2019 - Growing Together

What a year!

We made the big decision to return to the US with a Boye 19 Brooklyn conference. It was a huge gamble just one year after rebooting the company and nothing was certain.

Looking back it did work out, although we certainly underestimated the short-term impact it had in terms of hard work involved in landing on our feet in the US with a conference.

Held at the remarkable Wythe Hotel we had a unique learning experience. Among the emerging topics were Content Operations and 300 Seconds once again proved a good format to introduce a new diverse set of speakers.

At 300 Seconds one of the highlights were a talk on using augmented reality to drive engagement and improve the museum experience shared by Rachel Lewis from Brooklyn Museum.

For our 15th annual conference in Aarhus, Denmark we held the Boye 19 Aarhus conference at the iconic former city hall now housing the Women’s Museum.

Enjoy some of these postings about the conference sessions:

• Deconstructing The Experience Economy

• How To Lead Remote And Distributed Teams?

• Small Feature Award 2019: Little Forest Won A Close Race With A Simple Solution To Huge Problems

• Trust Is A Prerequisite For Great Customer Experiences

• With Kentico Kontent It’s Goodbye To Legacy CMS

2018 - Creating Together

The conference website for our Boye 18 Aarhus conference is still up and running. We held the conference at Scandic City and Scott Brinker was among the keynote speakers.

This was the first year we introduced our now famous conference jigsaw puzzle and also graphic recording by Michael Eriksen from Visuel Retning. Both were very well received!

A new session format in 2018 was 300 Seconds, which Sharon O’Dea kindly shared with us. It was during this format that Max Bailey made his impromptu talk on pain.

As per tradition, we also donated €1 per evaluation form to a good cause. #creatingtogether at #boye18 meant around 1,000 euro donated to SOS Children’s Villages making children around the world pretty happy that you filled out those feedback forms.

Svend Aage Petersen from Hempel made the trip from Copenhagen for the 9th time. After the conference he posted a refreshing conference review with the charming title A bath for your brain. To quote:

Compare, if you will, your daily working life with looking up at the night sky. You can see so many stars on clear nights, and you occasionally look up and marvel, but you mostly trudge on going about your business (admit it!). For these few days, Janus hands you a telescope and suddenly you see much further, much more, and you get a taste of the vastness and the innumerable discoveries waiting for us.

2017

No Philadelphia this year, but in Aarhus we had a good year with some world-class keynotes:

• Bebo White on The End Of The Beginning Of A Totally New Financial System

• Jake DiMare on avoiding disruption in the age of accelerating change

• Steven Pemberton with this talk: On the 60th Anniversary of the First Municipal Computer

• Theresa Regli which masterfully compared digital work with mixology, aligning ingredients

Hilary Marsh also joined us from the US with new content strategy insights and from the UK, MMT Digital brought a new agile board game.

Among the other UK speakers were Paul-Jervis Heath who spoke on ambient intelligence: designing intelligent environments for everyday life (PDF) and Marianne Kay on Content Strategy for Ultra-Large Digital Presences (PDF)

Maren Christin Hübl from SAP attended for the first time and brought the promise of combining new ways of collaboration with design thinking to come up with important innovation. Sounds almost too good to be true? Read the summary from the session: Scaling design thinking or browse the slides (PDF).

One of the case studies were from Danish shipping giant Maersk and their new strategy on how to strengthen relevance with key stakeholders (PDF).

This was also the first year for artificial intelligence to break through and become a big topic for discussion. We had a well-attended workshop on how to capitalise on the huge potential of AI.

Another highlight was Florian Hoecherl from Roland Berger in Munich, who had a great presentation on Kanban, Scrum and other tools for agile and hybrid project management (PDF).

2016 - Leading The Way

In Philadelphia we held our 7th annual conference, which featured Suse Cairns from Baltimore Museum of Art with a keynote on designing a digital experience. At first glance it might have seem to be all about the museum world, but if you listened carefully, you probably found many parallels to your own workplace. Key themes included how digital has changed how we experience the world and the evil data collection.

Robert Rose also joined us and spoke about content marketing and the rise of artificial intelligence when it comes to content creation. As a part of his keynote, he took us through the now famous NY Times opinion: Did a Human or Computer Write This? Even though it’s from 2015, do try it out yourself and see how surprisingly far AI for content creation was back then.

Other keynote speakers were John Stepper famous for Working out Loud and Steven Pemberton on HTML5 as the new Flash.

As usual communication was a major theme and we had Sara Walsh on double duty both with a content strategy workshop and presentation.

In November, we met again in Aarhus and Allan Tanner made the trip from Scotland and shared what he learned.

Among his highlights and probably also the highlights of many others was the keynote by Michael Bednar-Brandt from Oracle who talked about what’s just around the corner.

