J.Boye 2009 Town Hall Debate - Checklist for 2010

I'm now back home in Montreal fighting jet lag (yawn) after a great week at the J.Boye 2009 conference in Aarhus, DK. It was a great experience I hope to repeat. Perhaps my favourite event was the last one - the town hall debate, reserved for the die-hard attendees who hadn't run off to the airport. In this session, we were given 6 statements to consider and vote upon, after hearing from two "debaters" who represented the pro and against. In this case, we had the "good doctor" (David Ott, attendee from World Health Organization) and the "panda" (Neil Morgan, attendee from Word Wildlife Federation).

This is a seriously fun session that not only drew lots of laughs (I'll point out the memorable quotes), but also some intense debate. Here's a recap for those who missed out, but also this can serve as a checklist at J.Boye 2010 to see if our predictions came true. (You can also watch the video)

#1. CMS is a commodity.

Pro (Ja): Sure, "CMSs are like water - get it from one company or another, it's all dirty". (Janus Boye) There's not much difference between all the systems and vendors, so it'll eventually be like choosing a brand of shampoo. Lather, rinse, repeat every 3 years.

Against (Nej): CMSs are actually quite different - there are some that are industry-specific, scenario-specific, there are no real standards governing their architecture. You need the appropriate tool for the appropriate task - choose wisely.

Result: AGAINST - CMS is NOT a commodity. It'd be interesting to count how many in the audience were vendors... Let's see how we feel about this one after the web idol contest in 2010.

#2. Social media will replace professionally created content.

Pro: Crowdsourcing is the way of the future - just look at <cliche example>Wikipedia</cliche>. Soon all of our web content will have some user-generated element, then it's only a matter of time... (there wasn't much support for this point of view, so even the pro debater ended up arguing against).

Against: Wisdom of the crowd cannot be the single source - "there are just too many stupid people out there to trust them with our important content."

Result: AGAINST - Social media will not replace professionally created content. Social media tools and approaches will still be a great source, but we still believe in the authority/quality brought by the professional/SME.

#3. Google is the next Microsoft (or worse).

Pro: Yup, Google is the next mega-software-monopoly with designs on world domination. Swearing they aren't evil makes them even more evil. Even worse, they are more unpredictable - at least you know what to expect from Microsoft. And besides, Microsoft missed the whole internet boat.

Against: Sure, they're angling to eventually own everyone's information and are tracking our every move... but we trust them... just look at their cute logos!

Result: PRO - Unanimous, though some balked at the moniker "evil", everyone agreed that Google is up to somethingl and has already taken the lead in world takeover. Man your battlestations! Let's see what elseGoogle unleashes over 2010. But additionally, let's see if Microsoft can pull off becoming the next Google.

#4. The future is information managment (not CM, DM, RM, etc.).

Pro: All these specialties are just constructs to help vendors make more money. It's all information - this is going to simplify the problem and the solution. One flavour of management to rule them all.

Against: Seriously? This is like going backwards 25 years - we started out with IM as an umbrella term back then. The specializations make things more precise and offer more robust solutions for each type of problem. Don't lump everything together, that's just oversimplifying a complex problem.

Result: AGAINST. And really, we didn't fully understand this statement. But just for fun, we can check next year and see if there's been more convergence amongst tools to be more holistic or whether there are as many types as there are ice cream flavours.

#5. Content management is obsolete because everything will go into the cloud.

We tried to debate this one, but there was a lot of confusion about what it actually meant. The relation between content management and cloud computing was not obvious, so after a couple of minutes, we agreed to shelve this one.

Result: TABLED. The cloud is just a way to virtualize servers. Shouldn't have anything to do with content management techniques. (for more on why cloud computing is confusing, read this great rant by fellow attendee Jon Marks)

#6. The command line will come back strong in 2010.

Pro: Some of the tech geeks in the room swooned over the command line... it's a faster GUI, it's elegant... But the only regular joe comment was "it's better than the ribbon!"

Against: Usability and UX specialists all got nervous eye twitches - "Over our dead bodies!"

Best line of the night: "Isn't Twitter really just a souped up command line?"

Result: UNCLEAR. Props to the Pro camp for the Mac demo of the text to speech command as an inventive way to hammer their point home, but not sure we were convinced that it'll be the new wave of interface design. Let's see if all apps migrate to 140 character boxes for interaction: @Word Print my document.

Keep this on hand at J.Boye 2010 - we'll see how right or wrong we were. In the mean time, thanks to the J.Boye team for a wonderful conference experience.