If someone would have told me, some time last year, that things were going to be this busy at this time of the year, I would have told them they would be crazy! Alas, it is me the one who is going crazy! Wonderfully crazy, if I may say so! With no time to continue finalising the drafts I have been putting together for the IBM Web 2.0 and Beyond Summit, with which I am going to take another approach, as a new experiment, and see how things would go from there (See if I can finally push them through), here I am putting together another blog post to share with you folks the details of another trip I will be embarking on very shortly.

Yes, indeed, I will be on the road again! This time around to Hamburg, Germany, and as early as next week to attend an external conference whose line-up put together so far is rather fascinating and impressive: Next Conference, a.k.a. Next08 - Realtime. At the same time that I will be attending the event, I have been invited to participate as one of the speakers (Have got a keynote session at 2.45 p.m. CET on May 15th) and will have the great honour of sharing the stage with one of the folks I have been following for quite some time now and for whom I have got plenty of admiration accumulated over the course of the years. Yes, I am talking about JP Rangaswami, author from Confused of Calcutta and today Managing Director of BT Design for BT Group, according to the Wikipedia.

If you care for a moment to check out the agenda you would be able to see the good amount of great speakers that will be there, too. Some of them folks I have been following, and violently agreeing with all along, for quite some time as well, but who I have never met face to face and next week may be the perfect chance to do so. Examples like Stowe Boyd, yes, that edgling, Steve Rubel (The one and only!), Stefan Kellner (From Plazes), Gunter Dueck (Fellow IBM colleague who has done some tremendous piece of work on Knowledge Management and data warehouses), Leisa Reichelt (Author of the super fine Disambiguity) and the list goes on and on and on.

Thus with that specific agenda and impressive list of amazing speakers, you can imagine that the excitement is starting to grow inside of me quite a bit. More than anything else, because it is just right around the corner and can’t wait to get there and continue to learn from all of these thought leaders who have been pioneering in the Social Computing and Enterprise 2.0 spaces for quite a bit already!

In case you are wondering what I would be talking about at the event, I am sure that, if you have been following this blog for a while, you would already have a sense of what it will be about. Yes, indeed, about my experiment on giving up on e-mail, work related e-mail, that is. And with the well known title (Put together already by Craig Cmehil and Ed Stephens, respectively) of "Thinking out of the Inbox - More Collaboration through less e-mail". I have already finished the slide deck and this time around it is very much public, for open consumption, outside of the firewall, so once I get the heads up from the conference organisers I will be sharing the deck over here, after I upload it into Slideshare.

Yes, almost ready, indeed! You may be wondering when I am planning on getting there, right? Well, I will be arriving on the 13th, at around mid-day and will be leaving Hamburg on the 17th of May late in the evening. So if you fancy getting together for a drink or two, or to catch up with a lovely conversation while I am there, do not hesitate to contact me and we will arrange something, I am sure. For now, signing off and checking out some further details from the overall conference itself, which I am sure is going to be one of those special events where I might get to finally figure out whether I am a centroid or an edgling. Or something in between, who knows heh

Tags: Conference Events, Next Conference, Next08, Realtime, IBM, Hamburg, Germany, JP Rangaswami, Confused of Calcutta, BT Group, Stowe Boyd, Edgling, Centroid, Steve Rubel, Stefan Kellner, Plazes, Gunter Dueck, Lisa Reichelt, Disambiguity, Craig Cmehil, Ed Stephens, Slideshare, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Communities, Learning, Innovation, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Marketing 2.0, Mobile 2.0, Media 2.0, e-mail, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media

I was just on the verge of posting over here in this blog the first of three posts that I have put together sharing some of the various highlights from the IBM Web 2.0 and Beyond summit, along with one other blog post detailing my experience while I was in NYC for a couple of days, but then I realised that each of them are rather lenghthy entries and since yesterday I created a couple of blog posts over here already I thought I would go easy with some light blogging today in preparation for what’s ahead in the next couple of days

So, with all of that said, I am just going to put together a few lines in here to let folks know that, once again, I will be on the road travelling to meet up with a couple of customers. This time around, as you may have been able to check through my Dopplr account already, next week, on the 19th of May, and till the 22nd, travelling to Barcelona and with a fully packed agenda for the 20th and 21st meeting various clients to discuss Social Computing within the Enterprise, and the kind of impact Social Software is having within the corporate world.

