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

This week promises to be one of the shortest, and weirdest, weeks I have ever had in the last few years, as I’ll be enjoying three national bank holidays in a row, starting on Wednesday and finishing up on Friday, and will therefore be taking those days off! Like someone I know would say … W00t! But if this week is going to be a strange one, the same would have to apply to last week as well!

No, I haven’t forgotten. It is that time of the week already where I will be sharing with you my weekly report on how I am doing with my giving up e-mail campaign. I was just mentioning how much of a weird week it was, since I was out of work most of the time and without even noticing. Yes, that is right, you would remember how Monday was the day I was coming back from an amazing week in the US, attending the Web 2.0 and Beyond Summit in IBM Yorktown Heights and visiting NYC for a couple of days, then Tuesday & Wednesday were a couple of in between days as I was preparing my way to participate in a customer workshop on Friday in Zürich, then time to travel again on Thursday and return back on Saturday evening.

Quite an intensive week, indeed! But, unfortunately, and, like usual, life had other plans for me. My younger brother was taken into hospital for an operation to address a Trigeminal Neuralgia on Tuesday afternoon, to then get operated on Wednesday and wait for a couple of days before going back home again. I am now happy to report that he is doing just fine and although he was supposed to leave the hospital during the course of today, he decided to stay in one more night and will be leaving back home during the course of tomorrow. So, that is a piece of big news. And good ones, too!

Then on Wednesday evening, and, as I was preparing everything for my trip on Thursday morning to Zürich, I finally developed a terrible cold and a very very painful sore throat with which I could hardly say a word, nor swallow a thing (Not even any liquids!). So when I developed 39 C of fever I decided to cancel the whole trip as there was not going to be a single chance I would be flying in that state and decided to spend Thursday and Friday in bed, resting, and taking it easy, while I was getting rid of that nasty bug I got while I was in NYC!

Oh, and a quick interruption in here, I have got some AMAZING colleagues at work, because within minutes of me canceling the whole thing I had one specific good friend who came over to the rescue, grabbed all of the materials I had for the workshop, flew to Zurich for me, and did a GREAT job! And today his manager had a lovely e-mail coming from me, and he himself a lovely surprise along with it as well! There, that’s social networking doing its magic once again. This friend of mine working for IBM as well, obviously, is someone I mostly communicate with through various social software tools, since we both work in different projects, teams, business units, countries, you name it!

Anyway, so you can imagine how awful it must have been having to experience all of that in a single week. It started quite all right with me returning back from a pleasant trip across the pond, but then over time it developed into plenty of different issues that have just gotten fixed over the course of the weekend. Younger brother is doing fine and with no more pain any longer! My cold is completely gone and feel much better, thank you very much and today has been my first day back at work after being knocked down for those two days for the first time in 11 years! Yes, *that* bad!

But, as you can probably imagine, there is one single thing that doesn’t stop in this life, and that is the amount of e-mails you get on a daily basis, so I have still been keeping up with the weekly report and if last week was the one that has resulted in one of the busiest so far from the 11 weeks I have been following this experiment, this time around, this week, things have gone back to normal! Phew!

I knew it! I knew that last week was an exception due to some  special circumstances I mentioned back then and surely glad to confirm that although I was gone again, for most of the week, the amount of interactions through e-mail have gone down again. Here is the weekly screen shot with last week’s results:

37! Yes, that is right! 37 e-mails, coming from 60, the previous week! Talking about having a remarkable difference from one week to the other! Who would have thought about that, right? Well, there you have it. Funny enough, I mentioned in a couple of internal social software tools that I was offline sick and that it would take me a little while to respond back in those same social software tools and the response seems to have even reached my incoming e-mails! Which I think, not sure about you, was just terrific, because just this morning, it meant that I didn’t have any e-mails to process and could just get to work right away, even after a tough week last week.

You see? This is what I mean when I keep saying I will not give up any time soon on this experiment. On the contrary. I am even already investigating some alternatives for diverting a good chunk of the e-mails I am getting at the moment, and see if I can reduce that incoming e-mail load down to 20, or under 20 a week! Will keep you all posted on it as time goes by.

For the time being, I am just going to leave things as is, and already getting busy finalising those drafts I mentioned I would be putting together summarising my experiences while I was at the IBM Web 2.0 and Beyond Summit as well as my experiences in NYC! Thus stay tuned as they would be finally coming up shortly!

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, Zurich, Family, Sick, Illness, Brother, Trigeminal Neuralgia, Balance, Life, Things That Matter

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

Phew!! Finally! Today I got the chance, at last, to go through and digest, quite intensively, one of the best reads I have gone through in months around the subject of Social Computing within the Enterprise. Not only do I feel it is going to become an essential reading from here onwards, but I also feel that it will be a must read for those knowledge workers, companies, businesses, whatever, who would want to get things going with the wider adoption of social networking beyond the initial grassroots efforts. Yes, that good! While I have been reading through it I just couldn’t help nod time and time again as to how accurate it is with regards to stating the status of things within the corporate world for this wider adoption of social software right as we speak.

