say you will do, not what will happen in the future.
• Open layout, closely together. You can turn to someone and ask a question. No meetings, no IM, no emails.
• Q: Team is very interruption driven. Doesn’t that interfere with productivity?
• We want the interrupt driven because we can avoid meetings, and because people can overhear conversations. You can absorb more when the conversations are going on around you. People can quickly in ad-hoc way contribute to conversation and save time.
• The biggest time wasters are leaving your seat to go to a meeting. It’s less of an interrupt if you your work is still on the screen in front of you.
• Todd Jackson
• We do lots of things at Google by consensus. how do you do it well.
• Product Manager, Gmail and Google Buzz
• The product managers job is to work closely with engineers to figure out how to put the technology together to make sense to the user. 
• The ratio of engineer to product managers is 30:1.
• No one reports to product manager
• So the only way that the product manager can get anything done is to help build consensus
• Shit funnel versus for shit umbrella
• If you are a shit funnel, you funnel all the shit onto your team, and interrupt them all the time.
• If you are a shit umbrella, you protect your team from it
• Braden Kowitz
• user Experience, Google Ventures
• Work environment…
• We used to have people split across many different offices
• We consolidated to fewer offices, but we still have 24 hour coverage
• Mostly in Mt View, some in Seattle, some in Zurich.
• By covering Mt View and Zurich, we can cover around the clock – if someone submits a bug at 10pm, people can start working on it right away
• Gmail scale
• Google uses Gmail for their mail
• hundreds of millions of user
• 53 languages
• millions of lines of code
• several hundred thousand lines of javascript
• C++
• What is your process like? From having an idea to shipping it
• It’s pretty chaotic.
• If you have an idea for something, you do it. You build a prototype or a mockup, and you should it to people, and the idea takes steam.
• Engineers can push their code changes to a special set of servers, and then the engineers can switch their accounts to those servers. It allows for a tight evolution loop, because all the engineers can start looking at it.
• Labs is another testing ground, because they can get user feedback, and get a compelling story for why we should release it to the entire world.
• For example, we released a feature in Labs called “undo send”.
• debated it for two years because it touched a lot of the stack
• an engineer, not on the core team, in japan, just implemented it. 
• it went to labs, and it was most popular, and proved the feasability.
• We were adding a new feature (drag to labels), but we were fanatical that we would not slow down the user experience. We stopped ship over this. Even though we knew draggle email would be very popular feature, we could not compromise speed. So we worked on a design change — draggable handles, which increased discoverability, and avoided performance hit
• Buzz Launch — Privacy issues at launch
• We didn’t discover it inside Gmail, because, to a certain extent, we were in a trusted environment. We didn’t need to be private inside. Once we realized the concern, we made changes.
• Announcing things before they launch…
• We usually don’t like to do it, because users want to use it right away.
• But if we’re going to change the way the system works, then we do need to announce it.
• We’re doing a little bit more of it in response to user feedback. If people ask us for inbox controls, and it takes us a week to localize it, then we will announce that it is coming so that people won’t worry that it is coming
• Q: What are your metrics for success?
• We care about 1 day users, and 7 day users, and “5 of 7 days users”, because we want to focus on our heaviest users. Not 30 day users. We look a lot on users.
• We have a survey that will pop up in the right hand corner (very low frequency)
• Look at spam, look at how people rate the speed
• We saw that people thought Gmail got faster when we changed the color.
• Q: Do you have user interaction designers?
• Yes, we do. But our designers are also very technical. Most of them have CS degrees. So perhaps not purely designers.
• Q: Buzz: personal or business?
• Millions of people using it
• We plan to release it for google apps for your domain
• We find that people can use it to see what is going on inside your company
• Q: Do you use unit testing?
• Yes. Not initially, but about 2 or 3 years ago, we became heavily test driven.
• Q: Any plans to improve Contacts experience.
• yes, but we can’t go into too much details
• it keeps me up at night
• Q: Do features ever get killed for lack of adoption?
• yes, we’ve killed labs projects.
• We killed right-side labels, a Labs project, when we introduced draggable emails.
