In All Reality

Despite my overall positive opinion of the recent BigOmaha conference, there were a few snags. The majority of the speakers were truly fantastic, both in their advice and presentational skill. That being said, there were also quite a few contributors that I felt added little to the conference (at best).

Shira Lazar

Shira has worked for companies such as Yahoo!, AOL, Movies.com, Hollywood.com, and Verizon. Recently, she has been the host & moderator for several tech conferences including Twiistup, Digital Family Reunion, and Girls In Tech.

BigOmaha Guide

Shira started out as the first face we saw at the conference, acting in her role as MC and general host. I’d like to preface all comments I make with a disclaimer that Ms. Lazar may be the most witty and intelligent person on the planet. That being said, she came off as a complete airhead for most of the conference, to the point where you could hear a collective sigh from the audience whenever she took the stage. She tried to participate in the wind-down of whichever speech was currently going on, typically displaying that she knew next to nothing about what was being said. I suppose that Shira fulfilled the role of MC admirably, but her demeanor and commentary was in stark contrast to most of the obvious professionalism being exhibited by the other participants.

Micah Laaker

Micah leads User Experience for the Yahoo! Open Strategy, helping developers/publisher build inside the network and expand Yahoo! off-network. His work includes My Yahoo!, the ACLU pizza film, an MF Doom music video, 2 technical manuals, Tall Tales illustrations, the SVG-powered BattleBots site, and hip hop powerhouse music label DefJam.com.

BigOmaha Guide

Micah started his speech saying that “this is all going to be about my ego.” Everyone laughed; if only we knew that his statement were true. Another disclaimer: from his commentary, I do feel that Micah would be a neat-o guy to hang out with and trade stories. However, his presentation lacked… everything. I don’t know really what it was supposed to be about – ostensibly info on how awesome all the work that Yahoo! has been doing for its developer network to make it easier to use their powerhouse to drive data to your site. That would have been a nifty presentation. Instead, we were treated to the professional life story of Micah Laaker… which would have been appropriate as an introduction, but not as the bulk of the presentation.

Micah went through and did relatively thorough explanations of his childhood, his early starts into creative design, and eventually a lot of talk about his big break: DefJam.com. The meandering path eventually lead to talks about all the awesome things you can do with Yahoo!’s services, like Pipes, but with the caveat that Micah didn’t really understand a lot of the inner workings and that it was very technical and boring. And in conclusion thank you for your time. That was the entire presentation. Micah was second in line after Jason Fried from 37Signals, so I felt a bit gypped.

Adriana Gascoigine and Girls In Tech

Adriana is the Director of Corporate Communications for hi5. Launched in 2003, h15 is now one of the world’s largest social networks – ranked as a top 20 website globally and the #1 social network in 31 countries. In March 2007, Adriana launched Girls In Tech, and organization focused on touting women’s achievements in tech and beyond.

BigOmaha Guide

This was my least favorite presentation, for a variety of reasons. Where Micah Laaker’s ramblings may not have had a point, they were at least interesting. The Girls In Tech presentation lacked point, purpose, power, and anything remotely interesting enough to draw attention. All the other speakers (including Mr. Laaker) focused on offering some sort of advice or motivation. The Girls In Tech presentation was purely an organizational sales pitch, and a very poor one at that.

The speech went something like this:

“Hi, I’m Adriana Gascoigne from Girls In Tech. Girls In Tech is an organization that promotes women in technology careers. We promote women in technology careers because there need to be more of them. There need to be more women in tech careers because there aren’t enough. We’re starting a local chapter here in Omaha, which is awesome. Thank you for your time. Questions?”

Abbreviated, but not exaggerated. I have never been opposed to the movement for equality for minorities and women in the workplace, but there has to be some sort of point to it at least. Arguing that the reason that there need to be more women in a field because there “aren’t enough” is horrible reasoning. During the ending Q&A section, an audience member asked how much is enough. Ms. Gascoigne dodged this question, making some sort of oblique reference to wanting to view more statistics on ideal demographics. In addition, I find the idea of arguing for more women (or men, or cows, pullets, robots, whatever) in anything based strictly on there not being an arbitrary number of them, very silly. Especially if you’re arguing for equality across the board. If everyone is equal, does it matter that there happen to be more cows than robots working in the soilent green factories?

Lastly, Ms. Gascoigne never actually explained what Girls In Tech does. They are a chapter-based organization that promotes women in technology fields, but what does that actually come down to. No mention was made of fundraising or promotional events, professional services, PR campaigns, etc. An audience member (a women engineer, I might add) asked if GIT sponsors programs for schools that raise awareness for younger girls about possible tech career paths they hadn’t considered. Ms. Gascoigne skirted this question as well, referencing that there were a lot of programs like that out there, and citing NASA as an example. That’s all well and good, but what exactly is it that you do? It took a trip to the GIT website to discover the one-line answer: “Some of these resources include, educational workshops and lectures, networking functions, round table discussions, conferences, social engagements, and recruitment events.”

Matt Mullenweg

Matt is the founding developer of the popular open-source blogging software WordPress and writes a popular blog, Photo Matt. After quitting his job at CNET, he has devoted the majority of his time to developing a number of open source projects. In late 2005, he founded Automattic, the business behind WordPress.com and Akismet.

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I’m a huge fan of WordPress, though I recognize its flaws and areas where it is lacking. So it’s no surprise that I was really very excited to hear a speech from its father figure, regardless of what the talk was specifically about. However, my dreams were shot when it was announced that Matt had canceled and wasn’t going to be attending the conference. I found out on a WordPress discussion board via LinkedIn that Matt didn’t cancel, but instead wasn’t able to make the connecting red eye flight to Omaha because of delays in previous flights down the road. That sucks. I’m sure he would have given a great presentation.

Joe Olsen

Joe Olsen is the CEO and co-founder of Phenomblue, a multi-platform interactive software creation company. His footprint on today’s emerging media landscape has been recongized via several industry-specific awards targeting everything from his collective creative to the concept and delivery of complex design and digital systems.

BigOmaha Guide

I’d heard of Phenomblue in passing, but my work and interests typically travel in different circles. Still I thought the perspectives of an interactive software and installation developer would be interesting and unique given the hype and dominance of web applications, UX, and UI. Instead, Mr. Olsen came out on stage to perform a lengthy introduction to Jeffrey Kalmikoff and to encourage everyone to “be a balla” in their business. He even had us do the Branson-esque divided room chanting where one half of the conference hall yelled “Stop Hustlin’!” and the other half followed with “Start ballin’!” Had it not been for other other fantastic speakers up to this point, I would have been seriously questioning if the 7 hour trip northward had been worth it.

Ok, enough of the bad. Next time, I’ll do a review of the awesomeness that I was treated to, and breakdowns on individual speakers and their topics.

Thumbnail image credit: Zoran