Labourtech: how I spent my weekend

November 9th, 2008 | Tagged: ,

Whew. That’s a relief. I’m sitting on a plane on my way back to Ottawa after spending the weekend at the Labourtech conference in Toronto.

I think the conference went pretty well but am I ever glad it’s done.

I think it’s really important for old school organizations like unions to adopt and adapt Internet technology and there really aren’t any spaces where union dweebs can gather and learn from each other and from those in the biz.

So it’s good that this happened. And I hope it happens again. But I hope we have more help.

Shouts out to Pat Daley and Michelle Langlois who anchored the conference and really made it happen.

While I was typing I learned we have to switch planes. Grrr.

Ah well. I think my workshop went pretty well. It started to get better for me when I decided to stop struggling with the frustrating conference wiki and just use HTML.

I found this nifty light weight way to make a slide show out of a single page of HTML. Interestingly, I learned later that Eric Meyer (he of the many books on CSS fame and who did the markup for my work site has put together the canonical Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System but the DOM slides one ranked higher on Google, so I went with it.

Too bad. Eric Meyer’s is much better, but most likely has a steeper learning curve.

I need to get better at organizing my slides, but I took Joe Clark’s advice and just “killed my darlings” and they got a lot tighter.

The workshop was on findability mostly SEO, something I’m just kinda discovering myself. So that’s kinda nerve wracking especially when you realize that the little experiment you’ve been conducting isn’t worth shit.

And there wasn’t enough time.

But there were a couple of good ideas that came out of the conference:

I hope to have some time to pursue these things.

1 Comment »

One Response to “Labourtech: how I spent my weekend”

  1. Mike Gifford Says:
    November 10th, 2008 at 8:11 pm

    Good review Chris. Wish I’d been able to make your presentation, but heard good things from those who did.

    Like your summary too. I posted a short blog post here:
    http://openconcept.ca/blog/mgifford/labourtech_2008_a_great_beginning

    Looking forward to someone organizing a 2009 conference here in Ottawa.

    Mike

Leave a Reply