Play is nature's learning engine, says games researcher and author Aaron Dignan. In other words, we're hardwired to enjoy games - they're addictive, skill-building, and satisfying. So the question is: How can we integrate game concepts into our work lives to help us push ideas forward? In this talk, Dignan walks us through the principles of creating a great game and suggests ways that we might use them to overcome email exhaustion, spice up workaday meetings, and more.

As a child, I had read about the Homebrew Computer Club, where Osborne and Apple were born - and I wanted to be part of a big movement like that ever since. When I first heard about Y Combinator I thought here was something happening right now that might be looked back on in the same way. I worked my way through the list of YC companies, narrowing them down to the ones I thought were most impressive. Justin.tv was at the top of my final list. Smart people, getting lots of attention for what they were building. I applied for a job there, and they seemed as happy to have found me as I was to have found them. I became their first technical employee in 2007.


Our growth in 2008.
My first day at the company was quite surreal. First thing that morning, Justin and Emmett met with me and asked me to write a scalable chat backend. All of the irc server software they had tried had failed to scale-up well enough, and they'd decided we needed to start from scratch. "We'd like it to be written using Python's Twisted library" Emmett said, "Do you know Python?" I didn't, not at all. "Well, you're a Lisp guy, you'll pick it up soon enough.”

I own a good set of headphones that fully enclose my ears. I am not an audiophile, I just don't like to hear other people talk at me. When I am staring at my Emacs windows with headphones on, it generally isn't a physical cue that I am looking for conversation. In fact, when I am that deep into thinking out a problem and I get interrupted, I think about the anti-workplace-violence clause in the employee handbook, and how a poorly lit parking lot probably doesn't qualify as "company property".

Facebook engineers decide what they want to work on and are allowed to make changes across the site without asking for permission.

This paper has three parts. We start by briefly exploring what we mean by collaboration and why organisations and individuals should build their collaboration capability. Then, based on that understanding, we lay out a series of steps for developing a collaboration capability. We finish the paper with a simple test of your current collaboration capability.