reboot11 – recapping days 0 and 1

Ah, I promised some learnings, did I? First one: it turned out a good idea to arrive early, that is on Wednesday afternoon, the day before reboot. When I got to Kedelhallen some people were already there and while I was too late for getting into Wemind’s event there I happened to meet Kim Bach, with whom I had a very cool conversation around everything in between anarchy, bread baking and zoos and then a nice walk to the pre-reboot boat trip.

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I guess there have been some photos taken at this boat-trip, which was nice and a good start to an evening at the Copenhagen beaches  …

OK, now onto some of the talks on day one, I arrived early too:

Matt Webb started the talks, demanding more cultural invention – if only as a way to do more interesting things. Agree, we should stop “solving problems” and start “inventing culturally”, if this means going for the deep thinking. Needless to say that it all related to “design thinking” – and yes, “design has to invent, to create new ways of doing things, and to contribute to culture”.

David Weinberger, here I can say it with Peter’s words: “David Weinberger, who I always love to see talk, spoke about the web being a morally charged tool, and about optimism”. Yay, nice video, found via Peter:

Missed the talk by Matthias Müller-Prove, but went into Martin Jul’s session on what we can learn from Japan when they rebuilt after World War 2 – as they called on Deming for ideas, the session evolved into a collection of management principles (“Reboot your management“), some of whom are equally fitting our world of Enterprise 2.0.

It concerned Deming’s 14 principles for management, the humanistic, long-term thinking, keep learning, use the scientific method, and build from quality philosophy, that helped shape companies such as Toyota and Honda..

Researching the background of his work, it was interesting to see how the World-War 2 Training Within Industry principles played a big role in shaping his ideas and how its focus on operating from a basis of scarcity – such as saving material, time and labour to win the war faster, plays so well in an entrepreneurial setting and in cutting through the big-company trap of just throwing more money at problems.

Back from reboot, now onto blogging (again)

I am back from reboot 11, after basically two action-packed days on Thursday and Friday, and more socializing on the following weekend. Turned out to be a good idea to prolong the Copenhagen stay, not only was the weather very fine but got to meet some cool people too. And it sure helps the post-event wind down – happening when you have to retreat from the special reboot athmosphere into something more regular.

So I want to collect some takeaways based on me attending selected sessions (I was at nearly all of the keynotes) – yes, you only get a limited view of what was happening, but with sometimes five or six talks in parallel, and more longer-lasting side-projects running all of reboot time this is just the way it is. And of course it only is a part of my braindump mindmap …

My highlights included talks by (in no specific order) Matt Webb (check out his presentation), Lee Bryant and Bruce Sterling. That said, Bruce Sterling’s closing note was grappling, but some were supposing he’s making fun. I will leave that to your judgement, check out the video with him explaing his talk in short words:

Overall I learned a lot, not alone in the sessions but also in the many informal conversations happening around the conference. And while I am not feeling that much rebooted it inspired me to tackle some things anew, to refurbish some stalled mental investments and encouraged me to think about changing and tuning some of my approaches by giving me hints and inspiration (like “What does it mean to be an expert in social media?”, “How do I want to proceed with partnering, i.e. consulting in teams?” and more). Moreover, I decided to put more energy in my blogging once more, that is stepping up the frequency, together with being more flexible as to the ways it’s employed.

This was influenced in a way by Stowe‘s talk at reboot, which reminded me how lucky we are when we’ve got our own, self-designed venues to publish to the web. And while Twitter is cool (I think it’s way cooler than Facebook for that part), Friendfeed is great at managing (work)-lifestreams and other tools have their merits as well, blogging, that is putting up stuff with a permalink and means to comment, is still the difference between living a life of self-direction or dwelling in digital favelas. And I can still push all of what I want into the other feeds …

Enterprise 2.0: Involvement durch Innovations-Communities

Ein verregneter Feiertagmorgen – wie gerufen um all das aufzuschreiben was ich in den letzten Tagen so in den verschiedenen Veranstaltungen so an Notizen und Beobachtungen mitgenommen habe. Umso schöner wenn ich parallel dazu in eine Veranstaltung reinhören kann, die ich ausnahmsweise nicht besucht habe (Tipp von Thorsten per Telefon, Danke). Anfang der Woche fand in Berlin der DMMK statt, dabei u.a. ein Panel zu Enterprise 2.0, mit dem speziellen Fokus auf Innovationscommunities, sei es mit internem Fokus (Ideenmanagement etc.) oder auch mit Einbindung von externen Stakeholdern (Open Innovation, Co-Innovation etc.). Wie immer gibt es mehr zu Open Innovation und der Verbindung zu Enterprise 2.0 hier im Blog oder auch bei Business Model Innovation & Design.

