Some thoughts about Tecnimap 2010

I’ve been a couple of days in Zaragoza (Spain), participating in Tecnimap 2010 last week. Tecnimap is a conference on IT for the Public Administration in Spain. I had presented a paper about one of the applications I manage: DocelWeb.

Overall it has been a nice experience, but I wanted to share some thoughts about it.

On a personal level, I think I was wrong in my planning. I planned to assist to few conferences and talks that I really wanted to assist, and scheduled the rest of the time for relationships and stands. It turns out I was completely wrong. I had too much time wasted on the stands. Some people in the stands didn’t really know what were they talking about. For example, some random commercial was explaining his digital signature product, proudly saying it worked with XAdES-XL (a digital signature format). When I asked if they haven’t planned introducing XAdES-A (long time archival variant of the former: a must for public administrations), he looked at me as if I didn’t know what I was talking about, and said “of course not”. And that is just an example. Of course, I don’t blame them. But I’m a technical guy and I was looking for technical answers, or for technical “I don’t know but I’ll look up the answer and contact you”. Commercial babbling gets me bored. Next time I’ll dedicate less time to that, and more to the talks.

When talking about the conferences, I wanted to remark two. One about ISA and Interoperability in Europe. And the other about STORK. Both, very interesting: I will comment about them (and my opinion on the new tendencies about eGovernment) in a future post.

With respect to the organization I think it has been a great event and almost everything was perfect. I must congratulate Zaragoza for hosting the meeting, and to the organization for doing such a good job.