Over the last few years JBoye has established its Aarhus conference as an invaluable meeting point for delegates with diverse interests in making the best possible use of web technologies. The model works well, with multiple parallel tracks, good speakers and excellent opportunities to network with delegates and sponsors. Taking this model to the USA in the middle of an economic recession was a brave move but it worked out well, and over a hundred delegates at JBoye Philadelphia 09 left the city last week with great respect for the model and for Janus Boye and his colleagues.

In the elegant surroundings of the Down Town Club the opening keynote from David Pogue (New York Times) set the pattern for all the subsequent speakers by having interesting things to say along with strong opinions. The track topics covered everything from eHealth to SharePoint implementation, with a common emphasis on identifying and meeting user requirements, a topic that Lou Rosenfeld took as his keynote for the opening of the second day of the conference.

The speakers came from both the USA and Europe in almost equal balance, which is an unusual situation in the US conference scene, and made for some interesting discussions around issues such as information privacy. The conference also marked the first public presentation of The Information Management and Architecture Framework (TIMAF) by Bob Boiko, Eric Hartmann and Tony Byrne, and this too stimulated a lot of discussion.

All the papers were of a uniformly high quality, a result in many cases of the speakers adopting suggestions of content and focus from the JBoye team. Donna Spencer came all the way from Australia to speak about information architecture and also to promote her new book on card sorting, which is really excellent. Donna was a runner-up for the Overflight award which Stephen Arnold generously sponsors for the best paper by a practitioner, and which was won by Volcker Grunauer for his paper on developing a customer centric web strategy. 

The sponsors should also get a reward for their commitment to a new conference, but the best I can do is note that the main corporate sponsors were Ektron, Isys-Search and SDL Tridion.

Overall this was a very well balanced and presented conference. If there were any behind-the-scenes problems they were kept out of site. The only thing that the JBoye team failed to manage was the weather, with almost continuous rain. The web site for the 2010 event is now live, and I hope that Janus invites me back. The combination of content, location and networking should make this an event that goes from strength to strength. 

Martin White