CONIECTO

Coniecto has moved

2008-12-03T12:33:00.004+01:00

Coniecto got a new home. I postponed telling you, because the new home wasn't quite ready. But with the limited amount of time I have right now, it won't look neater anytime soon...

All the old posts (and the pile of drafts!) have been copied there, but I still have to find a solution for importing the comments (I was with Haloscan and it looks like the only way to export them is to get a paid account now that I want to leave them!)

Stop by and say hello if you haven't heard from me in a while (and you were missing my random rants) - here's the new address: Coniecto.org

Going to Podcamp Kilkenny

2008-09-26T23:35:00.003+02:00

Well, the Podcamp was in my calendar for the last two months, but until 3 days ago, I wasn't sure I can go. It was a tough week (and a tough month!), and I wouldn't have dared to go by bus or take the train up to Dublin and then to Kilkenny!

I had promised Sabrina Marczak (a Brazilian doing a PhD at the SEGAL group in Canada), who's visiting our research group, to facilitate a few discussions with people in the Irish software industry involved in outsourcing. I have done my best, but we didn't get many responses.

I intended to take her to an OpenCoffee in Cork, but this didn't work out. She visited Cork last week, attending the Irish HCI conference in my place, while I was stuck at home, with an injured back and hip (don't ask how it happened, because it was really stupid!)

But we're coming to Kilkenny tomorrow, so who knows?! Maybe we'll have a bit of luck!

If, by any chance, you have ever been in a software outsourcing/offshoring relationship (either at the receiving or at the sending end) and you happen to be at Podcamp this Saturday, please come and say hello!

We're getting a lift with Marian, and I'm really excited to get the chance to talk to her on the way!

My passage to India

2008-08-06T14:33:00.003+02:00

No, I didn't disappear from the face of the Earth. I just keep writing drafts here and never manage to publish them...

I am in India - another one of my childhood dreams coming true. An Indian colleague, consulted because I was very anxious before my departure, said he doesn't think I'll encounter any life threatening circumstances. His feeling was that I'll probably be disappointed. And in a way he was right...

Things here are very different. This is not David Lean's India. Neither is Mircea Eliade's.
It's a weird mixture of aggressive capitalism and thousands of years of culture. And I need time to get accustomed to it! Maybe one day I'll love it. But for the moment, I'm just overwhelmed.

I spent a week at Wipro in Bangalore. It was a great experience and I hope to blog about it this week!

Now I'm in Kerala, taking an ayurvedic massage course. I should be in the seventh heaven... only if I could be less critical!

I'm in an Internet cafe right now - I had to change a password that was expiring and I checked every Internet cafe in town if they would let me connect my laptop. Everybody else said: "impossible", until I found this nice guy at Rabby Towers. Wi fi seems not to have reached this land yet - they were looking at me as if I'd have been from another planet .

Image by Ankur Banerjee via Flickr Talking about other planets- I found in a bookshop Douglas Adams' Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy and I'm reading it now!
The hotel does have Internet access - but it's an old PC in a tiny room next to the kitchen, and shared with the staff and every other hotel guest!

Going back to my hotel now, more later, world!

The culture shock

2008-07-28T18:52:00.003+02:00

I arrived in Bangalore on Sunday morning at 5am. The airport looked impressive - it was just opened in April this year. On the way to the city, the first shock: shacks, rubbish, people selling food next to the motorway... And the red mud everywhere...

The second shock was my carefully picked up hotel. In my naivety, I had picked up a hotel close to the company I was going to visit. I was going to visit Wipro in Madivala, so all I had to do was to find a hotel in Madivala and check the map. I wanted to walk there every day. I didn't want to depend on any means of transportation. This is how I found The Libra. Don't let the banner fool you: the pictures must be taken in some rich cousin's hotel in the UK. The place is not what we would call a hotel. Minimal furniture, windows overlooking piles of rubbish and construction sites, shower dripping continuously... After a first attempt to eat breakfast, I gave up and did my own shopping. There was a sheet on my matress and then an old blanket without an extra sheet. I asked for an extra sheet but couldn't get one. I spent the first night covered with the towel I had brought with me. It was warm, but not comfortable enough. This is a picture of an executive roam just like mine. Doesn't look too bad here, but it was actually not very welcoming. The rooms were under continuous camera surveillance, and I felt uncomfortable to know someone was watching me day and night.

On Sunday, I took a motorickshaw into town. I enjoyed the experience, although a sudden rain drenched my whole left side. It was less than one euro, but when I tried to ask the driver how to get back - or what was the name of the place where he had picked me up, I couldn't get any answer. I stopped at the Mota Royal Arcade on Brigade Road, and I would have bought the whole place if it wasn't the very first day! I tried to get an Indian SIM card, and I found out I needed a picture and a proof of address in India in order to get one. It was Sunday, so I couldn't get my photo taken. But I had dinner in a fabulous restaurant: Just Oriental. The staff was so nice that I felt spoiled. I remember I had stuffed aubergines and they were fabulous. Nice music, nice ambiance, fantastic food and service! I went to the famous MG road and looked at book shops (almost the same books as home!), tried to buy shoes - well, for women it's basically leather made flip-flops and nothing else!) and entered an old and luxurious saree shop, where I felt a bit like an elephant in a garden: whole families were seated, having tea and discussing the options with shop assistants, who were showing there more and more fabrics.

The rickshaw back was 5 times more expensive, but I was glad to see myself back safe. It got dark around 7pm, and I was very tired.

My contact at Wipro sent me a car to pick me up on Monday morning, and I accepted, but told him I intended to walk once I knew were the place was. The driver arrived half an hour earlier, and I asked him to wait, because I didn't want to get there too early. He drove me through a city market and I was amazed seeing people camping there next to their merchandise. The traffic was absolutely insane, and on several occasions I feared for the lives of women and children travelling on motorcycles driven by men.

It took me a good while until I got accustomed to the hunking horns - in the beginning, I was continuously terrified. After the first trip, I couldn't imagine walking there anymore, and I accepted Shiva, my driver, as guardian angel! Anyhow, my work took me to different locations, so managing without a car would have been impossible. The car trip took an hour most of the time...

Another shocking thing was the fly-over getting build in the middle of the current 3 lane road, in order to separate the car traffic from buses and motorcycles. I would have never thought of such a solution!

I got a Vodaphone SIM card on the second evening, not without struggle. My hotel proof of address was considered dubious. But taking into account the bombs that went off just two days before that, I understood their concern. There was police everywhere, and at every supermarket they were checking people's bags! Shopping for food was a bit complicated, but I just went for fresh fruit, Ness Cafe and milk. I needed a lot of time to figure out what was in packages and cans.

My deceiving hotel had a LAN, so I used to dive into conversation with friends every evening and forget where I was. I could have moved out, but I didn't have the energy to do it. And I was there for work, and work was good. My only indulgence during these evenings was to eat pomegranates - a fruit I always longed for, as it was one of the main features of Romanian fairy tales.

Crossing the road was a big adventure, especially in the dark. One evening it took me 20 min! Going out for dinner on my own was also tough! After a bad experience in a food court, where I had to queue for each item separately (curry, nan and lhassi), I decided to go for restaurants. One night at Sahib Sindh Sultan, the guy at the entrance tried to persuade me to go for a pub instead. I only wanted a decent dinner in a nice ambiance, and I stood my ground. In the end I got a little table in the middle of corporate party groups, and had a delicious dinner!

I didn't get to see too much during the first week - in the evenings, I wandered around my hotel on Hossur Road and that was it. I was waiting for the moment when I had to get out of Bangalore as my salvation!

On my way to ICSE

2008-05-09T10:25:00.004+02:00

One more hour to spend in Dublin airport before my flight to Germany. I'm going to ICSE, the most important conference for the field of software engineering. I'll attend two workshops:
- STC - Socio-Technical Congruence - on Saturday, and
- CHASE - Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering - on Tuesday.

I'll also present our work at CHASE, and I'm pretty excited by the format suggested by the organisers, which will give us the chance to interact with the other participants. It looks like this workshop attracted 60 participants and it's one of the biggest this year.

The main conference will happen from Wednesday until Friday.
I'm looking forward to the event and excited to visit the place where my favourite baroque composer has spent a good part of his life!

Saturday in Dublin

2008-04-14T01:47:00.006+02:00

Because most of my trips to Dublin were for work purposes, my brain stored a Dublin=work association I'm trying to get rid of. I like Dublin a lot and I'm planning to go there more often from now on.

I discovered a different Dublin - empty streets and closed shops - because it was too early! I had breakfast in an Insomnia Cafe (Starbucks wasn't open yet), trying to think of the press release for 3Dcamp. I had my first walk through Stephen's Green on a sunny but fresh morning (all the other times I passed by it!), and I was deeply charmed.

I went to Deepak Chopra's talk at the NCH. I had read a lot of his books and I thought it was a great opportunity to see the man and listen to him speaking. No, for those who asked - I did not reach enlightenment on the spot, but it was a good motivational talk and the boost I needed.

He's a good speaker and unlike other people, pays respect to his audience. I was a bit annoyed by the over california-nized meditation music, but Utsav Lal, the young Indian pianist who played before the talk and during the interval, was fantastic.

I met a friend for lunch, and then I had a look at the iPhone in an O2 store - read a lot about it, but never touched one. Discovered there were 7 degrees in Dublin and 25 in Bucharest! This is not fair!

Impressions after the Social Networks discussion panel at UL

2008-04-14T00:04:00.006+02:00

I believe we did reasonably well: according to Bernie Goldbach, we had approximately 50 participants in the Library Board Roomon Friday afternoon.

There were interesting reactions to my invitation sent to the Events mailing list at the university: material for fighting students' Facebook addiction, invitations to similar events, requests to record the discussion so that it could serve as inspiration for other social networking evangelists, and apologies from people who would have loved, but couldn't be present.

Nothing worked according to the plan: but I guess this was the beauty of it!

Evert Bopp was in the audience and beside making meaningful contributions to the discussion, he qiked(aka recorded and broadcasted) the whole event.
We had a round of introductions where we tried to explain what was the connection between Bernie, James and myself: how I discovered the Limerick OpenCoffee looking for information about the Collison brothers, how Bernie discovered me through the Jaiku channel I was using with my students, and how Bernie and James were connected through the use of TypePad.

Bernie managed to write jaikus in the middle of the discussion and I guess it was spectacular for the audience to see them on the screen at the end of the discussion.

We touched on LinkedIn and Facebook. We spoke about how difficult it is to be aware of the implications and persistence of personal information disclosed on the web when you're very young. We spoke about bad experiences with Shelfari and good ones with LibraryThing.

We spoke about how Jaiku and Twitter can be used for getting ad-hoc information from your network. We showed del.icio.us and CiteULike and what can one do with them.

Taken out of context, this jaiku by Bernie created a bit of confusion among non-participants:
"@coniecto does not think any social network service is dangerous, as she explains to the UL socnet seminar".
What I meant was that I do not believe the services in themselves are dangerous. As for any other instrument, there are good uses and bad uses. Instead of banning students from using Bebo in schools and colleges, educators and parents should try to understand what's going on there. I can understand they're freightened because they can't understand it and all they can do is read the newspapers and listening to scary stories - but playing the ostrich won't help!

In my opinion, our teaching has to go where our students are and reach them. I could see this with my first year students: they're allergic to Powerpoint, but you can get their attention if you can prove your point with a video found or uploaded to YouTube ...

Bernie gave a few examples of situations when he used one-liners and podcasts to pass the information to students who wouldn't read the recommended books.

We spoke about "the death of books", and agreed that people who are inclined to read have more channels for getting information about books than ever before.

We didn't get too many questions from the audience - half of them were students. I guess we bombarded them with a lot more information than they could digest in an hour - but let's hope curiosity will do the rest!

We also managed to promote the Internet Experience in Education conference on 22 May 2008 in Thurles, the Limerick OpenCoffee and the 3Dcamp.

After the event, I took James for a walk over the Living Bridge, and we had a look at the venue for the 3Dcamp. We had the vision of 100+ people enjoying the interesting talks, the green ambiance of the campus and the networking... now all we need is to turn the vision into reality:)

PS Thank you, Zemanta, for saving me! I was ready to publish the post without links and go to bed, when I discovered you could actually do 3/4 of my work!

Panel discussion on Social Networking at the University of Limerick

2008-04-08T13:46:00.002+02:00

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!

My "interesting day" and a trip on Live Search Maps

2008-03-27T23:25:00.005+01:00

I had a tough day. Had a medical appointment and wanted to get my bike checked at the same time. And was expecting guests from Denmark who were landing in Shannon at 12:15. My mom would have said this is my usual way of cramming things into my schedule until it blows up in my face:(

I left my bike at the bike shop and they promised it will be ready in an hour. Then I enjoyed the sun in the bus station for 35min: went through my to-do list, reorganised my priorities, made a few phone calls, and finally I had to catch a taxi to get to the hospital on time. But I've made it! Standing in front of the reception desk, I worried a bit when I noticed the appointment letter the guy in front of me was showing to the receptionist was white, and not pink like mine. Just to find out two minutes later that my appointment was for the other hospital, 5 min walking distance from my place. Apologies. Phone call to the other hospital. They promised they'll call me back. Bus to the bike shop. Bike was not ready. Phone rings: "Come here as soon as you can, the doctor accepted to see you later." Getting more and more worried. Another cyclist waiting started a conversation about the beautiful day outside. She took a day off to enjoy cycling. Did I notice how splendid the weather was? No. I had my worries. Forgot to breathe. Bike finally ready.

Cycling through the city centre. What's the best way to get to the hospital? Never mind. Any way, just to get there. Their parking has a bike rack! Now this is nice! Hurrying in. Trying to convince the receptionist to reschedule my appointment. "We'll get you in in a minute, and you'll be out shortly!" Yes - in my dreams! The door opened, the nurse brought a patient in a wheelchair out, and took me in. She was nice. Said the doctor will be in shortly. I was ready to explode! What if my guests arrived?! And then suddenly I decided there's nothing I could do about it. It was actually a beautiful spring day and it was all my fault I wanted to do too much. And I relaxed. And breathed.
The doctor came in and I got my ultrasound. He was nice too. Amazing he was not mad at me! Out. And home. 5 min after that, my guests arrived. Everything was back on track!

And in the evening, after sending my guest to bed, I got to check my mail. Someone on a mailing list pointed to a blog post: navan, carlow, wexford and limerick are available now in bird's eye view on Live Search Maps! I took a virtual trip following my daily cycling route to work. I showed my kids in Romania the shabby houses behind my apartment block. I started my first collection. I read about it. Impressed. Imagining tons of new opportunities. Ooops! midnight! Tough day tomorrow as well - must go to bed now.

This is the building I work in UL - the Engineering Research Building. It's very close to the Living Bridge. It's also the place where the next BarCamp Ireland - 3DCamp - will happen on May 24. More on this in the following days!

Time off in Dublin

2008-03-22T01:49:00.005+01:00

On my way out from the IBM press conference at the Merrion hotel, I noticed another butler stopping a taxi in front of the next entrance. I looked around to find out who was the VIP the taxi was meant for, to discover Gabriel Byrne! OMG!

My next stop was the William Buttler Yeats exhibition at the National Library of Ireland. Ever since Mark Leslie presented at the iHCI event in Limerick last year, I wanted to go there. Unfortunately, every time I went to Dublin it was for work, and there was no way to get to the city centre during the opening hours. Except now!

I had lunch with friends at NCI , discussing usability issues and the possible impact of virtual worlds on education.

And in the evening, I went to the Jean-Michel Jarre Oxygene concert at the National Concert Hall. It was an amazing experience. Playing electronic music on a stage is probably much more complicated than recording in a studio, and pushing buttons and switches less spectacular than playing a guitar. The performance was absolutely stunning - even if the original album is 30 years old and everybody knows the pieces - the lights, the instruments, the projections and a sort of mirror hanging from the ceiling and showing an image of the scene seen from above(as in this recording) - all contributed to it!

Recordings of any kind were absolutely forbidden, and I've seen the concert hall staff invigilating this request of the artist, but of course the next morning short videos were available on YouTube! (1,2)
I was particularly impressed by the sound of the theremin and the choreography involved in playing it. And already thought of next year's Introduction to Digital Media course!

Today, I also had the nice surprise to discover a video made in Dublin by Jean Michel Jarre on YouTube!

The first IBM Cloud Computing Centre in Europe

2008-03-20T20:13:00.003+01:00

Just like any other of the many academic collaborators IBM has across Ireland, a while ago I was invited to attend an IBM event in Dublin yesterday, March 19. The invitation email didn't give many details - an important announcement was going to be made, and the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Micheál Martin, was going to attend.

After two years of observing "life at the code face" and reading a lot about IBM's corporate culture, this was a chance to meet people at the top of the organisation and observe IBM's public (inter)face I couldn't miss.

The venue for the event was the Merrion Hotel and I was lucky to see the open door and the IBM logo inside, because the building didn't bear any sign. A registration desk, a welcoming butler who took my coat and backpack, and I landed in a luxurious reception room while I was still untangling my headphones and wiping my nose. A few people I knew introduced me to others - and as usually in such circumstances, I barely retained one or two names. Plenty of formal suits, and a few more casual ones - people from the "code face". I was there early, so after having a cup of tea, I went into the conference room and flicked through the materials offered to us, trying to figure out what the announcement was about.

I witnessed the arrival of breathless journalists, and the efforts of an IBMer to offer them all the explanations in a layman's language again and again, for each newcomer.
I couldn't avoid noticing that the female/male ratio was probably 1 to 10, including registration staff, personal assistants and journalists.

The IBM country general manager for Ireland, Michael Daly, opened the meeting - actually a press conference. The Minister Micheál Martin made the actual announcement: IBM is ready to open its first European Cloud Computing Centre which will be located in Mulhuddart - Dublin. IBM Vice President Willy Chiu followed, presenting the bigger picture: the concept of "cloud computing", the existing IBM cloud computing centres and the ones to be be created in the future, and how this trend fits into the general IBM strategy.

According to Mr.Chiu, the "cloud computing" concept combines grid computing, on demand services and Web 2.o technologies (the IBM Idea Factory) to provide a new type of Enterprise Data Centre.

Cloud computing is an information technology (IT) infrastructure in which dynamically shared computing resources are virtualized and accessed as a service. Cloud computing replaces the traditional data center model in which companies own and manage their own stand alone hardware and software systems. Cloud computing is an attractive proposition for small to large-sized companies. It also is a green technology model that reduces energy consumption by improving IT resource utilization, therefore requiring fewer servers to handle equivalent workloads.

One of the first IBM customers who will make use of the services of the new cloud computing centre is Sogeti (the IT services firm owned by consulting firm Cap Gemini) - Michiel Boreel CTO of Sogeti had an intervention as well, showing that this initiative "jumpstarts a new innovation culture" and they are planning to "make innovation everybody's job".

More details can be found in this IBM press release.

The press conference was followed by a demo session and more networking.
I didn't bother taking pictures with my mediocre camera, thinking there will be plenty available - the press cameras were flashing at every new slide on the screen. But none of them was actually published! Here's a list of mentions of the event I could find in the media today:

- ENN- IBM to open Dublin cloud computing centre
- Information Week - IBM opens 'cloud computing' centre in Dublin
- ITPro - IBM moves into clouds and social networks
- RTE - IBM Cloud Centre brings Dublin jobs (including some audio recordings and a very low quality picture taken on the Mulhuddart campus probably with a phone camera from a car!)
- The Industry Standard via IDG - IBM opens cloud computing center in Dublin.

Without any possible doubt, IBM has a great innovation culture and the proper tools to support it. But will simply providing the same infrastructure (and consulting) to its clients lead to the same results?! From what we saw, people develop local, situated practices around the tools they appropriate. There are cases in the literature where software development teams making use of the same tool had built completely different local practices around that tool.

Right now I'm reading a book on corporate culture and the author makes it very clear that changing the culture of an organisation is a very difficult and delicate process, with no guarantees of success whatsoever. Not exactly the kind of things business people love hearing, I know.
But I'm afraid I find most of the approaches to innovation and knowledge management rigid and mechanical as opposed to the richness and beauty of what can be observed in practice!

At the CreativeCamp in Kilkenny

2008-03-08T11:45:00.028+01:00

I can't remember exactly when did I find out about the Kilkenny CreativeCamp. All I can remember was that my immediate reaction was: I want to go there!
I guess it was from Ken McGuire's blog.
There is a dedicated webpage, and the #podcamp jaiku channel was used for the day.
Ken also posted a couple of pictures of the venue - the Parade Tower of he Kilkenny Castle on Flickr. Hope to see more posted on the following days (my own camera decided to break after the first picture).
These were the organisers: Ken McGuire, Tom Corcoran, Keith Bohanna, and this the venue: Kilkenny Castle.

The audience was very mixed: artists, geeks, start-up people, bloggers, and so forth. 120 people have registered, but probably there were up to 80 attendees.

And these are my (slightly edited) notes from the event:
Ina O'Murchu - Personalisation and The Social Web
The Square Room is too small - many people want to listen to Ina's talk.
Ina: are you using iGoogle? iLike? - Ali interviewed on Intruders.TV - he confessed he didn't expect that viral spread through Facebook- had to get more servers.
Nike + iPod-nice combination - power song for the last mile. Personal as well as social!

Mashups - one of the best last year - Snow Patrol+Police.
(I just noticed the online program keeps on changing - bernie and walter are now down for 11am!)
Consumers are not listening anymore.
Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I-IV - cutting out all the middlemen - sold everything and made a lot of money.
It is much easier to do for established artists - money are not being made on music anymore - but on the add-ons.
Our lives are exposed - We're constantly connected.
Nova Spivack presented this week at DERI Twine - a knowledge networking application -there's a Twine Preview on YouTube.
It is a bit like Wikipedia - but based on the Semantic Web.
(time for me to discover Nova's talk in DERI)
There are many others out there:
TripIt - for organising trips
Hakia - search for meaning
Ina promises the audience to upload the slides on her blog.

Comments from the audience - daughter on Bebo and Facebook - but still using texting a lot.
Someone working with O2 - works on mobile portals - Bebo and Facebook took off on mobile phones. There are 2000 iPhones on Vodaphone in Ireland!!!

Damien Beresford on Outsourcing Your Personal Workload(11am Ormond Room)
He gave this presentation at the Open Coffee in Waterford yesterday. He was formerly with Iona. Now with tax123.ie

What do they outsource: graphic design, search engine optimisation, testing, java scripts, small chunks of tax123.ie.

Some of their negotiated tariffs: tester 13$ per day; graphic designer 8$ per icon;Java PHP $18 per day; Search Engine Optimisation $500 ongoing (one-off fee) Phillippines
Value compared to your time (~2/15split); it is 1/26 in manufacturing.
You still need to spend time - defining the requirements - selecting a person, checking the work.
You're the only one responsible for what you get back!
How: via conduit, guru.com, rentacoder.com, elance.com, getafreelancer.com.
They're all electronic market places - guru.com being the biggest.

You also need to solve the IP problem- signing an NDA with a person abroad might not be very effective. Resources to follow up are also needed.

Tips:
New project - requirements, tests, questions in the specifications, definitive outputs, engage & check profile; repeat work is easier.

Damien explains how these sites work: the intermediary keeps the money until the work gets done; an arbitration system is also provided.
Once he tried to avoid rent-a-coder - they take out 15% of the price. But because Paypal is not accepted in some countries, the hassle of having to go to the bank made him give up.

On the Jaiku channel, Ken McGuirre shares a link to a pic of the day's programme.
Here's how it looks like:
Finally, Damien makes some reading recommendations:

The Economist
"The world is flat" by Thomas Friedmann
Evalueserve: Person to person offshoring
Case studies on Elance
The 4 hour work week- Timothy Ferris

Discussions followed the presentation and being so eager to share what I found out during my studies on this topic I almost forgot taking notes.

Siasy Collins and Qamir Hussain contributed to the discussion, sharing insights from their own experience.

Someone expressed concerns about handling IPR - outsourcing chunks of work to different people seems to work well.

Working with Sri Lanka and India proved to create complications when a company is on the point of getting bought out - you have to prove you have the IPRs, and this is acknowledged as well by the other side, and accepted by the laws

of their country.

Ger Hartnett - coclarity - Managing Any Kind Of Project With Scrum (Square Room, 11:45)
SCRUM - American named it so- looks like they had no clue about rugby;)
Description of SCRUMS - all projects have chickens and pigs. Ger mentions an old joke in which a chicken and a pig are talking and the chicken says, "Let's start a restaurant." The pig replies, "Good idea, but what should we call it?" "How about 'Ham and Eggs'" says the chicken. "No thanks," says the pig, "I would be committed to the project, but you would be nearly involved."
Ger used to work for Intel, converting caffeine into code.

