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It’s been months since myself and Micheal O hAodha have discovered we share an interest in social networking and decided to organise an event on this topic at our university. We started with the idea of a presentation in mind, but as the date kept on slipping , the concept changed, in an attempt to make the event more lively and interactive.
Taking advantage of my collaboration with Bernie Goldbach (@topgold) and James Corbett (@EirePreneur) in bringing to life the next BarCampIreland, I thought of inviting them for a discussion panel.
The announcement went out to the university Events mailing list:
You are invited to the panel discussion
“Social Networking – Getting Beyond the Hype”
in the Library Board Room, Friday 11 April, 2008, 2-3 pm.
The panel will touch on the variety of existing online social networking opportunities (e.g. Facebook, Linkedin, Bebo, MySpace etc.). But instead of insisting on the potential advantages/disadvantages of social networking as sometimes outlined in the mainstream media, the panelists intend to share insights from their own experience with blogging and micro-blogging as instruments for building social interfaces, networking through “social objects” (like photos, bookmarks, references) and the numerous face-to-face events facilitated by the use of online applications.
Panelists:
- Micheal Ó hAodha –Librarian (College of Science and Engineering-ECE,CSIS,MAE,MOE), UL – Moderator
- Gabriela Avram – Researcher, Interaction Design Centre, UL
- Bernard Goldbach - Lecturer, Tipperary Institute of Technology
- James Corbett – Entrepreneur and social media consultant, EirePreneur
And here’s a wiki page dedicated to the event.
So, if you’re around Limerick this Friday, you are more than welcome to join us!
April 08 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
This year, I made it! After only 3-4h of sleep per night in the last two weeks, a bit of extra sleep over the week-end would have been highly appreciated. But I decided to stretch myself a bit more, jumped on the Dublin bus at 12:30 on Saturday (the price of a one way train ticket is prohibitive!) and made it to both events:
- the Ladies’ Tea Party at the Market Bar
- the Irish Blog Awards 2008 at the Alexander Hotel.
I had to go to bed around 11, because my crazy plans didn’t end here. This morning I took the Aircoach to Cork at 6am, and here I am.
More on the Dublin events later!
March 02 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Not only that we have an Irish blog week 2008, but now we have a social media social life here in Limerick as well!
On Jan 19, we met for an exquisite Blogger Coffee Limerick at the Marriott, thanks to Alexia Golez;
I blogged about it that very afternoon, but the gods of Internet were against it, and the post disappeared without a trace. (Don’t get me started on Mercury retrograde and stuff like that!)
This Thursday, Feb 7, we had the first Limerick OpenCoffee in 2008; as usual, the Absolute Hotel was the venue. Bernie Goldbach and James Corbett took care of the organisation - again, as usual. An interesting mix of people attended, and after a round of introductions and discussions on the format and a possible alternative venue for the future events, I had the chance to talk to a few people (and get a few very useful tips!)
The next one is planned for the first Thursday in March, 11am, in the Absolute. We hear that a website for Irish Open Coffee is cooking, and there’s already a blog titled Cork OpenCoffee - but reporting on similar events across the whole island.
There’s a Jaiku channel for it, and a calendar of the forthcoming events is available.
And now Anton Mannering is bringing the TechLudd to Limerick on February 21. Venue: the George Hotel. Can’t wait, especially because I couldn’t go to Dublin on the 24th of January and missed the first event of the series!
Aren’t we spoiled?!
Update: wiki created at wikispaces.com for Irish OpenCoffee, with the intent of making dates and topics of future events visible across the island and allowing for input and feedback.
February 10 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
The following quote comes from Jay Deragon’s blog The Relationship Economy, but I first got it via the Value-Networks Google Group mailing list.
I deeply resonated with this:
“The best approach to leveraging the social web is to understand the systemic nature of peoples interest, desires and needs: a relationship. Connecting the dots requires a conversation, not just a connection. What say you?”
Finally someone tells corporations that becoming involved in social networking just because it is trendy and without changing their attitude will not pay off!
Markets are conversations… and they will never ever again reverse to corporate monologues!
January 10 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
On Thursday we had a very nice exchange with a group of Creative Multimedia students from Tipperary Institute of Technology…
All started a few good weeks ago, with Bernie Goldbach following the
Jaiku channel I use with my students (Bernie recalls jaikus about Marshall McLuhan received on his mobile phone while he was walking his dog:)- must have been that “toaster as medium” thingie!).
