The web and beyond
The web and beyond was the title of the 10th SIGCHI.NL yearly conference. I’ve was involved with SIGCHI.NL since its inception, even being one of the signing ACM members needed to get the organization officially started. For a variety of reasons I’ve not been involved in the last few years, and in fact I had never been to one of the yearly conferences so far.
This year I did go because the topic is close to what we want to achieve with Winkwaves and because my co-worker Mark gave a presentation on our experiences with Wat vinden wij over. It was nice to come back into the community and catch up with a lot of friends from the years past. On the one hand it was like I never really left, but on the other hand many things also changed, most notably the fact that the community was vibrant and a good mix of old and young, also with more business-oriented people than I remembered from years past. It was good to ‘come home’ but also realize that the community had gone on and prospered with a lot of optimism about the future.
The program to me was only part of the attraction, as I’m always leaning more towards the community aspect, but certainly there were some good keynote speakers. Jared Spool kicked off with a good overview of web 2.0 aspects, with some good examples of past developments and good questions about web 2.0 that we need to solve. Sadly, Jesse James Garett’s presentation was lacking in direction and punch. While everything he said was true it was not inspiring and missed out on making a point. The closing keynote by Steven Pemberton stressed the idea of making sure to design (web) standards also from a usability standpoint and to facilitate development of good services so that they would be easy and cheap to develop, and using some of those spare CPU cycles on everyone’s desktop to make things easier to develop. He mentioned declarative programming languages as a possible way to make this happen. It reminded me of some of the constructs in Ruby on Rails where simple declarations (e.g. of a relation between two database tables) extends the class objects and makes available a whole set of methods to interact with the data based on this relation. Certainly a big time saver (provided what you do actually makes sense within the assumptions of the framework).