• We hate to kill anything because there are also some users that love it.
• There is an online petition to bring back one particular feature.
• It is hard to get rid of things, but… if it stands in the way of bringing some really useful, we will do it.
• People complain if we add features, people complain if we remove features, people complain if we don’t innovate and make changes. So we try to do the features that will do the greatest good for the greatest number of users.
• Q: I’ve never clicked on a Gmail ad. Do they make money?
• Yes, we can’t go into details, but it is healthy.
• We are trying to show less ads, but better performing ones.
• Q: Why wasn’t Wave built into Gmail like Buzz?
• It was the way it was built. the team was trying to go from scratch.
• There are some projects that are leapfrog projects: and Wave is one of those.
• Q: Google Buzz for enterprise – when available?
• Next couple of months
• Q: Impressed by framework that allowed them to respond so quickly to buzz launch problems
• A: Just work really, really hard. We realize the mistake we made, and some people didn’t leave the office until it is fixed. We slept there.
• Q: How do you feel when you see 3rd parties develop plugins?
• We love it.
• We worry that greasemonkey scripts can be somewhat fragile

• despite the fact that the design community has been absent from sustainability up until this point, it is exactly the interactive community that will be critical going forward
• will talk about using system thinking to create an interaction point with this tech community for them to help in sustainability
• Kurt Vonnegan: there are a set of archtypical stories
• good fortune and bad fortune on the vertical axis
• time from beginning to end on the horizontal axis
• you can plot stories on these two axis.
• there is a third narrative you can plot
• Kafka’s metamorphosis: an already unhappy man turns into a cockroach
• The Kafka narrative is the prevailing narrative for sustainability
• Child sitting in an e-waste dump in China. 100M computers a year, 300M cell phones. Families go through these dumps. It is so toxic, people vastly more lead in the bodies, open cuts and sores and rashes on their bodies, vastly more likely to miscarry a child
• North Pacific Garbage Pack: floating mass of plastic about twice the size of Texas.
• Albatrosses mistook pieces of floating plastic for food, and fed them to children. Photo of baby albatross, dead, body rotted away, full of plastic where their body used to be.
• “Why does a salad cost more than a Big Mac?”
• The government subsidizes meat and dairy industries… 73% of subsidies go to meat and dairy. Exact opposite of what is recommended for nutrition.
• Burn pits in Iraq: big gashes in ground, 24 hours a week, 7 days a week, fueled by petroleum products, used as garbage pits: throw everything in from amputated limbs to humvees to paper waste to human waste. A soldier in Iraq is now much more likely to die from breathing the fumes from these pits than to die in combat. Not just 1 to 1, but many to 1 ratio.
• The polar ice cap puts enough pressure on the earth’s plates to keep them from moving. If the ice caps melt, the plates will move. Which creates tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanos, which amplifies the corrupt governments that allow/cause people to build building they should never have built.
• A barrage of negative imagery, negative messages – doom and gloom that paralyzes you.
• Look at sustainability, environmental issues from a creativity, optimism perspective.
• Designer’s Accord
• kyoto treaty of design
• five guidelines
• range from personal accountability to collective accountability
• education myself 
• share my successes and my failures and compromises. talk about when you’ve made compromises and you just won’t do it again.
• use townhall meetings…
• I want the permission to not know. I want to be able to ask questions when I don’t know. So we can work through these difficult things, not by myself, but with other people.
• Use case studies… each week, to consistently address things
• About what works
• Educate a new generation of designers
• school: by design – pairing up college students with high school students, to take sustainability out of the ghetto of sustainability
• This movement has growth…
• 639 design firm adopters
• 33 educational adopters
• 32 corporate adopters
• Magazine covers… all green. Bizarre ways to talk about sustainability. There are much more interesting and complex ways to talk about sustainability.
• We can’t think about sustainability as something that sits outside what you do everyday.
• We can affect it with everything we do (analogy of moving a string, every movement causes other parts of the string to move)
• Systems thinking
• a system is more than the sum of its part (#1)
• e.g. hippo roller: women and child walking 5 miles a day to get water. women and children couldn’t work or go to school, because they were just walking to get water.
