Yesterday the IBM Connect 2016 site updated with the call for abstracts, so today I’m submitting sessions because I don’t know 100% what form the conference will take but I want to contribute as best I can to deliver the kind of event we all want to be at. They may not pick my session (alright sessions - I’m submitting a few choices) but I have topics I’m excited about and that I think people want to learn about so I went to submit.
First thing’s first, as with last year you have to create a speaker profile before you start with your background and a small bio but what I really found interesting was the submission form. There are no mentions of any specific tracks so when you submit a session you only get to choose from “Technical Breakout” or “Business Strategy Breakout”. What’s really exciting is the list of topics to choose from which I assume are alphabetical rather than importance order
Digital Experience
Email
Meetings and Chat
Social Collaboration
Social Content
Look at that! Those topics may be broad but they are exactly the things I want to hear about (Email, Chat, Social Collaboration) and talk about. In previous years we’ve had a lot of other topics listed that I would say fell outside the core interest of people that attended Lotusphere of old. I’m not saying that’s bad but it’s certainly good news that this conference is embracing the topics and technologies we’re all working with today and not just those IBM hope we will be working with tomorrow.
The categories that your session can fall into are short and sweet as well - personally I”m excited to see sessions that fall under these headings
Analytics
Cloud
Cognitive
Commerce
Mobile
Security
There are only a few weeks to submit as it closes on September 4th and I’ve heard noises about the short notice but I’m honestly not sure why. It’s not a surprise to anyone that Connect is running in January, that was announced months ago. It’s not surprise content, we are all working with these technologies. Submitting an abstract is simply a case of finding a topic that interests you, that you have a unique slant on and sending it in. My plan as always - be enthusiastic, write a good abstract and hope for the best.
I’m not involved in any way with the content this year but I’ve seen enough abstracts over the years to offer some advice I think - YMMV but here is last year’s posting on how to write an abstract 🙂
Good luck and click here to get started..
The Turtle Partnership Blog 
One of the tracks that has been a regular part of the Lotusphere events as far back as I can remember has been an Application Development track. With an estimated 20 million Notes applications having been developed of which around 10 million still in active use I am left wondering exactly where technical sessions covering development such as XPages would now fit. It is the significant investment in these applications that keeps many companies tied to the IBM platform and (based upon what I have seen) driven many of the people to attend these events in the past. I have lots of conversations with customers who still struggle to see the value in “Social” and now view mail as a commodity. Their needs are more immediate… How do I get more out of what I’ve got. Not do I need to spend money to attend an event so IBM can sell me on concepts I am not so sure I need at this time. I think this is good news for the LUGS such as MWLUG, Engage, Inform etc. as it seems they alone now cater for the need of Notes/Domino application developers.
Well they haven’t announced tracks yet but I certainly would assume there will be plenty for application developers because they aren’t stupid and this is their core audience event. Digital Experience, Social Collaboration, Social Content could all point to apps and even XPages apps. I plan to wait and see before jumping on a negative connotation.