English Only: Barrier to Adoption [en]

Foreword: this turned into a rather longer post than I had expected. The importance of language and localization online is one of my pet topics (I’ve just decided that it would be what I’d talk about at BlogCamp, rather than teenagers and stuff), so I do tend to get carried away a little.

I was surprised last night to realise that this wasn’t necessarily obvious — so I think it’s probably worth a blog post.

The fact a service is in English only is a showstopper for many non-native speakers, hence a barrier to wider adoption in Europe.

But doesn’t everybody speak English, more or less? Isn’t it the lingua franca of today that everybody speaks? It isn’t. At least not in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, and I’m certain there are many other places in Europe where the situation is similar.

Come and spend a little time in Lausanne, for example, and try communicating in English with the man on the street. Even if many people have done a couple of years of English at school, most have never had any use for it after that and have promptly forgotten it. German is a way more important “foreign language” around here, as it is the linguistic majority in Switzerland, and most administrative centers of big companies (and the government) are in the German-speaking part of the country (which doesn’t mean that everybody speaks German, either).

The people who are reasonably comfortable with English around here will most often be those who have taken up higher academic studies, particularly in scientific subjects (“soft” and “hard” science alike).

And if I’m the person who comes to your mind when you think “Swiss”, think again — my father is British, I was born in England, went to an English medium school and spoke English at home until I was 8, conversed regularly with English-speaking grandparents during my growing years, and never stopped reading in English: all that gave me enough of a headstart that even though my English had become very rusty at the end of my teens, I dove into the English-speaking internet with a passion, and spent an anglophone year in India. So, no. I’m not your average Lausanne-living French-speaker. I’m a strange bilingual beast.

Imagine somebody whose native language is not English, even though they may theoretically know enough English to get around if you parachuted them into London. (Let’s forget about the man on the street who barely understands you when you ask where the station is.) I like to think of my (step-)sister as a good test-case (not that I want to insist on the “step-“, but it explains why she isn’t bilingual). She took up the “modern languages” path at school, which means she did German, English, and Italian during her teenage years, and ended up being quite proficient in all three (she’s pretty good with languages). She went to university after that and used some English during her studies. But since then, she honestly hasn’t had much use for the language. She’ll read my blog in English, can converse reasonably comfortably, but will tend to watch the TV series I lend her in the dubbed French version.

I’m telling you this to help paint a picture of somebody which you might (legitimately) classify as “speaks English”, but for whom it represents an extra effort. And again, I’d like to insist, my sister would be very representative of most people around here who “speak English but don’t use it regularly at work”. That is already not representative of the general population, who “did a bit of English at school but forgot it all” and can barely communicate with the lost English-speaking tourist. Oh, and forget about the teenagers: they start English at school when they’re 13, and by the time they’re 15-16 they might (if they are lucky) have enough knowledge of it to converse on everyday topics (again: learning German starts a few years before that, and is more important in the business world). This is the state of “speaking English” around here.

A service or tool which is not available in French faces a barrier to adoption in the Suisse Romande on two levels:

  • first of all, there are people who simply don’t know enough English to understand what’s written on the sign-up page;
  • second, there are people who would understand most of what’s on the sign-up page, but for whom it represents and extra effort.

Let’s concentrate on the second batch. An *extra effort”?! Lazy people! Think of it. All this talk about making applications more usable, about optimizing the sign-up process to make it so painless that people can do it with their eyes closed? Well, throw a page in a foreign language at most normal people and they’ll perceive it as an extra difficulty. And it may very well be the one that just makes them navigate away from the page and never come back. Same goes for using the service or application once they have signed up: it makes everything more complicated, and people anticipate that.

Let’s look at some examples.

The first example isn’t exactly about a web service or application, but it shows how important language is for the adoption of new ideas (this isn’t anything groundbreaking if you look at human history, but sometimes the web seems to forget that the world hasn’t changed that much…). Thanks for bearing with me while I ramble on.

