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Training deficits in 'soft skills' -personal or nontechnical skills -have long been lamented by educators and employers despite longstanding evidence of their importance. Virtual environments, combined with online learning management and reporting platforms, offer potential for addressing this gap through affordable and scalable simulations. This paper aims to summarise virtual 'soft skills' work undertaken to date, and to explore practical issues encountered by development teams working in this area. The first section provides historical overviews of the 'soft skills' term and related digital training initiatives. This is followed by a case study of an interdisciplinary team of Australian software developers, researchers and educators who have built a series of virtual healthcare products. The case study reports on a number of challenges encountered by the team.

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In recent years, social computing technologies have emerged to support innovative new relationships between organisations and the public. Inspired by concepts such as collective intelligence, citizen science, citizen journalism and crowdsourcing, diverse types of organisations are aiming to increase engagement with the public, collect localised knowledge, or leverage human cognition and creativity. In supporting these approaches, organisations are often provoked to make their data and processes more open, and to be inclusive of differing motivations and perspectives from inside and outside the organisation. In doing so, they raise new questions for both designers and organisations. For example how are "official" and "unofficial" information sources combined or hosted, mediated, or considered reliable? Does the role of the professional change through greater involvement of amateurs? How are the motivations of members of the public harnessed for mutual benefit? This workshop brings together an interdisciplinary group of researchers to address those questions from different perspectives.

Technology-based interventions for young people diagnosed with autism have focused largely on individual use. Yet research into use of technology 'in the wild' emphasises the value of computer-mediated social interaction. In this paper we use HCI to examine the success of a program premised on the social use of technology in safe offline spaces. Participants typically go through stages of object-centred and computermediated communication before engaging in face-to-face interaction. We use the concepts of third place, social distance and ticket-to-talk to explain how this hybrid space helps 'Aspies' engage comfortably in social interaction.

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