Not only that we have an Irish blog week 2008, but now we have a social media social life here in Limerick as well!
On Jan 19, we met for an exquisite Blogger Coffee Limerick at the Marriott, thanks to Alexia Golez;
I blogged about it that very afternoon, but the gods of Internet were against it, and the post disappeared without a trace. (Don’t get me started on Mercury retrograde and stuff like that!)
This Thursday, Feb 7, we had the first Limerick OpenCoffee in 2008; as usual, the Absolute Hotel was the venue. Bernie Goldbach and James Corbett took care of the organisation – again, as usual. An interesting mix of people attended, and after a round of introductions and discussions on the format and a possible alternative venue for the future events, I had the chance to talk to a few people (and get a few very useful tips!)
The next one is planned for the first Thursday in March, 11am, in the Absolute. We hear that a website for Irish Open Coffee is cooking, and there’s already a blog titled Cork OpenCoffee – but reporting on similar events across the whole island.
There’s a Jaiku channel for it, and a calendar of the forthcoming events is available.
And now Anton Mannering is bringing the TechLudd to Limerick on February 21. Venue: the George Hotel. Can’t wait, especially because I couldn’t go to Dublin on the 24th of January and missed the first event of the series!
Aren’t we spoiled?!
Update: wiki created at wikispaces.com for Irish OpenCoffee, with the intent of making dates and topics of future events visible across the island and allowing for input and feedback.
February 10 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
The following quote comes from Jay Deragon‘s blog The Relationship Economy, but I first got it via the Value-Networks Google Group mailing list.
I deeply resonated with this:
“The best approach to leveraging the social web is to understand the systemic nature of peoples interest, desires and needs: a relationship. Connecting the dots requires a conversation, not just a connection. What say you?”
Finally someone tells corporations that becoming involved in social networking just because it is trendy and without changing their attitude will not pay off!
Markets are conversations… and they will never ever again reverse to corporate monologues!
January 10 2008 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
On Thursday we had a very nice exchange with a group of Creative Multimedia students from Tipperary Institute of Technology…
All started a few good weeks ago, with Bernie Goldbach following the
Jaiku channel I use with my students (Bernie recalls jaikus about Marshall McLuhan received on his mobile phone while he was walking his dog:)- must have been that “toaster as medium” thingie!).
In October, I finally made it to an OpenCoffee in the Absolute Hotel and met Bernie in person. Not before spamming him with a Shelfari invite the night before:(
Still frustrated because I missed the EduCamp in June and the PodCamp in September, I invited Bernie to give a talk on podcasting to my students. Bernie thought of bringing some of his students along – and I was enthused about this!
And then all happened on Thursday – Bernard spoke to the UL+TippInst students about podcasting, jobs and entrepreneurship, asked his students to talk about their own work and encouraged the audience to ask questions. The students were a bit shy in the beginning, but when he invited them to have a look at his podcasting gear, most of them couldn’t resist the temptation and the ice was broken. The two groups of students had the chance to mingle for a few minutes afterwards!
After the lecture, the TippInst students visited the IDC, where Liam Bannon gave them a briefing on the Interaction Design Centre and our way of looking at technology, and Lui spoke about previous and current IDC projects. The visit finished with the grand tour and a closer look at some of our “reliques” – the Shannon Portal, the recipe pyramid…
It was an interesting exchange and I have the feeling we all learned from it!
Some opinions of my students on the event can be read on the Jaiku channel!
Note: A more formal version of this post was published on the IDC blog previously.
December 02 2007 | Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
In case you haven’t heard yet, the next BlogTalk will happen in Cork, Ireland on 3-4 March 2008 – “continuing with its focus on social software, while remaining committed to the diverse cultures, practices and tools of our emerging networked society. The conference is designed to maintain a sustainable dialog between developers, innovative academics and scholars who study social software, practitioners and administrators in corporate and educational settings, and other general members of the social software community.”
