miLKlabs and IxDA Limerick are joining forces to organise the first Ignite talk series ever in our city!The event will happen on Wednesday, April 6 2011, 7 pm in the Absolute Hotel.
Why this event?
The idea is to spread the news about miLKlabs, bring together likeminded individuals, create synergies between people from different backgrounds and highlight possible collaborations. We are also trying to shed a light on the creativity and talent of Limerick people and bringing them to the attention of the public. IxDA Limerick is hosting the event as part of their United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development programme.
What is Ignite?
In talks that are exactly five minutes long, Ignite presenters share their personal and professional passions, using 20 slides that auto-advance every 15 seconds. Ignite events are run by local volunteers in many locations around the world, as part of the global Ignite network. Talks are video recorded and shared on the Internet, allowing local Ignites to share the knowledge and passion with the world (more about Ignite here ).
What is miLKlabs?
miLKlabs is a collaborative community space based in Limerick City, Ireland. The name is derived from ‘made in LimericK’. It is meant as a shared physical space for any and all creative projects: art, woodwork, software, photography and electronics – to name but a few. The aim is to provide Limerick with a place for people to work and collaborate on creative projects, to learn and to share their knowledge.
What is IxDA Limerick?
IxDA Limerick is the local chapter of the Interaction Design Association, a global network dedicated to the professional practice of Interaction Design.
If you have an interesting idea or project you’d like to talk about, there’s still room for speakers! Please drop us an email at ignitelimerick@gmail.com with your name and a title for your talk.
Back in August, when I was appointed Enterprise 2.0 Summit Ambassador, I discovered Jenny Ambrozek’s name on the workshops’ page. The name rang a bell- together with Joe Cothrel, Jenny had produced a report that generated a lot of reactions in the corporate world. It was one of the first publications that spoke about online communities in corporate environments, mentioning social software and backing it up with solid research. Until then, my interest for social software wasn’t taken seriously by any of my employers, and that was kind of torturing me.
I started following Jenny on Twitter(@sagenet) and we exchanged a few direct tweets (I was so honoured when Jenny asked for my opinion on the workshop outline!). Later on, the E2.0 Summit organisers asked me to do an interview with Jenny; I said yes right away, although I knew it wasn’t going to be easy for any of us to find time for it. In the end, after many private tweets exchanged, and days&nights of going back and forth via a shared Google Doc, the (asynchronous) interview is here:
Can you tell me a bit about yourself? What was your professional trajectory and what were the circumstances that led to your involvement with Social Networking?
Jenny Ambrozek: My interest in collaborating online began in my native Australia with a pre-Web Videotex venture. Moving to the United States I worked at Prodigy, the pioneering online consumer service. Always intriguing to me is how the skills I learned about developing relationships in early online environments are as timely and relevant today, regardless of technological changes or advances. Facilitating human interactions and sharing underpins successful collaboration. By the early 2000’s, working as a consultant, I’d confronted the human and structural realities within organizations that limited the success of collaboration initiatives. In 2003 I met Patti Anklam and was introduced to social network analysis. I’m convinced applying what we know about the science of social networks is vital for value creating enterprise collaboration and productive stakeholder engagement. (More about my professional trajectory is available in my Enterprise 2.0 Profile and a Knowledge Magazine article).
When I first read about your workshop at the E2.0 Summit, I had a revelation: “this must be THE Jenny Ambrozek who co-authored the famous 2004 report “Online Communities in Business 2004: Past Progress, Future Directions”. I was a member of AOK at the time, and I remember you and Joe Cothrell participating in the Star Series conversations. I remember being absolutely thrilled when I read about your report, it was exactly what I needed to convince the people around me that blogs and wikis were there to stay, and online communities in corporate environments were important for the future of the companies. I’m wondering if you estimated the huge impact this report was going to have when you started to work on the survey. What lead you to that initiative?
Jenny Ambrozek: I’m delighted that you found our study useful although you are perhaps too generous in crediting our report with a “huge impact”. However, I do think Online Communities in Business 2004 is important for capturing the perspectives and thoughts of leading practitioners in the field at the cusp of the Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 transition. In 2003, Joe Cothrel and I were watching the pioneering online services disappear and social software attracting a mass audience. We wanted to understand the enterprise impact so we initiated the study, reached out to practitioners we knew as thought leaders and sought their insights. Beyond our findings summarized in the report, I recommend reading the full free text comments wiki that SocialText provided. While the technology has evolved, the industry leaders’ wisdom about the practicalities of facilitating sustainable online communities, networks and teams is timeless.
