EuroIA 2007, Barcelona, september 2007

Moderate success for European IA.
I finally made it to Barcelona again. This time for the third European IA summit. My company is a sponsor of the conference, we also sponsored the welcome drinks and my partner; Eric Reiss, was the conference chairman. My other partner Thomas Snitker was there as well.

Eric noted that, whereas the IA summit in US has to days of pre-conferences. The IA summit in EU has 24 hours of partying. True!

The Beer bash
We started at “Danzarama”, with our traditional Beer Bash along with our friends and allies from Dutch UI – User intelligence; Tjeerd de Boer, Jacco Nieuwland and the rest of the gang. We all had a wonderful evening. I’m sure flickr will prove this!

First day
Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Director Yahoo! Research, ES held a fine opening key note (Later that day we shared a cap where I suggested him to “Google” some information.. oops! “Yahoo” some information). Thanks Ricardo, for helping me find the right way through Barcelona!

Bogo Vartovec held an interesting presentation: ”22 Languages and 30 000 Products: A Nightmare Comes True?” that applies well to the notorious “European situation”.

Kars Alfrink, has a good approach to mobile interactivity and interesting points about entertainment. By the way; he currently lives in Copenhagen.

Jim Kalbach told about “Navigating the Long Tail: Adapting IA to Niche Markets” and I had to leave to find the printer who had made a poster for me and Wolf Nöding. Thanks to local living, perfectly Spanish speaking, graphic designing Brit; Derry Birkett..

I just got back in time to see the interesting panel: “Perspectives on Ethics Olly Wright, Media Catalyst, NL; Joe Lamantia, US; & Thomas J. Froehlich, Kent State University, US”. Ethics is thin ice, but Especially Olly did well.

My poster session
Wolf Nöding and I, had a poster together at the poster session: “Roadmap for European IA Network” which gave is a tremendously positive response. We are currently working on the results of our survey and we will be back in January 2008 to honor the great interest we received.

My own poster was about loosing the "A" and the "I" from the "AIDA"-model, when dealing with the web.

Barcelona nightlife is great! A lot of us got together at a Mexican restaurant (the proposed posh restaurant next door was already full), so the “Germanic” invation filled whole place; Danes, Dutch, German and Brits.

The revenge of the Vegan
We missed some of our friends, but later learned that they had been pushed around from restaurant to restaurant by a Danish AI, because she was a “Vegan” and wouldn’t eat anything animal. She should have brought her own food, or stayed at home…

Next Day:
Should have seen Stanislaw Skorka, but chose Svein Ølnes, Nils Arne Hove & Terje Aaberge, Western Norway Research Institute.

After that Claire Rowland from Seren Partners UK, presenting “Service Design”. Very interesting subject, but boy! did she speak fast - almost as fast and mumbling as Olly.

“From Physical to Digital Environments (and Back): Towards Cross-Context IA” was charmingly presented by Andrea Resmini, University of Bologna, IT; & Luca Rosati, University for Foreigners of Perugia, IT. I think Andreas daughter will become a brilliant IA!

Margaret Hanley made an excellent presentation and engaged us with defining her. Tom Coates unfortunately took an illness and couldn’t be there. Great performance!

My first panel
Morten Nordby Larsen from Joost in DK had suddenly backed out, so that left a hole in the programme. Luckily Filip Borloo stood in and made a panel discussion (with a funny and thought provoking introduction), and where both Wolf Nöding and I participated, since it dealt with the future of euroIA.

I said moderate success for euroIA because only six IA’s from Spain had participated, while we were told that more than 300 Spanish IA meet at local events. Money was mentioned as I problem, but I think it’s a question of attitude. But thanks to those who came. And thanks to the local IA’s who took us down town later night. We all had a great last evening! Once again we took over a restaurant; at my table we were 11 people, from nine different countries, speaking seven different languages; truly an European experience.

See you next year in “Bamsterdam”