I will be coming back on the 22nd and since I already got the flight tickets and everything I just need to worry about the hotel, although I have been provided with some excellent recommendations already. Probably staying in the city center to be able to move easily and quickly, too! I doubt I would be getting much free time during the course of the 20th and 21st, specially during the working hours, but other than that it looks as if I am going to be pretty free for the rest of the time.

Thus fancy meeting up? How about some lovely tapas, a couple of beers here and there and all of that on the beach?!?! That’s the plan I have already set up with Tom Raftery, who earlier on today contacted me through Twitter to let me know that he got notified by Dopplr that we would be both going to the same city at the same time! How cool is that? (Dopplr ROCKS!!!) He is going to be there for the Startup 2.0 event, while I will be meeting up with customers, but it sounds like a really cool plan to me! Not only will I be able to finally meet up with him in real life, but I would be able to catch up with the event he will be attending with his highlights while I treat him for a drink or two heh

I know as well that Ferdy Rodenas lives in Barcelona, so that’s probably going to make it easy as well to meet up with someone I have been looking forward meeting up for a little while now, after all of our online interactions in various different places, just like Tom.

Thus there you go. We got a plan. Tapas, beers, a bunch of good friends and all of that on the beach, because I am sure the weather is going to be rather nice. Want to meet up, if you are around? Do let us know. Through a comment over here, or on Tom’s blog or Ferdy’s or hook up with us on Twitter. Probably the easiest way. Hope to see you there!

(Not sure just yet whether I would be able to blog about the outcome of the meetings with these customers, you would need to wait for a few more days, but if I can, I surely will, because so far the the scenarios are just perfect on one of the core arguments that I use for my pitch on Social Software in the Enterprise. Stay tuned for more to come…)

Tags: IBM, Travelling, Trip, Barcelona, Customer Meetings, Dopplr, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, Innovation, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Tom Raftery, Twitter, Startup 2.0, Events, Ferdy, Ferdy Rodenas, Tapas, Beers, Beach, Life, Work, Balance

Goodness! I cannot believe it’s been three months already! Three months since my working life became ever so much more productive than ever before! Three months since I decided that enough was enough and made the blunt move of giving up on e-mail, i.e. work related e-mail. Three months since I decided that it’s about time social software gets a chance to enhance the way I work. And, boy, has it surely been quite a ride! They say that time flies when you are having fun, and, as I am putting together this blog entry with the weekly progress report, I guess that certainly has been the case.

As I have mentioned at the beginning of the week, this was going to be quite an interesting week, since for the first time in 11 years I have been working in the IT field, I have just been enjoying the rare occasion of having three national bank holidays in a row, followed by the weekend, while the rest of my colleagues have continued working as usual. Thus you would expect that things may have been relatively busy, or, at least, just as good as it has been over the last few weeks, right? Well, things have been even better! Here is the weekly progress report screen shot:

WOW! 27 e-mails! Yes, that is right! A new low in the total amount of incoming e-mails for a single week! Sweet!  If I was ever looking for a nice way to celebrate the three months mark since I started with this new experiment I guess I couldn’t, perhaps, have a better one. I am not even sure whether I should continue calling it an experiment any longer, since it has already become a reality for me, at least. Three months, I guess, is a good time to stop calling it that way and start looking for something else. Or just simply venture into implying a new way of interacting, collaborating and sharing your knowledge with other knowledge workers. Either way, not too worried about looking out for definitions

For the rest not much more to share at this point in time, except for one particular gem I keep bumping into from various other folks who have been blogging about it and which I think would make an interesting connection with this particular blog post. For quite some time now, one of the questions that I keep coming up against all over the place is how do I keep up with everything that is going around in the social computing space? Most folks seem to think it is easier to manage your time through e-mail than through social software, when to me it is quite the opposite. It is way easier, and much more effective, to manage your time through social computing tools than through e-mail. And now there is something else I can refer folks to that could help answer the question quite nicely as well.