You are writing a blog in collaboration with Victoria G. Axelrod, 21st Century Organization, where you share a lot of interesting material. Can you tell us what is the mission of this blog?
Jenny Ambrozek: Victoria Axelrod is a leading organizational strategist I was fortunate to meet in 2005. We instantly discovered a shared concern to understand the impact of low cost emergent collaboration tools (Web 2.0) on organizations. We started blogging seeking answers to a simple question: “What defines a successful 21st Century Organization?”
One of your presentations posted on Slideshare 3 years ago, Open netWORKing Organizations Co-generating Business Value, advocates that strategy drives all initiatives(slide 17). However, you seem to place the culture of the organisation at the centre of any initiative. This is the context, the playground where the action takes place, the canvas we’re trying to work on. Can you give us your view on fostering a culture of collaboration in an organisation? Is this always feasible?
Jenny Ambrozek: Your question goes to the heart of the matter. There is a difference between organizations who embrace Enterprise 2.0 and those who resist. This slide was developed by my blogging colleague Victoria Axelrod , who explains there is no culture when a company starts up. It derives from the values, beliefs, practices, the key players act out as they interact with the marketplace (stakeholders) to make their business happen. That complex, messy human process is captured in the slide as the interaction of the 4 S’s: Strategy, Structure, Systems and Shared Values. Because an organization’s culture develops through interaction and is dynamic, not static, it cannot be dictated, making “culture change” almost impossible.
Given those complex interactions, my workshop builds from the 1990’s Xerox Parc Research that identified the simply profound principle: “Organizations are webs of participation. Change the patterns of participation, and you change the organization.” (John Seely Brown & Estee Solomon Gray 1995 “ People are the Company, Fast Company.)
Look around for a moment and envision the companies who are identified as Enterprise 2.0 leaders. Those companies have accepted the value of allowing employees different patterns of participation, of more open knowledge sharing within their organization and beyond—bringing outside partnerships and knowledge into the organization.
By viewing organizations as networks, we can draw on knowledge from social network science to intentionally facilitate the networks and patterns of participation essential to achieving a business objective. A “Social Networking Culture” is a by-product.
And finally, can you tell us a few words about what are you planning for the workshop you’re giving before the E2.0 Summit in Frankfurt, “Social Networking Culture – Made Simple”. Two of the items on the agenda, “Thinking Networks – Personal Network Drawing Exercise” and “Applying Network Mapping to Participants’ Enterprise 2.0 Projects” made me very curious. What will you ask us to do ( if you can disclose this, of course)?
Jenny Ambrozek: Of course. The network mapping exercises will help participants understand how their work and organizations are accomplished through networks. (The Personal Network Drawing exercise is public, published in The Sustainable Enterprise Fieldbook, Chapter 8.) Then we apply that network mindset to participant projects, thinking through key people to be engaged, interactions to be facilitated and contributions needed for success.
I’m delighted that Mark Masterson will be joining the workshop to share his company CSC’s use of Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) as a foundation for their award winning, enterprise-wide C3 collaboration platform. Understanding the networks of people to be engaged underpinned CSC’s C3 implementation and ensured employees across the globe joined immediately and participated actively.
The workshop introduces participants to the network analysis ideas that CSC applied.
There are many days when I feel proud to be part of various groups of people that work on things that matter. And today was one of them.
It started with the Limerick OpenCoffee in the morning. It’s amazing how much you can accomplish by having coffee with like minded people once a month! Talking about a possible home for the MiLK Labs and the many things that could happen once we find it with James, planning joint events for our students with Bernie, exploring social graphs and couchsurfing, adding events to my diary and meeting new people.
And it ended at the university, in the Concert Hall, where I went for this month’sICO concert. We are so lucky to have this world class orchestra in our vicinity and to listen to them every month!
Tonight, after the interval, this little video was shown, and Kathleen Turner, the ICO education officer explained how part of the money we pay for tickets goes to support initiatives like Sing Out with Strings:
I felt proud. My finances are not at their best these days, but this is a really worthy cause. Music can bridge many differences and transform people!
At the end of the video, the signature of Shannon Images brought back nice memories from Padraic O’Reilly’s talk at 3Dcamp back in 2008.
Life is good. And I am a very fortunate human being to live around so many people who work on things that matter – to them and to me!
Last year, I had my conference ticket and booked my flight, but I was appointed on a PhD examination committee and couldn’t go. I tried every possible solution to go over even for one day, but it didn’t work out in the end.
I am absolutely thrilled! And I am so grateful to those who recommended me for the job – I will finally get to meet the members of this vibrant community!