In February 2001, I briefly mentioned the WaSP Browser Push and realised that the French-speaking web was really “behind” on design and web standards ressources. I also realised that although there was interest for web standards, many French-speaking people couldn’t read the original English material. This encouraged me to blog in French about it, translate Zeldman’s article, launching the translation site pompage.net in the process. Pompage.net, and the associated mailing-list, followed a year or so later by OpenWeb, eventually became a hub for the budding francophone web standards community, which is still very active to this day.

(What happened with the Swiss Blog Awards is in my opinion another example of how important language issues are.)

Back to web applications proper. Flickr is an application I love, but I have a hard time getting people to sign up and use it, even when I’ve walked them through the lengthy Yahoo-ID process. WordPress.com, on the other hand, exists in French, and I can now easily persuade my friends and clients to open blogs there. There is a strong French-speaking WordPress community too. A few years ago, when the translation and support were not what they are now, a very nice little blogging tool named DotClear became hugely popular amongst francophone bloggers (and it still is!) in part because it was in French when other major blogging solutions were insufficient in that respect.

Regarding WordPress, I’d like to point out the community-driven translation effort to which everybody can contribute. Such an open way of doing things has its pitfalls (like dreadful, dreadful translations which linger on the home page until somebody comes along to correct them) but overall, I think the benefits outweigh the risks. In almost no time, dozens of localized versions can be made available, maintained by those who know the language best.

Let’s look at teenagers. When MySpace was all that was being talked about in the US, French-speaking teenagers were going wild on skyblog. MySpace is catching up a bit now because it also exists in French. Facebook? In English, nobody here has heard of it. Live Messenger aka MSN? Very much in French, unlike ICQ, which is only used here by anglophile early adopters.

Skype and GMail/GTalk are really taking off here now that they are available in French.

Learning to use a new service, or just trying out the latest toy, can be challenging enough an experience for the average user without adding the extra hurdle of having to struggle with an unfamiliar language. Even though a non-localized service like Flickr may be the home to various linguistic groups, it’s important to keep in mind that their members will tend to be the more “anglophone” of this language group, and are not representative.

The bottom line is that even with a lot of encouragement, most local people around here are not going to use a service which doesn’t talk to them in their language.

9:52 Afterthought credit:

I just realised that this article on why startups condense in America was the little seed planted a few days ago which finally brought me to writing this post. I haven’t read all the article, but this little part of it struck me and has been working in the background ever since:

What sustains a startup in the beginning is the prospect of getting their initial product out. The successful ones therefore make the first version as simple as possible. In the US they usually begin by making something just for the local market.

This works in America, because the local market is 300 million people. It wouldn’t work so well in Sweden. In a small country, a startup has a harder task: they have to sell internationally from the start.

The EU was designed partly to simulate a single, large domestic market. The problem is that the inhabitants still speak many different languages. So a software startup in Sweden is still at a disadvantage relative to one in the US, because they have to deal with internationalization from the beginning. It’s significant that the most famous recent startup in Europe, Skype, worked on a problem that was intrinsically international.

Printemps [fr]

[en] Some random comment about the extremely spring-like temperatures we're having around here these days.

> En avril, n’ôte pas un fil.

> En mai, fais ce qu’il te plaît.

Et en février, on fait quoi?

Hier soir, 11 heures, avenue de Beaulieu, je suis dehors portant juste un pull. Il fait tellement doux que je ne sens même pas une once de froid — et je suis frileuse.

Je suis de nouveau sortie sans mon manteau aujourd’hui. Et à un moment donné, j’ai même dû enlever mon pull.

Nokia 6280 Shortcomings [en]

[fr] Au début, j'étais réjouie du fait que mon Nokia 6280 était compatible mac. Maintenant, j'ai un peu la gueule de bois, même si j'aime toujours autant le toucher du clavier.

Appareil photo de vraiment mauvaise qualité, synchronisation capricieuse, dictionnaire t9 à la mémoire courte, impossibilité de marquer comme lus tous les SMS pas lus, volume d'alerte de SMS trop fort par rapport à la sonnerie (impossible à régler séparément), réveil qu'il faut réenclencher chaque jour, et lien vers Sunrise Live (qui n'est pas mon opérateur) gravé pour l'éternité dans le menu rapide que l'on peut soi-disant configurer entièrement.

