Yesterday was a eventful day at the CNI Spring Task Force Meeting. My travel arrangements for this conference were pretty tricky — I got in my truck and drove 20 miles downtown to Phoenix. No lost luggage.
This was my first ever attendance at a CNI conference; a different flavor of colleagues, so I got to meet a lot of new folks in the library and information architecture fields. My hats off to Clifford Lynch and colleagues who arrange a program that is interesting, not dense with too many sessions, and leaves room for the critical hallway meetings. And there is the touch of Cliff’s Roadmap, which provides a wonderful context for the 2 day meeting.
A highlight was getting to co-present with co-conspirators Bryan Alexander and Cyprien Lomas. We did a session on the NMC’s Horizon Report, of which they were both involved as advisory board members, What’s in Your Horizon? Process, Technologies, and Impact of the 2007 Horizon Report. The presentation itself was something I might call a PowerPoint mashup — I used as a basis the slides created by my NMC colleague Rachel Smith for the EDUCAUSE ELi conference in January (designer extraordinaire), but as her slides were custom designed, I had to toss in my own simple templated, but flickr-image loaded slides. And before the tomatoes get tossed for using PowerPoint- the only reason is to have something to load in slideshare:
We aimed to get the audience into participation mode and get them contributing ideas, questions for our Horizon Research Agenda effort (ahem, wiki operators are standing by), but we had a challenging time getting some audience participation! (Bryan is suggesting bringing a taser next time). Anyhow, thanks to the 40 or so who showed up, even the woman who was being critical (that was good, dialogue-good, need more dissention!), but left early (ouch!). And also to the colleague wishing not to be named who suggested this year’s report was “not sexy enough”. My response is the slide that mentions that “time-to adoption != time to technically viable”.
Beyond that, at the conference I had the shortest range IM ever. During the closing plenary, when I flicked open my laptop to Google a project the speaker mentioned, I got an IM from Cyprien… who was seated right next to me.
Also for a highlight was spending time with Bryan for a scenic drive to the top of South Mountain (he claimed he could see Vermont from there) and a decent Mexican dinner (sadly the wait was too long at Los Dos Molinos!). And he would have certainly enjoyed the Mystery Castle if it were open.
It was a terrific session, Alan, and a splendid evening. Many thanks.
Go Slideshare!