1) There seemed to be some pessimism in the air: I’d counter this by drawing attention to the experiences that we do have in build systems (see below, in suggestions for what next). I can’t believe that none of us have got systems working in the last five years...

2) I don’t think the problem as set was adequately addressed by any of the groups. Remember, we were asked to describe a way of getting from a business process to a service-based system, to decide what the services might be, and whether distribution was the answer. I don’t think we have anything concrete to show for this (apart from some interesting photographs of some concept art involving spoons and dried flowers :-) ). The problems could have done with more focus, and perhaps the day with more structure - an explicit alternation of design-fest, reflection pressured abstraction (think-tank!) might have served better.

3) In a similar vein, we should have a much clearer idea of the deliverables from the session. This probably reflects badly on all of us - after all, we were all in a position to do something about this (in particularly , defining what we expected to see). As far as capturing these deliverables was concerned, there were several laptops lying around unused, for a start (and even a scanner!).