It's now been two months since CMS Kickoff 24 in January in Florida and for a recent member's call we heard reflections on the impact of AI from seasoned CMS consultant Tom Cranstoun who joined us from the UK.
While CMS Kickoff 24 wasn't all about AI, the speakers made Tom rethink AI's role in content management. Given the translation, bias, regulation challenges and lack of trust in AI, one needs to employ reviewers and editors to correct the content; AI is better suited for consuming content.
Let’s think that the current state of AI creating content is a beta experiment, best left to the tech guys; we have a business to think of.
In this call, Tom shared how AI Simplicity affects your business, the need for better content modelling and also the key responsibility of an emerging team role: The AI evangelist.
Read moreSelecting the right CMS has never been easy and the marketplace remains confusing, crowded and full of new buzzwords.
At the same time, selecting the right one has probably never been more important with increasing demands and expectations both internally and externally. A good website and a good digital platform to power it five years ago doesn’t necessarily cut it in 2024. Many organisations have found themselves with massive technical debt and forced to migrate to another solution.
In a recent member’s call we heard an interesting non-profit case study from Web Team Leader Genc Kastrati at The Global Fund in Geneva. They’ve been using commercial open source CMS Umbraco to power their multilingual website for over 7 years and are quite happy with it.
The Global Fund is a Geneva-based worldwide movement to defeat HIV, TB and malaria and ensure a healthier, safer, more equitable future for all. Let’s start with a big picture of the Umbraco setup at The Global Fund.
Read moreThe hype around that thing called AI can be deafening and it’s quite overwhelming to try to stay on top of all the seemingly relevant AI developments.
To help us untangle what’s really happening and the impact it is having, we recently invited digital platform product lead Seb Barre from TELUS in Toronto to walk us through how he sees the big picture and notable changes.
Seb made the interesting point that we are entering a new do-it-yourself era for generative AI. While the first wave (last year) was dominated by large, proprietary offerings, including OpenAI, today other options have arrived on the scene, which allows organisations to seize new use cases and also approach it with more flexibility and lower cost attached.
As expected, it became a 30-minute packed member’s call on large language models, action models, new devices, privacy, how search is failing us, open source and much more. Seb shared plenty of interesting tools and also shared how to get your organisation to embrace AI.
Read more“The world is in need of better design, and Kozma’s book shows us how to get there.”
Last year Robert Kozma published "Make the World a Better Place: Design with Passion, Purpose, and Values".
The book has been well received and presents an insightful and hands-on discussion of design as a profoundly human activity and challenges us all to use design to transform the world for the better. The book explains how and why the design industry lost its way, and how to re-ignite the idealism that once made it a force for good.
Robert Kozma is a San Francisco-based author, researcher, and consultant with over 40 years of experience in technology, education, and social development. As an emeritus principal scientist at SRI International, he has collaborated with ministries of education, national agencies, multinational organizations, and high tech companies on how to use information and communication technology to transform education and support economic and social development
Make the World a Better Place describes a set of moral principles, based on our shared humanity, that can be used to create “good” designs: designs that reduce harm, increase well-being, advance knowledge, promote equality, address injustice, and build supportive, compassionate relationships and communities.
Read moreWe all have a responsibility to make sure we are implementing green, responsible systems of the future.
In a recent member's call, Andy Eva-Dale from UK-based digital agency Tangent shed light on ICT emissions and where we sit as an industry in the global carbon emissions story.
As the Technical Director at Tangent, Andy mentors a 45+ strong department, creating cloud-first, scalable, robust, secure, globally distributed applications. Andy is active in the community, championing sustainable system design, diversity in tech and dyslexia awareness
In the call he took us through “10 Do’s and Don’ts of Sustainable Systems” with actionable ideas and features of green system implementation and design. He also drew attention to the parallels between performance, scalability, cost saving and carbon with real-world metrics from some of the projects they’ve delivered at Tangent. In addition, we looked at what the big hosting platforms are doing to tackle the problem, as well as how best to measure your systems from a carbon and cost perspective.
As a final bonus, Andy provided a brief progress update on the new Umbraco Sustainability Team.
Read moreCan Arnold Schwarzenegger somehow help us make digital experiences better? This question was on my mind as I left the Ibexa Global Partner Conference 2024 held on the sunny Spanish island of Mallorca.
With over 200 participants joining, mostly from Europe, but also from further away, CEO Bertrand Maugain took the stage in his opening talk with an update on how the business keeps growing and how Ibexa now fits into the larger QNTM Group composable ecosystem.
Let’s zoom out: Ibexa is a well-established DXP vendor, who focused on B2B e-commerce and has grown from their roots in Norway to now in particular having a stronghold in Germany and France.
Read moreCool dashboards are not something we are used to seeing among CMS vendors, but it’s one of the things that stood out from the winning Directus demo at the prestigious CMS Idol 2024 contest held last week at CMS Kickoff 24 conference in Florida.
Directus is an open source composable CMS and CEO and Cofounder Ben Haynes did the one-man-show which won both big majority of the votes and also the stamp of approval from the three judges.
