Portals and KM

Our Upcoming Session at Boston KM Forum on Chaos Theory and Information Discovery

Thierry Hubert and I will speak at the December 17 meeting of Boston’s KM Forum.  We will discuss: Deliver Us from Web 2.0 Content Chaos: Activity, Attraction and Personal Knowledge Create the Awareness Engine™.  Here is the session description.

The presentation will share with the audience a practical application of chaos theory for creating knowledge focal points from the chaotic mess of content resources distributed across the Web. Using a couple of examples, one from the Internet where socially generated content is exploding, and one from the enterprise where social tools are also contributing their own content bloat, We will discuss the ideas that are driving a new product idea at Darwin Ecosystem. The examples will illustrate how activity can make information more discoverable, and easier to explore through various visualization techniques. These techniques open the door for more self-discovery through intuitive recognition of patterns. They will help the explorer to find relationships among content objects and people that would not have been found using traditional search methods.

We hope to see you there. It will be from 4 to 6 PM at the Microsoft offices, 201 Jones Road, Waltham, MA. Here is the announcement post on the KM Forum blog with directions. Here is more about Darwin Ecosystem and how it works. 

Collective Intelligence Summit: Leading Enterprise 2.0 Prediction Markets

Here is an interesting event. The Collective Intelligence Summit will take place on November 6 at the Gleacher Center at The University of Chicago: 450 North City Front Plaza Drive, Chicago. It features a number of interesting speakers: George Neumann (University of Iowa) on Iowa Electronic Health Markets: 
Real-money futures markets, Arik Johnson (Aurora WDC) on Intelligence 2.0 - Era of Asymmetric Interpretation, Robin Hanson (George Mason University) on Prediction Markets: Combinatorial Prediction Markets, Rami Levy, Motorola on Socialized Innovation: 
Tapping Motorola’s Collective Intelligenc, Linda Rebrovick, Consensus Point Enterprise Collective Intelligence: Leading Effective Enterprise PMs, Matt Fogarty, (Crowdcast) on Team Intelligence to Business Intelligence: Prediction Markets Delivering Key Forecasts and Paul Pluschkell (Spigit) on Enterprise 2.0 Social Media Tools for Ideas and Innovation.

The conference is designed for those who need to apply collective intelligence networks and market mechanisms to their current business issues. I have written about Spigit before (see Innovating Through Market Games with Spigit).  They have an interesting approach to innovation management. Spigit uses the concept of market dynamics to manage the innovation process and engage employees in this effort.

Great KM Cluster Meeting in Dallas on September 24

My friend Adriaan Jooste is hosting an interesting KM Cluster meeting in Dallas this week on September 24. The DFW Value Network and KM Cluster will be held in Irving, Texas, 10 minutes from DFW Airport.

The speakers include Adriaan covering KM Economics: What NOT to do in an Economic Downturn. Adraain is the Chief Knowledge Officer 
 Deloitte Financial Advisory Services LLP. Karl Wiig, 
Chairman and CEO
Knowledge Research Initiative, will speak on: Knowledge Futures: What can organizations and countries do to increase their knowledge competency right now? Nancy Dixon will discuss “Conversation: 
The Core Knowledge Transfer Technology.” Wilbur Swan, Co-founder
Contact Networks, and Deborah Roth Grabein, 
Chief Marketing Officer at Andrews and Kurth, will discuss, Enterprise Social Capital: 
Mastering employee contacts while optimizing privacy .

I have heard Adriaan, Nancy, and Karl before and they are all great speakers. I recommend this is you can attend.

Come to Webcom 2009 in Montreal October 22

Webcom 2009 will take place in Montreal on Thursday October 22 from 8Am to 6PM. I look forward to seeing you there. There is a great agenda of speakers. Shel Holtz leads it off with a session on Tactical Transparency: The Value of Access to Information. Then there are four tracks on: Enterprise 2.0 & Intranets, Marketing 2.0, Solutions 2.0, and Media 2.0.

I am pleased to be speaking twice. First, there is a Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 Blogging in the Age of Twitter. Here is the description. "Blogs were one of the initial social media, emerging on the political scene in 04 and business in 05. They were the first social media to make it into Gartner’s “slope of enlightenment.” Now Twitter has emerged as the hot new social media tool on the Web. Does Twitter replace blogs? Have blogs seen their day? This session will cover the state of business blogs in 2009 and attempt to convince you that blogs and Twitter are natural partners that make each other stronger. It will focus on blogging outside and inside the enterprise."

The second session is a brief discussion on Twitter for Business is Not an Oxymoron. In this discussion I cover "how Twitter is another of the long line of Web 2.0 consumer tools to cross over to the business world. It has emerged in the past year as a new communication channel that augments, but does not replacing existing ones, including blogs. Hear a wide range of business applications for Twitter from a skeptic turned convert. Case examples will be provided and discussion encouraged."

My colleague at Darwin Development Corporation, Thierry Hubert will cover how Collective wisdom is emerging from Web chaos. In this session he will demonstration the Darwin Awareness Engine ™ and discuss its capabilities. Our friend, Claude Malaison will discuss Twitter & the Mumbai Terrorist Attacks: How to scoop CNN.

There are many other interesting speakers and topics and you have the wonderful city of Montreal.

KM World 2009 Program Available

I received my paper copy of the KM World 2009 program recently. You can see the agenda online at the KM World 2009 site. It looks great with people like Andrew McAfee, Christine LI, David Snowden. Nancy Dixon, Thomas Vander Wal, and Leslie Owens.

The KM World people were kind to allow me to offer you a $200 discount on each of your full-conference passes. They can also sign up for a free expo pass. Go to this KM World registration form.

