Tags: IBM, Innovation, InnovationJam, Jams, ThinkPlace, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Ideas, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Communities, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Conversations, Ratings, Tagging, Tags, Forums, Innovation That Matters

Those of you who have been asking me lately what IBM has been up to in the space of innovation, after the great success of the InnovationJam, are going to find this particular weblog post interesting and rather relevant. You may have even seen it already, since there have been quite a few conversations about it, with some really good and relevant descriptions over here as well, for instance; including as well some initial announcements.

In the past I have been weblogging about this particular IBM initiative that keeps driving innovation behind the firewall, which is called ThinkPlace. You may have seen already though how things are starting to go beyond the firewall and as such that is also part of the purpose from this particular weblog entry. To point you to a recent new initiative coming up from IBM where a few weeks ago they have launched that same internal application, ThinkPlace, but for external use, so that not only IBMers, but also everyone out there who would want to chime would have an opportunity to help drive innovation that matters not only for ourselves, but also for our world.

And it all got started with an important challenge: Which areas of innovation hold the best promise for enabling economic development in Africa? You can certainly go ahead and click on the link to check it out. The challenge is now closed. But during the first few weeks that it took place (I was travelling in between so didn’t get a chance to cover it as it would deserve) there were about 80 different ideas that were generated with several hundred comments from both IBMers and other Internet users who decided to chime in on the important issues that would have a clear impact on improving the current situation. Out of those ideas there is a whole bunch of them who have been adopted by Catalysts and which will be brought into implementation making it not just a nice initiative to have, but one with a real impact. An impact that everyone has been able to make and which will give us all a chance to help improve different areas in multiple ways.

With this particular URL link you would be able to find out some more about what would happen to those ideas and how things will move forward, but not to worry, because there is a new challenge up and running at the moment. One that I think this audience would find quite an interesting one: Open collaboration gets more — open. Now what? and which I will think would drag a whole bunch of us into participating further. It is basically a challenge that will help drive the way we interact and collaborate in the near future, specially with the focus on social computing and Web 2.0.

A few ideas have been submitted already and the comments, the ratings and the tags keep flowing nicely into the whole thing. So I bet that in a few days time things will be even much more participative than whatever they may well be at this point in time.

So there you have it, IBM is helping drive innovation beyond the firewall with an application we have been using internally for a couple of years now, called ThinkPlace. An application that allows you to submit an idea, actively collaborate in it with a bunch of folks, you can also rate it and tag it, you can share your interest about it and, most importantly, you can keep the conversations going in such a way that you would be able to see how a number of those ideas would be adopted by catalysts and therefore make it into an implementation stage at some point. Oh, and you can subscribe to the Atom feeds as well so that you can keep an eye on the different ideas that get submitted and see how you can contribute to them. Pretty neat, if you ask me.

I know that there may be folks out there who would want to find out some more about how ThinkPlace works and how they can get things going, and for those I can certainly imagine that the best place to get started is the ThinkPlace homepage. From there you can check out the FAQ section, or the Forum (Yes, there is one there, too!), and whatever else that may be able. And after you have gone through all of that, you are ready to go. Ready to share your best ideas, get other people to collaborate with you in improving them, share your knowledge with others and keep innovating by coming up with refined ideas that would then be making it through the implementation stage.

Who said that innovation that matters would be so difficult, right? Well, with ThinkPlace things just got a little bit easier for you. Are you ready to tap into it and continue making a difference? I surely hope so. I will see you there some time soon and keep an eye on all of those challenges as every now and then there would be a new one where you can contribute with your thoughts and ideas! Let’s do it!

(One last thing, you would notice that in order to participate in ThinkPlace you would need to register creating an IBM ID, so if you do not have one, I would suggest you go and create one. Takes a couple of minutes and you would be able to use it for a whole bunch of the ibm.com services. And, yes, I know, it would great if ThinkPlace would make use of the OpenID services. Perhaps at some point in time. Who knows …)

Tags: IBM, Learning 2.0, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Stephen Collins, Trib, Twitter, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Communities, Slideshare

During the course of the day yesterday a very good friend of mine, and fellow IBM colleague, and myself had a very interesting discussion on how social computing was actually impacting the education system in multiple countries and opening up new ways of collaboration and knowledge sharing for students, teachers, tutors, parents, etc. etc. over the last couple of years and how it is certainly going to help prepare the way for Learning 2.0. I wish I would have the opportunity to share some more insights on such fascinating topic, since, after all, that has been my background for a number of years, so I guess at some point I will come around to it.

