re:publica 11 – Informationsparadoxon-Fallen

Ob es ein gutes Zeichen für eine zukunftsgerichtete Internet-und-so-Konferenz ist wenn die Teilnehmer weiter sind als die manche Leute auf dem Podium? Oder anders herum gefragt warum trauen sich manche auf so eine Plattform mit halbgaren Ergebnissen aus pseudo-wissenschaftlichen Seminararbeiten*? Und nein, damit meine ich nicht Sascha, auch wenn seine ausgedachte Trolltheorie mehr unterhaltsam als wissenschaftlich begründbar ist (Oliver hat mitgeschrieben). Aber den Tag bzw. den Vortrag mit der Stilvorgabe <rüpelnder rant> zu beginnen hat etwas ungemein inspirierendes. Kann man ja nicht allzuoft machen, ist vielleicht aber auch besser so …

Was bleibt also vom ersten Tag der re:publica 11 für mich? Im Grunde das zu erwartende – übervolle Sessionräume, übervolle UMTS-Funkzellen und übertolle Gespräche mit alten Freunden und Bekannten. Vielleicht sollte ich heute komplett auf Face-to-Face Interaktion setzen? Offline bin ich vermutlich ohnehin, wenn auch unfreiwilllig. Dagegen sprechen im Grunde nur a) die Vorfreude auf manche der heutigen Vortragenden, die ich nun doch nicht verpassen möchte und b) meine ausgeprägte Neugier (die mich so auch immer wieder in Grossman-Stiglitz-Informationsparadoxon-Fallen laufen lassen wird, vulgo: ich weiß erst nach der Session wie sie denn nun war).

Gilt irgendwie für die re:publica als Ganzes – man weiß aus Erfahrung dass es Fallen geben wird, man kennt sogar aus Erfahrung deren “Bauform” und Lage – und dennoch tappt man frohgemut rein. Wie immer eine tolle re:publica, ich bin froh dabei zu sein.

* aus Political Correctness Sentimentalitäten keine Links und keine weiteren Worte 😉

Upcoming: Social Business Jam …

it’s the thing to (virtually) attend the next three days – and it starts tonight. Guess who’s on the list of guests

It will be interesting to see which one’s of the following topics will gather most interest and action:

  • Building the Social Business of the Future
  • Building Participatory Organizations Through Social Adoption
  • Using Social to Understand and Engage with Customers
  • What does Social mean for IT?
  • Identifying Risks and Establishing Governance

Indeed these are the pre-planned forums where people are invited to join, discuss and contribute – I will participate mainly in the strategy tracks as I call them (“Building the Social Business of the Future” and “Building Participatory Organizations Through Social Adoption”) hoping to discuss ideas, arenas of possible uses etc.

After all it’s not about Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0 and the Social Web by themselves but about corporate uses of it all, where the usage can regularly span corporate boundaries (even when many things are happening behind some sort of firewall it must not stop there).

So timely this Social Jam is well, huh? Well, it’s probably quite an example of using social software for innovation and idea management across traditional boundaries (who is allowed to participate, who can manage to be there, etc.), that allows wide participation (that said – it starts at 10 AM EST, which is about 4 pm my time, hence thankfully not as early as for people on the West Coast …).

Blogging Lotusphere

Even when the press room at the Dolphin is getting emptier now there’s been a lot of blogging action going on during Lotusphere. I feel the need to collect some of the best parts in here. Partly this is for me so that I can find the interesting posts easily later on (yes, one could use the blogsearch thing), but I assume that others will find this useful as well. Worthwhile blogging takes time and is also quite an effort, but then blog posts they stay longer than the gazillion tweets that we’ve had in the past days. So let’s get some limelight and drum-banging.

There’s of course the german Lotus team, ie. Stefan Pfeiffer with german language notes (see eg. OGS: Activity Streams, Mobility und Social everywhere) and the not-so-affiliated folks (Volker WeberAlexander Kluge, die Noteshexe und mehr …).

Some of the prolific bloggers I had the pleasure to (re-)meet are Bill Ives from Portals and KM, Falk Hedemann from german magazine t3n (german blogging hence, interesting report on the RIM PlayBook), Luis Benitez and my irregular friends from the enterprise 2.0 sphere (Luis Suarez, Susan Scrupski, Bertrand Duperrin, Rawn Shah, Larry Hawes, Vinnie Mirchandani …) and other spheres (James aka Monkchips to start, I am curious to see what he’s writing, always insightful commenter on Twitter he is, plus the always knowledgeable Alex Williams from ReadWriteWeb Enterprise too – how can one person do such good live-blogging?).

