T-Shirt oder Anzug

wer löst das Rätsel?

Das ist – neben vielen Ideen und Eindrücken – eines der Mitbringsel von meinem Trip zur Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. Ein T-Shirt von Central Desktop, Anbieter einer beliebten SaaS Social Technology Platform. Und ich habe zwei davon, beide in Größe L, welche mir – selbst an einem Casual Friday – nicht passen …

Und jetzt wird es spannend: löse das Bilderrätsel oben, finde das Lösungswort und schicke dieses via Kontaktformular an mich. Der Posteingang entscheidet über die glücklichen Gewinner, die dann Post von mir bekommen.

Update: Die Gewinner stehen fest, die Collaborate (cola – lab – her – eight) als richtige Lösung eingesendet haben. Kai und Kim freuen sich bald über Post 🙂

Live-waving the #e2conf keynotes

Not many words in the actual blogpost, but many more in here:

Workshop Day at #e2conf

It’s the first day at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston and the place is buzzing (alas, only literally). I am in the Blackbelt Practitioners Workshop, designed and held by members of the 20 Adoption council, agenda is like this:

Planning and executing a comprehensive Enterprise 2.0 program requires an honest assessment of your organization and strong strategic planning. In this full-day workshop meet the vanguard of those who are currently engaged in implementing Enterprise 2.0 within large organizations. Learn firsthand from practitioners who have tackled adoption, architecture, change management, community management, education, governance, and the realities of living an Enterprise 2.0 transformative experience.

Besides a lot of Twitter updates some action is happening in the designated wave for the workshop, so far it’s restricted to the participants for writing (and they really should do this more, it’s basically me doing the typing …) but anonymous read-only access should work out too:


Shipping up to places, this time: Boston

For most people I know travelling is a hassle best avoided. Not so for me. I am still pretty fond of it, even when it isn’t normally the most productive of times for me (which opens up the side question of why airports, train stations and most hotels don’t offer some free wifi as a complimentary service?). Some of the good things include:

– free newspapers on planes (and I do enjoy sifting through paper not screens at times) and if you’re kind you may even get a few free drinks
– depending on airline even the food is good on the planes (Iberia was pretty neat this time)
– on a 7 hour flight one can write some blog posts drafts – provided you’re able to take a capable laptop with you

And travelling can provide you with some very welcome inspiration, perspective and (sometimes) outright mind-blowing stuff you learn when you look and observe closely (this guy caressing his Kindle on the airport in Madrid – and a total absence of iPads so far; getting a cold douche refresher on how different we Europeans are after all; how easy-going anï»żd nice-to-have the regular traveling American can be; how I enjoy the coffehouse-bookstore hybrid, pictured left is the Trident bookstorecafĂ©).

So it’s fitting that travelling is a prerequisite to meeting most people from my Enterprise 2.0 consulting industry – for instance when I was at Lotusphere 2010 in January I’ve met Marcia Connor in person (after following her on the internets, esp. twitter for a while) – and we’ll meet each other again, when I was in London for the Social Business Summit meeting people alone rendered my trip worthwhile. It’s an easy formula: No travel – no meeting my worldwide peergroup. And hanging out together on the internet has some obvious time-zone downsides you only avoid by travelling.

So it’s a good idea to make the trip cross the pond at times to meet these people that don’t come to Europe regularly. Valid for the US share of Enterprise 2.0 people (practitioners and vendors both don’t care so much for travelling to Europe in E2.0 business, for the latter ones this is a bit strange. With consultants and thought-leaders it’s a totally different story).

And this time it’s the Enterprise 2.0 conference, starting here in Boston on Monday. For this I’ve got a lot of mails and contact requests by vendors in the last days. Sorry guys, I haven’t reacted that much, one reason is that I don’t know yetï»żÂ what my schedule will look like (I am registered as press and sometimes press they’ve got some press appointments, treats or who knows – I would bet on it being here similar), the other reason being that I planned to browse around the exhibition venue on my own terms, check out what’s interesting and seek more information when necessary. So I may turn out to be not a totally lost contact, OK?