The thing is that at some point during our conversation he mentioned if I knew of presentation materials that would be simple enough to provide strong messages that would demonstrate the value of social computing in a learning environment. So much so that it would not focus on most of the tech jargon behind it, but just simply cut through the cheese and get down to the details on why schools should bother looking into and considering social software. Back then, I mentioned to him a good number of different resources, available internally, and also some suggestions from my public blogroll where he could get some materials to finally work on such presentation.

But then, after a couple of hours, since we finished our conversation, I found out that one of the folks I have been following for a while, my good friend Stephen Collins, and also a Twitter user, shared the following tweet:

"Woohoo! Slideshare has listed my WebJam talk as a featured presentation! http://tinyurl.com/ytg86m"

So, knowing him and the fine piece of work he has been doing lately as well around the subject of Social Computing and its adoption within the corporate world and beyond, I decided to check it out and head over to his slide deck in Slideshare and WOW! Exactly, what I was looking for. The type of presentation materials that delivers a key and powerful message on how social computing can contribute towards helping whatever business (Or school, for that matter!) become smarter at what they do and with a whole lot less effort in the process.

"Collaboration is everything" for sure. That is the main key point that you will get out of such a wonderful slide deck. And which, if anything, would help a wider audience understand some of the key concepts behind social computing without having to worry about the technicalities. In short, one of those presentations that you can show to those folks who would want to know what the fuss is all about, but without having to struggle with all of the technical jargon that you get to find in most presentations at the moment. Very impressive, indeed!

And since Steve shared it over in Slideshare, here you have got the embedded presentation materials so that you can watch them directly from here:

Very powerful, don’t you think? Yes, indeed, this is one of those presentations that I am surely going to share it with those folks out there who would want to have a good overview of what social computing is but without giving me weird looks in the process. Good stuff!

Thanks much, Steve, for sharing the deck with us in Slideshare. Well done!

(Oh, did I mention as well that it takes you about three minutes to go through it? I bet you will not give your audience a chance to get bored with it. For sure!)

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 Conference, Collaboration Technologies, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Web 2.0, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Personal Knowledge Management, PKM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Social Networks, Communities, Learning, Olivia Loy, Social Media Today

If you have been a long time reader from this particular weblog, you could probably remember how I was lamenting the fact that last year I missed what was probably the event of events regarding social computing and social media, both from a consumer and from a corporate perspective. Yes, indeed, at the time it was the Collaboration Technologies conference. This year it has actually been renamed to Enterprise 2.0 - The Collaboration Technologies Conference - Make the Shift to Enterprise 2.0.

And again, like last year, and due to a good number of different circumstances, that I may be able to relate at some stage, I am not going to be able to make it, even though Olivia Loy very kindly invited me to be press at the event (Of events, remember…). Yes, I know. Not again! But, unfortunately, it has happened again and there is very little I could do about it. As I said, very shortly I am hoping to be able to share some of the reasons as to why that is happening, but right now it is a no-go for me. Sigh.

Anyway, enough of that. Olivia has been fantastic and very understanding throughout and, of course, a very generous person, because she has also provided me with something I am going to share with the audience of this weblog. Basically, she has granted me with two free passes for the conference event itself that I can give out to anyone I would want, even if I cannot make it myself. How cool is that, eh? So, I thought that one thing I would do is to reward two of you, folks, out there who have been my faithful readers for some time, with one of those free passes so that you can get to attend the conference event I would have loved I would have been able to make, but that in the end it hasn’t worked out just right. At least, this time around.

So what is going to be the deal? Well, since most of you get to read my weblogs rather through my RSS / Atom feeds or going directly into the Web sites I am just going to leave it to the first couple of folks who get to visit http://elsua.net or http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/km/elsua and share a blog comment in either of these posts. Yes, I am going to duplicate this weblog entry and whoever gets to share the blog comment in either of them would get the free pass from me.

