Let's go 2024

By Janus Boye

A 2023 milestone was having a peer group meeting in the famous Chrysler Building in New York City. Thanks Kontent.ai for making it happen

2023 was quite a year with many big milestones. Also a confusing and difficult year with massive changes.

In this long overdue community update (Adapting Together in 2020 was the last one), I’ll share a bit more behind the scenes from the past year and provide an update on our plans for 2024. Let’s start by looking at 2023.

According to our members on the agency side, 2023 was a challenging year for many. Massive tech layoffs were a huge topic at the beginning of the year and in a memorable ask me anything with design leader Peter Merholz, he explained why he referred to it as a social contagion.

Also, at the beginning of the year, AI was more of a research thing and then just a few months into 2023, tools like Chat GPT was a big theme at pretty much every group meeting. We heard how it acts as a kind of assistant, how it was used officially and often also unofficially and terms like hallucination changed meaning. At the end of the year, Dutch Internet pioneer Steven Pemberton provided us a helpful reminder that there's no I in AI (yet).

Hamburg-based national weekly newspaper ZEIT has a Talent podcast, where I was a guest star during the summer: Janus Boye, welche Bedeutung hat Peer-Learning für die Arbeitswelt? (in German)

Let’s go to Hamburg: The major German port city has become a good one for us, in particular with thanks to Brian Tomlinson for driving the local community forward this past year. At our end of year get-together in November, we welcomed more than 30 participants and had 10 lightning talks on trust, sustainability, AI, design MarTech and more. You can find a summary from the both educational and entertaining session in this post What might 2024 bring?

Rasmus Skjoldan was finally able to join us at the annual November conference in Aarhus and gave an inspiring keynote on dodging the digital wasteland. A wake up call to create more high-quality experiences. Photo: Ib Sørensen

A community that works, sustainably

Personally, I’ve always treasured those aha moments that seemingly changes the perspective with just a few words. Norwegian sustainability expert Katrine Sundbye did just that back in April, when she eloquently made the point that digital is an enabler for sustainability. In other words: We need digital to achieve the sustainable development goals. To me, this provided a helpful balance to our somewhat more technical focus in past years on building websites for environmental sustainability and moving towards a fossil-free Internet. Don’t get me wrong, low carbon websites and green hosting remains relevant.

At the UX Connect 23 conference, we were joined by sustainability expert Katrine Sundbye who reminded us that we would need 3.6 planets if everyone used as many resources as we do in the Western world. Photo: Roar Paaske

Sustainability was also a theme in my annual New Year’s conversation with our Frankfurt-based friends at byte5: Read Digitale Trends & Herausforderungen 2024 (in German)

Sustainability was also a topic at several of our conferences. Hannah Smith from The Green Web Foundation made it to Aarhus for the Boye Aarhus 23 conference and Thorsten Jonas from the Sustainable UX Network gave multiple talks throughout the year.

As well as providing our networking and learning services with minimal negative impact, we also continued to use our brand voice and influence to make a positive impact. Taking inspiration from Crafted, one of our UK digital agency members, we’ve created a page where we write about our impact.

Back in August we passed a milestone, as we turned 20 years old. August 7, 2003 and some initial work with Maersk in Copenhagen The first member signed up in 2004 and then group meetings and conferences started in 2005. Time flies.

Navigating a crowded content technology landscape

About 80% of our members are on the customer side, and they still look for a new CMS every couple of years. In a longer marketplace update for CMS Critic, I shared how the days of the best CMS are over. My impression is that it’s more confusing to navigate the marketplace today than it was just 5 years ago.

With my focus on the customer side, I was very happy to be invited to be an expert jury for the TYPO3 Awards. A great opportunity to take a closer look at innovative work happening in the open source community.

Our Toronto-based friends at dotfusion hosted our first ever CMS Experts meeting in Canada. Among the participants were Agility, dotCMS, Metrolinx, TELUS and Uniform. Toronto is becoming a very good city for us with several local groups.

Based on an on-going conversation throughout the year in our thriving CMS Expert community, in particular with input from Deane Barker, I also wrote an article on why content production is the next wave for digital experience platforms.

MarTech and the Martech stack is also a big topic. Together with Kentico, we did two afternoon briefings with Scott Brinker in Hamburg and Copenhagen. You can read more about the events in these posts:

Together with our UK-based member Simon Jones at Studio 24, we created an overview of Headless CMS in 2023 to help untangle some of the confusion. To quote from the opening:

Headless CMS has been around for almost a decade and experienced an explosive growth, in particular in recent years. However, the marketplace is confusing, crowded and it doesn’t require a veteran industry analyst certificate to see that many vendors are struggling to define what they sell.

Similarly, in the beginning of the year, I shared the real story about digital experience composition. At the end of the year, we heard more about this topic in an update from Bart Omlo at Conscia.ai on 6 months in the world of DXO, DXC and orchestration.

Groups, members, and outstanding moderators

Since 2004 our peer groups have been the beating heart of our community. A seemingly simple model with 3 - 4 meetings per year, usually around 10 - 15 participants in each and curated around a topic or role. It’s been ups and downs for 20 years, but with steady growth since our reboot in 2018. Today with some 130 members in Europe and North America. And one in Australia.

I’ve already mentioned Hamburg and Toronto, but there’s also many other cities where we have progress to report.

