This year’s LavaCon conference, which took place Oct 27-30, 2024 in Portland, was the first one I’ve attended in a number of years, and I’m glad I did.
This is an event that feeds even the most seasoned professional in a number of ways.
The LavaCon 2024 conference program
Whether you are a content professional – practitioner or manager – or someone outside of the profession looking to up your content game, you’d have found something of value. This year’s program was titled “Content as a Business Asset: Reducing Costs, Generating Revenue, and Improving the Customer Experience Through Better Content” which included everything from theory and case studies to technical presentations and metrics to leadership skills and customer engagement. For example, Scott Abel’s presentation, “The Unseen Challenges and Hidden Costs of Adopting Markdown for Technical Documentation” focused squarely on the bigger picture of the cost in relation to business growth. You can see the entire LavaCon 2024 program here.
What stood out was the awareness of content as a value stream and how improving your content operations fits into the business. The shift from awareness of language to awareness of content ecosystems was striking.
A few of the presentations explicitly mentioned a business case but all presentations had a component of calculating the ROI of activities and outcomes.
Presenter knowledge
Many of the presenters are veterans of the conference circuit, people I’ve known and respected for decades; others were new to me. Either way, their depth of knowledge was evident. The balance of presentations between practitioners and analysts/strategists was on point. The vendors who presented stayed away from sales pitches for their software, and focused on case studies that demonstrated the value that could be realised.
Noz Urbina gets a special mention for his presentation on Truth Collapse. (He got possibly the first standing ovation for his keynote, and well-deserved.) Watch for a reprise at other conferences or possibly on YouTube – there’s a lot to think about in his 20-minute presentation about the good, the bad, and the ugly effects of generative AI on society at large.
What stood out was that while artificial intelligence seemed to surface in every presentation, each presentation consisted of a considered, realistic view. Presentations such as “Beyond the Hype: How Docs Teams are Leveraging AI to Actually Make a Difference” and “The Trush about GenAI and Content Delivery: Promises vs. Real-life Use Cases” and “Evaluating AI: Best Tools for Your Content Team” brought clarity to the topic, particularly when the presenters came from companies already significantly investing in AI specifically applied to the operationalisation of content.
Trends uncovered at LavaCon 2024
What I noticed was a shift from discussing authoring systems, such as Component Content Management Systems or Help Authoring tools, to discussing delivery systems other than traditional Web Content Management Systems. Vendors and practitioners alike are looking at customer support portals, sometimes for customer self-service, other times for support agents.
In most cases, the concept is to deliver topic-based content into a repository that can be segmented for multiple audiences or customer types. A common scenario is to have an AI-enabled chatbot as the interface which would interpret the user query, then locate the right information from the repository and deliver it with the help of a Large Language Model to provide an answer in a human-language form.
The implications are significant for content producers. It affects how we create and chunk content, how we structure and tag it – AI still favours semantically-rich, structured content – and how we’ve curated our repositories to disambiguate content variants. The push to bolt on chatbots also means working closer with conversation designers to ensure that the queries pull the right content. Not to be forgotten is the need to work with technologists, who need to enable the overall content ecosystem.
Can a conference be fun, too?
LavaCon’s organiser, Jack Molisani, pays attention to detail in a way that other conferences can only dream about. Food? The excellent menu has everyone covered, from celiacs to vegans, not just carnivores. Emotional support? There are dogs to pet and llamas to cuddle. Networking? Lots of opportunities to do so, both hallway chats and social events such as karaoke and storytelling. Recognition? An awards program, yes. Also, from the hotel staff to conference staff, efforts are recognised.
Overall, I rate this conference high on my list for direct value. It’s a concentration of expertise in the content strategy space that you’d be hard pressed to find elsewhere. Oh, and by the way, the next LavaCon conference will be held 5–8 October 2025 in Atlanta, GA (and there’s a BOGO registration special in effect right now).