With each vendor being given only six minutes to their pitch, Ben managed to mix his time with both a few slides to set the stage and the live demo.
Read moreOpen Source technology, practices, and thinking have revolutionized how we innovate, collaborate, and do business. The impact goes beyond our daily work and paying our rent. Open source is everywhere; we won! But there's a downside.
The open source community has been so busy with our success that we have forgotten to tell people what makes us and Open Source different. We must remember how radical and important Open Source is. It is extraordinary that we build international communities of experts sharing our best ideas, building businesses, and creating value.
Open Source — and we — have the potential to create more positive change in the world. And we need to tell the world ... again. Right now, proprietary systems and vendors are winning pitches in government and elsewhere that should be no-brainers for Open Source solutions.
In a recent member's call, open source evangelists Jeffrey A. "jam" Mcguire and Mathias Bolt Lesniak reminded us about the open source value proposition, told us what comes next, and how to make sure we can continue to make a positive difference with Open Source in the future.
Read more"By standing together, we can build a better version of the tech industry."
Ethan Marcotte published a new book back in August and it's all about improving the industry that many of us work in.
Ethan is a web designer, speaker, and author. He’s perhaps best known for creating responsive web design, which helped the industry discover a new way of designing for the ever-changing web.
In his new book - You Deserve a Tech Union - he shares a how-to guide, a history lesson, and a manifesto all in one.
In a recent member’s call Ethan joined an talked more about the resurgent labor movement in the tech industry, why unions matter and why you—yes, you—deserve a tech union.
Read moreHow do online businesses exploit consumers through carefully designed tricks and traps? Regulations are changing rapidly, and we're seeing a big rise in legal enforcement. But is it enough to protect consumers?
Our former Boye Aarhus conference keynote speaker Harry Brignull published his first book back in August titled: “Deceptive patterns - exposing the tricks tech companies use to control you”
Based on over a decade of work on deceptive design (also known as dark patterns), the book takes you into the shadowy world of deceptive design.
Harry holds a PhD in cognitive science and works as Head of Innovation at UK-based pensions firm Smart. We recently did a member’s call with Harry as an informal book launch to our community.
Read more2023 was quite a year with many big milestones. Also a confusing year with massive changes. Massive tech layoffs were a huge topic at the beginning of the year and in a memorable ask me anything with design leader Peter Merholz, he explained why he referred to it as a social contagion.
Also, at the beginning of the year, AI was more of a research thing and then just a few months into 2023, tools like Chat GPT was a big theme at pretty much every group meeting. We heard how it acts as a kind of assistant, how it was used officially and often also unofficially and terms like hallucination changed meaning. At the end of the year, Dutch Internet pioneer Steven Pemberton provided us a helpful reminder that there's no I in AI (yet).
In this long overdue community update, I’ll share a bit more behind the scenes and provide an update on our plans for 2024.
Read moreIt’s that time of year, where we look back at another year of learning and networking. We really like to have a good conversation and meet in person, but sharing openly as much as possible is also an important part of what we do.
The big stories this year covered AI (surprise!), intranets (an oldie, but goodie) and also a book launch on delivering services.
Keeping with tradition, here are the five posts, which seemed to resonate the most based on readership and engagement numbers.
Read moreThere's a new book on email coming and it’s written by two of our friends who really believe in good emails:
Ashley Budd, Director of Advancement Marketing at Cornell University and also a speaker at last year's HE Connect 22
Dayana Kibilds, Strategist at Ologie
They have seen what a good email program can do. But, unfortunately, they are also reminded daily what a terrible experience combing through your email inbox can be.
Powerful email programs can get people to do stuff–for better or worse. And lucky for them, they get to see email do good every day.
In a member's call back in the summer, we heard more about the emerging book, while the authors shared some of their key insights. We also looked at bad emails and most importantly, supported them on their new writing journey.
Read moreThe job title “Designer” carries vague promises of creativity and self-expression. It’s not necessarily a job you pick because you want to get rich fast. It’s a job you are drawn to because you find meaning in it. ‘Find something you love to do, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life,’ the promise goes.
What does this actually mean for designers? Working as a designer can be immensely fulfilling - you get to create things of beauty and effectiveness, you help people, you reinvent the world. Yet, this idea of design as a life-long passion project rather than a job may also open the door to unrealistic expectations of work as well as unhealthy work-life balances.
The pandemic has led most of us to re-evaluate the workplace and our role in it. In a member’s talk talk, Hertje Brodersen takes this prompt to re-evaluate what it means to love design and to work as a designer, and how to navigate the boundaries.
Read moreWe all have bias.
But how did biases find a way into the digital world, what are the effects of (machine) biases and what can we do against them?
In a recent member's call, Hamburg-based design leader Antonia Fedder decoded bias and helped us navigate the digital landscape towards inclusivity.
We heard about the cause and roots of bias in tech and society and Antonia also shared practical strategies and actions to prevent discriminative patterns and behaviors. As she said:
“True innovation lies in designing technology that doesn't discriminate, but rather embraces diversity and fosters inclusivity. “
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