(Picture of Lake Geneva by Mclaire2)

Continuing further with describing some of the highlights of the superb week I am having over here, in Zürich, Switzerland, I thought I would put together some further thoughts from the second day I participated in the round of Lotusphere Comes To You events. This time around in Geneva. Same agenda, same schedule, same presentation, different audience. Equally engaging, if not more!

All three of us, Ron Sebastian, Jutta Kreyss along with myself and one other colleague got started with an early morning on the train from Zürich to Geneva. It took us a bit over three hours to get to Geneva and over the course of those three hours we got to witness some of the most astonishing landscapes I have seen in a while! I definitely need to come back and check it out more in detail and not just passing by!! Lake Geneva is just spectacular and on a clear blue sky day it must be breathtaking! Alas, we had plenty of snow and cold along the way, so just the kind of perfect weather to have a lovely, cosy and warm atmosphere for some great conversations with my fellow travellers while we were heading towards our next show.

At the beginning I was wondering whether the train would be offering free WiFi, as I thought it would be really nice to catch up with everything while trying to get there. Perhaps I would even have a chance to blog some of the highlights of what I have been experiencing so far. Alas, it is not going to happen. Perhaps on my next trip to Switzerland, after I got the confirmation they would be offering it as of the 1st of April. We shall see.

Either way, it was much much better that way. Like I said, there is nothing like face to face (social) networking, perhaps the purest form of it all! Specially when you are really into some very interesting conversations over the course of three hours non-stop! And so we arrived in Geneva.

Like I mentioned above already, we had the exact same agenda and schedule ahead of us as in Zürich, but with a different audience. Slightly smaller number of customers, but equally engaging, if not so much more! So I decided to do a little bit of an experiment. I was actually using the same presentation as the previous day, but this time around instead of giving a little bit of a short description of some of IBM’s more popular social software tools, both inside and outside of the corporation, I actually described with plenty of detail how I was eventually making use of some of those different social tools to keep up with my fight against e-mail. Yes, that is right! Real, concrete and straight to the point examples of how I was using each of them to keep me away from e-mail and demonstrate as well how each and everyone of them has been disrupting IBM for a while now empowering knowledge workers to share their knowledge and collaborate so much easier than ever before.

And it looks like things worked out all right, since I had one very interactive session with plenty of people commenting on the flow, the usage of those tools, the interactions with customers outside of the firewall, social tools outside of the corporate firewall, etc. etc. Very refreshing and rewarding to see how my pitch on social computing was getting out a bunch of commentary that I truly found fascinating! Way better than my own presentation! For sure!

And it lasted for a while as well, since after all of the sessions were done, we enjoyed a bit of time having a drink and a snack and had a couple of folks coming over to comment further on what my experience was like so far. Wonderful stuff!

From there onwards and after we finish the event, and without very little time to do anything else, we decided to head back to Zürich and off we went for another three hours by train, this time though we decided to have dinner along the way in the restaurant, while having a beer or two and plenty more dialogue on the overall outcome from both days, along with some other interesting discussions from which I learned a whole bunch of stuff from what IBM used to be, what it went through way before I joined and where it is heading! Goodness! What a trip down the memory lane and into the future!! And all of that thanks to Ron Sebastian!!

I tell you, if you ever have a chance to bump into him, stop him, and get busy talking to him! The amount of information & knowledge he has got is just remarkable!! And plenty of good fun, too! Yes, it was a long day, but I can certainly let you know that Ron made it ever so much more entertaining than whatever we could have thought and the three hours went up very quickly!

The end result though was when we got off the train and the really long day hit on us so badly that, before we all realised about it, we were already in our hotel rooms, ready to hit the sack! At least, I was heh

And that was it! Another interesting, refreshing and at the same time rewarding day in Geneva this time talking about social computing and doing some serious face to face social networking! It cannot get better than this, I tell you! Well, it did, but those are the highlights from yesterday and today, which I will talk about briefly shortly…

Tags: IBM, Lotus, Lotusphere2008, Lotusphere, Lotusphere Comes To You, LCTY, LCTY2008, Collaboration, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Computing, Communities, Social Media, Learning, Innovation, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Zurich, Geneva, Switzerland, Ron Sebastian, Jutta Kreyss, e-mail

As you may well remember, not long ago I created a blog post where I was mentioning how I was going to be this week in Zürich, Switzerland, presenting as one of the keynote speakers at the Lotusphere Comes To You event. With the rest of the week on customer meetings & workshops talking about Social Computing @ IBM. Just this morning I have been told that all of those meetings I had planned for the rest of the week have been postponed for a later time. So here I am putting together this blog post where I will be sharing some of the highlights from Monday’s event, and then I will be sharing another one from yesterday’s highlights.

