E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Light Blogging Ahead for the Next Day or So…

I am sure that there are plenty of folks out there wanting me to let you all know about some of the main highlights from the IBM Web 2.0 and Beyond Summit I attended last week, plus some other really exciting stuff that is going on right as we speak and coming from various fronts, but you would have to forgive me for not doing so right away and having to wait for the odd day or two.

Just as I was getting back home yesterday from the US, I got a call from my mum telling me that my younger brother finally got everything arranged and in place, after having waited for a couple of months, to go through an operation to help fight some Trigeminal Neuralgia he has been suffering from for the last few months. Those of you who are familiar with such illness would know it is one of the most painful ones known to mankind, so we were happy that finally came through.

And just this morning he went through what was supposed to be a three hour operation, which in the end extended itself for a total number of seven hours!! He is now resting in intensive care for the next few hours and the next 24 hours will be crucial. Doctors (And my entire family) are very confident about the outcome of the operation, but we need to wait…

So I am hoping you would understand how my blogging from here onwards, and till things get better for him, will be very light, if not non-existent. I care passionately about all of this work I am doing in the social computing space, but I am sure you all know where I put all of my money any and every time: my family!

It’s the only one I got, thus that is where all my attention is going right now wishing my younger brother a speedy recovery knowing he is a tough guy and will get through this one in no time!

Hang in there, bro! We all love ya!

(And from here a special thanks! to all of those folks on Twitter who have been sending along their get well soon wishes for him. Know that he really appreciates them, and so do I! I said it once and I will say it again: you are all a special bunch and I am very proud of hanging out with you lot!)

Giving up on Work e-mail – Status Report on Week 10

What an incredible week last week that has just gone by! Yes, I am sure that you have noticed how quiet things have gone over here in this particular blog over the last few days, right? Well, as you well know, I have been attending IBM‘s Web 2.0 and Beyond Summit over the last few days and although I didn’t have a chance to blog much, the experience hasn’t certainly fallen short with the expectations. It was just wonderful and so much more! So much so that after a couple of days after the event I am still completely jazzed up about the whole thing. Yes, that is right, that good!

And here I am now, putting together some thoughts, as I am already back home, having arrived earlier on today, and trying to have some rest in between to get back to work tomorrow in full force. And faithful to keep capturing my experiences, I have been putting together some notes from last week’s weekly progress report on the my giving up on e-mail mantra, work related e-mail, that is, and must say that last week was not very encouraging. At all. On the contrary.

However, it surely was an amazingly exciting week having enjoyed one of the best conference events I have attended in years around the subject of social computing within the enterprise and beyond, met as well part of my team, and my new boss (Who, by the way, follows me now on Twitter. How cool is that?), went and visit New York city for the first time in my life (Yes, I know, about time!!) and, finally, met some wonderful people who, now more than ever before, are already part of my life as we finally had the opportunity to know each other face to face and the conversations, along with the experience, was just tremendously positive!!

Yet, after all of that excitement that I will be sharing some more thoughts on in upcoming blog posts, it was a disappointing week, at least, for my quest on giving up on e-mail. In a way, though. Not entirely, and over the next day or so I will explain what I mean. But before we all go into that I thought I would go ahead and share with you folks a couple of interesting links I bumped earlier on during the week, which I am sure you would find rather relevant to the overall experience.

They are both twitterings shared earlier on: by Stowe Boyd, who quoted Doc Searls on a particular statement which I have decided is going to be part of me and my online interactions from now onwards, specially as I move on further with this e-mail detox (As Matt Moore would say…): "Email is where knowledge goes to die" and by my good friend, Víctor Ruiz, who was quoting a rather enlightening comment with some wise words from Joi Ito under Loic Lemeur‘s Seesmic du Jour 124: Joi Ito explains Creative Commons: "Email is user generated content to each other, is crap to everybody except for ourselves". Really worth while listening to the four minute long videocast, for sure.