Check out Clay Shirky’s keynote session over at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco where you would be able to listen / read about some really fascinating stuff that Gina Trapani, over at Lifehacker, has put together quite nicely as a very thought-provoking summary in Where You Find the Time to Spend Online:

"We’re waking up from the "collective bender" of mindlessly watching sitcoms and instead, we’re choosing instead to spend our free time volunteering, interacting, and Web 2.0′ing online."

Just.Spot.On!!! And the same would apply to me, except that instead of T.V., which I rarely watch anyway, to be honest, it’s the time I save on processing / working through work e-mail that helps me free up enough time to collaborate and share my knowledge with other knowledge workers using social software tools. Because, after all, how much time do you spend on a daily basis working through your e-mail. One sitcom? Two? Three sitcoms perhaps?

If a couple of days ago I created a blog post over here where I shared some further details on a recent podcasting episode I recorded with Jon Mell, from Trovus, over at Case Study Using Wiki and Social Software in the Enterprise - Conversation with Jon Mell, I thought I would follow that up with another podcast I was invited to chime in earlier on in the week with Matt Moore, from Engineers without Fears, where I shared some extended commentary on my experiment of giving up on e-mail, i.e. work related e-mail. And the interesting thing from this particular podcast I participated in was the fact that we did it with a couple more guests: Patrick Lambe, from Straights Knowledge & Green Chameleon, and Alex Manchester, from Melcrum - Connecting Communicators, two of the folks I have been following up on the Knowledge Management & Social Computing spaces for quite a while and whom I was really looking forward to exchanging some ideas on the topic!

Thus with that initial setup, off we went into what turned out to be, in my opinion and if I may say so, a fascinating discussion on the overall topic of stop using e-mail at work and use, perhaps, other much more productive and collaborative tools, within the social software space. So interesting that in the end what was supposed to be a single podcasting episode turned out to be three (Yes, three!) for a total amount of nearly 50 minutes!

Matt Moore himself has already blogged about each of the different episodes, so instead of just me detailing what you will find in each of them I am just going to keep things short and share over here the table of contents that Matt already put together. That way you can get busy right where the meat is and enjoy one of the best conversations I have had on this topic in a little while now. Here are the links with the contents then:

- Download Part 1 now (16:48, 4.0Mb)

01:00 - Luis describes his email detox moment in 2007.
03:10 - Luis challenges his email correspondents within IBM.
06:10 - How do you bring people round to the post-email world?
11:00 - Where is email appropriate?
13:00 - Instant messaging & social networking.

- Download Part 2 now (20:23, 4.8 Mb)

00:00 - Patrick raises the infrastructure question.
03:00 - Luis brings up wikis.
04:10 - Luis talks about discussing the detox with his team.
07:55 - The laziness issue.
09:00 - Do we love email?
10:00 - Alex mentions email overload.
11:00 - Generational issues.
13:00 - Patrick raises the politics question.
15:00 - Luis busts the whole thing wide open.

- Download the final part of the email detox podcast

00:00 - Alex agrees with Luis on email politics.
01:20 - Humans as political animals - in public or in private?
03:00 - Should we be selling tools or solutions?
06:00 - Applying social software to business problems.
08:00 - The email detox workout video.
10: 00 - Wrap up & next steps.

And that’s it! Hope you enjoy it, just as much as we did getting together and exchanging some ideas on how it is really possible to move away from work related e-mail and still be as productive as ever, if not more, making extensive use of other more collaborative tools, like social software tools. The perfect segway for my next blog post where I will be sharing the weekly progress report on what’s happened this week. Stay tuned!

Matt, Patrick and Alex, a real pleasure taking part on the podcasting episodes with you guys and thanks much for such refreshing conversation! Excellent stuff!