The audience seems to come half from a creative background and half from the software industry (not that one excludes the other!).
Working in SCRUMs means frequent samples and small adjustments.
It is more about adaptability than about predictability.
Ideally for small teams - max 6 people. On a 35 people project - they split in 6 teams.
The people are ideally collocated, but there are ways to cope with distribution.

Every big project gets broken down into sprints; each sprint takes max 1 month; they keep a list of work items called backlog; at the start of each sprint - the team pick items from the backlog.
SCRUMs are about balancing the team's ability to focus with adaptability and ability to change.
Daily short meetings are hold; it is easier to focus on something that's a month away;
the daily meeting is 15 min max same time same place standing. 3 questions for everyone:

what did you do in the last day (binar answer- done or not done)
what roadblocks you encountered? how can others help?
what will you do by tomorrow?

People are managing their own tasks.
They use a highly advanced technology: loads of post-its stuck to a big sheet of paper:)
On the big sheet of paper:
- upper part - people
- lower part - current backlog, backlog, done

People are occasionally walking to the room to see where they are - for distributed projects you need a different solution. (3M make loads of money because people use so many post-its!!!-joke)
Managers still want a Microsoft Project document. Dealing with this is relatively simple - plan is a series of sprints; dependencies only at a sprint level.

Tracing a task list with a spreadsheet - in Ger's paper with Brian Fitzgerald- an example.
After the big chickens get to trust the team - they can do with less reporting;
everyone gets involved in planning and tracking, team "gells"
Further readings: The Wikipedia article on SCRUM.

Joe Drumgoole - people at PutPlace use TRACK. Other available tools: Lighthouse,mingle.
You can put tickets in if you take some out - otherwise you can't get all the tasks done and a sense of guilt develops.
White band Delphi - code reviews for estimates - Eurovision mashed up with code reviews:)

Q: how can you deal with roadblocks in 15 min? you don't solve the problem - you just state it - but you take it offline to solve it.
There is a person in SCRUMs who's half chicken -half pig. He reports to the chickens.
Every success is celebrated with roast chicken - Joe Drumgoole:)
Slides will be up on slideshare - promises Ger Hartnett.

Coworking -Jason Roe
He used to be a freelancer - web developer - he was working from home - and it was quite difficult. After a while, home seems a very lonely place and you can't do it anymore.
It was very expensive to get an office - he didn't need 3-5 people.
What he needed was to add some structure to his work. A lot of the customers were not based in Ireland - so meeting with the customers wasn't feasible.
Working from home - your days start to go into each other -they seem to run over and over and over. He looked at what was going on in different places in the US.
www.coworking.ie - was set up about 18m ago
He wanted to see if there was a demand out there for cafe like collaboration spaces.
In other countries, freelancers would meet up in cafes/bars to work. What people need is flexibility on costs and flexibility on committments. 15 bloggers support the site currently.
It is not an office share!
There are a few places for co-working right now:

Space 28 set up by Paul Cable Jul 07 dublin
Broombridge in assoc with Jason Feb 2008 Dub
Waterford Institute - co-working ethos

A need to show how co-working differs in Ireland - to date. It's a matter of finding the other people who are interested.
In Waterford - the coworking location is part of the business incubator - 7 people who wanted to work together. Each person has an individual licence agreement - they can be in /out in 30 days.

There is scope for other institutes to do it. A lot of cross working going on - people mingle.
What is needed is a building or a landlord with a building; there are pros and cons of taking a lease - advantages of partnering; benefits for the landlord
Spaces can be a slow process to get off the ground; you need to find other interested people in your area.

Personally, I don't like this idea - where's the freedom? the fluidity? the serendipity?
The same people are meeting every day - that's not what the digital bohemians concept is all about.
They did a survey on coworking.ie. The results are here.

A long lunch break followed - while the others were watching the rugby match on the big screen, I went out for a stroll - the castle has beautiful grounds and the weather was absolutely glorious!

I got back on time for the last 20 min of the Vultures screening ( episode 1"Kris Kringle Konundrum"). More about its history and context here.

The Women in Technology panel is next. Krishna De is facilitating it - she mentions the International Women's Day. The ladies on the panel:

Ina O'Murchu - ex DERI - currently working with a start-up.
Martha Rotter - Microsoft Ireland -helping companies across Ireland to adopt internet technologies
Sabrina Dent - web designer and Internet marketer
Elly Parker - better known as "ellybabes"

Krishna De: question for Sabrina - What is the impact of blogging on your reputation as a freelancer?
Sabrina: She wrote a lot about travelling - then she was hired as professional blogger for a start-up that eventually failed - but her reputation as a blogger brought her a lot of work as web designer.

for Martha - How is it to blog from inside a big organisation?
She started blogging as a channel for interacting with people she needed to reach out to - getting useful feedback via the blog.
Sabrina: blogging also brings more transparency to her work.
Elly : putting a face to a name.
Ina: She is planning a change for marking a transition from the semantic web niche to internet marketing (her new job).

for Elly: How did micro-blogging affect your blogging?
Elly: Twitter is a sort of permanent Irish backchannel - Ireland being small enough, you can follow a lot of the people. She tracks about 150 people - this is how she's finding out about events. For example the GGD - Martha, can you tell more about it?

Martha: The Girl Geek dinner started in London 2y ago. Girl geeks usually don't want to go to events, because they don't know anyone. The purpose was creating a network of women.
The first one in Ireland happened in Dublin last week, the next will be in Cork in April.

"We need one big bloody circle to see everything that's going on in Ireland!" (Elly)
Someone from the audience: there is a sort of snobbery amongst women - the term "geek" needs to be disspelled. They think these events will look like the "Revenge of the nerds".

Krishna De finds the opportunity to thank Ken, Tom and Keith - the organisers.

What about privacy? What do you think of exposing your personal details?

Sabrina: people are paranoid; she has chosen to expose her personal details; she's getting a lot of hate email- but people are not serious about it - they don't knock on her door!
Trying to hide doesn't make sense; people can trace you even if you try to keep your identity secret.

for Ina: What can you say to convince me I should expose my identity?

Ina:she got an interesting job because of her blog; every now and then, she does get nasty comments - but that's all!

Elly: digital footprint - young people today don't care what they put out there.
Dooce, Petite anglaise are famous cases of bloggers that were brought to court because of things they wrote in their blogs. (thanks to Elly for correcting me here!) If you're not sure about posting - better keep it as a draft.
Older people seem to be more terrified by the repercussions of blogging then the young ones.

There was a recent case of a tax inspector going after an Irish blogger with printouts of his Linkedin, Facebook and Xing details.
78% of the employers google the names of job candidates.

for Martha - Is there a company code for blogging?
Microsoft is encouraging people to blog and there are guidelines available. There's no guideline for what you can put in a technology blog - you have to use your common sense.

Krishna De: Women who are moving into technology careers - 27%
What should we be doing to encourage more women to move into technology?
Ina: we need to do more at the secondary level education - show them what technology is able to do, how to set up a business.
Sabrina: a lot of women are involved in technology - but don't see themselves as such; she has a friend selling nappies online only who doesn't consider herself involved with technology.

Krishna De: A lot of women worked for companies like Microsoft had kids, and later became consultants. They don't consider themselves as "into technology" anymore.
At the first Barcamp in Dublin, there were very few women in the audience.
What can we all do to encourage more women to get involved?

Martha: what doesn't help is bitching about percentages. If you're the only woman - make the point, show other people it's possible, don't be shy, go out and network.

Elly: less geeky panels; more general talks; more break-out rooms.
Ina: encourage women who work from home to come.
Sabrina: for any event - dump the damn wikis, they suck! People don't know how to sign up; also offer tshirts that can't get over tits; organise half days for women with kids.
The "everybody who comes- presents" rule can be intimidating, especially for women.
Change the language you use to communicate; appoint more women on panels; have a place for kids; and dear sponsors, thank you for the wine!

Breaking news: Elly and Sabrina are preparing the launch of a new website: Sass.ie- for Irish women who love the web; the plan is to build an online community; women can submit a max of 2 posts a month- using tags.
There will be a place for discussion, a calendar covering every event in Ireland in the future, articles to help people to start blogging.
The Ladies Tea Party will become an annual event.

(There were a lot of men in the audience, and they got involved in the conversation. I was afraid it could take a purely feminist turn, but the tone was just right, and the general mood was positive!)

Will Knott: could we organise a kids camp?
reboot in Copenhagen had a kindergarten.
There are insurance implication - we need to check this! BarCamps are informal.
Maybe there are existing creches nearby who could cover a Saturday.
There will be a discussion on Sass.ie.

Sabrina Dent - Miss Sabrina's Guide to Blogging Like a Boy-for proper ladies & sensitive gentlemen
Positioning your blog - a key to getting yourself readers and work, can make you an authority in your topic area
test: write down all the big companies with logos using blue green black purple or red
test: write down every logo including Pink: T Mobile Cadburry Barbie
Design is branding: death to flowers, faeries, sunsets and Webkins;Death to TicketFactory
Be ruthless with your sidebar. Really ruthless.

What about a mention of speaking at a conference? it is ok to mention this.
Manage your blogroll - no friends lists - link to the people you want to align yourself with
(you'll get good judgment marks).

Positioning:
- dress the part
- own your brand - no free blogging service - the mark of a naive beginner
- filter for high value in your niche- no flickr on your finance blog - with dogs and flowers
- voice- Holmes, Coates (slides will be on her blog)
- no passive voice - it's just my opinion - straight is good
- "I really feel that" - uncovers feeling rather than thinking
- I'm just X and not Y, but..." - diminishing the value of our own opinions before stating them
Abuse the elipse:
"I have no real idea here..."- sounds like you can't finish your thoughts
"Don't get mad at me!" - sounds like you're apologising
makes people not take what you say seriously.

Voice:
- blog your opinions
- make yourself uncomfortable if necessary
- watch your language
- take part in conversation
- leverage trackbacks and comments

Authority:
- has nothing to do with formal education or credentials
- self assignment as an authority - uncomfortable, but necessary - nobody else is going to do it
- speak about yourself in a way that increases your relevance
- mention your kids and life last - if you want to
- grant yourself authority
- go to things - events like this
- maintain the contact - twitter, jaiku, linkedin
Conclusion: "Nice girls finish last".

Martha: What can you do if you know you write an ugly blog ?
Try a decent use of colour and layout - call a friend and ask her opinion.
Elly: there are a lot of templates out there - Wordpress - ready made widgets
Ina: What blogging software do you recommend?
Sabrina: I am able to guide people via email in Wordpress - but anything is ok. Movable Type for example.
Sabrina: I used to blog by hand - using an Access database and hand coded HTML code - before you were born
Elly: Grannymar and Grandad- are using Windows Live Writer to post to Wordpress. (again, thanks to Elly for the correction!)

What are the big crimes in blogging?
- don't change the content after you published something
- check your facts

I must say Sabrina's talk was for me one of the highlights of CreativeCamp. What she said rang a big bell to me - a lot of things need to be changed here! Sabrina's slides are available for download.

The Beyond OpenCoffee panel was chaired by Bernie Goldbach.
We had an introductions round. The audience was mixed: from regulars and organisers of OpenCoffee meetings in Cork, Limerick, Galway, Dublin and Waterford, to people who heard of OC, but never made it to one, and people who had no clue what was all about and just wanted to find out.

A few questions were suggested:
Bernie (co-organiser of the Limerick OC, together with James Corbett):
- What is the best format for OpenCoffee?
- Would you consider a 20 min online presence, if your job makes it difficult to attend?
- Would there be content you would take with you from these meetings?
Tom Corcoran (organiser Waterford OC):
- How do you attract an audience?
Ina O'Murchu (organiser Galway OC):
- How do we advertise? we need to set goals and use them for attracting people!

Anton Mannering, the organiser of TechLudd (hold on the 3rd Thursday every month in different cities): TechLudd is meant to give people the opportunity to meet up. It is an evening time meeting, while OpenCoffee is traditionally a day time meeting. TechLudd is more about startups and the entrepreneurial mindset- not specifically orientated toward web2.0.

Bernie: there is an energy here - people are interested in creating something; ee have a movement - it will die if we don't find a way to foster it.
There were several ideas for making the existing information widely available:
- OpenCoffee.ie - a group blog; people are already writing about OCs, it might be better to aggregate these posts;
- using PageFlakes to create a page cast - James Corbett added all the feeds from the different groups and displayed them on one page;
- best of OpenCoffee - inviting the most successful presentations to other OC locations;

Current participants expressed their option for an "off the record" slot, with information exchanges meant for the people attending only.

That aggregate can then be distributed through other channels. There should be a possibility to subscribe to one city's OC only; but there are definitely people who would be interested in seeing what's going on around the country.

Anton Mannering said he's working with Microsoft on a unified events calendar for Ireland.

Other issues discussed referred to dealing with new comers:
- How do you help new people to come in? A contact person/facilitator could be mentioned on the website for each city.
- How do you get in? We should have a presentation that would attract people - showing that new people are always welcome and OCs are not closed circles.
Regular attendees should set on a mission to bring someone else with them.
The Techludd idea could be re-used here: "At OpenCoffee, you can talk to me about:"
Social artifacts are also very successful: for example, a guy in an orange t-shirt is going to introduce you to the others; Anton had great success with his hat.

For sponsoring the event, several solutions can be explored: in Cork, there's a queue of people who want to give demos and are ready to sponsor the event; Entreprise Ireland could be interested as well.

There was a discussion about the best time for OpenCoffee meetings- 9am? 11am?
Shouldn't it be in the afternoon?
TechLudd is for evenings and beers. OpenCoffees are connected to coffee time; usually at 1-2pm people go back to work. In Limerick, we also had Blogger Coffees on Saturdays - different events have different functions.

Related to the best ways of announcing people about the next event, people could be given an option for one of the many possible channels: Upcoming.org, email, Bebo, Facebook, phone calls via VoiceSage.

Update Tuesday,12 March:
Pictures from the event here (actually the location before the event) and here.
I know my post sounds more like meeting minutes than a blog post, but this is all I could do before I was knocked down by something that looks like a bug, but could be sheer exhaustion.
Maybe I'll find the time to revisit it. Or maybe not.

BlogTalk Day 2 - afternoon session

2008-03-04T15:44:00.004+01:00

Thomas Burg is chairing the afternoon session.

Keynote talk: Michael Breidenbrücker (Lovely Systems, Last.fm)
Let's face it: Web 2.0 is all about advertising

The Germans copy everything; StudiVZ is probably a localised version of Facebook.
Another company bought them because they had a lot of traffic.
How do we send this traffic to other sites? They put on ads, but they looked like old 1.0 banners-
"extraterrestrial beings that happened to be on that site".
In Facebook, you have newsfeeds. The same kind of feeds are produced by Last.fm - what are your friends listening to - actually ads;-)
If you want to push the right data to the right person, collaborative filtering doesn't work - you can't do it in real time.
Connect any user to any data - instantly. But we can't do it right now. Hope the semantic technologies will help!
Q&A - when you buy a book - last click recommendation; Last.fm - you recommend in real time while you're listening.

Andera Gadeib (Dialego)
MindVoyager: an interactive journey through the collective thoughts of a selected target group
People who take the elevator to go to the fitness centre; who knows what's on their minds?

100-200 people as target group - they are including the long tail. Have a pool of 100,000 people in different countries they screen for each study.

The Mindvoyager online tool: test design, survey design.
People are selected from a panel - choose an identity- an avatar. They join different rooms where they choose tags. Later on, they can see how other people tagged the same product/service. Allegedly it is fun for the participants and gives the clients an idea about what people in their target group think.

Sponsored demonstration: Martha Rotter (Microsoft)
Building blogs and mashing them up with Windows Live Services and Popfly

Martha is talking about the Windows Live platform.

- maps for Harley-Davidson owners - with photos and videos
- a website built for inspiration - Contoso bicycle club
- Contoso University -
- not many fans of Spaces in the audience...

Tafiti - a new search application

Robert Mao (Microsoft)
Social blog: turning a blog into a decentralised social network
Pet project, but occupying 100% of Robert's time; he knows of several avenues he could take, but unfortunately he doesn't have more resources.

Brian O'Donovan* (IBM), Gabriela Avram*, Liam Bannon (University of Limerick)
What is happening behind the firewall? The emerging role of social software in IBM
I have the feeling our presentation went well, but there were 100 things we didn't manage to say. I hope to blog about it in detail later.

Hak-Lae Kim*, John G. Breslin (DERI, National University of Ireland, Galway)
int.ere.st: SCOT-based tag sharing services
He did the same mistake Martha Rotter mentioned earlier: once he showed us the int.ere.st toy, we all jumped on it, ruining his demo. Bad, bad audience :)

BlogTalk Day 2 - morning session

2008-03-04T10:21:00.007+01:00

John Breslin, after being a perfect host at the conference dinner last night, is introducing the first speaker of the morning:

Keynote talk: Nova Spivack
Semantic social software: the Semantic Web for consumers
- the 3rd decade of the web - is a period in time, not a technology - a higher resolution web
- the web IS the database!
- web 3G - the Giant Global Graph instead web 3.0 (2010-2020)
OWL SPARQL OpenID Ajax - semantic search, semantic databases, widgets
- web 4.0 (2020-2030)
(2030's the human body as platform??! time of the borg? I don't wanna go there...)

the tagging approach
the statistical approach(Google doesn't work very well when there are no hyperlinks; Autonome does a better job parsing texts)
the linguistic approach - Powerset Hakia
the semantic web approach
the AI approach

- some approaches make the software smarter, other make the data smarter
- relational databases - relationships between columns
- RDF - only needs 3 columns and the relationship is given (subject, object, predicate)
Next, Nova gave a demo of their product Twine creating a new twine: Blogtalk2008.
Twine adds semantic tags to people, organisations, places and can be used as a blog, as a wiki and in several other ways. "Google says it's trying to organise the world's information, Twine is trying to organise your information."
- he invites the audience to try it - it is still in closed beta - but we can get invited.
Q: why would I put my content in? To get it semantically annotated - you can pull the feeds of your blog in - get its content annotated
Q: How can you get your data out? RSS, SPARQL

David Cushman (Bauer Consumer Media)
Reed's law and the demand curve
(initially announced as The long tail, and why multiple identities make it just a little bit longer)

I got distracted reading David's blog and forgot to take any notes...

And skipped the next two presentations because I started to feel nervous and needed to go through my presentation again... While in the lobby, I had a "dealing with procrastination" chat with Niall Larkin and Geoff Hartnett - nice occasion for procrastinating again;-)

Panel discussion: Stephanie Booth, Bernard Goldbach, Donnacha O'Caoimh, Jan Schmidt
From blog-style commentary to conversational social media

Steph - 3 tags that express your interest in SM, and one things people do not know about you
Jan: academic, sociology, practice - football fan
Bernie: academic,syndication, watchlist - blogged from prison
Donnacha: conversation sharing photographer - interested in soccer

Steph - the idea of this topic - on a panel with 4 teenagers
Do you blog? No, we're using Facebook now

How are the new tools influencing the reasons of why people blog?
Jan - people's perception that think blogs are irrelevant is aggravated by Facebook and micro-blogging
Bernie - transition year students introduced to blogging after being introduced to Twitter - "cool! like Bebo text!" the lack of opening for thoughtful writing, open to commentary
Donnacha - Wordpress developers worked on a tool named Prologue - takes a text message and puts it in a blog post format

Steph: different things people use blogs for - a tool and a publishing format - no limitations about the content - how did your own use of blogs changed since you started? is it because the new tools?

Jan - started in 2004; researched older blogs- diaries and photo blogs;
Bernie - I'm using different tools for blogging now; you can touch different people.
Donnacha - several blogs: In Photos, I quit Facebook; the format imposed by the tool definitely influence the practice
Steph: easy to publish feature first; adding a lot of other tools made it a lot more complicated and reduced the amount of posts. Now she uses Twitter and facebook to communicate short and simple messages.

Steph: survey - who blogs? a lot of people; who tweets? a lot of people; did Twitter change the way you blog? less

Joe Lamantia - Twitter - more like IM than blogging

Tom Raftery: Twitter made my blog posts sink - before 3-4 a day, now 3-4 a week.
Donnacha: feels like cheating the blog subscribers if he talks about personal stuff; refrains from doing it now. Twitter provides RSS feeds and making tweets public and taking them out of context is dangerous.

Twitter supports conversations, but so do blogs. Are tweets googlable?
IM and IRC - the Wordpress community communicates via IRC;
Bernie : Twitter better for average users than IRC.

Steph: your blogging habits changed because you evolved, or what this influenced by the existing tools?
Jan : it would be interesting to study people who start blogging now, in the current environment; more influenced by the tools.
Bernie: IRC, tweets are not publicly visible; the current tools are taking you away from things that need to be done; people consuming his RSS feeds are giving him feedback about things they don't want to see there.
Donnacha: the content influenced by the people who joined the blogosphere; he prefers to write long in-depth articles.

Steph: Social networking sites are not the death of blogs, but they influenced what we blog about. What do you think?

Jan: doesn't see any change from blogs to Twitter;
Bernie: we're using new technology to enhance the way we speak about things; buying options are influenced by what bloggers share; teaching about watchlists for taking informed decisions;
Donnacha: a lot of my friends don't use Twitter. Blogging about personal life - he knew he could reach his old friends - through Twitter, he knew it wasn't possible.
Bernie: a lot of people in their 50s have no clue about social networking, but they're brought in by their kids; that start using them without knowing what they are.

Steph: are blogs social networks?
Bernie: if you tag your blog posts properly.

Salim: the whole concept: self-publishing; why do we choose to fragment this discourse? putting fragments on different sites does not help. Jan- how do we bring this data back together?

Blogtalk 08 Day 1 afternoon session

2008-03-03T15:10:00.004+01:00

Jan Schmidt is chairing the afternoon session.

Keynote talk: Matt Colebourne (coComment)
Conversation tracking technologies: how to improve communication in a UGC world
- not everything people say is true and fair - but you have to take them into account

HD DVD hack - put on digg how to stop people from commenting?
people are passionate and emotional in their opinions - if you argue with them, their argument becomes stronger
52% of people are occasional players - they don't comment on blogs or write blogs

Paul Miller (Talis)
Realising potential in the web of relationships
Too tired to blog about... Interesting talk although!

Note to myself: Do I like slides with beautiful nature pictures and a few words on them? are they better than plain ppt? Internet waves on a background of sea waves...
The number of laptops patched with stickers around me is impressive. I perceive it as a fashion crime...

Sponsored demonstration: Jeremy Ruston (Osmosoft, BT)
The further adventures of TiddlyWiki
- innovative interface, possible to download the page

RippleRap
mojo, SpeedConnect used to connect - random dating
different way of building mashups
collaborative notes taking for conferences
I feel a bit frustrated because my phone didn't ring during the demo; left out of the game?!

One of the TiddlyWiki users: Garrett Lisi - Deferential Geometry
Support for users : tiddlyspot.com

Hugo Pardo Kuklinski* (University of Vic), Joel Brandt (Stanford University)
Campus Móvil: designing a mobile Web 2.0 startup for higher education uses

- applications for mobile devices used in Spanish-speaking universities

Jon Hoem (The Media Centre, Bergen University College)
Memoz: spatial webpublishing
- memoz - tribute to Vannevar Bush's memex - memory organizer
- using weblogs for learning...
- the concept of ship logging - combining geographical position and information
- selection by association - trail blazers
- del.icio.us - text driven -
- wists -images
- clipmarks - text&images
- Facebook - info org in time, but not in space
- geotagging of blogs, twitter - still not very helpful

- images are different - have a look at how information is conveyed by this painting: Pieter Bruegel - Fight between Carnival and Lent
- weblogs organise information temporarily
- how does temporality support mental maps?

Wim Wenders - In Defense of Places
- poster about video-editing
- had a look at how 15yo girls represent themselves - Piczo

- collaborating on annotating a map - but is this blogging?!
- Jorn Barger - collection of links on the web
- yes, spatial weblogging makes sense
My note: a pity he didn't close the circle - how does this apply to teaching and learning?
- Tinderbox - an example on how info can be displayed in different ways
Q: would a combination between the spatial and temporal perspectives be possible?

Jan Blanchard*, Conor Wade (Tourist Republic), John G. Breslin, Conor Hayes (DERI)
A proposed semantic recommender network for trip planning
- building a semantic trip planner together with DERI (John Breslin and Conor Hayes)
- explore, share and plan trips online
- cut and paste trip planners - ask you to have a travel blog
- a semi-intelligent trip planner - Yahoo trip planner, Kango
- so, what is missing? 3 areas: recommendation, booking, collaboration
(my note: could Dopplr, Twitter, Plazes content help? nowadays we use them to get suggestions from friends...)