I also want to bring to your attention to my workshop, Business Social Media Best practices: Blogs & Twitter. It is offered Monday, November 16 form 9AM to 12PM. Here is the workshop description:

Blogs were one of the initial social media and their influence continues to grow. They were the first social media to make it into Gartner’s “slope of enlightenment.” Gartner also recently wrote, “Enterprises must define clear strategic objectives for blogging, and support them with policies to encourage executives and employees to maintain regular entries and to identify and discourage harmful blogging practices… Increasingly, any public-facing media company or enterprise must have a blogging strategy.” This interactive workshop will help you develop and refine your business blogging strategy. It covers blogging best practices in 2009 and how to complement your blogging efforts with the new emerging social media such as Twitter. New customer communication options opened up Twitter are also explored.

I hope to see you at the conference, and even better, at the workshop. :)

MIT Sloan CIO Symposium: Notes from Four Panels

The MIT Sloan CIO Symposium is an annual one-day conference where CIOs and other senior execs gather to “explore how academic research and innovative technologies can help address the practical challenges in today's changing economy.” I sat through four panels and posted my notes on the FastForward blog. I found it interesting to hear what the various speakers are thinking but, with a few exceptions, did not hear much new stuff. Perhaps I am already following things too closely. However, I thought the day worthwhile.

Here are links to my posts on the four panels.

Part One: The Virtual Organization

Part Two: CIO Leadership and the Bottom Line

Part Three: Enterprise 2.0

Part Four: Cloud Computing

Enterprise 2.0 Conference Panel on Business and Twitter

I am pleased to be part of a panel at this June’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference on business uses of Twitter, How Twitter Changes Everything. It will be held on Tuesday, June 23 - 3:30 pm–4:30 pm. My panel co-participants include Jessica Lipnack, CEO, NetAge (our moderator) Isaac Garcia, CEO, Central Desktop, Clara Shih, author of The Facebook Era, and Patti Anklam. Here is the session description.

“Nearly impossible to describe without experiencing it (though countless try through analogy), Twitter has soared in popularity. Its 7 million-and-counting users seem to agree that it facilitates a kind of communication previously unknown, allowing large numbers of people to exchange ideas in extremely short bursts in nearly real-time. Among its appeals: tiny posts demand succinctness and clarity; you can reach tons of people/colleagues/customers in a second; it's superb in emergencies; communities of vaguely-connected folks can form quickly and naturally around shared interests; you can test ideas through instant polls...the list goes on. Join this group of dedicated Twitterers for a participatory session about how Twitter differs from other social appliances and how your business, organization, practice, and/or communication style can benefit. Come with stories!”

So we hope you do come with your stories. You can find much more on Twitter by looking at the Twitter category in this blog’s right side column.

Some of What Happens In Vegas Will Not Stay There

I am looking forward to Fast Forward 09 in Las Vegas, February 9 to 11 at the Mirage. I will be there with my fellow Fast Forward bloggers. We are certainly to going to blog the event, do video podcast interviews, and some other stuff. I hope to see you there and further the conversations on this blog and the Fast Forward blog.

Speakers include Charlene Li, Clay Shirky, Don Tapscott, Pekka Vijakalnen, and more. Elton John, Donnie and Marie, and a number of Beatles tribute bands will also be in town, along with a Frank and Barbra tribute concert. Do you need to know more?

The volcano at the Mirage is now active. You can see the video at their site, Mirage Volcano.

Fast Forward 09 Goes to Vegas

I had a great time at Fast Forward 08 - see Blogging Fast Forward 08 for the details. The only down side was the location - Orlando. Now they have greatly improved this factor as the show goes to Vegas. FastForward 09 will be there Feb 9 -11. I have not been there since I stopped by in 1967 on a cross country trip back to Boston from LA. 

The conference also has a great lineup of speakers and sessions. Speakers include Clay Shirky, Don Tapscott, Charelene Li, John Lervik, Bjorn Olstad, and others. The site says that FastForward 09 provides a much-needed forum for the discussion of best practices for developing and implementing search solutions as the evolution of the approach to user-centricity continues – both outside and inside the firewall. 

Here is how they elaborated on these themes. Outside the firewall, as users push to create, collaborate, and consume information and products in new ways, businesses are driven to find innovative ways to connect with this user-centric audience. On public- and customer-facing Web sites, search drives revenue by increasing customer loyalty and conversion, and monetizing existing assets. 

Inside the enterprise, as corporate data stores grow and as workforces become more mobile and geographically dispersed, businesses need to find effective ways to help their employees connect and collaborate. Search increases productivity inside the firewall by helping workers find relevant information and expertise faster. Search also improves business decisions by helping people make better use of what an organization already knows – connecting them to the latent and relevant information they need to make informed choices. 

There is an early registration discount at the FastForward 09 site. I hope to see you there. I will be blogging the event.

The Mother of All Demos – Doug Engelbart

On December 9, 1968, at 3:45PM PST, Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart and the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) staged a 90-minute public multimedia demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. It was the worldwide debut of personal and interactive computing. For the first time in history, the public saw a computer mouse, which controlled a networked computer system to demonstrate hypertext linking, real-time text editing, multiple windows with flexible view control, cathode display tubes, shared-screen teleconferencing, email and hypertext.

The Mother of all Demos changed everything. The 1968 demo presaged many of the technologies we use today, from personal computing and knowledge management to the World Wide Web and social media. ‘The Mother’ embodied Doug Engelbart's vision of solving humanity's most important problems by using computers to improve communication and collaboration.
“…frontier whizzed before their eyes. It was the mother of all demos. Engelbart's support staff was as elaborate as one would find at a modern Grateful Dead concert..."

On December 9, 2008 at Stanford University's Memorial Auditorium, SRI International will present a commemorative 40th Anniversary celebration of this historic event. Join us to hear original participants recount what led up to the 1968 demo, the drama of the demonstration itself, and its impact — which no one could have imagined at the time. Learn about Doug Engelbart's vision to use computing to augment society’s collective intellect and ability to solve the complex issues of our time.

Thanks to John Maloney for alerting me to these events. Below is the flyer for the original 1968 event. I was in San Francisco in the summer, a year earlier, but this type of event was not on my mind at the time.

