Digital North — The Future, Part 2

Following on from part 1 of the Digital North talks, Alastair Brown (@AlBrownCTO) and Nick Hancill (@NickHancill) explored their roles as CTO and Head of UX at Bright HR within the topic of ‘Boulders, Rock and Sand’.

The pair explored flow and why it is important to stop your organisation from dying and becoming stale when something big happens.

A question initially posed to the audience was MvP vs mVp? The difference? The ‘viable’ within the product.

Bright HR presented a variety of methods of working to the audience from exploring what is true agility to the idea of user research throughout for real lean UX.

Back to the idea of boulders, gravel and sand, these were presented as projects — large, medium and quick out the door. The importance of balance of these was also reiterated.

So, the big question, how do the Bright HR team work so well?

• Experimentation within the team to let them explore and allow everyone to generate ideas within a structured manner.
• Creation of suggestion cards, allowing the team to put forward ideas and potentially see these rolled out around the business or within teams.
• Building a forum for collaboration.
• Nomination of a head of innovation, to constantly keep ideas fresh and coming in.
• Everyone is liable for the risk of the development of a project, creates a more diligent team.
• Everyone within a team can see everything at every step so everything is created within a collaborative, team environment.

We took away some great ideas from the Bright HR presentation and can’t wait to include these within our processes as we continue to grow.

The final presentation of the evening came from Daniel Nolan (@iamdanielnolan), Managing Director at TheEWord, who explored ‘digital content, regulation and free speech’.

Daniel started by delving into the early days of the internet when everyone was the equivalent of hippies and everything was free and easy — including data. Then stepped in ‘The Man’ who hated the freedom of the internet, and began to take it away.

For big firms, something called the CDA 230 acts as a get out of jail free card for the ownership of content, especially that which may be questionable in nature — ‘No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider’. (section 230 The Communications Decency Act)

Places like Google, Facebook and Twitter are all able to relinquish accountability thanks to the CDA as they operate as a provider and not the creator of the content.

AirBnB and Uber are also able to forgo any accountability as these companies class themselves as ‘tech’ and nothing to do with travel/ accommodation or transport/ taxi and so will only take slack for any tech issues rather than those experienced by a customer when actually using the end service.

So, where are we now? We are currently in a world of trolling, fake news and people using the internet to do illegal stuff — quite a change from the hippy vibes of the data being free.

Where are we going? The European Commission have begun to push accountability back onto the companies who host the content as opposed to letting them get away with everything, now anything in ‘large volumes’ can make you liable.

Daniel’s talk was extremely eye opening and explored a great range of regulations and activities.

We had a great evening at the Digital North event and can’t wait for the next one. If you were at the event, we’d love to hear from you, send us a message at hello@wool.digital or give us a ring on 0161 635 0045.