I’ve had a Nokia 6280 since September, and unfortunately the initial excitement of managing to make it sync with my Mac has worn down. Here’s a round-up of what works, and doesn’t work.

The phone is pretty, it’s the right size to fit in my hand, and the keyboard has a very nice touch (particularly important to me as I have RSI). The sliding mechanism is fun to play with (specially to answer calls or hang up), and it overall behaves quite correctly as a device to call other people and be called.

However. Not all is well.

One of the reasons I bought this phone was the 2Mpx camera. Well, to put it simply, it’s crap. Too much compression, artefacts, patchy colors, and an overall impression of digital zoom.

As I said, the phone works over iSync to sync contacts and calendars. When it works, that is. Half the time computer and phone are unable to recognize each other. (Yes, it could have something to do with the computer, but for the sake of this post, I’m going to blame it on the phone.)

The T9 dictionary works fine until you want to teach it new words. It remembers them for a little while, and then forgets about them. Obviously, instead of being permanently added to the dictionary, they are kept in some kind of short-term memory of very limited capacity.

Flooded with many unread SMS, maybe because you use Twitter on your mobile and forgot to turn it off? Fear not, you will be given the chance to trudge through those 30 messages one by one to mark them as read. You can “mark” them individually and then delete them all in one go, but you can’t “mark as read” in a batch.

There also seems to be no way to set the volume for SMS reception and incoming calls separately. This means that the “beep-beep” announcing the arrival of text messages is way too loud, and the ringing for incoming calls is still not loud enough.

The alarm has to be reset each day. Learning this involved quite a bit of oversleeping, until I understood that just checking the alarm time was right and then exiting was not sufficient. The “OK” button needs to be pressed each day to reactivate the alarm.

The icing on the cake? The customizable “Go to” menu (for easy access to frequently requested functions) sports a shiny shortcut to the web portal homepage of a carrier which happens to not be mine. Hard-coded. First position. Unmovable.

Crossposted to hate.my.phone.

The Shadow IT Department (and Shadow HR) [en]

[fr] Un article qui montre du doigt un nécessaire changement de mentalité dans les départements IT: nombre des outils que les employés utilisent pour améliorer leur productivité ont en fait été introduits de façon "sauvage". Vouloir tout contrôler à tout prix n'est pas la meilleure solution.

Here’s a very interesting piece I picked up in Bruno’s links: Users Who Know Too Much (And the CIOs Who Fear Them). It talks about the chasm between what technology IT departments make available, and what tools employees install and use behind the IT department’s back to be more productive at work.

And that disconnect is fundamental. Users want IT to be responsive to their individual needs and to make them more productive. CIOs want IT to be reliable, secure, scalable and compliant with an ever increasing number of government regulations. Consequently, when corporate IT designs and provides an IT system, manageability usually comes first, the user’s experience second. But the shadow IT department doesn’t give a hoot about manageability and provides its users with ways to end-run corporate IT when the interests of the two groups do not coincide.

“Employees are looking to enhance their efficiency,” says André Gold, director of information security at Continental Airlines. “People are saying, ‘I need this to do my job.’” But for all the reasons listed above, he says, corporate IT usually ends up saying no to what they want or, at best, promising to get to it…eventually. In the interim, users turn to the shadow IT department.

I remember that when I used to work at Orange, many of my most useful tools were things I “wasn’t allowed” to have on my computer. I also remember that when I got really bad RSI and using dictation software was the only way to get me back to work, the IT department flat-out refused our request for Dragon. (Somebody actually said that if I couldn’t type anymore, they should just get rid of me.) My boss had to have a chat with somebody else’s boss to finally have the program installed on my computer.

The bit that actually prompted me to write this post is the comparison with the way HR organises the company:

For example, a similar dynamic has long played out in HR. A company’s employees have titles and reporting relationships that give their work a formal structure. But at the same time every company has an informal structure determined by expertise, interpersonal relationships, work ethic, overall effectiveness and so on. Companies suffer when HR is out of phase with the informal structure. Employees are demoralized when the formal architecture elevates someone at the bottom of the informal architecture, and people who occupy the top spots in the informal architecture leave when they aren’t recognized by the formal one. Good HR departments know where employees stand in both the formal and informal architectures and balance the two.

