JBoye09 Philadelphia - a summary

So I did not manage to blog from the conference, the schedule was hectic, the wireless in the venue was a bit flaky (hardly Janus fault !) and with so many old friends and acquitances attending, sleep was even in somewhat of a short supply !

You can check out the JBoye09 website yourself if you want to know what you missed, also check out the page with the dates for next years conference ! Sign up now, its really worth it :-)

Why is it really worth it ? Well if your in information management, intranets or web, a communicator or a techie, where else would you get real 'face time' (or 'meat space' as someone recently called in a tweet) with so many domain experts such as Lisa Welchman, Tony Byrne, Martin White, Toby Ward, Eric Hartman, Bob Boiko, Donna Spencer, Graham Oakes, and Steven Arnold ? Oh and I better not forget Janus too......

Even better the program is constructed so that is balanced between thought provoking 'expert opinion' and 'real world' experience from practitioner case studies. Plus there is always plenty of time to network and discuss your issues with anyone (or everyone) else. Even the conference 'party' is organised in a venue where you can mingle and chat, with no thumping beats drowning you out - well not until much later when you can find them for yourself.

This rather low res piccy from my cell phone was this years Conference Dinner venue, the Moshulu, a very nice sailing ship moored next to an old iron clad battleship and a WWII submarine on Philadelphia's Front Street.

You can find CMS Wires coverage of the con
ference here.

Toby Wards blog posts from the conference at Intranetblog here.

Tony Byrne's blog post summary of the conference here.

Pictures on Flickr here.


So what were the highlights ?

• Doing a joint tutorial with Martin White, we always have fun together
• Meeting Donna Spencer, attending her tutorial on IA and hanging out with her on thursday evening
• Playing devils advocate in the debate raging about whether Intranet Managers should instead be called Information Managers, and if corporate communications really knows anything about information management
• Chatting with Tony Byrne while walking through the historic core of Philadelphia !
• Helping my friend Lina Berg develop her master plan to combine IT and Communications into a single function that will report direct to the CEO and thus solve all information management and communications problems in one fell swoop.
• Meeting Jane from WestJet, and Steve from Covidien (Prescient clients), not to mention all the other great people I met for the first time.
• Working with and hanging out with all the great team from JBoye who had come across from Aarhus and London. I hope you got better Dorthe before you had to get on the plane!

As you can see all was good. A disappointment for me was that I never got to chat with Steven Arnold, other than a very quick hello, shame on me for not finding the time and hunting him down.

Possibly the most interesting thing though, was learning about the Information Management Association Framework (TIMAF) initiative from Bob Boiko and Eric Hartman. Go and check out the site for info: http://timaf.org/about - I really hope this takes off and turns into something big.

I will close this post off with a picture of my new mate the world famous author proudly diplaying her first book, "Card Sorting: Designing Usable Categories" by Donna Spencer

Please buy a copy of this marvellous tome, it will help repair the damage I did to her bar bill.

And finally, as they used to say on TV, a great big thanks to Janus and all his team, Sara, Dorthe, Peter, Lau, the other Peter, and all the volunteers, oh yes and congratulations to Volke for winning the best presentation award :-) Thank you, and good night......