12 frogs read think get curious

Defragging my brain, day one

So much to say about the first day of Defrag, I’m not sure where to start. You know those sponges that start off dry, compacted, almost crispy, then zoom out into their fully three dimensional shape when they get wet? Day one of Defrag was sort of like that for my brain.

So here are a few as yet still undigested highlights of the day for me:

David Weinberger gave a new talk, The Rise of the Implicit Web. The reason I love hearing him give a presentation is he can talk about things like ensouling computers, people understanding things through their potentiality, links revealing the way the world matters to us, and read a snippet of poetry and people take him seriously. We should. He is serious (though, charmingly, without taking himself too seriously) and how we human beings use the web should be taken seriously in ways that have nothing to do with measuring ROI or serving up ads.

The panel conversation about social intelligence (with Jerry Michalski, JP Rangaswami, Joshua Schachter, and J.B. Holston) was really interesting. I wish all c-level executives could be as fearless as Rangaswami when it comes to transparency and openness. I also loved J.B.’s point that “the challenge in enterprise is how do you make it as easy as poking someone on facebook.”

For the open space session, I participated in the discussion on getting traction in organizations. Andrew McAfee asked what I thought was a great question about security as a red herring in these discussions. I think (with few exceptions — say, health care, because of HIPAA concerns) it is, and that people are often afraid of new things, so they fall back on the bogeyman of security in order not to have to deal with something scary and new and different. Corporate bloggers behind the firewall are not inherently more dangerous than employees with email accounts. Deal with it.

The so-called “hallway conversations” were also most excellent. I talked to a wide range of peeps from big company folks to start uppers, folks with decades of experience in the tech industry and someone who recently graduated from college, and yes even other folks who come from library science land. I feel like I’m at the right place, at the right time, having conversations with the right people. I haven’t felt this way since I stopped going to Museums and the Web, the first work-related conference and community I felt at home in. (I was working at Jewish Women’s Archive at the time, and it was easily the best event to go to for my field. Sadly, now that I work for a big public company instead of a small virtual archive, sending me to Museums and the Web really would make far less sense to my manager, and I can’t really blame her.)

Which is why I had to laugh at the bathroom line at this morning’s break. I walked right in to the women’s room, no waiting, but saw that the men’s room line was out the door. That might be number one on the top ten list of ways to tell you are at a tech conference. The women here are speaking up (and yes, there women on the agenda) so I’m just a bit baffled as to why there are still so few of us here.

Security isn’t just an excuse for “I don’t get it.” It’s also something that all IT people know how to do, and it sounds so damn useful. IT people (or just “people in general”) do what they know how to do that sounds useful. Then they have to justify it.

Anything to avoid new concepts, some of which may not be, um, secure.

Your note about the bathroom line length reminded me of a funny tweet from one of the attendees at this year’s Defrag. Apparently she walked into the men’s room and didn’t know until departing since there were no urinals. How many people would broadcast that anecdote on twitter to the entire conference?