Gilbane Conference Boston

Although the Gilbane group has a different three Cs that I’m normally talking about (Content, Collaboration, and Customers rather than Content, Community, and Commerce) I’m looking forward to this year’s Gilbane Boston.

I’ll be part of a panel in the “Colleagues and Collaboration” track, about Social Publishing:

C5. Social Publishing: Strategic Content as Social Objects in the Extended Enterprise
Thursday, December 2, 9:40 – 10:40

Content has always been a focal point of interactions amongst employees, business partners, suppliers, and other members of the extended enterprise. However, the emergence of enterprise social software has placed a renewed importance on strategic content that serves as collaboration objects in digital interactions. This panel will discuss what types of content are strategic social objects in the extended enterprise, why they are important to business performance, and how they should be managed.

Moderator: Geoff Bock, Senior Analyst, Collaboration & Enterprise Social Software, Outsell’s Gilbane Group

Jerry Silver, Senior Product Marketing Manager, EMC Documentum xCP
John Eckman, Senior Director, Optaros
Doug Gaff, Director of Technology, NPR Public Interactive

Should make for an interesting conversation – now that content is increasingly distributed (and re-distributed), how does the ‘extended enterprise’ start to blur into the ‘web at large’? Do ‘enterprises’ interact over content differently than regular people do?

Can one make the case that LOLCats are ‘strategic content’ and can serve as ‘collaboration objects’? Or, are the only collaboration objects of use to the enterprise the plain old boring ones like material safety data sheets, TPS reports, and org charts?

It’s Thursday, December 4th, from 3:30-5:00pm. The panelists will be:

• Nate Aune of Jazkarta (Plone / Zope / Python)
• Elie Auvray of Jahia
• Michael Wechner of Wyona (Lenya, Yanel, Yulup)

Here’s the description from the official program:

There are many open source content management solutions available today, reflecting a wide variety of capabilities and costs, and organizations of all types are more willing than ever to consider them in place of, or along side commercial CMSs. This session will look at some of the pros and cons of deploying open source content management systems in terms of licensing, costs, maintenance, and functionality to help you determine if they are an appropriate option for your organization.

In addition to all of that, I also hope we’ll talk about how the adoption landscape is or isn’t changing for open source in the CMS space, innovation and standards compliance in open source CMS, and how open source projects can make user adoption easier or more effective.

What questions would you like to ask this group of speakers? How do you see the landscape changing for open source projects in the content management space?