Liveblogged notes from the second Learning and Skills Group webinar for the day. Lars Hyland is the Director of Learning services at Brightwave. Lars's plan was to share a series of tips that make all the difference to whether e-learning succeeds or fails:Avoiding death by LMSEnsuring your e-learning is learner- and performance-centricCreating meaningful and memorable interactions for your learnersIntroducing the IMPACT model: better design for better results5 tips for design successI'm very excited to see the examples Lars is trying to show. I'm a big fan of his work, though I feel some of it is too high-end for my liking.Why training and elearning failsWhat's the elephant in the training room? We're delivering training:to the wrong peopleby the wrong peopleat the wrong timein the wrong wayAs a result there's no learning, no value and a lot of time wasted! Elearning (not just the classroom) suffers the same problems. A lot of elearning is:too dulltoo inaccessiblelacks relevanceThis results in the same problem at a greater speed. Essentially similar point to what Laura made in the earlier webinar.Why DESIGN is an essential ingredient to engagementElearning demands more of the learner. It's hard to hold attention - distractions are all around us! This is an interface sitting between us and the content. So design matters to make elearning effective!The IMPACT way of designingInteractionThere are various levels of interaction ranging from game based learning to the good old 'Click Next to Continue'.  A few examples that Lars showed, that were quire useful:the use of a visual metaphor to explain a complex topic;the use of analog sliders to show dynamic change in outcomesThe common trend I see from these examples is that learners can actually see how their actions impact their real life outcomes. Again if you look at the example above, you'll notice that learners have an activity to learn about missing stock from a showroom. So there's a problem as you'd have in the real store and you'll learn from discovery by interacting with real customers in real situations. The example included real applications that people see at their job so they can transfer the skills back to work. Good example of teaching people to do something than remember facts. Key Learning: Make your interaction mimic the real world and real scenarios.MultimediaElearning is essentially a multimedia experience, so there's a good reason to focus on this element, isn't there? Again, integrating custom flash, video, audio isn't tough even with rapid-elearning.Key Learning: Try very carefully to draw key points by intelligent use of media. Green screen video isn't very costly these days, so transparent background videos on your slides is really easy!PersonalThis is a big opportunity for instructional designers where we can personalise the experience for every individual learner. So Lars' point is that too broadly generic content may just not stick and may not be contextualised to people's workplace. Of course, it isn't that easy to do this without spending too much money, but I take his point.So is there case for personalised action plans, personalised feedback, personalised learning logs and the like? The example above provides different interfaces for people with different tastes. How about mobile and computer versions of the same course?Actionable A lot of learning and training doesn't translate into actions very easily. Why don't we align learning around helping people perform actual tasks? Cathy Moore's action mapping approach speaks to this end. No fluff, only stuff!ChallengingDon't over-simplify and patronise your training/ elearning. If you break it out too much then it doesn't reflect the real world appropriately. So it's important that you reflect all real-world elements in a challenging and fair manner. Provide your audience an opportunity to go wrong, gain from intrinsic and extrinsic feedback and activate new skills in 'safe-to-fail' environment.TimingLars touched upon the topic of 'learning interventions'. We try to cram too much stuff in too little time. People forget as the learning event ends. How about spaced out courses, where you give people an opportunity to have more events to reinforce their learning. This minimises forgetting and is in line with the research from Will Thalheimer.There could be various other factors affecting IMPACT -- it could vary by your situation.Provide easy ways to access learningLearning management systems that are data and report centric aren't learner centric. The context of the learning can get lost. How about structuring your learning management platform to be more user-friendly and learner focussed? How about a portal approach? How about centering it on a campaign or desired performance or capability or a target audience?Lars' point was that design of how we get to elearning is crucial in increasing engagement and creating the pull to do more in the elearning and learning technology space in your organisation. I completely buy that!The point Lars made about 'anytime, anywhere' learning and reaching mobile audiences makes complete sense to me. The fun part is that with tools like iWebKit anyone can do it.A few other design considerations.Think about making the following elements of design:Applied - scenario driven, contextualisedAuthentic - practical, pragmaticOpen - put the user in charge of navigationIntuitive - design and structure encourages reuseAccessible - learner centric portalsDogma-free - don't be dogmatic about instructional theory.© Sumeet Moghe, 2009

Curating good, relevant content that matters to you is just such a wonderful thing! Over the last couple of years there have been a good number of really insightful, and very helpful, blog posts that have caught my attention on what, to me, is still one of the most important topics within the corporate environment and perhaps well beyond as well, without not necessarily even being related to social networking alone per se: Employee Engagement. Most of those articles have always been very positive, over the course of time, in identifying how critical and paramount it surely is to help drive new business and to delight your clients to the extreme, but also to increase that sense of belonging, of unmeasurable loyalty, or everlasting generosity of going the extra mile without expecting anything in return, of driving the whole concept of co-creation as part of that co-sharing of responsibility, of feeling good, etc. etc. Some others haven’t. The reality is though that, in my opinion, and thanks to the extensive use of social software tools, amongst several other things, we are now seeing both inside and outside of the firewall, employee engagement *does* exist and, as such, every business, every organisation, needs to start figuring out a way to resurface it, to both embrace it and promote it heavily, if they haven’t done so already, as it walks both ways, i.e. from top down, to bottom up, before they realise, the hard way, and acknowledge, they are employing autobots and not truly passionate, dedicated, engaged, motivated, committed, professional knowledge workers with the determination to make a difference. And here is why. Take a look into this nearly three and a half minute long video clip under the title of "How to Use Employee Engagement to Boost Your Business" to see what I mean. Don’t worry, it will be worth while your three minutes, for sure; in fact, after watching it I can guarantee you would be wondering why you may not have thought about Employee Engagement in the first place within your organisation a while ago. Yes, it’s that good: How to use Employee Engagement to boost your business - Explania Pretty compelling, don’t you think? Indeed, I thought so, too, myself! Even coming from someone, like me, who’s totally sold out on the whole concept of employee engagement, even though there may well be some folks out there who wouldn’t agree and state the whole thing is just an oxymoron; employee engagement as portrayed on the video is a reality and if your company doesn’t embrace in such way as described on the video clip, as an example, you may need to re-think about it twice. You may be doing something wrong, perhaps. What do you reckon? The clip itself starts off detailing what are some of the main challenges that every corporation faces today: Achieve more with less, reduce costs, improve efficiency, etc. along with listing some of the main issues I have always believed are some of the main drawbacks from a lack of engagement by knowledge workers within their organisations and businesses (No, I am not going to spoil those for you, you would have to watch the video! hehe), to the point where it is mentioned how in today’s working environment something that, for decades, was considered the norm, may no longer be the case: satisfaction, i.e. or, better said, being satisfied at work is no longer good enough. So what can both businesses and knowledge workers do to take things into the next level, to walk that extra mile to help align a common set of business objectives and a co-shared, common vision then? Well, apparently, employee engagement. Of course! And that’s exactly what you would be able to see from there onwards for what’s left of the video itself: a clear definition of what an engaged employee is all about, a description of some of the commonest traits they have AND share across with others and, most importantly, a good description of how they behave to excel at both quality and interacting with your customers building and nurturing those stronger than ever personal business relationships, which, we all know, are the ones that keep driving business revenue time and time again. Of particular importance and relevance permeating through the last part of the video as well is the good and rather helpful description of engagement drivers: an inspiring organisational culture, and future vision, quality jobs, leadership, offering support, recognition, and opportunities to learn and grow. Probably easier seen than done, but, eventually, at the heart of the matter of how organisations could surely inspire and provoke that employee engagement to take place within the corporate environment and help empower knowledge workers to do their share as part of that both ways equation I mentioned above. That’s the beauty of the challenge ahead for most folks who still think that employee engagement is a myth or a scam, or totally driven by the organisation, top down, ignoring or neglecting the knowledge workers themselves, i.e. bottom up. It’s actually a balance that needs to be achieved between both of them in order to make it happen where everyone would benefit from it. The advantages though are tremendously beneficial for both parties, as the fine folks over at SocialCast have demonstrated, once again, with another fantastic infographic on the topic of "Engagement Condition - How to Engage Employees in the Workplace" which speaks for itself, specially towards the end of it, looking from the other point of view, perhaps, the most interesting one, of the repercussions of not having an engaged employee workforce; quite revealing, to say the least (Click on the image to enlarge it to its original size): The interesting thing from Employee Engagement though is that it’s not something new. It’s been there all along. It may have been hidden for a while, but it’s starting to re-surface again. It’s part of us all, human beings, as a society. It’s what the Social Web has managed to unleash and awaken from all of those years. It’s that urge for wanting to connect with other people, to belong to the group, to have that strong sense of ownership and responsibility, to stand out and being recognised for what we do, to strive for social good and social justice, for helping others without asking much in return, for knowing at the end of the day that you have gone the extra mile helping others achieve their own goals as well, like they will do in return with you at a later time. Failing to engage through experiencing and embracing all of that will probably, as an organization, get you in trouble, as we are starting to witness over the last couple of days, over here in Spain with movements like #15mani #15m #nonosvamos #yeswecamp #acampadasol #notenemosmiedo #esunaopcion that have resulted in an unprecedented keen interest on taking a stake in something that most of us considered long time gone and forgotten: regular citizens, like you and me, defining, peacefully, the next generation of politics and open government by utilising, to the fullest, the amplifying effect and extended reach of The Social Web: (Spanish version of the video clip) Hello world! Welcome to the 21st century! Are you engaging your knowledge workers yet?

