Yeah!
It’s that time of year again where I pack far too many clothes and head to another University for the annual Institutional Web Management Workshop. I’m super pleased this year as it is in one of my favourite (UK!) cities, Edinburgh, where over the years I have spent many a summer at the Festival Fringe seeing some excellent, and not so excellent, theatre, music, comedy and art. But this time it’s all about XCRi, cookies, responsive design, data, the KIS, Content Management Systems (of course) and much more.
This will probably be my, er, 10th (?) IWMW – so why do I keep going back?
Well, we all suffer from being busy and sometimes that busyness gets in the way of doing anything new, exciting, different, or even useful. We can get bogged down by the daily churn of doing what we have always done and every once in a while (usually every year around about now!) I need the defibrillator applying to shake me from my day to day and get me excited again. And it works.
To be surrounded by like-minded individuals with similar needs, passions, interests and knowledge for three days is great – not that we always agree on everything. That is part of the fun.
Last year’s topic of ‘responding to change’ was very timely and this year has found us getting to grips with analytics and also responding to the new EU Cookie Law, the KIS, XCRi and much more.
So, what will this year bring? Well, myself and my colleague Paddy Callaghan are running 4 sessions between us, so there are nerves as well as excitement. It’s always scary sharing your work with peers but we know that the audience will be kind and appreciate that we are trying to share our experience rather than preach as to how something should be done. You will be kind, won’t you?
I’m looking forward to discussions around BS8878, a topic around which conversations have started at Bradford, but there is much more to do. ‘Data’ is a hot topic with both XCRi and KIS forcing institutions to think about their data on an institutional level rather than pockets of data spread around the university in different systems owned by different people, none of which talk to each other (people or systems!). So debates and discussions around data should prove interesting.
But it’s not all ones and zeroes. There is social interaction too! Usually over a beer or two and some silly dancing. There may even be swords.
So, as nervous as I am about my sessions I can’t wait to get there, see friends old and new, fill my brain with some new stuff and share some of the stuff in my brain with others.
See you in Edinburgh!
Photo from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23351536@N07/ Edinburgh: McEwen Hall dome.