In fact, if you have got a Knowledge Management background you would enjoy it quite a bit, too, since it does cover a very educational and enlightening trip down the memory lane on where KM was, where it went and where it will go with the adoption of social computing. Something that, as already mentioned in the article itself, we would not be able to stop any longer. Well, yes, there is one single aspect that may put a stop to it, and that is the whole point behind that very insightful blog post.

That single aspect is management and how it has remained stagnated for several decades! And how if Enterprise 2.0 is to prove successful within the corporate firewall we would have to start provoking big, massive changes in how we get to educate our leaders to become the kind of managers we would want for our businesses to be able to adopt and embrace successfully social networking in the near future.

I bet I got your attention already to get busy reading that article, right? Well, it is a rather long entry; in fact, it will be one of those blog posts that you will enjoy reading time and time again and at a low pace, for how condensed it is and how much really good stuff it has all around to deal with how traditional organisations have worked and what it will take for them to change in order to be ready for that Enterprise 2.0 movement to kick in behind the firewall.

There are plenty of things I could share about the article itself, but like I said, I am going to skip through all that and point you right away to it. Head over to Headshift’s blog and check out one of the recent entries put together by my good friend Olivier Amprimo under the title "The Museum and the Zoo" and read on!

You should not skip the section where uses the metaphor of a museum and a zoo to correlate to different various types of businesses as to how far they are within their own adoption of social computing within the enterprise. Priceless!!

And, finally, I bet that while you keep reading through it, you will be reminded at times about one other really powerful blog post put together by the wonderful Kathy Sierra, some time ago, on the topic of Manager 2.0 where you will find this very spot on figure that certainly illustrates as well Olivier’s brilliant take of how we need to provoke the change of our leaders of today to become the managers of tomorrow in the current Knowledge Economy we just entered:

Tags: Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Management, Leadership, Social Software Adoption, Museum, Zoo, Headshift, Olivier Amprimo, Kathy Sierra, Manager 2.0, Management 2.0, Management 1.0, Knowledge Economy, Knowledge Assets, Knowledge Objects

If you have been watching my Dopplr profile you would probably know by now how next week it is time for me to travel once again. This time around to the US, to Yorktown Heights, NY,  to be more precise, to the IBM Watson Research Center where I will be attending, for the first time ever, one of those special events that I know is going to leave a heavy mark on me for quite some time to come. Yes, indeed, I am talking about IBM’s Web 2.0 and Beyond Summit, which is an IBM internal only event, that will take place from the 15th till the 17th of April.

This is an event that focuses on "emerging business and technology activities within IBM that utilize the Web as a platform and define how the Web will drive innovation to IBM’s business and for our customers", which I know for most of you folks out there would sound very familiar with other social computing related summits. And it would probably be, at least, from what you can sense while reading that quote I just mentioned above.

To me, this is going to be one fantastic, wonderful and unforgettable event because for the first time in over five years that I have been working as a Social Computing evangelist at IBM, it will be the chance for me to meet up a good bunch of the folks I have come to develop a virtual relationship with through various different social software tools, both internal and external, and this would be the first time that I would be able to meet up with most of them in real life!

We are all incredibly excited about the opportunity to meet up and share our experiences with one another face to face (Still the best social networking experience there is out there. No doubt!!) on how we are, each of us, getting along with embracing, adopting, promoting, facilitating, living the Enterprise 2.0 experience at such large corporation as IBM.

I wish I could share with you folks the agenda of the event, but since it is just an internal only event, I am going to keep it to myself for the time being, but for sure it is going to be one marvelous occasion. That’s for certain! A good bunch of the topics that will be covered are around several of the subjects I have been blogging all about over here on how IBM is adopting various social software tools within the corporate world. So perhaps not much new in that space, if you have been following this blog closely for a little while now. However, the interesting part would be how different people from various business units and organisations get to share their take on how that adoption is going ahead. Exchanging experiences, pain points, lessons learned, success stories, you name it! Now, that is just going to be incredibly fascinating to witness and engage in with further conversations.

Like I mentioned above, I was checking the other day the list of people attending the event and I realise how one of the major highlights from the event, even before I get over there, is going to be the networking piece! Of course, I will be blogging all about it as I am planning to take my MacBook Pro with me. I am sure, I will be twittering as well quite a bit throughout the event and who knows whatever else. Each of the sessions lasts for about 30 minutes, so there will be some compressed and brief thoughts, I am sure, but they would eventually get there.

