Recap of Michigan/Ohio local leader meeting
Thursday, April 17th, 2008 by Keith InstoneOn Wednesday, April 2, we held a local user experience networking meeting in Ann Arbor. We invited leaders of local professional chapters related to user experience, university representatives, and anyone else who was interested in spending the evening meeting new people who are interested in UX. After letting everyone meet each other individually, we had dinner and then went around the room, learning about what each person was involved in. (See some photos.) The attendees:
- Anthony Viviano, Detroit UXnet local ambassador
- Bob Hale, Columbus UXnet local ambassador
- Carol Smith, UPA board member
- Connie Lippert, Refresh Detroit
- Constantinos Coursaris, Michigan State - Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media
- Dan Cooney, Ann Arbor UXnet local ambassador
- Dave Mitropoulos-Rundus, UPA & IUE
- Erin Moulton, STC/SM
- Jason Withrow, Washtenaw Community College
- Jenny Jacob, Hanson, Inc., Toledo
- John Rivard, MOCHI
- Josh Holmes, GANG, AACS (Ann Arbor Computer Society), AADD
- Keith Instone, Toledo UXnet local ambassador
- Lavie Golenberg, Human Factors Student, Wayne State College of Engineering
- Lisa Mullinaux, Bay area
- Mark Newman, U of M - SI & MOCHI
- Maureen Hanratty, U of M - SI, HCI Student, SOCHI
- Michael Beasley, Michigan UPA
- Mike Osswald, Hanson, Inc., Toledo
- Ross Johnson, Refresh Detroit
- Shane Sevo, SemaFX (SIGGRAPH), Creative Energy Alliance, Joomla Detroit,
There were several opportunities for cooperation and collaboration mentioned, such as organizing World Usability Day, joint HCI researcher/practitioner speaker series, monthly meeting information sharing, game design talks, and so on. As opportunities arise, we will leverage the contacts made at this meeting.
We asked several people if they wanted a mailing list or online group to stay in touch, and almost everyone said they were already on too many lists. We think instead it is better to leverage the existing lists, groups, social networks and so on. For example, the UXnet group on Facebook is something to join.
We think while we are using the existing tools to stay in touch and look for opportunities to work together, we should start planning our next meeting of local leaders with a passion for user experience. There are several representatives from local groups that could not make it this time, there are new groups of people to invite (such as advertising professionals or managers of local user experience teams), there is more brainstorming and planning we can do for specific UX projects, and there are other areas of the region we can reach out to.
As UXnet local ambassadors, we think that the biggest value we can add to the local user experience community is to focus on organizing these face-to-face networking events, and then let others take it from there on how they want to cooperate and collaborate.
We look forward to organizing more user experience networking events in the future.
Anthony, Dan, Keith