As simple as that! So if you were thinking about going, but didn’t find a chance or rather something else came up, but that got fixed and would love to go now, here is the chance for you to make it. Having me saying "Thank You!" for sticking there through thick and thin and here you have got this free pass.

I know that I would be missing a great deal by not making into the conference, but I am surely hoping that I would be able to catch up with it throughout the course of the event. I know that a whole bunch of the folks from the Social Media Today collective will be there, so would be able to keep an eye on things through them. But also I bet there would be plenty of people talking about it, just seeing the impressive agenda and group of keynote speakers that would be making it to the event of events, indeed!

Thus if you would want to be there, don’t hesitate, just head over to the main URL from this weblog post, share a comment with which you can leave your e-mail address (While placing the credentials of the blog comment) and I will give you the free pass. Remember, two free passes, so once they are gone, they are gone!

And looking forward to what promises to be one of those events that I am surely going to regret not making it to in a long while! But I am glad to see that, at least, two of the folks who read my weblogs would benefit from such opportunity. Go and grab it! Now!

(From here as well a big massive Thanks! to Olivia for her kind invitations and the free passes! It is greatly appreciated, Olivia! Thanks ever so much and hope to see you next year!)

Tags: Social Media Today, Bulldog Solutions, Robin Carey, Online Communities, Virtual Communities, Communities, Rohit Bhargava, Gina Bianchini, Craig Cmehil, Julie Wittes Schlack, Learning, Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Management, KM, Remote Collaboration, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Media, Social Software, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Twitter, Nancy White, Online Facilitation, Stephen Collins, Ning, Library 2.0, Pandemic Flu, Government

A couple of days ago I actually attended a Social Media Today event (Sponsored by Bulldog Solutions), facilitated by Robin Carey, on the subject of "The Art and Science of Forming Successful Online Communities" and I thought I would go ahead today and share with you a couple of thoughts that crossed my mind as I got to attend the webcast itself remotely. But, before I do that, let me just share with you as well that you can also watch the webcast yourself by going into the following URL and then click on the Join Event button. It lasts for a bit under one hour and can honestly say that it would be really worth while, specially if you are just getting into the fascinating world of virtual community building.

As you would be able to see from the link I shared above, the featured speakers were actually incredibly good. Very informative, knowledgeable, willing to share their experiences on community building and lots and lots of expertise on the subject. So, indeed, it couldn’t go wrong! And it didn’t. This is the kind of webcast that I would certainly recommend to anyone out there getting involved within the world of virtual community building as it would help you get plenty of great ideas on how you can get things going. If you actually get to watch the webcast you would be able as well to see a slide deck that was very helpful not only in introducing the speakers, but also in helping everyone get some of the key basics behind community building. As I said, a must watch for anyone out there interested in the subject of building online communities and get things off to a good start!

While I was attending the event, I decided to share as well some of the thoughts I found interesting in my twitterings, not only as a way to share some more snippets about the contents of the event, but also as a way for me to help me out later on when drafting this particular weblog post. Yes, indeed, that is one of the things that Twitter is very good at: share your quick thoughts on events that are happening so that you can revisit them at a later time as draft notes for your blog posts or whatever else. Pretty neat.

So from here onwards I am just going to share some of those thoughts I shared a couple of days ago. I must say something beforehand though. The webcast was a superb event from an educational and resourceful point of view, specially for people coming new to the world of online community building. However, for the folks who have been doing community building for a while it may not be just as useful. For instance, I was hoping that the aspects of knowledge sharing, collaboration and learning within online communities would be mentioned, as well as how communities are the main catalysts to help drive not only the adoption of social software within the corporate world, but also main key drivers of pure innovation. No barriers, no limitations, just connecting with others to share stuff on a common topic (Their passion!) and keep innovating.