BlogTalk 2008 Day 1 - morning session

2008-03-03T10:31:00.010+01:00

Tom Raftery opened the morning session and introduced Salim Ismail (ex Yahoo! Brickhouse)
He's back to "start-up land" now - just left Yahoo; he shows us the picture of an old "Guiness by night" t-shirt; when Damien Mulley, planning Paddy's Valley, asked him what could he bring from Ireland, Salim asked Damien for a new similar t-shirt!

Entrepreneurship and social media
- blogging being overtaken
- 4 major drivers: XML, syndication, low latency, great UX
- publish and subscribe - 00s - watching is today's pattern of information exchange
- we went from email (80s) web browser (90's) to RSS aggregators (00's)
- Internet 3.0 - is the nervous system, where search is the memory
- the hidden web - databases that are not visible to search machines
- ephemeral pages - plane tickets, eBay offers
- not easily available to search engines - 95% publicly available
- user fills form - data is syndicated - user receives feeds
- blog - only one facet
- Who do I know?(social networks), What am I doing? Where am I?
- social networks - closed syndication - you have to go there to get the info
- 3 ways of making money: users/advertising, subscriptions, data mining
Rapleaf - scrap info from several SN sites - aggregate it - sell it back
Internet Entrepreneurship:
- you have to do everything right AND get very lucky
- market timing
- team, team, team
- focus, then execute
- never give up - stick around long enough...
Dynamics of starting a company today:
- low barrier to entry, virality is key, lots of competition, focus on service rather than data
- you have to break some rules to get traction - afterwards, you can become a good citizen again
Flickr started as instant messaging for gamers - enabled photo posting accidentally

Thoughts on Social Media: social networks are going to fail - because of the numerous ways you can relate to someone. Computers are binary!
Advice for entrepreneurs:
- pick up a domain you're passionate about
-
- choose one of the drivers
- think about the risk
- jump in with both feet

If it doesn't work - get yourself a new t-shirt and start again!

the big problem - no of searches and no of new data published - matching data and searches
publish&subscribe - it is actually request/response
Twitter goes down - people publish - they have to match the queries (got a new tweet - who cares?)
- companies opening their databases to the public - they're guarding it
- big companies - forced to open their databases and position themselves as platforms
- Yahoo service to come out - danger - people can figure out where other people are - implications

The next speaker: Joe Lamantia (Keane)
The DIY future: what happens when everyone designs social media? Practical suggestions for handling new ethical dilemmas

- Joe's achievements - sorting cards - framework for portal design
A few sites to look at:

JoeLamantia.com
BoxesandArrows
UXMatters
Tagsonomy.com

Ethics & conflict in social media:
- Tagged.com - similar story with my Shelfari one
- asked his contact about his experience
- deliberate design decision "It's a highly viral, albeit controversial marketing strategy"- TechCrunch
- social software building blocks
- design becomes conflict mediator
- 3 shifts - permeation, integration, conflict
- for young people - technology seamlessly integrated in life
- more people are integrated in design
- Quechup.com - defence mechanism
- social networks anti-patterns
spam your contacts, enter your other site login

- rise of SPIME(Bruce Sterling) - world where the boundaries between information, physical objects and spaces blurr
- DIY shift - shadow IT, open source, mashups
- experiences are c0-created - more people involved in design - not only designers
- Joe suggest the term "eco-system of design"
Integrated experiences - integration actually amplifies the experience
- the role of designers changes - Kevin Kelly - The Bottom is not Enough
Craig Newmark - I created the platform, and then I got out of the way

"The Ethical design kit"
strategy, simple goals,...
Conflict resolution process - in 4 steps
- you need a framework - bows and arrows, bill of right
- conflict aware design artefacts - to make you aware what is ethical and what unethical
- last slide - questions? in gaelic as well
augmented experience - blogtalk IRC channel, jaiku, blog, flickr

Mark Bernstein (Eastgate Systems Inc.)
Neovictorian, nobitic, and narrative: ancient anticipations and the meaning of weblogs
(recording of the talk)
- weblogs do have ideas
- they are not C2C
- pro weblogs - The romantic critic
- enemies - weblogs - no ideas, no ideals
- neoVictorian computing OOPSLA 08- software factory - artisan software
- neoVictorian internet
- weblogs write with links; links the first significant punctuation
- weblogs want to be right, to be first
- weblogs want to be independent - who is the master? and who the slave?
realism
- blogging teaching us about how we ought to feel
- mutual improvement societies - the public lecture - Scoble lecturing the world every day
- nobitic = writing to ourselves
we're only allowed one person on stage - blogflaneur
- our objects send each other messages behind our back Tinderbox

Anna Rogozinska (Institute of Polish Culture, Warsaw University)
Everyday body regimes: the construction of self in weblogs about dieting
- academic and user - PhD student
- identity as reflective practice - Giddens
- virtual identity - facilitating identity play (Turkle 1996, Wakeford 2000)
- methodological concerns - context
- writing the self as cultural practice has 3 main aspects: technology, means of identity construction, social context
- participatory observation - researcher as user - being a fellow user as participation (ethic aspects- you actually hide there pretending to be a user!)
- Dieta.pl - a portal - Miladka - her own blog

Panel discussion: Sean McGrath, Bill de hÓra, Conor O'Neill, Ben Ward
Mashups, microformats and the mobile web
Questions already on the website:
* Is the phrase "reliable mashup application" an oxymoron?
* Will we ever see one syndication format emerge to dominate or is babelisation inevitable? Desirable?
* Do microformats need governance in order to work?
* Is the mobile web a technological superset subset or mutation of the "original" web?
* Can MMS be equated with WAP. Would that be a category error?
* Has blogging run its course as a phenomenon?
* Are microformats running out of steam or gathering steam?
* How many forms of digital identity will I need to use the Web in 2010?

I have to take a break from blogging and just listen to the conversation...

Own reflection: this conference as a playground - participants taking different roles - connecting through back channels: IRC, Twitter, Jaiku; parallel conversations contributing to the flow; how it changed from the first Blogtalk; How I changed over the last 5 years :)

SNP Webcamp - afternoon session

2008-03-02T16:37:00.006+01:00

First session:
* I went to [2] How Does Opening the Social Web Affect Society, Culture and Business; What Are the Rights of Users on the Social Web?

- Portable identities - do we want them? What's the benefit for businesses?
- The permanence/immanence of information
- different facets - not different identities
- who is going to decide what and when to disclose?
- data referring to relationships - who decides on them?- a relationship has two ends!
- there's no such things as one single central core identity - identity negotiated continuously
- Niall Larkin: our identity is socially assigned - socially negotiated
- any identity tag could do - passport assigned to you by the government.

For the second session, I have chosen:

* [3] Patternizing the "Teaching people to phish" anti-pattern.

- Aral Balkan exposed a possible solution - a service with the code in open source and checked daily by a trusted authority
- an explanation on what actually phishing meant - originally
- teaching people to let themselves phished - leisa reichelt's blog post

- you have to be aware that giving access to your email - you're giving access to your root account- "I trust you to behave as me" - I told my story about Shelfari.
- Stephanie:new service- oAuth - you can define the level of access - "you're allowed to do this this and that - and I don't trust you to be me!"

- "are you me? are you another entity"
- Google owning our data - should we be afraid?

Back in the big room.
Aral Balkan introducing the panel discussion:
Stephanie Booth, Dan Brickley, Ben Ward, Paddy Holahan

Summarising the breakout sessions:

Breakout Session 1

* [1] Adoption challenges (for social network portability) and ways for solving them
John Breslin

* [2] How Does Opening the Social Web Affect Society, Culture and Business
- What Are the Rights of Users on the Social Web?
Jan Schmidt - Notes from Session

* [3] Technologies for Social Network Portability and Lessons Learned from Them
o FOAF, Microformats, OpenSocial, SocialGraph API, XMPP, Be Techy and proud
Morten Høybye Frederiksen

Breakout Session 2

* [1] Digesting the Data - What can we do once the data are out there? John Breslin summarising.

* [2] Trust, Identity and Privacy for the Portable Web. Anders Conbers reports back from that one.

* [3] Patternizing the "Teaching people to phish" anti-pattern. Will Knott summarizes discussions in our group - well done!

Tom Morris - on the backchannel IRC asks: who's going to solve the problem? the hackers or the philosophers?
Niall Larkin - you need the different perspectives to find a solution; relationships are even more complicated online.

At Social Networks Portability Webcamp

2008-03-02T11:28:00.010+01:00

Missed the first speaker - Ajit Jaokar - my 6am Aircoach from Dublin made it into Cork at 9:45.
Dan Brickley is talking now, after a bit of fiddling around with the projector connection.
Already spotted Nial Larkin, Steph Booth, Jan Schmidt, Will Knott and Flemming Funch in the audience.

Weird how I had to look around to discover who was twittering from what corner of the room...
Dan showing a cool diagram. The latest fancy name: social graph when we talk about social networks.
SPARQL - a system for querying RDF databases - it is claim-based "who says John is 30?" instead of "How old is John?"

Nice break - time to finally talk face to face with Will Knott and Niall Larkin! It is scary, the taxman actually checks on Linkedin, Facebook and so on...

Stephanie's talk: no pics. No acronyms either ;-)
How do you take with you your profile and your "friends" from one social network to another?

My social network is not flat, it is lumpy! We need to organise our friends in different ways, both explicit and implicit.
Steph mentions "responsible design" as explained in a Leisa Reichelt post. All these services seem to teach us phishing... And the old problem - who owns my data?

What about interpolating friends?
Friendfeed shows recommended people - not enough. Would like to see all the friends of my friends, so that I could pick up the ones I'd like to add!

John Breslin aka Cloud shows funny drawings
instead off PPT slides. So refreshing!

1. What does Data Portability means to me?
2. Data Portability Changing the way you look at the web
3 Value of DP for Vendors?
4. The value of DP for users
5. Next steps for DP

Ben Ward web developer at !Yahoo Europe
admin at microformats.org
In the beginning, there was the URL...
Then came you...then your SN sites ...and your friends...and your claims...

Talk on the backchannel if we should have a standard set of cliparts for things like HCard, XFN:)
Google Social Graph API - I should try that!

Q&A - versioning profiles - should time enter into discussion?
Are we friends forever?
HCards - consolidated identity. Thanks, guys, just created mine here :-)
How do you feel about keeping a history of all your relationships? Hmm...

Uldis Bojar - FOAF for Social Network Portability
Dan Brickley already said everything that was to be said..
Just a few words about FOAF and SIOC

Note: decided to publish this draft "as-it-is" before I mess something up! It happened too frequently lately - maybe I'm just too tired!

Anders Conbere - crash course on XMPP
Twitter, Jabber, GTalk use this...
The presentation is here says @johnbreslin on Twitter.
Presentations coming soon here!
Very interesting talk on what you could do with XMPP...

Irish Blog Awards 2008

2008-03-02T10:24:00.000+01:00

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!

TechLudd in Limerick - great evening!

2008-02-22T08:38:00.003+01:00

After staying very late the previous night - doh! the Moon eclipse! - I managed to get back on my feet with 40 min of Reiki, and then headed to the George Boutique Hotel for the TechLudd.

Thanks a million to Anton Mannering for organising the event! Himself and Jessica Roy were wonderful hosts of the event, and I had an excellent time.

I had the chance to see again a few people I had met before (at Open Coffee Limerick, Blogger Coffee, BarCamps and other similar events). I finally met Pat Phelan in person, after late night twitter exchanges and following him on Qik for a while! And I met quite a bunch of new and interesting people!

Joe Drumgoole demo-ed PutPlace(I've installed it a few days ago, but didn't quite get it!), and John Gleeson demo-ed Process Master. Both interesting products, and I think it makes it much easier to talk about your company/service/product when you can actually show something!

I met Sheena Clohessy from Digital Media Forum (one of the sponsors of the event!), found out about WorldTV and discussed the many opportunities existing nowadays for spicing up 3rd level education.

Conn Ó Muíneacháin and Pat Phelan were Qik-ing each other, and I made my first appearance in a qik .

James Corbett and myself started plotting the future BarCamp Limerick - we still need a confirmation for the rooms we're trying to book at the university, but the most probable date is May 24.
Rumors say the date for reboot in Copenhagen is not yet set , it will be either the last week in May or the first week in June.

Moon eclipse

2008-02-21T09:46:00.003+01:00

I knew it was coming, I even joined the event on Facebook(confirming I will "attend" the eclipse! lol), but it was pure coincidence that I had so much work to do and stayed up that late!

There was talk on Twitter about watching it, but then I went off line to do some decent writing.
I came back online at 2:42 am to upload my submission, and suddenly both my kids jumped on me on Yahoo Messenger. It was 4:42am in Romania and it looks like they were having a deep philosophical conversation (400 km apart) on the meaning of life and the reason why we're here.

It was only then when I remembered it was time for looking at the skies - here in Limerick it was cloudy - I remember seeing the Moon for the last time around 11pm. My son (somewhere in Transylvania) went outside and came back disappointed - clouded there as well. It was only my daughter in Bucharest who got lucky: the Moon was right in front of her window in her student residence. She said she was happy to be reporting for us from "Eclipse central", and she sent us picture after picture (no qik available yet;)

Anyhow, two papers are in progress for the ICGSE'08, the slides for BlogTalk are almost ready, we made our final submission to ICSE (a workshop paper, but still an achievement!) and the work on other two papers is progressing. Means I can go to TechLudd tonight! Hurray! Hope I'll be able to keep my eyes open...

Limerick social media meetup scene

2008-02-10T01:09:00.000+01:00

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.

Irish Blog Week 2008

2008-01-19T10:55:00.000+01:00

Two days after myself and Ina were chatting over Skype about that busy week in March, Bernie Goldbach and Conn Ó Muíneacháin gave it a name: Irish Blog Week 2008.

This is how it looks like until now:

March 1st:

A Ladies' Tea Party , event organised by Sabrina Dent and Ina O'Murchu
Irish Blog Awards, Dublin

March 2nd:

Gourmet Brunch for Food Bloggers and Fans, Dublin

WebCamp - Social Network Portability, Cork

March 3rd, 4th: BlogTalk 2008 Conference, Cork
March 8th: Creative Camp, Kilkenny

There's already a Jaiku channel for it: #irishblogweek

My apologies for suffering of blogstipation lately (sorry Lexia;); I'd tell you I've been busy , but... ain't I always?! I seem to have a special talent to keep myself busy!

The thought that kept me so busy these days was figuring out how to achieve work-blog-life balance... do more of the things I love doing... try and see the big picture! Not that I got to a solution, but I'm a few steps closer!

The funny part is that after writing the beginning of this post, I just realised that I've booked accommodation in both Dublin and Cork for the night of March 1st! Now this is really stupid of me, we Transylvanians have the reputation of being slow, but excuse me, how slow can one get?!

I will go to the Ladies Tea Party and Irish Blog Awards in Dublin on the 1st, and then will travel to Cork on the 2nd to attend the Webcamp.

BlogTalk will be a less relaxed event for me this year - after 5 years, I am among the presenters again. See the programme online! Our paper was initially on a sort of waiting list - it got in because someone else had to withdraw - the competition was tough and I'm happy we made it in the end.

The paper is a reflection on the social practices developed by IBM-ers around the social software tools they build and try out inside the Big Blue, and I consider myself lucky to work on this study with Brian O'Donovan and Liam Bannon.

As a member of the organising committee, I was very impressed by the way the 4 chairs handled the reviewing process and by the efficiency of the software app chosen for handling it: easychair.
All the papers were read , commented and assessed by two independent reviewers. It wasn't easy at all, I had to stick to my reviewer chair when everyone was enjoying the Christmas break,but I am confident we'll hear some great presentations down in Cork in March .

I'm looking forward to the Irish Blog Week and would be happy to meet you at one/all of these events!

The economics of conversations

2008-01-10T12:06:00.000+01:00

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!

A Jaiku-born exchange

2007-12-02T18:33:00.000+01:00

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 Doug Engelbart 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:(

Photo by topgold

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.

BlogTalk 2008 in Cork, Ireland

2007-11-27T11:41:00.000+01:00

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:(

About privacy, user options and spam

2007-10-30T19:37:00.001+01:00

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!

"What's missing in Social Software?" workshop at ECSCW'07

2007-09-24T23:08:00.000+02:00

This workshop has a long history... As I had to put in a proposal for a Global Software Development workshop at ECSCW'07, I couldn't also apply for organising a social software workshop. So I instigated a couple of friends to do so;) As none of them could actually travel to Limerick in September, they suggested to bring in as workshop chair someone they knew. I agreed, and I did my best to support the organisation of the workshop in any way I could: structured the workshop proposal, created a wiki space for it, got in touch with some of the potential participants and so on.

And when everything seemed to be under control - 8 people put in papers, another few expressed their intention to attend - the workshop chair writes from Crete at 12:50pm on Friday afternoon that he's not coming! Well, I had a lot of things to do for Monday (teaching from 3 to 4pm at the University among others), but I still thought I can handle things. I prepared a workshop programme and put it online.

At the BarCamp on Friday I asked Ina to help me chairing the workshop and cover the afternoon- she accepted as she was also interested in the presentations.

And then on Monday morning I went in at 8am, to check the internet connection and all the other details - iBahn who's taking care of the Hilton Internet connections only set them up that morning. Everything seemed ok - a student volunteer was designated for supporting our workshop and another one told me she would like to sit in for part of it.

Here comes 9am, horrible weather outside, rainy and windy, and I find myself in the room with the chief scientist from IBM Dublin and one student volunteer only. It didn't cross my mind to ask the workshop chair if he was in touch with the workshop participants. I spoke very often to the each and every of the participants in the GSD workshop - from their submission until the very last minute, so I took for granted that any other workshop chair was doing the same. Ok, the workshop chair wasn't coming and Lilia was going to present from Telematica in Enschede, but where were the others?! I checked with the registration desk - two other people had actually picked up their badges and conference packs a few minutes before. Few minutes later, I welcomed Birgit Krogstie from Norway and Antonio Tapiador from Spain. A bit relieved... At least we had 4 presenters . Lilia joined us on Skype - and the audio connection was crystal clear! She asked if she could invite Robert Slagter to join the call, and of course we welcomed him!

I made up a new programme on the spot, negotiating and moving presentations around. We started a presentation round. When Alexander Troussov started speaking about Lotus Connections and Galaxy, I wanted to send Lilia the YouTube link to their ad. In the process, I clicked on it by mistake and then felt too embarrassed to stop it. Must have sounded like shameless advertising for IBM, who was one of our sponsors. I apologised, and told them about the incident in Berlin, when Craig asked if the info was public and I replied "it's on YouTube!"

It was for the first time I was using an LCD screen for presentations and the text was not reading very well. The slide images were also distorted... And as if this wasn't enough, I kept on upsetting the attendees in the room with frequent switches between presentations and email/Skype - I had to send the other slides to Lilia as we went (I preferred this solution to a two-ways Yugma connection - I was too afraid I could crash the system!).

I went first, and got some interesting comments from Lilia and Robert. Then, in the middle of Birgit's presentation, Ralf Klamma came on Skype and his Skype window popped on the presentation screen. Bad timing! Lilia saved me by taking over the task of setting Ralf up-who finally considered the possibility of giving a remote presentation!

During the coffee break, Ralf tried to negotiate an afternoon time slot - as he had meetings scheduled in the morning. The man wasn't aware of what was going on here! I had to teach, Ina couldn't come to replace me, and there were no papers to present left for the afternoon! I asked him if he ever heard from the other participants - and he answered with nonchalance that he had two cancellations in his mail box! Couldn't I have guessed that?!

Lilia's presentation via Skype and Yugma went extremely well - and there were plenty of questions and comments after it. I was starting to feel better - especially because for 30 min I had no control of my desktop and I could finally relax and listen. Ralf followed - but this time I had to handle his slides, because he didn't have the time to get Yugma running. A few hicups, but it was ok. The last presenter was Antonio - we were a bit confused to see he had ~80 slides in a pdf file, but most of them only had one-two words on them, and Antonio's intention was to make a fluid and dynamic presentation. Out of the box it was - unfortunately his attempt to demonstrate live how easy it was to get an OpenID failed!

What looked like a catastrophe in the morning ended like an enjoyable and convivial little workshop - thanks to Lilia's professional support and to Robert's contribution! Thanks a million, folks, this is the kind of situation when you find out how precious friends are! One of the student volunteers told me at the end that she felt you were more present there than people who were actually physically present in the room:)

And under the heavy horizontal rain, four of us went for lunch to the Hunt Museum - very nice atmosphere, delicious food!

A few lessons learned:

LCD screens have a different shape and size - presentations need to take this into account - no small fonts, images distorted;
when having remote presentations during an event, make sure you have a second computer and Internet connection available;
do something to make sure that your contacts won't try to contact you on Skype during the event; I changed my status into "live presentation - DO NOT DISTURB!" and it wasn't enough; I guess I should have blocked all the other contacts!
installing the software in advance and rehearsing the steps for successful desktop sharing saves you from wasting time and running into trouble during the event itself;
being a presenter and a facilitator at the same time is an extremely demanding job; if possible, get a person to second you as a facilitator (even one of the remote participants!).

Combining face-to-face with online facilitation is a hell of a job - you must keep your head very clear to be able to cope with it!

Looking for a reliable desktop sharing solution

2007-09-17T23:42:00.000+02:00

I needed a desktop sharing solution for remote presentations in 3 of the ECSCW'07 workshops. I have a whole collection of resources related to online facilitation, and I thought it will be easy.

After torturing my son (who was on vacation and got online from my apartment here in Limerick) for hours with trials of NetMeeting, Vyew, FogCreek Copilot and Lotus Sametime Unyte in the morning, I discovered Yugma - Skype.

I wanted to try it right away, and I looked around for friends who could help me. On Yahoo Messenger I found Dee, who was having trouble with her Internet connection at home in Dublin. Dee has a new laptop running on Vista. And on Skype, I found my friend Jim, from North Carolina, who's a Mac user. Both of them graciously accepted to install Yugma for Skype and give me a hand for testing it.

I shared my screen with them, and both could see what I was typing. There was a 20-30 sec delay for Jim, but it was acceptable.

Having both my friends staring at my screen, I felt a little bit like they were in my living room, and I took the chance to introduce them to each other. The funny part was that both of them could see me typing messages to one or the other before I pressed Enter:)

The next morning, I went to the Hilton and ran a complete test with Lilia Efimova, and an audio only one with Julia Kotlarski. Even if Yugma's interface is intuitive enough, we ran into trouble when I left one session and was trying to start another. I do not think it was a software problem, it's more about figuring out what are the proper steps to do this.

Fingers crossed for next week!

blogTV

2007-09-13T01:02:00.001+02:00

I got back from work tonight, and at some point I switched on my laptop to keep me company (I know it must sound pathetic, but it is very much nowadays like leaving the door of my house open to signal I was at home and willing to receive guests used to be!

I was browsing through my huge pile of unread feeds:( and I got in touch via Skype with David Gurteen, who said he was experimenting with blogTV. I went to David's Facebook page, but couldn't figure out where the link was.

Here's an excerpt from our conversation:
DG: i am playing with blogtv
GA: :)nice
DG: it's cool
DG: i am broadcasting now
DG: you can watch me from my facebook profile
DG: go take a look
DG: its rather boring though
DG: the tech is flakey but not bad
DG: can't find where to click
DG: goto my profile
DG: and its on the rh column
DG: have also embedded on a page on my site but does not seem to work there
GA: right hand column? I can't see anything on the right...hm...
DG: funny
DG: you are viewing my profile yes?
GA: yep
DG: blogtv pane is below my mini-feed pane
GA: got you now
GA: there are so many possible views of a profile...
DG: you can see and hear me LOL
GA: and a student of mine wrote in her exam paper that Facebook is simple and straightforward! well, it isn't!

It took me a while to figure it out, there was software to install and I needed to get an account before being able to comment in the show's chat box and not separately on Skype. David was great, he was speaking continuously and keeping the rest of his audience up-to-date with our separate conversation.

When I finally got in, David was just explaining them how we knew each other. The term "knowledge management" needed to be explained, and I got into an argument with a guy who draw the conclusion that KM was all about robots!

Timmy13 told David about the possibility of inviting a second person to co-host a show, and David brought the guy in - you can see his image next to David's, but a bit smaller.

In the end, David figured out how to embed blogTV in his website.

The ECKM'07 Conference in Barcelona

2007-09-09T00:20:00.000+02:00

After a short break in Germany after the ICGSE'07 conference, I had the chance to go to Barcelona for the 8th edition of the European Conference on Knowledge Management on September 6-7.
The conference attracted a large number of participants this year, and 11 streams ran in parallel... A huge challenge - running from one room to another proved not to be the most effective strategy... Some titles were misleading, some presentations very poor, and you were always finding out during the break that you've missed an outstanding presentation that happened somewhere else...

But as always, the KM people were extremely good at networking and this made the conference pay off!