The pre-conference day (Oct 26) has two workshops scheduled:
From Social Messaging to Social Sharing, lead by Joachim Lindner, and
How to Establish a Social Networking Culture, lead by Jenny Ambrozek.
They both sound extremely interesting – it is so important to understand that social media tools can’t work on their own! The right culture has to be in place for people to adopt and use them before any benefit can be realised!
I started looking for an apartment in Siegen right after I found out my grant application was approved by DAAD. The people at the international office of the university there were really nice and helpful. I was looking for a student room, because most of the Irish universities are renting out their student accommodation during the summer. In Germany though, the spring semester is still in full swing in July, and the students are still there. I was offered a small one-bedroom apartment, and I turned it down because it didn’t come with an Internet connection. After looking and looking, and getting assistance from my German colleagues, I realised that I was asking for an impossible thing. Apparently there’s a law preventing people to pass Internet connections to their tenants – the tenants have to apply for these themselves. This showed me once more how blinded we are by assumptions we make, and how we project our own environment on sites we are supposed to visit. I emailed the lady in the international office asking if the little apartment in Siegen-Weidenau was still available – and it was! It proved to be a wonderful solution: the landlords were extremely nice. They picked me up at the train station, brought me to the apartment, showed me around and volunteered to take me out if I ever felt lonely!
I learnt about the bus routes and used Google on my phone for finding the nearest O2 shop. I got there 30 min before closing time and managed to get a mobile internet “surfstick” with a prepaid account for one month. Although in the possession of a shiny HTC Desire (that was supposed to come SIM free, but didn’t!), I kept my old Nokia phone for daily usage. The prepaid surfstick and a 30 days voucher for TMobile hot spots kept me reasonably happy for the whole month I spent in Germany. Still, couldn’t do Skype voice on any of these!
The next morning I took the bus to the university, together with tens of students living in a student residence nearby. My plans to walk to and from the university, or to buy a bike faded away when I saw the steep hills Siegen is located on and the temperature reached 37 degrees Celsius. The bus was the best solution! The aprtment was located on the top of one hill, and the university on the top of another, on the other side of the valley. Three buildings, all very modern, a huge mensa(canteen), a big library, several smaller ones – everything looked quite impressive. The cable internet connection in the office really rocked, while eduroam was poor and only accessible in a few locations.
A colleague took me to administrative headquarters of the university in the city centre, were I got my stipend. I did a quick tour of the shops and returned to the apartment I got to like more and more.
The week was extremely stressful: I had brought unfinished work with me, I was still getting problems to solve from Limerick, while I was struggling to arrange my visits for the following weeks, plan the work I had envisaged to do with my colleagues in Siegen, and the temperature was getting closer and closer to 40 degrees. AC in German trains was failing, with people being taken to hospital after barely surviving locked in trains at 52 degrees Celsius. I knew it was going to be hot, but I didn’t expected it to get that bad.
On Wednesday afternoon, I was invited to a seminar were Stephan Lukosch from TU Delft presented his work in the area of Knowledge Management and Storytelling. It was a great opportunity to met Stephan in person (he had a paper together with Till Schuemmer from Fernuniversitat Hagen in a workshop I organised back in 2007), and to meet some of the other members of the Information Systems and New Media group that was hosting me at the University of Siegen.
On Friday, I discovered the joys of working from home. Sitting on the balcony overlooking the valley, sipping coffee and working away on my laptop while the birds were chirping in the nearby trees was fantastic!
My daughter, who joined me on Wednesday, took a few walks in the neighbourhood and discovered we were 7 minutes away from the woods and the footpaths that connect the whole area. We started taking walks in the evenings, which were one of the delights of being in Siegen.
Today we went to see a young friend of mine who had recently started a job at a hospital in Olpe, not far from Siegen. Sebastian was one of my online students in the e-portfolio course I ran back in 2005. At the time, he was a brilliant undergraduate student in a medical school, looking for an opportunity to continue with postgraduate studies abroad. We had met briefly in Bucharest that year, and we kept in touch the whole time after that. The day was really hot, but a nice boat trip on Biggesee and a quick dip in the lake made the day much more bearable.
For the last 3 years, I’ve been working with Prof. Volker Wulf‘s group at the University of Siegen, Germany on various projects related to Global Software Development.
It all started at the ICGSE’07 conference in Munich, where I met Alexander Boden, one of Volker’s PhD students, and we realised we were sharing a common interest in the social, organisational and cultural aspects of remote collaboration.
This spring, I found out about a DAAD scheme supporting foreign scientists and academics to spend time working in German institutions. I sent in an application, and two weeks ago I found out that my funding was approved!