Pernille Tranberg also returned to Aarhus and shared her insights on data ethics in a thought-provoking and timely keynote.

On the different tracks, Jonathan Phillips talked about tomorrow’s workplace (PDF), while Morten Elvang shared his now legendary Prison 3.0 slide with the memorable quote:

If the system doesn’t make sense, you often find a black market for common sense

Sounds familiar?

In one of the opening workshops at the Aarhus conference, the smart group of participants co-created The Declaration Of Digital Transformation Success.

Also, in Aarhus Paul Miller, CEO and Founder, Digital Workplace Group, gave a very well-received keynote titled: “Leadership in the new digital workplace era – from dictator to influencer”

2015 - Making It Work

In May in Philadelphia, content was once again at the center of attention.

Hilary Marsh gave a very popular workshop titled: Build your content strategy roadmap

Marli Mesibov spoke on how it’s big scary world out there, filled with content strategists, content marketers, content creators, content managers... it never ends! In her talk (download slides - PPT), we talked about the care and feeding of a content whatever, and answered the question: why does it matter what we call ourselves? Key Takeaways:

• 1. Although we *can* do everything and anything, we'll do our jobs better when we identify for ourselves, and our colleagues, what our job descriptions include.

  2. Every role deserves respect, and content folk with other specialties have a lot to contribute to our projects.

  3. The difference between content strategy, content marketing, and content management.

  4. Concrete advice for working with colleagues who don't understand what we do.

Customer experience was also a big topic and Scott Liewehr gave a talk on Raising the Bar on Customer Experience. Shawn Berven from J&J was among the speakers on our CX track.

Talking to our the growing numbers of marketeers attending, Lars Birkholm Petersen shared A Roadmap for Marketing Transformation and to our CMS audience and Deane Barker gave a CMS Implementations Workshop.

Spoiling our participants working with internal communications, Lesley Crook from GSK took the trip from the UK to share the stage with her US colleague Matt Bartow for a popular case study on How GSK works with Yammer.

Onwards to Aarhus in November with this memorable quote:

"Half of the virgins we sacrifice don’t help the crop. Trouble is, we don’t know which half"

This was one of many one liners & slides from Tim Walters in his legendary keynote on "the total impossibility of customer experience management". The blog post with the summary from the keynote was abtly title Enough with the mumbo jumbo.

Another well-received keynote speaker was UK-based Rob Gethen Smith who talked on 10 top tips for digital transformation (PDF).

As a part of the conference, we also moved to Aarhus City Hall for an afternoon, where Andreas Ramos from Silicon Valley was among our speakers. His topic: Use content strategy to make your organisation win

Marianne Kay is one of the conference regulars since 2011 and this year she gave her probably most popular talk which was on Modern Web Design Trends 2016.

Among our US speakers were Danielle Brigida, from the US Fish and Wildlife Service. She shared her insights on the changing game of social media (PDF).

Another case study was from Bosch in Germany, where Joachim Heinz gave a very popular talk on the future of enterprise social networks (PDF). From global consulting engineering group Rambøll Peter Nissen gave a talk on Using LinkedIn for content marketing and thought leadership (PDF).

2014

In Philadelphia in May, we held our 5th annual conference which featured keynotes by Donna Spencer from Australia, Rose Cameron from the US and Tim Walters from Germany.

Our Dortmund-based member Bernd Burkert at onion.net by KPS Digital helped build the momentum as a conference sponsor calling it the World’s Best CMS Conference.

Some highlighted talks from Philadelphia 14:

• Eric Greenberg on Using WordPress as a Distributed, Enterprise-level CMS (PPT)

• Jake DiMare on So Happy Together - Digital Project Managers and Content Strategists are,

• John Kottcamp from Tahzoo on social is much more than a channel

• Jim Hobart on Lean UX in the Enterprise

• Rachel Happe on the promise of social organization.

Our 10th anniversary conference in Aarhus was a great success. Tjeerd Brenninkmeijer from Bloomreach wrote about key trends at the conference and included this friendly testimonial:

Boye events are different. They're more than just traditional conferences, they’re really centered around networking and sharing knowledge among peers in a friendly atmosphere. It’s an event organized by people with a passion and deep understanding of the online space, not built around the wishes of vendors (read sponsors)

Intranet grand old man Martin White also gave a raving review called it the best yet!

the conference set an almost unattainable benchmark for both content and organisation

Marianne Kay also shared her detailed conference notes.

Among the memorable sessions in Aarhus, were a highly interactive one with James Cannings from MMT Digital who introduced us to the now famous Tennis Ball challenge in a session appropriately titled why do so many companies suck at agile (PDF). Also joining us from the UK were Simon Kaplan from the Government Digital Service with a talk on improving content quality on gov.uk (PDF).

Bebo White from the US also gave a fascinating talk on Are You Ready for Bitcoin? (Is the World Ready for Bitcoin?) and Steven Pemberton from the Netherlands made us think about What do we want from the web?

