So, maybe I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, maybe everybody else already has this worked out, but I just had what around our office we like to call a "Blinding Flash of the Obvious."

I've done 14 hours of presentations over the last 3 days, to groups that are amazingly enthusiastic. This Lotusphere has people excited. The next release of Notes (8) has people excited. The new version of QuickPlace (Quickr) has people excited. I'm excited about Lotus Connections, the new social networking software.

It's palpable. You can feel it in the air when you walk into the presentation rooms and the bars and the hallways and...well, you get the idea.

But here's the point: Until today I haven't been able to go to any session other than my own. Today I am. Walking out of Bill Buchan's Worst Practices presentation I grabbed a coffee next to Betsy Thiede who was busily in conversation with somebody about an upcoming session on AJAX.

She was considering it, he had been to the first instance of it yesterday and was raving about how great it was. Mind, I was mostly eavesdropping but it was one on my short list. His (enthusiastic) recommendation was good enough for me.

I went. It was good (except I had a very hard time understanding one of the speakers) and got me very excited about a couple of geeky new things. But right then, just as I was using the recommendation to make my mind up, it hit me.

I had the Flash.

Some of the most exciting things at Lotusphere this year are the things Lotus is doing to bring social networking-like software to business. Lotus Connections is a new offering that will let you combine instant messaging, blogging, activity-centric collaboration, and more in a way that I think will let many of us, my company included, fundamentally change the way we work.

So, that's part one.

An important component of all this stuff is feedback from the people. You know what I mean, like eBay's buyer/seller rating capabilities, or the way Amazon.com lets anybody review any book. Or the way Wikipedia lets the unwashed masses...us!...help build an encyclopedia. What I got in the hallway was direct person-to-person feedback on a session; feedback that helped me make a decision.

That's part two.

Then, I've watched how Lotusphere works. I've given at least three sessions this week that had overflow rooms. In other words, people stuck off somewhere else essentially watching it on TV because the room I was in wouldn't fit everyone who wanted to be there. Too, I've been in sessions in big rooms less than half full. It's not really anybody's fault: The folks doing the organizing have to take their best guesses about which sessions are going to draw the most people and assign rooms accordingly. But it would be better if it weren't an issue in the first place.

That's part three.

The Lotus research folks have just introduced a very interesting new web site www.many-eyes.com which is used to leverage a lot of research that's been done in the area of visualization of data. That is, making data trends something you can see. It's like graphing on steroids, but done right lets you see things you couldn't otherwise.

That's part four. So, then there was...

The Flash

Mind, I don't exactly know how all of this can be made to work, but let's consider it an idea in progress. You have overlapping problems: (1) the nice folks running the show have to make guesses about which rooms are right for which presentation (and, I would suggest, which presenter, as that's a factor, too); (2) the nice folks going to the presentations need to make guesses about which sessions will be the best use of their time; (3) although all sessions gather evaluations from the attendees, these evaluations are never available to the masses: Only the speakers and Lotus get to see them and even that is all after the fact.

So, there's no real-time person-to-person feedback. If there were--if, for instance, there was a place, on-line, all attendees could visit and use to rate speakers and sessions--it would be easier for others looking at repeat sessions to make go/no-go decisions. I'm talking about something like Lotus Connections, frankly. That would be nice--valuable, even--for anyone considering any session.

But the same data, swizzled another way, might make it possible for the organizers to find trends in the attendee's patterns and, from that, to figure out places where their earlier room assignments may have been wrong.

And, fix them. In more or less real time.

There would need to be a mechanism to let people easily understand changed venues, but I'm sure we can come up with something for that.

It's even something that could start ahead of time. A lot of the presenters--and presentations, for that matter--are not new to this venue or event. Half of my eight sessions were materials Henry and I had used before. People who'd seen any of them before could therefore make recommendations (or provide warnings) even before Lotusphere week. The system might even have an "I think I'm interested in this one" button that, while not committing the user to actually going, would be one more bit of information to use for better room-size decision-making.

Would it be worthwhile? Well, yeah.

Why wouldn't attendees want to have peer feedback to aid their decision-making? Why wouldn't organizers want a better handle on facility requirements? Come to think of it, why shouldn't there be a way for attendees to request a repeat of a session they'd missed or got shut out of or just wanted to see again? As it is, some sessions are repeated but I have to think the choice of which, like most of the other decisions being made, is based mostly on feel. How much could a bit more data hurt the process?

So there you go: Peer networking, social software, whatever you call it, being used to improve the quality of Lotusphere.

I like it!

1. Betsy Thiede01/24/2007 06:20:26 PM
Homepage: http://notesgeekgroupy.blogspot.com/

Right, it would be great if you could rate the sessions, well at least the sessions that are being repeated. That way, I could check to see what people thought of the session, before I decided to go or not!

That would be perfect!

2. Charles Robinson01/24/2007 11:08:51 PM
Homepage: http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com

That's an awesome idea. If nobody else steps up to offer such a thing, I'll do it when I get back to the office.

3. Dave Navarre06/06/2007 02:36:48 PM
Homepage: http://www.centretek.net

When I've been to Lotusphere, I had always wondered why there wasn't something to indicate which sessions you thought you would attend. With it available online during the conference, so you can change your preferences if you're really enthusiastic about the system, too. It would at least allow organizers to get some ideas about how many people to expect in the sessions. (It wouldn't save them from my occasional "I need to walk out of this session because it is marketing and education", but .... )

4. Dave Navarre06/06/2007 02:37:40 PM
Homepage: http://www.centretek.net

Grrr. I meant "marketing and NOT education"