Tags: Gran Canaria, Canarias, Canary Islands, Fires, Spain, Tragedy, Drama, Paradise

I know that this weblog post is very much off topic, and you would have to excuse me for it, but if there are ever pictures out there that would be worth while 1,000 words, the following set would be those that would provide you with a intensive sense of drama, if not tragedy. For all of us:

My dearest paradise is burning and it hurts. It truly hurts…

Tags: APQC, Knowledge Management, KM, KM Events, Innovation, Dave Snowden, Jimmy Wales, Carla O’Dell, Alice Dunlap-Kraft, Mary Ellen Sullivan, KM Training, KM Learning, Communities, ThinkPlace, Social Computing, Social Software, Social Networking, Wikis, Weblogs, Social Bookmarking, Podcasting, Tagging, Syndication, Collaboration, Knowledge Sharing

First day back after the long Easter break and it looks like this time around the everlasting battle between work / life balance was won by life! What an incredible weekend I have had! Checked out lots of different places and had a really good time! I took a whole bunch of pictures that I am hoping I will be sharing shortly in my Flickr account, as soon as I get back on track from catching up on everything! Goodness! How much e-mail can you get after being a couple of days off? At least, I am now done with it and back on track with almost everything.

Anyway, that is not the reason why I wanted to create this particular weblog post. Over the last couple of weeks I have been working on a presentation that I will actually be using very shortly as beginning of May I am heading over to Houston, TX, US, to attend the APQC event on The Conference on Knowledge Management & Innovation.

Yes, that is right. From May 10th till 11th I will actually be attending what promises to be a fantastic event, if you get to read the 7 Reasons why this KM conference is a must attend. The list of keynote speakers is rather impressive as well as you can read over here (Dave Snowden, Jimmy Wales, Carla O’Dell, amongst others). No doubt. But there is actually a whole lot more. From May 7th till the 9th there will also be some specific Knowledge Management training and I have actually decided to attend a couple of the different courses offered: Knowledge Management: Strategies and Tactics for Business Results and Measuring the Impact of Knowledge Management.

So in the end I am going to be there from the 6th of May till the 13th enjoying what I am sure is going to be a great learning opportunity to find out some more about what is going on around the world of Knowledge Management at the moment. As I have mentioned above, I am actually going to be speaking, along with two of my fellow IBM colleagues (Alice Dunlap-Kraft and Mary Ellen Sullivan), during the event as well as one of the different breakout sessions. The title of the session is Communities: Hotbeds of Innovation at IBM and I have taken the liberty of reproducing the abstract over here so that you get to see what we will be covering during the couse of the breakout session:

"IBM’s culture emphasizes innovation, and its leaders rely on communities of practice for innovation. The innovation culture permeates communities from the very top, where IBM’s vice president for technical strategy and innovation issued an executive challenge to communities, to the grass roots, where ThinkPlace catalysts evaluate new ideas from their communities. Community members swarmed around the buzz of new ideas in a recent 72-hour Innovation Jam, and IBM’s Academy of Technology created an outreach program to link to community members. The growing use of social software has increased the number and diversity of collaborators working on new ideas."

As you would be able to see, we will be talking about how communities have shaped the way knowledge sharing and collaboration amongst community members have taken a new wave of interactions within the enterprise by which innovation is thriving back again thanks to the adoption of different social computing tools, like wikis, weblogs, social bookmarks, podcasts, tagging, Web syndication, etc., in order to help those same knowledge workers drive that same innovation. And all that along with the usage of one other tool that has certainly grabbed a lot of interest already: ThinkPlace.

The final presentation has not been made available just yet. We are just giving it the last finishing touches, but as soon as it is ready to go I will actually be sharing it over here, so that you can have a look well ahead in advance of what we will be talking about. You can imagine how excited we all are with the whole thing, not only for making it to the event and present on some of the stuff we have been working for the last few months, but also because of the incredible opportunity it would be to attend some KM related training along with meeting up with a whole bunch of other passionate KMers and do some heavy (social) networking. Perhaps one of my favourite activities from every single event I get to attend

Will you be there? Will you be making it to this years’ APQC Conference on Knowledge Management & Innovation? If the answer to both of those questions is Yes! and if you would want to meet up for a drink, do not hesitate to drop a comment over here or contact me offline and we will be able to hook up, I am sure. Look forward to meeting up with those of you who may be going to the conference!

I may create another follow up weblog post with some final comments as the final dates approach, thus stay tuned for some more to come!

Tags: Navidad, Feliz Navidad, Christmas, Merry Christmas, Spain, Las Palmas, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Playa Las Canteras, Belen, Nativity Scene, Flickr, Pictures, Life

Yes, I know, *that* time of the year again. So I am going to keep it short. I just want to take this opportunity to wish everyone, who has been a faithful reader of elsua.net during the course of this fantastic year, a wonderful Christmas and whether you get to celebrate it, or not, I wish you have a great time with your loved ones enjoying those precious little moments of life that we all learned to enjoy and cherish year after year. Thank you for being there and for being who you are ! All the best !

Oh, in case you are wondering about the pictures, I took them yesterday afternoon in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, in Playa Las Canteras, where there is a display of a "Belén de Arena" (A nativity scene made of sand), the largest in Spain, over the next few days. I took a whole bunch more pictures covering different scenes and, if interested, you would be able to find them all over at my Flickr account.

¡Feliz Navidad!

Tags: Photography, Gran Canaria, Monte León, Presa de Ayagaures, Ayagaures, Flickr, Unwinding

One of the nice things about being on holidays, for an extended period of time, is the fact that you can actually get to disconnect from everything and unwind from it all. Relax, sit back and enjoy just doing … nothing. Or, on the contrary, you can go out and enjoy some of your favourite places to hang out where peace and quiet is just so abundant that it makes you feel rather small at times.