I know I will be back to Zürich as soon as by the end of April, so perhaps I will expand further on those different events I had planned and which then got postponed. We shall see.

For now a couple of highlights from Lotusphere Comes To You - Zürich March 2008:

It was the first time that I ever made it to any Lotusphere Comes To You event and must confess that I was a bit nervous just before getting the show started. Being the kickoff keynote speaker session talking about Social Computing @ IBM to about 100 customers and business partners, surely puts plenty of expectations straight up front to you to do the right job! And not sure why, must have been how incredibly well organised the whole set up was, but there I was with my Mac, the other presenters with their ThinkPads and no other computer in the whole room! Ready to rock!!

What a great event it was! I spent about 40 minutes talking about the kind of impact social computing is having within the enterprise and how it is tremendously disrupting the way we share our knowledge and collaborate with others and how communities are the primary social computing drivers within the corporate world of social software. I mentioned as well how they are the ones who are defining together which tools to stick with and which ones to bypass. How for the first time they are responsible for the tools suite they would be using with their own community members. And how organisations are starting to pay more and more attention to how communities are operating and increasing their overall productivity and knowledge shared by making use of these social tools.

From there onwards I shared a number of different screen shots with some of IBM’s most popular social software tools, both inside and outside of the corporate firewall. To name a few of them: Lotus Greenhouse, alphaWorks and alphaWorks Services, Blogs (Including some BlogCentral stats where we recently reached over 200,000 blog posts and comments since late 2003), Lotus Connections, developerWorks Spaces, IBM Jams, ThinkPlace, Fringe, Dogear (Part of the Connections bundle), Beehive, WikiCentral (And wikis in general).

Then from there onwards we had a bunch of different questions on how it may potentially work within the corporate world and what may be potential issues, like taxonomy vs. folksonomy, security, privacy, letting command-and-control go, etc. etc. Yes, along the same lines of what you usually can expect for the kind of presentation I gave.

Reason why I am mentioning all of this in here is because originally I thought I would be able to share the slide deck with you folks over here, but unfortunately while I was revising it to sanitise it a bit I am not going to be able to. Most of the slides are screen shots from those various tools where it is showing the names and telephone numbers, amongst many other details, from various of my social networks along with their pictures and I don’t think it would be fair to them to expose them, just like that, because of a presentation. I rather prefer to respect their privacy, just as much as they would be respecting my own, and that’s why I am going to leave things as is.

Sharing the slide deck without the tools / screen shots section would not be having the same effect, so perhaps what I will do is come up with some kind of mockups and share them accordingly as time goes by. We shall see. Or perhaps I’ll ask my social networks whether they would like to come up on the show or not. We shall see. Will keep you posted.

From there onwards, and while Ron Sebastian and Jutta Kreyss, were providing their own presentations on demonstrating the latest Lotus offerings from Lotusphere 2008 and Best Practices on the Open Client, respectively, I actually had to go to the IBM Research Lab in Rüschlikon to present that exact same presentation to an IBM client within the banking industry. 12 people sitting in a small room and with plenty more time to dive into the various topics and get a bit of a much more interactive section, which is what happened in the end.

Some folks out there say how both the banking and government industries, perhaps banking even a bit more, are a bit reluctant from Web 2.0 and social computing behind the corporate firewall. Well, what I experienced with that particular customer and their understanding of social computing was rather quite the opposite. Ready to rock and get some action going to help empower their knowledge workers to be in control of the knowledge flow again and get back into the conversations! Fascinating stuff!! Really.

I thoroughly enjoyed that very first occasion of presenting at Lotusphere Comes To You and no more, no less than in Zürich, one of my favourite European cities, specially when after a hard working day of having some really good and exciting conversations about the stuff you are passionate about, you go out with some friends and enjoy a super lovely evening with a chocolate fondue to end up the event and then off to dinner for a meat one! And, of course, some lovely Swiss beer, too! … It just cannot get better than that!!

Fantastic!!

Tags: IBM, Lotus, Lotusphere2008, Lotusphere, Lotusphere Comes To You, LCTY, LCTY2008, Collaboration, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Computing, Communities, Social Media, Learning, Innovation, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Zurich, Switzerland, Ron Sebastian, Jutta Kreyss, Mac, Greenhouse, alphaWorks, alphaWorks Services, Blogs, Wikis, BlogCentral, WikiCentral, Connections, developerWorks, developerWorks Spaces, Spaces, IBM Jam, ThinkPlace, Fringe, Dogear, Beehive, Rüschlikon, Fondue, Beers

While I am now in Zürich preparing everything and getting ready for Lotusphere Comes To You starting tomorrow (May be able to share the slide deck in Slideshare during the course of tomorrow or the day after… Stay tuned as I will try to get the audio for it as well!), I saw that the progress report post(s) from last week Friday on my fight against work e-mail has put together a bunch of very interesting comments. So I thought that instead of replying to them on the respective blog posts I would go ahead and consolidate all of the different commentary into a follow up blog post as I didn’t want those comments get lost just like that.