Wenn von Online-Communities die Rede ist, denken die meisten an Facebook, LinkedIn, XING und Co. Doch ob und wie sich damit Geld verdienen läßt, steht noch in den Sternen – und ein klassischer Marketingkanal sind soziale Netzwerke allemal nicht. Die Elite der deutschen Wirtschaft nutzt die Mitmach-Plattformen in einer anderen Weise: Daimler, BMW, Tchibo, Swarovski und viele andere binden Mitarbeiter und Kunden ein, um neue Produkte oder sogar Businessmodelle online zu entwickeln.

Das Panel „Enterprise 2.0: Involvement durch Innovations-Communities“ schaut hinter die Kulissen: Was sind die Erfolgsrezepte? Welchen Umsatz kann man erwarten? Welche Chancen, welche Risiken bergen solche Communities? Wie können Internet-Verantwortliche mit Strategie-Abteilungen und Kommunikationsmanagern zusammenarbeiten, um die Potenziale von Open Innovation und digitaler Interaktion gemeinsam zu heben? Wie motiviert man Wissensträger dazu, mitzumachen? Spannende Fragen, die sicher Ideen liefern für das eigene Unternehmen oder potenzielle Auftraggeber.

Der Mitschnitt von zaplive.tv beginnt mit einem längeren Standbild, los geht es nach ca. 12 Minuten mit der Anmoderation.

Upcoming: International Forum on Enterprise 2.0

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Like last year I am going to the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 – this year it’s Milano. And like last year I am looking forward to meeting some people face-to-face for the first timeon Wednesday. Well, one of them is Ross Mayfield of Socialtext (did you know that it was in Socialtext’s Palo Alto offices that the very first WikiWednesday happened?), the other one is George Siemens, e-learning thought leader and knowledge management guy.

Emanuele’s got a nice agenda set-up, I hope that we’ll see lively discussions and can learn from the companies willing to share their enterprise 2.0 experiences. Even when we know that it’s the networking in the coffee breaks (I learned a bit about caffé you know …) what makes conferences worthwhile …

Why is Google Wave a tsunami?

wavelogoWhy is Google Wave important? Well, the toys of today are the tools of tomorrow, a compelling keynote for a developer conference is cool and all, but there’s more on the upside:

  • Google Wave is poised to reshape (rewires I say) the nature of communication (yes, more face-to-face real-timelineness communication), improving the web experience. We probably need to experience and use it a while to understand its potentials completely …

– A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.
– A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.
– A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

And as we’re moving onto more real-timeness and collaboration already (think Friendfeed lifestreams, real social bookmarking and annotation, social news and more), this is much more than another Google service:

  • Yes, it’s a promising product, framework and protocol.
  • Yes, it’s got an API which is devised to allow “developers to embed waves in other web services and to build extensions that work inside waves”.  With HMTL 5 and a supportive browser we get an app that is part wiki, part chat, part forum, part collaborative office and document (nah, content) sharing tool and part email. We get multi-user real time editing – be it in uploaded photos, videos or other stuff (alas, you can’t edit the photo or the video but you can collaboratively tag the uploaded files). It’s possible to play-back the history of the document to see how it evolved (think wiki page history on a ton of steroids).
  • Yes, the platform will be open-sourced, it will be able to run on any server, so it won’t belong to Google. It’s a standard thing so whoever is hosting waves can build no walled garden (you listen Facebook, do you?) but must ensure interoperability (yes, like with plain old mail). One step closer to living in the cloud of distributed apps and data. And it’s playing along the lines of integration and adaptivity … so I can’t wait to put this on my own servers

At last, one more thing, something that explains why Google is such a remarkable company – it’s the story behind Wave. Starting from the question “Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today, in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?” they have achieved a lot. And Google’s introductory blog post has the innovation story, ie. why it must have been Google to say yes to this idea and on the early days of Wave (more on Google innovation culture, ie. a company whose unique culture shows through in small ways):

When Lars Rasmussen first floated the idea, Google co-founder Sergey Brin wasn’t impressed. “He came to me and he said ‘This may sound kinda crazy, but we’re going to reinvent communication and we just need a bunch of engineers to go of to Australia for a while and we’ll get back to you after a couple of years,'” Brin remembers. “It was not a very compelling proposal.”

More wave information at the usual places, like Techcrunch, Tim O’Reilly (Open Source, Open Protocol, and Federated Wave Clouds), Forrester, Mashable

And yes, you can sign up for Google Wave updates

Google Wave tsunami

Hmmm, preview of the real next Google, leaving email as we know it in the dust of time. Rather long presentation of Google Wave. This is ambitious, and technically impressive. And to explain what it may turn out to be – when my friend Daniel Hartmann alerted me to Google Wave and the other outcoming of Google-I/O-Conference, we were discussing the implications in a longish Skype Chat – in the future we’ll dig into a wave, collaborating with others, adding links and snippets to the conversation, overall collaborating seamlessly with an hybrid that integrates E-Mail, Chat, Instant Messaging, File-Sharing, Task- and Project-Management and whoknowswhat (collaborative editing functionality will be everywhere of course, “wiki as a verb” wins big time).