InfoCamp

I attended my first professional conference last weekend in Seattle (called Info Camp). It was actually an unconference (which basically means that the participants decide on and present the content of the conference), but it was still the first time I've attended anything like a conference. And it was awesome!

The first day was a bit overwhelming since I had no real clue what to do there. I mean I knew the basics: attend the sessions, meet people, discuss and participate. But putting that into action was harder than I thought. I'm not super great at just going up to random people and talking to them. And since this was a conference based on user experience and I have no professional experience with this topic, I've only studied it, I didn't feel like I had a lot of input that would be interesting or beneifcial to other people there. But I did enjoy attending the sessions and learned a lot. It was really cool to see what people are doing in this field, and that there are so many people making a living in this field. I did learn that if I really want to do this professionally, I've got a lot of work ahead of me creating a portfolio of volunteer website design or "just for fun" website redesign.

I think I enjoyed the second day a bit more. There were less people there, and I felt there were more sessions based on libraries, which I can relate more to since I do have professional experience with those. One session focused on the invisible library (online resources such as databases) and creating an open source ILS (integrated library system). I found this session to be the most interesting, and amazingly enough, I actually had thoughts on what they were talking about so I could particpate in the discussion.

So, what came out of me attending this unconference? Well, I learned the importance of a portfolio, I met a lot of people interested in the same kind of work I am interested in, found out about a professional organization that hopefully I can get involved in, got that "first time" out of the way, learned there are many opertunities in user experience work, learned that many librarians (or library school students) are also interested in this phenomona, and that many librarians actually make a living doing what I would love to do. So in a way I guess it gave me some hope.

I'm looking forward to attending next year, and to hopefully attending other similar conference between now and then, and hopefully having something more to contribute in the future.