Conference
I'm standing at the IBM cyber cafe (sans coffee) at the World Conference on Disaster Management. It's the one conference that I get to attend this year, and it's about a kilometer from my office.
I'm standing because there are no seats, presumably to get people to move on and not hog the computers all day. The luncheon is being served right now, but there aren't enough seats so many people are wandering aimlessly around with plates of food looking for a roosting spot for their feed.
And I've never been one for the feed call. I'd rather find my own Vietnamese noodle bowl somewhere than indulge in the limited though free delights of the industrial buffet.
The guy on my left just walked away after searching for a massage parlor or other form of transient companionship (not a word of a lie). The woman on my right is adding a photo to her blog entry on Blogger.
The conference itself has been somewhat lackluster. I was here two years ago and it was much worse, so you have to give them points for improvement. Their basic problem is that they can't decide whether they are a con for emergency first responders or a BCP group. They end up with an only marginally useful presentation for BCP people like me.
Many of the delegates are consultants or risk managers, and their interests are quite alien to me. I'll give you an example. I attended a workshop yesterday on crisis communications. It sounded like a good presentation - it was private sector, presented by BCP people from a Chicago FI, and asked the question 'what don't you know that you don't know you don't know?'
It turned out to be a long list of work-arounds for telecom, email, and web outages. But in my big corporate world, technical communications considerations are out of my hands. Phone and computer communications are strictly limited and regulated to protect our internal systems. None of it was helpful, no matter how enticing the description had been.
And this afternoon, there are at least three presentations that look spot-on. But they're all happening during the same time slot.
Of course, the whole thing "beats working," so I really shouldn't complain. I'm an absolute loss at networking, wanting nothing to do with my fellow delegates (and no doubt them with me).
I'm back here tomorrow and then in the office again for the last two days of the week.
It's odd to think that there are people here from 40 countries. I mean, people came from Australia for this. While I'd love to have the opportunity to travel a bit, I can imagine how disappointed I'd be if I'd flown in from Singapore for this.
The upside has been the parts dealing with the pandemic. There will, according to these experts, certainly be a pandemic of some sort in a reasonably short amount of time. It's the kind of thing that's almost impossible to plan for, so it helps to discuss it a bit.
Anyway, back to throwing fireballs at the Junta later.
I'm standing because there are no seats, presumably to get people to move on and not hog the computers all day. The luncheon is being served right now, but there aren't enough seats so many people are wandering aimlessly around with plates of food looking for a roosting spot for their feed.
And I've never been one for the feed call. I'd rather find my own Vietnamese noodle bowl somewhere than indulge in the limited though free delights of the industrial buffet.
The guy on my left just walked away after searching for a massage parlor or other form of transient companionship (not a word of a lie). The woman on my right is adding a photo to her blog entry on Blogger.
The conference itself has been somewhat lackluster. I was here two years ago and it was much worse, so you have to give them points for improvement. Their basic problem is that they can't decide whether they are a con for emergency first responders or a BCP group. They end up with an only marginally useful presentation for BCP people like me.
Many of the delegates are consultants or risk managers, and their interests are quite alien to me. I'll give you an example. I attended a workshop yesterday on crisis communications. It sounded like a good presentation - it was private sector, presented by BCP people from a Chicago FI, and asked the question 'what don't you know that you don't know you don't know?'
It turned out to be a long list of work-arounds for telecom, email, and web outages. But in my big corporate world, technical communications considerations are out of my hands. Phone and computer communications are strictly limited and regulated to protect our internal systems. None of it was helpful, no matter how enticing the description had been.
And this afternoon, there are at least three presentations that look spot-on. But they're all happening during the same time slot.
Of course, the whole thing "beats working," so I really shouldn't complain. I'm an absolute loss at networking, wanting nothing to do with my fellow delegates (and no doubt them with me).
I'm back here tomorrow and then in the office again for the last two days of the week.
It's odd to think that there are people here from 40 countries. I mean, people came from Australia for this. While I'd love to have the opportunity to travel a bit, I can imagine how disappointed I'd be if I'd flown in from Singapore for this.
The upside has been the parts dealing with the pandemic. There will, according to these experts, certainly be a pandemic of some sort in a reasonably short amount of time. It's the kind of thing that's almost impossible to plan for, so it helps to discuss it a bit.
Anyway, back to throwing fireballs at the Junta later.
posted by fiduciary at 12:40 PM
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