Gartner Web Innovation Summit Notes, Day 2

On the second day of the Gartner Web Innovation Summit, I unfortunately had to miss a number of sessions - had some conference calls and some briefings with folks at the conference.

There were a few good ones I did get to, though.

First was titled “User Experience: The Next Wave” and was Ray Valdes’ take on the core value of user experience and “usability-centered design.” He had some great general principles for how organizations can take advantage of scientific, measurable approaches to usability to get beyond the “I like the blue one” design process to many still follow.

He also pointed to some of the key fallacies about “usability-centered design” (I still prefer user-centered design as a term):

1. Usability testing (”validation”) has to be expensive
2. User-centered design has to explode the project schedule
3. Users like the system we designed the old way, therefore we don’t need to change
4. Having a customer-focused attitude replaces doing formal design

He closed by talking about some of the new technologies and approaches (social software, new interfaces and input modes), and how really the primary challenge (and answers) remain mostly unchanged: solid strategy, best-practices in design, and a constant feedback loop with actual testing.

The second talk I saw was titled “Strengthen Your Governance Strategies for the Wave of Web 2.0 Technologies” and was by presented by L. Frank Kenny.

He talked about all the new kinds of endpoints into the enterprise which characterize web 2.0 - mashups, rogue service endpoints created to connect to outside services, users consuming outdated versions of corporate web services, etc.

Ultimately he argued that the current generation of mashups and syndication feeds probably don’t necessitate new controlling technologies for most enterprises - they can be governed by existing CMS systems, firewalls, filters, and the like.

He suggested that organizations should consider taking advantage of some of the new services which monitor social networks, the blogosphere, wikis, and forums - services like brandimensions, cyveillance, and webclipping.com - what he called “Brand Protection” as an emerging market.

—
Last session of the day was the Yochai Benkler keynote about which I wrote earlier.

I missed, unfortunately, the “It’s the Web, Stupid” presentation by David Mitchell Smith and Gene Phifer - based on the presentation slides (which attendees get access to but I can’t share) it looks like I would have enjoyed it. Here’s how they describe the presentation in the agenda:

Although the Web 2.0 name is popular and represents the Web of today, the world seems hungry for 3.0, whatever that is. While Web 2.0 suffered from being perhaps overly broad, the special interests driving 3.0-mania have the opposite problem – they are often too focused. We’ll look at the future of the Web including the semantic Web, the mobile Web, the virtual world Web and other candidates for “3.0.” Regardless of what the next big buzzword is, the Web will remain one of the major catalysts in technology and one of the major sources of innovation.

Anyone reading this who did see that session care to comment on it?

The $3.97, Mobile, Web 2.0, Infrastructure Appliance

As a consultant who travels a fair amount, this device gets my vote as the single most important discovery this year:

When you’re at a conference (I’ve been at both Ajax World West and Garnter Open Source / Web Innovation Summits in the last week) or in an airport, electrical outlets are at a premium. There are countless web 2.0 knowledge workers wandering the halls seeking power. (Ampires, or wherevolts).

This little device turns that moment of potential conflict - where you spot an outlet but all the available sockets are in use - into a moment of collaboration. (In case it isn’t possible to tell from my hotel room photograph, this translates a single three-prong outlet into three. Simply approach the user of one of the existing outlets and ask to unplug them for an instant - they get to stay plugged in, you get to plug in, and you get one bonus plug for a third person or a second device.)

It’s “just good enough” - carrying a real powerstrip with fault protection, etc. would be better, from the point of view of protecting your laptop - but hey, you were plugged directly into the socket already, so this doesn’t make things worse.

It’s small enough to put in your computer bag and travel without problems.

It’s cheap enough that if you leave it somewhere by accident you can just go buy another one.

It’s even in RSS orange.

Gartner Web Innovation Summit Notes, Day 1

I’ve already written up a number of notes from sessions I saw at the Gartner Open Source Summit, which overlapped with the Web Innovation Summit.

(Full disclosure: Optaros was a sponsor of the Web Innovation Summit).

Unfortunately I got in too late on Tuesday night to see any of the Tuesday evening sessions. I would have enjoyed Anthony Bradley’s Web 2.0 Basics Tutorial, based on reviewing the slides and seeing Bradley’s other presentations. I like the way he approaches questions about adoption and Enterprise class Web 2.0 applications.

Wednesday am, running a few minutes late due to a conference call with Optaros colleagues on the East Coast, I wandered into the opening remarks just in time to hear the speaker (was it Adam Tinkoff?) ask “is jeckman in the room?” - he’d been following me on twitter as I tweeted away about my travel saga. (Planes never arrive on time anymore - it’s really just a question of how late they will be or if you’ll get there at all). Best publicity I’ve had from twitter so far, though I’m not sure my “complaining about travel” tweets are the ones I most want to be known for.
(more…)

Gartner Open Source Summit Day 3

The third and final day of the Gartner Open Source Summit included Tony Wasserman talking about Best Practices for Open Source Evaluation and Adoption.

Wasserman works with Carnegie Mellon West, and is the Executive Director of the Center for Open Source Investigation.

He covered a lot of the basics of what organizations need to keep in mind as they evaluate open source projects, and some resources (the Business Readiness Rating, for example) they can use to support those adoption plans.

His basic principles for evaluating software:

• Does the software do what I need it to do?
• Are there good sources of documentation and support?
• Is the software being maintained and updated?
• What do others think about the quality and performance of the software?

Good advice for open and closed source alike. People often get caught up in the details and intricacies of licensing options and miss the basics. Not that you don’t need to think about licensing, but you can’t let a focus on the fact that you’re looking at open source software distract you from the core questions you already know how to evaluate.

—

Another panel I saw was “Commercial Open Source: Beginning of the End or End of the Beginning?” by Brian Prentice.

He put the recent controversies this summer of SugarCRM’s attribution license and the CPAL in the context of a longer term divide between competing interests within the open source world - pointing to VC’s funding commercial open source companies, who hope to control the costs of sales and marketing by using open source as a distribution model but feeling the need to hold back some intellectual property to create a sellable asset.

He described the challenges inherent in the “functionally delineated” model, where there is a community edition which is free and an enterprise edition which is not. Users and organizations adopting this style of commercial open source must be careful to recognize the details of what is and is not included in the solution they’ve adopted. (Just as in a functionally delineated closed source model with different versions of a product each version must be clearly differentiated).

Alfresco, on the other hand, was signaled out as a counter-example, or at least another way of doing commercial open source, since the community and enterprise editions are functionally identical, with the difference being support and services. (Disclosure: Optaros is an Alfresco Platinum Partner).

I suppose you could say that what we’re seeing is a period of experimentation as companies which would otherwise have been traditional proprietary companies trying to learn from and benefit from the open source ecosystem. It’s neither the end of the beginning nor the beginning of the end, just another chapter in the ongoing saga.

Gartner Open Source Summit Day 2

Day 2 of the Gartner Open Source Summit started with the “Mastermind Interview” with Michael Tiemann, current president of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and VP of Open Source affairs for Red Hat.

Many of the points Tiemann made about the efficacy of open source as a development methofology as compared to closed source were reported here in eWeek: “Is Open Source the Best Way to Unlock the Value of IT?” (which ironically enough had a big Microsoft VisualStudio ad in the middle of it when I read it).
(more…)