In October, I finally made it to an OpenCoffee in the Absolute Hotel and met Bernie in person. Not before spamming him with a Shelfari invite the night before:(
Still frustrated because I missed the EduCamp in June and the PodCamp in September, I invited Bernie to give a talk on podcasting to my students. Bernie thought of bringing some of his students along - and I was enthused about this!
And then all happened on Thursday - Bernard spoke to the UL+TippInst students about podcasting, jobs and entrepreneurship, asked his students to talk about their own work and encouraged the audience to ask questions. The students were a bit shy in the beginning, but when he invited them to have a look at his podcasting gear, most of them couldn’t resist the temptation and the ice was broken. The two groups of students had the chance to mingle for a few minutes afterwards!
After the lecture, the TippInst students visited the IDC, where Liam Bannon gave them a briefing on the Interaction Design Centre and our way of looking at technology, and Lui spoke about previous and current IDC projects. The visit finished with the grand tour and a closer look at some of our “reliques” - the Shannon Portal, the recipe pyramid…
It was an interesting exchange and I have the feeling we all learned from it!
Some opinions of my students on the event can be read on the Jaiku channel!
Note: A more formal version of this post was published on the IDC blog previously.
December 02 2007 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
In case you haven’t heard yet, the next BlogTalk will happen in Cork, Ireland on 3-4 March 2008 - “continuing with its focus on social software, while remaining committed to the diverse cultures, practices and tools of our emerging networked society. The conference is designed to maintain a sustainable dialog between developers, innovative academics and scholars who study social software, practitioners and administrators in corporate and educational settings, and other general members of the social software community.”
The conference chairs are John Breslin and Thomas N. Burg , having Tom Raftery and Jan Schmidt as co-chairs.
The full call for proposals is available here, and the deadline for submitting proposals has been extended until December 7, 2007.
Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare and Nova Spivack of Radar Networks are among the invited speakers.
There’s a colocated WebCamp on Social Network Portability scheduled for the day before, March 2 2008.
As a member of the organising committee, I should have blogged about this long time before. But as always, I’m madly busy at work and can’t find enough time for the things I love doing!
Shame on me:(
November 27 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I got back home today and found an invitation from a friend to join Shelfari, supposedly a social network service for book lovers.
I recently heard about Bookmooch and I had a look at it without joining. But this afternoon, in between cooking dinner, cleaning my apartment and chatting to my daughter, I decided to give Shelfari a try.
I never liked this kind of shortcut in finding out who else is on that network (giving them your Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail username and password), but until now - with all my bad feelings about giving someone free access to my mailbox - nothing bad ever happened. But there’s a start for everything…I discovered a few friends were already using it and opted for connecting to them, but I specifically de-selected all the other people on my contact list. Pressed “send”, and - SURPRISE! - few minutes later I discovered the invitation WAS SENT to everyone on my contact list… Mailing lists, former students, former co-workers, a few blogs - all got it!
Two minutes later, a friend emailed warning me it happened to her as well and I went in, deleted my account .and started apologizing to people …
A bit of a search on Technorati showed me that it happened to others as well…
That doesn’t make it less embarrassing though:(
If you got the Shelfari message from me, please note that I don’t recommend it…unless you think you can handle the odd interface!
October 30 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
This draft has been sitting here for more than a month… Trying to finish & publish it now!
On June 22 early in the morning I flew to Berlin to attend the EACE Workshop at Fraunhofer FOKUS, after a demanding week spent in Dublin doing fieldwork.
The EACE project is part of the ongoing research in Europe looking at ICT technologies for developing new collaborative tools and environments. The EACE project is an 18 month FP6 Specific Support Action set to “investigate further the dynamics, potential and impacts of the technological advances in order to feed the policy making process”.
The agenda sounded very interesting, and I was hoping to meet some of the people doing research in the field of Collaborative (e)Working Environments, which ties so well into our work. I’m part of several AMI@work communities, I’m subscribed to the ECOSPACE newsletter, but I didn’t have yet the chance to meet face-to-face with people doing research in this area, and I thought this would be a good opportunity.
As usually when I travel abroad, I did my homework before(booked the flight, arranged accommodation at friends, printed out directions and a map). Unfortunately, the Deutsche Bahn website knew nothing about Kaiserin-Augusta Allee, and gave me directions to Kaiserin-Augusta Strasse instead. I had to arrive there before realising there was no Fraunhofer Institut in that area, and it took me a while to get to the right place, so I missed some of the morning talks.
