If you have been watching my Dopplr profile you would probably know by now how next week it is time for me to travel once again. This time around to the US, to Yorktown Heights, NY, to be more precise, to the IBM Watson Research Center where I will be attending, for the first time ever, one of those special events that I know is going to leave a heavy mark on me for quite some time to come. Yes, indeed, I am talking about IBM‘s Web 2.0 and Beyond Summit, which is an IBM internal only event, that will take place from the 15th till the 17th of April.
This is an event that focuses on "emerging business and technology activities within IBM that utilize the Web as a platform and define how the Web will drive innovation to IBM’s business and for our customers", which I know for most of you folks out there would sound very familiar with other social computing related summits. And it would probably be, at least, from what you can sense while reading that quote I just mentioned above.
To me, this is going to be one fantastic, wonderful and unforgettable event because for the first time in over five years that I have been working as a Social Computing evangelist at IBM, it will be the chance for me to meet up a good bunch of the folks I have come to develop a virtual relationship with through various different social software tools, both internal and external, and this would be the first time that I would be able to meet up with most of them in real life!
We are all incredibly excited about the opportunity to meet up and share our experiences with one another face to face (Still the best social networking experience there is out there. No doubt!!) on how we are, each of us, getting along with embracing, adopting, promoting, facilitating, living the Enterprise 2.0 experience at such large corporation as IBM.
I wish I could share with you folks the agenda of the event, but since it is just an internal only event, I am going to keep it to myself for the time being, but for sure it is going to be one marvelous occasion. That’s for certain! A good bunch of the topics that will be covered are around several of the subjects I have been blogging all about over here on how IBM is adopting various social software tools within the corporate world. So perhaps not much new in that space, if you have been following this blog closely for a little while now. However, the interesting part would be how different people from various business units and organisations get to share their take on how that adoption is going ahead. Exchanging experiences, pain points, lessons learned, success stories, you name it! Now, that is just going to be incredibly fascinating to witness and engage in with further conversations.
Like I mentioned above, I was checking the other day the list of people attending the event and I realise how one of the major highlights from the event, even before I get over there, is going to be the networking piece! Of course, I will be blogging all about it as I am planning to take my MacBook Pro with me. I am sure, I will be twittering as well quite a bit throughout the event and who knows whatever else. Each of the sessions lasts for about 30 minutes, so there will be some compressed and brief thoughts, I am sure, but they would eventually get there.
One other reason why I am really excited about the whole event, apart from the incredibly good quality of the sessions, and the networking that will be going on, is the fact that it will be as well the first time that I will get to present, this time around as a Birds of a Feather (a.k.a. BOFs) session, on my own experiences on how I am getting on with giving up on e-mail, work related e-mail, that is. Yes, that is right, I will be conducting that BOFs session during the course of one hour, and whatever else more, on how such experience is going and how other folks may be able to join me with it. That would be the first time that I will be sharing plenty of tips on how I actually get it down and how for the last 8 weeks I have been able to reduce considerably the good amount of e-mails I was already getting through to me at one point.
I just can’t wait for that session to take place, since I will actually be using a couple of slides as entry points to get the discussion going and then I will dive right into it! (Not to worry, I will share the slides as well over here in its due time!). Now, here is the big question. What do you think is going to be the title of the presentation / BOFs session? Any ideas? Well, if you followed my Twitter stream a few days ago, it is actually coming out from a good number of conversations I had on that very same day. And thanks to Craig Cmehil and Ed Stephens (And a bunch of other folks who chimed in altogether as well) the final title I have adopted is:
"Thinking out of the inbox: More Collaboration through less e-Mail",
which fits in quite nicely with what I have been doing over the last few weeks. Thus thanks much, Craig & Ed, for participating in the brainstorm session and for helping out coming up with that title! Loving it! (Stay tuned later on in the week for another lovely surprise coming up your way 😉 , by the way).
Finally, to wrap up, I will be leaving Monday early morning next week, arriving through JFK on Monday afternoon and staying at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in White Plains for the entire week as I will be leaving on Sunday evening. Thus if you plan to be around and fancy getting together for a drink or two (Guess I will be rather busy from the 15th till the 17th, but pretty open after that, for sure!), get in touch and we will get together! Right now that end of the week looks very much available at the moment.
And that would be it for now, folks. Like I said, I will be doing plenty of blogging and twittering all along on what promises to be an stunning event around Social Computing, but if you really want to get down to some serious social networking, and you happen to be around, give me a buzz and we will meet up!
Tags: Dopplr, Yorktown Heights, NY, IBM, Watson Research Center, Web 2.0 Summit, Web 2.0 and Beyond Summit, Conference Events, Summit, Social Computing, Social Networking, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Media, Collaboration, Remote Collaboration, Knowledge Management, KM, Knowledge Sharing, Personal KM, Personal Knowledge Management, Personal Knowledge Sharing, Social Software Adoption, MacBook Pro, Twitter, Blogging, Con-Blogging, Metablogging, BOFs, Birds of a Feather, Craig Cmehil, Ed Stephens, Communication, Crowne Plaza, White Plains, Events
Luis, very much lokking forward to hearing about summit.
Hey, Luis, can’t wait … it’s going to be an awesome few days. Do we have a twitter hashtag yet for the summit?