Upcoming: BarCamp Bodensee 2010

Well, buzzing a lot prevents me from blogging more – sad truths of an ever evolving digital smarter work knowledge worker’s lifestyle. But then again, other than with Google buzz (and this movie we all know and love) the first rule of BarCamp is “You talk about BarCamp”.

And the http://barcampbodensee.mixxt.eu/ this weekend is something we better talk about – an international event, attracting people from France, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark et al.

Denmark? Yes, I am happy that Kim Bach is making the trip from Copenhagen. I met him last year at reboot – another international event drawing geeks in literally droves – and we had the great time that’s facilitated by an athmosphere of kindness to strangers and intellectual curiosity. Yes, my reboot experiences are fueled by both the shared understanding and the sparkling contrarian discussions – it’s a very special climate and I am sad that this year will be a year of breath-taking and pausing (there’s a substitute for those that can’t live without their yearly rebooting fix experience). And for crying out loud I can’t even make it to the Ersatz because I’ve got a major event lined up. More on that later.

For now, let’s blog about the proposed sessions at #bcbs10, there’s some interesting stuff in there, my selection:

You see, I am cheating a bit about the interesting proposed sessions, but I really do hope that we can do some collaborative, live-documenting the BarCamp in Wave this year:


Yes, that’s the second rule of BarCamp: You blog wave about BarCamp …

tags: , , , , , , ,

reboot11 – recapping day 2 and wrapping it all up

Time for a wrap-up, huh? Blogged about day 1 here, now onto the remainders, which included favourite talks by Lee Bryant, Euan Semple, JP Rangaswamy, Stowe Boyd and Bruce Sterling (interview here).

And with favouriote speakers on stage I am a bit hesitating to see it like Anders who writes:

[…] the slightly holier-than-thou tech-savvy social media web crowd in the hall. And the ribbing was needed, in my opinion, since the first keynotes of the day – Lee Bryant and Evan Semple – had been gagfests of we-know-what-it-is-about-and-they-do-not-comments on enterprises and old media, entertaining and insightful though they were.

I don’t think this was only for the converted, the smart guys who get it – talks like these provide us with inspiration and things to think about. Granted, from the outside “cyberutopianism and activism” look very much like a sick insider’s joke, yet it’s more mainstream than one assumes at first. The changes are underway, both in social media as whole and in the enterprise.  And the topics of this year’s reboot are probably more mainstream than we realize, like we can see e.g. in the race for the colonization of social media. As Stowe Boyd demands:

[…] we are not online for money, principally. We have created the web to happen to ourselves: to shape a new culture and build a better, more resilient world. And we need better media tools than we have at present, to make that a reality.

So reboot11 was a success in my mind – giving us stories and storylines (or shall we say a Reboot mythology) to proceed. And some nifty action projects like the solar bike went live too (the rebike in fact turned out to offer better wifi than the regular reboot one, watch the video …). After all you can’t fit everything into two days, sometimes you just have to be content with what you’ve got, it’s like Casper says:

[…] a lot of friendly people and generally the conference went beyond my expectations for a reasonably small tech (not in the real sense anyways) get-together as this was. I hope to join next year as well.

To close, my short video interview with Ton Zijlstra, talking about what makes reboot so special (and yes, some systems work best when they’re not stable):

ps. reboot presentations get collected on slideshare, tagged with ‘reboot11’ and then probably added to the reboot group on slideshare

tags: , , ,

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.

pict0034

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.

tags: , , , , ,

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 …

tags: , , , ,

Termine: Seminar zu Enterprise Portals, Enterprise 2.0 Usability und mehr

Transparenz von Terminplänen ist manchmal eine gute Sache – wer mich bei den folgenden Veranstaltungen treffen möchte weiß nun wo und wann. Also, rund um verschiedene Kundentermine (die ich natürlich nicht transparent machen werde …) bin ich in nächster Zeit hier tätig:

Als erstes das Barcamp Bodensee – vom 31. Mai bis zum 01. Juni in Friedrichshafen.

Es folgen die Intranet.days vom 3.-5. Juni 2008, hier werde ich zusammen mit Michael Schuler von der Architektenkammer Baden-Württemberg am ersten Konferenztag einen Vortrag mit dem Titel “Usability innovativer Intranet-Werkzeuge: Einfachheit, Schnelligkeit, Klarheit” halten.

Insbesondere freue ich mich auf die Panel-Diskussion mit allen Referenten zum Abschluss des ersten Veranstaltungstages. Aufgrund der thematischen Vielfalt ist ein spannender Tag garantiert, das ausführliche Programm der Intranet.days mit allen Uhrzeiten und Referenten ist hier zu finden.

Leider kann ich nur am ersten Konferenztag teilnehmen, das liegt an einer Terminkollision mit dem dritten Dresdner Zukunftsforum am 5. Juni – veranstaltet von der T-Systems Multimedia Solutions. Motto ist „Leben in der digitalen Welt“, unter anderem wird Don Tapscott zu dem durch „Web 2.0“ eingeleiteten Wandel zum „Unternehmen 2.0“ und Wikinomics sprechen:

Im Mittelpunkt des Zukunftsforums stehen nicht die Technik, sondern neue Möglichkeiten zum sozialen Austausch, die durch moderne Technologien entstehen. Wie verändert der Einsatz von „sozialer Software“ die Arbeitswelt? Welche neuen Möglichkeiten bietet das Web 2.0 der Unternehmensführung?

Passt sehr schön zu meinem Termin am 10. Juni in München. Hier werde ich im Auftrag von Componence und BEA Systems einen Vortrag zum Thema Enterprise 2.0 halten. Im Mittelpunkt werden Praxisberichte und Implementierungswege stehen, sprich welche Einsatzmöglichkeiten bestehen und wie Unternehmen diese Konzepte erfolgreich umsetzen können. Ich werde dabei u.a. auch eine Brücke zum Thema Geschäftmodellinnovation schlagen, d.h. deutlich machen, wie mit Enterprise 2.0 Konzepten Business- und Marketing-Ziele erreicht werden können.

Und ein Termin für die langfristige Planung, vom 26.-27. Juni findet in Kopenhagen die reboot10 statt, hoffentlich mit mir …

“[…] a community event for the practical visionaries who are at the intersection of digital technology and change all around us…

2 days a year. 500 people. A journey into the interconnectedness of creation, participation, values, openness, decentralization, collaboration, complexity, technology, p2p, humanities, connectedness and many more areas.”

tags: , , , , , , , ,