Lucky me! I’ll spend the following 4 weeks working with my colleagues in Siegen, refreshing my German and visiting nice places (if I can only find a cheap bike:)!
And here I am, packing my bags and hoping to get my HTC Desire today, so that I can download Leo and brush mein Deutsch;)
My intention was to give a presentation about FabLabs at 3Dcamp. But being in the middle of 1000 other things, I postponed putting my name forward until no slot was left unoccupied. Well, I guess you don’t need to hear me talking – you can read it by yourselves.
FabLab (or Fabrication Laboratory) is a concept originating at MIT as part of the MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA). If you’re looking for a short explanation, it is the realistic version of the Star Trek replicator.
The whole idea is about sharing designs globally, while making things locally.
There are 41 FabLabs around in the world at the moment, in US as well as in Norway, Germany, the Netherlands in Europe, in Afghanistan and in rural India. The concept seems to have captured the imagination of many, and inventors, artists, teachers and students can get access to top technology to experiment making things without too much need for training.
Will the day come when we’ll produce all we need in our own kitchen? The plates, the mugs, the tea towels, but also the washing machine and the family car? Will the day come when machines will be able to replicate themselves?
Last year on Ada Lovelace‘s day, I wrote a post about someone I admire. I prepared a lot for that post, but I got very sick on that very day, so I had to crawl out of bed with fever to actually edit the post and publish it.
Call me superstitious, but I postponed taking the pledge this year, thinking that it would be safer to do it if and when I can, than dreading that I can’t do it. I don’t get to spend a lot of time on my blog these days and my sense of guilt is kind of going through the roof by now.
So for today, I would like to thank to some fellow bloggers from whom I’ve learned a lot during the years and who have been inspiration for me for many years now. The list is probably incomplete, and I’ll remember some more names when I’ll go to bed tonight, but here we go:
Nancy White(@nancywhite): although I have never had the chance to meet Nancy face-to-face, her work on online facilitation had a profound impact on everything I studied, wrote and did in both my professional and my social life. I attended her Online Facilitation workshop back in 2006, and I went back as a mentor in 2007. Nancy has a special gift of making everybody feel comfortable and important when participating in an online event, she is amazingly creative and open to new perspectives. She lives in Seattle and when she’s not on the road, manages to work from home. She is also a well-known chocoholic:)
Stephanie Booth (@stephtara): I met Steph for the first time at Blogtalk 2 in Vienna, in 2004. She and Suw where like twins – always together! I always wanted to go to LIFT and to the Going Solo events she organised, but never made it. She came to Cork for Blogtalk 2008, and so we met again. Her blog is my special Sunday morning treat, many times when I read her posts I feel like someone is putting a mirror in front of me and makes me see things I usually avoid seeing! I learn a lot from her GTD endeavours and I am following on her steps trying out new tools on occasion. She lives in Lausanne, Switzerland, blogs in both English and French and I’m happy I can read in both. She started a coworking space last year and has a beautiful cat.
Suw Charman-Anderson(@suw). Suw is a prolific blogger- she blogs here, here and here. She’s based in London, is married to @kevglobal and has two lovely cats who tweet: @Grabbity and @SirMewton.
We only met once – in Vienna in 2004. Reading Suw is a delight – she’s interested in the same things, but she can put things in writing so much better than I could ever do! In November last year, she began to write to write on Computer Weekly’s Social Enterprise blog, covering various aspects of social technology in business. That was like my best Christmas present ever! Her hobby is making jewelry. She’s actually the one who initiated the whole Finding Ada movement.
Lilia Efimova (@mathemagenic) Lilia is a person I admire a lot. We were both interested in Knowledge Management, but at a time when Social Software was in its infancy (and somehow despised), she had the guts to embark on PhD research that put blogging practices at the centre of developing a knowledge-based ecosystem. She actually gave me the courage to go against the flow and consider what we call today Social Media as a research topic back in 2004!
How we first met: I missed Blogwalk1 because I was just out of hospital after surgery, but went to Blogwalk2 in Nuremberg in May 2004 and met Lilia and Elmine on that occasion. I remember that day very well: I was after a week of teaching at CNAM in Paris and I had to move from Germany to Luxembourg on that very Sunday, but I spent the Saturday in Nuremberg speaking and walking along with all these people whose blogs I was reading, and I was so happy I could be there!
Last summer, I had the honour to be there when Lilia defended her thesis in Utrecht. Lilia lives in Enschede, Netherlands.
