Sessions at Lift12 on Friday 24th February

At the crossroads between technological innovation, economic mutations and social transformations, lie the next disruptions that you simply cannot afford to ignore: Transformative opportunities, Really hard questions, Discontinuities and Tipping points. During this workshop, we will try to identify a few possible disruptions and what they could mean for all of us.

No crystal ball is required, nor provided: What we'll do is build up on previous and ongoing collective thinking, initiated by Fing in France (in French - English translation in process), and begin including the Lift community in this process.

19 initial scenarios (French version, English version to be published soon) will be submitted to the workshop participants ahead of time. Out of these, you will select 4-5 stories, to be torn down / rewritten / continued / evaluated / and translated into concrete action.

The results will be published online. They will be open for sharing and comments. And they will initiate an ongoing collaborative process of creative foresight from one Lift to the next.

DIGITAL SENTIENT MAPPING – "Le géographe est trop important pour flâner" // "The geographer is too important to stroll" said the geographer to the little prince. Ever since "we are inhabiting at the same time the space and its representation", the flâneur has become the geographer. Sentient mapping is nowadays much in fashion and offers many more personal rewards than just finding one's way through navigation. This workshop explores how a sentient map is different than a traditional map and questions content and platforms of such tools.

1_ what interactivity elements does your workshop offer?

Explore creatively digital sentient mapping.
Engaged discussions.

2_ what is the take-away for the participants?

A sense of how the digital has disrupted mapping... and the yet to be explored opportunities by extending maps beyond the traditional analytical / scientific / quantitative approach to the qualitative / art world that was actually part of mapping in its early stage but disappeared since the century of the enlightenment.

Link to the open Google document: https://docs.google.com/document....

Remember Egypt? How about the OCCUPY movement? Haiti Earthquake? Social media has been there, not only as a detonator of specific actions, but as a main character in stories that unravel throughout the world.

Now imagine having the tools to better understand where the conversations are going and who the real leaders are.

Our workshop deals with turning talk into action, with proven techniques to mobilize citizens around a common cause, based on actual experiences (lobbying, breast cancer crusade, humanitarian hurricane relief, calls to action). An overview of these projects was presented at Tech@State Citizenship 2.0 Conference hosted by World Bank and the State Department (US) and at TechCamp (Personal Democracy Forum in Chile). Now we incorporate the use of KPIs to further develop strategies to enhance civic participation.

This is a hands-on activity where participants can interact with Ondore7, measuring sentiment in digital conversations, regarding specific topics and identifying key opinion leaders and influencers.

Participants will have a better understanding on how to detonate conversations that lead to specific actions.

Who are we?

Fernando Luege CEO, Ondore: http://mx.linkedin.com/in/luege
One of Mexico's top tech entrepreneurs. Developed Ondore7, a platform that allows for digital reputation management through artificial intelligence and data mining.

Eva Sander Chief Strategist, Ondore: http://mx.linkedin.com/in/evasander
User experience and crossmedia communications strategist, enhancing civic participation to create a better world

Expect part "provocative", part "case study" and part "brainstorming" session touching on new forms of documentary, storytelling, journalism and PR ( transmedia storytelling ) ; connection and geo location technologies in developing communications programs in post conflict and crises zones.

The rise of cloud-based music services, combined with streaming and radio automation services, now mean that anyone can be a DJ with all of the required elements existing in the cloud. This enables new venues and methods for creating radio, as well as further lowering the barriers to internet broadcasting. We'll check out a few of these tools and try our hands at DJing in the cloud.

A workshop with Mathieu Castelli (C4M).

Location-based games now exist for quite ten years. They have always been a creative platform to test innovative propositions (beyond gaming) based on geopositioning.

The game mechanics in this field is stable now with treasure hunt, geocaching and people tracking. Interestingly, the evolution of these platforms is quite slow; mostly because it is difficult to tune the game component properly. Beyond contextual issues (the city you’re in, its architecture), the experience is very much dependent on details such as the number of participants at a given time, the reactivity of the game or the accuracy of geopositioning.