Business of Software 2008 - Discount Rate

The Business of Software 2008 conference looks interesting. It occurs in Boston September 3-4. Key note speakers include rock stars like Seth Godin and uber blogger Jason Friend of 37 Signals. I have been told that you can get a $100 discount by using this link and
entering "MASS" when registering.

Serena Tag Conference 2008 – Santa Clara September 7 - 10

Beginning in 2007, Serena took a new take on their user conference. First, they to wanted to extend the event to more than just existing users. Their goal is to bring together innovative people who are testing the limits of technology and provide new ideas and insights into how to solve the business problems they are looking at. They also wanted to make sure that they gave their attendees plenty of time to interact with other attendees since they felt that sometimes the most interesting product experts are the other users -- not the designated speakers. Innovation is usually a result of a sharing of ideas, passing from one person to another. Since the concept of a game of tag fit their goal, they decided to call the event Serena Tag.

This year the event will be held on September 7 through 10 at the Santa Clara Marriott. Here is the Serena Tag event schedule. Featured focus areas will include Mashups, Agile, Project & Portfolio Management, Application Lifecycle Management, Software Configuration Management and more.

I have been asked to blog Monday and Tuesday of this event on assignment. However, just as with my other paid blog work for the AppGap and Fast Forward blogs, I am being given the freedom to write what I want without prior editing by the Sernea team. My conference posts will appear on the Serena Tag conference blog that they are stetting up and they will also be cross-posted on this blog, Portals and KM for the two days of the conference that I cover. This is a departure from my normal mode on this blog, so I wanted to provide full disclosure. I am excited about this opportunity, this experiment for my blog, and look forward to the event. I have great respect for the product innovations at Serena that I have written about on this Portals and KM blog, the AppGap, and FastForward so it will be interesting to see how this conference evolves.

Here is what Serena says about their event:

At the Tag conference, attendees can choose either the full three-day conference or mash their own one-day mini-conference on Business Mashups or Agile software development. They can attend the free Mashup Fest, where they can work closely with Master Mashers from across the industry to kickstart new mashups or take existing ones the last mile. Or attendees can take the first step in becoming a true Agile practitioner by joining in the free Agile Mastery training session, where anyone can get Agile certified in 2-days for free. (Usually Agile certification costs $1,400 or more.)

Additionally, industry VIPs will be leading sessions designed to keep attendees ahead of the tsunami of market-changing technologies that can either boost or drown a project team, a department, or even a global organization.

• Forrester Research analyst Oliver Young, who specializes in Web 2.0, will present practical ways for technologists to become IT Superheroes able to understand new technologies and solutions to get work done faster and better.

• Gartner’s Anthony Bradley, managing VP focused on Enterprise Mashups, will lead a panel discussion exploring how to sell Business Mashups to C-level executives with practical examples of how small, medium and large companies in various industries have successfully incorporated them.

• Jeff Kaplan, principal analyst and owner of Think Strategies, will walk through a checklist of factors to help companies decide when to go on premise or when to go on demand, determining what applications and timing is most appropriate for choosing Software as a Service (SaaS).

4th Annual Text Analytics Summit in Boston

If you still have energy after the Enterprise 2.0 conference, here is another Boston based event which should be very useful. At least that is what some of my search friends. said. The 4th Annual Text Analytics Summit will be held 16 - 17 June 2008, at the Hilton Boston Back Bay Hotel. The theme is critical success factors to unleash the huge potential of unstructured data. It promises to that your biggest challenges will be discussed and answered. At least on that topic. Also do not forget the KM Forum on Categorization and Tagging - Where’s the Beef? on June 25. I am presenting there on Social Bookmarking within Enterprise 2.0.

Beat LA! Beat LA! Beat LA! - Again and Again

On June 11, 2004, I wrote a post, Beat LA! Beat LA! Beat LA! As I mentioned, I was in Mendocino during the 1987 NBA Finals. For those too young to remember it was the Celtics vs. Lakers, the last time Boston was in the Finals. I went to a local bar with a friend to watch the game. I commented to a person next to me that we would probably be the only ones there rooting for Boston, he said, “Are you kidding, This is Northern California,” seeming shocked that I would even consider this possibility. “We (dislike) (----ing) LA up here. It’s a different state.”

At that time the Pistons were my surrogate team as the Celtics were long gone and I liked their teamwork over the imported LA individual star power. I was thrilled when they won, see Detroit Shows Teamwork Trumps Individual Talent. I had great respect for the Pistons in this current 2008 series. It was showdown between two teams who emphasize teamwork and they showed respect for each other during the series and at the end. In my post on the Pistons 2004 win, I said that it shows the good guys can win. The NY Times agreed as they wrote in Teamwork Thumps Star Power: "The Detroit Pistons, the essence of teamwork, the essence of grit, manhandled the built-to-win, built-to-gloat Los Angeles Lakers."

Now the Celtics have passed the Pistons to return to the NBA finals for the first time since 1987. The 2008 Celtics were a built-to-win team but they are the opposite of “built to gloat.” They have won on teamwork and their new leader, Kevin Garrett, while being one of the most intense and excitable players ever, does not even known what it means to gloat. His humility and deep respect for the game and teamwork has been woven throughout the team. Every one of their stars willingly gave up individual numbers for team performance. Let’s hope the good guys win again. As I wrote then, this morning a chant builds in the east coast spreading across the heartland to the other north coast. “Beat LA!” "Beat LA!" "Beat LA!"

In the meanwhile, listen to Bill Russell talk with Kevin Garnett, the conversation speaks for itself.

Update - Bill Simmons game four diary - From exasperation to exclamation in 170 minutes - and what the NYT Times said on game four - Celtics’ Rally Puts Title Within Reach

Supernova 2008 in San Francisco

It seems like San Francisco gets a lot of good conferences. Supernova 08 is one and it will be held this year June 16-18 in San Francisco. There is a lot of stuff of networks and good bit on decentralization. Here are some of the all star cast of speakers.

