The conference is working. Networking & new insights. That’s what conferences are supposed to produce, & Computers in Libraries 2007 is doing it – already.

New insights – started with Lee Rainey, the fabulous, return keynoter. As Director of Pew Internet & American Life Project, he always has statistics to share; for example, the number of people accessing the internet from libraries has doubled in 4 years. That’s significant.

Young people are “living” in social networking spaces & places, but the adult fear that youth is making themselves incredibly vulnerable to web predators is unfounded; the vast majority are being very careful about how much personal information is shared, & who it’s shared with. More importantly, they’re creating content – lots of content on the web – & librarians need to understand how to meet them where they are.

Showing Prof. Wesch’s famous youtube “The machine is us/ing us“, Lee ended with the advice that we need to revisit our concepts of privacy, governance, ethics, copyright, etc. Which led very nicely into my talk about rethinking our organization structures.

Hm…..we introduce new technologies, particularly 2.0 collaborative, social software technologies every 6 – 12 months – sometimes sooner. Yet we “reorganize” our organizations & how people are working together every few years. And then we wonder why we have people problems such as motivation, job satisfaction, teamwork & silos. Our organization structures have to enable people to collaborate — the technologies can’t do it on their own. Organization 2.0 will

Continue reading CIL 2007: Ubicomp and the print disoriented