The First Gilbane

For a long time, Gilbane was the content management conference. There used to be two every year – both in Boston and San Francisco – and it was the conference you waited all year to go to. Everyone was at Gilbane, and there’s still a huge fraternity of former speakers with so many stories.

I spoke at Gilbane from 2011 to 2017. Today, it’s much smaller, and this year they moved it from Boston to Washington DC at the end of April to co-locate with two other conferences.

Interestingly, I found a page listing all the past Gilbanes, back to 2002 (scroll a bit). The page for the first Gilbane is still online, and it’s so nostalgic.

Aside from the rogues’ gallery of pioneering vendors – Vignette, Interwoven, Stellent, Documentum, FileNET – the session titles reflect things we take for granted today but were mind-blowing back then:

• “XML and Content Management”
• “Single-Source Content Management: If, Why, and How”
• “Content Control: Applying Business Rules and Rights to Content”

I loved Gilbane. It was a huge part of my professional development, and quite a few of the people reading these words right now know me because of the time I spent there and the relationships I made.

Question: what is “the new Gilbane”?