Jonathan Schwartz (Sun Microsystems)
Esther Dyson (EDventure)
Reed Hundt (Former FCC Chairman)
Lili Cheng (Microsoft Research)
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School
Greg Luib (Office of Policy Planning, FTC)
Noshir Contractor (Northwestern University)
Joi Ito (Neoteny)
Clay Shirky (NYU)

2nd Annual International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

The International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media will cover new research, applications, thoughts and ideas on social media analysis. “Social media content now accounts for the majority of content published daily on the web. As the space evolves, academic and industrial practitioners find themselves at a key point for collaborating on research, implementation and deployment of a wide range of analyses and applications.” It will be March 30 - April 2, 2008 in Seattle, WA. It looks like a good reason to be in Seattle in the height of its rainy season.

Will Green Teams Become Prominent in 2008?

Happy New Year, for those who celebrate it today. With this title, I am not talking about our local basketball team in Boston, but the idea of carbon neutral teams that Jessica Lipnack discusses at Endless Knots. As she writes, “For years, we've been singing the praises of virtual teams for their ability to bring together differing perspectives, amass greater intelligence, and gain the benefit of more human diversity--then wrap it all together in a world where the sun never sets. Nice stuff. Along the way, people have also been pointing out that working at a distance is less expensive, less stressful, and more environmentally friendly.”

Now, as Jessica notes, some companies are attempting to go beyond simply being green and become carbon neutral through a combination of energy savings and purchasing carbon offsets. Ironically, one of the first is a Rupert Murdoch (as in all the trees waiting to be cut for the New York Post) company in the UK. Perhaps a better way for them to offset their carbon emissions than plating a tree in Africa would be to shut down the Post.

Anyway, the energy savings part is a good idea and Jessica has some good suggestions the next time your plan to travel to a team meeting. There are times like interviews where I find virtual meetings to work better because I can focus on what is being said and taking notes, as well as looking at my key questions while talking. In the days of in personal meetings, I would often have to bring an extra person to take the notes. Another trend is the blogging of conferences so that only one team representative needs to go and the others can have real time conversations on the event in time to provide feedback.

I now look for firms like WebEx and Go to Meeting to start having green commercials in 08. Which, in their case, will be legitimate unlike some ads I have seen. Some energy ideas can be problematic like these new energy saving light bulbs than contain dangerous chemical like mercury whose pollution they cause in manufacturing and disposal is likely much worst than the benefit from the energy they save. Bottled water does not pretend to be environmentally friendly but many people who are concerned about the environment do not realize what an environmental disaster it is from the fuel to haul what is, in many cases, tap water to the disposal of all that plastic which rarely gets recycled. My practice is to simply refill the bottle from the tap when it is done so I still have the utility of the container. In my last home I did this with the same bottle for two years. Think of all the carbon emissions I saved. Rupert would be proud.

Having gotten off on a rant, I do you suggest you visit Jessica’s suggestions as they do make sense. She closes with a carbon neutral soccer team and it is not playing in Second Life.

Singularity Summit in San Francisco

The Singularity Summit will be held at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco this Saturday and Sunday, September 8-9, 2007. The topic of discussion: to address the promise and peril of advanced AI to the future of humanity. What are the major challenges to achieving advanced AI? What are the benefits and dangers? How far are we from self-improving AI? How should we prepare for this potentially powerful innovation?

Web 2.0 University(tm)

Are you in New York on October 2. Here is a way to get a comprehensive intorduction to Web 2.0 thorugh the work of Dion Hinchcliffe, Jeremy Geelan, and associates. Deatils on the Web 2.0 University in NYC site. These guys are really smart in this space so I am sure it will be worthwhile. web 2.0 enterprise social media

Marketing to Reality 2.0 Conference

It had to happen. Now there is a conference on marketing to the 6 million virtual customers in Reality 2.0, aka Second Life. You sell them real products and they pay you real money – after the exchange. If eBay is web 1.5 or 2.0, this must be web 2001.0 IPQC is the organizer. I used to run workshops for them on using knowledge management and the balanced score card in the early 90s. Companies such as Coldwell Banker, AOL, H&R Block, American Appeal and the Harvard Business Review are attending. This gives you and idea of what might be sold. The Marketing to Second Life conference will be in New York in September 24-26 (or perhaps they should have it in Second Life?) web 2.0 web 2.0 marketing

McMaster World Congress – Call for Papers McMaster World Congress – Call for Papers

It is the 4th of July for us in the US. Not a holiday in Canada so here is news for those Canadians working today and anyone else. I was a landed immigrant in Canada in the 1970s when I was in grad school and dealt with the different set of holidays. The border people frequently reminded me of this former status when I enter Canada now.

The Congress is a well respected and long running event related to knowledge management. The 29th McMaster World Congress is going to be held January 16 – 18, 2008 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, Paper proposals need to submitted by September 30. You can get more information from their McMaster World Congress site. The four themes this year are:

- Intellectual Capital & Innovation (Knowledge Management)

- Corporate Governance

- Strategic Business Valuation

- Mission Driven Organization.

Future of Media 2007

The Future of Media 2007 will practice its message with a conference connecting participants at simultaneous events in San Francisco and Sydney on July 17. Video and cross-continental panel discussions will discuss the future of media globally. In SF it will be at the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF.

Speakers include:
Michael Birch, CEO, Bebo
Peter Bray, Managing Director, Clear Blue Day
Ross Dawson, Chairman, Future Exploration Network
Jeremy Liew, Partner, Lightspeed Ventures
Harold Mitchell, Chairman, Mitchells and Director, eMitch
Mitch Ratcliffe, Founder, Buzzlogic and Tetriad
Gabe Rivera, CEO, Techmeme
Anne-Marie Roussel, Director - Strategic and Emerging Business Group, Microsoft Corporation
Ian Smith, CEO, Yahoo!7
Senator Stephen Conroy, Australian Federal Shadow Minister for Communications and other Australian thought leaders will also be speaking in the extended sessions at the Sydney side of the event.

