2005 Collaborative Technologies Conference
Submitted by Larry Cannell on Fri, 07/01/2005 - 18:10.
Last week I attended the Collaborative Technologies Conference held at New York's Chelsea Piers. Overall, this was the best conference I have attended in a long time. The quality and mix of people in attendance was outstanding. Conversations I had during breaks, at lunch, and at dinner were engaging, educational, and, quite simply, enjoyable.
I would love to list everyone I met and talked with last week and during the months preceding the conference, but I just don't have the time to do it. But, thanks to the many of you who made CTC a great event for me.
Kudos to MediaLive, and specifically Jennifer Pahlka, for producing a conference with a successful mix of business and technology covering the whole gamut of collaborative technologies. There were a number of occasions during the conference when someone mentioned to me that this was the first conference they've attended that had this comprehensive focus on collaborative technologies. However, I have to admit to tooting my own horn since I was an active participant on the CTC Advisory Board and had some input on the track themes and agenda.
Monday started off with a keynote presentation from Tom Malone entitled "The Future of Work" based on his book of the same title. If you haven't read this book yet, it's pretty good. Malone discussed how business is evolving similar to governments. From initially being tribal to becoming centralized and hierarchical, to becoming decentralized.
Next, I was joined on stage with Clay Shirky (ITP/NYU), Laura Baur (Maritz), Melanie Turek (Nemertes), Michael Sampson (Shared Spaces), and Robert Kath (Pfizer). Our panel discussion was entitled "Is Collaboration IT's Last Chance to Matter." Overall, the conversation went very well but, unfortunately, we were having problems with the numerous microphones in use (it seemed that only five out of the eight microphones worked at any one time and predicting which ones that were working was hit and miss) and I expect the impact of the panel discussion (although it sounded great to me :-) was significantly impacted.
At lunch I met Brian Hoogendam, the President of Advanced Reality. We talked about the concepts behind Jybe, which facilitates peer to peer collaboration by passing events rather than using screen scraping. The methods used for this type of real-time collaborative experience, although not new, are compelling and we may see some really cool stuff evolved from this in the future.
The afternoon sessions started with Lisa Kimball's "Effective Virtual Teams" which was particularly good. My notes are sketchy since I was hoping to get a copy of the slides but there are more notes on the CTCWiki. I also found that the Group Jazz site has a number of whitepapers I plan on reading as well.
I then caught Clay's "Blogs and Wikis: Emergent Collaboration in the Enterprise" session with Anil Dash, Ross Mayfield, and Peter Thoeny. Clay's introduction to blogs and wikis, and the way he contrasted them with other types of forums was excellent. Unfortunately, the presentations from Anil and Ross often sounded a little commercial but there were nuggets of good stuff sprinkled among them nonetheless.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get to Dave Martin's "Effective Meetings In A Virtual World" session since it was running concurrently with Clay's session. Dave is Co-Founder of Smart Technologies, the makers of the SmartBoard. I once attended a workshop led by Dave and it was excellent.
Later that evening I had dinner with the rest of the CTC Advisory Board, the MediaLive staff, and some folks from SocialText (including Ross Mayfield). The dinner conversation was fantastic.
Tuesday started off with a keynote from James Surowiecki, author of "Wisdom of Crowds." Having just read the book much of the material was a review for me but the presentation was very good nonetheless.
Next, Melanie Turek hosted a panel discussion between Anoop Gupta of Microsoft and Gordon Quinn of Nortel entitled "Presence: The Battle for the Desktop." Although I expected to hear commercial pitches (and they did fall into "message" from time to time) the session was excellent. Clearly, these two executives understand the value of presence and the role it can play in the future.
After lunch I started the afternoon off by attending Melanie Turek's "Virtual Workplace" presentation. Next, I listened to Zack Rosen's presentation on CivicSpace, an Open Source collaborative website management solution tailored for civic advocacy groups based on Drupal.
My session, covering creating a strategy for collaborative technologies, was next up. Overall, I think it went well. I have to admit to being more nervous about this session than the keynote panel the day before. But, I was satisfied with the results and received some good feedback afterwards.
Unfortunately, there were a number of overlapping sessions during Tuesday afternoon that I am sorry to have missed. Specifically, I would have liked to see Michael Sampson's "Collaborative Team Workspaces" session, along with the "Conferencing Applications: Are They Commodities," and Eugene Kim's "Patterns of High-performance Collaboration" session. Too many good sessions, too little time.
The evening "Inaugural Dinner" was great. The food was incredible; the location breathtaking, and the GEEC table Michael and Eric Mack organized was totally awesome. Listening to the diverse background of everyone at the table, hearing about their interests, and what first sparked their interest in collaborative technologies was fantastic.
Wednesday highlights were "Simple Lightweight Applications," "Open Source Collaboration Solutions," and "Content Management Goes Collaborative." Unfortunately, I had the same problem as the day before and was unable to sit in on Michael Sampson's "Extending Collaborative Applications to the Mobile Worker."
I found the BaseCamp demo in the lightweight applications session to be intriguing. A very simple solution but their customers are swearing by its usefulness. The Open Source Collaboration session was a discussion led by Eugene Kim. Peter Saint-Andre of Jabber, Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress, and Peter Thoeny of Twiki.Org also joined in.
However, later on Wednesday is when the real excitement started. My 7:45 flight out of LaGuardia was cancelled at 8:30 leaving me scrambling to book a Northwest flight to Detroit… by way of Minneapolis… out of JFK the next morning at 7am. The bad news (it gets worse) was that New York hotels were pretty much full before and the Hotels.Com computers crashed just as I was making a reservation. In short, it's a good thing I had an interesting book to read while spending the night at JFK airport.
