Defrag Blog

Recapping 10 reasons to come to defrag (and, really, there are many more than 10 reasons):

#10: Next-gen email thinking: email’s broken and we’re discussing how to fix it.

#9: Grounded Optimism: Economic realism plus strategy equals grounded optimism.

#8: An Intimate Setting: Tired of expo aisles? Join us.

#7: Learn something you can actually apply: Ask big questions and get some actionable answers.

#6: The People: Defrag’s attendees, speakers and participants are really what it’s all about.

#5: Transparency is the new black: “Collaboration” vendors are about to start pushing “transparency.”

#4:Â The Conversation: No death by PowerPoint. All conversation, all the time.

#3: BoF dinners:Â Birds of a Feather dinners (at the end of day 1) help you to dive more deeply into a specific topic.

#2:Â Great Wifi: No really. A tech conference with great wifi.

#1:Â You: We really do want *you* there.

Make sure to join us.

Reason #1 to come to Defrag: You.

Not “you” in some narcissistic sense; “you” in the, we wanna hear from you and have you contribute to the conversation. And in doing so, you’ll:

A) help your own career

B) help your company’s planning and implementation

C) help move the community’s conversation forward

It’s a triple-win — not something you get to have every day. Join us.

Reason #3 to come to Defrag: BoF dinners.

As if the agenda and networking reception weren’t enough, Get Satisfaction will be organizing Birds of a Feather dinners (”BoFs”) on Monday eve of Defrag (after the evening reception ends). These are emergent, group organized dinners around topics - and they tend to A) help you dive much more deeply into a specific topic; B) get to know other folks at Defrag better; C) get you eating a darn good meal in Denver in the process. From the time you rise to the time you collapse, Defrag’s got your topic-cravings covered. Join us.

Reason #4 to come to Defrag is simple: The Conversation.

If you look at the Defrag agenda , you’ll see that what might normally be an hour long keynote is only 45 minutes, or what might normally be a 45 minute breakout session is only 30 minutes. That’s by design and for a reason: Defrag is not designed to be a conference where you, the “attendee,” sits passively and gets beaten over the head with powerpoint slides. Rather, Defrag is designed for you, the participant, to interact with your fellow participants around topics. As such, our sessions aren’t meant to be “listening times” - they’re meant to be “conversation times.”

When you come to Defrag, you’ll find yourself joining in the sessions — rapidly. The conversation really is what it’s all about. Join us.

As I’ve been blogging today, I think that “transparency” is about to become the new “black” (similar to what “compliance” and “governance” became in the wake of Enron and the legislation of Sarbox).

All of which leads me to reason #5 to come to defrag: over the next 12 months, you WILL see a ton of the “collaboration” and “enterprise 2.0″ vendors that are sponsors of Defrag become companies that help other companies get “more transparent.” Now, much as I’d love to say that my Keyser Soze brain saw this all in a vision 24 months ago, that’s just not true. Events on wall street are creating a big storm around the issue of transparency, and Defrag will be the leading tip of the spear (conference-wise) this fall.

Make sure to join us.

Reason #6 to come to Defrag: The People.

Pete Warden has done a herculean job of outlining a “who’s who” from the Defrag speaker list. But, of course, the speakers aren’t the only cool people at defrag - in fact, it’s not even close! The attendees at Defrag make the whole event sing. If you’ve been to an “expo,” or really big conference lately (over 1000 people), you’ll quickly notice how hard it is to actually have real conversations with new people. We’ve limited Defrag’s size on purpose - for precisely this reason. Reason #6 to come to Defrag: the people — all of them.

Reason #7: Learn something you can actually apply

One of my favorite quotes from last year’s Defrag attendees came from Erik Miller of Western Union (emphasis added):

“I’ve been to a lot of conferences. Conferences of all kinds, in fact. I’ve been a speaker at many conferences even. What separated Defrag from every other one, including the ones that I was a speaker at, was that I actually learned something. And not just something that I’ll wind up disregarding in a couple of days, but something actually useful that I can apply to my line of business.”

Too many times, when I say that Defrag is a “strategic” type of conference, people confuse “strategic” with “pie in the sky.” That is, in fact, totally untrue. Rather, Defrag’s exploration of the BIG questions helps implementers to get things right from the get-go; to learn something they can actually apply to business.

Do you need to learn about social search in the enterprise? Rich Hoeg (of Honeywell) will be telling us what he’s doing.

Are you trying to figure out how to derive real intelligence from distributed communities? Four industry experts are digging into that.

Do you want to know how you stack up with your peers when it comes to “social computing?” Saugatuck research will be presenting new findings on just that.

Are email and RSS feeds increasingly becoming a drain on productivity? We’re talking about how to fix those foundational information channels.

Is the whole mess of user data (and the meta-components of that) keeping you up at night? Daniela’s exposing the taxonomy and folksonomy of it all.

All of that and so much more. Bottom line: The *questions* asked at Defrag are precisely the precursor needed to taking real action back in the “real world.”

Defrag is a “strategic” concept - in the best sense of the world: broadly and deeply useful.

Reason #8 to come to Defrag: An intimate setting.

There are lots and lots (and lots) of tech conferences. And it’s no secret that most of those are run by big media companies, while some of them are run by “independent conference organizers.” Defrag falls into the latter camp — probably more so than most. Which brings me to reason #8…

Most folks don’t realize that Defrag really is run by myself and my wonderful wife, Kim. We spend about 7 months out of the year ramping up toward Defrag. We tend to every detail, obsess over minutiae, and just flat out care. I think all of that contributes to what I would call “an intimate setting” at Defrag. My goal, when people show up at Defrag, is to have them feel relaxed, ready to learn, and -most importantly- wanting to get engaged in the conversation.