Summit themes include:
* User Generated Content in Mainstream Media
* Emerging Business Models
* Influence Networks
* Media Globalization and Localization
* Mobility and New Media Channels

There is also a Future of Media Summit participant blog for speakers and attendees to contribute and discuss the future of media before, during, and after the event. web 2.0

Webcom 2007 in Toronto

Here is an interesting looking conference, Webcom 2007, in Toronto sponsored, in part, by my friends at Helix Commerce. It covers interactive communications and web 2.0 and will be held April 11, 11, and 12 at the University of Toronto. This is the first Toronto session of the event. There are over 40 speakers. A number of them, such as Cindy Gordon, Hubert Saint-Onge. Dave Pollard, Euan Semple, Martin Cleaver, and Nick Bontis, I have heard speak or, at least, read some of their stuff. It is a good group to cover the topic. Many are from Toronto so it will be a good chance for local people to meet many of the local leaders in this space.

Workshops on Using Narrative in Business: Boston and Seattle

Are there communication issues with your company? Here is a narrative workshop that might help. Understanding the stories within your organization can be a key to helping solve these issues. Here is a one day workshop that will “provide you with a set of practical skills that will enable you to design and implement projects based on the collection and interpretation of your organisation’s stories.” I have seen a number of people discuss the power of stories, Steve Denning and Dave Snowden being two of the better known and I do believe in their power. Here is the series on my KM stories and another series on the power of stories. The workshops will be held in Seattle 26-Mar-07 and Boston 29-Mar-07.

Shawn Callahan is the workshop leader. Shawn was the former knowledge-management practice leader for IBM Australia and regional leader of IBM’s Cynefin Centre. The session focuses on “collecting stories currently being told in your organisation in order to provide insight that is unavailable through traditional analytical approaches. From this basis, innovative solutions can be designed.”

If you go let me know and mention this blog to the workshop leader. He is offering a referral bonus to bloggers. This is also a disclaimer on my recommendation but I still would not recommend it if I did not think it has value for someone within an organization. It is nice of Shawn to think of bloggers. Thanks to Ross Dawson for passing this on.

Collective Intelligence Networks Summit – LA

KM Clusters is sponsoring the Collective Intelligence Networks Summit in Los Angeles on February 22 at Pepperdine University – LAX, 6100 Center Drive, Los Angeles. There are speakers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Cisco Systems and MIT, as well as several area experts including, Verna Allee, David Brin, and Dr. Harald Katzmair.

As the description says, “Entirely new ways to share, trade and aggregate information using collective intelligence networks are growing rapidly. These networks help companies, schools, governments, and individuals to acquire, to create and lead ever-growing bodies of knowledge.” Very true. It should be a good day.

Using Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts for Communication and Marketing

On January 10 I will be speaking on how to “Open New Lines of Communication With Your Web Site” at the Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA) in Toronto. The event runs for January 7 to 10 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. I will explore how blogs, wikis, and podcasts can be used as an effective communication and marketing tool and put this in the context of web 2.0. business blogs

The Next Sunbelt Conference - 2007

The International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) is asking for proposals for individual papers and paper session organizers for the next Sunbelt social network conference, which will take place at the island of Corfu, May 1-6, 2007. Great spot and time to be there. This is the premier social network conference. It provides an interdisciplinary venue to present current work in the area of social networks. Proponents are invited to submit their paper titles and abstracts at the Sunbelt web page (full papers are not requested) until January 30, 2007. The process of evaluation of submitted papers will be finalized in February 2007.

Fourth International Conference on Knowledge Management

The 4th International Conference on Knowledge Management (ICKM-2007) will be held in Vienna from 27 to 28 August 2007. The conference includes developers, academics and practioners in different areas of knowledge management. Unpublished papers are eligible for the main conference. Workshop contributions for the industry workshops and work in progress can be submitted as powerpoint presentations (same deadlines as papers and directly to the workshop chairs). On-line submission is required for both. The proceedings will be published. This is a great city for such an event and good time to be there.

Important Dates
Call for papers - submission of papers as of: Nov. 13, 2006 (using distribution lists of all partners)
Electronic submission of contributions closes: Feb. 28, 2007
Notification of paper acceptance: April 15, 2007
Camera-ready version of accepted papers: May 15, 2007

KM World 2006 Presentation Links are Up

KM World is proving links to sites and presentations related to their presenters. I was pleased to do a pre-conference workshop there with Martin Cleaver of Helix Commerce. We covered “Blogs and Wkis: new KM Tools.” You can find the links at the KM World site. There were many great sessions that I was unable to attend so this is appreciated. Martin has deep expertise in wikis and I am offering workshops on blogs and wikis together with Helix Commerce.

Collaborative Knowledge Management(CoKM2007)

Here is a potentially interesting conference in Potsdam, Germany, 28-30/03/07. The Collaborative Knowledge Management Conference is now calling for papers. The key dates are:

15. October 2006 Submission of workshop papers
15. November 2006 Notification of acceptance/rejection
23. December 2006 Submission of final version

The conference announcement makes a useful point:

"Over the last few years, the use of collaborative knowledge management
systems (social tagging systems, wikis, blogs, etc.) has been exploding
on the web. This phenomenon is mainly due to the fact that no specific
skills are needed for publishing, but also to the social interactions
these systems offer. However, while these systems grow larger, users start to criticise the
inherent lack of transparent structure in the organisation of resources
(e.g. tagging tags). This poses new challenges and fundamental questions
to collaborative knowledge management (CKM) systems."

If this event can shed some light on the challenge they oputline, it will be very useful. I assume that they will make the papers available for those who cannot atend.

KM World 2006 – San Jose

I will be leading a session at KM World 2006 with Martin Cleaver of Helix Commerce. We are doing a half day pre-conference workshop on October, 30 covering “Wikis & Blogs: New KM Tools.” This workshop provides an introduction to blogs and wikis for business, looks at their differences, and illustrates with examples how these solutions can be used to meet internal and external communication needs for organizations. Martin will be focusing on wikis and I will be covering blogs.

