CS Forum 2012 Recap

October 30, 2012

There are two things to remember about content strategy – and, really, all web work in general: content is made of people, and people are always changing.

It’s no coincidence, then, that the overarching theme of CS Forum 2012 was two-fold:

  1. Good content comes from good processes, people and organizational attention, which means – at heart – content is made up of people.
  2. Because content is made of people, and people are always changing, we have to understand how people change – from the technology they use to access content to their habits and fears.

I was fortunate enough to travel to Cape Town, South Africa, this past week. In addition to beautiful weather and brandy distillery tours, I watched a bunch of great speakers and friends talk at length about a little bit of everything – from driving change to HTML5; from the challenges of owning – and changing – a business to the functional possibilities of structured content. It was inspiring and comfortable – a little bit like Content Strategy Camp – and the attendees and speakers alike were all wonderful.

I’d love to share my notes, but my notes are poor. Thankfully, Margot Bloomstein seemed to be present in all of the talks I witnessed, and she has a wonderful two-part CS Forum recap that you should go read immediately.

Conversations in Cape Town: Day 1 – including recaps of presentations by:

Conversations in Cape Town: Day 2 – including recaps of presentations by:

Or, search around – most of the talks were posted to Slideshare or some other presentation-related website. If you’re looking for mine, it was posted here last week.

A huge thanks goes out to Kerry-Anne Gilowey and her team – Irene Walker, Rian van der Merwe and Nathan Blows – for all of their work in putting on a great event. It was a blast. AND THERE WAS A CHEETAH.