From 25 February till 27 February i was a participant of Wirtschaftinformatics 2009. The conference take place in German-speaking countries of Europe(Germany, Austria and Switzerland).
I'm not "Wirtschaftinformatiker" hovewer the conference was so big that i found my tracks:COllaborative services and E-Learning.

It is always a competition between Informatics and Wirtschaftinformatics. Researchers from the first area insist on the fact that they are doing "real science" - hardcore, while the others
think that computer scientists doing something that is not always needed, without analysis what the user really require. There were some presentations/papers that i found poor from scientific point of view, e.g.
ideas were not new or the amount of dataset entries was very low. But there were some interesting presentations and interesting people.

I like Matthias Trier presentation of "Content-based Community detection in social corpora".
The ENRON mail dataset was analysed on the existence of clusters. The research was devoted to two types of networks:a network built according to who write mail to whom and a network built based on content similarity.The clusters
were then compared.and... no wonder!the clusters both types were not similar.people who are talking about similar things were not always connected by mails. I had the same impression in the research of E-learning mailing lists. Now it
is a challenge to find how structures of mail networks are dependent from the content the network members create.What input do actions of the network members have? does it important what roles, experience do the nodes have?

"Mine, yours, ...ours.Designing for princiipal-agent collaboration in interactive value creation" from Jasminco Novak forced me to rethink how important for users to see the system in its development state. Usually users do not know what they
want. Exactly they do but they can not describe it. And if the users will participate in design process (review the prototypes of software) as much as they can, it might be useful to create an efficient software. It is like you are creating
the design of your house.you can have it in your mind but if you use a software that can present how the room looks like then you can change your mind about the furniture, the color of walls, etc.

Thursday was interesting only because of the keynote speaker, Mark Soley. I admit that he is a great speaker. I don't think that he presented something new, otherwise he talked about state of the art. Anyway it was useful to know that 25 millions
computers are running with Windows 3.1. Surely it was one more event that had to be highlighted - Gala dinner in Vienna Rathaus - gorgeous and luxury. I felt myself like in a tale.


Last day the track E-Learning took place. "Der Einsatz von Online-Peer-Reviews als kollaborative Lernform" from WUW (Christine Bauer and Kathrin Figl) was about peer reviews that were done by students to analyse the papers that they read. We have
proseminar now for our bachelors and it may be efficient to ask students review papers of others. And surely it save the working time of assitents ;-)