Yes, indeed, one of the great things about being on holidays is the fact that I can pick up once again one category that I have been neglecting over here for quite some time now (Nearly 7 months already!) and that I feel is just about time that I put a stop to it and get it going again. I am talking, of course, about the Photography section from elsua.net where I haven’t been sharing lately many of the different pictures that I have taken all along from the place where I live: Gran Canaria.

I have been uploading a few of them, my favourites, to my Flickr account, so you would be able to find them over there. However, there are some of them that I decided I just have got to share them as well over here, more than anything else because they all bring back some really good memories of different places I get to visit on a regular basis and certainly I would want to spread the word about them a bit.

Take, for example, Monte León and Presa de Ayagaures (Ayagaures’ Dam), two of my favourite places in the south of the island and which I can certainly recommend to go to for rather long walks where you can do plenty of thinking and unwinding, while enjoying some of the stunning nature around the area. In the past I have been weblogging about that particular area as well, but just a few days ago I went back there after we have had the first rainfall of the autumn and here you have got a couple of pictures of what it looks like now:

And if that wasn’t good enough already here you have got as well one of my favourite pictures from the series that I took on my way to Monte León of one of the many mansions / villas you would be able to see along the way. Like this one:

Don’t tell me that it doesn’t make you feel like you would want to hang out there for a little while. Just a little while longer, right? Ahhh, yes, it is good to be on holidays and capture some more of these precious moments. Certainly, a whole lot more to come from other different places I have been to in the last few days. Stay tuned …

(Oh, and, don’t forget, if you would want to see some more of that same area, just head over to my Flickr account and you would be able to check out some more from that same area)

Yes, folks, this is one of the places where I am going to be hanging out for the next few weeks. A colleague of mine at work just shared over in our internal weblogging network this really fine web site that I have been checking out for the last couple of hours and that has got me hooked. It is called Woophy and it puts together something so simple yet so effective: you get to share your favourite pictures from the different places you have been to, or that you would be interested in, or that you would want to share with others. In short, you get to share pictures in a world map. How simple is that? Yes, I know, very. And perhaps that is the actual beauty from the overall offering. Or is it perhaps the huge amount of great pictures that people have been sharing already? I tell you, once you start checking out the web site you would just want to chime in and share your best photos with the community of folks who have been hanging about all along.

Woophy has got also a news section where you can see what is happening with the service along with checking out on some of the great snapshots that people have been sharing thus far. I know it would be really nice if it would be having RSS feeds, and I guess that is coming, but certainly just checking out the news section will get you sticking around for some time. Then you have got the Forum where you can interact with other members of the community about the Woophy experience. There is even a contest whether they would be gathering “a collection of pictures portraying the diversity of life on our planet“, so that would also be a nice incentive to get you going. Although I am sure that after you have hanged out on the web site for a little while you would see that it is actually worth while the experience just browsing through the thousands and thousands of photos available already.

One of the nicest things about the whole experience is how you can actually help on the community building aspects by being able to leave comments on different pictures, or by actually rating a picture, or sending it to others or just simply by checking how many folks have already visited that particular snapshot. Pretty neat that instant notification of how much people are interested in your pictures or not. Then, finally, if you would be interested in a particular picture you have the opportunity to see it in full screen displaying up to 1280 pixels which actually makes for a very nice picture, at least, from the ones I have seen already.

As I said, quite an interesting offering that I would be spending some time on. Of course, I had to go into it and create an account: elsua. Thus you can get over there and search for all of the pictures I have been sharing already thus far. There will be some more coming up but for the time being I certainly want to recommend to you that if want to check some of the most amazing pictures head over there and start enjoying the Woophy experience. Oh, and not to worry, there are actually quite a lot more features available but I would let you discover those by yourselves while you head to the homepage. And then from there I am sure that you would be whoopying around like all of us for quite some time …

Oh, and in case you are wondering if I am going to stop sharing pictures in my Flickr account like I have been doing so far, that is actually not going to happen. At least, not for the time being. I will be sharing some of the best pictures I have shared in Flickr (And many more!) over there, in Woophy, but I will also continue to share some more as usual. Thus time to have some more fun !

Technorati Tags: Woophy, Photography, World Map, Flickr

If you would remember, last year, when I was moving from one Internet weblog to elsua, I actually migrated a number of different weblog posts in order not to lose the information. Well, one of those weblog posts was this one: The Biggest I Have Ever Seen So Far, where I was actually detailing the largest paella party I have ever been to and where I shared some pictures about the event itself. What can I say, folks? If I was flabbergasted back then when I attended the event for the first time, this year it has been more of the same. But this time around I was well prepared. I thought.

Yes, the traditional paella party or festival, whatever you would want to call it, took place this year as well as the ending event from the local festivities of El Tablero de Maspalomas. There were perhaps a little bit less people than in previous years but it is also true that there wasn’t much paella left at the end of the event (About two and a half hours later) thus it looks like it was a bit more scaled than in previous occasions. This time around I did my homework and I arrived a little bit earlier than usual so that I could take some pictures before hand of a paella that was going to feed several thousand people! I cannot describe it with many more words, other than saying that it is an art to be able to cook such a tasty giant paella for such a large crowd and still make it worth while eating! A big thumbs up for all of the cooks and rest of personnel who helped making it possible year after year! Just brilliant! Congrats, guys!

I doubt that I would be able to say something more than just show you a few of the pictures that I took during the event. There are many more that I will be sharing later on in my Flickr account but here you have got some of the most representative ones:

Next year, I will be ready for some more. No doubt ! Thus if you happen to be around here on holidays, or whatever, you know where you will find me! Yummy!

Technorati Tags: ElTableroDeMaspalomas, ElTablero, Paella, Flickr