Saturday, October 20, 2007
Day One: Tulsa Tech Fest
Today, the mental handcuffs of enterprise thinking were removed...
.jpe)
It has been a long time since I have had an honest conversation. Whenever I attend IT gatherings, there is some agenda involved where I have to use buzzwords regarding alignment with the business, value, and babble infitinitum regarding process. The Tulsa Tech Fest is a pleasant anti-thesis to modern enterprise thinking in that attending you will have conversations with real folks who genuinely want to make IT better.
Yesterday, I heard a wonderful presentation from the guys from vidoop who has a compelling value proposition towards making the complexities of paswords go away. It surprises me that I learned of them not from reading the blog of industry thought leaders such as James Governor or Bob Blakely but from others. Of course, they are welcome to redeem themselves by researching and blogging on them in the next couple of weeks.
Anyway, not only did they have a compelling technology proposition, they also had a human value proposition as well. They are a local company in Tulsa and are proud that they haven't made mindless humanless decisions to be anti-community by outsourcing to foreign lands and instead realize that the best business model always takes community into consideration.
The event was put on by David Walker whom I will dedicate a separate blog entry to but would like to say that he is one of the most genuine good natured folk I have met in my travels. The effort of a husband/wife team putting on a conference with 700+ attendees is enormous. It is even more compelling in that he isn't doing it because it is his job or for profit, but doing so because he wants to see the nature of community grow.
The one thing that made me cry is that I realized that while I live in the United States, I rarely interact with American's. The spiritual feeling of being surrounded by IT folks who are patriotic made me realize that I have been bankrupt and yet attending this conference made me feel like a millionaire...
| | View blog reactionsIt has been a long time since I have had an honest conversation. Whenever I attend IT gatherings, there is some agenda involved where I have to use buzzwords regarding alignment with the business, value, and babble infitinitum regarding process. The Tulsa Tech Fest is a pleasant anti-thesis to modern enterprise thinking in that attending you will have conversations with real folks who genuinely want to make IT better.
Yesterday, I heard a wonderful presentation from the guys from vidoop who has a compelling value proposition towards making the complexities of paswords go away. It surprises me that I learned of them not from reading the blog of industry thought leaders such as James Governor or Bob Blakely but from others. Of course, they are welcome to redeem themselves by researching and blogging on them in the next couple of weeks.
Anyway, not only did they have a compelling technology proposition, they also had a human value proposition as well. They are a local company in Tulsa and are proud that they haven't made mindless humanless decisions to be anti-community by outsourcing to foreign lands and instead realize that the best business model always takes community into consideration.
The event was put on by David Walker whom I will dedicate a separate blog entry to but would like to say that he is one of the most genuine good natured folk I have met in my travels. The effort of a husband/wife team putting on a conference with 700+ attendees is enormous. It is even more compelling in that he isn't doing it because it is his job or for profit, but doing so because he wants to see the nature of community grow.
The one thing that made me cry is that I realized that while I live in the United States, I rarely interact with American's. The spiritual feeling of being surrounded by IT folks who are patriotic made me realize that I have been bankrupt and yet attending this conference made me feel like a millionaire...