Unfortunately, none of them were mentioned. Perhaps the perfect opportunity for an upcoming follow up session where these topics would be discussed: on how communities can help nurture a new wave of interactions where the power of the collective goes wild into helping us all work smarter and not necessarily harder. We shall see. For the time being here you have got my live thoughts from the event itself:

"- Interesting to see how the focus of the webcast hasn’t touched base on the knowledge sharing & learning aspects of online communities.
- Too much focus on tools & content, as usual. Disappointing, I must say
- Oh boy, watching slides that bring me back to the 90s!
- "People are more willing to share if they know & trust who they are sharing knowledge with" > Now you are talking!
- Business models for online communities? That’s a new one to me!
- Recruiting people for online communities? Oh my!
- Online facilitators are key to communities’ success. Amen to that! Where is Nancy White, when you need her? heh
- "The community makes the community, technology is just an enabler" > That’s just the best quote from the entire event & what I got out of
- A couple of interesting links from the webcast as well: http://blog.pandemicflu.gov/ (Which was then mentioned as well by Stephen Collins over at Government Blogging on how the government can engage in the world of the blogosphere by launching meaningful and provocative conversations on stuff that matters to us all! And I totally agree with that!)
- http://library20.ning.com/, to prove the point social networking is not just for the younger generations. Older generations get it, too!!"

Thus, as you would be able to see, quite a highly recommendable event to listen to whenever yo get a chance, and I am now really looking forward to the follow up, whenever that takes place…

Tags: Penny Edwards, Wikis, Corporate Adoption, Enterprise Adoption, Business, Feedback Poll, Business Value, Dennis McDonald, Survey, Social Computing Adoption, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Collaboration, Communities, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Remote Collaboration

A few days ago, while I was trying to settle back in from my trip to Paris and also right before I had my computer issues knocking me down for a couple of days, I received an e-mail from Penny Edwards asking me if I would be kind enough to contribute into a feedback poll she has been working on, trying to evaluate the management of wikis in different businesses. Now, most people who know me would probably let you know how I am not so keen on filling surveys all over the place, but in this particular case from Penny I am actually making an exception, because I strongly believe it is worth while the time spent on it. And here is why.

Penny is trying to evaluate the kind of impact that wikis are having within the corporate world and, for that matter as well, with smaller businesses, too. She realises how new technologies that have been available out there for a few years now are emerging more and more within the corporate firewall to help knowledge workers share their knowledge and collaborate with one another perhaps much more effectively than ever before and they are starting to show some promise.

So with that goal set up ahead she has put together a Management of Wikis in Business feedback poll, where she is actually asking us 30 different multiple choice questions where we can certainly share our thoughts about how our own businesses are starting to make extensive use of wikis behind the firewall. My good friend Dennis McDonald has already weblogged about it as well and has shared a short paragraph that Penny put together ass well that gives people a good idea of what the purpose of the poll is and it shows already some of the goals behind it:

"Penny Edwards is working on a study regarding managing wikis in business as part of her MBA Technology Management research with the Open University, UK. She has published a survey about wiki management on her wiki, focusing on people who use or manage wikis in the business environment. The survey takes approximately 10 minutes to complete. If you would like to help out, follow the link (http://pennyedwards.net/tiki-list_surveys.php) and fill in the survey. Your participation would be much appreciated."

As the above mentioned paragraph states, the poll takes you about 10 minutes. Actually it is a bit shorter than that, a bit over seven minutes and while going through the questions you can see how Penny has put together lots of thought to a good set of questions and through them you would be able to see how she nails it down as far as how most businesses are already making use of wikis. Pretty interesting stuff, because she is offering some really good tips on how to make the best out of the wiki, how you can build up a business case for it, and how you can get things going if you would want to get one started yourself, along with giving you a good idea of how much your business has been involved with wikis thus far.

Very very helpful, indeed, and worth while seven minutes of your time, don’t you think? I do hope you folks out there get a chance to spend a few minutes filling it in as well, so that, when she is ready to share the results with us, we would all have a much better understanding of how wikis are bringing together really good opportunities for boosting knowledge sharing and collaboration. That way, we can convince the powers that be that we need tools such as wikis in order to help bring knowledge sharing into the next level of interactions through the adoption of social computing for day to day business, which I guess is the main goal for most of us.