Craig Cmehill from SAP has blogged the event on the spot (and then waited indefinitely for this post to be published, guessing - I don’t know how!- that there was another blogger in the room!).
In the afternoon, Arnd Layer from IBM Germany spoke about Practical experience with social software at IBM. He spoke about profiles, communities, tagging, internal blogs and activities - all what Lotus Connections basically offers!, but he illustrated everything with examples, which made the talk really interesting. I really loved this particular tag cloud!
After spending the whole week absorbing information in my fieldwork, I was on the same wavelength with the speaker. When Craig asked: “Is this public? Can I blog this?”, I basically couldn’t keep from telling him it was on YouTube 
as public as it can get!
Arnd also mentioned Lotus Greenhouse, meant to give customers and collaborators the feeling of the new products, and ThinkPlace, the internal Web application for facilitating innovation.
Arnd concluded with a few words of wisdom on Business Social Networking:
- listen to your customers;
- use blogs to communicate externally, watch blogs speaking about your own products;
- encourage adoption: instant messaging and web conferences can provide people with real time information;
- use wikis as glossaries for teams / FAQs.
He emphasized that we live in a globalised world, in which the ones who dare and are pro-active will have the advantages. Knowledge Management was - for too long- stuck in top down processes; social networking opens new perspectives.
The next speaker was Craig Cmehil, Community Evangelist at SAP AG - presenting The world(s) of the SAP community Network. This time, the facts were completely new, and I had a tremendous surprise to see what a big company can do with these nice tools, if the right attitude and culture are embraced. And of course, the right people - Craig appeared to me as a sort of wizard, open-minded, innovative and ready to try new things in new ways, always present in a hundred places at one time, reading, commenting, adjusting the tools to fit the people.
The SAP community network seems to me an impressive achievement, with separate areas dedicated to developers and business process experts.
What makes the concept interesting are its exclusive content, the downloads available, the worldwide collaboration it fosters and a recognition system for the contributions of its members.
Craig said 76% of the content was actually contributed by the users, which is quite impressive.
He also mentioned specific problems, like French speakers not mingling with the others and having their separate community - but the community network is actually supporting this.
New tools are offered to the community and people are experimenting. Some get adopted, some others don’t. He mentioned Second Life and Twitter (and the case of Sen. Edwards that made the corporate world to actually pay attention to micro-blogging!)
The next presenter was Volkmar Pipek from University of Siegen, Germany. His talk was titled Every Software is Social -Appropriation Support in Collaborative Systems.
He tackled one of my favourite topics: the adoption of collaborative software tools, mentioning long-term studies on Groupware adoption such as Orlikowski 1996, Kasten & Jones 1998, Pipek & Wulf 1999.
I loved the idea that good design and user centred software development are important, but they don’t guarantee adoption; use dynamics can‘t be fully anticipated.
I particularly liked the statement on the role of social practice around collaborative systems
in adoption. Actually the practice is the appropriation of these technologies!!
He illustrated his talk with a few examples from their work - the help function of a tool(an Eclipse-based client for the BSCW system) was combined with a wiki.
The main conclusion was that these ‘appropriation activities’ should be actively supported, and we’re moving towards ‘Virtual Communities of Tool Practice’! The designers of a tool can do a lot, but the last mile has to be done by users.
Frank Fuchs Kittowski from Fraunhofer ISST was next, speaking about Integration of Knowledge Communities into Knowledge-intensive Business Processes.
I came across Frank’s name while I was working for Fraunhofer IESE and some of my colleagues were involved in a project called APO-IT together with several other Fraunhofer Institutes, but I never had the chance to meet him in person before.
He spoke about making informal collaboration visible and integrating communities into business processes. Wikis were then brought into the picture for providing “context- (process-) based access to the community” and give birth to “collaborative knowledge activities without process
boundaries (in and across process steps)”. I must confess I am a bit skeptical about this idea. It might sound good in theory (finding a cure for a pain we all know it’s there!), but it doesn’t pay any attention to the fact that communities are living organisms (if we speak about real communities here and not about special interest groups assembled by the management!)
Their approach is actually adding a wiki and a wiki interface to the existing APO Pilot process oriented knowledge base.
The interesting twist is that the application is designed for process integrated learning in the automotive industry.
