@nthony

You know sometimes when you get that "is it me, or is it everyone else?". Well the other day I had one of those that was specifically "everyone else". MOST reassuring.

We attended an e-Business seminar run by the Welsh Assembly here in the building I work in the last week. The keynote speaker was a great guy by the name James Alexander - the chap behind Egg, Zopa, and more recently Green Thing (the kind of thing the DO Lectures peoples would muchly approve of). He gave a fine talk about how people where starting to think, work, and how he made use of that, and then an interesting section on Green Thing and how these people where working with him to get the important messages across to those not living in their daily-mail-bubble, rejecting accepted society values, and looking for their own solutions - and how the balance of power was changing (with a healthy undertone of implications of current greed).

However - having opened the seminar, it went to panel, uestions, and ended. Hmmm. Can you have a key note if you are the only note? I am not sold on that. Furthermore the majority of the questions started with "is there funding" (answer is always no incidentally) - rather than anything to do with strategies, engaging your market, security, concerns, or almost anything IT related. So I braved up - with a slightly shaky hand I took hold of the microphone and asked about the perceived worth of solutions, and whether this effected the worth of FOSS (Free and Open Source solutions - in other words if it costs less, or nothing is it seen as second rate / toytown / crap?) - and whether this is related to the lack of take up by government? To which there was an undertone of "huh?" and someone audibly saying "what did he ask?" (clearly nothing funding related - sorry).

Needless to say I was suitably placated (or so the response was inteded to do), and while I could have pushed the point further (specifically with regard to sense of community, green issues, and the key note speaker - to which the question was initially directed). I felt like following that up would make me sound more of a geek / fan boy / radical than was productive - so let it rest... there is always next time. Small steps.

I have to say that the whole seminar was superbly put together, delivered, choice of speaker. However it had very much a feel of "seen to be doing something" - as I was unsure where it was meant to be going - what if anything it was achieving - and who the target audience where as they didnt appear to be technical staff from local business, or their developers, just - them. Hmmm.

eCrime Wales I think is next up - which seems like quite the sizeable affair. However I feel that I am again not the intended audience - aimed at wising up the non technical and selling them things as opposed to getting the techs together to learn, talk about the problems and advise the suits and bean counters. More on eCrime Wales website, and eCrimeWales twitter stream.