At the same time a couple of other interesting links were put together by two folks I have been following for a while. The first one JP from Confused of Calcuta who comes to ponder some more on the role of e-mail with social networking sites like Facebook and how it is changing the game between enterprises to help them share their knowledge and collaborate closer. Good read! And the other link is from my good friend and one and only Kelly Drahzal, who seems to have started her own fight against e-mail and although perhaps not as radical as my approach, still a very good one, which I am sure is going to work for her rather well. No doubt! Oh, and Kelly was one of the many many folks I met while at the IBM Web 2.0 Summit and Beyond and she is even much more amazing in person! But more on that later on…

Like I said earlier on, this past week has not been very good as far as my giving up on e-mail experiment is concerned. On the contrary, rather disappointing! But not to worry, I am not planning on giving up any time soon! Like I have been saying all along, I am not going to go back. This new working environment where everything goes around through everything else but e-mail is way much more fun! But first things first. Here is the screen shot with the results from last week:

Whoooaaahhh!!! 60 e-mails in a week while away from the office? How can that be? I mean, the week before you would remember how I eventually got 38 e-mails, yet last week things have gone sky high! My goodness! The highest number of e-mails I have received in a week ever since I got started with the whole thing about giving up on e-mail! So, what happened? What am I going to do from here onwards to keep things back under control on that 30 to 40 e-mails range? Is there still hope to make it work?

Yes, there is, indeed! Like I said, there is no way for me to go back, so the first thing I will be doing from here onwards is to be a bit more aggressive in how I am going to keep diverting some of these conversations. And here are a couple of examples that would help illustrate the whole thing and what I am talking about.

As you would be able to see, most days from last week were all pretty busy. On Monday, however, I got 9 e-mails, out of which 7 of them were related to an urgency matter that needed my attention and which could have taken place in a collaborative wiki. It was for a project team and, pretty much like Ray Sims has been saying over at KM2.0 Presentation – Boston KM Forum (By the way, if you haven’t watched the referenced slide deck nor the blog post I would strongly suggest you do as you are going to get exposed to some very solid piece of work around the topic of Knowledge Management 2.0), ALL e-mails related to a project should be going into the team collaborative space and not e-mail. It would have had the same effect, except we would not have wasted so much time clearing the whole thing out through e-mail in the first place with people bouncing off and on different tidbits that we all knew we needed in a central place!

The second example is actually a result of something that I have been exposed to and which may not be that frequent to other folks. As you may have observed, specially if you have been reading this blog for a while, this year seems to be the year of the conferences and customer meetings for me, because I am getting to attend plenty more than the last couple of years combined! This, in itself, is a very good thing as it shows more and more folks are interested in social software in general and folks would want to know how they could make it work for their businesses. Unfortunately, this means that there is going to be an increase of incoming e-mails to try to confirm and finalise dates, agendas, presentation materials, etc. etc. So before I knew it I was already on 12, 14, and 14 e-mails for the last three days from last week, and that is something I am really willing to explore and find a solution for it, before it becomes an overkill.

So how about a wiki, an internal wiki space, in this case (Since some of those events may be of a sensitive nature), where folks who may be interested in inviting me to attend and / or present at conference events would have the opportunity to put a few lines indicating what it would be for, what they are looking for and then I can come back into the wiki page and share my take on it, i.e. confirm whether I can make it or not. And get things going from that moment onwards. The amount of e-mails exchanged to achieve this is something that has got me thinking and perhaps something that I will be giving it a try starting this coming week. I would be curious to find out how people react to this new approach of coming up with conference events invites. If it works all right, I am planning on sticking around with it. And if not, then I will have to look for something else, because most of that traffic has originated with such kind of events.

As an example, this past week I have managed to confirm my attendance and participation in events taking place in Spain, Germany (And several times while in there as well!), Zürich, and a couple of other places I will be mentioning shortly, as soon as I get a chance to update my Dopplr account.

Yes, I know, long blog post, but not to worry, I am going to leave things like this looking forward to this week to see what would be happening this time around. So far this past week has been an interesting one in this respect, since I never expected to reach such high number, but then again it was all due to a couple of items that I am sure are easily fixable. Thus let’s see what happens this week and I will surely keep you posted on progress, for sure. As a teaser, my Monday is now done and we are back on track!

Now… on to finish those draft blog posts with some of the highlights from the IBM Web 2.0 and Beyond Summit, as I am sure you are wondering what the week was like and why I enjoyed it so much. Stay tuned for more to come …

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, Conference Events, Summit, Twitter, Social Networks, Networking, Stowe Boyd, Doc Searls, Joi Ito, Victor Ruiz, Loic Lemeur, Matt Moore, JP, Confused of Calcuta, Kelly Drahzal, Kellypuffs, Ray Sims, Wikis, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, KM 2.0, Knowledge Management 2.0

Getting Ready for IBM’s Web 2.0 And Beyond Starting Tomorrow!