That is the main reason why I have agreed with her to fill in the poll first and then help get the word out there so that we can have enough meaningful data to build up better informed opinions as the kind of impact of these technologies within the business world. So whenever you get a chance go and fill in the feedback poll and let’s all wait in anticipation for the results because I bet they would be rather enlightening with very interesting and revealing data on how we can improve the overall experience of adopting social computing, and wikis in particular, within the enterprise.

Good luck, Penny, and look forward to seeing the results from the feedback poll! Good work!

Tags:  Innovation, Lenovo, Lenovo 3000 N100, Notebooks, ThinkPad, Mac, Formatting, Backups, E-Mail, iPod, Apple, Nokia, N95, Twitter, Social Media, Rich Media, Mobile 2.0, Social Software, Social Computing, Social Networking, Web 2.0, IBM

As you may have noticed, yesterday I didn’t get a chance to create a weblog post in here, although I got the chance to respond to a number of different weblog posts (And some more I still need to get to shortly) and there was actually a good reason for it. Due to several circumstances (Rather busy in meetings and conference calls at work, amongst others) I run into the trouble of having to re-format the hard drive of my Lenovo 3000 N100 notebook after having some issues with my computer firewall. Not happy about the whole situation, since it has knocked me out for several days, as you may have been able to read further in some of my twitterings. But in the end I didn’t have much of a choice. I had to do it.

I haven’t weblogged much about this actually, but I am actually having a great time with this particular notebook. One of the best I have used in the last 7 to 8 years! (Yes, I know, I still need to check the Mac heh). So it was a bit painful having to do the re-formatting as I knew it would knock me out for a day or so while I backed up everything, formatted and installed everything back in shape. But still necessary as things got rather nasty in the end.

Last time I did re-format a hard drive was from my previous ThinkPad a couple of years ago and back then I can certainly say that it was a very painful experience! Not having connectivity during the entire day and also working with multiple DVDs to back up stuff and get it back to work afterwards is not the most pleasant of happenings during the course of the day. So I was afraid of having to suffer from the same thing this time around. But the truth is that I didn’t.

You may be wondering why not, right? Well, mainly, for two different reasons. The first one, the two iPods I have at the moment providing me with 90 GB of disk space to back up everything in a single process and then get the data out of them into the notebook again in a single attempt. Amazing the kind of impact such devices have got, when having to store large amounts of content in just a few minutes in such tiny gadgets. Just making use of these two helped me speed up the process tremendously of backing up and reinstalling stuff rather quick! And rather painless, too!

And the second reason is, of course, the lovely N95 from Nokia. What an amazing experience! Up until now I was happily making use of it for a good number of different tasks and always learning something new along the process, as I have mentioned in a previous weblog post. But yesterday was the first day that I was actually making extensive use of it in order to have access to the Internet. And WOW! What an amazing experience! I thought I would be struggling with it quite a bit, but on the contrary. Incredibly intuitive and productive navigating the Web with such a tiny device. No doubt! Loved it!

Certainly, it may not be the best of experiences to write extensive e-mails or weblog entries, but certainly to be able to subscribe to your favourite feeds and catch up with some of them, including your podcasts and vodcasts is just priceless. So much so that, since it is easier for me to carry with me the mobile phone than the notebook, I still continue to catch up with feeds through it today, specially for the rich media feeds I am subscribed to.

Then the fact I can check out my external e-mail to see if there are any urgent messages is a big plus for sure. Without taking into account as well how I have been able to keep up with my twitterings on what people were up to as well, so it didn’t feel that lonely as in previous occasions. In the end, and after finishing off late last night installing everything back into the notebook I realised that now I not only have one computer at home, but two! And one of them nicely integrated with my mobile phone! I guess I could now go and travel a bit just bringing with me the N95, which, amongst other things, would be rather handy to keep me connected as well as health-wise.

Who would have ever thought about that, eh? This is, to me, indeed, what Innovation is all about. Being able to make you productive again in the shortest time possible with a rather painless experience for whatever the tasks at hand. And on top of that, I got to do a massive clean up of my Lenovo 3000 N100 and quit installing those applications I haven’t used in months! Look now at all of that available disk space waiting to be used!