The conference chairs are John Breslin and Thomas N. Burg , having Tom Raftery and Jan Schmidt as co-chairs.
The full call for proposals is available here, and the deadline for submitting proposals has been extended until December 7, 2007.
Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare and Nova Spivack of Radar Networks are among the invited speakers.
There’s a colocated WebCamp on Social Network Portability scheduled for the day before, March 2 2008.
As a member of the organising committee, I should have blogged about this long time before. But as always, I’m madly busy at work and can’t find enough time for the things I love doing!
Shame on me:(
November 27 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I got back home today and found an invitation from a friend to join Shelfari, supposedly a social network service for book lovers.
I recently heard about Bookmooch and I had a look at it without joining. But this afternoon, in between cooking dinner, cleaning my apartment and chatting to my daughter, I decided to give Shelfari a try.
I never liked this kind of shortcut in finding out who else is on that network (giving them your Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail username and password), but until now – with all my bad feelings about giving someone free access to my mailbox – nothing bad ever happened. But there’s a start for everything…I discovered a few friends were already using it and opted for connecting to them, but I specifically de-selected all the other people on my contact list. Pressed “send”, and – SURPRISE! – few minutes later I discovered the invitation WAS SENT to everyone on my contact list… Mailing lists, former students, former co-workers, a few blogs – all got it!
Two minutes later, a friend emailed warning me it happened to her as well and I went in, deleted my account .and started apologizing to people …
A bit of a search on Technorati showed me that it happened to others as well…
That doesn’t make it less embarrassing though:(
If you got the Shelfari message from me, please note that I don’t recommend it…unless you think you can handle the odd interface!
October 30 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
My paper made it into one of the most important conferences in our field, the International Conference on Global Software Engineering, that happened in Munich between 27 and 31 August.
On Monday, I went to a tutorial on SNA- Seeing inside: Using social network analysis to understand patterns of collaboration and coordination in global software teams offered by Kate Ehrlich and Giuseppe Valletto from IBM Research. It was great to meet Kate in person after collaborating with her in drafting a project inside IBM! (The project never took off, but it was great to work with Kate and learn from her!)
During lunch, I made a terrible faux pas when I sat down at the same table with Phillippe Kruchten who was in the middle of his lunch. I read his name tag and as my excitment was bursting, the only line I could find after “Hello, nice to meet you!” was: “we’re reading your papers!” He was very nice answering: “and I’m reading your papers too! I had to read all the 100+ submissions…” The truth is I had discovered one of his papers only the week before, and it served me very well to make a point in my ECKM’07 paper, so for me it was a wonderful coincidence and all I meant was to thank him… but then I made a complete fool of myself!
My colleague Anders introduced me to Frances Paulisch, the host and the good fairy of the conference. Frances introduced me to Daniela Damian (again, what a difference between exchanging emails and talking on Skype from being face-to-face!) Daniela introduced me to some of her students – I remember meeting Sabrina Marczak on that occasion.
A welcome reception at the Hilton City Munich followed on the same evening.
On Tuesday, instead of a keynote, there was an opening session including “two important papers”-as introduced by the organisers. Their topics – text-based communication in distributed requirements workshops and respectively the relationship between time zone separation and performance – were of great interest and therefore they were vividly discussed by the audience during the following breaks.
An Experience session, containing only papers from the industry, followed.
Before introducing the keynote speaker, Phillipe Kruchten presented some statistics: there were 100 submissions, out of which 29 were accepted; 156 participants were 60 from Germany, 22 from the US, 9 from the Netherlands, 8 from Finland, 5 from Canada, 4 from India, 3 from Japan. There were supposed to be 2 more Irish, but they didn’t make it till the end.
25% of the participants were from academia, 35% from the industry, 19% came from research, 5% were consultants and 16% belonged to “other categories”. Strange enough, not a single person from this last category could be identified…
Then “Herr Professor Doktor” Erran Carmel delivered his keynote speech, “Reflections on a Decade of Studying Global Software Engineering“.
