The Defrag Conference 2008 website describes the event as "the first conference focused solely on the tools and technologies that are leveraging the 'social' aspect of software." A modest event, drawing what I would guess to be 300 to 400 people, it nevertheless deals with what is arguably the dominant issue in the complex and evolving relationship between people and technology: Social computing.
While the importance of SOA, virtualization, XTP, grid computing, and the like cannot be overstated, social computing has the distinction of being the one trend/concept/practice/whatever that directly engages Joe the End User. And by making it easier than ever before for anyone and everyone -- regardless of technical skills or knowledge -- to create and consume content, social computing is responsible for the explosion of data that has turned the Web into an overstuffed information turkey. That's not a bad thing. Not at all., But it does present certain challenges in adapting to and leveraging how social computing has changed... well, everything.
And that's what Defrag is about. As business conferences go, this is the only one I've attended that didn't require massive ingestion of coffee by about 2:00pm. This is damn interesting stuff!
Among yesterday's sessions, one in particular stood out for me. Dr. William Duggan, of the Columbia Business School, set the context for the entire conference with a presentation that connected Napoleon, Steve Jobs, and Picasso in an examination of how great ideas are born of previous great ideas. Creativity and innovation are, in a sense, cannibalistic processes (my description, not Dr, Duggan's) that need a steady stream of information on which to feed.
During DR. Duggan's presentation I couldn't help but wonder that the very size of the data stream available today might actually overwhelm rather than nuture the creative process.
More on the conference in the next post. I have to run now to make this morning's Keynote.