OK, my timetable for Monday to Thursday is filling with sessions and things to see and do quickly (starting with Dion Hinchcliffe early Monday morning), some peer-group socializing, tweet-ups and odd small-talk in the halls. I am probably waving a bit, too. Don’t hesitate to get in touch with me and the others there or in real life – I traveled a long distance for exactly this 😉

Upcoming: More Enterprise 2.0 Community Events

Now, just now I was writing about my session proposal and my expectations for the upcoming Lotus JamCamp – especially in terms of the benefits of open communication and direct feedback that a BarCamp setting provides – and I’ve got fitting news on top:

One is the very ambitious Enterprise 2.0 Forum at Cologne this week (which I can’t visit as it’s colliding with re:publica and the intertwined Lotus JamCamp events where I’m an active stakeholder) – but anyway I am going to listen from afar what gets tweeted and blogged. I hope that Joachim Niemeier, who is moderating the event will also post a summary come time, and make up for me missing Euan keynoting (“How-to manage the Enterprise 2.0 (r)evolution?”) and the rest of the event, including the workshops tomorrow.

Then – and for crying out loud I am going to miss that one too – there’s the third International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 at Milano June 9 & 10.

In the past two years I attended them, ie. went to Varese and then, last year to Milano, but it’s so close to my (pre-scheduled) flight’s departure for Boston’s e2conf that I can’t combine them two. And one needs to find some time for actual customers in between all this conferencing …

So I am looking forward to meeting up with Emanuele, Sameer and Hutch over some Irish beers instead of Italian wine, weird bartering it is. But again joking aside, the agenda is looking nice, combining three topical tracks and an OpenSpace BarCamp-alike venue and room for discussion. And plenty of topics are on the slate, from “internal collaboration, customer engagement and open innovation” to:

– Setting up the strategy and building the business case
– New organization schemes and leadership models
– Nurturing adoption and cultural change
– Business drivers, metrics and return of the investment
– Community management and customer engagement frameworks
– How to socialize business processes: BPM 2.0, CRM 2.0, PLM 2.0
– Best practices and lessons learned through case studies
– From marketing to social CRM
– Social Media Marketing and PR 2.0
– Intranet 2.0
– Idea management and prediction markets
– Social softwares and collaborative platforms

Virtual Enterprise 2.0 Conference (notes and agenda)

It’s about to start underway now, the Virtual Enterprise 2.0 Conference, live on24.com – and I need a place to tweak, extend and comment on. While this could be Google Wave, like at the last e2conf in San Francisco, a nice little blog post might do the trick for the moment as well.

So what’s on the slate? First it’s the opening keynote with Morten T. Hansen, Author of Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results.

Then at 6pm my time it’s Oliver Marks & Sameer Patel discussing “Accelerating Business Performance with Enterprise 2.0” – see their video here

[…] the stages from inception to completion that form the gateways to successful justification, budget allocation and roll out. The session will provide guidance on how to plan, internally sell, design, develop and launch Enterprise 2.0 initiatives that will provide tangible business value to your organization.

7pm my time it’s Building an Interactive Enterprise with Louis Richardson, IBM:

[…] he reviews what IBM is doing to challenge people to think differently and do business differently. Learn how to create an interactive office environment with enterprise 2.0 capabilities that can bring people and content together quickly, integrate them into existing business processes, support high performance teaming, and drive faster decision making across the value chain of your organization.

Hey, did I notice I’ve been to Lotusphere? Nice to have a recap anyway 😉

9 pm my time it’s Social Software Tools: A Critical Evaluation with Tony Byrne:

[…] To date, technology analysts have quite properly focused on the social and business aspects of social software. And yet, social software tools (including collaboration suites, pure-play blog / wiki / social-networking products, and revamped portal products from major vendors) differ quite substantially in maturity, approach, and support. This session will share customer research from noted evaluation firm CMS Watch on leading social software technologies, and provide a framework for customers to evaluate the marketplace based on their own needs.

10 pm it’s the Microsoft Keynote with consecutive Q&A Session

11 pm The Evolution of Hello.bah.com with Megan Murray :

In this session, learn how Booz Allen’s Hello.bah.com platform is evolving. From the tools leveraged to their approach to policy, governance, and user support, Hello, like many Enterprise 2.0 implementations, is changing as it is integrated into the fabric of the organization.

For the moment I think I will follow the tweet stream, favourite some of the better ones (they will get syndicated into my tumblr lifestream here) and make some scribbled notes on plain paper …