Buzzing beim WikiWednesday Stuttgart

Tja, das war eigentlich abzusehen – der neunte WikiWednesday in Stuttgart ging nicht ohne Verluste über die Bühne. Konkret haben wir einen alten Hasen mit der kurzfristigen Ortsänderung – und trotz Umleitungsschildern – verloren in die Irre geführt. Sorry Dirk – tut uns leid. Du hast viel verpasst, das war gestern ein sehr spannendes und gut besuchtes Meeting. Danke an alle Anwesenden und Mitgestalter!

Wiki Wednesday Stuttgart

Zuerst aber ein großer Dank an den Coworking Space Stuttgart, der uns gestern einen Raum, Beamer und auch alles andere zur Verfügung gestellt hat (Kekse!). Bei Flickr gibt es einige Fotos von der Veranstaltung, da sieht man auch dass es schöne Seminarräume im CoWorking Space hat (hint!). Mehrere der Bilder wurden schon während der Veranstaltung bei Google Buzz gepostet – dem Mittelpunkt unserer Diskussion gestern abend.

Unsere Agenda war ja vielfältig – kein Wunder, bereits in der Vergangenheit haben wir immer wieder die Zukunft der Zusammenarbeit und der Wissensarbeit diskutiert. Buzz ist hier (wie auch Wave) nur ein weiterer Schritt in eine Welt in der das Wort Wiki mehr als Verb, denn als Pronomen verwendet wird …

Entsprechend haben wir gestern abend eine Tour durch Buzz unternommen, inklusive Tipps und Tricks:

Daneben haben wir auch einige Ideen für das WikiCAMP am 6. März 2010 bei der CeBIT gesammelt – diese trage ich noch zusammen und stelle sie dann im Mixxt-Wiki ein …

Es geht los – CoWorking in Stuttgart

Genug des Redens, seit dieser Woche wird gebuzzt geschafft im Beehive Stuttgart CoWorking Space Stuttgart der Name steht noch nicht fest – aber ich bin mir mittlerweile nicht mehr sicher ob die Buzz-Metapher noch sinnvoll ist …

Bis Anfang März, wenn wir die offizielle Eröffnung planen, möchten wir Euch die Gelegenheit bieten, die Alpha-Phase des Coworking Stuttgart mitzuerleben und zu gestalten und – warum nicht – an eigenen Projekten zu arbeiten! Auch wenn nicht gleich am 15.02. die ganze Infrastruktur vorhanden sein wird, sondern erstmal nur Tische, Stühle, Internet und Kaffee 😉 laden wir euch herzlich ein, zwischen dem 15.02. und 28.02. im Rahmen unserer Coworking Test Days, eure Projekte und Laptops mitzubringen und Coworking gratis zu erleben!

CoWorking Test Days? Am Rosenmontag werde ich meine Arbeit (Laptop) und einen Kuchen einpacken und zur inoffiziellen Einweihung da sein, ich freue mich darauf …

Waving bei der LeWeb

leweb logoKleine Sünden werden direkt bestraft – nachdem ich gestern nicht nur ein Google-T-Shirt bekommen, sondern auch kritische Fragen beim Google Wave Workshop gestellt habe fehlt die Hälfte meiner Eingaben in die Dokumentationswave von Tag 1 der LeWeb …

Klar, wir sind noch in der Alpha-Phase aber das kann es doch wirklich nicht sein. OK, vielleicht schafft es der Wave-Server ja doch noch die Änderungen wieder hervorzuzaubern – wenn nein sind das wohl die Nachteile wenn man sich “on the cutting edge” bewegt.

Information overload in Enterprise 2.0 and waving a hello to LeWeb

between a rock and a hard placeI’m stuck in the midst of conferences and end-of-year-accelerating projects, both adding to the workload (low-quality rock and the hard place picture of Homer ‘course copyrighted by Fox, obviously).

And next week will be filled to the brim with LeWeb. Still I wanted to conclude with me looking back at the e2conf in San Francisco and the E20SUMMIT in Frankfurt (yes, will post my other promised posts now …). One needs to use a blogging opportunity if it’s there, that is before all the interruptions that result from being better connected in this social web world will result in another dropdown of productivity on Monday morning …

This might well be one of the symptoms Kathleen Culver diagnosed at e20conf – that the attention erosion that comes with mutliple, real-time and intertwined activity streams may result in “an inability to perform deep analysis on whatever it is you’re working on”:

Research is suggesting the Enterprise 2.0 technologies might introduce negative impacts productivity, decision quality and job satisfaction, in addition to the positive ones. What do we need to be aware of as we unleash these solutions on employees?

[…]

Join me in challenging companies to address these soft challenges of Enterprise 2.0. Challenges that can potentially dilute the benefit of E2.0 and maybe even make employees less productive and happy. Either take a moment to consider these issues when plunging forward with deployments or add your comments to the blog so we can raise the visibility of these challenges.