One other reason why I am really excited about the whole event, apart from the incredibly good quality of the sessions, and the networking that will be going on, is the fact that it will be as well the first time that I will get to present, this time around as a Birds of a Feather (a.k.a. BOFs) session, on my own experiences on how I am getting on with giving up on e-mail, work related e-mail, that is. Yes, that is right, I will be conducting that BOFs session during the course of one hour, and whatever else more, on how such experience is going and how other folks may be able to join me with it. That would be the first time that I will be sharing plenty of tips on how I actually get it down and how for the last 8 weeks I have been able to reduce considerably the good amount of e-mails I was already getting through to me at one point.

I just can’t wait for that session to take place, since I will actually be using a couple of slides as entry points to get the discussion going and then I will dive right into it! (Not to worry, I will share the slides as well over here in its due time!). Now, here is the big question. What do you think is going to be the title of the presentation / BOFs session? Any ideas? Well, if you followed my Twitter stream a few days ago, it is actually coming out from a good number of conversations I had on that very same day. And thanks to Craig Cmehil and Ed Stephens (And a bunch of other folks who chimed in altogether as well) the final title I have adopted is:

"Thinking out of the inbox: More Collaboration through less e-Mail",

which fits in quite nicely with what I have been doing over the last few weeks. Thus thanks much, Craig & Ed, for participating in the brainstorm session and for helping out coming up with that title! Loving it! (Stay tuned later on in the week for another lovely surprise coming up your way , by the way).

Finally, to wrap up, I will be leaving Monday early morning next week, arriving through JFK on Monday afternoon and staying at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in White Plains for the entire week as I will be leaving on Sunday evening. Thus if you plan to be around and fancy getting together for a drink or two (Guess I will be rather busy from the 15th till the 17th, but pretty open after that, for sure!), get in touch and we will get together! Right now that end of the week looks very much available at the moment.

And that would be it for now, folks. Like I said, I will be doing plenty of blogging and twittering all along on what promises to be an stunning event around Social Computing, but if you really want to get down to some serious social networking, and you happen to be around, give me a buzz and we will meet up!

Tags: Dopplr, Yorktown Heights, NY, IBM, Watson Research Center, Web 2.0 Summit, Web 2.0 and Beyond Summit, 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, Craig Cmehil, Ed Stephens, Communication, Crowne Plaza, White Plains, Events

I am sure that at this point in time of another week about to finish you were expecting from me to share with you the weekly blog post on the current experiment I am conducting on giving up e-mail (Work related e-mail, that is). However, I am afraid you would have to wait a few more hours as I am just too excited at the moment about the progress made this week and several interesting conversations I have bumped into as well, during the course of the last couple of days. So you would have to allow me to take some time to digest another wonderful week of events at the same time that I get to put together that progress report when all of that excitement wears off a bit. Not to worry, you won’t have to wait too long. Just a few more hours …

Thus what would I talk about today then, right? You may be wondering. Well, continuing with that fashion of putting together shorter blog posts, I would just like to point out to you an AMAZING blog post that a very good friend of mine, Rob Paterson, just put together earlier on and with which I feel, if anything, truly touched!

Most people out there, who have been following this blog for a good number of months, would realise about how excited I have been all along about social computing both in the corporate world and outside. I am sure that you may have experienced some of that excitement here in this blog. However, today I have got something for you that will certainly help you understand where all of that excitement comes from.

Go and read Rob Paterson’s article titled: "The Mystery of Attraction on the web - Luis Suarez"

I am going to keep this entry rather short, since Rob’s post is rather long, but, believe me, if you ever have to justify the business value, or just simply the value, from Social Computing, I would strongly suggest you keep forwarding and linking to Rob’s entry, because it is just as good as it gets, regardless what some other people may tell you. It is an essential and indispensable read that shows you the magic of serendipity, some wonderful knowledge discoveries and how we are all somehow connected with one another through smaller villages inside of that major metropolis that the Web is at the moment.

Like I said, keeping it short, go and read this unique and wonderful article and you will get to find out why over 5 years ago I decided to get involved with social computing and become what I am today: a social computing ambassador as excited and thrilled as back in day one!! And still going strong!!

Have a good one everyone!

(And a SPECIAL thanks to Rob for a superb and unforgettable conversation through Skype, earlier on this week, that would be difficult to forget throughout the years! Rob, many thanks for allowing me to be part of your small village! It is certainly a great honour and the pleasure was all mine!)

Tags: Rob Paterson, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Media, Enterprise 2.0, Collaboration, Web 2.0, Communities, Villages, Serendipity, Knowledge Discovery, Essential Readings, Evangelist, Ambassador, Business Value, Value, Life, Internet, Web, Technology, Awesomeness, Work, Life Work Balance, LWB, Islands