The conference itself runs from Oct. 31 to Nov. 2 with some follow on workshops. All events are held at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center in San Jose , CA, an excellent facility. I was there last year. It is near the San Jose Art Museum and some good restaurants. Cindy Gordon, also of Hleix Commerce with be speaking with Dave Snowden on “Innovative Enterprises: Leaders’ Visions & Stories.” As the keynote on Wednesday, Nov. 1. Dave Weinberger has the keynote the next day, The New Shape of Knowledge: Everything Is Miscellaneous.” I have heard a version of this before and it is very provocative. It is a good event that brings in a lot of the leaders in KM. The complete program is now out on their site.

Int. Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

The Int. Conference on Weblogs and Social Media will be held on March 26-28, 2007 in Boulder, Colorado. They commented that , "Continuing the tradition from the WWE'06workshop, we are once again offering a large blog dataset to conference participants. The data release comprises a complete set of weblog posts collected by Nielsen BuzzMetrics for May 2006 (consisting of about 14M posts from 3M weblogs). The data set includes the full content of the posts plus mark-up and represents an unprecedented collection for blog researchers. Our hope is that a communal dataset, approached from many different directions, will yield many interesting results. More information on the dataset, which is available for immediate download, can be found at their site.

Google and Microsoft are among the sponsors. They are also calling for papers that make use of this data (or toehrs I imagine). The key dates are:
Submissions: December 8, 2006
Acceptance Notifications: February 2, 2007

The Value of Networks: Vertical Networks and Methods for Leaders

The New England KM Cluster will host the The Value of Networks: Vertical Networks and Methods for Leaders in the Boston area (Waltham, MA) on October 12 & 13. This is a corrected noticed from what I wrote earlier today. There are a number of speakers. Verna Alee will lead off on Value Network Strategies: Organizational and Value Network Analysis. Others include: Oliver Schwabe on Value Networks and Financial Reporting Standards: Tools, Standards, Results, Carol Rozwell on Value Network Archetypes: Truth to Power, Patti Anklam & Joseph Hutchinson on Advanced Social Network Analysis: Tools, Concepts, Results, Kathleen Gilroy on Web 2.0: Value Networks Next Practices, ™ and Bruce Hoppe on Organizational SNA. I will also be speaking there on October 12 covering, “Web 2.0:Web 2.0. What does it Bring to Business?.”

The event will be at the Forefront Center, 404 Wyman Street, Waltham, MA which is an excellent venue. I have been there before. I hope to see you there.

Tagging and the Folksonomy

At the next KM Forum in Waltham MA (Boston area) on Thursday, September 21, from 4:00 - 6:00 p.m. I will be leading a discussion on Tagging and the Folksonomy. This is a great group for that topic as there are a number of taxonomy experts present. You can resigter at the KM Forum site. enterprise tagging

Everybody's a CEO - Otter Group

Kathleen Gilroy and the Otter Group is introducing a new one day workshop, Everybody's a CEO, on ways to incorporate the new Web 2.0 tools into your worklife. As they says, "This one-day, interactive program will give you a solid foundation for a new, more satisfying, and more competitive means of working."

I have worked with Kathleen on a number of occasions and I am sure that this will be a wothwhile event. The first one is planned for October 18, 2006 from 8:30 am to 4:00 pm in the Boston area. It will cover how to use blogs, RSS, podcasts and learnign networks in your business to both have more fun and be more competitive. You can get more details at the Otter site.

Organizational Storytelling and Business Narrative in Cleveland

Last May I had the pleasure of speaking on the impact of web 2.0 on business at the Ohio KM Cluster. Their fall meeting will be on Organizational Storytelling and Business Narrative. It will be on October 27, 2006 at the Cleveland Federal Reserve Bank. Steve Denning will lead the conversation on the topic. I have been at several sessions with Steve and he is a great discussion leader. Be sure to go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame while you are there. I saw it on my last visit and stayed until it closed and we had to leave.

Value Networks and Social Media – Dallas, September 29

On September 29 I will join a number of others at the Dallas KM Cluster on Enterprise Social Media. The one day event will be held on May 12 in Irving, Texas, at the City Center Tower II Suite 800, 6363 North State Blvd Highway 161. I am discussing Web 2.0. What does it Bring to Business?.

Nancy Dixon of Common Knowledge is speaking on “Conversation: The Core Knowledge Transfer Technolog,” Michael J. English of Best Practices, LLC will cover “Japan's suppa ginosha Movement: 21st Century Human Capital, Knowledge Transfer, & Organization Development.” Over lunch Verna Alee will talk about “Network Strategies for Managing Complexity: Organizational and Value Network Analysis.” Then Camille Venezia of Knoll will discuss “Time as a New Currency: Flexible and Mobile Work Strategies,” and Adriaan Jooste of Deloitte will conclude with “21st Century Knowledge Leadership: Winning the War for Talent.”

I am looking forward to this session and hope to see some of you there. Here is complete information at the KM Cluster site.

Collaboration University

I recenlty wrote about IBM Lotus Quickplace. It continues to be shipped with version 8.0 now available. Here is a related event I heard about from Rob Novak. Collaboration University is being held in Kansas City September 13-15, repeated in London September 27-29. It is a 100% Sametime and QuickPlace technical conference, with at least 10 technical sessions available on each track. They will cover each product in-depth, progressively, and completely. They will also have materials on Sametime 7.5 (shipping just before the conference) and QuickPlace 8.0.

International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media

The International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media will be held on March 26-28, 2007 in Boulder, Colorado. Nice to be there then if you are a skier. As the announcement syays, “there has been a fundamental shift thanks to significant advances in the ease of publishing content. Creating web content was for years the domain of tech-savvy people; now the barrier hasbeen torn down. Perhaps the most visible among the successes of social media in recent years is the blogosphere.” They are also interested in all social media. This is a research conference. Google is one of the sponsors.