A poster session followed – only 3 posters were presented, and unfortunately the Irish IBMers who were co-authors of one of them couldn’t be there. Kate Ehrlich and Prof.Marilyn Tremaine had to stand next to it, explaining the work that had been done.
Sabrina Marczak from PUCRS, and a group of students from TU Munich(under the supervision of Marilyn Tremaine) were the authors of the other two.
In the afternoon, we had a session dedicated to Quality and Performance. Two very different talks. Rajesh Agarval from TCS presented the solution found by his company for motivating their developers to work as quality engineers as well. The other speaker was Timo Poikolainen from Nokia – and again, the audience had the chance to hear about successes and failures with thorough openness, as always when someone from Nokia is giving a presentation.
The session organized for students in the evening included two parts:
– In the first part, J.Sauer from Hamburg University presented the results of a survey he has undertaken on the particular difficulties of research in the GSE domain. It was interesting to listen to the student introductions – it gave you an idea of the differences between research settings in different countries.
– In the second part, Harold Ossher from IBM Watson introduced the Jazz Technology platform. Jazz is the result of a collaboration between IBM Rational and IBM Research and is attempting to build a team collaboration platform on top of the Eclipse IDE. Jazz.net – not yet open to the public; a few videos available. Two related research projects based on jazz were presented: one from Victoria University and the other one from University of California, Irvine.
And then the banquet, at the Ratshaus Keller. A lot of nice food and drinks, a magician going around and entertaining people, socializing and networking, and lots of fun.
On Wednesday, it was my turn, and I was extremely nervous. The session was titled Communication, and I was in very good company: Matt Bass from SEI-CMU (actually from Siemens!), and Luis Izquierdo, from the University of Victoria. Luis’s paper was extremely interesting – his methods were also inspired by ethnography, and his field site very similar to ours.
I oscillated between a classical presentation and an unusual one. In the end, I couldn’t resist the temptation – I went for the unusual one. I started with a warning – no figures nor tables in my presentation!
I don’t know what was the impact at the conceptual level – if I managed to convince the audience how important social practices and human actors actually are in a global environment!, but probably my little SouthPark characters have made quite an impression!
On Wednesday afternoon, I had the chance of presenting to the steering committee the Lero proposal of organising ICGSE 2009 in Limerick.
Thursday, the last day of the conference, was shorter.
In the morning, the announcement was made that ICGSE 08 is going to take place in Bangalore, India, and ICGSE 09 in Limerick, Ireland.
In the first session, Michael Vax from LUXOFT delivered the keynote speech, substituting his boss who couldn’t come because of visa problems.
The keynote was followed by an Experience session: Subita Sudershana from Roche Molecular Systems (very energetic talk, including stories of miscommunication with both parts speaking English!) , Viktor Clerc from VU Amsterdam, and Alexander Boden from University of Siegen.
The final session was dedicated to Processes and chaired by Daniela Damian. Alberto Avritzer from Siemens Corporate Research presented the Global Software Studio 3.0 project. Our own university was involved in the first and second year in this project, so it was interesting to see how it evolved in the next stage. Fausto Fasano spoke about an experiment on code inspection, while the final presentation (Rafael Prikladnicki from PUCRS) examined different offshoring and onshoring strategies.
It was a very interesting for me to meet in person so many academics and practitioners involved in GSE research. As I said, I was reading their papers, but didn’t have any perception of their personalities.
And it was good to see who does the same kind of work in the GSE community. I found a lot of connections with the work of people in Daniela Damian’s group (Luis Izquierdo, Sabrina Marczak) and with Alexander Boden’s research – clearly grounded in CSCW. Let’s hope we can cook a workshop or tutorial together for next year!
I must confess I was very anxious during the conference: we seem to worry a bit too much as a group that our work won’t be well seen by hard core software engineers, who are obviously preferring quantitave studies and experiments to our “soft” qualitative and interpretive approach. The conference proved to me that the community is ready to listen to what we have to say, and we can actually make an important contribution complementing those quantitative approaches.