I understand there's a huge interest amongst people to know about different presentation tools and the situations in which you'll use them. I believe that no tool is a silver bullet for all... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

Who doesn't want their slides to look beautiful? I bet each time you've seen a professional looking presentation, you've wished deep within that your presentations look just as good. In my last three... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

This evening I attended a TrainingMag Network  webinar by Ray Jiminez - Chief Architect at Vignettes Learning. Ray was addressing the topic of creating 'Lecture free Webinars'. Webinars are... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

June is just around the corner and, once again, that can only mean that one of my favourite times of the year for conference events is about to kick off as well. Yes, that’s right! Once more, and like every year, the Enterprise 2.0 event in Boston is approaching really fast and before you know it it’s already here! Mark your calendars for June 20th to 23rd, because this time around it looks like it’s going to rock more than ever! Yes, you can see how excited I am about going there in just a few weeks from now. But first things first. Before #e2conf there will be another one of my favourite Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business events taking place in Milan, Italy, on June 8th. Indeed, mark your calendars as well for the Social Business Forum 2011. I will be there as well! … And you? That’s right! The Enterprise 2.0 Forum in Milan, now transformed into the Social Business Forum, is moving along nicely from year to year into consolidating itself as one of the most relevant Enterprise 2.0, Social Computing and Social Business events in Europe, along with the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in both Paris and Frankfurt, and, once again, it’s a great pleasure, for me, to be invited by the always insightful and rather resourceful Emanuele Quintarelli, along with the smart folks from Open Knowledge, to participate in such a wonderful and refreshing event on all things related to Social Computing within the enterprise. It’s going to be a true honour to share the stage with an amazing array of inspirational speakers as this year’s edition, and taking a look into the extensive Agenda one can only conclude what an interesting event it surely is going to be, since there will be a bit of everything for everyone! Ohhh, and did I mention how the conference is free for everyone to attend? Yes, free, as in free, the real free! One of the many reasons why I’ll be looking forward to attending and presenting at the Social Business Forum 2011 is, as usual, the networking part of such events, specially, when in this case I’ll be meeting in the flesh, for the first time in many years, folks who I have been following in the KM, Learning, Online Communities and Social Computing / Business fields such as George Siemens or Esteban Kolsky, or meet up, once again, with a nice bunch of good old friends, as it’s been quite long already since last time we met! So looking forward to that as well! Not to mention the rather impressive agenda as well! Either way, my session is going to be a new one I have been contemplating already for a while on the topic of "The Hybrid Organisation" where I will cover the role of traditional organisations, structures and hierarchies and how they would compare to new ways of working around networks and communities. I will be covering how we have been using such hybrid approach at IBM with BlueIQ of combining both top-down and bottom-up social software adoption to the point where we all feel that it’s probably one of the most comprehensive and empowering approaches towards adoption of social tools: instead of split and replace go more for augment and empower! Yes, indeed, combining the best of both worlds! Why not, right? I will be sharing plenty of experiences, lessons learned, know-how, on what worked and what didn’t and why. Either way, I will probably have an opportunity later on, before the event kicks-off, to talk more about the event itself and everything, but for now I thought I would go ahead and leave you with a teaser interview I did last week with Roberto Cobianchi, who kindly invited me to participate in a rather interesting Skype interview where he asked a bunch of questions on the topic of the Social Enterprise and Collaboration and I just shared my ¢2 cents of the conversation on those topics; yes, you know, they are still some of my favourite ones from the last few years… So we did the interview and decided to split it up on two parts. Part I is readily available over at "On collaboration: Interview with Luis Suarez (first part)" and here is the initial set of questions we cover, so you could have a glimpse of what to expect from some of my answers hehe : A little bit of an introduction of yours truly: for those folks who may not know me… Yes, I’m still that crazy weird guy who is living "A World Without Email" and who is very much long overdue an update on progress! (Coming up shortly!) Can we, knowledge workers, collaborate effectively even while working remotely?: My answer was pretty much along the lines where we may not have a choice any longer in today’s distributed and rather virtual working environment… or do we? How far does culture help influence how collaborative and social a certain business can / will be?: Picking up further on the theme of how critical having the right corporate culture is in order to help boost your online existing collaboration with social tools, and how cumbersome it may well all become, if your organisation still lives by the "Knowledge is power" mantra. Of course, we had to talk about it as well… what is it like working AND living "A World Without Email" in a corporate environment where email stats seem to indicate there’s a huge increase day in day out? Will social networking tools replace email any time soon? (I ventured to give out a time when that would happen for most organisations, by the way!) In another interesting question that Rob asked we talked about the costs of Enterprise 2.0 and which focus area would be, in my opinion, the one grabbing most of the traction and additional interest; it’s not technology, by the way… And that would be it for Part I, folks; in a couple of days, Roberto will be sharing Part II, which I will probably be referencing it as well to add a few more thoughts on it and the overall Social Business Forum 2011. For now, I would want to take this opportunity to sincerely thank Roberto for the lovely conversations we had and for hosting the interview and to all of you folks out there who will be in Milan, on June 8th, attending the event live, come and drop by to say "Hi!". It will be a great pleasure, as usual, catching up in real life, too! See you there!! (Pssstt, remember … it’s free for everyone to attend! Bring your friends, customers, business partners, too!, and start living social!)

