Svein-Magnus Sørensen's Blog

Most of the work I do as a consultant is by its nature invisible to the general public. Some of this is because of security concerns, but mostly it is due to the work consisting of building or improving internal intranets, applications and collaborative systems, writing reports on various topics, holding courses in different technologies and aiding our salespeople with technical details in bids and meetings, all of where the results are rarely published externally. While these inputs are often important parts of the day to day operations in many organizations, they will rarely be appreciated by anyone beside those people directly involved.

However in the past year I've also been part of several projects that have resulted in public facing websites where my work will affect how thousands of people go about their day, and can be accessed by anyone in the world. The most ambitions and innovative of these has been the new site for the merged University Colleges of Oslo and Akershus, which was just launched a few days ago. I've also held a key role in planning the redesign and restructuring of the Norwegian Business School (BI) website, as well as managing the implementation of the Moonwalk RED campaign website for the Norwegian Red Cross. All of these have naturally been built as team efforts where my work have only played its part along with that of the designers, the developers and the clients themselves, but none of the sites would have appeared as they are without all the contributions coming together as one.

I've recently returned home after spending a few days in the rainy city of Bergen, my birthplace from where I still can be identified by my accent, despite us moving north when I was just a few years old. I was there to attend the Roots conference, a different technology conference where all kinds of IT-workers can meet and get professional and social inspiration from each other and the fascinating talks they had scheduled, one of which was by me on improving the user experience in existing solutions. The slides from my talk are as always available from Slideshare, and impressively the Roots organizers have already made all the talks available online, including mine!

Besides giving my talk the conference was a very interesting place to be and I heard and talked to a wide range of both the speakers and participants that provided me with new insights and food for thought. This was definitely a different kind of conference and one I can wholeheartedly recommend. The location in Bergen was also a positive thing, as it provided opportunities to go sightseeing and exploring in a city I rarely visit otherwise.

Based on my interest in fine chocolate I'm holding chocolate talks and tasting as a side-business. In the chocolate tasting events that I'm doing on request you get to listen and taste your way through the history and geography of chocolate.
Recently I've held several reserved tastings for my co-workers at Itera Consulting and other companies, but I'm also available to give chocolate talks and hold chocolate tasting events for any businesses and organizations that are interested in a tasteful team-building session out of the ordinary! If this sounds like something your company could be interested in, check out more details on my fine chocolate appreciation page.

This week the volunteer run Communities in Action unconference was held in association with the GoOpen conference, allowing the open communities to intermingle with paying conference attendees and getting the best of both worlds. This year there was a separate track for Open Data during the GoOpen sessions it was fitting that there be someone at Communities in Actions to take up the slack during the after hours sessions. To achieve this on short notice the Oslo Open Data Forum that I organize joined forces with Oslo Semantic Web Meetup to host one of the community tracks to introduce new faces to both groups and show the differences between them. The SemWeb-organizer Pia Jøsendal and I held the opening talk of our track on the difference between semantic web and open data, before we had a series of notable open data speaker from Norway present some of their recent work. The event was a great success with our largest number of attendants thus far, filling our assigned room to overflowing.

The past couple of months I've been somewhat out of touch with my usual activities, the reason being that we have moved to a new apartment and renovated it completely. This has naturally taken its toll on my time and energy so there has been little left for other activities and even just keeping up to date on my blogroll, twitterfeed and all the other streams that our lives have started revolving around in this age of social media. However now all of the big things are completed, and as we are finishing the final details over the next couple of months I expect to get back on top of my streams and find the energy to spend on other activities as well.

As usual I was in attendance at the JavaZone conference that ended today. This year I attended as a speaker with a variation of the talk on wiki usage that I held at XP2010 this summer, but based on my work with the open data movement I was also invited as a panelist for a debate on Open Public Data centered on what is being done about opening data in the Norwegian public sector, which the Norwegian IT newspaper Digi.no covered in detail. Besides myself the panel lineup consisted of some vocal open data advocates from all sides of the table including Liv Freihow from IKT Norway, serial entrepreneur Shahzad Rana, Christine Hafskjold at the Norwegian Board of Technology and Sverre Andreas Lunde-Danbolt from the Ministry of Government Administration. Hopefully this debate will open more eyes to the issues of public open data!