My ego got nicely massaged on several occasions; for example, Alberto Avritzer greeted me on the first day as we would have known each other – just to find out before the end of the conference that he was reading my blog from time to time! Frederick Zarndt commented at the end of my presentation (with shining eyes and a big smile on his face) that he had experienced as a practitioner all the situations mentioned in the presentation. Frederick gave a tutorial on the first day on “intercultural expectations, misunderstandings and communications” that I unfortunately missed. And then, there was a very touching scene in the lobby on the last day, when a young lady (a Brasilian student volunteer) came to tell me in her hesitant English: “When I’ll grow up, I would like to be like you!”
In conclusion, the conference in Munich was a very rewarding experience – and it was followed by a short vacation. Here’s my Flickr set from the conference and the one from the cycling tour of Munich on Friday!
September 01 2007 | Events and GlobalSD and ICGSE07 and Munich | No Comments »
This draft has been sitting here for more than a month… Trying to finish & publish it now!
On June 22 early in the morning I flew to Berlin to attend the EACE Workshop at Fraunhofer FOKUS, after a demanding week spent in Dublin doing fieldwork.
The EACE project is part of the ongoing research in Europe looking at ICT technologies for developing new collaborative tools and environments. The EACE project is an 18 month FP6 Specific Support Action set to “investigate further the dynamics, potential and impacts of the technological advances in order to feed the policy making process”.
The agenda sounded very interesting, and I was hoping to meet some of the people doing research in the field of Collaborative (e)Working Environments, which ties so well into our work. I’m part of several AMI@work communities, I’m subscribed to the ECOSPACE newsletter, but I didn’t have yet the chance to meet face-to-face with people doing research in this area, and I thought this would be a good opportunity.
As usually when I travel abroad, I did my homework before(booked the flight, arranged accommodation at friends, printed out directions and a map). Unfortunately, the Deutsche Bahn website knew nothing about Kaiserin-Augusta Allee, and gave me directions to Kaiserin-Augusta Strasse instead. I had to arrive there before realising there was no Fraunhofer Institut in that area, and it took me a while to get to the right place, so I missed some of the morning talks.
Craig Cmehill from SAP has blogged the event on the spot (and then waited indefinitely for this post to be published, guessing – I don’t know how!- that there was another blogger in the room!).
In the afternoon, Arnd Layer from IBM Germany spoke about Practical experience with social software at IBM. He spoke about profiles, communities, tagging, internal blogs and activities – all what Lotus Connections basically offers!, but he illustrated everything with examples, which made the talk really interesting. I really loved this particular tag cloud!
After spending the whole week absorbing information in my fieldwork, I was on the same wavelength with the speaker. When Craig asked: “Is this public? Can I blog this?”, I basically couldn’t keep from telling him it was on YouTube🙂 as public as it can get!
Arnd also mentioned Lotus Greenhouse, meant to give customers and collaborators the feeling of the new products, and ThinkPlace, the internal Web application for facilitating innovation.
Arnd concluded with a few words of wisdom on Business Social Networking:
– listen to your customers;
– use blogs to communicate externally, watch blogs speaking about your own products;
– encourage adoption: instant messaging and web conferences can provide people with real time information;
– use wikis as glossaries for teams / FAQs.
He emphasized that we live in a globalised world, in which the ones who dare and are pro-active will have the advantages. Knowledge Management was – for too long- stuck in top down processes; social networking opens new perspectives.
The next speaker was Craig Cmehil, Community Evangelist at SAP AG – presenting The world(s) of the SAP community Network. This time, the facts were completely new, and I had a tremendous surprise to see what a big company can do with these nice tools, if the right attitude and culture are embraced. And of course, the right people – Craig appeared to me as a sort of wizard, open-minded, innovative and ready to try new things in new ways, always present in a hundred places at one time, reading, commenting, adjusting the tools to fit the people.
The SAP community network seems to me an impressive achievement, with separate areas dedicated to developers and business process experts.