The first keynote speaker, Daan Andriessen from INHOLLAND, The Netherlands, spoke about Knowledge as Love: How Metaphors Direct our Efforts to Manage Knowledge in Organisations.
A bit shocking in the beginning, but the idea of the keynote was that the metaphor we use for referring to something as abstract as knowledge influences not only our vocabulary, but also our approach. If knowledge is treated as a resource, it can be stored, packaged, transferred. If knowledge would be treated as love, it would be all about relationship, trust, sharing and so on.

During the first morning, I met David Gurteen on a corridor and we shared our frustration regarding some of the presentations: people reading slides or some script, with no interaction whatsoever with the audience. David came up with the idea of creating a networking space and hijacking people who seem to be wandering from one room to another in order to have a meaningful conversation. David and me share the idea that we learn the most when we interact with our peers, and not when we sit in a chair watching slides. We didn't hijack anyone in the end;), a lady joined us voluntarily, but then I left and caught the second part of a presentation with a promising title: Disconnecting the Knowledge from the Knower (by Jennifer Adelstein).

During the break, while talking in Romanian to Constantin Bratescu (whom I didn't know, but who was coming from my alma mater) I managed to attract two other Romanians: Virginia Maracine and Adriana-Sarah Nica. Quite a crowd, can't remember seeing so many Romanians at any of the previous editions!

I had to chair a session in the afternoon, and it was quite disappointing. The first participant presenting had an audience made of two: myself and the next speaker! Her work was serious, her presentation attractive...and though... If we think of ~180 participants spread over 11 parallel tracks, the average attendance should have been a bit higher... or my maths are wrong!
The next participant had all his luggage stolen from his car in France the day before, and he was forced to improvise a presentation using the text of his paper. The third presenter didn't show up, despite of having registered in the morning. As people were flocking to our room - even if we didn't have a presentation, we spent the time chatting and preparing Julie Boyd from Loughborough University for her very first presentation. I really enjoyed the presentation of her small ethnographic study in an explosive factory focusing on learning in practice.

The conference dinner was impressive and I was happy to be in a fabulous building and not on a boat like in Paris or Budapest. While introducing myself to my companions at the table, I discovered that half of them were Irish! Isn't this a small world?!

On the second day, the keynote speaker was Jan Annerstedt from Copenhagen Business School, Denmark on Intelligent Cities. The topic seemed interesting, but the presentation lacked any connection to KM. Or were we too tired after the night before?!

The highlight of the conference was the Knowledge Cafe, ran by David Gurteen and dedicated to the Knowledge Metaphor. David posted Daan's slides, pictures and a few video interviews on the Gurteen Knowledge website. I set up a wiki page within the eckm wikispace to serve as placeholder for our knowledge metaphors.

My own paper - "Knowledge Work Practices in Global Software Development" was well received and initiated an interesting discussion. Why most of the virtual teams in the literature are made of software developers? Aren't there any other examples? What's the value of studying practices?

A few interesting contacts initiated at the conference:
- Andrea Fried, from Chemnitz University of Technology
- Igor Hawryszkiewycz, from The Sydney University of Technology
- Ved Prakash, from WIPRO Technologies, Bangalore
- Stella Van Rijn, from Nyenrode Business University
- Hanna Timonen, from the Helsinki University of Technology.

On Friday afternoon, we were invited to a session of the InCas EU project - A pragmatic ICS Methodology for European SMEs. To my greatest shame, I was put to sleep by the pilot SMEs experiences- people with very poor English presenting the "outstanding" experiences of their companies. Been there, done that! The highlight of the afternoon was Leif Edvinsson's talk - I've never had the chance to listen to the grandfather of intellectual capital before!

Here's my set of pictures on Flickr.

Next edition will happen in Southhampton, on 4-5 September 2007.

The ICGSE in Munich

2007-09-01T22:49:00.000+02:00

My paper made it into one of the most important conferences in our field, the International Conference on Global Software Engineering, that happened in Munich between 27 and 31 August.

On Monday, I went to a tutorial on SNA- Seeing inside: Using social network analysis to understand patterns of collaboration and coordination in global software teams offered by Kate Ehrlich and Giuseppe Valletto from IBM Research. It was great to meet Kate in person after collaborating with her in drafting a project inside IBM! (The project never took off, but it was great to work with Kate and learn from her!)

During lunch, I made a terrible faux pas when I sat down at the same table with Phillippe Kruchten who was in the middle of his lunch. I read his name tag and as my excitment was bursting, the only line I could find after "Hello, nice to meet you!" was: "we're reading your papers!" He was very nice answering: "and I'm reading your papers too! I had to read all the 100+ submissions..." The truth is I had discovered one of his papers only the week before, and it served me very well to make a point in my ECKM'07 paper, so for me it was a wonderful coincidence and all I meant was to thank him... but then I made a complete fool of myself!

My colleague Anders introduced me to Frances Paulisch, the host and the good fairy of the conference. Frances introduced me to Daniela Damian (again, what a difference between exchanging emails and talking on Skype from being face-to-face!) Daniela introduced me to some of her students - I remember meeting Sabrina Marczak on that occasion.

A welcome reception at the Hilton City Munich followed on the same evening.

On Tuesday, instead of a keynote, there was an opening session including "two important papers"-as introduced by the organisers. Their topics - text-based communication in distributed requirements workshops and respectively the relationship between time zone separation and performance - were of great interest and therefore they were vividly discussed by the audience during the following breaks.

An Experience session, containing only papers from the industry, followed.

Before introducing the keynote speaker, Phillipe Kruchten presented some statistics: there were 100 submissions, out of which 29 were accepted; 156 participants were 60 from Germany, 22 from the US, 9 from the Netherlands, 8 from Finland, 5 from Canada, 4 from India, 3 from Japan. There were supposed to be 2 more Irish, but they didn't make it till the end.

25% of the participants were from academia, 35% from the industry, 19% came from research, 5% were consultants and 16% belonged to “other categories”. Strange enough, not a single person from this last category could be identified…

Then "Herr Professor Doktor" Erran Carmel delivered his keynote speech, "Reflections on a Decade of Studying Global Software Engineering".
A poster session followed - only 3 posters were presented, and unfortunately the Irish IBMers who were co-authors of one of them couldn't be there. Kate Ehrlich and Prof.Marilyn Tremaine had to stand next to it, explaining the work that had been done.

Sabrina Marczak from PUCRS, and a group of students from TU Munich(under the supervision of Marilyn Tremaine) were the authors of the other two.

In the afternoon, we had a session dedicated to Quality and Performance. Two very different talks. Rajesh Agarval from TCS presented the solution found by his company for motivating their developers to work as quality engineers as well. The other speaker was Timo Poikolainen from Nokia - and again, the audience had the chance to hear about successes and failures with thorough openness, as always when someone from Nokia is giving a presentation.

The session organized for students in the evening included two parts:

- In the first part, J.Sauer from Hamburg University presented the results of a survey he has undertaken on the particular difficulties of research in the GSE domain. It was interesting to listen to the student introductions – it gave you an idea of the differences between research settings in different countries.

- In the second part, Harold Ossher from IBM Watson introduced the Jazz Technology platform. Jazz is the result of a collaboration between IBM Rational and IBM Research and is attempting to build a team collaboration platform on top of the Eclipse IDE. Jazz.net – not yet open to the public; a few videos available. Two related research projects based on jazz were presented: one from Victoria University and the other one from University of California, Irvine.

And then the banquet, at the Ratshaus Keller. A lot of nice food and drinks, a magician going around and entertaining people, socializing and networking, and lots of fun.

On Wednesday, it was my turn, and I was extremely nervous. The session was titled Communication, and I was in very good company: Matt Bass from SEI-CMU (actually from Siemens!), and Luis Izquierdo, from the University of Victoria. Luis's paper was extremely interesting - his methods were also inspired by ethnography, and his field site very similar to ours.

I oscillated between a classical presentation and an unusual one. In the end, I couldn't resist the temptation - I went for the unusual one. I started with a warning - no figures nor tables in my presentation!

I don't know what was the impact at the conceptual level - if I managed to convince the audience how important social practices and human actors actually are in a global environment!, but probably my little SouthPark characters have made quite an impression!

On Wednesday afternoon, I had the chance of presenting to the steering committee the Lero proposal of organising ICGSE 2009 in Limerick.

Thursday, the last day of the conference, was shorter.
In the morning, the announcement was made that ICGSE 08 is going to take place in Bangalore, India, and ICGSE 09 in Limerick, Ireland.

In the first session, Michael Vax from LUXOFT delivered the keynote speech, substituting his boss who couldn't come because of visa problems.

The keynote was followed by an Experience session: Subita Sudershana from Roche Molecular Systems (very energetic talk, including stories of miscommunication with both parts speaking English!) , Viktor Clerc from VU Amsterdam, and Alexander Boden from University of Siegen.

The final session was dedicated to Processes and chaired by Daniela Damian. Alberto Avritzer from Siemens Corporate Research presented the Global Software Studio 3.0 project. Our own university was involved in the first and second year in this project, so it was interesting to see how it evolved in the next stage. Fausto Fasano spoke about an experiment on code inspection, while the final presentation (Rafael Prikladnicki from PUCRS) examined different offshoring and onshoring strategies.

It was a very interesting for me to meet in person so many academics and practitioners involved in GSE research. As I said, I was reading their papers, but didn't have any perception of their personalities.
And it was good to see who does the same kind of work in the GSE community. I found a lot of connections with the work of people in Daniela Damian's group (Luis Izquierdo, Sabrina Marczak) and with Alexander Boden's research - clearly grounded in CSCW. Let's hope we can cook a workshop or tutorial together for next year!

I must confess I was very anxious during the conference: we seem to worry a bit too much as a group that our work won't be well seen by hard core software engineers, who are obviously preferring quantitave studies and experiments to our "soft" qualitative and interpretive approach. The conference proved to me that the community is ready to listen to what we have to say, and we can actually make an important contribution complementing those quantitative approaches.

My ego got nicely massaged on several occasions; for example, Alberto Avritzer greeted me on the first day as we would have known each other - just to find out before the end of the conference that he was reading my blog from time to time! Frederick Zarndt commented at the end of my presentation (with shining eyes and a big smile on his face) that he had experienced as a practitioner all the situations mentioned in the presentation. Frederick gave a tutorial on the first day on "intercultural expectations, misunderstandings and communications" that I unfortunately missed. And then, there was a very touching scene in the lobby on the last day, when a young lady (a Brasilian student volunteer) came to tell me in her hesitant English: "When I'll grow up, I would like to be like you!"

In conclusion, the conference in Munich was a very rewarding experience - and it was followed by a short vacation. Here's my Flickr set from the conference and the one from the cycling tour of Munich on Friday!

Relaxing after a long day...

2007-08-03T00:16:00.000+02:00

Actually, there have been several long days in a row... We had a bit of sun the last few days, and I was planning to take it easy - instead, I was in the office from 9am till 9pm every day this week.

Without doing anything exciting - just tiding up things..."cleaning my desk, so that I can get my suff done!" {bitter smile}

I spent the previous week-end struggling with the stubs in my project's blog, Tales from the Field of Software Engineering. Thank god, I got up-to-date tonight - I even blogged about today's event! And even managed to denounce myself as "the other blogger in the room" on Craig's Rantings;-)

I actually managed to get a lot of decent work done this week:

created a wiki page for our GSD workshop organised in conjunction with the ECSCW'07 conference and emailed the participants about the next steps;
drafted a survey meant to facilitate the tailoring and adoption of a wiki for Lero;
together with Anders, my TA for the "Introduction to Digital Media" course, prepared a new set of tricky;-) exam questions for the August repeat exams;
finished a second revision of my paper for the ECKM conference(Collaborative Knowledge Work Practices in Global Software Development), incorporating the feedback from the reviewers;

Last night, while adding links to my post about the EACE workshop, I discovered a few highly relevant resources for our work:

International Reports on Socio-Informatics (IRSI)
the Communities &Technologies conference proceedings (the 2003 and 2005 editions)
and this year's edition abstracts

Volkmar Pipek (who is involved in all these!) is part of the ECSCW07 programme committee, and will be our guest in Limerick in September.

Yesterday evening I also skimmed through Craig's post on Job Burnout, got to its initial source, heroically resisted to the temptation of taking the Burnout SelfTest - I didn't need any macabre conclusions at that late hour alone in the empty office!, and my attention was drawn to two of the points in the article:

Reach out of yourself. When you start to burn out, you may push people away with your grumpiness, but connecting with other people can be just what you need to to change your thinking around. If you feel comfortable with it, share your exhaustion and pessimism online with your friends. Instead of annoying people by using IM as your personal therapy provider, broadcast your angst on Twitter or Facebook or Jaiku. Then the people with some free emotional cycles can come to your aid.

Start a side job. What, work more? Yes. Sometimes enthusiasm for a second project can rekindle your energy for your other work. The web offers all sorts of ways to experiment with new ways of making money. Maybe you need a whole portfolio of jobs, not just one.

I must confess I already thought of the side job solution. Cure workaholism with more work? But why not? Especially if it's a different type of work:-)
Now on the reach out of yourself: it made me realise I've made a big mistake looking for "therapy" at two friends who had previously told me they were emotionally exhausted themselves.
Facebook's moods? I already thought of that! Broadcasting my Workaholics Anonymous* confessions on Twitter? Been there, done that! But where are those people with "free emotional cycles"??? Only joking, I'm back on my feet now!

And today, while searching for Ulrike Schultze's inspirational MISQ paper to share it with my colleagues, Google brought to my attention Lilia's post mentioning it. I am a regular reader of Mathemagenic and I'm sure I read this post when it was first published. But at the time, ethnography sounded like something extremely exotic to me, and I probably didn't resonate with it!
It's kind of funny how I keep on stepping on Lilia's footprints - whatever I discover, she's been there before! And this afternoon I went straight to the library and borrowed Auto-ethnography, personal narrative, reflexivity: Researcher as subject by Carolyn Ellis and Arthur Bochner:-P and started reading it.
Later on, I finally got to read Blackler's 1995 paper (thanks to UL's affiliation to EBSCO), and of course Lilia was there long before...

Was this "a day in the life of a..." kind of story?! Well, I didn't intend it!
I had more than 140 characters on my mind, and I felt the need to take a snapshot of it! Just in case I'll decide to write an auto-ethnography one day - Jaiku has all the links, but misses the context!
Now that I'm done, I feel relieved, and I can go to bed...I need to wake up early in the morning ...and get my stuff done;-)

* and WA actually exists already:-( No joking!

Workshop on Collaborative e-Working Environments in Berlin

2007-08-02T19:28:00.000+02:00

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)

My fieldwork is coming to a natural end...

2007-06-21T20:30:00.000+02:00

The team I have observed for 16 months is handing over their project to another team in Europe. The joys of global distribution of software development:-)

So, my time with them has come to a natural closure. And in a way, I'm glad it happened like this - it was so difficult to make up my mind about when to stop!

The team is staying together and will be assigned another project, and I think this was a very wise decision. It takes about 6 months for a newbie to come to full speed (maybe less if he's only changing projects inside the same business unit!). There's so much to learn, not necessarily about coding, but also about people, tools, internal processes and procedures...

If I give it a thought, only 6 of the members we met in the beginning of our study are still part of the team. Probably 9-10 left, joining other projects, sometimes leaving the company, some other times the country... That's life! People are not spending 20 years of their lives in the same job anymore - they're moving, learning, adapting, and I don't think this is bad. It keeps you alive!

As a former software developer, there were times when I felt I got too close to my "subjects", becoming involved in their activities (at least emotionally;-) . Ethnographers call this "going native"!

But now that the circle is closed, and I'll have to move on and do the writing... the most challenging part!

(Originally published in Tales from the Field of Software Engineering)

"My" reboot 9.0

2007-06-17T13:48:00.000+02:00

Let's start with an introduction for my readers who have no clue what reboot is:

"reboot is 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.

Applied towards us as individuals, citizens, teachers, culture workers, entrepreneurs, creators and change makers." (from the conference website)

Flickering through my green reboot notebook now, to give you my version of reboot.
First thing I had to do after I found a seat was to reboot my machine, who got stalled:-) That made me think about what rebooting means in people's case... starting fresh!

It was very difficult to decide what session to attend, as so many good things were happening in parallel! I'll list here the talks and workshops I attended, and those I'm terribly sorry I missed, for the record.

DAY 1

the opening talk - Tor Nørretranders, a Danish scientist, spoke about Civilisation 2.0. He shared the slides on his own blog, tor.dk. His core message was "Dare, care and share!". During his talk, my friend Ina spotted my "reboot" status on Skype and expressed her regret for not being there. Of course I gave her a few leads: there were already images on Flickr, and the Jaiku back channel. Martin sent me the address of the IRC channel, but there was not much going on there...
Trusted Space - Nature's Rules by Robert Paterson-loved it! It referred to my ancestors, the Romans, and life in a legion:-)
While We Wait For The Babel Fish- by Stephanie Booth-what Stephanie said made a lot of sense: software creators need to understand that the world is not exclusively made of English speakers. She went through different aspects of localisation and translation - right when I was terribly frustrated that Blogger started speaking Danish to me!!!
Mobile Social Play- Kars Alfrink - Kars is a Dutch interaction designer who spoke about the ways the physical and the virtual intertwine nowadays. He shared his slides -see his blog!
Online Symbols in the offline world - Aram Bartholl - heard an interview with Aram the day before, and it made me curious. I must confess I ran out when someone wrote on Jaiku: "come to the big hall! That's where the fun is!"
Contact -Johnnie Moore - well, I got only the second half of it. Johnnie is a great speaker, and he had an interesting impact on the audience!
Social - Ross Mayfield - Ross is a great speaker, and he spoke about one of my favourite topics: bringing social software to the corporate environment.
Micropresentations -Guy Dickinson -lovely! mind blowing! I wish every conference would have a sort of sneak preview in the beginning, or that this kind of presentations would be uploaded in advance on the conference website, to help people make up their minds. There were 6 people presenting:

Hypertext - Jeremy Keith
New Interaction Rituals - Julian Bleecker
The Art of Looking Sideways - Jeroen Visser
Intimacy - Lee Bryant
Geography - Fred Oliveira
Ambient Intimacy - Leisa Reichelt

My favourites were Jeremy's, Lee's and Leisa's. I guess it was damn difficult for them, but they were absolutely brilliant. I thought of importing this practice in our group - it would help us focus!

Travel & serendipity Matt Jones - that's where I found out about Dopplr! Want an invite? let me know!
Rebooting barcamps -an interesting conversation about different experiences with BarCamps; we spent quite a lot of time discussing if there should be any formal presentations or not, and how could you select the interesting speakers and give them the right amount of time to present their ideas;
MICROBLOGGING - Jyri Engeström - this was for me one of the highlights of reboot; not only entertaining, but also thought provoking! He spoke about microblogging and about how Jaiku came to life after reboot 8; have a look at this pitch: "At a meeting; good crowd";-)
Talks I'm sorry I've missed:
The Uncanny Valet- Tom Armitage
Happiness- Alexander Kjerulf
Are avatars Human?- Markus Breuer

DAY 2

Conversation: Owning your learning path, facilitated by Ton Zijlstra and Elmine Wijnia. This was another highlight of the conference. Outside on the lawn, good crowd, interesting ideas. Ton has posted the resulting post-its and his reflections on the event.
A town called kozarac.ba - Lee Bryant; I knew Lee was involved in helping a Bosniac community, but I had no idea about his family ties to that place. The talk was impressive and made the audience think about other similar situations where we might be able to help.
New Interaction Rituals - Julian Bleecker
An interview with Dave Winer- Thomas Madsen-Mygdal did a great job interviewing one of the legends of interaction on the internet - a few min of video here;
Intuition? Oleg Koefoed
Rob Patterson and Johnnie Moore's micropresentation on Non-linearity (they submitted a few slides, and Guy Dickinson added random ones) - they were absolutely brilliant!
PERFORMANCE Rasmus Fleischer, MAgnus Eriksson- the two presented the story of their Swedish think-tank, Piratbyrån ("The Bureau of Piracy"); there's a video recording here. In my opinion, they weren't able to convey their message properly. I only figured it out after checking Wikipedia.
Boosting Our Collective Intelligence: Getting Smarter Together - George Pór and Martin Ludvigsen; this was a conversation about how events such as reboot can be improved even more to boost our collective intelligence. George and Martin gave us the chance to 5 min of action learning in small groups, and this made me realise what bad listeners are we actually.
Ambient Intimacy - Leisa Reichelt; I followed leisa's tweets, I read her blog, I lis tened to her pre-reboot interview, I attended her micropresentation - and still I found her talk interesting. She was speaking about the kind of intimacy the social software tools are giving us: you feel like you know someone very well if you happen to know his persona on the web - you read his blog, watch her pictures, are aware of his travels... and still - is this a real person?! Leisa used an expression that surprised me "performing yourself": more or less, we're always playing a role. We show the others the face we want them to see...

Talks I've missed:

Flow: A New Consciousness For A Web Of Traffic by Stowe Boyd - a video recording is available on Google Video; I'll try to blog my take on this topic, as "flow" is a term of special significance to me.
Your ideal working environment - Robert Slagter; very sorry to miss this - Robert is involved in research that has a lot in common with our studies;
Work, us and our kids - Lilia Efimova;
Portable social networks - Alper Çugun;
Citizens of the future - Ewan McIntosh(Edublogger); I've heard a lot of people talking about this talk. It looks like it was extremely interesting!
Products are people too - Matt Webb - the same as for the above!

I have a couple of bookmarks on my del.icio.us, a set of photos on my Flickr, and a few tweets and jaikus on the #reboot channel.

A lot of people have blogged about reboot - I gave up the idea because I wanted to focus on what was going on. A Romanian writer said once: "you either live, or write", which might seem a bit odd to a blogger. We're living while we're writing - or is it vice versa? writing while we're living? Anyhow, this time there were so many better bloggers around, that I felt like letting go!

For more detailed comments, I recommend Steph Booth, Mathias Muller-Prove, and many others.

reboot 9.0 - how I saw it!

2007-06-17T09:50:00.000+02:00

First of all, I must say I've been trying to get to reboot for the last 3 years. Two years ago, I was waiting for my Irish visa, eager to start working again after having spent 3 months in Romania. Last year in June, I was deeply immersed in my field studies and I couldn't leave for a single day: "my" team was getting close to their first release!

Before saying anything about the talks and the people at reboot 9, I want to share a few things about the organisation of the event. I wish I'd see more such events happening! I have no clue how Thomas and his pals managed all this, but I was deeply impressed! We're organising a conference ourselves here, and I learned a lot during those two days in Copenhagen!

What impressed me most:

the venue - the old Kedelhalle turned into a modern conference center - the 3 rooms(especially the big one), the lobby, the terrace and the surrounding lawn- was perfect for allowing people to move from one talk to another, or to take a break(see note by Peter Rukavina on Jaiku!), speak to someone interesting and relax for a few minutes. The smaller rooms were somehow less inviting, but most of the times people found alternatives (like having the workshop out on the lawn!) ;
the double-sided name tags, having the names written with large fonts;(finally, reading name tags proved useful for finding people)
the reboot notebook, specially designed for meaningful notes;-)
the free reboot t-shirts, and the free customisation service provided;
power plugs available and wi fi coverage (most of the time);
the hacker space in the lobby;
the virtual reboot spaces: the continuously emerging conference web site, Copenhagen on Plazes, the Jaiku channel;
the big screens in the lobby and in the big conference hall, mainly displaying what was happening on the Jaiku channel;
the reboot chairs outside on the lawn;
the conference programme posted on a wall at the entrance, with comments and notes;
a baby sitting space in the basement; a baby-friendly atmosphere that made the conference much more "human"- without any question mark!;
free coffee, tee, fruits and pastry available all day long;
free lunches (ok, no vegetarian meals, but the raw carrots and fruits provided allowed me to survive; Geoff Jones and Euan Semple found a Mexican restaurant nearby, but I never managed to hook up with them);
a bar with both alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks - beer was by far the most popular!
an impressive gala dinner organised in the very conference hall, with candle-light, video productions and exquisite food;
the Nintendo wii in the lobby
the do-it-yourself groups for dinner in the second evening; although I found it an excellent idea, the group I joined didn't realise there was no reservation made, and we had to handle that ourselves. We ended up having dinner in three, instead of the group of 15 who signed up for that particular Thai restaurant!;
the reboot after party - free entrance.

Speaking to someone during the break, I remember expressing my surprise about how "normal" this conference was. Most of the conferences we go to are artificial environments where you struggle to learn the rules and play by them. This time, I felt at home from the very first minute, and there was food for mind, soul and ...stomach altogether:-)

A Swedish friend who hosted me the night before reboot asked me about the conference site and checked it to get an impression. His reaction surprised me: "How do you find all these 'New Age'-y things?!"
How did he come to this conclusion? The topic - "Human?" The social networking site appearance of the web site? I have no clue. But there definitely is a sort of counterculture. Are we the new hippy generation - now tentatively called "digital bohemians"?!

All these unconferences are an opportunity to meet like minded people and talk about things that matter. reboot's system of values (scheduling the talks participants showed most interest in) is not very common. Most of the conferences count on reviewers. Nobody comes to reboot looking for ready made solutions, immediately applicable in their practice. People go there for having their minds rebooted. Listening to out-of-the-box ideas. Bumping into interesting people. Having their own ideas challenged.

I love my social networks!

2007-05-30T14:14:00.000+02:00

After having a wonderful time in my home town (class reunion, my father's 86th birthday, a week-end with my kids, nice weather), I'm on my way to reboot.

I got to Budapest airport 4h before my flight's departure (but at least I had a very comfortable trip by car, with pick-up on my parents' door steps) and thought of doing a bit more reading on reboot before leaving. First thing I've noticed was that my Wizzair flight to Malmoe was already delayed with 3h:-( Terminal 1 is by far less functional than Terminal 2A, but I guessed there should be a hot spot somewhere. Not on the ground floor - or is there anything wrong with my wi fi card?!

No escalators here, you have to carry your suitcase up and down the stairs...
The words of my former school mate came to my mind: "Fly cheap, fall deep!" Hmm... right now,
I'm inclined to think he was right. My 6th sense brings me to the Internet-Cafe upstairs- shiny machines with coins, but none wants to talk to me - or my Hungarian is not good enough?! After finding a nice armchair in the Visitors' Gallery upstairs, I discovered the wi fi was working!!! Hurray!

Read my mail, then went to Jaiku. Found Lilia's feed, went to her blog, jumped to Nicole's interviews, then to Stowe Boyd's podcasts on Blogtalk - when my battery dies, I'll have plenty of stuff to listen to!! Thanks, Nicole, thanks, Stowe, looking forward to meeting you tomorrow!

My friend in Malmoe told me SAS has been on strike - this could explain the delay!
Had a chat with my best friend who lives in Germany about our class reunion last week. Found out about the PhD seminar in the IDC yesterday. Talked to another old friend in Montreal...
People saw my status - "stuck in Budapest airport" and they all wanted to entertain me;-)

It's not boring at all anymore...

Digesting Blogwalk eleven Amsterdam...

2007-05-20T13:26:00.001+02:00

I'm on my own in the house of my friends in Amstelveen, it's a sunny Sunday morning and I am torn apart between spending more time down by the canal my friends have in the back of their garden admiring the wild ducks(and ducklings!) - or blogging about what happened at Blogwalk...

I guess I'll take my laptop down in the garden and have both...how spoiled I am this morning...no less than five wi-fi networks around...all open! I love this country!

The theme of this Blogwalk was Digital Bohemians...
I'm kind of hesitating what to talk about first...for me, it was a great experience, as always when I managed to attend! But this experience includes a lot more than spending a day together with like-minded people and meeting old friends again... It includes all what happened around it, it's like a web weaving itself, involving people, tools, content and events...

I won't have time to write about everything, I'll have to leave for the airport in an hour or so, but I need to start somewhere...

As said in the previous post, I did a bit of reading around the list of Blogwalk participants and I signed up for Gerrit Visser's twitterings few days before. I got to discover Frank Meeuwsen's
What's the next action (great resource if you're struggling like me with GTD!) because he left a comment on my Breda post...unfortunately I missed him at Blogwalk - which shows I didn't manage to talk to everyone...

I couldn't go to the Thursday evening dinner in the end, but after dinner I found out from Geert's twitterings that Ana-Despina and Riina sat next to him, and that they had Irish stew...

I got lost on Vijzenstraat(couldn't find the 51-55 building!), and seeing me struggling with my map, a nice lady got off her bike to help me. I was actually looking for Vijzengraacht, which was a bit further. I spent 2 min in the lobby with Thomas Madsen-Mygdal without knowing who he was...otherwise I would have expressed my enthusiasm about reboot...

I was happy to see Lilia, Ton, Elmine, Carla and Sebastian again. I finally got to meet Robert and Alexander Slagter in person;-) I was able to recognise a few people I knew from their web presence - Johnnie Moore, Gerrit Visser.

This Blogwalk was more unstructured and informal than any other I attended. No expectation post-its, no introductions, no topic groups. It started with socializing and networking, at some point Ton gave a few explanations for the people who were not familiar with the OpenSpace paradigm, and then we
started posting to the "wiki windows".
Elmine and myself in search for triggers(foto Sebastian)

I had several meaningful conversations, getting to meet people as I went around the room, listening to conversations and to my own intuition, trying to contribute wherever I could.

These were the topic clusters we could see emerging (probably Ton will manage to publish that content later on- update- see here):
- spaces - where do Digital Bohemians actually work?
- presence - how do DB signal their presence to the others?
- what kind of business model is this? are DB free or actually cyberslackers?
- what are the tools supporting DB's life style?
- how do they achieve a work-life balance? do they?!

We had a sort of identity problem: we couldn't figure out if we, as a group, belonged to that Digital Bohemians category. In the original book that inspired this title, digital bohemians are living in a metropolis(Berlin) and are freelancers. Part of us have permanent jobs (actually most of us!) - don't we qualify?! I guess this bohemianship is more a state of mind than anything else: flocking together at such unconferences on our own expense seems to be one of the features; having a digital lifestyle, trying to keep in touch with what's going on, being open to try new things are some of the others. Someone tried to define digital bohemians on a post-it:
"DB have:
- mad social skills
- a lot of gadgets
- even more RSS feeds to read
- more blog(posts) than time."

The morning passed very quickly, and we all took the tram to go to the Post building next to the Central Station, where we had lunch together. Riina complained that we couldn't move around during the lunch, but I must say I believe that whoever sits next to you or in front of you is the right person, and there's something interesting to find out from them.

The walk was interesting because of our guide Mark( I have to confess that it took me a while to figure out he was BicycleMark himself!) - he showed us secret corners I wouldn't have discovered as a regular tourist. I got the chance to speak to a few people I wanted to meet but didn't manage in the morning; among others, I had a very interesting walking conversation with a lady who will be working with the Games Programme of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, but can't remember her name(update: Carla Hoekendijk- thanks Ton!).
It's strange how stories bring a place closer to your heart...this is how I will probably remember the Zoo or Magere Bruecke later on...

The afternoon was dedicated to a plenary group debate - we struggled a lot to discover what actually characterizes a digital bohemian - and I don't have the feeling we succeeded. Anyhow, the conversation is still open, and - as after every Blogwalk- it takes a lot to digest and undersand what actually happened there...

As opposed to regular conferences, in such events the end is open and a lot happens after the event... and I'm talking again about relationships, idea, content...

Afternoon discussion( photo Sebastian)
Peter Kaptein from Instant Interfaces was our lovely host. Not only that he did his best to make us feel at home, but he also contributed a lot to the discussion.

More later, I have a plane to catch!

(Quite a struggle to speak Dutch with Blogger!)

Twitter, Jaiku and so on...

2007-05-17T23:30:00.000+02:00

Although I got a Twitter account back in March (after the Webcamp at DERI), none of my contacts tweets regularly. I couldn’t make much sense of what would be my use of Twitter without any examples. People around me were talking and blogging about it, but none had a direct experience with it yet.

So, about two weeks ago, while visiting the reboot website and looking for interesting talks to attend, I was reading leisa reichalt’s proposal and I saw a link to her Twitter. I signed up to follow her tweets, and found out she was coming to Dublin for a talk. The next few days, Leisa was my Ulysses: I could follow her throughout her trip, learning how to make Guinness, getting excited at the sight of an Irish breakfast, leaving Dublin for London, planning trips, taxis, facilitating workshops, having fun, getting guests, admiring her new Mac… Leisa was a complete stranger for me before that: a person who’s talk I intend to attend. Not anymore! When I’ll finally meet her, she won’t know me, but I will know a few things about her last month…

And next, I went to the Twitter homepage and among the Blogger: CONIECTO - Edit Post "Twitter, Jaiku and so on..."most recent twitters, I saw Luis Suarez, who’s an IBMer, writes a blog (or more?), and has an active interest in Knowledge Management, communities of practice and collaboration in general. I knew Luis from the IBM intranet, and I was an infrequent reader of his blog. He was attending the APQC conference, so I thought I’d sign up to his twits as well… Great experience, he’s a much more frequent twitterer, he was commenting a lot on the course, on the networking and so on. He also pointed his readers to interesting resources, helped me find out what an n95 was, let us know he has a dog and even that he’s watching TV (I couldn’t have guessed this, judging by the number of activities he’s succeeding to cover, I would have bet he’s a workaholic just like me and he’s typing and staring at a screen 24/7!!!) This morning, struggling to access the net from Dublin airport, I got my Gurteen Knowledge Letter, and 2 min later I found out via Twitter that Luis got it as well! And that he knows David…Couldn’t stand anymore: had to twitter about this myself!

The third person I started following three days ago is Gerrit Visser, whom I’m going to meet tomorrow at Blogwalk. He’s just ordered a Dell, so I might ask for some advice tomorrow. And tonight, when I got back to my friends’ house, I got Gerrit's impressions from the dinner via Twitter – sorry I missed it, but I had to spend a bit of time with my friends, who are flying out tomorrow!

And I also signed up for Jaiku…

I’m sure I’m going to enter this game very soon . But will it last? On the long run, will it make sense to follow more and more people and to broadcast my own thoughts? Will I follow 2-3 people at one time, projecting my own cine-verite with heroes I can simply dump when I find them boring, negative or simply too talkative??!!

With mailing lists, I had to unsubscribe when I realized I’m just deleting daily digests without even opening them. The number of unread feeds in my Bloglines got absolutely scary, and I don’t find the time and energy to clean up my subscriptions…Twittering is even more personal then blogging, more ephemeral…

Going to bed now, don’t want to be yawning the whole day tomorrow! Will add the links when I'll find time, I'm writing this offline...somehow there's no wi fi in my room under the roof...

The first Irish HCI Conference hosted by the IDC

2007-05-03T13:27:00.000+02:00

My department organised a great event yesterday - the first Irish Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. About 50 people from different universities, companies and public institutions attended the event, which turned out to be a success! Several research groups from Cork, Dublin, Galway , Limerick and Maynooth presented their current research and projects, and I must say it was very interesting to find what was going on - not only in the other universities, but also in our own!

I found a lot of interesting connections in the presentations of Tim Hall (EMRC), Mark Magennis(NCBI) , Aphra Kerr(NUIM - NIRSA).

Mark Leslie(Martello Media) presented three of their projects, and the "fun palace" designed for the Visitor Centre at the Cliffs of Moher really caught my attention. I'm as mad as everyone else for the horrible impact that building had on the environment, but I'd still like to see what came out!

The ScanCam one of the participants was wearing at his neck raised privacy concerns (taking shots at every change detected in the environment- 5000-7000 pics/day). Our colleague introduced an interesting application that was actually trying to make sense of these images by selecting the less frequent situations out of the huge pile.

I was fascinated by the story around the design of a digital piece of jewelry presented by John Mc'Carthy from UCC. Different interactive artefacts made me think of the wide spectrum of opportunities for augmenting human intelligence made possible by technology: the topographic torch, the touch table, the search of digital archives, or artistic events such as the re-creation of the 1831 riot in the Queen Square in Bristol.

I also had the chance to discover that one of our colleagues in TCD is actually studying meetings and the electronic support for meetings (unlike us, who are focusing on software engineering, he's looking at the medical domain).

The breaks allowed for a lot of networking, and the gorgeous weather brought us outside, in the nice ambiance of the Kilmurry village.

In the afternoon, we had a group discussion on possible future actions for keeping in touch, creating awareness mechanisms on each other's work, and becoming more visible in Ireland as a community. The ideas kept buzzing, and we put together a wiki page to keep track of what was said and remains to be put into practice.

A few other people blogged the event: Mike Bennett, Eoin Brazil.
And of course we had a short note (and some comments!) on the IDC blog as well!

Although several people were involved in the organization, my colleague Luigina Ciolfi was the heart and the force behind this event. Kudos, Lui, for all the hard work! I enjoyed every minute, and judging by what I've heard, so did most of the participants!

My trip to a riverless Breda...

2007-04-29T14:22:00.000+02:00

OK, winning a trip is a wonderful thing... The details might be a bit less pleasant, but you can't have everything!

I received the trip details by post the day before, because the envelope was returned to the post office, where they couldn't locate it when I asked for it first. Why not email?!

A RyanAir ticket, no luggage, no insurance...sounded a bit cheap. I almost thought we're going to be accommodated in a tent... My friend and I got to Shannon airport at 10am, just to find out the flight was going to be delayed with approximately one hour. While waiting, we witnessed a strange thing happening. The loudspeakers kept on making announcements for a flight to Chicago, and there were probably about 100 people waiting to board that plane. Suddenly, I heard applauses and looked around to see what was going on. Some of the passengers waiting for the Chicago flight were clapping their hands enthusiastically at the view of a group of American soldiers entering the departures waiting lounge. And again...and again... every 3-5 soldiers coming in to grab a beer or a sandwich were saluted with the same enthusiasm. The soldiers didn't look impressed or grateful. I tried to identify the supporters: a bunch of old ladies, followed with less enthusiasm by other passengers. It gave me goose bumps: applauding soldiers is not exactly my thing...

Finally, we took off. The plane was packed, and when we finally landed in Charleroi, it took probably 45 min to get our luggage. We were thirsty, hungry and already tired. When we finally exited, we found a driver waiting to take us to Breda. A limo! now this sounded good... There were 192km to go on the highway... a beautiful day outside, but dark windows and air conditioning kept us "cool"...and then the dreadful traffic around Brussels on a Friday afternoon...it took us 4 hours to get there...I was more dead than alive when we finally got there!

The hotel was nice. The city was charming. We had an excellent dinner in a lovely restaurant on Grote Markt. Came back to life. Located the Irish pub (brown door in the back, behind the cathedral) . Went to bed at 9.

On Saturday morning, we met the other happy winners in the hotel lobby (following the competition , each city involved sent two people in every one of the other 5 partner cities): a friendly couple from s'Hertogenbosch(NL), a trio from Mechelen(BE) (grandmother, mother and daughter?), and another couple from Gent(BE). The people from Chester never showed up, despite of checking in the night before.

Our hosts took us to the old City Hall in Grote Markt, and we were given a presentation on the history of Breda, followed by explanations on the current project: De Nieuwe Mark. Basically, the purpose is to bring the water back in the city (in the 60's, the old harbour was dried off and the first underground parking in Holland was built in its place). Disappointed that there was no water to walk by yet, I was though deeply impressed by the passion and energy our hosts were putting in this huge project.

We spent the rest of the morning walking around the city, guided by Amanda from Breda Promotions. Because it became tedious to give the explanations both in Dutch and in English (the guests from Belgium were all speaking Dutch), Amanda switched to English, having the agreement of the whole group. She took us to beautiful hidden corners and told us stories about things that happened there during the long history of Breda... I was listening to her and thinking that no technology ever will be able to replace her, with her funny English expressions, her passion for storytelling and her humour... answering to questions, caring for everyone and smiling all the time... On the way to Nieuwe Mark, we stopped at the Begijnhof(only in Dutch, sorry!), visited the Tine Merkx Collection of miniatures (amazing doll houses!).

We passed by William of Orange's statue and by the Castle (nowadays hosting the Royal Dutch Military Academy), and got to the old harbour, where a new "High Bridge" was built, a new pedestrian path created by the river, and the old Fish Market is being rebuilt.

On the left -what we really saw. On the right - how the river is supposed to look like in a few months. The beautiful weather and the company of the group made the walk very pleasant and helped me forget my frustration that there was no boat tour included...and no water to be seen...

Among the nice stories heard from Amanda, one about beer: because the drinking water wasn't safe to drink, the amount of beer consumed on average was of 450l/year per person(including kids!); there was a special type of beer made, reserved for funerals, and the recipe included some magic mushrooms... probably for getting in touch with the spirit of the deceased...

We visited a shop attached to a small chocolate factory, the Tourist Information Office, where Amanda showed us all kind of artefacts discovered during the works in the old river bed, and in the end we had a good-bye beer in a famous place: Brouwerij de Beyerd!

We tried shopping at De Barones (shopping center with an impressive architecture), but it was simply too crowded, and we found refuge on the hotel's terrace, enjoying the sun and a nice cup of coffee ! In the evening, we took a walk and discovered the Singel (the canal), compared the old and the beautiful with the new architecture, and had a glimpse of the round roof of Breda's Panopticon Prison.

Sunday morning was too nice to do anything else than sit on a bench in the Valkenberg Park, admire the blooming trees and bushes, and observe people, bicycles, carriages and wedding cars passing by... The trip back was much shorter (2h on the highway instead of 4!), but as much as I loved the trip, I wished teleportation would have been possible ...

Back home, I was anxious to find out who were the Beguines... amazing, the place in Breda was a paradise, and I remember visiting the Begijnhof in Amsterdam as well.
And then the beers, and the history of Breda, the prison...so many things I would have ignored if I wouldn't have had the chance to go there...even for such a short time...

I was reflecting on my habits: I usually do a bit of reading before every trip around the people I have to meet, the event I'm attending, the places, their history. Once back, I'm tempted to find out more, to place things in context... No matter how "prepared" I am, I always find something that's very different from the mental model I tend to build beforehand -this time was the missing river, other times it's about people or the course of events... All that matters is to be flexible and enjoy the real thing:-)

One thing I was jealous about was that our two colleagues from Limerick who went to s'Hertogenbosch got not only a boat tour, but also got to visit the Jhieronimus Bosch Art Centre.
They don't seem to have any originals, but they do have reproductions of all Bosch's paintings and drawings. I've seen a few in Munich, a few in Vienna, and one in Luxembourg - but what a feast to get to see all of them together...

More pictures on Flickr.

Flying to the Netherlands tomorrow!

2007-04-20T02:11:00.000+02:00

...actually, it is already tomorrow!

Back in September, following to a radio announcement, I found out about a competition organised by the WIHCC European project. I went online, completed the questionnaire, and a few weeks after, I got an email from Shannon Development - actually an e-card!

I won a trip to Breda, in the Netherlands, for a week-end! Lucky me! I can't remember winning anything before in my life, so this was quite a big event!!! 3 days in a beautiful Dutch town...with a water passing through it! What can I ask for more?!

I'm looking forward to it, as it's 1:20am, and I just "finished" work for today:-( Not exactly finished, there would be another 20,000 things to do, but I decided I'm human and I deserve a few hours sleep! But I'm glad I finished a workshop proposal on "Challenges for collaborative work in Global Software Development", and sent it over to the workshops chair of ECSCW'07, Mark Rouncefield. I even got a confirmation - at 00:12!

SFI CSET Roadshow @ University of Limerick

2007-04-18T09:44:00.000+02:00

Yesterday afternoon I went to the CSET roadshow.
The Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, Micheál Martin, was the special guest, and there was a launching ceremony at Lero (the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre) before the roadshow. Somehow I missed it - miscommunication...

It's always useful to know more about the context of the research you're involved in. Both in Germany and in Luxembourg, I tried to keep up-to-date with what was going on around my particular slice of work. Waste of time? Procrastination? I don't think so! I always pick up ideas from this kind of meetings...

I had the chance to see John O'Connor, the Acting President of UL opening the session (the first time in almost two years!) , followed by the Minister himself, who spoke about the plans of his government for research, Science Foundation Ireland and the new Stokes Programme. Finally I found out who George Gabriel Stokes was;-)

The name had some bad connotations for me - probably because of our colleagues from the Stokes Institute upstairs - last year they kept on either flooding our office, or making the whole building vibrate with their machines, as a helicopter would had prepared to take off...

But Sir George Gabriel Stokes can't be blamed for any of these, so finally I got rid of those bad connotations and started honoring the man as he deserves!

There were three CSET presentations (CSET=Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology) made by the centres' directors:
- Kevin Ryan - Lero
- Sally Cudmore - APC
- Donal O'Mahony - CTVR

and two speakers from the industry:
- Joe Gibbs - Snap-on
- Suresh Goyal - Bell Labs

The speeches were followed by a Panel Session : ‘Working with a CSET’. There was an interesting idea formulated by Joe Gibbs: "Ireland has an established reputation for its research in the food and pharma domains, as well as for research in telecommunications. But who would look at Ireland when it comes to software development for the automotive industry?" And he's probably right - not many companies around involved in this field right now. In order to establish a reputation, Lero needs not only notable research results, but also to encourage the set up of spin-offs that would commercialise the results of research... and a lot of networking... which made me think of a possible new project!

No, definitely it wasn't a waste of time!

Note:
Chris Horn has blogged the first of the CSET roadshows back in February.

Choconancy about communities and online facilitation

2007-04-17T00:51:00.000+02:00

At Diva Marketing Blog, an interview with Nancy White, titled "Building Community with Online Communities":

"The Diva of Community has to be Nancy White. Nancy knows more about online communities than anyone I've ever met. She graciously agreed to share her insights. But what Nancy gives us, in this mini interview, goes beyond a few ideas. She provides a primer on community best practices. "

Last year, I participated in Nancy's Facilitating Online Interaction workshop, and it was a fantastic experience! This year, I'm returning as a mentor, and I'm really looking forward to it!

It's starting on May 7, and it will have a slightly different format. Anyone interested?!

There's a huge need for both online and F2F facilitation in distributed teams, and people have only started to become aware of it! It becomes more and more obvious that just building state-of-the-art collaboration tools is not enough!

My spectacular come back:-)

2007-04-14T12:36:00.000+02:00

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:

Webcamp on the Emmerging Mobile Internet in Dublin on May 17 (if I can make it to the airport on time!)
Blogtalk in Amsterdam on May 18
reboot in Copenhagen on May 31-June 1
EduCampIreland in Tiperrary on June 7
the Women Business and Blogging conference in Leicester, on June 8

Exciting...and scary on the same time:-P

The First IS Workshop on Global Sourcing

2007-03-14T19:43:00.000+01:00

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!

WebCamp at DERI next Wednesday

2007-02-28T23:07:00.000+01:00

After a sort of hibernation, with lots of paper writing, revising and nights without sleep, I've got a phone call from John Breslin, inviting me to Galway for a WebCamp on Social Networking taking place at DERI on Wednesday, the 7th of March.

My first reaction was: too bad! I won't be able to go, I'm teaching on Wednesdays. But then I sat down and thought: this is something I've be longing for all these long winter months, and as they say: "where there's a will, there's a way ..."

I really want to attend, and the way was found;-) Now I must start thinking of my talk. What I had in mind was "Social Networking in corporate environments" - giving an account of my observations, maybe focusing on one story only... will see!

Valdis Krebs is the special guest, and he will give a talk on "Social networking and emergent communities". Can't wait!

The Sionna Festival - the last concerts

2006-11-19T22:23:00.000+01:00

I was lucky enough to attend the last two concerts:
- Barry Douglas and Camerata Ireland played Mozart in St.Michael's Church on Friday;
- on Saturday, The Chieftains performed at the University Concert Hall, together with a large group of students of the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance.

Both concerts were excellent, I can't stop wondering how lucky I am to be here. I missed a few concerts because I had to travel, but still...

Last night I was so proud to see our students on the stage! (I didn't move a finger, but they are "our students", see?!;-) Especially the first years were fantastic if you think they only joined the university a few months ago! And I guess for them it will be an unforgettable experience to have played (and danced) with the Chieftains right from the beginning of their artistic career! Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin was invited to join them on stage, and they also brought in a young female group (all UL graduates!) who's going to join them in their American tour next year.

The end of the concert was remarkable, they asked the public to dance together a dance from Brittany. Two guest dancers came in the audience and invited people to join, and in the beginning, people were shy. But the very next minute, everyone stood up and caught the neighbour's little finger - there was a wave of energy coming from the stage and encompassing the whole audience...the grand finale! Usually people don't want such a concert to end, but this was such a good closure, that after this everyone went home happy!

Thinking about my blogging appetite

2006-11-14T08:37:00.000+01:00

Yesterday night, during my long ride on the bus, I was reflecting on my blogging appetite: I don't think it shrank. The thing is that my field notes are very much like blogging: I write down both facts (what I see and hear) and my impressions - on a regular basis, because I have to. And I love doing it, even if some times I find it very difficult to balance notes taking with observation and participation.

And I'm typing so much that my fingers ache nowadays...

Ok, there might be another reason as well: being under an NDA, it's difficult to make up my mind if it's safe or not to blog even about apparently neutral stuff.
I happened to hurt friends with my blogging without having the slightest intention, and this made me more aware that on occasions, I can be too direct and maybe blunt.

At one point in time, it occurred to me that I might want to start an internal blog here, but I don't think I could sustain it right now...

There's another reason that made me think twice whenever I feel like blogging: I am supposed to "write primarily about knowledge management", since I have the honour to be included here... Maybe there's a bit too much on music and shows on my blog lately and too little on KM, but it's my blog, my thinking out loud, my place - if you don't like it, you don't have to visit it!

The Sionna Festival 2006

2006-11-12T18:42:00.000+01:00

I went to the opening of the Sionna Festival last night. A welcome reception, followed by a concert of Ensemble Bhaktar, playing traditional and classical music from Afghanistan.

The music was exquisite. Yusuf Mahmoud playing tabla was fascinating, he energized the whole audience. John Baily was the one who introduced the ensemble, and said very little about himself.
We assumed he was Afghan himself, while the name Veronica Doubleday's name (his wife) sounded obviously European. Ok, we were sitting in the back and we couldn't see much - hearing was everything!

Back home, I went online to found out more. This is how I found out we heard John Baily himself playing dutar, and he was the one who introduced Micheál Ó Súilleabháin to ethnomusicology in Belfast years ago. Micheal mentioned this in his welcome speech, but the man was so modest that he probably avoided telling us his own name. Or we didn't hear it!

Anyhow, browsing the web brought me again a lot of background info I would have otherwise missed: John and Veronica spent many years in Afghanistan, studying Afghan music. She even wrote a book on her Afghan experience: Three Women of Herat. Veronica got to master the art of Afghan singing so well that she sounded as she was a native - we were wondering last night how good she was!

This makes me think I should go back to programming and put a bit more effort in learning Java. As one of my best informants said, when they go to war, journalists get a riffle. Maybe I should be able to help fixing a bug after all...

A guest with similar views

2006-11-09T00:42:00.000+01:00

We had a guest this week: Briony Oates from University of Teesside, Middlesbrough, UK visited the University of Limerick and gave two talks on Wednesday, one at Lero - the Irish Software Engineering Research Center (details here), and the other one at the PhD forum.

Briony's also teaching research methods to IS/CS students at Teesside, and she published a book at Sage recently: "Researching Information Systems and Computing".

The Lero talk suggested that Evidence-Based Practice, an approach gaining more and more support in healthcare, could be a possible way to do research in software development. In her talk, she showed the results of a survey: an impressive proportion of the research papers published in Software Engineering journals are proposing frameworks, models, and new methods, but it looks like there aren't many speaking about the effectiveness of all these models and frameworks in the long run. The situation looks a bit better in Information Systems journals, but still... And then the eternal question of SE research came up: why such a huge gap between theory and practice?!

We didn't find any answers, though. Being so close to software developers right now, I can realise they can't even think of reading research papers - they're so incredibly busy! And to be honest - we, the researchers, are writing for journals, threatened by the well-known "publish or perish"! If we would write for practitioners, we'd use a different language and a different approach, I think.

Back to Evidence-Based Practice, I think medicine has a huge advantage: everything HAS to be documented. And they have a unique unit of analysis: the patient (or the healthy person), while us we are looking at teams, roles, products, processes... We were talking not so long ago about Grudin's law and software developers having to document what they're doing ...

The Stuttgart Ballet

2006-11-06T00:40:00.000+01:00

Sometimes, the people you meet can make all the difference in the world, by pointing you to the right places and to the right events. I was put in touch with a lady from one of the companies I was going to visit, in order to help me with my travel arrangements. She was very nice and friendly, and she also recommended me to go and see The Lady of the Camellias at the Stuttgart Ballet.

I must confess I wasn't decided - I used to like ballet a lot ages ago, I had the chance to live nearby the Opera in my hometown and I was going there very often, but... ballet?! Hmmm...

While visiting the company that morning, I had the chance to meet that lady in person and she offered to book me a ticket on my credit card right away. And she did it! Oh, she was my good fairy - I would have definitely missed it otherwise, it was cumbersome enough to find the Opera in the dark, and I was, as usually, late...

It was a show I will remember my whole life - I laughed, I cried, it changed my whole perspective on dance and on telling a story through ballet. I guess what I saw in my young years was nothing like this...

Die Kameliendame is a very famous ballet - John Neumeier dedicated it in 1978 to Marcia Haydee. Chopin's music, the lights, the atmosphere in the opera - everything was special.

But the artists were absolutely outstanding! Jiri Jelinek danced in the role of Armand Duval, and Alicia Amatriain danced Marguerite Gautier. A beautiful picture found on the web here - I didn't feel like taking pictures at all....

It's interesting how your web browsing experience after an event like this can enhance your understanding of it... I even found a forum dedicated to Ballet Talk...

And a leaflet that was passed to me at the entrance says I could get a DVD with selections of some of Marcia Haydee's performances here. Hmm, this would make an excellent Christmas present!

Stuttgart in November

2006-11-04T12:13:00.000+01:00

Last time I've been here was for talking at a meeting of Buecherfrauen, more than two years ago. I remember it was very hot, and I had no time at all for looking around: arrived, delivered the talk, and had to leave.

This time, I was kind of forced;-) to also take a break - the incoming flight was on Wednesday, and I'm only leaving tomorrow - these are the Hapag-Lloyd flights! Last week was hectic, last week-end was hectic. I only slept 2h on Tuesday night, so Wednesday was a travel and dozing day - I fell in bed immediately after my arrival.

It was good to be back in Germany; as I grew up in a town heavily influenced by the German culture, to me Germany feels almost like home. I believe what I like the most is that things are predictable, and when you're surprised, it's because things exceed your expectations;-)

My German came back almost instantaneously - that was because I was hungry! And the German trains - oh, how I love them! Always on time, always reliable...

The hotel recommended by HLX is perfect - friendly, comfortable, affordable, and it even has a swimming pool in the garden(not for this time of the year!) and a wellness area in the basement( I just got back from there!). Free wi fi everywhere - I can check bahn.de to find out when the next U-Bahn leaves from the stop next to the hotel, I can find my way to any point - isn't this nice?!

I was here for work, and I'm very happy with the results. Talking to some of the German people who work together with my team on a daily basis was a kind of mind opener - when you get too close to something, you tend to forget the big picture... All that mutual knowledge these people share - and me, as an outsider who got inside, getting a glimpse of it!

There was a funny incident: one of the meetings was scheduled over lunch. At the canteen, the cashier had a look at my visitor badge and said hello in Romanian. We had a two-minute basic conversation, and afterwards my host asked me if we knew each other - no, she was just a country-fellow woman!

In another meeting, it took me more than 15 minutes to bring together what I knew about my interviewee - from our previous 4 months email exchange- with the real person in front of me. Not that the person didn't meet my expectations, but in a way I felt like the info was in different folders and I had to place it together. It was like realigning the two different silhouettes - I guess I've done this many times before, but it was the first time when I became aware of it!

Anyhow, visiting Germany again was a nice experience! A pity I couldn't visit my former colleagues, the time was too short, but I hope to be able to do it the next time!

ArtsElectric

2006-11-01T02:00:00.000+01:00

As I said in a previous post, I started teaching a module this semester. This morning, I got a phone call from my colleague Jurgen Simpson, telling me about a seminar and a performance taking place at the Daghdha space this afternoon. Great stuff for our students, who had the opportunity to get an idea (maybe for the first time) what's the use of what they are learning.

I went there myself for the evening concert. I didn't get any name while I was there, but I asked my friend Google when I got back home, and he told me everything:

Soundings: KK.Null

Tuesday, October 31. At Daghdha Space, Limerick, Ireland. Soundings presents KK.Null, escalation 746, and Tony Higgins. More information is available on the web.

I had the place and the date - what else did I need?! A bit more googling, and I found out who's who:

soundings - a performance series designed to open the senses to new forms of music, sound art, and media interaction;
Tony Higgins - a 23 year old composer from Galway City, Ireland. He has just completed a Master's in Music Technology at the University of Limerick, for which he wrote "I'll be there in ten minutes", for drum kit and tape. (might have been this the piece performed tonight!);
escalation 746 -escalation 746 is an association engaged in sonic attacks, art appropriation, and terminal documents. Performances are designed to detach segments from the audio spectrum in order to expose their form and the medium itself for examination. Starting in radiophonics, escalation 746 has explored performance art, music, soundtracks, phonography, electro-acoustics and other disciplines. The piece performed tonight was based on the well-known Nokia standard ringtone, and I found it extremely interesting!
KKNull alias KAZUYUKI KISHINO - born in Tokyo, Japan. Composer,guitarist, singer, mastermind of ZENI GEVA and electronic wizard. One of the top names in Japanese noise music and in a larger context, one of the great cult artists in experimental music since early 80's. It was obvious to me that he was good at what he's doing, but that doesn't mean I liked it. I guess I lack a lot of context knowledge, and even so... It has to do with the vibes, I feel like I can't attune myself to this frequency, it even makes specific points on my body ache...

The easy way out would be to say: I'm getting old, this is not my music, it's for who enjoys it, leave me alone! But I don't feel like this - I am curious, I'm ready to try , to learn ... I believe it's fantastic that sciences and arts can converge, marvelous things could come out of this... And I usually like loud music, I enjoy that tickling in my solar plexus, the only problem I have is with music hitting directly some sensitive points on my body and causing real pain...

At the end of the performance, one of my MMPT students came to me and told me full of pride that they went digital: they created a MySpace for their course and they plan to use it as a notice board! We talked about MySpace a few weeks ago, I'm glad they're experimenting!

Life in the field - continuation

2006-10-26T11:46:00.000+02:00

Yesterday it was a busy day and because I had to meet some old friends from Germany at 8pm, I decided to leave only at 7 and to take the bus directly to the city centre. I noticed that one of the fellows who was also travelling by bus was in a call conference for the last hour, and I said to myself: lucky me! I can leave, he can't! So I went out in the rain at 6:55 to wait for the bus. 3 more people were in the bus stop, and this made me think I didn't miss it!

The Bussicus Dublinius is one of the most unpredictable beasts I've met in my life. It comes and goes whenever it feels it's right, so the bus schedule is there purely for keeping your mind busy and make you run out like crazy when you think it's about to leave, just to spend another 20-40 min relaxing after a hard day's work by walking up and down...

This time, I had to wait no less than 70 min. Two buses arrived and turned back without stopping (it's the end of the bus route there!) At least I got two companions from the team I'm working with to comment on the bus predictability and talk about our frustration. When a school bus finally showed up and took us on board, we had been laughing for a while, so it didn't feel so bad anymore. Weird, isn't it?! When you get the chance to channel and share your frustration, it doesn't seem that bad anymore...
Today, I thought of filing in a complaint. On this forum? or on BusRage? Anyhow, I don't think it would make any difference!

But thinking of my young companions, who just started their job here a few months ago, I thought the situation was really serious. One of them told me he was on the bus 4h every day - that means he was getting home and going to sleep just to start again the next day early in the morning...

Life in the field

2006-10-25T14:10:00.001+02:00

Living the life of the people I'm studying is quite a challenge - sometimes I get so immersed in the problems that I forget about my real identity and I become one of them... Not the right thing to do for an ethnographer, but I can't wipe out my memory and forget about the times when I was a software developer myself... happy times!

I'm familiar with this environment, but I'm still perceived as a stranger; from time to time, people still introduce me to their colleagues with "we're her guinea pigs", even if now, I believe, they became aware we're not running any kind of weird experiment here.

I'm observing the day-to-day practices of a software development team, focusing on their collaboration with other people in remote places. And there's so much going on... Global Software Development ceased to be an abstract concept for me as I see it happening...

I have to make an effort now to abstract myself from what's happening, to take a step back and "to make the familiar strange". Looking for the origins of the "making the familiar strange, and the strange familiar"phrase , I landed on Alistair Cockburn's blog and consumed his findings. Google-style learning is not always efficient, but I love it!

My colleague also pointed me to this paper by Bell and Blythe, and I'm looking forward to reading it tonight!

Hmm... these were my after lunch reflections... According to the weekly lunch ritual, Wednesday is the day when "we" (see? I'm considering myself part of the team) are going to O'Brien's (where I had the chance to learn about "tripledeckers";-)

Back to work now!

Dublin CASCON'06

2006-10-23T18:22:00.000+02:00

Last week I attended the CASCON Dublin Symposium at the Dublin Software Laboratory of IBM. The event was organised in association with its bigger "sister", the Toronto CASCON, already at its 16th edition. This year's edition had a suggestive name: "Meeting of minds".

The keynote speaker here in Dublin was Prof.Mark Keane, the director of Science Foundation Ireland. For me, it was an excellent opportunity for getting a broad picture of research being done in Ireland: research centres, groups, topics, funding perspectives, and so on.

There were 3 papers presented in the morning, and 3 in the afternoon (very little compared to the Toronto CASCON, who went on for 4 days and included several tracks and workshops and a technology showcase). Two guests, one from Egypt and one from Sweden, gave an international dimension to the local event.

During the lunch break, a poster session gave us the chance to network with IBMers, colleagues from other universities and other participants. My team presented two posters, and we got some very interesting feedback on them. We all voted for choosing the "best poster", and Benoit Gaudin(and his colleagues) from University College Dublin got the award for a poster titled From Migrations to Population Concentration, based on some very interesting visualizations.

The video link with IBM Toronto worked (almost) without fault, and we were able to watch the keynote speech and the panel discussion going on there, and even to ask questions... It was such a nice feeling, to be part of that global research community and to participate in the Toronto event while sitting here in an auditorium at IBM in Dublin. I was happy to discover that someone blogged that event - here's the link.

The CASCON blog is aggregating posts from several participants' blogs; it almost feels like I've been there! I was thinking of it as an inspiration for setting up a conference blog for ECSCW'07 - we'll be hosting it in Limerick!

Going back to the CASCON blog today, I found a very interesting (and painfully true) reflection on CASCON (but it could apply to any other conference!), the incredible amount of enthusiasm and ideas they stir in us, and how these get killed by our inevitable return to our day-to-day lives!

No time to breathe...

2006-08-24T00:54:00.000+02:00

Lots of things happen... lots of things to work on... I don't do anything else than work, work, work... but vacation is 'round the corner... I can smell it!

A short update:

after almost 5 months of field studies at IBM, we're organising an internal workshop this month; actually two, for different target audiences; lots of work involved, but we hope for relevant feedback; in a way, I'm still a novice in doing this kind of field work, but I enjoy it a lot and I become more and more confident every day; today I fell on a paper by Dave Millen on "Rapid Ethnography" - exactly what I needed to read right now!
this week at UL, we're hosting a PyPy sprint - an excellent occasion to meet interesting people and to observe software development in a less common setting;
I'm looking forward to the Social Software workshop proposed by the ECKM this year; we were planning it for quite a while, but I wasn't sure it will happen in the end. David Gurteen and myself will be guiding the KM people in the Social Software wonderland - focusing on how KM researchers could benefit of using it. I started a wiki page for the conference participants at wikispaces, let's see what will be the adoption rate;-)
I still hope I will be able to send my entry for the new book proposed by Knowledgeboard after the Contactivity event in Londonon on time; I have my unconference model in mind, all I have to do is to write it down...
and let's not speak of deadlines... there are too many coming!

What else? Well, in-between there's a week of vacation by the sea, back in Romania.

I can't believe it's still summer there - here we had to give up the sandals and the short sleeves ... and the day is getting shorter every day! Not that I'd complain about - I just read in the local paper that Limerick could become a very popular tourist destination in the context of global warming: we would invite people here to cool down, when Spain and Italy and Greece become too hot!!!

Interesting job announcement

2006-08-18T18:26:00.000+02:00

The Open University is advertising an interesting position:
Research Fellow, Role of Blogs in Learning and Teaching

The Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Research Group is seeking a postdoctoral researcher to work on an e-learning project in the area of blogs. The project is jointly funded by the Faculty of Maths and Computing and the Virtual Learning Environment programme of the Open University. The research work will be carried out in close collaboration with industrial and academic collaborators.

Far from being just a fad, as some people predicted, blogs had become a common presence in our day-to-day lives. Their use in education gains ground, as we see.
Two years ago, this would have been my dream job. But not now... Anyone interested?!

"Rachmaninov by candlelight"

2006-07-29T03:38:00.000+02:00

Another late night concert: a magnificent Russian choir sang Rachmaninov's Vespers and the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom tonight at St.Mary's.

The name of the show wasn't a joke: actually, the two huge chandeliers with real candles (not fake ones!) of the Cathedral were used. The voices sounded astonishing in that space, the whole atmosphere was magic, but... I have never ever, since my arrival in Ireland, assisted to a performance with such a noisy and unrestless audience! Caughs, sneezes, feet moving on rough surfaces, chairs... For me, the music had something sacred (even if I only understood a few words, the original ritual was the Orthodox Christian one, which is so familiar to me!) and when the lady beside me touched me with her arm, I almost fainted. Another lady had a coughing crisis and finally decided to leave the Cathedral, but she came back and started again...

In the second half, I succeeded to focus on the music ... magic voices! I was transported so far by the flow of music, that I found it really difficult to come back when the applauses started. I wanted to stay in that extatic state for a few more minutes!
The conductor offered some additional pieces that pleased the audience maybe more than the main program - and the evening ended in ovations...

I was thinking again about my schoolmate who was struggling to understand my preference for classical music. He asked me how did I actually get to like it - and I remember answering: "by listening to it, again and again". Of course, it's difficult to listen to something you can't stand in the first place. But he went home, followed my advice, and after one week only, he came to tell me he began to enjoy some of the Beethoven's works.

My guess is that we need a minimum of affinity - and then it's a process of fine tuning - by listening to the piece again and again, you get to resonate with it, and once there, you start to enjoy its energy, its flow... you become one with the music! When we were in school, we were told that we have to learn to understand the music... I doubt it was about understanding... reasoning... brain... music is meant for the heart - you either feel it, or not!

Anyhow, wonderful evening!

Undeserved glory

2006-07-28T18:34:00.000+02:00

In the last few days, several friends congratulated me for the success of my colleagues. The benefits of being part of a department with such spectacular outputs:-)...

"We" made it into the 2nd page of the Irish Independent on Tuesday

This is what the press review said:

The paper ... says that passengers at Shannon Airport are flocking to a newly installed dolmen in the transit lounge. The "Shannon Portal" resembles a prehistoric stone but is in actual fact a futuristic installation that allows people to send e-postcards all over the world for free.

The project that gave birth to The Shannon portal is called Shared Worlds, and it's meant to bring technology in public places.

On the portal site, there's a gallery of postcards edited and sent by visitors , and you can vote for your preferate ones.

Here are some of my favs:

What about yours?

Wow! What a nice surprise:-)

2006-07-28T01:18:00.000+02:00

My last night's post got a lot of attention. I couldn't imagine there was anyone left on Earth keeping an eye on this blog, after all this silent period! I was away the whole day as I had to attend a Lero meeting in Dublin, and when I got back this evening, I couldn't believe my eyes when I opened my Inbox!

Thank you all for your kind words! They are a strong motivation for me to go on ... even if I still wonder what could be of interest...

This blog used to be my personal archive; my current duties include keeping a project archive. As my work = my life (almost!), and that information does not belong to me, I found myself somehow disorientated - what could I talk about? and why? What would be the point?!

It was quite an important shift from doing individual research on selected topics (somehow together with peers) - to becoming part of a research team that grew continually in the last few months... But I have the feeling that we've reached a stability point now.

My research domain also shifted ... and so did my personal life.

I've been in Ireland for almost 14 months now, and I continue to be fascinated by this country.
I can't avoid seeing its problems, but still... I wouldn't want to be anywhere else right now!

I'm afraid I'm not very coherent, I had a long day with more than five hours spent on the train...
They were not completely wasted, as I'm reading some very interesting stuff right now. I finished Ulrike Schultze's paper presenting an ethnography of knowledge work and I found it really instructive for what I'm doing right now, while Van Maanen's Tales from the Field was waiting its turn.

Anyhow, after that, I treated myself with an amazing concert: Anthony Marwood played Chausson's Concert in D for Violin, Piano and String Quartet in St.Mary's Cathedral (right around the corner from my place) as part of the MBNA Shannon International Music Festival. The night was really special - Limerick is such an oasis for classical music fans!

Long, long silence...

2006-07-27T01:42:00.000+02:00

I'm striving to understand what's happening to me, and why my apetite for blogging seems to have radically decreased. I guess it's because I'm changing, going through a transformation period, becoming somebody else... and I like this new person much better than the old me...

I know, it would have been interesting to document this transformation. But I didn't feel like...
I simply felt the need to be on my own for a while. Things are changing again now ... I'd like to reconnect to my peers, to lay a bridge between the old and the new "me"... to get my voice back!

Let's see if I am able to sustain this impulse by blogging regularly again!
I need a fresh start, and I should forget about the tens of unfinished drafts - they'll never get published!

"Take it easy" day...

2006-05-27T10:10:00.001+02:00

After 3 x 12h per day spent in the office, I decided to take a morning off and go to the final performance of the MA in Irish Traditional Dance. I really needed a break!

I had the chance to meet Catherine Foley, who's leading the programme, in several other occasions. And I've seen her students last December, performing on the same stage with "The Chieftains". I knew it was going to be worth it!
The performance took place in the Daghda space, an old church in St.John's Square that was transformed in a space for cultural events by a few enthusiasts.

Joelle Sheppard and Patrick Coyne, the two young students performing, were fantastic! Not only that they were excellent dancers, but it is pretty rare that you can see such a large spectrum of ideas communicated through dance!

There was Irish dancing on French cancan, Brazilian and jazz music. There were duets, solos and group dances. Although Joelle danced a solo from "Feet of Flames", "King of the Fairies" which was excellent, my preferate was a "Rhapsody of Squares and Boundaries", who tried to demonstrate how, through training, rules of particular activities become ingrained in an individual. We work very hard to acquire the skills of a profession, to become accepted in particular circles, we draw squares and boundaries around us to better comply with the requirements, and one day we discover ourselves emprisoned. You try to relax, but your foot continues to dance, you try to give up work, but can't live without the blue screen, and it becomes more and more difficult to get "out of the box".

In my lunch break, I went to a "Work-life balance" seminar on "disengagement". Part for myself, part thinking of my project, the high level of stress and the low numbers of women working in software development. The University organises one every month and the last I attended was on music therapy. This time, Sarah Moore started by asking our opinions on the total absence of men from the audience. Are their lives perfect? don't they feel a need for balancing their lives? I assumed they just didn't have time:-) (not that I'd be any better!)
The talk was about flow, play, and disengagement as a way of restauring the balance between Yin and Yang...

I guess we women tend to feel responsible for too many things. Our capacity of multitasking makes us think we can solve all the problems and keep everything under control. This might be our worse enemy, preventing us from focusing and getting into the flow when working. We simply don't turn the email and the phone off when we have to focus on something important, because we think we can deal with the interruptions and do our work. And... god forbids, something bad could happen at home and our beloved have to be able to reach us!

Men don't seem to give any thoughts to the content of the fridge at home or to the kid's running nose when working. But we are!

Looking back in time, I realise once more how lucky I am to be given this second chance to do a work I am passionate about after my kids became adults! I had some very hectic periods in my life, sometimes I even wonder how I survived the early 90's...

Munster red

2006-05-20T18:22:00.000+02:00

I was away for a few days, doing field studies. This is what I found in my Inbox when I got back to work:

"Turning Munster Red"

The Munster Rugby Supporters Club is asking the workplaces of Munster to become a sea of red the day before the Heineken Cup. In preparation for the big day in Cardiff the 19th of May is to be designated Munster Red Day.
All factories, shops, offices and schools are being asked to participate in the initiative by encouraging employees and pupils to wear the Munster colours to work or school. Some of the largest employers and schools throughout the province have already agreed to show their support for the Munster Rugby team by allowing employees to wear jerseys and red clothing.

Hmm... that explained why a lot of people in my department were wearing red that day!

On Saturday, I decided to go to the city center and join the crowd. Many of my colleagues said they will be there, the atmosphere was fantastic, and, the most important thing, MUNSTER WON THE CUP!

A few images taken in the hours before the game ... So that you can see how Munster red looks like!

Blogjects

2006-04-18T12:20:00.000+02:00

A paper by Julian Bleecker from USC (found via ZDNet blogs ) is dedicated to Networked Objects and "Cohabiting with Pigeons, Arphids and Aibos in the Internet of Things".

I especially liked what the author put on the title page (less orthodox, but extremely catchy!):

tag cloud:
spimes, spime, things, thing, lift06, ubiquitous computing, design, object, objects, rfid, arphid, arphids, pervasive networks, blogject workshop, near-field communication, nfc, web2.0, world 2.0

permalink:
Ever since this "blogjects" topic has started circulating, I've been asked lots of things, but two questions have come to the fore. First, why would objects want to just blog? Second, why would I care if objects "blog"?

"Objects that blog"?! I must admit I was a bit offended in the first place. Only we, humans, can blog, said my ego. But after reading more about these cute little blogjects, it started to make sense.
Bleeker describes them as having :

a sense of space combined with its ability to track where it has been,
knowledge of its encounters and previous experiences and
the ability to participate in an assertive way to social networks.

Hmm... Yesterday blawgs... today blogjects... Will we one day have a science called Blogology?!
Wow! Many people thought of this before - says Google...

Resouces mentioned at Contactivity...

2006-04-17T23:15:00.000+02:00

In different occasions, different people indicated names, book titles and Internet resources.
Here's my little inventory - with links:

Thomas A Stewart - The Wealth of Knowledge
Michael Stankosky - Creating the Discipline of Knowledge Management
Marcus Evans
Stanley Aronowitz - Science as Power
Steve Farber - The Radical Leap : A Personal Lesson in Extreme Leadership

Serendipity

2006-04-16T18:05:00.000+02:00

Googling the name of Michael Stankosky (and misspeling it!) I fall on Joy London's blawg, excited utterances. Hmm... I always thought that legal firms are a very fertile soil for KM initiatives, but had no idea there were so many bloggers in this field!

Contactivity Day 1 - morning session

2006-04-14T23:58:00.000+02:00

On Monday and Tuesday (April 10-11) I attended the Contactivity event organised by KnowledgeBoard and London Knowledge Network at University of Greenwich Business School.
I was looking forward to it, but until the last moment I wasn't sure if I will really make it, both budgets (time and money) being very tight.

And there I was, on a beautiful and fresh Monday morning in London, heading to Greenwich - Queen Anne's Building. Of course I forgot the printed indications on how to get there at home and had to find an Internet connection first!
I was there early, and I was happy to meet again some old friends, and to make the acquintance of some other people I had read about on the Contactivity wiki: Martin Roell, Peter Troxler, John Curran, Ron Dvir, Julie Fenwick.

We were invited in a big room with tables and I watched Martin trying to pick up a table - where he could learn the most, I assume. I sat down at an empty table because I found its label - Gamma- appealing. I found out later that a whole group of tables where labelled the same way, to give the chance of consolidating the results of the simulation. Soon, I was surrounded by 6 people I didn't meet before. It took less than 2 min when prompted to tell them all about myself. We had labels with our first names, but it was still difficult to figure out who was who. In another 2 min I found out that one of my neighbours was Dan Dixon from Headshift, and of course I had to show my enthusiasm about their concept and their work (I had the chance to meet and to listen to Lee Bryant at BlogTalk2). The other 2 guys in my team were Gary Bruton and Alan McKinnon. The other team at our table was formed of Corinne Floeck, Markus Lehne, and Mike Yeomans. We were to find out later that we were quite an interesting mix of academics, practitioners and consultants.

The simulation we were invited to participate in was a simulation on a project named Cayenne, designed by Celemi. Martyn Laycock made the introduction, mentioning the well-known study of Standish Group that made me so happy many years before, and explaining the rules of the simulation (I was ready to call it game, but it would be wrong to name it this way, we were explained). Why in particular I was happy that so many projects fail? Because I found out that mine was not the only one, and felt much more comfortable;-)

The guys in my team were very sharp, and they came up very quickly with a way to prioritise the decisions. We seemed to agree on most decisions. The thing I didn't agree with where the scoring cards - who can decide a decision is better than the other in a simulation?! It's all based on statistics, and statistics and real life do not get on well together. My mates seemed very interested, because the problems were the ones they were encountering in real life, and were very keen on seeing the results. Our scores looked incredibly well, but after aggregation with the other Gamma teams, we were average. It was good, because it made us think and talk and argue. Amazing how problem solving can bring complete strangers together in such a short time!

The next slot of time was dedicated to networking. Dr.T (Peter Troxler) and dr.W (Patricia Wolf) proposed a networking exercise. People were invited to find a peer they never met before, to find out everything about him/her in 2 min, and then each of the two was supposed to walk around the panels and, with their partner's needs in mind, to find presentations of people he/she should meet (and write down their partner's name next to it). The exercise was interesting, because it involved empathy, and it gave each person 2 pairs of eyes when looking for interesting people. You were there to find matches for your partner, but you couldn't avoid noticing interesting contacts for yourself.
Quite a couple of late birds (like me) didn't send their presentations to Ed Mitchell on time, so we had to spend time on re-writing our presentations. I was lucky to have my printed one in my bag. I talked to Peter Heisig from eureki, but probably because we were late and a bit stressed, we didn't succeed to do a good work - at least I had problems with finding people Peter should have met. Instead, I found quite a bunch of people I didn't want to miss, so I made my own list and even said hello to these folks, with the promise to talk more later. These were the names on my list: Lale Eidal (DNV) who's company is into GSD, Yvonne Buma, Anne Braithwaite, Corinna Floeck, Celso Flores, Sabine Gary, Jozefa Fawcett, Lawrence Clark (hm...I never met Lawrence though!).

I managed to identify most of these people, introduce myself and tell them we had to talk (sometimes also mentioning the topic). It worked almost perfect, because I found time to talk to almost each of them during the breaks or group activities.
I was thinking of a possible way to improve the exercise, and suggested that next time, we could find our pair online, exchange a few mails, start searching for contacts on the wiki, and come up with a 3-5 names list (and photos!) before the event. Some of the titles suggested for the presentation were a bit awkward: I am an expert in... I'm looking for expertise in... What should people know about me... They might work well for consultants, who learned to "sell" themselves...

Where did all this time go?!

2006-04-08T18:52:00.000+02:00

I'm sitting here and looking back and I can't really understand where does this time fly...

I came back from Vienna on St.Patrick's Day in the evening, after joining a group of Irish people in the morning for breakfast at ORF Kultur Cafe - Carl Corcoran broadcasted his Lyric Breakfast from there .

As I couldn't reach my friend who promised to host me, I had to spend the night on the Dublin airport - peaceful, warm and safe place.

A little bit of Internet surfing before falling asleep - much too expensive this Eircom wi fi! - and an early walk in the fresh Dublin morning, as the LUAS wasn't working yet at 6am.

Once at home, I sat down and started working on my paper for ICGSE '06. I had sent the abstract from Vienna, now I had a few more days to finish the paper. On Tuesday, as I couldn't see the light, I decided to give it up and go back to life. I told myself there will be other conferences, took a hot bath and left for the office. I had a few hours of clear conscience, listening to the wooshing sound of the deadline passing by. But then... I got an extension!

From that point in time on, things got out of control, and I went on and on, for long days and nights. Let me try and list a few of the events that followed:

GSD workshop on March 22, having as guest dr. Pamela Abbott, from UCD, who gave a talk on "Dimensions” of Distance in Offshore Outsourcing Arrangements: Exploring nearshore software outsourcing ventures;
Short paper submitted to the ICGSE: Knowledge-Related Group Activities in Global Software Development;
Presentation at NUI Galway - Godel seminars- on March 29: Social Software - What could it do for you? (an outline can be found here)
Presentation at DERI Galway on March 29 as well: Peopleware and Globalisation (Tom DeMarco's influence, couldn't help it;-)
Few other interesting meetings in Galway on that very day: I had the chance to talk to Doug Foxvog, Uldis Bojars and Knud Moeller at DERI, had lunch with prof. Brian Donnellan at NUIG and dinner with Ina O'Murchu, talking about possible future collaboration;
Two abstracts sent to BlogTalk reloaded on April 1 (yes, I was greedy - couldn't decide to give up any of the paper ideas): The Initiating Journey of a Researcher in the Land of Social Software, together with Ina O'Murchu, and Social Software Generated Content as Ground for Empirical Studies, on my own.
The visit of a British consultant, dr. Michael Hales from SPRU, who spent two days (3-4 April) with our group;
A lecture given to the Imedia students (April 5): Designing for Online Social Interaction
Participation in an expert seminar organised by the AIB Centre for Information and Knowledge Management- J.C.Spender presented his paper Managerial Practice:Shaping the Reasoning and Imagining of Others (same day, April 5).

Busy, busy, busy...if we add the internal meetings and the field visits to the industry...there was no time to breath!

An excellent book

2006-04-08T14:48:00.000+02:00

I just finished reading "The Deadline" by Tom deMarco, an excellent novel about project management. Here's a good review by Richard Mateosian, and the first chapter is offered for preview here.

A few words on the plot: Webster Tompkins, a systems manager who has just been laid off from a giant telecommunications company, is kidnapped by a charming spy and brought to the fictitious state of Morovia to organise its software development industry and put to work about 1500 software engineers who are supposed to re-produce six carefully chosen (already existing) software products in a two years period.

From Tompkins' perspective, the four most essential ingredients of management are:

people selection
task matching
motivation
team formation

- and he calls all the rest Administrivia.

Because he has too many people that have to be given some work to do, Tompkins decides to try a controlled experiment, running three parallel projects with teams of different sizes and using different methods. He envisages a sort of world’s first project management laboratory.

Tompkins is seconded by Belinda Binda -a bag lady who used to be the world’s greatest
project manager in her day, and who eventually recovers from her burn-out after embarking upon this experiment. She had also been kidnapped and offered Tompkins' position before, but she declined and found refuge on the Morovian beaches searching in containers.

Reading the book was a delight, I was looking forward to the evenings and to travel time when I was able to continue reading.

I particularly liked this conversation between Tompkins and Belinda Binda, where Belinda explains that management involves heart, gut, soul and nose.

The 'heady' leader can lead, but people won't follow. You can't do much about the heart you've got, and maybe you have to be born to it. However, there are people who grow into management ; they start awkward and become confident and eventually make wonderful managers.

The soul has to do with the fact that projects prosper to the extent that people learn to work together effectively. If they work entirely apart, a bunch of piece workers in different places who didn't even know each other, then soul wouldn't matter. Management would be a simple matter of coordinating their efforts. It would be an entirely mechanic process.
..the real world requires close, warm, and almost intimate interconnections between team members, and easy, effective interaction through the whole organization.

And Belinda emphasizes that the manager can't make this happen - he has to let it happen, to create an atmosphere where it can happen. If he's lucky, it does happen. That's what she calls building soul into the organization.

She also speaks about a team's need for a shared vision (could be a cult of quality work, the feeling of being an elite or simply integrity): ...the group desperately wants to be unified. The human creature has - built into its firmware - a need to be part of a community. And, in today's rather sterile modern world, there isn't much community to be had.

The scene is absolutely fantastic - a top manager getting advice from a bag lady in a Morovian park on soul and community;-)
And it relates to my current work - how to create this atmosphere where flow can actually happen ? From user-centred design to team-centred design - isn't this what CSCW is all about?!

Movies and the Klimt obsession

2006-03-17T00:39:00.000+01:00

Back home, reflecting upon my trip to Vienna while trying to kill some time on the Dublin airport (thanks eircom! only if your prices weren't that high!).

I think it was my 6th time in Vienna, and I got to know the city much better now. I guess you can't ever get bored there, there are always so many things going on!

What surprised me was the whole obsession ( or marketing campaign?!) around Klimt and Schiele. I was asking myself: was I completely blind the other times I went there, and the talk I had with a friend recently made me more receptive to Klimt's work and personality - or there's something special about Klimt right now?!

I heard about the new Klimt movie, there were posters all over the place - could the launch of the movie be the cause?! That took me to IMDb, in an attempt to find out the release date - it's already out - but only in Austria for the moment. Doing some more reading around, I found out it was a nice chance to become an extra if you were in Vienna at the right time - and that reminded me of the IDC survey - no, I've never been an extra!

We went to visit the Hundertwasser House and Village - there were reproductions of Klimt's paintings for sale in every imaginable shape - posters, scarfs, T-shirts, calendars, tin boxes.

We heard that recently Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie came to Vienna to see the Schiele exhibition at Albertina. No wonder - the selection was fabulous, totally focused on the erotic facet of Schiele and on the anthroposophic influences on his work. I've never seen so many people in an exhibition before - a huge crowd (speaking Hungarian, German, Italian, English and Japanese and god knows what other languages) was wandering around...

I thought a lot about the ways the context can influence the "knowing" process. We build on previous experience, on both likes and dislikes... But the capacity to absorb new knowledge is influenced by so many factors! Weather, mood, company...

I'll probably be obsessed with Klimt and Schiele for a while... Anyhow, I have to see the movie!

Why did I miss it in Vienna?! Well, because of my missy who couldn't understand a word because it was doubled in German! And for the same reason, we skipped the Farun Harocki retrospective at the Film Museum.

Questioning my own theory...

2006-03-16T01:35:00.000+01:00

I'm in Vienna for a short vacation with my daughter. I was supposed to be online, both for doing some urgent work, and for blogging - after all, I'm on vacation, and I'm supposed to do whatever I love to.

Well, the Internet connection of the friend who's hosting me refuses to work. It worked at my arrival on my own laptop - not anymore! In situations like this, I used to say it wasn't meant to - now I started doubting about my own theory... What's the use of a vacation if you can't do the things you like?! Weather is bad - grey skies and -6 to -8, I'm really looking forward to landing back in Dublin on St.Patrick's Day!

We visited the MUMOK yesterday, and Albertina today - a brilliant Egon Schiele exhibition!
I'd really like to see the Leopold Museum tomorrow, there's a Klimt-Schiele-Kokoschka exhibition, but I have no idea if I can convince my daughter to bear with me!

I'll try chasing some Vienna wi-fi hotspots ...maybe.

Anyhow, I hope to be back here in October, for BlogTalk reloaded...

Learning about Online Facilitation

2006-02-13T20:08:00.000+01:00

I'm far behind with my blogging - and there are so many exciting things happening in my life!

This afternoon I had the chance to participate in an interactive session on the Elluminate platform (oh, I should mention first that I'm taking Choconancy's Facilitating Online Workshop).

It was a really "illuminating" experience, with Fernanda Ibarra as facilitator. Instead of a chair, I got a yoga mat (how could she guess my preference for sitting on the floor?!)

Burn's Day

2006-01-25T21:58:00.000+01:00

Any idea what day is today? Burns Day, aka the anniversary of Robert Burns , famous Scottish poet, author of Auld Lang Syne.
And this is what Google brought me:

How would you like to get a pudding that has been cooked in a sheep's stomach? Ugh! You say. Actually it's considered a tasty treat among the Scots. You'll certainly have a chance to try some if you ever get the opportunity to go to a party to celebrate the birthday of Robert Burns, Scotland's national poet. Every January 25, many people in Scotland celebrate this event in a rather befitting way.

Among Burn's many poems is one called "To a Haggis," in which he describes the dish as that "Great chieftain O' the puddin'-race." Naturally, haggis must be served at the party. Haggis tastes slightly like hash. It is made from the heart, liver and lungs of a sheep. These organs are finely chopped and mixed with toasted oatmeal, onions, and seasonings. Then everything is boiled in a bag made from the sheep's stomach.
While the haggis is ready to be served, a man marches into the dining room playing a bagpipe. Behind him comes another man, elegantly carrying the haggis on a tray. The appearance of the famed pudding causes the crowd to cheer... (more here)

Wikipedia adopts a more serious tone:

A Burns Supper is a celebration of the life and poetry of the poet Robert Burns, author of the version of the Scots song Auld Lang Syne, which is generally sung at Hogmanay and other New Year celebrations around the English-speaking world. The suppers are normally held on or near the poet's birthday, January 25, sometimes known as Burns Night, although they may in principle be held at any time of the year.

Burns suppers are most common in Scotland (and also in Russia, where nationally televised Burns nights are held in the Kremlin) but they occur wherever there are Burns clubs, expatriate Scots, or indeed lovers of Burns' poetry.

Now that's a nice way to celebrate a poet! We're bringing flowers at the statues of our Romanian national poet, Mihai Eminescu, both at his birth and at his death anniversary (he died very young!) and sometimes people are reciting his poems, but having a meal together... and a special dish to serve... and a special toast... that's a completely different thing!

Heard about this yesterday on the radio (RTE Lyric FM, my favourite program), after having a minor incident with my bike on the way back home ( a car bumped into me when sliding back, but no serious harm was done on either side;-)

And I have something to celebrate myself: the day when my Internet connection came back into senses and decided I deserve to be allowed to post on my blog! Cheers!

A community is like a tissue

2006-01-24T14:07:00.000+01:00

Wonderful quote in today's digest of the com-prac Yahoo list, sent by Rosanna Tarsiero:

"A community is like a tissue: it will "create itself", whether you are there or not, but if you do your job you will make it easier (facilitation comes etymologically from the Latin word "facile" that is, in fact, EASY.)"

My beloved ISP

2006-01-16T14:16:00.000+01:00

This blog post started as a message to my ISP. I was so furious I could have killed someone!
Not only that their new firewall installed at the end of December prevented me from posting both on my blogs, and on any other site, but even sending mail via Gmail and my email client was impossible!

I wrote to them several times. Nobody seemed to care. There was no answer at all. A wall would have been more receptive!

I live in a brand new residence, and the broadband (and wireless!) Internet connection is included in my rent. That means I don't have a contract with the ISP myself, and I'm not even suppose to know what's the name of this company.

I had the same problem from August till October, and because I was the only one complaining, they put the blame on my computer: You must have a virus or something!
And then it was up and down, depending on the firewall experiments they were running!

The ISP company is specialised in providing services to complexes - Internet, telephone, CATV. Looks like their life is very comfortable - there's no costumer to deal with - people complain - they pretend not to hear - and they can get through with it.

They wired the building so well, that 2 months after moving in, when I had a Norvegian visitor, I discovered that in the main bedroom, I had a hole in the wall instead of the Internet plug.
Of course I announced the administrator. And of course it took 4 months to have it fixed.

Sometimes, the wireless stops working on week-ends - do they unplug it when they leave for the week-end?!

Yes, the Internet connection was kind of working - but read-only!!!
Now let's imagine that the police comes to your place and says they'll have to put you in jail because someone could attack you. Would you stay in jail, or would you prefer to hire a bodyguard?!

I could do very well without a firewall that prevents me of answering to the outside world. I'm a big girl, I know how to protect my computer myself!

Not even the read-only mode is not working properly anymore - my fingers hurt because of the
number of times I have to hit Try again!

Now look what these IMedia guys say on their web site:
"We provide full broadband internet access with complete internet security
through state-of-the art Firewalls that protect complexes from the hazards
of the internet. We manage internet usage per user by evenly distributing
bandwidth throughout the complex. " Phbt!!!

I especially like this blank case study: Maritana Gate Apartments Section 23, with the picture of my apartment block on it. The address is, of course, from another Irish town!

I am fed up, gentlemen!

Update: this text was kept on my Desktop waiting for the day when I'll get my voice back.
Guess what worked in the end? A friend taught me to call the landlord and to refuse to pay my rent until the quality of the Internet connection is back to "normal"! In a few hours, the problem was solved!

In the New Year...

2006-01-04T16:00:00.000+01:00

In the New Year, may your right hand always be stretched out in friendship but never in want!

I found this Irish toast, and I liked it a lot...

Today is Women's Christmas (Nollaig na mBan in Irish)- I heard it on the radio and asked a few people what was this tradition. In the end, Wikipedia told me: Irish men are taking on all the household duties on this day and give their spouses a day off! Very nice of them;-)

I went to a SQRL lecture today: Spencer Smith, from McMaster University, Canada , talked about the relationship between Computer Science and Software Engineering: "Is Computer Science to Software Engineering as Physics is to Civil Engineering?"

The same old debate: is Software Engineering real engineering at all?!

Went back and checked Wikipedia again:

"The term software engineering was used occasionally in the late 1950s and early 1960s, though some argue that software engineering was coined by F.L. Bauer. It was popularized by the 1968 NATO Software Engineering Conference held in Garmisch, Germany, and has been in widespread use since."

A label was applied, probably with the intent of introducing a more structured approach to an emmergent domain (or to sell it better?!)
In any case, rivers of ink have flown ever since - both pro and con...

Update: Browsing through the podcasts from IT Conversations I've been listening to last year, I located Alistair Cockburn's interview on Agile Software Development who also mentioned this issue:

"Doug Kaye: How about the engineering metaphor? In what ways is software development like engineering or not like engineering?

Alistair Cockburn: Well, here’s the thing that was a surprise to me. Well, I did, again, two things. I looked at the history of the term “software engineering,” where it came from, and then I had to look at the term “engineering” itself and what does that mean. And it came around full circle in an odd way that engineering itself is to a very large extent also a cooperative game of invention and communication. So everything I said just now about developing software applies also to pretty much any engineering project, with the possible exception of bridge building, which is so candid in the books that you look stuff up, look up all the answers.

But in the history of these things as I chased it down, after the Second World War, engineering took an odd turn. And as the reading came to me that I got was after the Second Word War, there was a “discipline envy,” as we as we might call it, of applied physics. So, applied physics had done great things in the Second World War, we got atomic bombs, we got missiles, we got all that kind of stuff, all based on heavy application of math and a priori in-advanced thinking and design. And engineering got this little envy of this other discipline that we saw an increase in the amount of applied mathematics being shoved into the engineering curriculum at the major colleges after the Second World War.

In 1967, the Dean of Engineering at Harvard wrote up a thing where he said, “I think we’ve gone too far. We’ve lost the art aspect, the contact aspect.” Engineering is very sensitive to people having contact with the materials and having a deep, visceral, personal understanding of the behavior of the material they’re working with, whether it’s construction or electricity or whatever it could be, and was advocating a return. But the problem being that in the academic tradition that was building up at the time, the practitioners were getting devalued and the theoreticians were getting more valued.

Now then, I jump to the next thing. In 1968 there was this NATO conference on software engineering. And when you read the preface to that -- you can find it online -- in the preface, it says, “We wanted to come up with a provocative term, and so we chose this term “software engineering” as a provocative term.” That was a big shock to me when I read it because I think, like most people, they assumed that somebody had said… there was reason to believe that software development is a branch of engineering, but, in fact, what these people were saying is, “We don’t like the state that software development is, so we will throw out this word “engineering” and suggest that it should be like engineering and see what goes from there.”

So they had a big impact, but if you read through their description, they didn't understand what engineering was. They were thinking of engineering as being lots of a priori modelling, lots of math, and all of that stuff. So they were buying in to the face that had been put on engineering, not that it was true, but the public face that had been put on engineering. If you’re inside the same conference where they interview each other and you look at what they do, when they say what works, you’ll find, “Put ten people in a room, give them lots of face to face, make sure there’s a filing cabinet, watch who uses the filing cabinets, gossip is good because it helps pass information around.” All the stuff that I write about in “Agile Software Development” put inside this cooperative game is right there under everyone's noses when they are doing individual personal experiences and recommendations. And then you’ll find them throwing in a sentence out of the blue which is like, “Ah! We build software these days like the Wright brothers built airplanes; just build it, throw it of a cliff and see if it survives the crash,” which is wrong because the Wright brothers, they invented the wind tunnel basically, and they made tables of lifts and stuff, so they were doing real engineering.

So the people who are coining the phase “software engineering” didn't understand engineering. It wasn’t a deduced term; it was a provocative term, in their own words. And so we’ve now come in a sense to fully believe the face value, the false face, that these guys falsely put on engineering.

So it comes around full circle when you look at it back again; there’s a lot of similarity between software development and engineering, but not the obvious one. It’s that they’re both examples of cooperative games of invention and communication."

On knowledge and knowing

2005-12-19T00:44:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I had the chance to listen to Handel's Messiah in a live performance. The Limerick Choral Union and Orchestra performed at the University Concert Hall (which became a sort of home to me lately - it's 100 m from my office - so to speak, in our yard!)
And as always, the live experience was very different from I knew from the several Messiah interpretations I've been listening to through the years. There were times when I used to play the CD several times a day, as a background for my work, and I never got bored of it.

In the morning, I did some preparatory reading and found out with astonishment that Messiah was first performed in Ireland - "in 1742, at a charity concert on Fishamble Street in Dublin's Temple Bar district"(Wikipedia). I might have read this before, but probably didn't pay attention, Dublin was just another city with no significance to me.

And this is the explanation:

Messiah was composed at Handel's usual quick speed, but was premiered a year later in Dublin without Jennens's involvement. Handel appears to have been reluctant to present such a sacred subject matter in a London theatre, which seems wise considering the Bishop of London's outrage in 1732 when cathedral choristers had sung in Esther. The theatre, and Handel's music, were still perceived by many ecclesiastics as profane and subversive. Even Dean Jonathan Swift, a cranky old man with Gulliver's Travels long behind him, almost prevented the Dublin performance by threatening to forbid singers from St. Patrick's Cathedral to take part. Swift relented, but the contention Messiah aroused was still considerable enough to persuade Handel that the London premiere, a year later, should be advertised under the title "A Sacred Oratorio", thus avoiding any charge of blasphemy. (Source: gfhandel.org)

The performance last night was memorable. No, it didn't go perfectly - there were a few hiccups. But the communion of the people in the concert hall made it memorable. I was surrounded by a big group who all knew each other (family or perhaps neighbours). Many of the people in the audience were there because they knew someone in the choir or in the orchestra.

Wikipedia also told me that:

In many parts of the world, it is the accepted practice for the audience to stand for this section during a performance. Tradition has it that on first hearing the chorus, King George II rose to his feet, which required everyone attending the concert to stand as well, and it became the custom ever since. To display due respect, the custom of the time called for people to stand whenever royalty or other authorities stood, including their entry and exit. Therefore, as the Hallelujah Chorus proclaims Jesus' entry into the physical world, King George II was inspired to stand to recognize the presence of Royalty.

and I was wondering if this will happen here. There was a 10 seconds hesitation, but after that everyone stand up. The feeling was overwhelming, some of the people in the audience were singing along. I can't tell how much of it was based on religious beliefs and how much on a long lived Christmas habit, but it impressed me deeply.

Again, the interplay between knowledge and knowing became very obvious to me (I am probably more than obsessed with John Seely Brown's Bridging Epistemologies!).

Without the previous knowledge I had about Handel's Messiah, probably I wouldn't have been there on Saturday night. The new knowledge I acquired that morning helped me, but only as a prelude to the live experience. And then being there, witnessing the performance, revived both my musical memories and everything I knew about the work. It also added some local flavor; the mayor of Limerick prefaced the event with a short speech on the contribution of the Limerick Choral Union & Orchestra to the artistic life through the years (and didn't forget to mention that his mother was a member of the choir!).

Nothing compares to the "knowing" process - making sense of all the accumulated knowledge, valuing what you know, and acquiring new knowledge. And yes, listening to a record at home can be a good experience - sometimes. But the act of "knowing" in interaction with others is without any doubt better!

What's going on

2005-12-02T17:53:00.000+01:00

The CONVIVIO Workshop - Understanding public spaces: exploring methods was held this week in Killaloe, at the Lakeside Hotel. My colleague Parag Deshpande, an Indian architect working on his PhD in the IDC, was in charge with the organisation.

I was asked if I could host one of the participants, and this is how I got the chance to meet Mirjam Struppek, a German freelancer who's running Interactionfield and who was one of the organisers of the Urban Screens conference in Amsterdam this autumn. Not only that Mirjam studied and worked in Kaiserslautern for a number of years, but we discovered we shared a lot of interests like digital graffitti, Wikipedia, social networks and so on.

One hour after her arrival, we both switched on our computers on the kitchen table and spent a few hours exchanging links and tracking concepts.
This is how I discovered Fibreculture , the activity of Geert Lovink, with whom Mirjam collaborates, and his Principle of Notworking.

I couldn't attend the workshop on Thursday, but went there on Friday, for the second day.
Amazing weather, it was a sort of Indian Summer (in December!) and the surroundings were breathtaking beautiful.

Briggite Bundesen from Copenhagen spoke about using literature and music for analysing the rythm of suburban areas.
My colleague Marylin Lennon presented a project realised by the iMedia students for the Colbert train station in Limerick in 2003- BIN-IT (moving and talking litter bins!) - not only the idea and the illustrations presented were very appealing, but also the methods used for developing this project.

The most interesting part of the day was the discussion that followed. Just a few of the topics:

How can researchers from different backgrounds negotiate meanings? (some speak in words, some other in images, and others use sounds)
What do we mean by public spaces? A supermarket or a cinema are not public spaces, they are privately owned. What's the opposite of public?
People are the ones who give meaning to spaces - the boundaries are redefined dynamically;
What is the role of IT in public spaces? (few of my bullet points here: geotagging, plazes, geotagged photos, music, bookmarks, blogs, forums, tribes, meetups, craigslists)
Why physical public domains are so important? What if we'd move them on the Internet?

I wish I'd had more time to detail these ideas. But...

Parallels...

2005-12-01T18:10:00.000+01:00

I'm reading an "oral history"- actually a 2003 interview with Irene Greif, the one who back in 1984 coined the CSCW term, together with Cashman.

And I can see myself discovering Lotus 1-2-3 back in 1990, after the arrival of the first PCs in Romania, printing help screens in order to learn how to use the commands, and teaching them to my colleagues a few months after. I remember my enthusiasm when I first discovered the spreadsheets- and how a lot of applications came into my mind instantaneously - my enthusiasm was overwhelming, I succeeded to contaminate our accountants who gave up their old accounting software which was anyhow outdated.

And then my spying around Lotus Notes - I read about it, and I tried to gain access to Cooper &Lybrand in Bucharest - the only company who I knew it was using it... couldn't make it...

I had to wait till my arrival at Henri Tudor in Luxembourg to make this experience...

And all the collaboration issues Irene is mentioning- I know them so well, I've been there so often...

A few ideas from the interview:
When it comes to "How to do technology transfer?", she says there's no verified way that works, and gives a few examples of what did work in the past for her:
- telling people outside the company - and getting it told back by industry analists;
- building a case - this is what they did to convince the company about the need for synchronuous communication- and she mentions the SameTime Manifesto

And when she's questionned about how she found her life balance:
"the main thing I kind of figured out over the years is that you can't...I can't necessarily have balance at every given moment in my life.
...
You have to stop every once in a while and reassess and maybe shift the balance."

Reassess...shift... we all need it once in a while!

Another long blogging break...

2005-12-01T17:02:00.000+01:00

I keep on lecturing people that blogs are like Tamagotchi, you have to write regularly in order to keep them alive, and I am the first not to follow what I am preaching!

I guess I have to overcome two major mental obstacles:
- that even if it's fun and I like doing it, blogging is not a distraction, it is part of my work and I don't have to experience any guilt when I feel like blogging;
- I don't have to persevere in postponing to blog about one topic until I fulfill my self-imposed duty of finishing an older draft - this strategy won't take me anywhere!

After I left my parents' home to go to the university in the capital city, expecting to get liberated from all the strict rules they were imposing on me, I discovered with astonishment that I was re-inforcing those rules on myself more severely than my parents used to do it.

Old habits die hard - and it looks like I can't prevent the history from repeating itself. My current position gives me all the freedom I could have ever dreamed of, and - probably because no one else is imposing me anything - here I am making new stupid rules for myself!

Well, lots of things happened since my last post. I missed the Social Computing seminar at Oxford, but then I also missed the TechCamp in Dublin because of a bad flu.

I was invited to give a lecture on Social Software at Trinity College in Dublin at the end of October - oh, my, oh my! what a Cinderella feeling I had entering the main gate at Trinity! I used to dream that place night and day back in 2000, when my paper got accepted at the IS/IT Evaluation Conference but unfortunately I couldn't find the funding to attend!
Teaching at Trinity - nice experience, bright students, impressive atmosphere! When I asked if they ever tried to contribute to the Wikipedia, the students pointed me to this article;-)

Then I decided to skip the Fringe at KCC Europe - too much work to do, nobody was able to tell me who else was going there, the knowledgenetworker wiki page was last updated in July. It sounded to me like a silence conspiration - or maybe I was looking for excuses?! I'm sorry I missed it now, I feel kind of disconnected from the KM community. And I still wonder why so few people blogged about!

I started a new blog at elgg - this is why - trying to support a bunch of young people who really deserve it. Time is never enough, my involvment in that project is not the one I'd wanted it to be, but I still hope it will make a difference...

Then I had to travel to Romania, for the last meeting in the Pellea project, the one who provided me with the chance to organise that online blogging course in Romanian last year. The time was short, the weather changing from Indian summer to snow and frost, and there was no way to meet everyone and to do all the work I planned.

On the way back, a short break in Amsterdam - beautiful city, lots of hidden treasures, magic places like this one, I'll be always happy to go back there. A few misadventures in restaurants ( I was served a "vegetable soup" that proved to contain a big piece of meat, 2 1/2 h spent waiting for one pancake), but the biggest surprise was reserved for the Dublin airport at my return.

The immigration officer told me I am not allowed to enter Ireland, because I lack a visa. A 24kg suitcase, a sore throat and 10 days of travel behind, this was the last thing I needed. I tried to explain no one asked for a visa when I came back from Frankfurt, I showed him my residence card, and I was pretty sure I was right. In the end, I proved to be wrong, the documents I have by now only allow me to stay in Ireland, but not to travel back and forth.

So this is the end of travel for this year - no more 's-Hertogenbosch for the final meeting of the PACE project. A pity - I would have loved to participate in the conference organised on this occasion and say good-bye to the partners I worked with in the last 2 1/2 years!

But...you can't have them all, isn't it?!

I wish I could go...

2005-10-06T20:05:00.000+02:00

Tomorrow at Oxford, the seminar on "Social Computing & The Organisation".
Sounds like a great event! Let's keep an eye on it - in case Piers Young will find the time to blog it!
Unfortunately, I still don't have a British visa.

But I'm looking forward to next week's TechCamp in Dublin!

Interesting papers at the ECKM

2005-09-26T15:36:00.000+02:00

Some of the presentations I went to:

An Answer Shared is a Problem Solved: Encouraging a Knowledge Sharing Culture in the NHS- Caroline De Brún , National Knowledge Service, Oxford, UK - very interesting case from the medical field - "Clinical KM" - there's a lot of information accumulated in time in that particular field. An interesting detail: in the UK,
Her project also started a blog , and this is an interesting resource she mentioned: you can't see very often people sharing stories on what went wrong!

Knowledge management strategies of software development organisations- Feher Peter, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary

The Knowledge Management Strategy of Agile Software Development-Wendorff Peter ASSET GmbH, Oberhausen, Germany and Dace Apshvalka Riga Technical University, Latvia

Promoting people-focused knowledge management in the engineering industry: The case of IDOM - Aramburu Nekane and Josune Saenz, University of Deusto, San Sebastian, Spain
- almost incredible story of a company (IDOM in Bilbao, Spain) that seems to value more the individual development needs of its employees than profit!

Josune presented a quite impressive fragment from the farewell letter written by the company founder, Rafael Escola, when he retired, which I'd like to reproduce here:

"Keep the trust each of you now has forever. Nobody should even imagine that another person would maintain a less than noble attitude towards him or her. Even less so in the case of the managers who one must always believe will wish the best for each other and who will always say exactly what they mean rather than something else. They must really feel like that and, furthermore, look the part … So far, this climate of trust in IDOM has been incomparable to any we see in other environments; as long as you preserve it, you will continue to form work teams that provide engineering services efficiently to the extent that you will have no competitors. At the present time, unity is of vital importance: how inappropriate it would be today to lose this value owing to the bad luck or bad temper of but a few! I don’t want to think of a group of individuals from IDOM losing a customer who had sought us out, having seen our unity. Yet this fact of being vital is not the most important reason for not losing this value, the true crux of the matter lies in the fact that without it there can be no friendship among us or a worthwhile working environment."

It made me think that after all, we might see in practice more illustrations of what Ton once said: " Value is in the relationships, organisations are transactions along those relations."

Coordination mechanisms for knowledge work: A case study-Walsh John, University of Limerick, Ireland
My team is doing some work on coordination too, and finding someone here at UL interested in the same topic was quite a surprise!

Knowledge creation in groups: The value of cognitive diversity, transactive memory, and openmindedness norms- Rebecca Mitchell, University of Sydney, Australia
Again, in our project we are looking at group knowledge - I found a few interesteng connections!

Narratives of knowledge - Beyond the tacit and explicit- Williams Roy, University of Portsmouth, UK

Communicative action in intellectual capital creation: An empirical test - O'Donnell David, Intellectual Capital Research Institute of Ireland
- based on Juergen Habermas' theory; I need to do more reading in this direction!

SWITCH ON - Semantic Web Integration Through Converging Hybrid Ontologies- Sandra Moffett and Martin Doherty, University of Ulster, Ireland
- interesting survey on key knowledge factors; the way the macro-environment and the organisational /internal technical climate influence informational, technical and personal capabilities within the organisation; few links provided by Sandra: the On-to-Knowledge project , Semantic Edge.

I missed some other interesting ones, because of another conference taking place at UL on the 9th of September, CALIBRE.

I had the chance to read them in the proceedings, but still... I wish I had been there...

An integrated approach to knowledge management strategy
McGrath Fergal, Rebecca Purcell, Catherine Parkes and John McCarthy, University of
Limerick, Ireland
- Their research focused on the impact produced by the perception and understanding of IT Professionals on the nature and roles of KMS deployed in that organisation.

Unitas - An Integrated Approach To Knowledge Management Strategy-
Rebecca Purcell and Fergal McGrath, University of Limerick, Ireland
- sensible approach, based on the balance between codification and personalisation strategies, planning to bring together:
- Knowledge and Knowing
- Subjective and Objective views of knowledge
- Epistemology of practice and possession
- Exploitation and Exploration
- Organisational knowing and Organisational learning
They did an empirical study on high technology firms engaged in R&D in Ireland.

Inter-organisational collaboration; A social network analysis approach -Whelan Eoin and Brian Donnellan, National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland

Knowledge Discovery from unstructured data -Balasubramaniam G and R Suresh, Institute for Financial Management & Research (IFMR), Chennai, India

Managing project and process knowlede in a pan european initiative - Hessami Ali and Kurt Andersen, Atkinsglobal, London, UK

Larry Prusak's keynote speech

2005-09-21T22:07:00.000+02:00

I tried to make a podcast and I only took a few notes - unfortunately the result was of very low quality, I couldn't use it at all.

Here are just a few ideas from Larry Prusak's speech:

Before - you could earn a living from making things; today - the cousins of knowledge - e.g. entertainment, design, consulting, tourism - become more and more important.

There was a study in the Economic Review showing that 28% of the US GNP was based on persuasion (encompassing marketing, public relations, lawyers, marriage counselors, ministers etc ).
Persuasion is, after all, a form of knowledge (this reminded me of the lab at Stanford!)

KM will never go away. It's not new, and it won't disappear, no matter how we call it.

KM&learning -have both a theory and a practice level.

In 1990, Tom Davenport & Larry Prusak were advocating that talking to a knowledgeable person is usually preferred to reading.

In a paper written together with Robb Cross (I assume he was talking about “The people who make organizations stop - or go”), they showed that people talk 14 times more than they read.
Human beings tend to accept knowledge easier when it is alive - acquired through interaction.

In order to make people confident in KM, you need cases - stories of success. There are already several famous cases that increased the public awareness on what managing knowledge means: BP, Xerox, World Bank, Mc Kinsey.

Larry's advice: write stories, get them published and legitimized.That means printed in business magazines like The Economist and FT, not on the web.

Management is not a science.

Management was mainly based on the command & control (& fear) mechanism (with the most successful managers in the history being the military, and the Roman Catholic Church).

This model was ok for managing land, labour and capital, but it doesn't work for knowledge - if you try to use this model on knowledge organizations - people just walk out!

"Technology alone, per se, doesn't change the behaviour".

The famous study of Wanda Orlikowski from MIT spoke about "farmers and hunters", and Lotus Notes being a farming tool given to hunters.

Most people are individualistic; but knowledge is not individual, knowledge is profoundly social;
there is no such thing as individualistic knowledge.

The unit of analysis has to become the group - not the individual, not the organization.
The group can be a university, a community or a country, a CoP or a network.
The ideal size of the group ranges from 50-300 people - they can share trust, stories.

Companies like SAP and Microsoft thought: wire up the enterprise and you will control it. It proved false.

We witness today the rise of the social capital.
In the last 10 years, at least 20 books were published on trust.
The anglo-american culture is individualistic, and knowledge is sticky.

Trust lowers the transaction cost.
How do you create trust? By modelling an adaptation. Transparency,charisma.
Trust is asymmetric - it's enough to make one single mistake, and you lost it.

Social norms are as important as trust.

Future directions for KM research:
1. Space - the role of various types of space: physical, cognitive, social;
(I couldn't stop from checking Wikipedia on Social Space !)
- knowledge is a local phenomenon - and now organisations have to manage it globally;
- knowledge is local, sticky, intextual.

2. Measurement - how can one measure knowledge productivity? We tend to measure what can be measured - and most of the time this proves useless.

3. The perspective of learning - training inside the organisations will have to evolve; we still train people like you'd train a dog.
The way people learn involve emotions; how could organisations adopt a substantial second loop deep learning?

Note: this is my perspective on what Larry Prusak said. I might have distorted things without intention. Feel free to comment!

My own paper presented at the ECKM

2005-09-21T14:48:00.000+02:00

I always wondered how do the organisers always succeed to match my paper with other related ones - it happenned every time I attended the ECKM. This time, the panel included three papers:

Knowledge management strategies of software development organisations- Feher Peter, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary
The Knowledge Management Strategy of Agile Software Development-Wendorff Peter ASSET GmbH, Oberhausen, Germany and Dace Apshvalka Riga Technical University, Latvia
At the crossroads of knowledge management with social software - my own!

and was chaired by Tiit Elenurm, who did a very good job - he tried to make the session more interactive and asked the participants to make remarks and formulate questions on transparencies he handed out. (Later on, in a discussion, Heather spoke about a session chair who googled the names on the panel, and was able to give a proper introduction to the speakers. I thought of a few "chairing guidelines" for next year...)

Both Peters were old acquaintances - I met Peter Feher at several editions of ECKM (he was in Paris last year!), and Peter Wendorff at ECITE'04 in Amsterdam.

Listening to them, I tried to position my paper against theirs.

They both spoke about KM in Software Development organisations - very interesting from the perspective of my current project, while I was looking at software tools for KM.
Peter Feher referred to KM strategy initiation, that can be done top-down, bottom-up or middle-up-down, while I was literally advocating for a bottom-up approach. His empirical study looked at Codification vs. Personalisation. (cf Wikipedia: codification vs. personalization - the trade-off between capture and storage of explicit information and making connections to people that know.)
Peter Wendorff(who presented the paper he co-authored with Dace Apshvalka) focused on Personalisation, as being the dominant approach in agile software development.
I never thought at Social Software from this perspective before, but I would say that while wikis provide support for coding and storing knowledge, online social networks essentially enable access to people who know things; blogs are somewhere in-between, enabling mainly individuals to publish personal knowledge, but also to become more visible.

I started few minutes before the time indicated in the timetable - while people were continuing to come. Tiit hoped to leave time for discussions in the end - but I kind of "ate" it all!
I was so "taken away" by my topic that I used 25 min(instead of the 20 allotted) for my presentation and used most of the time to talk about Social Software - I never really got to the KM stuff!
Most of the audience was familiar with the blog&wiki concepts (I did the quick handraising survey before starting), but I felt they wanted to find out more. I know, I know, I'm trying to find excuses...

This was the structure of my paper:

Introduction - What could Social Software do for KM?
What is actually named Social Software?
Social Software as Support for Knowledge Activities (based on the Despres&Chauvel taxonomy);
Few Illustrations of how blogs, wikis and social networking systems are used for KM purposes;
Unsolved Problems and Future Trends;
Conclusions

Thanks a million again to Martin Roell, who reviewed my paper when I was lost in fogg (I knew precisely it was not good enough, but I simply couldn't read it again with a fresh eye), and made a lot of useful suggestions.

The paper is available for download and so are the slides (sorry for the non-clickable links in the PDF version!).

I got several interesting questions from the public - David Gurteen took a photo of me backing the wall and rushing to answer. Fortunately, later on I got the list of questions from Tiit and I will try to answer in more detail here. Here are the questions:

Most KM theory looks at the organisation. Social Software is very much about the individual. How do the two meet?
How does the "peer network" aspect of blogs/wikis relate to Communities of Practice like Groove?
What about the use of Social Software in enterprise setting (security, confidentiality etc)?
How can management ensure that Social Software contributes to the organisation's goals?
How can you increase the number of the people visiting your blog?
Why would Wikipedia be a more reliable source of information than a book written by a single person?

I'll leave the answers for a future post, otherwise these old drafts will never get published!

The ECKM Knowledge Cafe

2005-09-16T17:31:00.000+02:00

I got a lot of publicity from David Gurteen for my blog. Unfortunately, the busy week at work and the crash of my laptop at home prevented me from posting anything on the ECKM.

I'm in a lousy Internet-Cafe right now, with kids crying and horrible loud music. But let's give it a try!

The two questions for the Knowledge-Cafe where:

Dan Remenyi introduced David Gurteen, who gave a short introduction. For those who are not familiar with the concept, there's a briefing available on the Academic Conferences website.

David made a short reference to Theodore Zeldin, who's running The Oxford Muse. He also mentioned The World Café as inspiration for those who would like to organise a similar event.

I hope to find a bit of time for another post on how to make such events more interactive (or transform them into un-conferences), but now let's stick to the subject.

There was a question from the audience: " Is there a way measure the success of a Knowledge-cafe? Do such events yield any results?" David's answer was "the measure of success is what people take away from here". Another comment was about such events being useful for the individual, but not for a company. David repeated that for inside a company, a knowledge-cafe is not the best way for encouraging interaction, for several reasons - there are other more appropriate techniques.

I was part of two different groups, and in both cases the discussions were very interesting. We started by introducing ourselves (name, type of organisation, occupation, country, and one thing we would like to mention about ourselves). It took a lot of time, because in both cases the groups were made of 8-9 - instead of 4-5 people, as recommended by David. People felt like joining and we couldn't refuse them. (For next year, we could think of some post-its to be pasted on our name tag and to include a bit more information on ourselves - it would save some time).

Some of the areas of research (or research questions) mentioned in my two groups were:

How to better explain Knowledge Management to managers and to the grand public ( some success stories were considered the most useful)
What is the kind of knowledge that needs to be managed (actually, we agreed that knowledge cannot be managed - what we try to manage is actually a knowledge ecosystem)
How to develop a Knowledge Management system (and not necessarily from the technical point of view)
How to manage large scale knowledge ecosystems (nationwide, for example)
How to change people - to make them more receptive to sharing knowledge (possible solutions suggested were: more case studies, success/war stories, story telling).

It was difficult to leave the group just when the discussion started to get a shape. When we exchanged groups, some of the participants couldn't find easily a second group and preferred to leave:-(

David Gurteen lead a final plenary discussions, where some of the proposals issued by diverse groups were briefly presented.

The general conclusion was: "IT doesn't have anything to do, it's all about people"(we know how to manage IT solutions by now, we can design State-of-the-Art solutions, what we don't really know how to do is how to deal with people.)

Some other comments:
On the very term of Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management got a negative connotation because its extensive use for labelling expensive IT solutions;
KM is not the only wrong term out there - just think of Change Management and other buzz words like BPR and TQM;
terms like KM and QM are misleading - we can only manage processes;

Problems of current research:

we can't manage knowledge, what we can manage is the ecosystem encompassing it;
there's a severe lack of tangible benefits of KM;
can we at least manage our own knowledge?

what we would consider the useful research areas can be very different for the industry and for the academia;

the aim of research: when done from a customer perspective, would refine understanding and eventually produce tangible results;
KM research is meant to solve existing problems; can pure research exist in the field of KM? should we look beyond the problems that companies face now? Yes, because innovation can create new needs. Someone gave the example of the walkman - nobody asked for it. David Gurteen gave another example:

"Look what happened with social software- blogs and wikis and all the others– mainstream software development organisations were not interested because they haven’t been demanded by corporate customers; they’ve been developed by a small groups of enthusiasts, who’ve seen the benefit, they’ve been growing and developing, and slowly, but surely, the large corporations have started to see the value".

how can we convince people to share their knowledge?
is there a knowledge divide (similar to the digital divide)? research is needed on how richer nations share their knowledge with the poorer ones;

For the second question, regarding the most appropriate research methods, there was very little time left. The whole audience agreed that we need a balanced combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods. The methods mentioned were:

case studies (especially on failures)
grounded theory
action research (change the organisation as social system, communicate and involve people)
ethnographic observation
participative design.

The discussions continued all evening, first at the Millstream Common Room, where the participants were invited for a glass of wine, and later on at the Bunratty Castle, where the conference banquet took place. The photos on Flickr can tell you more than 1000 of my words;-) You can start here and go back to see them all!

ECKM '05

2005-09-08T14:42:00.000+02:00

The European Conference on Knowledge Management is hosted by the University of Limerick this year. Most of the guests arrived yesterday, and we had a cocktail and a nice dinner together. Academic Conferences did a great job with the organization, as they did in every year.
I was so happy to meet Dan Remenyi, Sue Nugus and their whole team again!

Yesterday, I met David Gurteen in person, and we had an interesting talk over dinner. I guess we annoyed a bit the others with our blog-wiki-Lilia-Ton-Martin jargon, but we tried to convince them it was worth it at least to have a look at the Social Software phenomenon.

Bernard Marr gave his keynote speech this morning.
David Gurteen will run a knowledge-cafe this afternoon.
Charles Despres will deliver a speech after the banquet at the Bunratty Castle.
And Larry Prusak will give the other keynote speech tomorrow morning.

It's amazing how much energy I can get from being in the middle of "my kind of people".
I don't experience hunger, sleep or thirst anymore... I guess I'm in a state of flow;-)

I'll have to run back now.
Btw, Carla Verwijs is here too - she might be blogging the event!

Few photos already on Flickr!