• they invented rolling barrel that holds 24 gallons, instead of 5. easier on body, easier to move.
• but there was a quality problem in manufacturing: for every 75 that got to the end user, 50 were thrown out because of quality issues.
• and they were very expensive to ship because of the size of the unit.
• engineers without borders helped redesign it to improve quality, and made a nested design that allowed 3 units to be shipped in the space of 1 old unit.
• but eco-nazis were outraged because the units weren’t made of recycled plastic. but the engineers had looked, but couldn’t find a sufficient source. the eco-nazis were failing to look at the bigger picture.
• feedback delays + bounded rationality = design traps (#2)
• I can only made decisions based on the information I have around me.
• Example: Dell compact desktop – meets epeat requirements, special ecopacking requirements.
• by designing for the symption (energy, recyclability), it missed the point that we shouldn’t be designing another desktop computer. (Will: I don’t get it. What should they have been doing?)
• Bought tacos in san francisco, and tracked ingredients. All the ingredients for the taco had travelled a collective 60,000+ miles to get to san francisco. 
• prevailing thinking is that local is good, and global is bad.
• discovered that the salt and cheese was local.
• avocado from chile.
• they looked at the embodied energy for each of the ingredients.
• e.g. tomatoes grown in greenhouse versus those grown naturally and shipped
• creating the right measurement of success (#4)
• prevailing indicator is gross domestic product, which measures money in the economy.
• if there are more car crashes, more money is spent on medical bills and fixing cars, and the indicator of wellbeing goes up, which is counter to actual life
• ecological standards look at what the land performed in terms of water filtration, air filtration, and ensure that the built environment will do the same thing.
• different than LEED, which mostly just looks at how to make a building less bad.
• selecting the correct level for change (#5)
• people tend to identify the wrong thing to change when they want to make a change
• in romania they noticed that the birth rate was dropping. they made it illegal for women under 45 to use contraception or use birth control. gave a short term increase. but over time, it leveled out. it not just leveled out, but mother mortality went up dramatically as women got illegal abortion, and tons of children ended up in orphanages. not the desired effect at all…
• NakedPizza: four guys in new orleans that built a shack, less than 500 square feet, in a place that took 8 feet of water in katrina, and turned it into a lab to make the world’s healthiest pizza. they want to take that concept and scale it. They want to go into the fast food industry as a trojan horse. They want to price it the same as Dominos and Papa Johns. They don’t want to make tons of money, they want to educate people about healthy food. use pizza as a trojan horse to talk about this issue. 
• but if you add in all the cost of organic foods, recycled boxes, recycle everything, then it would drive the price of the product up so much, that it would not be accessible to the very people you are trying to help. 
• enabling new models by recognizing the relationship between structure and behavior (#6)
• Dana Meadows would take a slinky out of a box. She’d pull her hand out, and the slinky would boing up and down. She’s ask why it did that. The class would answer that it was because she moved her hand. She’d repeat with a box, which of course would not behave in that way. The answer is in the innate capabilities of the object… the structure of the object. You can’t change the behavior without changing the structure.
• HUB: shared space for social entrepreneurs to help cross pollinate ideas. joint help and resources around fundraising and strategy. 24 around the world.
• Rather than just have NGOs, in which activists live off the excess of the government and corporate donations, they enable people to be entrepreneurs and launch profitable businesses
• issue-attention cycle: degree of awareness is inversely correlated to the degree of productive action.
• once people realize the cost of making change, attention peters out
• when the public starts to get a great passion around a subject, there is a point at which attention peaks, but still nothing is happening. when you get a couple of hundred thousand people involved, no one does anything because they all think someone else is doing it.
• we already see in the sustainability movement that there is fatigue. people are opting out, believing someone else is doing something about it. (Will: count me in this group.)
• If you change the purpose of the system – the goal of it’s existence, that is the great change for the system.
• Architecture
• LEED
• Architecture for Humanity
• Challenge 2030
• Product Design
• Cradle to cradle
• LCA
• Creative Community…. (didn’t capture in time.)