Closer to home there’s naturally also wonderful Copenhagen and our local groups here in Aarhus. Rene Bomholt has been leading the charge in our Copenhagen digital project manager group, while Adam Feldt has led our digital leadership group. There’s also our national M365 group moderated by Thomas Julø and in Aarhus our design leadership community is in good hands with Kristina Larsen. Personally, I’ve enjoyed attending as a guest some of the sessions in these groups and then I’ve personally led our gov’t digital web group.

Let’s also go to the UK. Simon Jones both led our London digital strategy group, hosted us for a good day in Cambridge which included both a visit to the University and the Cambridge Film Festival. We also managed to return to Scotland with a very successful kickoff meeting in Edinburgh.

The Norwegian capital of Oslo is charming, also with several local groups, friendly members and a few conference speakers.

AI is not working was the subject line of our August newsletter. This was based on a conversation in an Oslo peer group where Kristine Vik Andresen from Santander brought the below memorable slide.

Chris Hovde works with diversity and inclusion at Telia and has been a huge role model for many in our community, including yours truly. We were finally able to welcome him to an in-person meeting in 2023

Switzerland is also going well for us with activities in Zurich, Basel and our first ever meeting in Lucerne thanks to Donat Wullschleger at Schurter. Both Andrius Knispelis and Brian Tomlinson helped out with local groups.

Many member’s calls is a result of a conversation in the peer groups. There’s also our regular informal get-togethers and then there’s also the conferences, where we can bring together the larger community.

Now with four plus two annual conferences

As a major milestone, we were able to once again launch a US-based conference with CMS Kickoff 23 held in January at the historic Don Cesar hotel in St. Pete Beach, Florida. After 7 years of Philadelphia conferences (2009 - 2016), 1 Brooklyn conference (2019) and then the pandemic, it felt really good to do something bigger in the US. Our CMS Experts community has held January meetings in Florida since 2018, so this seemed a good progression and with some help, including from local friends like Matt Garrepy from CMS Critic and Shawn Moore from Solodev we made it work.

Surrounded by friends at the Don Cesar for CMS Kickoff 23. Tim “let the world feel your heartbeat” McDonald to the left and Matt Garrepy from CMS Critic to the right.

CMS Kickoff 24 is now just two weeks away and will be bigger, but even more importantly, hopefully better. The sessions are without the usual sales and marketing pitches. Yes, we’ll talk AI, the future of content, visual workspace and much more, but there’s also plenty of time for conversations, so that you can bring actionable insights back to your desk and your projects.

Let’s go back to the summer of 2023 and UX Connect 23, our design and sustainability conference in Aarhus. To be honest, we were a bit late with the conference program, but we made it happen. Unexpectedly garbage collection became a big topic. We also talked about how everybody has bias. Design leader Antonia Fedder joined us from Hamburg and shared a post after the conference titled Question Everything. To quote:

For me, conferences sometimes feel like ‚same procedure as every year’ - people add each other on LinkedIn, talk a bit about their work and listen to some speakers. Which is nice, but not that meaningful.

The past two days were completely different. Open and intense conversation about processes, business, bias, sustainability and accountability characterised the conversation. Tools were shared, ideas developed and together we questioned it all.

We added more workshops and interactivity to UX Connect 23. Photo: Roar Paaske

LeThe planning has started for UX Connect 24, our third one, and we are once again collaborating with Vertica to make it happen. The draft program will be ready shortly.

It’s also become a tradition to collaborate with our Croatian friends Netgen for the annual pilgrimage to the Adriatic coast for the Web Summer Camp. At the end of the summer we met in Opatija where I led the Tech Forum, round-table discussions on martech and web technologies. Deane Barker presented (in shorts) and we also heard about AI in Content Management from the perspective of Kontent.ai. We’ll be back in July for Web Summer Camp 2024.

In September we then moved to Liverpool for HE Connect 23, a gathering place for the higher education community. Eric Greenberg, Marketing Operations Leader at Wharton posted this conference summary on LinkedIn: What's the best Higher Ed conference you've been to? In 2024, we’ll bring the community to Leeds for HE Connect 24.

Finally, as a highlight of the year and every year since 2005, we had a great week at the Boye Aarhus 23 conference. Thanks to everyone who made it from near and far. Canadian CMS vendor Agility won the Small Feature Award, our Czech friend Jan Havel from ACTUM Digital joined for the first time and summed it up like this:

a unique event defined by "no bullshit" discussions of trends in digital.

This year will be something special, as our European conference will be the 20th annual conference! Save the dates 5 - 7 November and hope to see you at the Boye Aarhus 24 conference. Among the speakers joining us for the 1st time is Ottawa-based tech analyst Mark Demeny and also the author of the book on Sustainable Web Design Tom Greenwood from the UK.

One last thing on the conference circuit in 2024: Let’s go to Mallorca. We’ll be there twice this year. First in late January for the Ibexa Global Partner Conference and then in September for CMS Camp Mallorca. Let’s see if these become annual traditions as well.

That’s it. Here we go. Let’s work together to be useful and make 2024 a good one.

Once again: Thank you for being a part of it!

Join us and be a part of the conversation

If you want to learn more, why not dive into our top five articles from 2023. The big stories were AI (surprise!), intranets (an oldie, but goodie) and also a book launch on delivering services.

If you have read all of this without being a part of it, why not join the conversation?

More from the behind the scenes

Read more about our history in these past community updates