This afternoon, I'm attending a Learning and Skills Group webinar by Julie Wedgwood - where she plans to share with us an amazing new suite of tools that has caught her imagination, demonstrating how... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

In the recent past I have been blogging over here a couple of times already on some of the amazing piece of work that BASF (disclaimer: An IBM customer) has been doing over the course of the last year or so on becoming a Social Business and behave and act as such. Living Social is no easy task, for sure, but with a bit of perseverance, commitment, resilience, and a couple of other key important traits BASF has been demonstrating it’s now possible to achieve it. And big time! Even if you are not in the IT industry. Even if IT is not your area of expertise, "get social, do business" is very much no longer a dream for the corporate world in general, but quite the opposite, probably; pretty much an imperative no business can no longer ignore nor neglect. The story behind connect.BASF though (BASF’s social business platform, based on IBM Connections) is a special one. Through plenty of dedication, communications, executive sponsorship, education, unprecedented leadership, etc. etc. they are now at the stage where becoming a social business is no longer a long term goal, but today’s reality. Take, for instance, this short video clip of a little bit of 3 minutes, where my good friend CheeChin Liew shares the story of what it’s meant for BASF to live social: The really exciting part of this tremendous success story is not the full commitment to make a difference in this Social Business space, but to eventually have done it in such a way that presents the perfect business case, and business opportunity, for all of those companies to embrace Enterprise 2.0 techniques and technologies, even if you are not in the IT industry. I surely would want to stress this one out a bit more, since time and time again I keep hearing from various different people how lucky we are (at IBM) for being an IT company with the right social technologies. It looks like for us it’s just a given, a no-brainer, and while I certainly disagree with that sentiment (Since we do have a bunch of other challenges to fight against), it’s great stories like this one from BASF that confirm that even non IT related companies can be amazingly successful with their 2.0 deployments to help improve their effectiveness and efficienfy from their own knowledge workforce as they get to collaborate and share their knowledge amongst themselves, their customers and business partners. And so much more! Because in that video clip that I mentioned above CheeChin gets to share how becoming a social business has meant for them to empower people to connect with one another, reaching out to share their knowledge and learn from others in the context of nurturing, cultivating and fully embracing communities to solve business problems and achieve certain business goals. He also mentions how Mergers & Acquisitions have got the perfect use case for social business in helping teams, organisations and whatever other groupings get to know each other much easier by having information and knowledge flow naturally from knowledge worker to knowledge worker. The use case for microblogging that he gets to share as part of that story is fantastic! One of my favourites, actually. One that I can surely relate to and corroborate as perhaps one of the most impressive cases to prove the business value of social tools: helping facilitate the sharing of ideas across openly to pursue further ad-hoc, on the spot, collaboration sparked by those same ideas in the first place. Eventually, with the end result of promoting such rampant innovation inspired by a engaged, transparent and nimble set of interactions and conversations for which most knowledge workers would probably wonder why they didn’t start much sooner! And the best part? All of that inspired by my all favourite 2.0 concept: facilitated serendipity (Or informal and accidental knowledge discoveries, whatever term you would want to use). Informal / Social Learning anyone? Finally, one last key message from CheeChin’s interview recorded and put together on that video clip is that sense of utilising social software tools for something more than just related to pure work. In their case, for something so important, inspiring and mind-blowing as social good. What makes us unique and humane, and differentiates us from the rest of species. Now, I am not going to spoil it for you much further, you will have to watch the clip to see what kind of social good connect.BASF promoted with such a huge success. Needless to say that the first word that comes to my mind is a strong sense of pride. Ok, that’s 5 words, but you know what I mean, right? Either way, if you are still wondering whether social business can be good for your company, whether in the IT industry, or not!!, brilliant success stories like BASF’s connect.BASF can probably confirm that there is a way to become a successful social business. It’s just a matter of having the commitment to make it work across the organisation, following that hybrid approach of top-down, bottom-up that I have talked about in the past, wanting to help define and shape up the next generation of businesses for the 21st century. BASF is already there! Well done!!

Back to my webinar reporting business for this afternoon. This Learning and Skills Group webinar is by Hanif Sazen of Saffron Interactive. BTW, for those who're interested, Saffron Interactive write... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

As I have mentioned in a blog post a couple of days ago, on June 8th I will be participating in the upcoming Social Business Forum 2011 event in Milan, Italy. And as a way to introduce my breakout session on the topic of "Organisations or Communties?" I mentioned a recent interview I did with Roberto Cobianchi "On Collaboration: Interview with Luis Suarez (Part One)", where we talked at length around the topic of virtual collaboration, online communities, and the role social networking tools are playing within the enterprise. The interview was divided in two different parts and yesterday, Roberto published the second part under "On collaboration: interview with Luis Suarez (second part)". Once again, we spent some time talking about some interesting facts from another infographic (This time around SocialCast‘s "Dare to Share?") around the subjects of Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing and how can both, through cooperation, help solve business problems more efficiently. Specially, in today’s, now-more-than-ever distributed corporate environment where not only is the vast majority of the knowledge workforce working remotely, but at the same time those knowledge workers keep working on multiple projects and teams across the board. Long gone is the time when we *all* used to be co-located and working on the same floor, on the same building, on the same single project / team, without having to go elsewhere to get the job done! To such extent, and to share with you folks over here a little bit of a teaser on the kinds of conversations we had during that second part of the interview, I thought I would go ahead and add those questions over here, with an additional short annotation, perhaps, and point you to the article itself to read the rest. And see what you think on this rather important topic around fostering and boosting collaboration within the workplace. Once again, I would also want to take the opportunity to thank Roberto for taking the time to do the interview with me and for sharing it across over at his blog. Many thanks! So, here we go: "In the long history of humankind (…) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed": Indeed, now more than ever, we have been witnessing, over the last couple of years, how more and more businesses are starting to turn their heads towards their internal (AND external) communities, whereas before they weren’t just simply doing it, as perhaps the most powerful organisms to help boost collaboration and knowledge sharing across the board, helping flatten the organisation encouraging work to take place amongst networks versus teams and organisations, making them all much more agile and nimble. Yes, indeed, about time that happens, don’t you think? "From an enterprise perspective, the social software and the change in the behavior of employees is not only a question of efficiency or cost reduction, it’s a matter of survival": And that matter of survival is driven mainly by customers and business partners, even competitors!, whereas before it was all somehow driven by vendors themselves in their ivory towers thinking they always knew better than their customers, when all along, social software tools have confirmed it’s rather the opposite. No matter how much a vendor is knowledgeable about their own products, your customers will always know more than you, not only because of the extensive use they make of your offerings, and the figuring out of new ways to use your products you didn’t even think about!,, but because they are also connecting and talking to other customers, amongst themselves, and competitors! to converse about your products and that’s something that in order for businesses to succeed they can no longer ignore, nor neglect. They need to dive right in, before your customers move on to the competition… just because you were not there! "In the same infographic: "20% to 50% of collaboration activity resulted in wasted effort". There are three main factors: poorly planned meetings unproductive travel time bad communication I think you agree with that, but which one do you suggest to consider first? Which one do you think is the first to fight with?"This question surely was an interesting one, specially, since I have been trying to tame down, quite a bit, one of those items for a few years now while living "A World Without Email"; thus, considering that one out already, my answer for this question was probably what’s going to be my next quest, poorly planned meetings, not only because of the quality of some of those meetings, but also because of the sheer number of them we all seem to have throughout the course of the day (How can you have 7, 8 or 9 meetings a day and still get work done?!?! That’s just insane!), when, in reality, we may not even need them in the first place, if we would get to utilise our own collaboration, knowledge sharing and social software tools much more effectively reducing our dependency and addiction, not to count the time we spent in meetings! But that would be another topic for an upcoming blog post on living "A World Without Meetings"… (Notice that I am not going to state I’d want to kill off meetings altogether, but certainly find smarter ways of getting the job done without having to call for a meeting along the way…) "How many tools do you use in your daily work in order to reduce mail overload?" I tried to be brief on this one, since I know it could get far too long before we all know it, but basically I mentioned the main social tools I am currently using, both internally and externally, in order to reduce, rather substantially, my dependency on corporate email and, like most of you folks know already, I detailed plenty more of that on a recent mindmap & presentation I put together on that very same topic of "A World Without Email", for those folks who may be interested in finding out much more in-depth. "Each tool is an opportunity to keep in touch with customers, colleagues and partners and so on": Indeed! and 4 years later I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s that fragmentation and diversification of my mailbox that has allowed me to forget / worry about all of those issues with inbound email. It just doesn’t happen. Even if I am gone the entire week on a customer and company event like I have been, having just returned from Barcelona, Spain, where I got 17 emails for that single week, while I have been interacting all over the place on social tools. Priceless! Oh, and here is another good reminder for a much overdue update on the progress report over the last few months that I need to do as well over the next couple of days … "When do you foresee to arrive to zero emails?": Probably, the one million dollar question that everyone is trying to answer to a certain extent, for sure; specially, seeing how there are some business that are starting to question the validity of corporate email and are already well embarked on a mission to ditch it altogether. As part of my answer, I mentioned how we would probably not be capable of ditching it altogether, since there are two single use cases for which email still is probably the most effective of communication tools (i.e. Calendaring & Scheduling and 1:1 private / confidential conversations), but for the rest we can probably kiss it good-bye, if we are all ready to embark on diversifying and fragmenting our Inboxes to look out for much more effective and efficient collaboration, knowledge sharing tools within the social computing realm.  I guess that time will tell, although for me, seeing a reduction on my incoming email already by over 95% is probably good enough for me to state I’m almost there, don’t you think? And that would be it! Those were the questions that Roberto asked me as the second part of the interview and I do hope you may have found some of the answers interesting and relevant. I would be looking forward to the Social Business Forum event  where, after checking out the agenda, I know it’s going to be a rather interesting and tough challenge to decide which sessions to attend, because, once again, the line-up of speakers is outstanding with plenty of smart folks like Bill Johnston, Sameer Patel (Who has already blogged about the event over here), Cordelia Krooss, Esteban Kolsky, George Siemens, Bertrand Duperrin, Norman Lewis, Ming Kwan, Craig Hepburn, Rosario Sica, Laurence Lock Lee and a few others! Lots of really good friends to meet up and see again, and a bunch more new ones to be made in a packed couple of days of great conversations and thought-provoking knowledge sharing around Social Business! Yes, sir, you can tell I just can’t wait for it to get started!! And you?

Third webinar for the day. I 'm now attending the Elearning Guild webinar on 'Social Media in e-Learning: Ur Doin' It Right' The speakers are: Mark Oehlert, Defense Acquisition University Koreen... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

Fourth and last webinar for the day, is yet another Elearning Guild webinar. This one's a real life case study for enterprise collaboration by Lisa Choi, Beth Branick and Wendie Whelan from Advantage... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

Over the course of the last couple of years I have taken the chance to blog, every so often, about one of my favourite video series that has surely changed the perception of the real impact of the Social Web, not only within the corporate world, but also within our own society as a whole. Of course, I am talking about the Did You Know? series of video clips that keeps re-surfacing every now and then. One other interesting outcome of those clips is the good amount of spin-offs that abound all over the place on the Web, like today’s inspiring video that I thought I would share over here to kick off another week at work. It’s all about going Global, Local, Personal. It lasts for a little bit over 4 minutes and it was originally presented at the Elisa ICT Symposium 2011 conference event in Helsinki, Finland. And apart from painting together a rather interesting landscape of the impact of the Internet, and the Social Web, in our lives, both at work, and in our personal relationships with others, whether co-located or not, the rather interesting part of the video clip is how it evaluates the impact of current trends like Cloud Computing and Mobility to set the stage of how we will be using the Internet in the next few years… More instrumented, intelligent, interconnected than ever. More integrated, even, into our daily lives. What really resonated with me from the video itself though was the main theme permeating through these three keywords: Personal, Local, Global. Personal from the perspective of how critical context is as "the new battleground for business" (Couldn’t have agreed more with it!) and how we can probably no longer ignore it, nor neglect it, in a business environment as perhaps one of the most critical success factors for employee empowerment. Local from the perspective of how that context is king and how through the use of social networking tools we have got that opportunity to localise our knowledge having access to globally available information. And, finally, global by helping introduce a concept I have grown very fond of over the course of years, specially, internally, at IBM: global integrated enterprise. Global companies helping define the next generation of the corporate environment for the 21st century combining nicely both that global reach with that local flavour of flattening organisations through the extensive use of social computing tools and, eventually, arranging work through networks and communities instead. Not a bad start of the week, don’t you think?

I am a trainer by profession. I know there are war cries in the industry to just get rid of the training department completely. I agree and I disagree. Jane Bozarth's landmark quote remains at the... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

I have been working as a remote knowledge (Web) worker for the last 9 years in two different countries and four different business units in one single organisation and I guess that, at this point in time, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Specially, thanks, amongst several other reasons, to the flexibility and freedom of being in control of your own workflow. I can imagine though there may well be people out there who question the validity of remote workers, mainly now that the trend seems to be leaning more towards that distributed, virtual global workforce I have been blogging about over here a couple of times already who are making heavy use of social software tools to keep in touch, collaborate and share their knowledge. Indeed, for most people working remotely, i.e. from home, while at a customer site, while on the road, etc. etc. it can be quite a challenge, even more if you have to justify it to your co-workers located at the traditional office. However, it *does* work! Mashable’s Nellie Akalp‘s piece on "9 Ways To Increase Your Productivity While Working From Home" is just another proof of how it can work out in setting up the right expectations for both remote knowledge workers and those co-located in the same traditional office to inspire that collaborative environment where everyone can benefit from it. That’s why I thought I would spend a few minutes today talking about this particular topic and perhaps add some additional ways of how it’s worked for me as well over the course of those 9 years. The interesting thing is that Nellie’s smashing article on this subject surely is spot on. As a remote knowledge worker, I can relate to it myself, and I am sure if you are one as well, you would probably do, too! So in order to build further up on her article I thought I would add my ¢2 into the conversation describing how those very same ways are working out for me, and those around me, who are also distributed employees. Hopefully, we can add some further insights that may be helpful to others… So here we go, let’s do it!: Respect Your Own Time: This is probably one of the toughest challenges you are going to bump into as you initially move away from the traditional office into your own home office. I struggled with it myself back then, and for multiple various reasons, till I eventually had that ah-ha moment that if I wanted to make it work for me I would need to add discipline and flexibility into the mix. Transitioning from being measured by your sheer presence to being measured by the results you produce can be quite challenging, but if you allow for flexibility to kick in, along with a good dose of discipline it will work out time and time again. Being a bit stubborn and resilient would also be good traits to make it work, more than anything else, because if you don’t respect your own time, how can you expect others to do the same? Show them, educate them, help raise the right level of expectations and negotiate that mutual respectful agreement that should work both ways in equal terms.  Impose Time Limits on Specific Tasks: Oh, yes, ever since I have introduced The Pomodoro Technique to help me schedule time chunks on specific tasks, specially, rather complex ones, also even the time I spend on social networking tools, it’s made a huge difference for me. I have got a stronger sense of achievement at the end of the day by checking out the logs from those pomodoros to see what I have done for the day, and I can certainly recommend it to folks who may be wondering how their days are gone by without them hardly noticing. I use to have that very same feeling till I introduced this technique on my day to day workload. And I’m loving it! It’s like a bit of fresh air coming along in small time lapses that would allow you to transition from one task to another rather easily, without losing much of the control of your own productivity. Quite the opposite, actually! Priceless! Set Strict Deadlines: This is perhaps one of the hardest things to comply with, yet, one of the most rewarding, because, just as it happens with co-located knowledge workers in the traditional office, procrastination surely is not your best friend, as some people seem to claim time and time again. The best way to fight it off is to set those deadlines, even if you don’t really have to set them up. Still knowing there is a timeframe lurking around in the horizon waiting for you to accomplish something, somehow accelerates your sense of urgency and that seems to be really handy. At least, it works for me. That’s why I rely quite heavily on one of my favourite services within IBM Connections: Connections Activities.  Log Off for "Power Productivity" Hours: Indeed, most of you folks know I am a rather heavy user of social networking tools, whether internal and / or external, but you may have noticed how, every now and then, I suddenly go silent for a period of time; I lurk heavily, I learn from what others are sharing across and eventually it’s the time when my "Power Productivity" kicks in. Once again, The Pomodoro Technique is a superb way of helping you schedule those hours, so next time you see I have gone quiet, I am not really gone away, or gone into hiding; rather the opposite… When I come back, ask me what I was busy with during that power productivity time lapse and you will see what I have been up to, which, in a way, may eventually end up on this blog as well anyway hehe Delineate Your Workplace: This is a very important point. If you are working from your home office, as in working from your kitchen, or your bedroom, or your living room, or the front porch, the terrace or whatever else, you are certainly extending your virtual office to the point where there is no hide-out. You need to avoid that. You need to find a spot where you can escape work, specially after work hours. Having a home office will help you do that; not necessarily that you need to close the door time and time again, but certainly understand that even work has got a limit in your own home space, it’s a physical room, once you leave that door, that’s when your quality time will begin. Don’t neglect it; it’s the most precious time of your day. Every day.  Slowing Down? Change Your Environment: Now, I am not saying that working from those places can be rewarding every so often as a way to freshen up your working environment, specially, if you are putting long hours, but the thing is you should try not to make a habit out of it eventually. There is still a need to separate,  to some extent, your work life, from your personal life. Not because of you, per se, but because of them. Those who make you treasure the little things that matter. That quality time that’s worth while going for after a hard working day! On the other hand, and as a side note I can tell you folks that, to me, whenever I need to change my working environment the device I have leaned on to relying the most, by far, has been my iPad, which allows me for that flexibility of taking work wherever I am and still have that sense of detachment from the computing environment. And even more notorious when I am travelling… Conduct a Time Audit: This is a rather interesting one, specially, to me, since I wasn’t aware of the many benefits of doing such time audit trail, but then again, subconsciously, I have been doing it all along thanks to the logs provided by the nifty application Pomodoro that I have been using for a good few months now. So every day, by the end of the day, I take a look at those time lapses specified in the Pomodoro logs to see not only what I have achieved during the course of the day, but at the same time the actual time that it takes me to achieve that; so in the social networking front I have come to the conclusion that unless meetings and conference calls collide I usually spend about 3 pomodoros of 25 minutes each throughout my work day to keep up with what’s happening out there on the internal and external Social Web. That seems to be the right measure for me as to how much time I spend using social software tools every day. Not too bad! Perhaps on future posts I will detail as well what other tasks / activities I get to embark on and share which ones are the biggest time sinks, although I can already give folks a hint on which one is coming up big time over and over again: presentations! (Grrr) Create Tasks Lists: I don’t know where our obsession, as human beings, comes from creating lists. They have always been there since the dawn of time and I guess we will still continue to create them for almost everything. Of course, I, too, use them quite a bit, both for public consumption, through Connections Activities, once again, and for private use, where I rely on a couple of iPad Apps Things being one of my old time favourites. They are the first thing I check in the morning and the last thing I check in the evening as they help me get a grasp of what I need to get done, and what I have done in the past. I keep up with them religiously as a way to help empower my own productivity, and that one of others, if I need to collaborate on a particular task with other peers, networks or communities. But perhaps the main reason why I heart Tasks Lists is because they help me get a grasp of my workload throughout the year, which I find rather convenient referring to whenever my yearly performance evaluation comes up by year end. Somehow, they have turned themselves into a tracking record of sorts that helps me manage how I interact in multiple projects, teams and initiatives. And I can honestly say that if you haven’t created your tasks lists just yet, you surely are missing out some big improvements in your efficiency. No doubt! Make your breaks count: Finally, this is probably one of the most important traits I can think of from working remotely. Make your breaks count, indeed! Over the course of the years one gets to learn, through the hard way, unfortunately, how important it is to have regular breaks while at work, more than anything else, because if you don’t take them yourself, no-one else will, in fact, no-one will even notice you need a break after those long hours of hard work. So the first person who should take care of taking those breaks should be yourself. Like I said, remember, if you don’t do it, no-one else will do it for you.  That’s why long time ago I resolved to take several breaks during the course of the day (Even when I am travelling) and to achieve that I have been making use of this relatively small, but rather powerful and nifty application called MacBreakZ 4 (For Macs), which allows me to stay healthy and watchful for my wrists by taking regular short breaks during the day. Then I also take extended breaks where I try to do some exercise, to help me keep fit. You know, sitting kills (A must-go-through and read infographic, if you haven’t done so already, by the way!), as so does standing, so I figured that striking the balance between both of them is going to be the key to make it work.  And, finally, another type of break I have learned to take rather consciously as well over the course of time is to schedule a one full hour for my lunch (Scheduled as in blocked in my diary for everyone!); again, based on the same principle as above, if I don’t take that break for lunch, I have learned, through the hard way, once more, no-one else would, and I won’t be able to rely on that regular and healthy habit of eating at the same time every day. So, whenever folks try to schedule a meeting or a conference call with yours truly, that time is blocked, marked as busy, in my diary. Already. And again, for everyone! Throughout the whole year! And I cannot relate well enough what a difference it’s made for me to stick to that schedule. Long gone are the days where I didn’t have lunch, or just a 10 minute lunch break, or just munching along through that conference call, while on mute. Now, I just walk away from the home office, shut the door, enjoy my one hour disconnect time from everything, get my energy levels back and ready to hit the rest of the day! Highly recommended, if you haven’t started doing that! And that’s it, folks! That’s my ¢2 worth of comments on that wonderful piece put together by Nellie Akalp on "9 Ways To Increase Your Productivity While Working From Home". However, and before I let you all go, I thought I would share one more way to increase your productivity, the #10, which would work as well for both remote workers and their co-located peers in the traditional office. And it’s probably one that you would be least expecting it, since I doubt most folks would associate it with that trait to help you improve your efficiency and effectiveness at work. Of course, I’m talking about sleep, or getting *enough* good sleep! Yes, something so relatively simple as that! Sleeping enough hours day in day out will surely help you increase your alertness, focus, attention, motivation, speed of execution, etc. etc. And the magic here is to figure out how many hours would be good for you to help you function properly, but once you hit that, stick to it. For good! In my own case, and after trial and error over the course of the years it looks like 7 hours is good enough for me, although I have seen and read plenty of research suggesting to go for the 8 or 8.5 hour mark of daily sleep. That would probably include power naps as well, which seem to gain plenty of popularity as of late. But the important thing is to strive for that good night sleep that can help you function properly the day after. Now, I do realise about that saying that "Sleep is for the weak"; well, it’s actually quite the opposite. It’s the weak the ones who don’t get enough sleep in the first place! Jessica Stillman, over at GigaOm’s WebWorkerDaily wrote, not long ago, "Why the Web Worker Lifestyle Is Good for Your Health" and I can highly recommend its read. Very insightful and powerful piece at the same time, specially the additional resources included. After going through it, and after reflecting on the 9 years I have been a remote knowledge (Web) worker, I tend to agree with its overall sentiment that, perhaps, indeed, our web workers lifestyles might be good for our health as employees after all; it feels like that to me. At least, I am happy with how its flexibility and freedom, amongst several other things, have been working out for me so far. And you know what they say about happy employees and employee engagement, right?

Now let me confess, I didn't know of Lou Russell until I joined the Training Mag Network. That's because I often overlook authors from some of the books I casually pick up. Lou's better known in the... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

One of my all time favourite social networking tools for informal learning, as well as information discovery, on a good range of interesting and relevant topics, and specially Enterprise 2.0 / Social Computing and Social Business as of late is Slideshare. I could spend hours and hours in there diving through slide deck after slide deck digesting some of the most amazing content people have been putting together over the course of time and never get tired of it! Can you imagine saying that about presentations? Goodness! That’s what I thought, too! Anyone on Presentation Zen? I guess Slideshare has brought back to presentations, to some extent, the sexiness they once had, before we all got obsessed with them without remedy! No, seriously, you know what I mean, I even have got a lovely notepad text document where I keep filing some of these worth while slideshare links that I know at some point in time they would be having a mention, and a space, over here in this blog. That’s why today I would like to introduce to you a couple of them, in case you may not have seen them just yet: Why Social? and How Social Software Helps Get Work Done. Both of them would be worth while going through, for sure, as much as keeping them in mind whenever you would want to reuse them for your upcoming speaking gigs. Yes, indeed, they are both that good! Both of them have been put together by a couple of really good friends who are very well versed on this whole topic of Social Business, Collaboration and Knowledge Sharing. The first one, Why Social?, was put together by Stu McIntyre and in it he covers, very successfully, the whole landscape behind Social Collaboration going from the problems it aims to address (Finding and connecting people, sharing information, contribute to the collective intelligence, informal serendipitous knowledge discoveries, etc. etc. pretty much the same ones traditional KM used to aim at back then), to the value / business benefits inherent to it (Business growth, deepening customer business relationships, innovation around both old and new ideas, a much more effective knowledge workforce, etc. etc.), to the implications of a collaborative organisation (And how to get there if you business is not that keen yet on true open collaboration). The highly recommended part of Stu’s slides is coming towards the end where he shares a bunch of them around the topic of Where do you get started? No, don’t worry, I am not going to spoil it for you, you will have to go through the slides yourself to find out plenty more about it. But one key message you will see permeating through all of them is the confirmation of how we are finally shifting gears, making a huge leap forward, and leaving both technology and tools far behind us, focusing on the business, or, rather, the people behind the business! Yes, I know! About time, too! Why social? View more presentations from Stuart McIntyre The second Slideshare presentation I would want to share over here with you folks is coming from Alan Lepofsky and it is titled "How A New Generation of Software IS Helping Colleagues Work Together". Another worth while deck where Alan covers some very interesting and relevant topics, like the evolution of collaboration, its inherent changes at work and some "best practices" (Ok, ok, we will forgive him this time around for using such *cough* old business school terminology *cough*). Instead, we would stick around with rather good practices or next practices. Anyway, moving on to some of the most thought-provoking slides he shared across. Let’s start with slide #6 that sets up nicely the landscape of the evolution of collaboration over the course of decades. Simple, easy to digest, straight to the point. Priceless! From there onwards you will embark yourself on a rather enjoyable and pleasurable trip, with some excellent imagery used to illustrate plenty of great points and exploring the real impact these social technologies are having in the way we work, collaborate and share our knowledge with others. Very inspiring altogether as it then finishes off the presentation with plenty of reflections and helpful insights on those good / next practices. However, the key remarkable thing you will notice as well from Alan’s deck is, once more, the confirmation, along with Stu’s presentation, of how the conversation has evolved from that rather tenuous and everlasting focus on tools and technology to try to address and fix all of our business problems to eventually focus on the business itself as the major driver for fixing those problems altogether. And that major driver? Yes, I know you know where I am going… Of course, once again, the people! Because businesses *are* people. People who, actually, *do*care! Or like Seth Godin brilliantly put together just recently under "Caring": "No organization cares about you. Organizations aren’t capable of this. [...]  People, on the other hand, are perfectly capable of caring. It’s part of being a human" with one of the most amazing conclusions that I am going to shameless steal, errr, I mean, reuse and insert over here in this post, as I feel it’s spot on in helping us fully understand why social is now more important and critical than ever in helping us knowledge workers work together much more effectively and efficiently than ever before, and how every organisation or business that tries to put a stop to it and not embrace it, but neglect it will eventually suffer from it, sooner rather than later: "If you want to build a caring organization, you need to fill it with caring people and then get out of their way. When your organization punishes people for caring, don’t be surprised when people stop caring. When you free your employees to act like people (as opposed to cogs in a profit-maximizing efficient machine) then the caring can’t help but happen" How Social Software Helps Get Work Done View more presentations from Alan Lepofsky I think you would agree with me we are reaching that point where we would need to decide for ourselves, not for the business, but for us, people, whether we would eventually want to care … or not. And live by it. Doing so will help us transform, for the better, not only the organisations we work for, and with no way back, but also the way we conduct and do business in the 21st century. Doing so will help us, essentially, become better at what we already do naturally: Connect people to people (And people to (relevant) content) to do real, meaningful, responsible, sustainable good business. Ultimately, and, like usual, the choice is all ours. Have you decided yet? (I have…)

A few days back I ordered a large meal at a restaurant. Unfortunately, the food tasted awful - really awful. My first thought was to curse the chef - not for one moment did I think of complaining... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

If you would remember, late last year, over at CommunityBuilders, one of our IBM internal communities of community facilitators, we had the great pleasure, and true honour, of having with us guest speaker Rachel Happe, co-founder from The Community Roundtable, come and present, along with Jim Storer, on The State of CommunityManagement 2010. That session was one of the most commented and interactive we had throughout the whole year and, of course, we decided to go and come back for more. So I am pleased to share over here with all of you "The State of Community Management 2011 with Rachel Happe". That’s right! A couple of weeks back we had the opportunity of inviting Rachel again to come and talk to us about the absolutely wonderful piece of work by The Community Roundtable folks on the yearly free whitepaper "The 2011 State of Community Management". And, once again, another rather popular session with lots of interactions and great conversations on the side. So after things have quiet down a bit, specially with my crazy travelling schedule as of late, I am really happy I am finding an opportunity now to come and share with you folks over here some further details on how you can get a copy of the slides that Rachel used, as well as the recording of both audio and video of the event itself. As a starting point, you can download the slide deck from CommunityBuilders - The State of Community Management 2011 with Rachel Happe and the recording from this other link. The replay lasts for a little bit over one hour, so you may want to go and watch it over a cup of coffee / tea, or two. At the same time, and as a teaser to what you will be able to find on that education session, Rachel pointed me as well to this Slideshare presentation they have which covers a similar set of slides you could peek through: The 2011 State of Community Management View more presentations from The Community Roundtable So, what else can you expect from watching the replay? Well, as a starting point you would be able to get a good reminder, and a refresher, of the excellent Community Maturity Model along with a good dive into the main key themes from the 2011 study / research: "Social Business Becomes A Strategic Imperative Interest in Community Management Has Increased The Community Management Discipline Is Evolving A Lot of Confusion Remains" From there onwards, Rachel, once again, did a great job in describing how those new findings translate into a really nice bunch of good / next practices for each and everyone of the various elements from the Maturity Model, which would mean it would give folks a great opportunity to learn some new tricks on the art of community building, as well as find out some pretty interesting nuggets on how leadership stands with regards to Social Business and Community Facilitation, from a recent survey they conducted as well. Truly fascinating, specially, the data around culture lagging… Now, don’t worry, I am not going to spoil it for you any further, since otherwise you wouldn’t need to listen to the recording any longer hehe. Just hope these teasers would give you enough ground to go ahead and take a look, as we are approaching the weekend and have perhaps a bit more time to go through it than through the regular week at work  I can tell you though that it would be worth while your time. Every minute of it. From here onwards, I would just want to take the opportunity to share a special Thanks!! with Rachel for being with us, once again, and we surely look forward to further interactions in this fine art of managing and facilitating online communities. Later on, in its due time, I will share across another blog post where I will comment further more in detail about The State of CommunityManagement 2010 full report, which I can surely recommend you have a read, if you would want to learn plenty more of the traits behind successful community management. That is, learning new tricks right from the horse’s mouth, The Community Roundtable, if you would ask me…

Aah! I finally made it to this one. Had a busy afternoon till now, but now it's webinar time. Today's LSG webinar is by Jane Hart, one of the world’s leading experts in social and collaborative... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

As you may well remember from a couple of recent blog posts I put together over here, this week, on June 8th, the yearly Social Business Forum will be taking place in Milan and it will be a great honour for me to be able to attend it as well as go and present on the topic of "Communities or Organisations? - The New Collaboration Ecology", where I will be sharing some further insights on IBM’s various experiences with regards to the wider adoption, enablement and empowerment of online communities through social software tools and how traditional hierarchies and teams are transforming themselves, as a result of it, into a new, richer, more complex, more dynamic and agile Collaboration Ecology. I’ll be sharing some initial reflections as well on an absolutely wonderful piece of research done by the IBM Almaden Research folks with Tara Matthews leading the efforts in this very same area of figuring out the next generation of the collaboration landscape. There will be, as usual, plenty of live tweeting from my side over at @elsua under the hash tag #sbf11 and a couple of follow-up blog posts with plenty of highlights from the overall event as well, but that would be the subject for another blog post or two. For now, I would want to reflect on something that I have noticed it’s starting to happen to me more often than not and so far it’s proved to be a challenge to put it down for good in order to reflect further on it to see where it would finally go. So I thought that today could be the perfect opportunity to air it out and, at long last, get it out of my chest. Yes, indeed, folks, it looks like my Hippie 2.0 side is coming out again, and this time around in full force and with a sweet, long lasting vengeance after putting it in a dormant status for far too long! They keep saying that a good personal business blog is that one that has struck that perfect 80% / 20% balance; 80% business and 20% personal. Funny enough, I have always felt that most of the content I have shared over here, in this blog, has been, for the most part, business related, with the odd personal entry here and there. However, and over the last few weeks, I have been putting together a whole bunch of various different blog entries that I wanted to share across, but that never made it, because they were exceeding that 20% big time. I know they would need to get out at some point, but somehow I am kind of not very keen on re-converting this blog on something far too personal. It wouldn’t be the purpose of what I envisioned for the blog right from the start. And, certainly, creating another one, separate from this one, is not an idea I would want to contemplate just yet. Thus how do you get to compromise? Do you actually need to compromise in the first place? Should you? Will people walk away and never come back if you start becoming a bit too personal? A bit too close? Hummm, questions, questions. Choices, choices. Not an easy answer for any of them, don’t you think? I am sure though, at this point in time, you may be wondering what has triggered that sudden change and that re-emergence of my Hippie 2.0 side, right? Well, you are probably not going to believe it, but it’s mostly been a rather hard and sudden touch with reality that has provoked an awakening, like no other, for yours truly in a couple of areas that I never thought I would see coming along after all of this time being on the Web: mainly that one of being a critical thinker while being a good citizen / netizen. And I am sure you know where I am heading with this … It’s been an awakening that I am finding it harder and harder to tame and control over the course of time, to the point, where, in some cases I have hinted already that certain change is already in the making and happening altogether. Back in 2001, when I was first exposed to social software tools, there were a number of different guidelines I decided to put in place and abide for myself; mainly, stating there would be three different subjects that I wouldn’t touch much *ever* in any online Web form. Mainly, politics, religion and sports. So far I think I have been doing pretty well, since I hardly ever get to share any content in either of those three subjects. However, things are changing and somehow I feel there is no way back. Involvement is a very powerful word, indeed. And that touch with reality that I have experienced over the last couple of weeks surely has marked the time when that involvement may be much tighter and much more direct than whatever was happening in the past. At least, for me. Yes, that’s right! For a long while I have stayed away, on purpose, from the whole world of politics, more than anything else, because I know, along with religion and sports, it’s one of those visceral subjects that often keeps getting misinterpreted time and time again provoking even more trouble than helping out in the first place. Yet, when certain things like this one happen far too close to home (I was there just the same morning that set of events took place!) one starts to question whether you can let it go, just like that, hoping that it will be forgotten, when you know exactly that’s not going to happen. They call us internauts, bloggers, twitterers, facebookers, social networkers, freaks, you name it. When in reality we are just like them; citizens taking advantage of the tools available to us to try to make a difference. It bugs me. It bugs me big time that my social computing evangelist bubble has burst just like that, so easy. It bugs me the huge amount of fear and apprehension there seems to be out there, from all over the place, towards the Internet, specially, that thing called social networks, where no-one seems to have the control over them, as if they are the last resource of freedom, or revelry, the world has got left out there. It gets me how, now more than ever, I keep ending up having rather engaging discussions where I end up trying to justify a social behaviour that’s been with us for thousands and thousands of years and that’s finally finding its natural path: that one of showing how interconnected we all are with one another. Regardless. You see? I told you. My Hippie 2.0 side is back! Ha! I knew it would eventually be happening, but I never expected that it would be coming back in such full force… To the point, where, even if my 2.0 evangelist bubble has been burst and smashed in hundreds of pieces in the last couple of weeks I’m now more motivated than ever to do a better job at evangelising around the subject of social networks than ever before, wanting to reach out beyond the original focus within the corporate, business environment and directly into our societies as a whole, because, after all, that’s all it matters, isn’t it? Who we are and how we are connected with one another. And if I can help open up a few more eyes and ears, why not? Wouldn’t it be worth it for all of us altogether? I mean, what are we, social computing evangelists, doing to help those around us understand where our passion and motivation for these social tools come from? Why don’t we try to make a little bit of an extra effort and pledge to make a difference with those evangelism efforts? Well, I do realise that this is not the typical blog entry you would be expecting to read over here. And that’s fine. I wasn’t expecting it myself either. I meant it as an article reflecting on some personal changes I am seeing, AND experiencing myself, that I cannot longer control (Not even sure anymore I would want to control them in the first place!) around the potential impact social has way beyond just a business context. I do hope you understand though where I am coming from. Where that touch with reality has made me realise there is now more work ahead of us than ever before! Specially, seeing recent global events in multiple countries, I doubt we would ever have a choice anymore to ignore it. In fact, I am starting to think I don’t want to ignore it any longer. I have done so for over a decade and I am starting to have enough of it; enough of having to justify how I live the Social Web, just because people don’t understand it, as a result of the fear they have been accumulating over time from all over the place. You see? As my good friend and, fellow Hippie 2.0, Mark Masterson once wisely said, not long ago, "If you focus on fear, you’ll get fear. If you focus on humour, you’ll get laughs", I thought I would close this thinking-out-loud open reflection letting folks know that, somehow, this blog (As well as my overall online interactions in social networks) have just started a new phase where my new mission is that one helping focus on the humour and the laughs versus the fear. I know now why I put together Three Wishes at the beginning of the year. Started to hint it subconsciously right there! Basically, to keep evangelising on social computing, not just in a business context, but also as an integral part of our societies, as citizens, because, at the end of the day, we are not internauts, we are not bloggers, nor twitterers nor facebookers, we are just people with a strong willingness to connect, and stay connected, with those who we share a common affinity with and learn further insights from that knowledge sharing experience to help us all become better at what we already do. That’s why I am embedding this video clip over here, as part of the weekly inspiring series of videos, by Aleix Saló under the title "ESPAÑISTAN La Burbuja Inmobiliaria a la Crisis by Aleix Salo", which clearly marks, to me, what innovation, creativity and a touch of humour can do to help explain complex problems we are facing ourselves with simple solutions, whether work related or not. In this case, the latter. Something that affects us all… (Video clip in Spanish) I guess I am now, finally, ready to unleash the fury, the passion and the motivation behind my Hippie 2.0 side and let it spread around once again. Somehow I am hoping I won’t be the only one…

I'm a foodie and I find a lot of inspiration in my food. A few days back, I went to watch Shrek Forever After 3D at a multiplex. As you'd expect, after the superlative 3D show, I was hungry so my... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

Yesterday I delivered two workshops at the XP 2010 conference in Trondheim, Norway. The run up to this conference has been awfully busy for me from a work perspective, so I'm extremely pleased that... A one stop shop for Sumeet Moghe's thoughts about learning in the modern enterprise.

What an amazing and exhilarating week altogether! I am now back from the Social Business Forum conference event in Milan (Check #sbf11 for some amazing live tweeting), that took place on June 8th, and my head is about to explode with plenty of new ideas, new experiences, and lots of great new stuff learned and acquired around Social Computing and Social Business, both with internal and external flavours, along with a whole bunch of new friends, as well as that token of gratitude and contentment of having met some good old ones and doing a proper catchup in real life with most of them and what they are doing. If you ever want to re-energise yourself or charge your batteries to keep living social #sbf11is a good one example of how it can be done! Highly recommended, for sure! No doubt! Now, as you can imagine, I have got a whole bunch of things that I would want to talk about over here, in this blog, not only related to the overall content and outstanding quality of the speakers, along with the connections made through that couple of days, but also from the perspective of tech conference events in general. Lots to share. Perhaps, a quick note to get things going, have a look into the Social Business Forum Slideshare channel, where you can find already a whole bunch of the slides used by the speakers (Here are mine, of which I will talk about shortly as well…). That would be a good starting point, indeed, while we are also awaiting for the recordings to come along. In my case, and while I’m putting some structure together into those upcoming blog posts with plenty of highlights of the event itself, I thought I would drop by over here today and share with you folks another gem that Erik Qualman has just released a couple of days back as part of the now famous Socialnomics initiative. Welcome to the Social Media Revolution 2011! As usual, it’s one of those fun and interesting video clips that lasts a little bit longer than two minutes, while it goes through, rather quick, some amazing trivia around the social media landscape and its impact within both the corporate environment and our society as a whole. The clip itself is worth while having a look at, specially, if you are thinking about using some of the many nuggets included in it for your next upcoming presentations. So I thought it would be the perfect intro, and teaser, for the next round of blog posts with those highlights from the Social Business Forum conference event, as well as a great start of the weekend over here as well, which is just around the corner! Hope you enjoy it, and do get ready for a massive update with plenty of good highlights from what I learned on one of the Social Business events I have enjoyed the most in the last few months, not only because of the content and the overall event itself, but also because of the networking and the various human elements behind it, and you will see what I mean with that very very shortly … Have a good one everyone!