2013

More on Philadelphia coming soon

In Aarhus in November, Ivo Lukac from Netgen made the trip from Croatian capital Zagreb and published a very positive conference review. He highlighted the lack of sales presentations, the networking opportunities and open source confusion. He also wrote:

“In last few years I had the chance to be on many conferences but rarely on such perfectly organised one. You can see and feel how much experience Mr. Boye and his team have in organising events, they are really using it to their advantage”

Keynote speakers in Aarhus included Harry Brignull on dark patterns (in 2023 he published a book on deceptive design) and Misia Tramp on “Dancing with the Eight Ball – Making Social Insights Actionable”.

From Switzerland, we also had Hjördís Árnadóttir, Director, Corporate Communications at pharmaceutical firm Actavis who gave a memorable talk on making governance work.

2012 - Sharing is Caring

With our theme inspired from the museum world, we held 2 conferences in Philadelphia in May and in Aarhus in November. Here’s notes from the Philadelphia conference written by Hans Keijmel at Bloomreach. To quote:

Overall, it was very well done conference – and one that we’re sure to return to.

Kristina Podnar took the stage and shared a practical web governance cookbook. Jeff Cram also made it to Philadelphia and shared a longer blog post on exploding topic pages, which was a joint talk by Tim McGovern of the Heritage Foundation and David Hobbs. Jeff opened the posting like this:

It’s a place where practitioners get together to talk about what’s really happening with digital strategy. An event short on schwag and vendor sales pitches and long on in-depth conversations and peer networking

Deane Barker also attended in Philadelphia and gave his now famous talk on The Future is in Delivery. In the talk, he considered content management a solved problem and basically predicted the arrival of what later became known as headless.

Joining us in Aarhus in November was Interact Intranet, which shared their conference highlights and included this friendly testimonial:

..a very action packed two days with excellent speakers and some great content delivered

Here’s a few of the notable conference presentations from Aarhus in 2012:

• Anne Sluhan on Development of an alumni strategy for Copenhagen Business School - via mobilization of social media (PDF).

• Catherine Bellamy on LSE’s kanban story (PPT)

• Sue Beckingham from Sheffield Hallam University with two talks

  • Digital Identity: The Value of a Professional Online Presence

  • Digital Innovation: Rethinking the NO in InNOvation

One of our conference participants from Finland, Jere Majava from the University of Helsinki, shared this graph on IT departments adoption on new technology.

2011

In May in Philadelphia, we had another packed program with keynotes by Bob Boiko and Jon Udell. Other notable speakers included:

• Carmen Iannacone, Chief Technology Officer at Smithsonian Institution

• Indi Young

• Martha Gabriel, Professor of Intelligence Marketing and Digital Marketing at BSP - Business School Sao Paulo

• Philippe Le Hegaret, Interaction Domain Leader at World Wide Web Consortium

More to come on Philadelphia…

Onwards to Aarhus:

Michael Edson helped to create numerous award-winning projects and the Smithsonian's first blog, first podcast, and the first alternate reality game to take place in a museum.

He also made the trip to Aarhus to keynote our 2011 conference in Aarhus. The keynote had the fitting title: Going boldly into the present" and was all about our changing relationship with “the future” and how organisations, governments, and businesses should adjust the way they think about strategy, planning, and work.

Another US keynote in Aarhus was hypertext developer Cathy Marshall.

One of the more popular user experience sessions were by UK-based Caroline Jarrett who shared Design tips for complex forms (PDF). She also ran a popular workshop on surveys in practice.

We also had a online health track, were Kent Bottles from the US wrote a blog post on What I learned in Denmark.

Our 2nd year in Philadelphia and joining us all the way from Denmark was Niels Hartvig, founder of the open source CMS Umbraco. He spoke about the importance of community.

The conference featured 8 tracks on higher education, online strategy, user experience, web content management, intranet, e-health, online communication, and web project management. The social business and the social web was a big theme with a keynote from Peter Kim on designing a social business and multiple case studies on driving participating and generating business from collaboration. Permeating the discussions was the notion of “speaking human”, i.e. connecting with your users and customers on a down to earth way – a concept proposed by keynote speaker Eric Karjaluoto.

Marko Hurst spoke about user experience by the numbers. We also had a strong presence from the higher education community, which Mark Greenfield called the toughest gig in all the web.

We were once again at the Down Town Club, a former gentleman’s club where wifi access was not exactly what our crowd expected, but hey it was 2010!.

In Aarhus, Bebo White did a keynote on web science or "web cosmology". Here’s 2 reviews of the Aarhus conference:

• Boye conference Aarhus 2010 highlights
  By: Tim van Waard

• Aarhus 2010 – A Recap of the Boye Conference
  By: Mark Greenfield