A few months ago, I was giving a talk on blogs (etc.) to a bunch of Internal Communications people, and one of my points was that there is an informal structure inside the company (the value of which is in fact recognized by the companies, who will invest in “teambuilding” or “recreation” activities to encourage transversal communication), and that use of tools like blogs can help make this structure more visible and efficient. (Think Cluetrain, these 50.)

Travel Adrenalin Rush [en]

[fr] Projets de voyage: 28 mai - 5 juin, Copenhague pour la conférence reboot. Puis un ou deux mois à San Francisco (encore à déterminer) dès le 18 juin. Décision pas facile, parce que je dois me décider vite (sinon je perds l'option) et que ce sont des billets non remboursables et non modifiables.

On the way back home from judo by this bright sunny springy afternoon, I decided it was high time to hop in at the travel agent’s my brother had recommended and give a little bit of substance to my travel intentions.

Well, oh my! I wasn’t quite expecting as much substance. I’ve got a pre-reservation for San Francisco (June 18th to August 19th — two months!) and one for Copenhagen (May 28th to June 5th), for reboot (is reboot happening this year?) Both are quite cheap, but the downside is that I have to give confirmation very soon (3 days for SF, one for Copenhagen) and that there is no flexibility in the dates (I can’t decide to fly back a few days later), and if I cancel I still have to pay the full price of the ticket.

I’m thinking now that maybe two months in San Francisco is a bit of a plunge. There are two issues:

  • money (most of my paid work is done face-to-face — speaking engagements, consulting, training — so I can’t really “do stuff through the internet” for my clients here while I’m away)
  • the cat (he’s 10 now, I’m very attached to him, and a bit torn between leaving him here and being afraid something will happen to him when I’m gone — I have a good cat-sitter and a good cattery, so there are options open, or taking him with me and having him not be able to go outside in SF, depending on where I’m staying)

So, maybe one month would be more reasonable. Specially as I’ve been told summer could be quite cold (50F=10C?! can anybody confirm that?) in the city, whereas it’s beautiful in Lausanne during July and August. And maybe come back in autumn? Heck. I need to go to Montreal and India too.

Now, just in case I do decide to come over to SF for a month, starting June 18th… Are there any events taking place mid-July that I should know of? As I said, once I fix the return date, it’s set in stone — and I would hate to be biting my fingers off because I’m leaving just that one day early and I could have known…

Premier jet d'un vague plan [en]

[fr] Here's the really rough first draft of the outline for the book, as I got it down in a bit under an hour many months ago. It will certainly need reworking.

D’abord, merci, vraiment merci, pour vos encouragements, surtout entre samedi soir tard et dimanche midi! Je suppose que c’est aussi un des avantages de se mettre à écrire un livre sur la place publique (ce blog en l’occurence): je me sens un peu moins seule face à mon grand projet.

Comme promis, voici l’ébauche de plan que j’avais mise sur papier (décidément, il nous faut urgemment des équivalents numériques à ce genre d’expression) en moins d’une heure, il y a près de six mois. Ce n’est certainement pas définitif, mais il faut bien commencer quelque part, et ça a au moins le mérite de tenter d’éclairer un peu ce que j’ai dans la tête.

  • Introduction
    • la technologie évolue de plus en plus vite => l’écart se creuse
    • ados livrés à eux-mêmes pour découvrir
      • outils
      • communautés
      • nouveaux moyens d’être en contact avec autrui
  • Ce que les ados font en ligne
    • bibliothèque vs. ville
    • msn/jeux/blogs
    • réseau social s’étend au-delà de la vie hors ligne
  • Regard sur les blogs d’ados
    • pourquoi le font-ils?
      • mémoire collective
      • tribu
    • ce dont ils sont faits
      • photos
      • paroles copiés, poèmes
      • anecdotes
      • le plus souvent: album photos
  • Problèmes sur les blogs d’ados
    • mobbing
    • insultes
    • suicide/dépression
    • s’exposer
      • peau
      • actes
        • vol
        • drogues
        • fêtes
  • Pourquoi nous avons ces “problèmes”
    • anonymat
      • être discrets
      • comment on peut tomber ‘par hasard’ sur qc en ligne
    • permanence du contenu numérique
    • inconscience du caractère public du blog
    • communauté purement de pairs
  • Une approche de cette situation via les écoles
    • personne externe connaissant bien l’internet social
    • approche triple: parents, enfants, enseignants
  • Que dire et comment