So without much further ado, here we go with my two cents on the input shared thus far on my progress report blog posts:

From Adam Carson’s comments - Someone I have admired for quite some time now and who I would wish he would start his regular blogging again… Two years without blog posts is a long time, Adam!: "I was wondering if you could do a follow-up post explaining how you deal with incoming emails by responding through social media options. Can you categorize/generalize some of your incoming communications and then map them to different 2.0 tools?"

Yes, I will certainly follow up with a more extensive blog post where I would detail some more what those various social software tools may well be and how I get to use them. I will put together a brief description of each of them and how I am actually using them. But for now, I will just share some of the basics on how I actually process every single piece of work e-mail that comes my way:

An e-mail will come into my Notes 8.5 Beta, while I am running the embedded Sametime 8 for the Mac as well telling me whether that person is online or not. I will look into the e-mail and if I see that’s one of those work related e-mails that falls under the category of one-on-one private, confidential / sensitive conversations I will reply back through e-mail and keep the dialogue private. If not, never reply to it!, and if the person is online in Sametime (i.e. Instant Messaging with some more powerful social networking capabilities I will detail some time soon as well!), I would right click on their name, start a chat, check availability and provide the answer. E-mail will get archived or deleted, accordingly.

If the person is not available on line in Instant Messaging, I will check whether I am connected with that person or not on some of the various social software tools I use. Handy tip in here is how most people include those online social software tools in their closing info or e-mail signature to promote their online spaces. I take advantage of that and go into their online social networking tools and drop the answer there. So whether it is Lotus Quickr, Lotus Connections (And its various components, specially Dogear and Activities), Wikis, Blogs, Beehive, BlueTwit (Think Twitter here, but incredibly much more stable), Forums, etc. etc. you name it, I just go ahead and share the reply of my e-mail there. Again e-mail gets archived / deleted accordingly.

Like I said, I follow a specific logic on processing the replies to those e-mails and the last few lines above would give you an idea of how I am doing it. In another specific blog post I will continue to develop further on the overall approach. One thing for sure, to comment further on the last questions from Adam, although I am not doing any categorisation of the replies to them chose a specific social software tool, I do actually always think about the reply and where could I share where it would have the highest impact, not just for the original sender of the e-mail, but for the entire company. That way, it would save me time next time I get that same question again. Chances are that folks would probably try to search for something before heading my way, in which case sharing that content in such 2.0 manner will certainly be worth while quite a bit! But again, at a later time I will expand further some more on this, including a much more descriptive account of the several tools I use…

From Joe Chacko’s comments (One of my fellow IBM colleagues): "We have taken a similar approach to one particular part-time project. All communications will be via a Wiki or a (logged) IRC channel. One huge benefit is that all conversations are publicly documented and retrievable."

This surely is a fantastic piece of news and something that over the course of the last three weeks (When I started this fight against work e-mail) has been rather remarkable as well! Why? Because from the very first moment that I went public saying that I would no longer be replying to open, public conversations through e-mail, I keep getting contacted by plenty of other folks, both inside and outside of the company, saying that they have been experimenting with it to some degree and have been enjoying some really good results. This surely is very encouraging and one of the things I also wanted to bring forward from this approach: i. e. the more we get the word out, the more folks would jump in, and therefore benefit from adopting and embracing social software.

Mind you, very important thing here, I am NOT saying that e-mail is dead. On the contrary, I think it’s about time to re-purpose how we work with e-mail and how we may need to keep things the way they were meant to be in the beginning: e-mail as a one-on-one private / sensitive / confidential conversation. For the rest, bring forward those conversations out in the open and let the rest of the knowledge workers benefit from your knowledge, skills and expertise on a wider level, i.e. corporate level!

Remember those very wise words from Bob Buckman?: "Don’t be afraid to share what you know, because you know it better than anyone else!" That’s exactly what I am after!

From Joitske Hulsebosch’s comments: "I wonder though- email is just a useful tool- why would you want to get rid of ALL mails?? and do you have a few social network sites you visit daily? is that not replacing one with the other?"