Elmine Wijnia (@elmine) Elmine is a wise person who asks a lot of thought provoking questions. She’s always on a quest for what could help us live up to our values. The workshop she facilitated together with Ton Zijlstra at reboot9 in Copenhagen was one of those moments when you feel surrounded by creative and intelligent people, the ideas burst from all directions, and sky is the limit! Elmine and Ton live in Enschede, Netherlands, and I’m really looking forward to visit them this summer!
Carmen Holotescu (@cami13) – Carmen is teaching Software Engineering in a renowned Romanian Technical University in my hometown, Timisoara. But she’s also building fantastic apps. Cirip.ro, a sort of Romanian version of Twitter, but with far more capabilities built in, made her known worldwide. To me, she is the one who gave the Romanian blogosphere the much needed self-awareness, by putting together and maintaining a list of Romanian bloggers at a time when blogging started to take off in Romania back in 2005-2006.
Sabrina Dent (@sabrinadent) Sabrina is a web designer extraordinaire living in Cork, Ireland with a dog and a husband;) Although she’s working insanely too many hours, every now and again we get the chance to listen to her witty and thought-provoking presentations at various barcamp-style events across Ireland. Sabrina’s blog is a sort of focal point for many people involved in digital media here in Ireland, and on many occasions I’ve sent my students to have a look at her work and read her blog instead of reading yet another academic paper. Sabrina is a real treasure and imho we are very lucky to have her here in Ireland!
Alexia Golez(@lexia) – Alexia is originally from Limerick and currently works for Microsoft in Dublin, Ireland. She blogs about everything from current affairs and technology to music and cultural events. And her Red Links are a delight to follow! She’s part of the fantastic team that organizes the Irish Blog Awards every year – a great opportunity to meet face-to-face hundreds of bloggers from all the ways of life. I had the honour to have Alexia in my class last semester, giving a talk to my 4th year students, and I had the feeling that her insights about her work at Microsoft and the social media landscape in Ireland were extremely valuable for them!
Ina O’Murchu (@Ina) Ina lives in Galway, Ireland. She’s a brilliant community facilitator and a passionate promoter of the semantic web technologies. She’s always up-to-date with the latest technologies and is very active organising Social Media events in her area. She was the first blogger I met after I moved to Ireland – I found her blog by accident and then we organised to meet in person when I travelled to Galway. She was the one who introduced me to the Irish blogging scene.
So, on Ada Lovelace’s Day, thank you, ladies, for sharing your knowledge, reflections and enthusiasm day-by-day through your blogs, and for being such a great inspiration for me and for others!
On Wednesday, Nicholas Polley, the founder of the Dublin-based company 3rd Dimension was our guest in the IDC. He was invited to give a talk for our students and staff, continuing the Interaction Design Talks series we initiated in autumn (previous speakers were Nicola Quinn and Macdara Butler).
3rd Dimension’s Visualisation and Animation studios are based in Blackrock in Co Dublin. The company is focused on creating design solutions that include 3D visuals, photomontages, visual impact assessments and 3D walkthroughs meant to support their clients planning and marketing strategies.
I met Nick last year at the InnovateMedia 09 event, and approached him to talk about 3dcamp. Nick was open to the idea of coming to give a talk in UL, and we’re glad we managed to organise it.
The talk, titled Inside 3D Visualisation, attracted a pretty large crowd from both our undergrad and postgrad courses: Digital Media Design, Product Design and Interactive Media.
Nick spoke about his own career, about his company’s past and ongoing projects and referred to the processes and technologies involved. I think it was a great opportunity for our students not only to find out about technologies and work processes, but also about how to get a job in the digital media industry. Nick emphasized the importance of portfolios in selecting appropriate job candidates – and gave me yet another argument to push our students to start the work on their portfolios as early as possible!
On the same evening, Nick was the guest speaker at the IxDA Limerick meetup in the Absolute Hotel.
In the medical domain, 3rdDimension are doing interesting things in representing the eye, its conditions and interventions to correct this, in collaboration with a Swiss ophtalmologist.
A discussion started around VirtuSphere and its potential use for walkthroughs in to-be-built spaces. It was compared to CAVE – after the InnovateMedia 09 event, both myself and Nick had the chance to visit the CAVE installation owned by IADT. I expressed doubts that bringing people to visit an installation would be as successful as the wide spread visualizations that can be made accessible to anyone, anywhere
Nick blogged about his visit as well. It was great to have him in Limerick and I hope we can convince him to speak at the next 3d camp!
I’ve seen many posts, articles, presentations and videos about making social media to pay off. Most of the times, people don’t get it, and I can see a lot of metrics that are produced just to please managers.
So I was delighted when I cam across this presentation via someone’s tweet:
Last year on 
Suw Charman-Anderson(
