Check out the Google Wave backchannel at E20SUMMIT

Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT After some good experiences at both the BarCamp Munich and the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco it’s probably a good thing to expand the Google Wave experiment onto the upcoming E20SUMMIT. And while we don’t know how many of the attendees have got a Wave ID already, the more geeky ones sure have. And when Joachim Niemeier and I asked on Twitter if we should curate a Wave backchannel to the conference enough people raised their hand. After all there’s more than Twitter for getting more out of conferences – even when it can’t beat the face-to-face experience.

So here’s the idea, we’ve set up a public Google wave which will act as a central repository and catalogue of the various sub-Waves people are free to open (find it by searching for tag:e20swith:public on Wave). And we’ll provide some public “pre-filled” waves too, linked from there. These pre-filled public waves are there to give some framework and structure so that the actual working in the waves during the conference is easier. Much like pre-filling a wiki for sake of better adoption I think …

You are free to add more waves to the catalogue – after all it’s about crowd-sourcing various voices before and after the event. And those individual waves may be both closed to some collaborators or open to everyone, so it’s important to note that once you’ve opened up the wave to everyone (by adding easypublic@appspot.com to the wave) you can’t go back to closed (if there’s a way to accomplish this please let me know).

Moreover I think it’s a good idea to ask presenters if it’s OK to document their presentations in Wave – especially when you’ve opened it up to the world. Much like live-tweeting or -blogging it’s professional decency to respect the speaker’s wishes. Then again, and much alike the “wiki situation” – it’s probably cooler to have open waves for everyone from the beginning.

Upcoming: E20SUMMIT next week

Enterprise 2.0 SUMMITThis coming week it’s showtime finally.

It’s the week of E20SUMMIT, ie. a week packed with discussions, information and “peer talk” on Enterprise 2.0. I know that some of my readers will be there, but I don’t think I can manage to have a beer with each of you, sorry about that, but I want to remember the event 😉

As you probably know I was involved in the “configuration” and set-up of the event, and while I haven’t been too bothered with the organizing aspects of it, I’ve seen that there’s an immense amount of work and engagement that was invested. Thomas Koch and his team at Kongressmedia, namely Steffi, Björn and Kai have worked countless hours to realize this event. And I think now’s the time to thank them for envisioning a great event, way in advance they’ve seen and believed in the potentials of the social web in the enterprise and they’ve built and supported the community in many ways – not alone in Germany but on a European scale as well.

Choose the right (social web) tools

Andrea is giving us still more videos he recorded at Somesso this week – see his site for all of them. I decided to embed at least one of those, it’s Lee Bryant from Headshift, now part of Dachis Group and also one of the speakers at the upcoming E20SUMMIT, half and hour about “which tools banks, insurances and other companies in the financial industry [should] investigate and which are the costs and degrees of difficulty in adoption”:

Yes, this adoption meme is keeping me up at night – and there’s some posts brewing right now.

Oliver Marks and Andrew McAfee at the Enterprise 2.0 conference

During the last two days I have spent the better part of my nights listening in to and participating in the discussion at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco. This wasn’t only Twitter, quite some documenting took place in Google Wave too (that’s global collaboration, me and Dan editing the same blip while being literally thousands of miles away from each other, for #nirvana we only need to sort out the time zone problems). Some notes and thoughts are still forming and may end up in a frogpond- or enterprise2open-blog post soon …

Until then this video is a good thing to watch, Oliver Marks (who happens also to be one of the headliners at next week’s E20SUMMIT) talking with Andrew McAfee (new book here: Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges) about the conference, it’s target audience and about the current state of the discussion around Enterprise 2.0.

We discuss the strengths of the event – the evangelists and middle ranking employee success stories – but also note the need for impressing on senior ‘C’ suite decision makers in organizations the business value of these modern ideas and associated technologies.

There are at least two interesting things to notice in there, one: the discussion is evolving quickly and the experts have since long stopped to mull over questions of definition, why even of questioning RoI. The real topics are now the necessary steps we all should take to get the C-Suite from “being interested” to becoming active sponsors – and how to explain the tangible benefits of collaborative performance. Systems are ready and able, experienced consultants ditto and may work for the satisfaction of being the change you want to see money. Gentlemen, please let your projects start.

The other thing is the obervation I absolutely second that middle-level people aren’t the roadblock, in fact they are the necessary ingredient of Enterprise 2.0 success and make out most of the participants both at the Enterprise 2.0 conference and the upcoming E20SUMMIT. This isn’t by chance or “because they were told to go” but because they feel the need and the willingness to change with and by Enterprise 2.0.

