Workshop Day at #e2conf

It’s the first day at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston and the place is buzzing (alas, only literally). I am in the Blackbelt Practitioners Workshop, designed and held by members of the 20 Adoption council, agenda is like this:

Planning and executing a comprehensive Enterprise 2.0 program requires an honest assessment of your organization and strong strategic planning. In this full-day workshop meet the vanguard of those who are currently engaged in implementing Enterprise 2.0 within large organizations. Learn firsthand from practitioners who have tackled adoption, architecture, change management, community management, education, governance, and the realities of living an Enterprise 2.0 transformative experience.

Besides a lot of Twitter updates some action is happening in the designated wave for the workshop, so far it’s restricted to the participants for writing (and they really should do this more, it’s basically me doing the typing …) but anonymous read-only access should work out too:


Shipping up to places, this time: Boston

For most people I know travelling is a hassle best avoided. Not so for me. I am still pretty fond of it, even when it isn’t normally the most productive of times for me (which opens up the side question of why airports, train stations and most hotels don’t offer some free wifi as a complimentary service?). Some of the good things include:

– free newspapers on planes (and I do enjoy sifting through paper not screens at times) and if you’re kind you may even get a few free drinks
– depending on airline even the food is good on the planes (Iberia was pretty neat this time)
– on a 7 hour flight one can write some blog posts drafts – provided you’re able to take a capable laptop with you

And travelling can provide you with some very welcome inspiration, perspective and (sometimes) outright mind-blowing stuff you learn when you look and observe closely (this guy caressing his Kindle on the airport in Madrid – and a total absence of iPads so far; getting a cold douche refresher on how different we Europeans are after all; how easy-going and nice-to-have the regular traveling American can be; how I enjoy the coffehouse-bookstore hybrid, pictured left is the Trident bookstorecafé).

So it’s fitting that travelling is a prerequisite to meeting most people from my Enterprise 2.0 consulting industry – for instance when I was at Lotusphere 2010 in January I’ve met Marcia Connor in person (after following her on the internets, esp. twitter for a while) – and we’ll meet each other again, when I was in London for the Social Business Summit meeting people alone rendered my trip worthwhile. It’s an easy formula: No travel – no meeting my worldwide peergroup. And hanging out together on the internet has some obvious time-zone downsides you only avoid by travelling.

So it’s a good idea to make the trip cross the pond at times to meet these people that don’t come to Europe regularly. Valid for the US share of Enterprise 2.0 people (practitioners and vendors both don’t care so much for travelling to Europe in E2.0 business, for the latter ones this is a bit strange. With consultants and thought-leaders it’s a totally different story).

And this time it’s the Enterprise 2.0 conference, starting here in Boston on Monday. For this I’ve got a lot of mails and contact requests by vendors in the last days. Sorry guys, I haven’t reacted that much, one reason is that I don’t know yet what my schedule will look like (I am registered as press and sometimes press they’ve got some press appointments, treats or who knows – I would bet on it being here similar), the other reason being that I planned to browse around the exhibition venue on my own terms, check out what’s interesting and seek more information when necessary. So I may turn out to be not a totally lost contact, OK?

OK, my timetable for Monday to Thursday is filling with sessions and things to see and do quickly (starting with Dion Hinchcliffe early Monday morning), some peer-group socializing, tweet-ups and odd small-talk in the halls. I am probably waving a bit, too. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with me and the others there or in real life – I traveled a long distance for exactly this 😉

Upcoming: BarCamp Bodensee 2010

Well, buzzing a lot prevents me from blogging more – sad truths of an ever evolving digital smarter work knowledge worker’s lifestyle. But then again, other than with Google buzz (and this movie we all know and love) the first rule of BarCamp is “You talk about BarCamp”.

And the http://barcampbodensee.mixxt.eu/ this weekend is something we better talk about – an international event, attracting people from France, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark et al.

Denmark? Yes, I am happy that Kim Bach is making the trip from Copenhagen. I met him last year at reboot – another international event drawing geeks in literally droves – and we had the great time that’s facilitated by an athmosphere of kindness to strangers and intellectual curiosity. Yes, my reboot experiences are fueled by both the shared understanding and the sparkling contrarian discussions – it’s a very special climate and I am sad that this year will be a year of breath-taking and pausing (there’s a substitute for those that can’t live without their yearly rebooting fix experience). And for crying out loud I can’t even make it to the Ersatz because I’ve got a major event lined up. More on that later.

