Defrag Blog

We haven’t even launched Defrag’s 2010 website (look for that in April), and already I’ve got exciting updates.

First off, we had a minor date change from Nov 10-11 to Nov 17-18 to avoid a direct conflict with a conference that I didn’t want to conflict with. In short, I just didn’t want our attendees and sponsors to feel like they had to choose, so we moved.

More importantly, I’ve been re-thinking how it is that we’re going to structure keynotes vs. breakout sessions, and the overall “theme” of the conference. I don’t have the “messaging” worked out quite yet, but essentially, Defrag’s uniting theme this year will be the “ubiquity and connectedness of data” and how that will effect how individuals interact with data, each other, in groups, with customers, in organizations and with the world around them over the next decade. Accordingly, what I’m aiming for this year is to foster some “creative tension” between *extremely* “meta” keynote presentations and *extremely* tactical breakouts focused around things like process optimization.

As such, with this year’s keynoters, I’m going to put “authoritative voices” on stage to address a topic — ie, “On Markets” or “On Explorationn” or “On X” -with data being the uniting theme. Confirmed keynoters (and early “On” topics) so far include:

Esther Dyson - On Exploration
Michael Wesch - On Digital Anthropology
Paul Kedrosky - On Markets
David Weinberger - On Knowing
Jeff Jonas - On Context

Those five keynoters alone would be incredible, but we’re just getting started. So mark your calendars now, Defrag is going to redefine what it means to think/act around all that is social, semantic, collaborative and data-driven.