Well, I am not saying that I would be getting rid of ALL e-mails, although I wish I could. What I am just saying, and I briefly mentioned it above already, is that I think it’s about time we re-purpose the way we work with e-mail. Don’t take me wrong. It is a very good communication tool, no doubt, but we would all have to admit also how it is a very poor and inefficient way of collaborating and sharing knowledge for various different reasons: lack of visibility, openness, mail capacity, enforced control, etc. etc. So to me in the current stage of things, and thanks to social software for the most part, I think that e-mail should just be used for one-on-one private conversations where information of a sensitive nature needs to be exchanged.

For the rest, let’s move the conversation to the open, public online social computing spaces, within, and beyond, the corporate firewall! Yes, that is right. I do have a list of favourite social software tools that I use on a regular basis and in a way they are starting to substitute my mail (Finally!!) and all I am seeing at the moment are just advantages: total visibility and openness, lack of control (Specially command and control), boosting knowledge shared, improving expertise location, finding information when you need it, not when the system tells you otherwise, etc. etc. These are to me some of the reasons why it makes sense to me to move into the social software world both inside and outside of the corporate firewall.

I am also working already on another blog post, where I am detailing some of the main benefits from a knowledge worker perspective and also from an enterprise perspective. Stay tuned!

From John Smart’s comments: "Are you counting all emails, or are you not counting ‘pointer’ emails like automated alerts that you receive from sites when someone else updates something?"

No, I am not counting all e-mails. All of those "pointer" emails like automated alerts, a.k.a. bacn, I actually delete them right away through filtering by making use of various rules, since by the time I get those notifications via e-mail I already have received similar ones through my RSS / Atom feed reader. The last three weeks my feed readers have been instrumental in helping me speed the access to the right sources of information, scan through what I need to do, and what I need to read and what needs to be deleted that in a way my feed reader has become my new inbox. But with a huge difference, in my opinion, and that is that all of those different feeds coming through are from items that are publicly available to everyone and much more accessible than what would happen with e-mail.

Plus one other major difference. With my RSS / Atom feed reader, I am back in control of what I would want to get involved and notified about, whereas with e-mail, I am no longer in control. It is actually the e-mail system taking over. And the fact that e-mail has been rather addictive for plenty of us is a indicative sign of what I am mentioning over here. We need to get out of the vicious circle: the more e-mail we send, the more e-mail we get!!

From Mike Kavis‘ comments: "I get over a hundred emails a day. After reading your first article on this topic, I mandated to my team that for our SOA Center of Excellence (CoE) initiatives, we could not use a single email. I had the remind the team a few times the first day. Since then we have collaborated mostly in our wiki, face to face, and through our blogs. This has been great so far!"

What a great story shared by Mike, where you can see that you don’t need to start with anything big; starting small and building up from there would work. Yes, you may need to remind a few folks here and there to move away from e-mail, but that’s not a problem. You know in the end they will be joining you and start consolidating some of those conversations. Then once they see it all happening and sharing the huge benefits, they are so sold on it, they would not want to go back! That is just what Mike’s story is about. A little bit of convincing, facilitation, patience, perseverance and before you know it, you are there! And, like I said, for good! Once you give it a try for, say, a week or two, and you get to see the immediate benefits, there is just no way back!

And, finally, from Samuel Driessen’s comments: "Interesting you’re also apply this to your external email!"

Yes, that is right. Although not doing it on purpose, since I don’t get many public conversations coming my way through e-mail anyway, I am starting to notice how I am beginning to drive away myself from e-mail and into various social software tools. Next step for me would probably be to detail what are some of the social software tools I use outside of the corporate firewall, in order to stay away from e-mail… Stay tuned! That would be the story of another blog post.

For now, I just wanted to give folks who commented on the blog post(s) a chance to share their opinions as part of a main blog entry, and then share my two cents hoping to inspire some more people out there to give it a try. Yes, I know, start small, be patient, persevere, hang in there … and make it happen! Remember that it is up to us to get out of the vicious circle. Are we ready?

(Oh, in the mean time, check out as well Techcrunch’s recent blog post talking about something along these very same lines… Kind of makes you wonder, don’t you think? …)

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, Confidentiality, Privacy, Private Conversations, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Collaboration 2.0, Visibility, Slideshare, Adam Carson, Notes 8.5, Beta, Mac, Sametime 8, Sametime, Quickr, Connections, Dogear, Activities, Wikis, Blogs, Beehive, BlueTwit, Twitter, Forums, Joe Jacko, IRC, Bob Buckman, Buckman Laboratories, Joitske Hulsebosch, John Smart, bacn, Feed Reader, RSS, Atom, Mike Kavis, Samuel Driessen, Techcrunch