For now, let’s blog about the proposed sessions at #bcbs10, there’s some interesting stuff in there, my selection:

You see, I am cheating a bit about the interesting proposed sessions, but I really do hope that we can do some collaborative, live-documenting the BarCamp in Wave this year:


Yes, that’s the second rule of BarCamp: You blog wave about BarCamp …

Upcoming: DNUG Workshop am 9. Juni

Ja, das steht auch vor der Tür – nächste Woche in Berlin bei der Frühjahrskonferenz der deutschen Notes User Group:

In dem Social Media Workshop am 9. Juni gehen Stefan Pfeiffer, Marketing Manager Lotus, IBM Deutschland,  Thorsten Zoerner, Solution Architect Business -Experte bei der IBM, Martin Koser, Enterprise 2.0-Berater und Blogger, und Lars Basche, Social Media Consultant bei Text 100, auf diese und weitere Fragen ein und geben Antworten. Die Teilnehmer erhalten einen Einblick in die Möglichkeiten, die Social Media ihnen im internen und externen Einsatz eröffnen und bekommen Tipps für ihre konkrete Situation.

Ich freue mich darauf die Notes & Connections Familie wieder zu treffen und bin gespannt welchen Verlauf der Workshop dieses mal nehmen wird (hier der Blogpost zur Diskussionsrunde bei der Herbstkonferenz in Fulda 2009). Spannende Fragen gibt es ja genug, Stefan hat hier einige davon gesammelt: “Wie sollten Unternehmen anfangen mit Social Media? Worauf sollten sie achten, um nicht in Fettnäpfchen zu treten? Welche Relevanz haben Social Media im B2B-Umfeld? Wie bereitet man seine Mitarbeiter vor, welche Hilfestellungen benötigen sie? Was ist machbar und was nicht? Wie behält man bei der Informationsflut den Überblick und trennt Relevantes von Unwichtigem? Welche Ziele können erreicht werden und wie lässt sich Erfolg messen?”

Mein Part wird es sein, die Implementierungs- und Change Management Aspekte herauszuarbeiten, und damit den Teilnehmern Wege aufzuzeigen, die gangbar sind. Natürlich sind die Erfolgsfaktoren von “Corporate Social Media” abhängig vom Kontext des jeweiligen Unternehmens, dennoch lassen sich hier schon einige generische (und eine Reihe von praktischen) Erfahrungen und Best Practices vermitteln.

Working Wikily

Working Wikily has just been published as an article in the summer edition of the Stanford Social Innovation Review. This version contains new examples and is written in a more narrative format that is even easier to read. I hope you find it valuable. You can view it in the reader below or download the PDF from the SSIR website. Please pass it along to anyone you know who might be interested in applying these ideas to their work (via)

So pass it along:

View more documents from Noah Flower.

Upcoming: elfter WikiWednesday Stuttgart

Nachdem der zehnte Jubiläums-WikiWednesday Stuttgart ein Erfolg war (dank der Bühne im Innenhof des H7 wurde niemand wirklich nass …) sollten wir daran gehen den elften WikiWednesday zu organisieren.

Dieses Mail wieder in konventionellem Rahmen, sprich mit Sesssions, Kurzvorträgen und Erlebnisberichten (Wikisym!, Wikimania!, Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston! – es sollte genug Interessantes geben). Ideen und Wünsche wie auch Terminwünsche direkt in die Wave bzw. die darin enthaltene Doodle-Terminabstimmung eintragen):


IOD 2010 – collecting some todos and ideas

I am happily back from the Rome IBM Information on Demand EMEA conference and now collecting the things I want and need to investigate more, now that the fun is over:

– Hadoop and IBM big sheets technology
– IBM’s open source contact points and interests like Apache Lucene (is OYE out?)
– The Internet of Things (that think)
– business intelligence metrics and methods apart from Big Data
– CMIS
– ilog, business rules, Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS), Websphere and ECM BPM
– databases aren’t probably as ungeeky as I thought (ok, haven’t checked there since long)
– the book I was kindly given by its authors (got me autographed copy) – “The Art of Enterprise Information Architecture – a systems-based approach for unlocking business insight”

Some of things I need to put some time thinking about include:
– why, where and what for to integrate Cognos and SPSS into Lotus (where does it fit in best? Quickr? Connections?)
– social media analytics vs. social media monitoring (business roles and processes? can we identify best practices? how to integrate and complement human insight with number crunching beasts? …)
– business ecosystem dynamics (partnering & competing & complementing) – covers areas from Sharepoint to Lotus to XYZ, but also overall the consulting landscape. Are there things to learn from these big, hairy projects that can be applied to the sole, geek consultant business as well? More of a business model innovation thing I guess.
– what does it mean if we want to go from “sense and respond” to “anticipate, shape and transform”? What to integrate into enterprise collaboration consulting from the “information on demand” learnings?
– and finally – why I am not seeing more GNU/Linux desktops here – everybody and their dog are using XP et al. – not to speaking of the Office users everywhere. Yuck.

And there’s also a lot to check out that’s coming in via the Google I/O in San Francisco. More cool stuff to geek around with when having not yet a z/OS machine to play around with …