This workshop will look at this in a very “hands-on” way as we will test different game mechanics with a prototype. It is aimed at participants, interaction designers, web and mobile app developers and game designers interested in testing ideas about the user experience of location-based applications.

Activity: The session will consist in a series of group activity based on Meatspace Invasion, a location-based game recently developed by C4M and Mekensleep. After a quick introduction about these, we will form groups who will test different combinations of game parameters. We will then go on the field in Geneva to test these scenarios and regroup after the game session to debrief the outcomes.

About myself: I've been a product manager for 5 years at Google, and before that an early joiner at Shazam. I built a multitude of products, features, and more for various markets worldwide. My passion is in products that have a strong value proposition, slick and minimalistic interfaces, great experiences, and that generally make sense. Hence, I try to talk about product development and improvement regularly.

The Workshop:
-------------

Adding features is easy. Taking them out is hard. A lot of time and words have been spent talking about feature proliferation, feature creep, and so on. Everyone has an example (or 10!) of things that are over-complicate and are an annoyance to use, that they would like to change or even get rid of if they could.

Designing the core use case is not trivial, and I propose to walk through a process to simplify an existing product through a very practical and pragmatic approach. We'll see how constraints prevent us from simply jumping ahead and kicking everything out. We'll discover what the original designers had in mind, and retrace their steps.

There will be 3 steps to this workshop:
1. I'll open up a suggestion list for people who signed up to propose products they care about and that they'd like to see simplified
2. After we collected ideas in the previous step, I'll open up voting on all the ideas
3. At Lift12 itself, we'll tackle the product that got the most votes, and walk through feature redesign/simplification over the course of the workshop

The format of the session at Lift will be that of a brainstorm, resulting in actionable items and UX mocks as if we were about to start implementing the changes we want.

This workshop will have the following purposes:
- Show the participants an alternate way to define requirements (User Stories instead of Specs document)
- Give them an insight into agile methodologies
- Introduce the participants to the importance of requirement's priorization
- Show them how cool and easy it is to build a web product when applying agile! ;)

To achieve these goals, the session will be organized in different steps :
- Introduction to web product development
- Let's build a product : Lift Mobile Website
-- Target group definition
-- User Story writing in teams
-- Merging user stories
-- Assign business values to the User Stories
-- Assign complexity values (Story Points) to the User Stories
- Priorization of the Product Backlog

What we want do together is then:
- A prioritized product backlog using a concrete example (= agile specifications)
- Live agile methods by doing it on a concrete product about something that the attendees love (Lift)
- Have fun!

Considering:

• technology has brought along a profound change in the way we relate to information and knowledge,
• most of our students are on the Internet as they attend and follow lectures,
• many high profile universities around the world have opened their lectures and even full curricula (including detailed indications on how to follow them) in OpenCourseWare (not certifying, but MIT will be offering credentials in 2012 under the "MITx" label),
• some students are increasingly complementing their certifying curricula with such OpenCourseWare material,
• physical mobility is often an issue in dense areas where schools and universities are located and people wish to be able to study anywhere, anytime,
• a significant part of the world population has or is about to have access to most of the world's encyclopedic knowledge, in the palm of their hand and in a few clicks,
• general treaties and agreements have standardized most processes in higher education (credits, BA, MA, PhD, etc.),

several questions concerning the existing educational systems need to be raised, and the traditional answers may not apply.

Therefore, the purpose of this workshop is to bring together educators, researchers, students, professionals and interested citizens to co-creatively and openly explore this issue, trying to re-think out of the box, to figure out what higher education could be in a not so distant future given the above transformations.

