*If you heard my email promise at Enterprise 2.0 Town Hall, please reply to this post.
Write books, go to conferences. One follows the other. Twenty-five years ago exactly, Doubleday published Jeff Stamps' and my Networking: The First Report and Directory. Shortly, we spoke at World Future Society--an explosion of people and ideas, a moment when I felt in exactly the right place and that unexpected things would come to pass. They did.
Enterprise 2.0, just in Boston, feels the same. Attending: Inventors, entrepreneurs young and old, educators, thinkers, analysts, scientists, executives all passionate about figuring how to bring organizations across the Great Plains of the Internet. I'm staring at a two-inch pile of business cards hurled my way (and remembering a crazy promise I made in the final session*).
What stands out:
David Weinberger opening with an old-time slide show (disguised as Powerpoint). He flashed an interesting picture (two Fiats driving through an Italian toll booth--together), said something clever (which I can't remember now.) My mind does keep tripping over this: "a conversation among strangers." How many of these have you had today? Something about very thin lines that connect people, these pixels that allow us to know one another in a different way. The name is not the thing; the e-person is not me, but both are parts.
John Abele, founder of Boston Scientific, about creating a culture of trust, in a small workshop called "Group Intelligence."
In the same workshop, learning that IBM has a voicemail system that allows people to dial in to conference calls and announce their arrival all by pressing 1. Optimized for conf calls while driving, it seems, which worries me. I disapprove. But I do approve of their new product, Effective Meetings, that puts everyone on a conference call in a seat at a virtual conference table, points to the person who's speaking. Next up, IBM? Please build the "behaviors" for good conference into the product too...easy peasy.
A conversation with Grier Graham of TechDirt about the Enterprise Irregulars, their blogs so well-read that companies have invited them in. One great story: a company invited the bloggers to a big event, along with traditional media. Even gave the bloggers a section in the Press Room, their own seats and outlets. Then the company handed each their "time slots" for interviewing the company's executives, separately. No, no! the bloggers protesteth! We want to work together, talk about what we're hearing, write our own posts, then link to each other's blogs. The company was dumbfounded. This is the new journalism.
Bumping into the same woman in the ladies' room the first time I visited, the last, and several times in between. Conferences cause strange synchronizations (like what happens to girls in dorms with periods).
Engineers Sujatha Bodapathi of ProdexNet and AssetPulse and Carole Boudinet of Volvo IT explaining their technical approach to collaboration: First, culture.
Beginning each session where I had the mike by asking people to stand, one-by-one, say their names loud, say where they're from. (Fact: Even for 100 or so people, this only takes a couple of minutes, brings everyone's voice into the room.)
They were from the Supreme Court, CIA, Ford, Sun, Microsoft, the Taiwan government, a zillion venture capital firms, SAP, Cisco, Fidelity, Reuters, and a google of start-ups, with very hip names like Comotiv and CoreMedia and BrightCom.
And there were a lot of bloggers there, too. I can't guarantee these guys were blogging precisely -- maybe they were teleporting around Second Life -- but everywhere I looked there were people with laptops, tapping away. Separately, I'll post a buncha links to conference blogs.
And, finally, for all those who translated "network" into many languages for our keynote, thanks. I read off the word in Swedish, Afrikaans, Russian, German, Norwegian, Japanese and Thai, all the same with slightly different accents, simply "network" all around the world.
From left: Carole Boudinet, Volvo IT, Jen Pahlka and Steve Wylie from CMP
Thanks, CMP. A good time was had by all.
*Crazy promise: to email everyone who handed me a biz card.