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Conversations, Dialogue, Openness, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communication, Jon Mell, Trovus, Matt Moore, Engineers without Fears, Patrick Lambe, Straights Knowledge, Green Chameleon, Alex Manchester, Melcrum, Connecting Communicators, Podcasting, Podcasts, Episodes

Third bank holiday in a row and still enjoying the gorgeous weather out there! Too nice out there to be sitting in front of the computer, but I just thought I would share a few lines over here to point out to you folks something that I am sure you would find interesting and relevant, specially if you have been following my experiment on giving up e-mail, i.e. work related e-mail.

Remember Jon Mell, from Trovus, who I have talked about about a month ago and who put together the superb blog post "Wikis as alternatives to email - find the ROI" where he built up a rather compelling business case for my new mission on giving up on e-mail? Well, just the other day I finally got to meet up Jon through Skype and we have a superb conversation about how the experiment was going and the kind of impact social computing is having within the enterprise in order to drive new ways, perhaps better, to share your knowledge and collaborate with other peers.

As a result of that conversation we decided to put together a podcast, where over the course of nearly 35 minutes, we discussed a number of items based on a good set of questions that Jon put together and which clearly detail some of the extended commentary I have been receiving from all over the place. To give you a sense of those questions we cover during the podcasting episode, here you have got them:

1. What has the reaction been from colleagues and friends in the industry?
2. Has anyone got frustrated / annoyed (said “why can’t you just send me an email?”)
3. How much time do you spend using social media tools?
4. Given you mostly use IBM’s internal tools, how do you communicate with customers / colleagues outside of IBM?
5. Do you think it’s possible for a 100% customer facing individual (eg. a brand sales rep) to reduce email so drastically as well?
6. Have you gained any net time? Is there value in using these tools even if you haven’t?
7. Aside from time-saving have you gained any insight / learned new things from interacting with social tools that would not have been possible by email?

You would be able to download the podcast from this particular URL:

- Case study podcast on escaping from email in corporate world.

And at the same time you could also have a look into Jon’s related blog post on that very same subject under "Case study using wiki and social software in the Enterprise - conversation with Luis Suarez", where he gets to detail as well some of the key items he took away from the podcasting episode. I am not going to detail all of them, you can surely go ahead and read further from his blog post, but, as a teaser, here you have got a couple of them, which I found really good and very relevant as well as incredibly descriptive of what I am trying to achieve with giving up on e-mail while at work to still get the job done:

"- The main incentive for the content provider (Luis) was to prevent the same question being asked of him over and over again via email
- Instead of getting answers from a person, he believes in getting answers from your network. This way if Luis is too busy to reply instantly, someone else will
- There was emotional relief and reduction in stress level of having to face a sea of unread email after some time away
- Email still has its place - private and confidential exchanges of information between two parties"

There are a few more insights from Jon over at his blog post, but I am just going to leave things as is over here, so you can head over there and read some more and then, perhaps, over a lovely cup of coffee / tea enjoy the conversation we had together and which trigger the creation of such podcast.

One thing for sure that I am really glad about this particular experiment I have started a couple of months back, is that fact that not only is it helping me become much more productive than ever before, but it is also allowing me to get to know some other folks out there who are also very much involved with social computing and its adoption within the Enterprise. Lots of incredibly smart talent out there, not to be missed. Like Jon Mell’s. I am glad I decided to get things going way back then and share my experiences as well outside of the firewall, because thanks to it, I have now subscribed to one really good blog and met someone who is bringing forward lots of great ideas into provoking that cultural change we would all need to go through, at some point, if we would want to talk Enterprise 2.0.

And really really glad to finally being able to share and exchange ideas with Jon! Great conversation!