IMPORTANT DATES

Submissions: December 8, 2006
Acceptance Notifications: February 2, 2007
Tutorials: March 25, 2007
Conference: March 26-28, 2007

PodCamp Boston

PodCamp Boston to be held September 9th-10th at a venue somewhere near Boston (and accessible by train). PodCamp Boston is a new media forum covering podcasting, video blogging, and other new media, and will feature a great variety of session offerings for those interested in learning about podcasting, as well as those already hacking away at a podcast. I look forward to hearing more details.

Intranet Week- Boston - is next week

IPQC Intranet Week is coming up soon. This year it is covering Innovative Technologies and Solutions for Improving Processes in Internal Communications . It will be held on July 24 - 26, 2006 · at the Hyatt Harborside, Boston, MA. The focus this year is on focus on keeping information updated, best practices for redesigning your Intranet, utilizing Wikis and Blogs, streamlining business processes and managing global Intranets. I am pleased to see the focus to include new web-based tools.

Josh Rosenthal of iQuest and I will offer a worrkshop on Using Web 2.0 to Break Down Barriers & Enhance Collaboration Within Your Enterprise. In our session we will cover:

- the next generation of internet tools, Web 2.0, and the business opportunities and applications they offer to intranets
- how the transparency of Web 2.0 collaboration tools (tagging, blogs, wikis, RSS, mashups. etc.) help to break down barriers and enhance communication with the enterprise
- how social network analysis can examine and enable communication through web 2.0 tools within the intranet to promote innovation and creativity
- and help you decide if Web 2.0 tools are right for your business and possible applications that support your business goals and those of your clients

There will also be two days of conference sessions. Hope to see you there.

Collaborative Technologies Conference – Boston June 20-21, 2006

Here is a good event for the Boston area. The Collaborative Technologies Conference will be at the Seaport Hotel June 20 - 22. There are many great speakers including the following that I know or have heard speak (with some of their conference bios):

Jessica Lipnack co-author of Virtual Teams (Wiley, 2000), The Age of the Network (Wiley, 1995), and co-founder and director of NetAge has been reporting on and working with networks as organizations for 25 years.

Matthew Glotzbach joined Google in 2004 with responsibility for the development, management, and markeitng of Google's Enterprise product lines.

Ross Mayfield, CEO, SocialText.

Rod Boothby, Manager, Ernst & Young. Rod is currently leading an effort to deploy secure internal-only enterprise blogs within his firm. Rod is the author of the blog Innovation Creators

Laurence Prusak, Director, Working Knowledge, Babson College.

If you are still in Boston in July, Josh Rosenthal of iQuest and I will offer a worrkshop on Using Web 2.0 to Break Down Barriers & Enhance Collaboration Within Your Enterprise at Intranets Week on July 24.

McMaster World Congress on Intellectual Capital & Innovation – Call for Papers

The 9th World Congress on Intellectual Capital & Innovation has issued their call for papers for the session to be held, January 24 – 26, 2007 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. It is jointly sponsored by the Management of Innovation and New Technology (MINT) Research Centre and the DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University. Topics include: · intellectual capital · innovation · knowledge management · new technology · intangible assets · human capital · organizational learning · knowledge-based view / theory. Paper submissions can be conceptual, theoretical, empirical, experimental, or case studies. This is solid event that has covered knowledg emanagement related issues for some time. The key dates are:

September 30, 2006
Full paper is due – send via e-mail to
[email protected]

October 31, 2006
Notification of acceptance

November 30, 2006
Registration and fees due

Two Berkman Center Events – OPML Camp, May 20-21 & Identity Mashup Conference June 19-21

Harvard’s Berkman Center is sponsoring two upcoming public conferences that should be very good. Here are the details from a recent email from the center.

The OPML Camp will be held on May 20-21 at Harvard Law School. It is is free and open to as many people as the rooms will hold. This event follows the trend of community-led “unconferences” pioneered by BloggerCon and BarCamp. OPML Camp participants will discuss current tools and applications, and build wish lists for future development. There will be tutorials for OPML newbies, as well as advanced sessions for experts.

The Berkman Center defines “OPML as a web-based format that makes it easy to create structured outlines of RSS feeds and links to websites. Until recently, OPML was mostly used to manage RSS feeds and keep up with blogs, but several new tools have expanded use of OPML to include collectively managed outlines that span multiple websites.”

The Identity Mashup Conference is a three-day event to explore the role of identity systems (tools that let users and merchants know whom to trust on the web) in furthering or inhibiting privacy, civil liberties and new forms of civic participation.

As the Berkman Center writes, “A variety of parties — governments, technology companies, international agencies, non-profits, financial institutions, health organizations, and merchants among them — are clamoring for identity systems to address a spectrum of issues from terrorism and child pornography to identity theft and spam. The proposals vary dramatically from national ID cards with centralized data stores and a single universal identifier to highly-distributed “user-centric” models with distributed data stores and authenticated anonymity. The goal of this conference is to examine the problems these organizations are trying to address and assess which solutions offer the greatest benefit.”

This is a critical issue for anyone who uses the web for any reason and it is a great serve for the Berkman Center to provide this conference. I hope to attend at least some of it.

Things to Do in Cleveland

I will be traveling to Cleveland to participate in the Social Media, Networks and Tools on May 19 sponsored by KM Cluster. While there I plan to go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I recenlty received a descritption of other great things to do in Cleveland from Lumpy the Cyber Junki. Highlights of what he sent are provided below in mostly his words.

The Great Lakes Science Center is right next to the rock hall.

The Terminal Tower and Tower City – landmark building of Cleveland. Lumpy’s grandfather was one of the men who erected the flagpole on top of it. The building is unique in many ways. Much of Cleveland is lake silt and foundations are a problem. The terminal was built as a train depot. It’s foundation consists of concrete “stilts”. To avoid vibration problems, the rail terminal beneath the building has a completely independent set of stilts. In other words, the tower stands, independently over the terminal.

