While I am just about to finish editing the audio recording (And fine tune the slide deck that will go with it) from my pitch on Social Computing @ IBM at the recent IBM iForum event in Zürich, and while trying to wrap up everything at work since tomorrow is my last working day for the remaining of the year, earlier on today in Twitter a crazy thought came up from James Dellow after I mentioned in one of my twitterings how one of my abstracts for a conference event, taking place next year, on the state of social computing, was rejected. From there onwards, Dennis McDonald also jumped in, along with Steve Collins, Kelly Drahzal (a.k.a. Kellypuffs), Mark Masterson, Nancy White, LittleLaura, Ryan Boyles, Thomas van der Wal, Ryan Lanham and Jasmin Tragas so far. And before we knew it we had a whole bunch of folks in Twitter interested in the overall event (Plus those who contacted me already offline!).
Look at that!?!?! Who would have thought that Twitter would have such a huge and immediate impact where a bunch of folks passionate on a particular topic, i.e. social computing, will be gathering together into participating on an online conference event around the subject of Knowledge Sharing and Learning and the impact social software is having in both of them? Pretty amazing, don't you think?
From there onwards, we were all thinking about a potential title and theme for the conference. Nancy White came up with some really good comments on a potential direction: "I have been struggling with "what it is" And it is not just personal. It is organizational. KS, knowledge creation and application. And yes, some management" and so did LittleLaura: "like the idea of KM and IM and info architecture, importance often gets forgotten with all the hype of modern media these days!", along with Kapil Gupta with some really good suggestions: "I only saw part of your conversation about nextgen KM conf, but sounds like you need is something like a barcamp for KM -in SL maybe?"
And in just a matter of minutes things are starting to pave out quite nicely. No, we haven't finalised a title yet, nor a theme for the overall conference event. So far we have agreed it would be best to host an online event, pretty much like the rather impressive and superb eLearning Technology - Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovations that Tony Karrer, and a few other folks, helped put together not long ago and which I will also blog about in the near future (Catching up with the recordings and blog posts at this moment in time).
But before we move forward on to figuring out the next thing (Establish the final title of the conference, overall logistics, online venue, themes and speaker sessions, etc. etc.) and seeing how not many of the folks who get to read this blog or James Dellow's ChiefTech are actually hanging out in Twitter, I thought I would poll you folks over here on whether there would be any people out there interested in having such event taking place, some time during the course of 2008, perhaps in the spring. Still to be decided, indeed.
What do you think? We haven't figured out just yet either how long it would be taking, but I am sure that we could come up with some suggestions in here on the overall length of the conference, and the final format. For now, just querying the folks who get to read blogs on social computing, knowledge sharing and learning topics, plus anyone else interested in the subject. What do you think? Feel you would be able to find some time during spring next year to participate in such an event? Rather as a speaker in whatever the three fields (Or, whatever other you would feel would be relevant for the current trend of discussions held thus far), or as an active participant? Either way would work for us.
Well, here is your chance to weigh in. Share with us below, as a comment, or contact me offline, whether you would want that event to take place or not, whether you would want to participate as an speaker or not, whether you may be able to help volunteer some time to help out with the logistics and whatever else. Like I said, this initial blog post is a little bit to touch base on exploring the potential of hosting such online event to help shape how social computing is impacting Knowledge Sharing / Knowledge Management and Learning in the corporate world.
Thus go ahead and share those comments with us! A simple Yes / No would do as well. No need to elaborate much more right now, if you wish to. Just getting a sense on whether it would be worth while pursuing or not... What do you feel? Fancy joining us altogether to shape the way we are embracing social software within the corporate world to dramatically change the way we share our knowledge, learn and collaborate with other knowledge workers?
No comments:
Post a Comment