I haven’t met Turbotodd so far (and it’s getting late, yes) but one can’t have everything, no?  But I have shook hands with Scott Treggiari, who’s the last press/analyst/blogger with me in the press room on Wednesday evening. More to meet at tonight’s party – an appointment with Harry Potter it is.

ps. I will update this blog post with links to the posts as they come in (and I come around reading them, tomorrows a time of travel.

Day 1 Lotusphere 2011, part 1

Some notes from the Lotusphere 2011 OGS – the opening, which as always is designed to be inspirational, theme-setting and energizing. Like last year it started off with loud music to awake everyone (well, smart idea when you know that yesterday evening’s welcome reception party was prolonged by many at other places …).

And like last year there was a surprise guest for the opening, actor Kevin Spacey. Some grounded remarks on collaboration, social networks, helping people achieve their potential and the social responsibility of mentoring. Plus – again – some rationale for collaborative social business, ie. based upon his personal insight into filmmaking as an effort of many and the need to lower the walls for innovative ideas to come inside one’s organization and social sphere. Yes, the movie industry can be understood as an archetypical model of networked collaboration and Kevin tells us the story of how he and partners founded a web based platform for scriptwriters years ago – helping them not only to turn in their scripts but also to help them learn from each other. And yes. that was long before the social network.

Then regular Lotus time with Alistair Rennie expanding upon this year’s theme Get social. Do business. Some takeaways from his talk:

  • social business is all about a new business context emerging, both in terms of open tasks and opportunities. We need to help business people to solve hard problems, problems that are keeping them awake at night. Read business volatility, the changing nature of customer relationships, et al.
  • creative leadership needs to tap and redesign relationships, in order to leverage collective intelligence
  • social business is a real game changer, and we know that game changers are rare. Here we have one for sure, even when the model and its understanding is still in the early stages. Why? Because we (and that’s not only IBM but us) have been thinking and researching on this since years literally. IBM wants to lead this movement.
  • evolution from mainframes to departmental computing, then PCs on every desk, then the Internet – now it’s stage five, ie. Social Business.
  • Companies that employ social technologies Social businesses outperform their competitors according to a recent McKinsey study. It’s because they’re more engaged, more transparent and more nimble and agile (able to change and adapt quickly and able to act with speed). Being engaged in networked social business, ie. working the networks pays as well – when they’re transparent it’s easier to tap distributed competencies and capabilities
  • What social business needs is open standards – best served with enterprise grade security. IBM is commited to standards, be they HTML5, activity streams, open social, or else.
  • Activity Streams are the cornerstone of the smarter knowledge workers environment, aggregating information from all kinds of sources (be they internal or external social media). And these streams can be accessed and worked on when on the go as well (unified communications as well). So, mobility is another key thing. Clients on all kinds of devices and platforms.

Now some notes from the following panels and demos, starting with RIM CTO Jim Basillie who came onstage with a RIM Playbook (multi-tasking and flash support included unlike other market playbooks ;). He’s holding it’s a viable platform (well, he’s got a point, at least it’s “CIO approved”).

Jeff Schick moderated a customer panel (with BASF, KBC, CSC and AT&T) on how they employ social Lotus software (plus some remarks on how it played out economically, I noted one thing that the guy from BASF said that it’s no longer a mere question of RoI at their place by now, they have demonstrated that it’s worthwhile and have crossed the Rubicon it seems).

Another customer panel with the AFL (he**, australian english is so hard to understand, mymy), the Massachussetts Blue Cross Blue Shield and RBC, big canadian bank. All perfectly satisfied with what they’ve done with Lotus so far.

Then introduction to the demo rounds, reaching back to last year’s Project Vulcan blueprint roadmap vision, the Vulcan ideas get integrated into Notes next, Connections next, Sametime next, xyz next. The idea is to provide exceptional work experience (shall I say with the goal of improving day to day corporate work?). Find some notes on the demos at Alex Williams who was live-blogging the event, Alan Lepofsky was also live-blogging the opening session and has more details of the demos.

After that I was off to the official press conference and a round of executive meetings and briefings during the most time of the afternoon (there will be more posts, stand by … I was writing this post during the whole of the afternoon, ie. during the breaks in my schedule)

PS. Luis Benitez embedded the Lotus live-blogging Cover it Live collaboration of him and Mitch (cool pictures and loads of short remarks made during the session)

PPS. You can see the whole 2:30 video footage of the OGS here:

Watch live streaming video from ibmsoftware at livestream.com

Sammelwave für die #leweb

Später werde ich hier die verschiedenen Waves zusammenfügen und verlinken, bis dahin ist sie eine Sammelstelle für verschiedene Notizen, in der Regel zu den Talks auf der Hauptbühne der LeWeb: