Photo galleries from the VRM West Coast Workshop and VRooM Boston 2009 are up. Tim Hwang has an excellent follow up (Geek Insurance! — go read it) to the Getting Personal With Data panel, which turned (as we had intended) into a round-table discussion involving everybody in the room (including Adriana Lukas, via live video from London) that lasted two hours.

In discussions since VRooM, some of us have started thinking that a better approach to VRM events is to pick single topics (health care, governance, search, VRM+CRM, personal RFP, personal informatics, whatever) and have separate workshops on those. Or to weigh in on VRM-related topics at other events, as we’ve done all along at the Internet Identity Workshops — or as Keith Hopper did for VRM at Public Media Camp. Or both.

The problem is that VRM itself is extremely broad, and still lacks working code that applies to all VRM topics. In the absence of that code — some personal tool as universal in the digital world as the wallet is in the physical one — we end up scattered across many topics. This isn’t bad, but it might not be the best way to get traction in any one topic.

Thoughts?