Over the years I have been in many unusual conference venues, but never one held in a gymnastics and sports centre that had been converted from a railway repair workshop. This was the location chosen by JBoye for its fifth Aarhus conference  in the first week of November. When I arrived on Monday there were games of basketball and badminton taking place,  but on Tuesday morning it had been transformed into a main auditorium for the 250 delegates (from 19 countries) and multiple breakout rooms for workshops and parallel sessions.

The conference, as always, was an adroit blend of quality speakers, excellent networking opportunities, and faultless timekeeping and food. The conference opened on Wednesday with one of the best keynote papers I have ever heard. It was given by B.J.Fogg.  Fogg differentiated between Hot Triggers and Cold Triggers. In brief a Hot Trigger is something that you can respond to (the example being a cheap cup of coffee in the Starbucks you are passing) and a Cold Trigger is something that you have no chance or interest in responding to, such as being asked over the radio to contribute to a charity when you are driving down a road. Fogg, in essence, was arguing that web sites needed a few Hot Triggers, and no Cold Triggers, to motivate people to use them. To me this was the justification I needed to suggest that news really does not need to be all over the home page and so be just a huge mass of Cold Triggers. This summary really does not do justice to a masterly presentation given with humour and insight.

The conference then split into a number of tracks, which were slightly different on the two days. If I tell you that the tracks included higher education, intranets, Microsoft, web content management, web strategy, standards, eHealth and web project management it will give you some indication of the breadth of the conference, which to me is the main attraction. This is an event where ideas travel between tracks.
Two of the presentations in the intranet track were given by the Raiffeisen Bank and the News Room concept of NYK Shipping. Both of these were award winners in the Intranet Innovations 2009 awards, which were announced in early November by James Robertson. The intranet team at Raiffeisen have come up with a cleverly constructed My Homepage, for which they have now released the software under an open-source licence. That really is innovation. Rupert Shanks from NYK Shipping in London described a very neat way of creating a news feed from both internally generated news and also from external feeds. One of the issues that the project team had to address was whether negative news should be included. In the end it was allowed, as it might have been based on erroneous information and employees needed to see the news to be able to redress the mis-information with their customers.

Unlike so many conferences the delegate fee includes social events on each evening, one of which was in the turbine hall of an old power station, expertly converted into an event venue. Attending a Jboye event is really total immersion. I have now been to four of the five events and have always come away with some interesting ideas and lots of business cards. The dates for 2010 are 2-4 November, or if you have a travel budget then there is JBoye Philadelphia on 4-6 May.

Martin White