The Haystack

Origin

The acronym JASA was coined on Twitter by Stephen Hay in response to several tweets (posts) regarding a new Spice-Girl-association-inducing acronym POSH. JASA is also known as SPORTY. Other variations (three more) are currently in development.

Why

The term “stupid” is really a mouthful, so we expanded upon it in order to make it shorter. Remembering “stupid” is hard, especially for the ultraintelligent geeks who use all of their thinking power to develop the modern internet using tons of complex technologies, so perhaps mnemonics can help. And basically, the consensus is that we don’t have enough acronyms in the web development industry. JASA as an initiative will hopefully promote the creation and use of even more acronyms. The ultimate goals are:

• to confuse developers by introducing new but existing terms with their own associations and meaning for things which have existed and gone by a different name for years. We lend this trick from e.g. AJAX and the Hipster PDA (which means Index Cards With A Clip).
• to get developers to eventually use these acronyms, even when they really hate them and don’t want to, but hey: peer pressure (the cool kids will start to use it), acronym and buzzword conferences, and cute little banners.
• to promote quick implementation of new acronyms: think it up today, promote it tomorrow. These things don’t need thinking about. If you actually consider them before promoting them, they wouldn’t be stupid, right?
• to create pages about our acronyms which use <b></b> instead of <acronym></acronym> to mark up the acronym itself.
• to eventually sound like an alien race when communicating with each other.

These are noble goals, and will help distinguish us developers from the rest of the world. JASA has been used succesfully in government for years. There is simply no reason to lag behind.

The JASA process

There is no process. Just do things as you always do. Only now it’s got a name. Oh, I mean a different name.

JASA resources

The same resources you’ve always used.

JASA bling for your blog

We are currently seeking volunteers to develop horrific eye-candy which will absolutely never complement any blog design. Oh, and we need one of those small RSS-like thingies. What are they called again? There’s no acronym.

I’m actually starting this post while still in London at the Future of Web Design (FOWD) conference; there are a few presentations to go. So far I’ve found this event pretty well organized. Being a one-day event, it’s been packed and maintains a high tempo. Ryan Carson has been “nudging” speakers to adhere to the allotted time, so everything has run like clockwork.

As far as I’m concerned, the quality of speakers is not on par with @media (save Andy Clarke), but let’s face it: it’s five times cheaper, there was water and wifi (@media2006-goers will know exactly what I mean) and some of the lesser known speakers did have very interesting things to say. I enjoyed almost all of them.

A few of the presentations seem to have been more sales pitches than anything else. One presentation made me want to hang myself from an eyelid. Andy Clarke’s TopGear style presentation definitely stole the show. He’s not only entertaining, but also made some great points, arguing his preference for using XHTML/CSS prototyping over Photoshop wireframes and mock-ups.

Rei Inamoto presented 5 ways to strengthen your brand. One of the speakers presenting material not explicitly dealing with web design, he obviously took the time to make the points relevant to the audience. Web designers need to look outside their medium and technique to become and remain creative. Inamoto is a strong creative, and Ryan Carson and team did well in choosing him to speak.

There were other good speakers, of course. As far as the sales pitches go, well, one can’t really complain. I’m sure that’s one of the many ways Ryan and crew were able to create a conference which costs roughly one-fifth of an @media ticket. For that price, it was well worth it.

Anything new here? Nothing mind-blowing. But I applaud Carson Systems for daring to throw some cross-media experts (like Inamoto) into the mix. I’m interested in seeing where this conference will go in the future.

See a few photos.