Clairement, il faudra reprendre ça. Prochaine étape, je pense, avant, c’est d’essayer de mettre par écrit de façon succinte la problématique dont traitera ce livre (idée attrapée chez Karim, merci!). Comme je l’ai dit hier, je crois que j’ai besoin d’être un poil plus au clair sur où je vais avant de me lancer dans la rédaction proprement dite — sinon je vais me perdre.

Sur ce… j’abrège, parce que bobo — allez donc savoir si c’est lié, ou quoi. Dragon et Parallels seront de la partie. Il faut juste que je m’encourage à les installer, entre une visite d’école, une matinée chez un client et une table ronde à Genève. La suite au prochain épisode!

LIFT'07 Swiss TV Coverage [en]

[fr] LIFT à la TSR.

Here’s a short piece on LIFT’07 that was on the Swiss News last Thursday, and another one with an interview of Laurent. Beware. Window resizing and RealStuff to be expected. (More videos here, click on “Vidéo”.).

Livre: je me jette à l'eau [en]

[fr] Prompted this evening by a conversation with Peter Hogenkamp about what I might talk about at BlogCampSwitzerland, I've decided that after many months of not acting upon my decision to write a book, it was time to take a deep breath and jump in. The conversation I had at LIFT with Sarah, Stowe and Trine-Maria clearly also prepared me to take the plunge.

The book will be in French, so I'm afraid this is not very exciting news for my English-speaking-only readers. I'm more comfortable writing in French than English, and also, there is already a clear local and francophone interest for the book topic: teenagers, blogs, the internet, the chasm between parents and children when it comes to social media and online culture, and what can/should be done about it in terms of "media education".

The first draft of the book contents was made in English, though, so you'll get a copy of it when that post comes up. Oh, and if you were thinking of suggesting that I write the book in French and English at the same time... you probably haven't thought it through 😉

Il y a plusieurs mois, suite à une longue discussion avec mon ami David Galipeau, je me suis retrouvée en fin de soirée un peu surprise et la tête légère à me dire qu’écrire un livre paraissait soudain possible, et que je tenais un sujet. Le lendemain, j’ai rapidement établi un plan général de ce que pourrait être le livre dans Freemind.

Puis, j’ai passé près de six mois à ne pas avancer. Je souffrais d’un accès aigu de TMS, donc pas question de me mettre à rédiger avant d’avoir installé Parallels et le Dragon. L’opération a échoué, entre autres pour cause de mal aux mains qui m’empêchait de mener à terme l’installation (ironie!). Aussi, j’avais décidé que je voulais bloguer l’écriture du bouquin, et je n’étais pas trop sûre si j’allais le faire sur ce blog ou un autre. Puis, last but not least, écrire ça prend du temps, et j’étais un peu inquiète à l’idée de me lancer dans une entreprise comme ça chronophage alors que je n’étais pas encore très sûre dans quelle mesure mon job de consultante indépendante me permettrait de tourner confortablement ou non.

Bref, des tas de très bonnes raisons, mais franchement, surtout la trouille de me lancer dans quelque chose que je veux faire depuis aussi longtemps que je me souvienne (écrire un livre), mais qui m’intimide.