• Interactive community creates the architecture of our technology, the architecture of our communication. How can we take on the purpose of cultural sustainability instead of commerce? What is we educated people instead of dumbing it down? What is social media was actually about social impact.
• Every profession bears the responsibility to understand the circumstances that enable its existence – Robert Gutman

Here are my raw notes from Joi Ito’s presentation. He is a great speaker, and very interesting.

• Social software didn’t save the world
• But the ecosysem and framework (e.g. internet) is the only way we’re going to solve the problems we have
• Our world is fundamentally messed up, the problems we have are messy
• We made technology to make things faster, more efficient.
• More efficient doesn’t necessarily mean better.
• More efficient means things get brittle, they start to amplify
• Things get non-linear and complex (non-linear means drastic changes. not continuous.)
• Before things were so connected, we still had problems but they didn’t amplify each other
• The only way to deal with complexity is a decentralized system
• The way we deal with world hunger or terrorism is still via centralized planned efforts. they don’t work.
• Book about current political failures. (i think the book is The Age of the Unthinkable by Joshua Ramo.)
• example: kid with cell phone and laptop. In silicon valley, this kid would go work for Google. But he was in Beirut. What are his options for where he will go?
• When you look at Israel and how they have responded to terrorism, it works best when it is decentralized, not nation-to-nation.
• The solution is to turn these kids into entrepeurs, instead of joining the hesbala.
• World Without Oil
• alternate reality game
• about the future when peak oil has passed and oil has run out
• game is over now, but you can read the forums
• in the forums you see stuff like the high school physics teacher, and the hardware store guy, and the mom who are figuring out how to lower the energy. it’s backyard ingenuity.
• Positive Deviance – Jerry Sternin
• In any culture, where you find disfunction, instead of focusing on on trying to stop the disfunction, you look for cases where the disfunction doesn’t exist. Then you try to amplify the good.
• Example: daughters who confronted mothers in Egypt over genital mutation. They found ways to get this daughters to talk to more people, talk to entire villages, and almost overnight they stopped the practice.
• The Internet
• “I believe very strongly in the Internet. It’s my religion”
• free and open source software has created the nuts and bolts of everything we use
• even google could not have done what they have done without open source software.
• it lowers the cost of innovation, the cost to try things around.
• The Stack:
• Creative Commons
• The Web (W3C)
• The Internet (IETF)
• This stack is the core of the internet. it keeps things low cost.
• It used to be that big companies and governments, with big budgets and experts, would work through standards bodies on specifications that would take years and years and years. These specifications would then go to large contractors and R&D labs, who would make products.
• Now, everyone sits around talking on mailing lists. It’s so easy, a couple of people can do it. It’s based on rough consensus. Just about everything important that has happened on the internet, it is a small group of people, trying things out. They love when people use it in ways it wasn’t anticipated. They don’t try to know the whole thing.
• By comparison, in the old way, there is no way to use it other than intended.
• Japanese have started doing header compression. The television guys have taken the header compression and brought them to the ITU. This is a battle over trying to keep the internet open.
• Having the stack allows people to interoperate without having to renegotiate everything over from the start. e.g. it used to be so hard to mac and PCs to talk together.
• The lower friction from the web allowed an explosion of innovation.
• Now that everything is so open, the friction is so low. Now the problem is the legal costs. The legal fees and time costs can exceed the value of collaboration. 
• So Creative Commons eliminates some of that.
• Joi will tie all this back to saving the world
• Creative Commons
• They have a core of six licenses
• Attribution
• Non-commercial (2/3rds of people elect this)
• No-derivatives (don’t want people to mess with the content of the work, e.g. documentaries)
• Share-alike (if people create a derivative work, they have to share it back with the same license)
• It deters some sharing and reach, because for example, ABC won’t use your work because they won’t share back their whole show under those rights.
• Most bloggers and educators want liberal sharing
• Professional musicians want more constrained sharing
• The point is not to dictate what people should do, but enable people to share they want they want to, without having to have a legal discussion.
• Wikipedia was previously using a free software foundation license. Now using Creative Commons licenses. The problem was that if you had a university professor who was using Creative Commons, they couldn’t use wikipedia content, because the licenses would conflict, even though they were essentially the same.
