I’ve finally got around to posting up the talk I gave at the fantastic She Says SCAMP conference in July, and thought it would be an opportune moment to point it out in case it’s of any interest, and talk a little bit more about the very exciting project I spoke about.

She Says is a fantastic organisation – even though the world is roughly half men, half women, the same can’t be said for the creative departments of most digital agencies. So rather than moan about this, a group of women decided to do something about it, and thus She Says was born – an organisation which holds regular events for women in the industry to share good stuff and support each other to progress within the industry.

The London crew put on their first big event last month, called SCAMP, a conference about making creativity. The theme was ‘Work in Progress’ – since good ideas take time, they’ll go through lots of iterations, Ideas on a whiteboard, post-it notes, prototypes, many directions until the one presents itself as the final ‘thing’ everyone else sees. The aim of SCAMP was to share a diverse range of creative projects – with the added twist that whilst most conference lineups tend to be dominated by blokes, for this event this was turned on its head with one lone male speaking alongside a bunch of inspirational women. It was an awesome day with some incredible speakers, all sharing some fascinating projects, and it was most definitely an honour to be invited to share something I was working on.

As I mentioned in my first weeknote, the very talented Toby Barnes, of Pixel Lab, Mudlark and Playful fame, very kindly asked me if I’d like to get involved with Chromaroma, which turns commuting in London into a game. I’d spoken at last year’s Playful about the power of gaming and play to help change behaviour, so as you can imagine, this is absolutely right up my street. Chromaroma’s currently in closed alpha, although Season 2 has just started with another 300 new players added, so it’s still very early days, but I’m going to be helping with ongoing strategic development, and particular with existing and potential partners. I’m really excited about the potential for Chromaroma in helping change behaviour around transport (especially hopefully getting Boris Bikes on the system so you can be rewarded for cycling instead of taking the tube, for example), so there’s lots of opportunity to work more closely with TFL to get more & richer Oyster data, do more with it, and hopefully have lots of fun in the process. Not to mention where we could start to take it with other partners – gets the neurons firing and excited about the potential for who we could work with and what we could do. Happy days.

So at SCAMP, being as the theme was work in progress, I talked about the fantastic work that Toby and the team have been and are doing on this very exciting project, and some of the potential for where I was starting to come in. Below is the deck posted up on slideshare (annoyingly slideshare seems to have crunched some of the formatting on a couple of slides, grrr), or alternatively I’ve posted up the slides with accompanying notes (NB keen observers will note that the talk borrows heavily from Toby’s excellent talk at Future Everything, as Chromaroma is his baby seemed only right to tell its story in his own words!)