To all collaborative technology vendors I recommend you plan to be involved with this conference next year. MediaLive hit the bulls-eye with CTC and I personally am looking forward to next year's conference.
For more information:
CTC Wiki
CTC Blog
I would love to list everyone I met and talked with last week and during the months preceding the conference, but I just don't have the time to do it. But, thanks to the many of you who made CTC a great event for me.
Kudos to MediaLive, and specifically Jennifer Pahlka, for producing a conference with a successful mix of business and technology covering the whole gamut of collaborative technologies. There were a number of occasions during the conference when someone mentioned to me that this was the first conference they've attended that had this comprehensive focus on collaborative technologies. However, I have to admit to tooting my own horn since I was an active participant on the CTC Advisory Board and had some input on the track themes and agenda.
Monday started off with a keynote presentation from Tom Malone entitled "The Future of Work" based on his book of the same title. If you haven't read this book yet, it's pretty good. Malone discussed how business is evolving similar to governments. From initially being tribal to becoming centralized and hierarchical, to becoming decentralized.
Next, I was joined on stage with Clay Shirky (ITP/NYU), Laura Baur (Maritz), Melanie Turek (Nemertes), Michael Sampson (Shared Spaces), and Robert Kath (Pfizer). Our panel discussion was entitled "Is Collaboration IT's Last Chance to Matter." Overall, the conversation went very well but, unfortunately, we were having problems with the numerous microphones in use (it seemed that only five out of the eight microphones worked at any one time and predicting which ones that were working was hit and miss) and I expect the impact of the panel discussion (although it sounded great to me :-) was significantly impacted.
At lunch I met Brian Hoogendam, the President of Advanced Reality. We talked about the concepts behind Jybe, which facilitates peer to peer collaboration by passing events rather than using screen scraping. The methods used for this type of real-time collaborative experience, although not new, are compelling and we may see some really cool stuff evolved from this in the future.
The afternoon sessions started with Lisa Kimball's "Effective Virtual Teams" which was particularly good. My notes are sketchy since I was hoping to get a copy of the slides but there are more notes on the CTCWiki. I also found that the Group Jazz site has a number of whitepapers I plan on reading as well.
I then caught Clay's "Blogs and Wikis: Emergent Collaboration in the Enterprise" session with Anil Dash, Ross Mayfield, and Peter Thoeny. Clay's introduction to blogs and wikis, and the way he contrasted them with other types of forums was excellent. Unfortunately, the presentations from Anil and Ross often sounded a little commercial but there were nuggets of good stuff sprinkled among them nonetheless.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get to Dave Martin's "Effective Meetings In A Virtual World" session since it was running concurrently with Clay's session. Dave is Co-Founder of Smart Technologies, the makers of the SmartBoard. I once attended a workshop led by Dave and it was excellent.
Later that evening I had dinner with the rest of the CTC Advisory Board, the MediaLive staff, and some folks from SocialText (including Ross Mayfield). The dinner conversation was fantastic.
Tuesday started off with a keynote from James Surowiecki, author of "Wisdom of Crowds." Having just read the book much of the material was a review for me but the presentation was very good nonetheless.
Next, Melanie Turek hosted a panel discussion between Anoop Gupta of Microsoft and Gordon Quinn of Nortel entitled "Presence: The Battle for the Desktop." Although I expected to hear commercial pitches (and they did fall into "message" from time to time) the session was excellent. Clearly, these two executives understand the value of presence and the role it can play in the future.
After lunch I started the afternoon off by attending Melanie Turek's "Virtual Workplace" presentation. Next, I listened to Zack Rosen's presentation on CivicSpace, an Open Source collaborative website management solution tailored for civic advocacy groups based on Drupal.
My session, covering creating a strategy for collaborative technologies, was next up. Overall, I think it went well. I have to admit to being more nervous about this session than the keynote panel the day before. But, I was satisfied with the results and received some good feedback afterwards.
Unfortunately, there were a number of overlapping sessions during Tuesday afternoon that I am sorry to have missed. Specifically, I would have liked to see Michael Sampson's "Collaborative Team Workspaces" session, along with the "Conferencing Applications: Are They Commodities," and Eugene Kim's "Patterns of High-performance Collaboration" session. Too many good sessions, too little time.
The evening "Inaugural Dinner" was great. The food was incredible; the location breathtaking, and the GEEC table Michael and Eric Mack organized was totally awesome. Listening to the diverse background of everyone at the table, hearing about their interests, and what first sparked their interest in collaborative technologies was fantastic.
Wednesday highlights were "Simple Lightweight Applications," "Open Source Collaboration Solutions," and "Content Management Goes Collaborative." Unfortunately, I had the same problem as the day before and was unable to sit in on Michael Sampson's "Extending Collaborative Applications to the Mobile Worker."
I found the BaseCamp demo in the lightweight applications session to be intriguing. A very simple solution but their customers are swearing by its usefulness. The Open Source Collaboration session was a discussion led by Eugene Kim. Peter Saint-Andre of Jabber, Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress, and Peter Thoeny of Twiki.Org also joined in.
However, later on Wednesday is when the real excitement started. My 7:45 flight out of LaGuardia was cancelled at 8:30 leaving me scrambling to book a Northwest flight to Detroit… by way of Minneapolis… out of JFK the next morning at 7am. The bad news (it gets worse) was that New York hotels were pretty much full before and the Hotels.Com computers crashed just as I was making a reservation. In short, it's a good thing I had an interesting book to read while spending the night at JFK airport.
To all collaborative technology vendors I recommend you plan to be involved with this conference next year. MediaLive hit the bulls-eye with CTC and I personally am looking forward to next year's conference.
For more information:
CTC Wiki
CTC Blog
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