Summary
We will bring an entire Headshift development team to work with you to discuss, define and design the first iteration of a tool we think is badly needed in the social stack - one that helps people manage flow, information overload and personal productivity in large networks or organisations.

Workshop Outline
Social tools such as newsreaders, online social networks, presence management and messaging tools have provided us with access to more information than ever before. These tools are really good at generating information flows, but they are not so good at helping us manage flow, prioritise and contextualise the information we receive.

Controlling flow is key to increasing individual and network productivity. We need more flexible, intuitive tools that support our own (superior) cognitive process, augmenting rather than seeking to re-engineer how we naturally deal with information.

This workshop will review existing social toolsets in the light of this challenge, and assess their effectiveness in helping us process information.

We will then go on to analyse the impact of these technologies on our cognitive processes, with a particular focus on how technology impacts decision making in networks and organisations.

Finally, we will ask you to help us design an interface to help people manage the flow of RSS, messaging, subject alerts, activity feeds from social networks, etc., in more intuitive, responsive interface that also brings a touch of personal productivity thinking to bear on the problem, drawing on the work of GTD. We will bring a complete consulting and development team to the workshop who will work in real-time with the group to develop a specification and outline user experience / interface designs that we will continue to develop after the workshop.

At Headshift we work inside some of the biggest companies, using social tools to improve corporate life. Our experience suggests this tool - whatever it ends up being - can potentially play a very important role in helping people make sense of, and take control of, their participation in a variety of social tools, networks and fora.

We have done some early work on how such a tool might work and how it might integrate with other systems, but this is a challenge that is bigger than Headshift-sized, so we thought we would create an opportunity for others to get involved on the basis that we share the results of the workshop openly, and also provide further opportunities for those involved to have an influence on the development of the tool in the future.

Who is the workshop for?
There are several groups that might be interested in the workshop, including those with an interest in:

• user experience design
• interface design
• information architecture
• personal productivity in a networked context
• APIs, piping and systems integration

However, we welcome all contributions and the workshop is designed to maintain the interest of people with no prior knowledge of these areas, as well as those with specific areas of expertise.

Workshop Structure

Introduction
Led by: Lee Bryant

* How this will work
* What we want to achieve
* Why it matters

Review of prior art
Led by: Tom Taylor & Colin Schlüter

* Newsreaders
* Email clients
* Presence info clients
* Alert systems
* Social Networking tools

Supporting better decision making
Led by: Serena McHugh

* How can this tool help us make better decisions
* How much can we process, and how often
* Supporting peripheral awareness
* Subtle signals and other forms of communication

Developing a feature list
Led by: Tim Duckett

* What do we want to pipe through it?
* How do we want to access and transform this info
* What sort of global actions do we need to support
* What are the key features of the tool

Live interface iteration
Led by Jess Wittebort and Serena McHugh

* Basic interface ideas and elements
* Thinking about behaviours and states
* Drawing up some initial structures

Wrapup and Next steps
Led by Lee Bryant

* What have we learned?
* What else do we need to do?
* Our plans for taking this forward