Klaas Bals' Blog

I'm currently attending XPlor 2007 Conference, and I'm also speaking about how enterprises can implement an Open Standards based Document Service that is used for all output related tasks throughout the enterprise.
I has been very interesting until now. The keynote session was, as always, a lot of marketing blabla, many thank you statements etc. Despite that all, it still proved to be very interesting, when reading in between the marketing lines.

This week I went to the XML 2006 Conference, held in Boston. It turned out to be very interesting, mainly because a couple of sessions gave me the 45 minutes of time focusing on a single topic, where in day to day life, I haven't been able to spend that time on these topics, even though I knew I should.

Much focus was given to documents and publishing (many XSL-FO related projects and talks), XQuery and Web 2.0. XML 2006 was definitely worth the trip.

I've maintained a list of the sessions that I attended.

I was a little bit afraid that the session XSL-FO 2.0: Laying Out The Future was the last session of the day, as many people already had gone home. However, it still had more than 70 attendees that wanted to talk about the future of XSL-FO... great!

The last two days I've been to the Creativity World Forum 2006, organized by the Flanders District of Creativity in the ICC in Ghent.

The organization was very very good, actually the best I have ever seen on a conference. Very good food, nice venue etc. Some of the content was not really interesting though. It doesn't really matter because there were a couple of very interesting sessions.

Yesterday, the best session was given by Dan Pink who explained the evolution of work over the years into the future. As a day job, people have been doing farming (18th century), then industrial work (19th century), factory work (20th century), then knowledge work (last part of 20th century), and the future will be mostly creative work. This is caused because the abundance the western world now know, the huge amount of people in Asia capable of doing a lot of work, and the large amount of tasks that can be automated or perfectly described how they need to be performed. I'm adding his book, A whole new mind, to my wish list.

Today, there was a very interesting session by Sophie Vandebroek, CTO of Xerox. She is told that you really need to make fun in order to be creative, and I really find that to be true. Another thing that I'll always remember is that in Chinese, the 2 symbols that together from the word crisis are actually the combination of the symbol for danger and the symbol of opportunity. Danger and opportunity are indeed very close to each other, and there is no innovation without failure. For that reason, you need to be persistent while doing innovative things, and overcome problems and obstacles.

The closing session was normally going to be given by John Cleese, but he couldn't give that session because he was sick, lying in a hospital in Ghent. He did however have a very good replacement speaker, Ken Robinson. His book, Out our minds: Learning to be Creative, also goes onto my wishlist.

Guy Dehond, my father in law and the CEO of Inventive Designers also gave a session, which many people (including me) found very interesting, and really down to earth and funny.

Next year, the Creativity World Forum 2007 will be organized by the city of Qingdao in China... maybe too far for me to go, but you never know...