Thursday, April 07, 2005
I worked as a moderator for two of the sessions at this local conference. This meant that I had to introduce the speakers to the audience and get the ball rolling with questions after their talks, neither of which I had any problems with. And I got in to see everything as a result.
This conference was right up my alley: content management and web development issues with a dollop of Information Architecture thrown into the mix.
The day before would have been the real day to go to it, since all the exhibitors were there, and there were some speakers I would have liked to have seen. But the people I introed gave interesting talks.
The first was Jane W.-F. of Manulife Financial and Carmine P. of Prescient Digital who gave a talk about how they developed a new Intranet for the company when they went through a major merger. Essentially they created a new overarching Intranet site containing plenty of news, while retaining the old Intranets, and slowly ported all of the useful information to the new Intranet overtime. What I found interesting was the importance they laid on the editorial process and that they recognized that the lack of a taxonomy was a real issue for them. Was interesting to get a glimpse at the evolution of another major firm's intranet.
Managed to attend part of an afternoon session on the relevance of taxonomies, which ended up being a bit of a bunfight. You wouldn't normally think that a topic would draw a big crowd, bit it did -- easily the most people I saw in any of the sessions I attended. Obviously a hot button topic at the moment. There were a couple of familiar faces there, Huw Morgan who was very much on the side of more search engines, less taxonomies, and Rita Vine who held the opposing view. Much argument ensued. The opions expressed by Dr. Cindy Gordon were particularly interesting as they obviously came from someone who has tried to implement more than one type of solution for different companies. It was a good session but unfortunately I had to leave prior to the conclusion in order to head over to the second session I was moderating.
That session was also interesting: Lise D. from Statistic Canada gave a talk on how they are planning on rolling out the first Canadian Census to solicit responses over the Web. Lots of interesting security measures in place, all of them seemingly well thought-out. I know that I would definitely respond to doing my census submission via the computer from what I saw. I also asked her some questions from the family history perspective afterwards, and apparently there is legislation in the works (which may be on the verge of passing as I write) that would add a checkbox to the next census asking the submitter whether or not they would mind if the results are released to the general public after 90+ years or so.
On a more personal note it was great to see my old friend (and also former ex-Delrina-ite) Kim S. again. She is the ringleader of this event, and was very pregnant with her first child, which is potentially due any time. Looked great.
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