06 September 2007

OIM 0.8

Posted in Presentations, Public Sector at 8:33 pm by kkj

Yesterday saw the convergence of no less than 160 people from all over the Danish Public Sector, at the SAS Hotel, Amager, Copenhagen. The Digital Taskforce of the Ministry of Finance called the event to promote the 1.0 (0.8) launch of a common integration model (OIM) for web based public sector information portals. See the previous post on the topic for details.

The day was packed with presentations that outlined goals and solutions of a strategic, and technical nature as well as backgrounders on how the two portals virk.dk and borger.dk are being designed.

My involvement in the project was on the appendices of the OIM that contain the low level guidelines that service providers need in order to get started on publishing content via portals. I gave a presentation on this topic just after lunch, the time of day which in my experience is about the worst time to present: people are full and dazed, and if there’s no coffee (which there wasn’t), it can be quite a challenge to sow any intellectual seeds.

The solution? I don’t think there’s a universal panacea, but I try to keep a loud voice, have interesting as in “less text, more pictures” slides, and maybe crack a joke or tell a story. That tends to help a little … although, truth be told, at the end I did spot two that had their gaze firmly fixed on the inside of their eyelids.

There were no evaluation sheets, but from the discussions I got the impression that people were positively curious. For instance the dreaded, “why is this relevant at all?” question didn’t show, and instead lots of relevant topics were brought up.

A good day, kudos to the Taskforce. Now let’s see this baby in action!

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