I’ve often told sponsors of Defrag that the thing they’ll notice right away is that they’ll end up involved in “intimate” conversations — or conversations with real depth. And I think that shows through in what our attendees bring to the table as well. Our part in this whole saga is making sure that no one at Defrag is “just a number” (or registration).

We work very hard to create the right atmosphere - and believe me when I say, nothing “just happens” — but I do believe that our level of obsession is directly related to the kind of experience you’ll have at Defrag. I hope you’ll join us.

(This post continues my series of “10 reasons to come to Defrag.”)

Kara Swisher has posted an interesting article entitled, “Dear Web 2.0: It’s Still the Economy, Stupid!” In it, Kara rails against the seeming disconnect between the startups that launched last week, their valley backers, and the economic troubles at large. It is the kind of post that warms the cockles of my heart.

Everyone knows that the economy has been “rocky” (to say the least), but I think that folks that live in Colorado or Florida or Minnesota probably have a better sense of that than our counterparts in Silicon Valley. Still, innovation soldiers on. All of which brings me to reason #9 to come to Defrag….

While everyone else is focused on scarcity, limits and reduction (and reductionism), we’ll be turning our sights on abundance, overload and expansive new possibilities. Now, none of that is to say that we’re not “grounded in reality” — to the contrary, folks like Paul Kedrosky (a real “wall street” kinda guy) and Rich Hoeg (from Honeywell) ensure that we’re going to be grounded. But we’ll be grounded as we collectively work on solving the next big problems. You don’t come to Defrag to hear people give you answers. You come to Defrag to help phrase the question correctly. Bottom line: People at Defrag are directly connected to the economy (and mostly from outside of the Valley), but they also know that getting some strategic perspective is often the *best* thing you can do for your tactical inner-workings.

So leave the depressing pontifications to everyone else and come get optimistic with us. Times aren’t so tough that we can’t all still build something truly great. We’ll be digging in at Defrag.

I’ve been really digging into the defrag agenda, so much so that what’s currently on the website isn’t totally “current” (that’ll change shortly). As such, I thought I’d walk through and highlight some things, topics and cool stuff that I’m seeing on day 1:

Strategic Intuition and Defrag:Â William Duggan kicks things off with a talk about how his book, Strategic Intuition, relates to all things Defraggy. I’ve told the story many times, but essentially Bill’s book set off light bulbs all over the place for me, and I think his unique mix of modern science and theories on strategy provide some incredible pointers with regards to where semantic, collaborative, implicit technologies should be heading.

Around the Horn with Paul Kedrosky:Â If you’ve ever seen ESPN’s “Around the Horn” - this panel is modeled after that. Pau’s going to be discussing various topics (from both him and the audience) with each panelist — and SCORING their responses. The end result will be the awarding of the first annual “Kedrosky” - and an all around good time. [sidenote: Lou Paglia has explicitly asked that Paul not dive deeply into exotic strategies around financial derivatives. ]

The Quantification of Everything:Â Esther Dyson’s going to bring us deeply into the future - as we begin to think about what it means when our ability to quantify everything out-paces our ability to process, analyze or even store all of that data.

Getting into the “flow” apps:Â This one’s not on the website yet, but here we’ll be exploring this new set of applications that are broadly about “flow.” Twitter is the classic example. We’ll be bringing a few new examples, and an audience discussion moderated by Chris Shipley. It is my personal belief that “flow apps” are about to change the fundamental ways in which we imagine and interact with our productivity tools (email, messaging, collaboration, etc), and I think this session is a great jumping off point for further discussion.

After that, we’ll head into some breakouts. I won’t highlight all of them here, but a couple of fun notes…

Knowledge Networking and Ambient Intimacy:Â Leisa Reichelt (who unfortunately can’t be with us) coined the term “ambient intimacy” to convey the weird thing that happens as you get to know topics or people better simply by “hanging around” them (via tools like FriendFeed). Perry Mizota is going to take that initial thought and then dive into how that relates to “networked knowledge” — or the power that comes from insight derived by connections.

Is collaboration changing how we consume and interact with analysis?:Â This is a question that Sam Lawrence first raised when he began publicly grading analyst firms in the interest of transparency. Now Sam’s flipping the usual meme and putting the analysts on the spot. Fireworks, anyone?

Appfrica: the growth of information overload in Africa:Â When Jon Gosier, who lives in Africa, approached me and said he thought he had something to add to the Defrag discussion, I immediately said “yes.” Not only am I fascinated by the tales Jon can tell, but I’m absolutely determined to have Defrag move past the “usual conference circuit speakers.”

Social Computing and the Enterprise:Â We close the day out by grounding things a bit. Mark Koenig of Saugatuck Technology Research will present his early findings of a major research study they’re doing around the “gaps” between what vendors are promising and enterprises are wanting, seeing, desiring. If the afternoon of day 1 is meant to let you imagine the possibilities, then this session is really meant to bring you back to how we actually can get “down to business.”

I’ve left out a bunch of good stuff — Stowe Boyd on lifestreaming; deriving intelligence from distributed communities, a panel discussion on identity as a filter, and sessions on democratizing data and connected platforms via semantic technologies. I’ll try to highlight more as we go.

Needless to say, Defrag’s day 1 is set up to ignite discussion, stretch our thinking, move all of us out of the “echo chamber” (that we all stay stuck in too often), and finally, bring it all back to earth. The day is capped off with a great evening reception, and birds of a feather dinners that are being organized by Get Satisfaction.

The day will be packed, fun, relaxed, approachable and intimate. You won’t find yourself lost in a sea of bodies — but engaged with exciting people and great conversations.

I hope you’ll join us.