Who You Calling A Jesse?

As December sets in on campus the IT staff get a chance to huddle around Ron Coutts Hall (RCH) and get together to swap some stories along with learn new things at the WatITis conference. I have blogged loads about this in the past as I have enjoyed every single one since they started. It is a great way to find out what the heck is going on this large campus and put some faces to email addresses (not many on twitter, yet).

This year I am presenting on baby steps in an agile world (slides below). It is a slimmed down, more focused version of a presentation I did at Higher Education Web Conference in Milwaukee this past October. I took the feedback (thanks for the feedback folks) and slimed it down, focused on real practical tips for agile techniques, and I think I have a good 30 min presentation. Which leaves 15 minutes for discussion—something requested by the organizing committee.

Since no one will probably do it at the keynote I will set the hashtag now as the obvious #watitis09 (watitis without the 09 is a pretty funny hashtag to follow) and keep the realistic expectation that there will be a hand full of people tweeting ;) Looking forward to the day.

On the way home yesterday I wrote this post in my head about dozen times. Lots buzzing around after some great discussions and some late nights in Milwaukee. HighEdWeb is by far the best conference focused on web technology, strategy, and networking in higher education. It isn’t because of the speakers (although some were simply amazing), it is because it brings together people from the most diverse collection of schools from across North America all with similar problems but different solutions.

Messages I kept hearing:

• Web teams in some schools are already starting to evolve as they grow while other schools still have layers of committees (Web Task Force – WTF – is my favorite) duplicating work and removing accountability. Not many teams of one left out there.
• Usability testing is required, it is not an option. I would slide towards more of ‘usability monitoring’ along with iterative improvements is the way to go. Not many schools are there yet but enough are going there to see a trend starting.
• Engaging your audience using Web 2.0 tools with Web 1.0 thinking doesn’t work. You probably don’t know you are doing it.
• CMS deployments solve one problem, create many others that aren’t as bad as the original problem. No surprise here.
• Problems or challenges: budgets are being slashed, recruitment is getting scary, web initiatives are underfunded even though they could have a big ROI.

There were some extremely entertaining moments around the keynote from the second day. The presenter was well out of touch with the audience, slides were poorly designed and outdated, and his content was poorly delivered. He got mobbed on twitter (and isn’t on twitter himself even though his topic was on using the web to engage your audience) with the outside audience reacting in a funny way. The backchannel was rough on him but honestly if I did that I would expect the same reaction.

As for my presentation, I think it went ok, people seemed to appreciate it. I got totally nervous given how packed the room was though. I am sure they noticed but nothing nasty on twitter ;) In retrospect, I tried to cover too much in a 45 min slot. I could have easily broken it in half and I think people would have got just as much out of it. Project Management is a workshop, a lighter overview is a presentation. Maybe they will let me do that next time. Really looking forward to HighEdWeb2010 or 101010. My slides are here:

With the Facebook data drama getting mainstream media attention and people dropping their Facebook accounts out of protest it got me thinking… people don’t understand the web do they? If you have ever had a conversation with a person insisting you change the results in a Google search as it points to an old page or out of date content in the summary you know how hard it seems to be for people to get what happens to things once they are posted on the web.

The data is crawled, it is stored, it is copied and pasted, etc. It might get locked away in archive.org or on someone’s screen shot. Whatever happens to it you only have control over the source but once you drop those keystrokes onto something accessible by a web browser or by someone else on the network you don’t have control over what happens to it. Facebook might have tried to simply write it is as it is but people don’t seem ready to understand it.

Worry about accessing your data not where it may be copied.

The real battle over your data in my mind is whether you can access it if Facebook decides you can’t. If you can’t export it or access your content (like say with Twitter past whatever number of tweets they let you get at) then we have a problem.