(But not to worry, there is just one other little surprise I will be sharing in the next few hours. For now … getting ready to go and enjoy live Il barbiere di Siviglia)

Tags: IBM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, e-mail, email, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Computing, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Innovation, Productivity, Conversations, Dialogue, Openness, Progress Reports, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Communication, Jon Mell, Trovus, Wikis, ROI, Return On Investment, Business Case, Case Study, Enterprise Adoption, Social Software Adoption, Podcast, Podcasting, Episodes, Opera, Il barbiere di Siviglia, El Barbero de Sevilla, The Barber of Seville

Yesterday was one of those days where I didn’t have much time to come over here to share the daily blog post. Reason why? Well, I was preparing, and getting things ready, for that rare occasion I am experiencing at the moment of having three national bank holidays in a row! (Yes, three!! You are reading that right!) Starting with Koninginnedag and then Ascension Day (Which in The Netherlands it’s two days, instead of just one) I am going to be offline enjoying some gorgeous weather till next week Monday! Not sure about you, but I *love* short weeks like this one! First one I can remember and one I could well get very well used to.

Thus as you can imagine I haven’t had much free time just yet to finish up those various blog post drafts I keep wanting to share over here at some point. But, like I have said it already, not to worry, they will come. However, today I just wanted to share with you something that I am sure you are going to enjoy. It is actually a couple of video links that match quite nicely the festive time I have been enjoying whole day today.

The first one is actually a video clip which is part of a videocasting series that is going on inside IBM and which is having a huge success at the moment, to say the least. Some time ago, my good friend, and fellow IBM colleague, George Faulkner came together, with a couple of his colleagues, with this bright idea of encouraging IBMers to shoot short video clips showing where they were working, i.e. the IBM building site, customer location, on the road, whatever, but mostly from the IBM office wherever it may have well been in the world. And that is how "This is where I work…" was born and why, from the very first moment, it became quite a show!

Thousands and thousands of downloads have gone through already and, funny enough, I never thought I would be taking part of it, since I always doubted people would be interested in my home office location. However, while I was in NYC, after having finished a superb week at the IBM Web 2.0 and Beyond Summit event, I spent a couple of days with George, and a bunch of other IBMers, and George, as brilliant as he is coming up with some serendipitous discoveries and fun activities, proposed to me to shoot a short video with several fragments sharing my thoughts on my stay in NYC’s IBM sites and do a clip on "This is where I work … today!". 

He thought we could take a few pictures here and there and get things rolling, but I thought we could actually do it with a little bit of a twist and decide to put to a good service, as usual, my Nokia N95, and we went video. If you have been reading this blog for a while, you would know how much in love I am with the N95 device (And you would probably know my reaction to other fancier mobile devices -no names mentioned in here - hehe) and after those couple of days, even so much more now!

I have been getting lots of comments about the quality of both the sound and the video footage for a mobile device and all I can say is that the N95 beats any other device in this category by quite a bit! One of the best purchases I have done in my short life buying gadgets. And the proof is this blog post.

Thus attached, and without much further ado, here you have got the video clip from that series "This is where I work … today" where you would be able to see yours truly, in various locations throughout the city, talking about what it is like working for a large corporation in the city. All done on the fly, with no script, no pauses, no premeditated wording going around, just pure, informal, on the spot, good fun!

George did both the video shoot and the post-production, more than anything else because he is much more talented than myself, for sure! And if not judge for yourselves. Here I am, talking to you from NYC in front of a video camera for the first time in my life and having a great time at it!

Yes, indeed, after you have watched this video clip I am sure you would understand now, in case you haven’t done so thus far, why I *love* working for the company I work, and why I am still enjoying it just as if it were my first day 11 years ago!! You got that one right, because of the people!

Does it ring a bell? Well, here is another good reason. A bonus clip I put together myself with the Nokia N95 while in NYC, enjoying some of the lovely spring weather I was fortunate to witness throughout the whole week!

Of course, I will be back!! (Even if that means bringing back with me another nasty bug that may take me down again for a couple of days! hehe)

(Time now to go and enjoy a long walk through one of my favourite places over here…)

Tags: Holidays, Bank Holiday, Koninginnedag, Ascension Day, IBM, George Faulkner, Videocasting, Vodcasts, This Is Where I Work, Nokia, N95, Serendipity, New York, New York City, Central Park, 11 Madison Ave, 590 Madison, Fun, Fun Stuff, Work Life Balance, Balance, Life, Work, Things That Matter, Spring, Experiences, Unforgettable Experiences