InfoCamp2007: A Great Triumph

InfoCamp 2007 was a great success, and I am really happy about the way that it went. There were roughly 50 sessions over 2 days, and roughly 85 participants. It was a great relief, and everyone seemed hopeful that there’d be another one next year and there wasn’t too much negative feedback, and that’s about as high praise as you can expect.

My session was called “Thesaurus, Ontology, and Inference” and was about the benefits you get from having a minimal amount of semantic data associated with documents — mostly exposing metadata that’s already present in the system and some things you can do with it. I think my presentation confused a bunch of people because I had to cut so much information out (my session was compressed from 60 minutes to 10 for various reasons), but we’ll see how it plays in the long run. I think there’s a lot of difference in the assumptions that I make based on previous work experience and what the IAs/IxDs in the audience have from their work experience. At any rate, got some decent feedback for refining the presentation.

I made it to about half the sessions I wanted, keeping folks moving in the right direction was a time-consuming project. Low time between interrupts, but a lot of good fun. It was especially fun talking to an audience and getting people to introduce their sessions, and I also had a lot of valuable hallway conversations with people. One particular thing I found was a good venue for publishing professional work other than the one I have already, and the fact that there’s a difference in focus between the two helps, so what isn’t wanted by one may be by another.

All in all, I really enjoyed being one of five people running this conference, it was a great time with a great group of people… I look forward to this community growing.