What makes the concept interesting are its exclusive content, the downloads available, the worldwide collaboration it fosters and a recognition system for the contributions of its members.
Craig said 76% of the content was actually contributed by the users, which is quite impressive.
He also mentioned specific problems, like French speakers not mingling with the others and having their separate community – but the community network is actually supporting this.
New tools are offered to the community and people are experimenting. Some get adopted, some others don’t. He mentioned Second Life and Twitter (and the case of Sen. Edwards that made the corporate world to actually pay attention to micro-blogging!)
The next presenter was Volkmar Pipek from University of Siegen, Germany. His talk was titled Every Software is Social -Appropriation Support in Collaborative Systems.
He tackled one of my favourite topics: the adoption of collaborative software tools, mentioning long-term studies on Groupware adoption such as Orlikowski 1996, Kasten & Jones 1998, Pipek & Wulf 1999.
I loved the idea that good design and user centred software development are important, but they don’t guarantee adoption; use dynamics can‘t be fully anticipated.
I particularly liked the statement on the role of social practice around collaborative systems
in adoption. Actually the practice is the appropriation of these technologies!!
He illustrated his talk with a few examples from their work – the help function of a tool(an Eclipse-based client for the BSCW system) was combined with a wiki.
The main conclusion was that these ‘appropriation activities’ should be actively supported, and we’re moving towards ‘Virtual Communities of Tool Practice’! The designers of a tool can do a lot, but the last mile has to be done by users.
Frank Fuchs Kittowski from Fraunhofer ISST was next, speaking about Integration of Knowledge Communities into Knowledge-intensive Business Processes.
I came across Frank’s name while I was working for Fraunhofer IESE and some of my colleagues were involved in a project called APO-IT together with several other Fraunhofer Institutes, but I never had the chance to meet him in person before.
He spoke about making informal collaboration visible and integrating communities into business processes. Wikis were then brought into the picture for providing “context- (process-) based access to the community” and give birth to “collaborative knowledge activities without process
boundaries (in and across process steps)”. I must confess I am a bit skeptical about this idea. It might sound good in theory (finding a cure for a pain we all know it’s there!), but it doesn’t pay any attention to the fact that communities are living organisms (if we speak about real communities here and not about special interest groups assembled by the management!)
Their approach is actually adding a wiki and a wiki interface to the existing APO Pilot process oriented knowledge base.
The interesting twist is that the application is designed for process integrated learning in the automotive industry.
The last speaker was George Milis, from European Dynamics who presented the current results of the EACE project in a talk titled: Towards a New Policy Framework for the Adoption of Electronic Collaborative Working Environments.
The project partners set to elaborate policy recommendations for CWE adoption(Collaborative eWorking Environments) in the EU.
What they came up with was a “layered ontology of collaboration patterns”. More on the framework and the 3 selected CWE prototypes in George’s slides!
There were mentions about counterbalancing the American supremacy in designing collaborative software tools (doh!). Someone mentioned the Buerger Portal initiative in Germany – giving every german citizen an email address, a web page, access to shared spaces (who’s interested already has all these).
Someone asked the following question: “If the availability of the technologies is not a problem, then how can EU stimulate the adoption?” I tried to bring into discussion the idea the approach shouldn’t be centred on the technology and the collaborative tools, but on the purpose for which one would embrace these tools. If a job application procedure or a tax claim can only be done online, people will learn how to use it. But putting the carriage in front of the horses won’t help!
I mentioned Karin Knorr-Cetina’s work on Sociality with Objects that has been used by Jyri Engestrom to show why some social network services work and others don’t.
Another discussion topic was the (disappearing) work-life balance. People tend to take care of personal matters durring the working hours and work from home in the evenings, so the boundaries between work and free time tend to get blurred. Arnd stated that what’s happening inside IBM shows that actually adding a social dimension to work improves productivity.
Volkmar argued that life needs structure -say the psychologists!
