Conferences News & Articles

 Ah yes, this is indeed a glorious era for learning and networking. There are conferences and webinars coming out our ears, wifi spots a-plenty, 3G data services galore and if you're lucky, sponsored drinks at the bar.

 Want your event in this list? Submit it here.

Hangin’ around the Switzerland area this September? Be sure to mosey on over to the Magnolia Conference for an open source good time.  

The conference, held in Basel, Switzerland, will consist of keynotes and sessions with business and technical topics in regard to Magnolia CMS (news, site). Speakers include Pascal Mongold and Boris Kraft, Magnolia's CEO and CTO, respectively. Additionally, some folks from Day Software, Aperto, and several other companies and institutions are scheduled to make an appearance as well. The whole shebang will then close with an "Unconference-style" event run by the attendees.

Here's a closer look at the schedule:

Presentation Day, September 10th

During Presentation Day, participants of Magnolia Conference will gain the knowledge they need to build simple open source content management solutions with Magnolia CMS through expert instruction, hands-on tutorials and case studies.

Community Day, September 11th

Community Day will be an Unconference. This means that attendees themselves will be responsible to propose talks, vote for talks, present, share, question, inquire and otherwise make the event.

For more information on the event, including a detailed schedule of speakers, head on over here. If you aren't going to be anywhere near Switzerland but would still like to get out and shake some hands, check out our complete list of events for something a little closer to home. 

For his presentation at the eZ Conference, Victor Sanchez of Hachette Media presented a quick overview of his company's implementation of eZ Flow and eZ Find for Woman's Day Magazine.

Woman's Day got its start in the 1930's, but the venerable magazine is taking on the digital age with an on-line portal. 90% of the site's content is original, and Sanchez reports that the editorial staff at the magazine are pleased with the flexibilty of eZ Flow.

Using dynamic blocks and by tracking clicks on the main page, the editorial staff can move around their content on the fly taking into account what is, and isn't working on the layout. This, in turn, has freed up Sanchez and his department to work on new projects (such as an upcoming recipe finder iPhone app) rather than tweaking templates for the site.

As for searching, Woman's Day uses eZ Find, and has worked out a way to tag and search content in order to run a promotional campaign against certain types of content.

The site integrates Brightcove for video, DART, Moniture, WordPress, Silver Pop and some Typepad for blog content.

Sanchez and his team are gearing up for a site redesign. With the platform already in place, the redesign is a simple matter of gathering together the development requirements.

Ah yes, this is indeed a glorious era for learning and networking. There are conferences and webinars coming out our ears, wifi spots a-plenty, 3G data services galore and if you're lucky, sponsored drinks at the bar.

So, what say you to some mingling? If you’d like to get out and partake in a solid (or virtual) handshake or two, our weekly events list is designed to help. Every Tuesday we plug as many relevant events as we can find into the big list and publish it, just for you.

Are we missing something? Don’t hesitate to add your event to our events calendar (view all events). And if you've got feedback on the coming events -- good or bad -- do share it in the comments below.

June Events

July Events

August Events

Want your event in this list? Submit it here.

Forget Paris in the spring. Do it in the Fall this year, particularly if you are involved, interested or even vaguely curious about open source software.

That's because in October, the second Open World Forum with the Open Source Think Tank will take place in Paris and bring together the key global players in the Free, Libre and Open Software (FLOSS) community.

Conceived as a ‘meeting point’ where industry movers-and-shakers, community leaders, politicos and CIOs could all bang their collective heads together, this year’s event will focus on FLOSS as one of the key drivers in the development of the digital industry.

At the J. Boye Philadelphia 2009 conference, Wienerberger's Volker Gruenauer was awarded the Overflight Award for the best presentation of the event. An interactive marketer at Wienerberger -- the Austria-based largest brick manufacturer in the world -- Gruenauer designed and deployed a customer-centered web presence that transformed Wienerberger's business even in a tough economy for builders.

A second-place award was given to Donna Spencer, author of the new book Card Sorting from Rosenfeld Media and a respected information architecture practitioner with MaadMob in Australia.

The Overflight Award is given to J. Boye conference presentations that are highly credible -- from fresh voices or perspectives to the discipline of information management -- and are rooted in actual accomplishments, such as projects that have been built and that are "take it home and do it Monday" practical.

Special consideration was given to those presentations that were likely to have a lasting effect on the field.

A panel of industry experts selected the winners, who received trophies and an additional cash prize for first place.

The libraries at Oxford University are the heart of one of the oldest organizations in the world. Oxford's centuries of immutable traditions aren't just old musty rituals that get in the way: they're the reason Oxford has persisted even as so many other institutions have perished. But what if change is essential or even critical? At the J. Boye Philadelphia 2009 conference, the OULS, or Oxford University Library System, gave a presentation on how they'd managed to unite forty separate libraries under a shared portal. However did they do it?

Shibani Kapoor, human factors engineer for Intel, was at the the J. Boye Conference this week. She described the many user experience benefits of consolidating a multinational intranet into a single portal -- and some unexpected challenges.

At the 2009 J. Boye Philadelphia conference, Lou Rosenfeld, co-author of 'the polar bear book' on information architecture and principal of Rosenfeld Media, called for web analysts and user experience people to work more closely together. The result? A solid basis for identifying the right design questions, and the power of surprise and vision brought to data.

Bob Boiko and Erik Hartman are at the J Boye Conference in Philadelphia and they want webmasters, knowledge managers and anyone and everyone who works with information to step up and think of themselves as information managers -- and tell everybody.

An open expert roundtable at the J. Boye conference. Panelists included Lisa Welchman, Welchman Pierpoint; Tony Byrne, founder of CMS Watch; Martin White, principal of Intranet Focus; and moderator and conference host Janus Boye.

Here's a quick review of the discussion held at the roundtable.

David Pogue, tech columnist for the New York Times, shares his viewpoint at the J Boye Conference on three tech trends that are likely to make a difference in the next few years.

Bob Boiko, author of Laughing at the CIO and a speaker at the 2009 J. Boye conference in Philadelphia, advises information managers to get comfortable with saying no. You don't do it by practicing in front of a mirror, even if you're shy. Instead, you practice laying the groundwork to justify the no. In the process, you'll make better decisions and work with more effective people.

Everyone says that information is power, but what does that really mean? Some people talk about information strategy, but that's even murkier. How does an information manager -- a content manager, Webmaster or anyone who works with information -- make sense of all this? And what happens when the boss wants to make your tile and flooring company's intranet "more like Facebook"?

At the J. Boye conference in Philadelphia, Bob Boiko, author of Laughing at the CIO, had some great insights on using information the way that finance uses numbers: to make points and make things happen.

Paris in June! eZ Systems (news, site) 10th anniversary as Open Source CM vendor. The Champs Elysées. Over 300 delegates. Three subject streams.

All this and more at the eZ Conference and Awards 2009 to be held for the first time ever outside Norway at the end of June.

Gathering in Paris, delegates from 30 countries will discuss and analyze three main themes over the two day conference that will include contributions from some of the top people in the field.