Dirk Röhrborn im Gespräch – Enterprise 2.0, Microblogging und Pre-Conference-Workshops

Im Vorfeld des Enterprise 2.0 SUMMITs habe ich einige Interviews mit Akteuren und Stakeholdern der deutschen Enterprise 2.0 – Szene geführt. Bereits im Mai – direkt nach dem MobileCamp in Dresden – habe ich u.a. neben dem Interview mit Frank Schönefeld von der T-Systems MMS (hier im ECM World-Blog hat Björn noch einige Anmerkungen notiert) auch ein Interview mit dem Geschäftsführer von Communardo, Dirk Röhrborn gemacht (ebenfalls im ECM World-Blog zu finden – “Interne Kommunikation mit Social Software unterstützen – Interview mit Dirk Röhrbörn“)

Im Mittelpunkt dieses Gesprächs stehen […] Entwicklungen im Bereich Enterprise 2.0. Einen besonderer Fokus wird dabei auf die Aspekte gelegt, wie durch Social Software die interne Kommunikation – sei es auf Projekt- oder Unternehmensebene – unterstützt und gefördert wird. Durch den erhöhten ‘Fluß’, wie auch die Transparenz für alle (weil öffentlich einsehbar) […] kommt es zu einem Effekt des ‘schneller und besser Informiertseins’

Interessanterweise ist Dirk gerade in San Francisco bei der Enterprise 2.0 Conference – direkt nach dem Confluence Community Day ging sein Flug – und teilt uns von dort seine Eindrücke, u.a. zur Situation im Markt für Enterprise Microblogging, sowie zur Einführung von Enterprise 2.0 in Unternehmen in seinem Blog mit. Daneben haben wir beide heute morgen auch kurz geskypet, eine Zeitverschiebung von 9 Stunden macht es dabei möglich, dass beide Gesprächspartner gleich müde sind, wenn auch aus unterschiedlichen Gründen …

Gerade Dirks Rückblick auf Dion Hinchcliffes Session finde ich spannend, nicht zuletzt weil Dion auch nächste Woche auf dem E20SUMMIT im kleinen Kreis eine “Masterclass”, d.h. einen ähnlichen Pre-Conference Workshop anbieten wird. Daneben wird er auch Keynotes und Panels (mit-)gestalten, kurz gesagt: ich freue mich unheimlich ihn wieder zu sehen und mit ihm über die Zukunft von Enterprise 2.0 zu diskutieren.

PS. Wer sich noch schnell für eine Teilnahme am E20SUMMIT entscheiden kann, dem bietet der (Community-Manager-)Blogger-Promotioncode “e20sfp” einen Rabatt von 200€ bei der Registrierung.

Upcoming: Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT

4046866060_b4e5aa42a3Next week, Wednesday and Thursday there’s the Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT in Frankfurt upcoming – this is one of the pivotal events for the Enterprise 2.0 community in Germany and Europe. Together we’ll be preparing and building deep understanding of the potentials of web technologies in corporations and we’ll be exploring and analyzing the challenges to organisational structures and processes.

To support this the SUMMIT combines panels, case studies, best practices and workshops in two high-energy days. Especially the best practices should be most interesting, as discussing with peers and innovative corporate users is much more valuable than sitting through vendor or consultant’s presentations (this ain’t true for my very own talks, obviously).

So I think that this is a great primer for executives wanting to learn what, where and how to start with an Enterprise 2.0 initiative. The two days spent are a good investment, register here and be part of the event.

And I’ve also got a special treat for you – tell me in the comments (or trackback from your very own blog …) your views on Enterprise 2.0 and Collaborative Performance and why you want to take part in the event. I’ve still got some blogger tickets to distribute and you might be lucky and we can meet in Frankfurt …

Speaking at Confluence Community Day

Next week, Oct 29 I am attending the Confluence Community Day 2009 in Frankfurt. The organizers have done interviews with all of the speakers, including me. And because my interview is in german language I wanted to give the english-speaking community a short summary of what I’ve promised to speak about in the track “success factors of implementing wikis in organizations” (yes, some ideas are dear to me, and blogging repeatedly about them is the name of the game – Jörg Kantel is right, this is OK, there are re-re-screenings on TV too).

Well then, the Confluence community day is aimed at people generally interested in wikis, especially people who are looking for better ways to implement them, better ways to support adoption and better ways to make wikis a success. Thus I will start by defining and showing the “playing field” in which we find ourselves in the introduction of wikis, and illustrate the particular relevance and importance of the infrastructure fields in implementation. My goal is that in the end we’ll all have a more comprehensive approach to the implementation process and a better understanding of what is really important.

Dirk also asked me about my expectations about the future of wikis, and the underlying trends. Here’s the gist of what I’ve said:

I expect both a higher market adoption – particularly with SMBs – and more intensive usage of wikis. Case studies and the documented benefits attract both imitators and innovators to wikis […]

Succeeding with a wiki is no given or naturally – it’s adoption must be actively promoted, and it’s a good idea to do this together with specialized consultants (this was a hint, right …).

And on the trends that will affect the use of wikis:

First and foremost, I am watching the wiki space from a broader perspective, i.e. Enterprise 2.0 – in addition to current trends such as Twitter or social networking, wikis are virtually a constant: They are a mature and controlled technology, and its anchorage in the organizational map is understood quite well. Thus we’re able to proceed to work flexibly and creatively with the tools …

It’s the discussing time what is making these kind of meetups so important – needless to say that I also did put on my marketing and community manager hat and invited everyone to the upcoming E20SUMMIT and the WikiCamp at the CeBIT 2010.