• License proliferation is bad because it prevents sharing
• It’s like having two internets. One internet allows collaboration and sharing. Two internets means you can’t.
• Nine Inch Nails used Creative Commons licensed. They grossed $1.6M in the first week. Top selling album on iTunes, even though it was also available free. 
• The cost of failure is so low, you can try lots of things. e.g. Linus Torvalds saying “I’m going to create an Operating System.”
• A company can spend millions of dollars thinking about whether to do something, and then millions more getting ready to do it. They would never do something like Linux or Amazon or Google.
• Doplr went into a cabin and prototyped it over a weekend.
• There is no idea you shouldn’t be able to prototype in a week.
• It’s cheaper and easier to prototype something than it is to create a presentation and try to explain things. 
• Examples of organizations
• Global Voices: network of bloggers, regional heads aggregate in each region. And then aggregate at higher levels. They do translation. The purpose is to give voice to each region, and enable a global conversation.
• Witness: gives resources to human rights organization to record and share video to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations
• Meetup: For profit. Thought of doing it as a non-profit. We think of non-profits as volunteer work, and for-profits as IPO work, but there is a whole range of in between. Meetup has a tremendous amount of social good, and the founder only cares about saving the world, and makes money to keep the company going.
• Architecture for humanity: get designs for building, license them under creative commons license. architecture is quite hard, so sharing it and opening it up is tremendously valuable. designs for hospitals and schools.
• The Girl Effect: the power social and economic change brought about when girls have the opportunity to participate.
• Lulan Artisans: teaches women and girls how to knit, dye fabric, make money. Founder wanted to stop human trafficking, and the way to do that was to enable the woman to make money. They make more money than the man. So instead of selling the women, they are more valuable in the family. Thing has done more to stopping human trafficking than almost anything else. 
• Keys
• empower people financially
• give voice

Sorry, these notes are a bit messy than usual. It was an interesting session format…

• What is a socially responsible geek?
• Non-profit versus No profit
• Transitioning from corp work
• triple bottom line / alternate business models
• 4 empty seats
• Modified Samoan Fishbowl
• Really a desire to learn about different types of business organization. A co-op as opposed to a partnership or a corporation. 
• Annie Bruno: materials geek, have a consulting business that does deep research into materials impact
• Philip Dja? Uja? : drupal shop
• Web of Change conference…
• Why aren’t you doing what you really care about?
• It is a positive experience loving what you do
• Many people come into it with a starving artist perspective… if i do what i want to do, i won’t be able to make money.
• One thing that has helped me get over a fear of profit is having employees. when it was just my partner and i, it felt greedy to take profits. but when we had all these amazing employees, i realized i wanted to be able to hire them and keep them there, and provide for them.
• Sarah, from Australian: curious how many people are from non-profits, looking to technology, how many people from geek world who want to be socially conscious. poll showed room was 90% geeks.
• Max Whitney, NYU, central IT. essentially a non-profit. Recently tried to be recruited to a massive internet company. But her response was that it wasn’t very stable…only been there for 10 years. Her question… They need to hire people, can pay only a third of what a big internet company can pay, how can they get talented people to come do worthwhile things.
• A: if you create a business you want it to be profitable. if you don’t make a profit, it goes away.
• B, latino, worked for presidential campaign. 1 out of 4 babies born in the US is latino, yet when you come to SXSW, there are no latinos. want to leverage and engage technology. civil rights organizations are so far behind environmental organization when it comes to adopting the technology. how can we all work together to share best practices, how can we work together in solidarity, rather than in silos. could build real political power if all worked together. how can a community take the internal power they have, and work with other communities. 
• C, agency in portland. Personally socially conscious, but have to come to work everyday and make ways to sell more cola to kids. Want to do socially conscious stuff, but in the non-profit world, either need 10 years experience grant writing, or would have to make the same salary she made coming out of school.
• response: There are jobs available, you have to find them. Partly it is selling the whole lifecycle: normal work hours, being happy, etc. some non-profits can afford to hire agencies, some cannot do it at the regular rates.
• resources: netsquared.org, puts on net tuesdays, for people to network.
• college students are coming out of school with $100k to $300k in student loan debt. If you work at non-profits, after 10 years, you can get the loans forgiven. This can add up to $30k/year in a benefit to the employee.
• one option is to do volunteer work. maybe you may still be at an agency to make money, but you could use skills to volunteer at organization. e.g. manage a non-profits social media.
• VP marketing from patagonia there.
• socially conscious marketing does work.
• for profit company, but a company that does believe strongly in doing good.
• they give 1% of revenue away (about $35m over many years) to non-profits, primary those that benefit the earth.
• they try to be as sustainable as possible, but avoidable to pollute somewhat.
• grassroots activists schooling: they teach people how to be activists, write grants, give presentations, etc.
• Dawn, from Intuit. They are committed to social responsibility (will: they are?). They do fundraising for non-profits, give 32 hours paid volunteer time per year. Their question, how can they leverage their skills in technology to help non-profits. For people in non-profits, they have skills that they can bring to for-profits, to help them blend their for-profit and do-gooder sides.
• (gap in notes because I went up to speak)
• Suggestion of Four Hour Work Week book, because it can make you more effective and efficient so you can get your day job done in 20 hours a week, and spend more time launching things on the side, or volunteering.
• Idea for Crowdsourcing Non-Profit ideas… have a site where people can propose ideas, and corporations can fund them.

Resources:

• http://www.netsquared.org/
• Four Hour Work Week http://bit.ly/bADd4A

• Social media ethnographer
• Looks at how people use social media in their lives
• been blogging about this for 13 years
• Wonders how does social media transform society
• Is an activist: wants to make the future we want.
• Everyone is involved in social media at some extent. Everyone is seeing the transformation.
• One of the puzzles is how privacy and publicity intertwine.
• Privacy is not dead. People care about it. But what privacy means is not necessarily what people think. Privacy is control over having what information is shared. When people feel that they don’t have control over their environment and their setting, then they feel like their privacy has been violated.
• Recent fail: Google buzz. Google has taken a trust hit, because of people’s experience. 
• People were given option to be part of buzz. As part of opt-in experience, they were given a default list of people that they would probably want to follow. That list of people was publicly listed in their profile.
• Nothing they did was technically wrong, and they gave users plenty of chances to opt-out, turn things off, etc.
• Google Mistakes
• Google integrated a public facing system inside one of the most private systems possible. Many users thought Google was exposing their private email to the entire world. Not true, but it caused a panic.
• Google assumed people would opt-out if they didn’t want to participate. More and more technology companies seem to think it is OK to thrust things onto user, and then back up later if people freak out.
• People wanted to check it out, so they accepted the defaults to opt-in. But it was hard to opt-out. People got confused. Were afraid they would cancel their gmail account.
• You want your application to go viral, but throwing everyone into the water and accepting a few drownings is not an acceptable way to do that.
• “Hello, how are you?” is not an optimal way to start a conversation, but it is an essential social convention. Technologies frequently overlook essential social conventions in favor of optimal experiences. e.g. it’s one thing to start a conversation by volunteering your age, sex, location, but it is weird if someone else looks that up in your profile and uses that to start a conversation with you.
• Social network types:
• articulated (linkedin)
• behaviorial (e.g. AT&T knows we’re all in the same room as SXSW) 
• personal 
• Google made the mistake of merging articulated and behaviorial social networks. We just don’t understand those kinds of networks as well as we do personal networks.
• Just because something is publicly available doesn’t mean people want it publicized. 
• Learning to trust
• a conversation with a friend… you think the conversation is private, but there is nothing to stop your friend from telling others. you develop trust over time. but it can easily be broken. 
• “walls have ears”
• we want an architecture that protects privacy
• but there can be eavesdroppers
• when sitting in public…
• you have certain expectations of who you might encounter, and the maximize number of people who could show up
• if your mother, who lived 3,000 miles showed up, or if your entire high school class showed up, you’d freak out.