Ce soir, discussion avec Peter Hogenkamp, un des organisateurs de BlogCampSwitzerland, auquel je me suis inscrite un peu plus tôt. Je ne sais pas encore vraiment de quoi je vais parler à BlogCamp, et je lui disais que je pourrais peut-être faire quelque chose au sujet des ados, des blogs, et d’internet, comme c’était aussi le sujet du livre que je mijotais (enfin, là, je suis encore en train d’éplucher les patates, pour être tout à fait honnête). Du coup, on a parlé du livre, je lui ai raconté tout ce que j’ai récrit plus haut dans ce billet, j’ai dit un peu en riant que je pourrais m’y mettre et en parler à BlogCamp. Dont acte: il est temps d’arrêter d’en parler à tout mon entourage et de me lancer à l’eau. Le travail que j’ai fait dernièrement pour ciao.ch m’aide aussi à trouver le courage de m’y mettre, car si ce n’est pas le même public, c’est bien le même sujet.

Donc, quelques décisions et remarques:

  • Je vais écrire le livre en français. J’ai hésité, bien sûr, mais d’une part je suis quand même plus à l’aise dans l’écriture en français (faudra que je fasse la chasse aux anglicismes, tout de même), et d’autre part, il y a déjà un intérêt local et francophone pour ce que j’ai à apporter à la problématique blogs-ados-internet.
  • Je vais bloguer le processus et le contenu du livre au fur et à mesure que je le produirai ici sur CTTS (je ne crois pas à la multiplication des blogs). (Catégorie Livre.)
  • Le livre sera mis à disposition/publié sous une licence Creative Commons.
  • Je ne sais pas trop comment je vais m’y prendre, c’est la première fois que je fais ça, et vous allez donc me voir patauger joyeusement.
  • Je n’ai pas encore de titre pour le livre. Lorsque j’ai fait le premier jet du plan (en anglais!), je l’ai appelé “The Blogging Divide” — je ne sais honnêtement plus si ça me plaît ou pas (il y a des wagons, avec des mots pareils). De toute façon, je ne pense pas qu’il faille un titre pour que je m’y mette. On verra bien ce que je trouverai.
  • Si je choisis de construire ce livre en public, c’est parce que je pense qu’il sera plus riche de vos remarques et de vos critiques que si je l’écris seule dans mon coin. Mon but est avant tout de faire un livre utile. N’hésitez donc pas à réagir à ce que je publierai.
  • J’ai encore besoin de clarifier un peu le sujet du livre, et ce sera l’objet d’un billet futur. Mais ça tournera autour des adolescents, de l’internet social, du fossé entre “adultes” relativement peu branchés et ados “digital natives”, et de ce qu’il y a à faire en matière d’information et de prévention — ce pour quoi j’aime utiliser le terme “éducation aux médias”. Le public cible se situera plutôt du côté des parents, enseignants, éducateurs que des ados ou des geeks.
  • Je publierai dans un autre billet (et un autre jour, il se fait tard, là) ma première ébauche de plan, une fois récrite en français.

Voilà pour ce soir. C’est donc parti!

Geeky Frustrations [en]

[fr] Quelques râlages (comme quoi je ne fais pas ça qu'en français) au sujet de certains outils que j'utilise quotidiennement.

Right, so, just so I can get it off my chest, here is a list of little things that bug me with the tools I use daily. If I save them for a “proper write-up” they probably will never be posted, so… here goes.

  • Twitter: let me see a differential list of those I follow and those who follow me, both ways. I need to know who is following me that I’m not following (maybe I missed somebody out) and who I’m following but they’re not (to keep in mind they won’t see stuff I twitter).
  • Twitter: let me tag my friends, or sort them into buddy groups. Then let me activate phone alerts for only certain groups. One-by-one management is just impossible with 100 or so friends.
  • Adium: let me turn off Gmail notifications. I have Google Notifier for that. I hate having to click “OK” on that window all the time.
  • Google Reader: let me drag’n drop feeds from one folder to another.
  • Facebook: let me import more than one RSS feed in my notes.
  • Nokia 6280 and Macbook: please sync with each other each time I ask you to, not once out of three.
  • Nokia 6280: gimme a “mark all as read” option for my text messages, please!
  • Nokia 6280: I’d say something about the really crappy camera, but there isn’t much you can do about it now, can you.
  • iPod: let me loop through all episodes of a podcast instead of having to go to the next episode manually.
  • iTunes: let me mix playlists as a source for Party Shuffle (30% My Favorites, 30% Not Listened in Last week, 40% Artist I’m Obsessing Over These Days… for example)
  • Google Reader and del.icio.us: find a way to allow me to automatically post Shared Items to del.icio.us too.
  • Flickr: let me link to “My Favorite photos tagged …” so I can show my readers what I’ve found.
  • Added 18.02.07 0:10 Google Ajax-y Homepage: let me Share Google Reader items, not just star them.
  • …

Certainly more, but these were those which were bugging me badly just now. Well, they’re off my chest, now I can go back to fretting about all the stuff I need to get rid of in my flat and which is still lying around because I haven’t quite figured out the optimal way to dispose of it.

