Last week I attended and presented at the annual Portal Conference at Gettysburg College. This year’s keynote speakers were Richard Katz, Vice President at EDUCAUSE and Jonathan Markow, Executive Director of JASIG.
A true community of practice has grown around this conference. Each year a core group of attendees makes the trip to come together and share current thinking and work in the area of portal and web technology.
I am always on the lookout for news items that make parts of my life look more like a constellation than a random scatter of stars. Here is one:
“East coast travelers take note: this July, Baltimore’s Inner Harbor will play host to the city’s first LEED-certified hotel, which is taking up residence in the former Baltimore Brewing Company.”
Jack Welsh was on MSNBC the other morning talking about the bailout rescue bill recently passed in Congress. He had a good point in talking about the problems getting buy in from the general public. He maintained that what we really needed was a leader who could explain this extremely complex problem in a fairly simple way. I agreed (being an extremely simple guy living in a fairly complex world).
Scalability is something I hear quite a bit about among my enterprise technology peers. I actually see less of it put into production, though. It seems there are (at least) two roadblocks to achieving scalability.
John Maeda wrote recently on infinite loops over at Our (and Your) RISD. He posted a looping photo and suggested staring at the photo as long as you could while picking up nuances in the image.
Artists and designers make very good technologists and quasi enterprise architects. Here are a few of my ideas so far.
Can we agree on how to communicate visually to save precious time? Is not that time better spent solving problems, building our enterprise, describing it elegantly?
Let’s work to create a better architecture, to build it to advance the mission of the organization it supports, and to describe it beautifully.
