I had my trip all planned out so I could walk around Venice and get to (finally) know the city. That didn’t happen. The trip was off to a bad start after the flight got canceled because of an air controllers strike in france1 and it got worse when on the 14th my credit limit foiled my plans to rent a car and make it to Bled in three hours.

Maybe some sort of Kismet or Fado was keeping me from reaching BledCom in time to be in the discussion panel. Either way, let me try to make something good out of my mis-adventures.

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This year I had the amazing opportunity to participate in BledCom and talk about what I think is a Connected Government. A happy coincidence given the fact that in 2013 the SHiFT Conference chose “Connected” as its main theme. You can read the article, find out about the case study and see the slides after the jump.

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I had my trip all planned out, like everyone else in this picture I am sure. Due to a strike by french air traffic controllers, our flight got canceled. From the little I could gather, other airlines did not cancel flights, instead they opted to go around french air space whenever possible.

Before reaching the customer service counter I had already read on twitter what was going on. There was a strike and my flight would be changed or refunded. I sat down, got online with my phone (because for reasons I don’t understand airports still don’t offer free access to the web) and changed my flight, re-scheduled my arrival at the hostel I booked.

Points and a thank you go out to Booking.com for helping as best they could with just one phone call.

But as far as easyjet goes, even tough they did manage to notify me quickly, their customer service desk still had just two people to handle a whole flight being canceled. I understand it’s a low-cost (and apparently high risk) airline but I expected at least a more proactive approach.