Moreover, if any of the ideas expressed by the following experts inspire you (definitely not a complete list) :

- Prof. Sugata Mitra on the Future of Universities:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R...
- Sir Ken Robinson, Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity, 2006
seminal talk, http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_rob...
- Sir Ken Robinson, Bring on the learning revolution!,
http://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken...
- Sir Ken Robinson and RSA Animate, Changing Education Paradigms,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z...
- MindShift, KQED, School Day of the Future,
http://mindshift.kqed.org/tag/sc...
- Marcel Kampman, Reinventing School, Project Dream School :
http://klewel.com/conferences/li...
- Denis de Rougemont, 1929 essay (revisited in 1971), The Misdeeds of
Public Education (Les méfaits de l'instruction publique)
http://bit.ly/eJGhZb
- Frog Design Blog, No Right Brain Left Behind, Design Mind,
http://designmind.frogdesign.com...
- Michel Serres, Eduquer au XXIe siècle, LeMonde.fr, 5 mars 2011,
http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/arti....

or if you want to bring your own contribution to the subject, come join us!

As a thought provoking set of initial questions and challenges for the future, here are some we plan to raise during the workshop :

• what is the role of a university professor?
• what is an academic assessment, a certification, a degree and ultimately a curriculum?
• what is a university and the role of its strategic board (rector, provost, president, etc.)?
• what is an elective / required course, where and how can it be taken and assessed?
• how do we link research to education again?
• how do we bring back talent and passion into standardized curricula?
• is there room for tailor-made curricula based on local and remote courses available elsewhere?
• how can all of this play out?
• etc.

If you feel committed to thinking about these issues in a creative setting, join us and we'll decide together what we can do with the outcome of this workshop...

On a side note, you may also want to know :
1) who we are : Concerned educators, researchers, foresight professionals, Int. Org. members, activists.
Jean-Henry Morin and Laurent Moccozet (UNIGE)
Giorgio Pauletto (OT-Lab)
Robert Shaw (ITU, to be confirmed)
Philippa Martin King (IEC, to be confirmed)
Marcel Kampman (DreamSchool foundation, to be confirmed)
+ some game changing people in this area but also to be confirmed and it would be a nice surprise...

2) what the workshop is about : The Future of Higher Education in a globalized, networked, social society (i.e., rebooting higer education to make it simple!)

3) what interactivity elements does the workshop offer: based on a "Remember the Future" innovation game, participants will engage in story telling, foresight, and creative thinking

4) what are the take-aways for the participants : a set of possible future scenarios to be used as game changing inspiration to make changes happen and possibly a call for action, a roadmap or anything else the crowd may come up with...

See you @Lift and let's give this a try!

Crowdsourcing has received a great deal of attention over the past few years. But what does this buzzword really mean? Why should we use crowdsourcing? What can be crowdsourced? And how can we design successful crowdsourcing initiatives?

This workshop is part of a design science doctoral thesis carried out by Ulysse Rosselet, phd candidate in information systems at HEC lausanne, who has been studying this phenomenon for two years now. The final goal of this research is to create a methodology to support the design of adequate crowdsourcing platforms.

This workshop will not follow typical structure of academic presentations, it is not a lecture about crowdsourcing! I want to use this space to achieve two goals: one the one hand, I need to elicit from internet-savvy lifters their understanding of crowdsourcing, its potential applications and its perspectives. This will be done thanks to collaborative scenario building and narrative techniques. On the other hand, we will use a taxonomy of crowdsourcing developed during this research to classify various examples of crowdsourcing initiatives.

The participants will come out of this workshop with fresh ideas about how they can use crowdsourcing in a creative way in their professional activities, and practical hints about how to coordinate a crowdsourcing operation!

Stories from people with amazing lives and projects, to inspire and surprise you.

This session explores near future technologies, those innovations that will happen in the next 5 years and change the way we live, do business, love, learn, play, interact, etc.

The internet favored the rise of the hacker in areas such as journalism and music. Now, some are taking that concept to a whole new level, from rocket-building to nuclear physics experiments... Meet the extreme hackers.

Lift founder Laurent Haug will wrap up Lift12, summarizing the ideas heard during the two and a half days.