I attended my first post-pandemic, in-person LavaCon last week, and it did not disappoint. Jack Molisani always puts on a great conference.
Conference Program
The program was fantastic, and I actually made it to a number of sessions.
- Melinda Belcher‘s session on “Building Influence” was both inspirational and actionable
- Relly Annett-Baker talked about canaries, coalmines, and how to raise alarms without being pigeonholed as an alarmist
- Dipo Ajose-Coker shared some great ideas about how to engage SMEs in authoring workflows
- Fabrice Lacroix showed examples of real-world uses of gen-AI in content delivery
- Noz Urbina‘s session on Truth Collapse was the emotional highlight of the event, delivering timely cautions about the looming AI meta-crisis
- Michelle Irvine‘s talk on the impact of internal documentation shared a meticulously researched case study about how to demonstrate the value of content
- Scott Abel showed the shortcomings of docs-as-code and Markdown as documentation tools
- Christi Guzik set out the benefits of communities of practice and how to run them
- Amber Swope, Joe Gregory-DeBernardi, and Lief Erickson described their real-world adventures in implementing AI into content workflows
- Scott Abel moderated a panel with Carlos Evia, Sarah O’Keefe, Rahel Bailie, and Patrick Bosek about the content ops book they recently published
- Michael Haggerty-Villa talked about how to deal with “Phantoms of Content Strategy,” the non-content folks in your org who do content work
- Val Swisher offered a fantastic overview of how to curate content so that it helps your AI programs
I’m looking forward to binge-ing recordings of the talks I missed over the next week or so.
The Future of Content
I don’t know if Jack knew about the Amsterdam Future of Content meetup that I help organize when he invited me to join the closing panel on . . . “The Future of Content.”
It was a broad-ranging conversation about the future of structured content, intelligent content, content curation, content ops, and, of course, AI, in particular its ubiquity in content tooling, its impact on content employment, and AI ethics.
I tried to hammer home the importance of actual human intelligence and how it can be ensconced in AI architectures with symbolic AI like ontologies and knowledge graphs.
The Hallway Track
As usual the “hallway track” was my favorite part of the conference. I had many great chats with friends old and new – Noz Urbina, Alan Porter, Paula Land, Carlos Evia, Joe Gollner, Rebecca Wyatt, Elizabeth Riley, Rahel Bailie, Kristina Halvorson, Meghan Casey, Lief Erickson, Heather Hedden, Marcelo Lewin, Marianne Calilhanna, Sarah O’Keefe, Alan Pringle, Rob Hanna, Chris MacMillan, Michael Haggerty-Villa, Kit Brown-Hoekstra, Fabrice Lacroix, and too many others to list here. Apologies to anyone I forgot to mention.
The Kinetic Council
Rahel Bailie and I staffed a booth for the professional association formation group that we’ve been working on with Cruce Saunders and Deane Barker. There’s lots of interest in the new association, and we had many great conversations about our proposed three-pillared mission: industry outreach, professional education, and a “big tent” community across the span of content practice. To stay informed, or better yet, to get involved, fill out our online interest form.
