Brightstars and meisterminds
Last week I chaired the Brightstar 7th Annual Strategic Intranets and Enterprise Portals conference. It was a fantastic event, with a really good atmosphere, largely due I think to the community that’s sprung up around the KiwiIntranets online group over the last year, and due to Michael Earley’s engagement with that community in planning the conference.
One of the presenters at the conference, Helen Baxter of Mohawk Media, used a new Web 2.0 mind mapping tool called MindMeister for her talk. It’s similar to Freemind, and Mind Manager, but is web based and allows collaborative authoring. I was so impressed with it I used it for my conference summary.
The key themes of the conference were, for me:
- Radical trust in users – turning Intranets into read/write collaborative spaces
- Maturity and pragmatism in Intranet development methodologies
- A strong culture of learning from each other in the Intranet professionals community
- Web 2.0 concepts moving into Intranets and creating a more open content authoring paradigm, and social networking
- Kaizen – applying the japanese philosophy of continual incremental improvement to Intranet development
- Open source is a real option now
- Sharepoint is ready
For more details on this, see the conference summary.
Michael Sampson also live blogged the entire event, his prolific effort is here.
My favourite quotes of the conference were:
“invisible rain is captured by Web 2.0 companies and turned into mighty rivers of information. Rivers that can be fished” – (I’m unsure of the source of the quote)
“a blog is an unexploded bomb” – Paul Reynolds