What an exciting day today! And what an exhausting one, too! After having travelled over 17 hours I am completely shattered, yet, the excitement I just mentioned is winning over the whole thing! My body just wants to go and get some night sleep. My brain and my heart though are just buzzing from what promises to be one of those events very difficult to forget! Yes, folks, I am talking about IBM‘s Web 2.0 and Beyond Summit, which starts tomorrow and till the 17th of April, where I will be having the opportunity to present, for the first time and following the format of a BOFs session, my pitch on "Thinking out of the inbox: More Collaboration through less e-Mail". W00t! I can’t wait!!

But if I have to be honest with you folks, the main reason why I am so looking forward to this week’s Web 2.0 event is because for the first time in years I would be able to put together a face behind the text, the voice, the interactions of a whole bunch of people I will be meeting up with for the next few days. It is going to be one of those experiences where I will be taking social networking to the extreme once again. The experience through the Web on what you can get from social computing will have NOTHING to do with what is going to happen tomorrow and over the course of the next couple of days.

And today just saw a glimpse of it already. Arrived at the hotel, chilled out a bit, unpacking and getting comfy and, of course, had to get the wireless connection to see what various people were doing and right away and in less than 30 minutes I got my WHOLE week booked up with some really really cool events!! Way awesome! Not only meeting up with a great bunch of social software enthusiasts, but also exposure to lots and lots of great materials, fantastic keynote speakers, lovely dinners and meetups in the evening and after the event already packed with additional activities I will be confirming with different people involved. So if you tried to get in touch with me before, not to worry, I shall be sharing all of the details with you shortly. If you haven’t got in touch just yet, but planning to do so, by all means, I am sure we could spend some time catching up with each other! After all, one thing is the social computing interactions through the Web and another thing is just getting to experience it in real life.

Which is what I am about to do in the next few hours, so you may need to excuse the light blogging coming along, since I doubt I would have much time to blog it all initially due to the fact I will be running around like mad helping out that everything works out all right with the rest of the organisers. Plus attending some sessions, plus meeting some new people, plus getting to talk to some of those folks I know for years! and the list keeps growing larger and larger by the minute!

So much so that I think that in between enjoying the event, the multiple various conversations I will engage with, the social events and whatever else I sense there will be very little time blogging ahead of me. Thus that’s why this time around I am going to try something different…

Remember my twitterrhea over at Lotusphere 2008, where I got a chance to tweet quite a bit on all of the happenings during such a terrific event that I got exposed to? Well, this time is going to be different. To start with, I have gone ahead and created an exclusive new Twitter id: elsuacon, that I will only be twittering about the different events I will be attending from here onwards, and that getting started tomorrow. So I am planning to go wild on that one and make as much annotations as my little brain can process, with the hopes that those notes in Twitter will help with the creation of highlights through various blog posts on what the event has been. Thus the blog posts may not be that often, since the sessions are very very short and there are multiple places where I would have wanted to blog and won’t be able to, but my new Twitter ID, elsuacon, surely is going to get plenty of activity.

So you can imagine that with all that said, I am going to share with you one short, quick warning: do not subscribe to the channel unless you would want to go through some twitterrhea which may take over your own Twitter snippets. You can certainly keep commenting and engaging in the conversation over at my usual Twitter handle, but everything else, like session reviews, anecdotes, summaries, stuff learned, etc. etc. will go into this new Twitter account I have created.

Hopefully, that way, I can put together plenty of thoughts very quick for each session, which I could then summarise and put together with some nice wording after the whole thing is done as part of the Highlights. Apart from the day to day dialogue. At the same time, I am sure you have seen already how one of my fellow IBMers,  Sacha Chua, one of the folks I have been wanting to meet up for a long while now!, has created a hashtag for the event under web20summit, so folks can also follow our thoughts easier and much much faster.

And talking about thoughts, there would be plenty of other stuff I could talk about for what’s left of the week, but one step at a time, my body is seriously asking for some rest, and I think I am going to give in. So, stay tuned for plenty more to come and if you see I have gone far too quiet on this blog, it is for sure due to the fact that I am taking the extreme the usage of elsuacon, over at Twitter!

Can’t wait for all the fun to get started!!

Tags: Yorktown Heights, NY, IBM, Watson Research Center, Web 2.0 Summit, Web 2.0 and Beyond Summit, Web20Summit, Web20Summit2008, Web20Summit08, Conference Events, Summit, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Personal KM, Personal Knowledge Management, Personal Knowledge Sharing, Social Software Adoption, MacBook Pro, Twitter, Blogging, Con-Blogging, Metablogging, BOFs, Birds of a Feather, Crowne Plaza, White Plains, Events, Lotusphere2008, Lotusphere, elsuacon, Sacha Chua, Hashtags