On the other hand I am a great fan of Clay Shirky’s meme of “filter failure, not information overload” – thus I am constantly on the search for better tools to filter and sort. That said, this constant search may be adding to the overload again …

logoYet I am expecting that the directory wave I prepared for LeWeb can help in collecting, systematizing and refining the various real-time content streams. Wave can be a very capable interactive venue, that’s allowing and enabling freeform collaboration, that is accesible and searchable by all, and that can help us master the “Information Candy Superstore” that LeWeb sure is going to be.

I told you already that I’m one of the official bloggers this year, hence you may find my writings, tweets and posts aggregated on many more places, Steph compiled some of the meta places to follow in here:

[…] You can also follow them all on Twitter with the official bloggers list. During the conference, you will be able to find all their posts about LeWeb’09 on a single page, with a single feed (thanks to Superfeedr). Another way to access their publications is through the LeWeb’09 Pearltree — just click on the Official Bloggers branch.

Looking back at the E20SUMMIT, part 2: Wave

Enterprise 2.0 SUMMITSo, I am in the midst of collecting and reviewing some of my learnings from the E20SUMMIT last week – let me start with Wave (after focussing on the people of the E20SUMMIT in part 1 here), and we’ll see how many parts will follow. While this Wave at conferences evaluation may seem not really focussed on Enterprise 2.0 at first it offers some insights and learnings for the ongoing discussions of adoption and organizational readiness.

What do I mean? i think that during the SUMMIT both on-site and remote participants showed deep understanding of the usage of Wave for a conference backchannel – we’ve seen mature usage, ie. nobody misinterpreted the master- or the subwaves as a forum, as twitter substitute or as “facebook wall page”. People chose the channels that were most effective and they were professional at this.

Contrast this with the one wave that was filled during the BarCamp Hamburg (search for it with tag:bchh09), the two days after the SUMMIT – here the public wave evolved into a wild hodgepodge of close to 300 blips, together with added videos and stuff – all in all, an excellent example of what happens when geeks playfully explore a new thing 😉

wavelogoI assume that the difference is the result of provisioning of some pre-filled waves and an initial stucture – much like scaffolding a wiki this prepared and leveled the playing field, made it easier for new wavers to enter the E20SUMMIT wave space, find their way around and contribute in a meaningful way. That said, it’s probably an insight for our expectations regarding our employee’s readiness and competencies in using innovative collaboration infrastructures – even geeks on the cutting edge of the social web (like BarCampers typically are) aren’t grokking and mastering the new collaboration approaches easily. Scaffolding seems to be an essential element of enabling them (and their much less geeky colleagues). As such it’s a part of the “implementation effort” (in quoting signs because as we’ve learned at the SUMMIT implementation means different things to different people), I collect and systematize under the notions of “kennen-können-wollen-sollen”, ie. “know about it – master it – want it – be obliged (and ordered to)”. Scaffolding supports all four areas, and consequentially enabled the sustainable growth of the E20SUMMIT waves …

Mid-stage evaluation of live Waving at E20SUMMIT

wavelogoI think our little experiment turned up some pretty good conversations and real-time collaboration success stories. Not all of the prepared waves got filled extensively, but that’s ok. Not all of the attendees are bringing their laptops to a conference, and among those that have, not all are on Wave. So I am pretty satisfied and think that this is an excellent add-on and complements the “behind the scenes” doumentation in the wiki, the live-blogging and -tweeting around the E20SUMMIT (and of course the provisioning of the presentation slides).

Check out the Google Wave backchannel at E20SUMMIT

Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT After some good experiences at both the BarCamp Munich and the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco it’s probably a good thing to expand the Google Wave experiment onto the upcoming E20SUMMIT. And while we don’t know how many of the attendees have got a Wave ID already, the more geeky ones sure have. And when Joachim Niemeier and I asked on Twitter if we should curate a Wave backchannel to the conference enough people raised their hand. After all there’s more than Twitter for getting more out of conferences – even when it can’t beat the face-to-face experience.

So here’s the idea, we’ve set up a public Google wave which will act as a central repository and catalogue of the various sub-Waves people are free to open (find it by searching for tag:e20swith:public on Wave). And we’ll provide some public “pre-filled” waves too, linked from there. These pre-filled public waves are there to give some framework and structure so that the actual working in the waves during the conference is easier. Much like pre-filling a wiki for sake of better adoption I think …

You are free to add more waves to the catalogue – after all it’s about crowd-sourcing various voices before and after the event. And those individual waves may be both closed to some collaborators or open to everyone, so it’s important to note that once you’ve opened up the wave to everyone (by adding easypublic@appspot.com to the wave) you can’t go back to closed (if there’s a way to accomplish this please let me know).

Moreover I think it’s a good idea to ask presenters if it’s OK to document their presentations in Wave – especially when you’ve opened it up to the world. Much like live-tweeting or -blogging it’s professional decency to respect the speaker’s wishes. Then again, and much alike the “wiki situation” – it’s probably cooler to have open waves for everyone from the beginning.