LIFT'07 Social Networking Map Experiment [en]

[fr] Si vous étiez à LIFT'07, remplissez le questionnaire pour l'expérience de Social Networking Mapping!

I can only encourage you to participate in the LIFT’07 Social Networking Map Experiment if you attended the conference. It takes a little while to complete, depending on how extroverted you are, I guess. And if you hang out with evil supernodes, too.

Listing the people I knew before the conference wasn’t too hard, though of course I had to plough through the list. Here are the names I came up with:

Henriette Weber Andersen, Jean-Christophe Anex, Bieler Batiste, Yoan Blanc, Florent Bondoux, Stowe Boyd, Raphaël Briner, Stefana Broadbent, Lee Bryant, Marie Laure Burgener, Riccardo Cambiassi, Jérôme Chevillat, Marco Chong, Matthew Colebourne, Samuel Crausaz, Thierry Crouzet, Pedro Custodio, Nicolas Dengler, Jens-Christian Fischer, Antonio Fontes, David Galipeau, Bruno Giussani, Tanguy Griffon, Matthias Gutfeldt, Laurent Haug, Peter Hogenkamp, Dannie Jost, Christophe Lemoine, Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, Yann Mauchamp, Geneviève Morand, Philippe Mottaz, Hugo Neves da Silva, Nicolas Nova, Bjoern Ognibeni, Roberto Ortelli, Jean-Olivier PAIN, Marc-Olivier Peyer, Bernard Rappaz, Andre Ribeirinho, Martin Roell, Pascal Rossini, Robert Scoble, Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz, Joshua Sierles, Nicole Simon, John Staehli, Elisabeth Stoudmann, Sandrine Szabo, Olivier Tripet, Guido Van nispen, Benjamin Voigt, Alfonso Von Wunschheim, Ellen Wallace, Bertrand Waridel, Mark Wubben, Chris Zumbrunn, Jan Zuppinger

“New people” I met at the conference was more difficult, firstly because I didn’t get the names of everyone and business cards are only so helpful, particularly when you don’t have any for the people you talked to, and secondly because many people did not include a photo in their profile on the site, or any information about themselves. Here’s the list I managed to compile:

Jeremy Allen, Paula do O Barreto, Nuno Barreto, Brian Cox, Florian Egger, Ramon Guiu Hernandez, Noel Hidalgo, Lisette Hoogstrate, Tom Klinkowstein, Trine-Maria Kristensen, Maya Lotan, Gia Milinovich, Glenn O’neil, Nortey Omaboe, Michele Perras, Ivan Pope, Derek Powazek, Thomas Purves, Dieter Rappold, Colin Schlueter, Maryam Scoble, Sebina Sivac-Bryant, Jewel THOMAS, David Touvet, Remo Uherek, Sarah Wade Hutman

A much smaller list, as you can see. Well, as I knew quite a lot of people to start with, I guess it’s expected to be short — but I’m sure this is at most the two-thirds of the people I met. If we talked and you’re not listed, let me know!

One methodological problem I can see with the survey is that “already knew” and “met for the first time” are not clearly defined. I’ve taken a really wide interpretation of those expressions for this survey. I’m not sure absolutely everyone on my first list would consider they “know” me. Or if I haven’t met a person yet but we’ve got common friends and I’ve followed a lot about them, do I “know” them? Ditto for “met for the first time”. I’d interacted with Gia online after LIFT’06, but this is the first time we talked offline, for example.

Anyway… interested in seeing what will come out of this. Please take the survey!