Last week I found myself in Denver at the AAM National Program Committee (NPC) horsetrade, where sessions are selected for the upcoming annual meeting. I found myself there due to another case of taking a restroom break just as volunteers were being sought by committee vote. Its curious that this strategy works in a restaurant when the bill arrives but not in a committee meeting when voting happens. I need a new strategy.

The NPC process, in case you’re interested, is something like this. There are two options to submit a session for AAM: through an SPC (Standing Professional Committee) or directly to AAM – so-called, At Large. SPCs will spend time working with session chairs to ensure a solid session is put together, there is no pre-vetting process for an At Large session. SPC Program Chairs all meet in D.C. at the beginning of August and pitch their sessions trying to secure co-endorsements. In mid-September, those lucky NPC volunteers (yours truly) receive a binder containing all the proposed sessions, this year about 220, and have about 3 weeks to review, grade and comment on every proposal. Then comes the fun.

The NPC selection meeting lasts two days and is always in the host city of the annual meeting, Denver Art Museum graciously hosted the event. About 25 lucky volunteers hunker down in a room, lock the doors and are not let out until every session is discussed. Each SPC gets to ‘protect’ four sessions which it regards as crucial to its field and the theme of the annual meeting – these are given a cursory review, for everything else, its a pitched battle. Everyone has a different view and perspective on every session, opinions are expressed and swayed, votes are taken. Abstinence is frowned upon, conviction is respected. It is a horsetrade.

The staffing of the committee is extremely diverse and provides for an exhausting, stimulating and rewarding process. As you might expect, I am an advocate and resource for the technology-related proposals. As a result, I get to review technology proposals that take you by surprise in their theme or viewpoint, but also you get to review technology proposals that make you want to grab the Session Chair by their lapels, beat them about the face and neck then throw them roughly to the floor. The ones that really get me are the ones where people are reinventing the wheel, building something that already exists. Crazy, lazy, self-indulgent or self-serving?

Back in the day, I once spent months building an application to scale down images to thumbnail size, scale down the colour space to 8-bit and generate a common 8-bit palette. You pointed it at a folder of hi-res images, it generated a folder of thumbnails and a clut (colour look-up table). Just as the last bug was dealt with, some idiot, albeit a smart idiot, released Debabelizer. My app was toast and it taught me a hard lesson.

I’d need an extremely convincing argument to embark on a custom application development today, so its incredibly frustrating to see people considering bespoke asset management, collections management, shopping cart or ticketing applications. Selecting software will invariably need some form of compromise, but if you can’t find an application that meets 80% of your needs, you should take a hard look at your processes and workflow. This assumes that you’ve done your homework to list your requirements so that you can map them to an application’s functionality. I have to believe that this is not always the case.

Anyone embarking on an audience-development/community-building/user-generated-content initiative and not looking to use available software and services, which are largely free, needs treatment. Despite the Web 2.0 nomenclature, we’re in the third phase of the web: First there was just ‘The Web’, then it was ‘My Web’ with personalisation and customisation, now its ‘Our Web’ with collaboration and community building. The web has been specifically designed for us to do this business of engaging and building communities – which was awfully generous – so the least we can do is take advantage of it.

As I read another proposal which featured some wheel reinvention, it reminded of a scene in the film Knocked Up. There’s a running joke through the film centering around a bunch of losers who spend their entire time researching naked scenes in movies for a website that will make them millions. They compile the data, build the website and just as they’re about to launch it, one of them stumbles across Mr. Skin (which is a real website). The moment they realise it, is funny and painful.

So that made me think about my next blog to list my favourite technology-in-the-movies moments…

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