It’s almost three weeks ago I presented at USI2010 (Universite du SI). Organised wonderfully by the Octo consulting company, the conference’s tag line, “The Annual meeting of Geeks and Bosses” captures a really good essence. Mix over conferences and events are important to ensure that communities don’t silo themselves in ways that prohibit their growth. The complexity and chaos community clearly demonstrated the value of idea cross-pollination between between professions with their think tank, the Santa Fe Institute. This event is definitely the seeds of something good like this.
To add to the mix, I had the opportunity to present my session on Building the Next Generation of Technical Leaders here. This is the first conference I’ve been to where the majority of the session were not in English. This made me think a lot about how memes spread, and how quickly this affects how adaptable a community is.
I think it is wonderful for this conference to invite speakers from non-French speaking backgrounds, as I hope that it helped seed some more ideas into a community where translating text into a local language hinders the uptake of new ideas. I know that it is much more difficult for people to understand a language other than their native tongue and I can only admire those French people willing to strike up a conversation with me during the conference where my study of the French language is what tourist books teach.
The conference was very well run and although I would like to comment much more on the presentations since most of them were in French. If you understand French, and you find yourself near Paris, then I think it’s an excellent one to attend.