The last speaker was George Milis, from European Dynamics who presented the current results of the EACE project in a talk titled: Towards a New Policy Framework for the Adoption of Electronic Collaborative Working Environments.
The project partners set to elaborate policy recommendations for CWE adoption(Collaborative eWorking Environments) in the EU.
What they came up with was a “layered ontology of collaboration patterns”. More on the framework and the 3 selected CWE prototypes in George’s slides!
There were mentions about counterbalancing the American supremacy in designing collaborative software tools (doh!). Someone mentioned the Buerger Portal initiative in Germany - giving every german citizen an email address, a web page, access to shared spaces (who’s interested already has all these).
Someone asked the following question: “If the availability of the technologies is not a problem, then how can EU stimulate the adoption?” I tried to bring into discussion the idea the approach shouldn’t be centred on the technology and the collaborative tools, but on the purpose for which one would embrace these tools. If a job application procedure or a tax claim can only be done online, people will learn how to use it. But putting the carriage in front of the horses won’t help!
I mentioned Karin Knorr-Cetina’s work on Sociality with Objects that has been used by Jyri Engestrom to show why some social network services work and others don’t.
Another discussion topic was the (disappearing) work-life balance. People tend to take care of personal matters durring the working hours and work from home in the evenings, so the boundaries between work and free time tend to get blurred. Arnd stated that what’s happening inside IBM shows that actually adding a social dimension to work improves productivity.
Volkmar argued that life needs structure -say the psychologists!
The question: Do we need a collaboration etiquette(c-etiquette)? was also asked. Could such an etiquette be modelled ? (In my opinion, it can only emerge!)
The opportunity of using CWE as a vehicle for transferring knowledge and skills to new and younger employees was also touched in the discussion.
The slides of the presentations were made available for download, and there are also a few pictures from the event available.
Together with Craig Cmehil, we managed to ignite some interest for social software tools and especially for Twitter and Dopplr! Unfortunately, the enthusiasm was short lived - none of the invitations I’ve sent were ever answered!
Craig also uses a nice tool I wasn’t aware of - Time-to-Meet - for scheduling his meetings.
There’s a link to a database full of other fancy applications on his blog.
In conclusion, it was an interesting event and a good networking opportunity, but my original expectation of getting associated with some FP7 proposal writers in this area wasn’t unfortunately met.
(Originally published in Tales from the Field of Software Engineering)
August 02 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I’m dreaming about blogging day and night. Then why I’m not doing it?!
I’m a Virgo, you know, and we Virgos have the tendency to excessively analyse everything…
It took me quite a long time to analyse the reasons for my erratic blogging: mad workload (self-imposed!), lack of work-life balance and… a fair amount of good old procrastination…
I’m writing things in so many places that it’s difficult to keep track anymore… I’m kind of lost in the jungle of web 2.0 tools, and I realise more and more that, despite of being somehow “permanent”, most of the content I generate is ephemeral. My blog was a sort of central point where I used to be able to retrieve everything I needed from my past… Actually, this is what it was meant to be:
“A place where stories, thoughts and ideas come together“
Now this map of my past three years has a lot of blank zones… a lot of stubs, unpublished drafts… but I lost hope of ever getting back to them, and I decided to focus on the future…
I’m feeling much better now - got rid of my anxieties, accumulated some experience in my research domain and I’m more positive about finding ways to invest more time in this violon d’Ingres of mine which is social networks… playing my Connector role;-)
March was hectic, but great! The Webcamp on Social Networks in Galway, the Global Sourcing workshop in Val d’Isere, and BocSe (the Bosch Software Engineering conference) in Ludwigsburg, where Ita Richardson and myself were invited to give a tutorial on Global Software Development. I must confess I was a bit wary about calling it “tutorial”, because I doubted we could teach the Bosch software engineers anything new, but formally, there was no other way of doing it… It went amazingly well, and we enjoyed it as much as the participants…
April looks a bit less hectic - more time for producing stuff…
But May and June… oh, my! What’s on my list right now:
Exciting…and scary on the same time:-P
April 14 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I’m in a dream place -Val d’Isere - attending the first IS Workshop on Global Sourcing.
Val d’Isere is advertised as the best ski resort in the whole world. After what I saw today, I might agree;-)
The workshop is extremely interesting - the proceedings are already online!, and there’s another day to go!
March 14 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
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