Diagonally across the square from the terminal sits a red stone building, the Society for Savers Building This building has a few unique aspects to it. First of all, it overcame the lake silt issue by being built on a six foot thick slab of concrete… It floats so to speak. Second, it was the first building in Cuyahoga County to incorporate the use of steel in itts structure. Even thought the walls are solid stone, up to five feet thick, I-beams sitting in notches in the stone support each floor. Finally on the Southwest Corner of the building hangs a replica of the first electric street lamp. Cleveland was the first city to have electric street lights. At the debut of the event, spectators all wore sunglasses for fear that the lights being on at night would shock the eyes into blindness.

Good links on Cleveland provided by Lumpy

Modern Cleveland (no this is not an oxymorom) As it says this is a “list of all that's noteworthy, mid-century modern, historic, retro, independent, worthwhile, and otherwise interesting in the area. No malls or chains here! Whether you're just in town for the weekend or you're a life-long resident, this site is your guide to doing Cleveland in style!”

Western Reserve Historical Society

Cleveland State University has an excellent "special collection" of historic photos and books but, currently, many are being digitally archived at the Cleveland Memory site.

Barcamp – “free” Conference for Geeks

BarCamp is an ad-hoc gathering of technology people to share and learn in an open environment. It is free but you have to participate which is a good thing. I learned about it from Jessica Baumgart of the Berkman blog group. It is an intense event with discussions, demos, and interaction from attendees. The rules tell you to bring a sleep bag so I guess it goes on and on. They have been happenng all over and there will be one in the Boston area soon.

As their Barcamp Boston wiki site says, “BarCamp (pronounced BAH-camp) is an unconference, organized on the fly by attendees, for attendees. There is no cost to come, but you can't just attend a BarCamp-- you have to participate by giving a presentation, a lightning talk, or joining into another cooperative event. For Boston BarCamp, we are expecting a turnout of around 150 people.”

The Boston Barcamp will be held at Monster Worldwide, Clocktower Place, Maynard, MA. It will start around 10am on Saturday, June 3 and end around 6pm on Sunday, June 4. If you cannot come ot ths one, you can organize your own. See their Barcamp site

Karl Wiig added to Dallas Enterprise Social Media Event

Karl Wiig is one of the pioneers of knowledge management and wrote one of the first books on the topic. He is joining the program at the Dallas KM Cluster on Enterprise Social Media and I am pleased to be able to meet him there. The one day event will be held on May 12 in Irving, Texas, at the City Center Tower II Suite 800 6363 North State Blvd Highway 161.

Nancy Dixon of Common Knowledge is speaking on “Company Command: Unleashing the Power of the Army Profession,” Michael J. English will cover “Japan's suppa ginosha Movement: 21st Century Human Capital, Knowledge Transfer, & Organization Development.” Over lunch Verna Alee will talk about “Network Strategies for Managing Complexity: Organizational and Value Network Analysis.” Then Camille Venezia of Knoll will discuss “Time as a New Currency: Flexible and Mobile Work Strategies,” and Adriaan Jooste of Deloitte will conclude with “21st Century Knowledge Leadership: Winning the War for Talent.” I am also speaking there on “Web 2.0. What does it Bring to Business?”

I am looking forward to this session and hope to see some of you there. Here is complete information at the KM Cluster site.

Intranet Week- Boston July 24-26

IPQC is sponsoring Intranet Week covering Innovative Technologies and Solutions for Improving Processes in Internal Communications. It will be held on July 24 - 26, 2006 · at the Hyatt Harborside, Boston, MA. Te focus this year is on focus on keeping information updated, best practices for redesigning your Intranet, utilizing Wikis and Blogs, streamlining business processes and managing global Intranets. I am pleased to see the focus to include new web-based tools.

Jordan Frank of Traction Software is going to provide a workshop on issues in implementing blogs and wikis within an intranet. Dave Clarke
co-Director Global Taxonomy
at Factiva is going to hold a workshop on Utilizing Taxonomy as a Means to Organize Your Intranet and Improve Content Discovery.

Josh Rosenthal of iQuest and I will offer a worrkshop on Using Web 2.0 to Break Down Barriers & Enhance Collaboration Within Your Enterprise. In our session we will cover:

- the next generation of internet tools, Web 2.0, and the business opportunities and applications they offer to intranets
- how the transparency of Web 2.0 collaboration tools (tagging, blogs, wikis, RSS, mashups. etc.) help to break down barriers and enhance communication with the enterprise
- how social network analysis can examine and enable communication through web 2.0 tools within the intranet to promote innovation and creativity
- and help you decide if Web 2.0 tools are right for your business and possible applications that support your business goals and those of your clients

There will also be two days of conference sessions. Hope to see you there.

Supernova 2006 San Francisco

This year’s Supernova will occur June 21-23, 2006 in San Francisco. It features many of the celebraties of the web. The theme of Supernova 2006 is Making Connections in a Complex World. They have started the Supernova2006 Weblog to provide the detials. They are also offering podcasts. Here is what they say about the first one in therir own words. More web celebraties but a good topic.

Knowledge@Wharton has posted the first Supernova 2006 podcast, What Makes an Online Community Tick?. Knowledge@Wharton is the online business journal of The Wharton School, read by over half a million subscribers worldwide. The interview is a conversation with Craig Newmark (founder of Craigslist.org), Julie Herendeen (VP of Network Products at Yahoo!), and Bill Flitter (CMO of Pheedo). The podcast explores how to facilitate, nurture, and benefit from online communities, which are becoming not just major social forces, but significant drivers of business activity both online and offline.

APQC’s KM Conference – Las Vegas

Here is a good reason to go to Vegas. APQC’s eleventh annual knowledge management (KM) conference in being held May 1 to 3 at Harrah’s place there. There is a list of keynote speakers that includes the KM hall of fame with people like, Ikujiro Nonaka, John Seely Brown, Robert Buckman, Nick Bonits, and their own Carla O’Dell. I have heard a few of these. There are also many case examples from companies that have implemented KM over the years. I have read a lot of the APQC KM publications since the mid-90s and they are always very practical. They also have an APQC KM Blog that Ron Webb has taken over.