• Online environments are harder to figure out than offline environments. we’re still trying to structure the environment and learn the norms
• Security through obscurity
• Technorati found that the average blog is read by six people
• Ears and mouths
• Early adopters are consistently surprised how communities change when adopted by the mainstream
• Privacy Fail #2: Facebook changes in december 2009
• Facebook asked users to change the settings for how to share information
• 35% set their settings to be private
• 65% unconsciously made their settings public by accepting the defaults
• Among non-technies, Danah asked people what they thought their settings were, and what they actually work. And not a single person had settings that matched what they thought
• People who could be at risk by sharing information publicly (e.g. teen girl with abusive father, who moved thousands of miles away to get away from him, unknowly accepted the new Facebook defaults, with the result that her information was available to her abusive father
• PII versus PEI: personally identifiable information vs. personally embarrassing information
• People want to share PII, they want to control PEI
• People want to share a limited amount of information because sharing private information establishes a bond
• Conversations in social media are public by default, private thru effort. Conversations previously are private, public thru effort.
• People think about what they have to gain or lose by being in public
• Teens tend to think about what they have to gain
• Adults tend to think about what they have to lose
• Not the adults at SXSW mostly…
• Teens want to be seen by their peers, but they don’t want to be seen by people who have power over them.
• People want to have things in public, but not publicized.
• Taking something that is in public and making it more public (e.g. facebook, google mistakes) is violating the established norm
• Teenagers want to become celebrities, but they are unaware of the actual stress and pressures of being a celebrities. Teens today were not alive when paparazzi drove Princess Di to her death.
• Publicity
• Many people assume that because twitter and facebook are visually similar, people use them in the same way
• Facebook is about communicating with people you know
• Twitter started out this way, but it has become the place for people who want to develop an audience.
• In some cases, it can be a way to develop a level of intimacy in public: example of celebrity who couldn’t go out in public without guards, but could interact with fans via twitter
• Teens and tweens are highly involved in twitter compared to people’s expectations
• Justin , a teen star, was a trending topic for 18 of 20 days. 
• Black users highly visible.
• Many white users responded poorly
• As a privileged person, I believe I have certain rights: to be online, to be in public, (lots more good stuff.)
• But many people don’t have these options… people who are illegal immigrants, people who have abusive ex-partners, LGBT folks have lost jobs, been kicked out of the military.
• Can your child’s teacher have an online profile? Can they express their religious views? Post photos from a party?
• Offline, people can switch their context. They can put on their teacher persona when they meet a parent or student on the street. Online, people can’t change personas. 
• Chatroulette: get randomly connected to a stranger with a video chat. You can talk to a stranger. If you don’t like it, you click next. 
• A source of concern among adults… who worry about things like their kids getting exposed to someone’s genitalia.
• But the site was developed by a 17 year old russian teen
• But the stories of people using it are heartwarming. One wanted to play rockband with an audience, some want to talk to others about college, etc.
• Odd combination of privacy and publicity. Private space (happens in bedroom, livingroom), but talking to strangers.
• People can be geo-located based on IP address. 
• No magical formula for privacy and publicity.
• They are processes, evolving, being transformed.
• No easy answer.
• What you want today will change tomorrow.
• How you do it in one place is very different from another place.
• When you moved from Web 1.0 to 2.0, you deploy living code. You learn to embrace the complexity of your users. 
• You have to figure out what people want. If you expose people, you lose trust, and may put others at risk. 
• Parenting…
• Forget about “back in my day”. It doesn’t exist.
• The key is to ask questions. What are trying to achieve? How would you feel if other people were looking? 
• You, as an adult, are not expert, so it will be something you need to figure out with your child.
• Marketing…
• Just because you can see someone doesn’t mean they want to be seen by you.
• Just because you see what they are saying doesn’t mean you understand them.
• Pew found 85% of adults want control over their information.
• People want privacy, and they want a sense of control.
• It’s not about having something to hide. It’s about having a sense of control. It’s about having a place to open up.
• Angelina Jolie say she puts out so much information in public because then she could maintain some information in private. Bloggers find this too. The more they share, the more that others assume that is the whole picture. So what is left can stay more private.