The question: Do we need a collaboration etiquette(c-etiquette)? was also asked. Could such an etiquette be modelled ? (In my opinion, it can only emerge!)
The opportunity of using CWE as a vehicle for transferring knowledge and skills to new and younger employees was also touched in the discussion.
The slides of the presentations were made available for download, and there are also a few pictures from the event available.
Together with Craig Cmehil, we managed to ignite some interest for social software tools and especially for Twitter and Dopplr! Unfortunately, the enthusiasm was short lived – none of the invitations I’ve sent were ever answered!
Craig also uses a nice tool I wasn’t aware of – Time-to-Meet – for scheduling his meetings.
There’s a link to a database full of other fancy applications on his blog.
In conclusion, it was an interesting event and a good networking opportunity, but my original expectation of getting associated with some FP7 proposal writers in this area wasn’t unfortunately met.
(Originally published in Tales from the Field of Software Engineering)
August 02 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
First of all, I must say I’ve been trying to get to reboot for the last 3 years. Two years ago, I was waiting for my Irish visa, eager to start working again after having spent 3 months in Romania. Last year in June, I was deeply immersed in my field studies and I couldn’t leave for a single day: “my” team was getting close to their first release!
Before saying anything about the talks and the people at reboot 9, I want to share a few things about the organisation of the event. I wish I’d see more such events happening! I have no clue how Thomas and his pals managed all this, but I was deeply impressed! We’re organising a conference ourselves here, and I learned a lot during those two days in Copenhagen!
What impressed me most:
- the venue – the old Kedelhalle turned into a modern conference center – the 3 rooms(especially the big one), the lobby, the terrace and the surrounding lawn- was perfect for allowing people to move from one talk to another, or to take a break(see note by Peter Rukavina on Jaiku!), speak to someone interesting and relax for a few minutes. The smaller rooms were somehow less inviting, but most of the times people found alternatives (like having the workshop out on the lawn!) ;
- the double-sided name tags, having the names written with large fonts;(finally, reading name tags proved useful for finding people)
- the reboot notebook, specially designed for meaningful notes;-)
- the free reboot t-shirts, and the free customisation service provided;
- power plugs available and wi fi coverage (most of the time);
- the hacker space in the lobby;
- the virtual reboot spaces: the continuously emerging conference web site, Copenhagen on Plazes, the Jaiku channel;
- the big screens in the lobby and in the big conference hall, mainly displaying what was happening on the Jaiku channel;
- the reboot chairs outside on the lawn;
- the conference programme posted on a wall at the entrance, with comments and notes;
- a baby sitting space in the basement; a baby-friendly atmosphere that made the conference much more “human”- without any question mark!;
- free coffee, tee, fruits and pastry available all day long;
- free lunches (ok, no vegetarian meals, but the raw carrots and fruits provided allowed me to survive; Geoff Jones and Euan Semple found a Mexican restaurant nearby, but I never managed to hook up with them);
- a bar with both alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks – beer was by far the most popular!
- an impressive gala dinner organised in the very conference hall, with candle-light, video productions and exquisite food;
- the Nintendo wii in the lobby
- the do-it-yourself groups for dinner in the second evening; although I found it an excellent idea, the group I joined didn’t realise there was no reservation made, and we had to handle that ourselves. We ended up having dinner in three, instead of the group of 15 who signed up for that particular Thai restaurant!;
- the reboot after party – free entrance.
Speaking to someone during the break, I remember expressing my surprise about how “normal” this conference was. Most of the conferences we go to are artificial environments where you struggle to learn the rules and play by them. This time, I felt at home from the very first minute, and there was food for mind, soul and …stomach altogether:-)
A Swedish friend who hosted me the night before reboot asked me about the conference site and checked it to get an impression. His reaction surprised me: “How do you find all these ‘New Age’-y things?!”
How did he come to this conclusion? The topic – “Human?” The social networking site appearance of the web site? I have no clue. But there definitely is a sort of counterculture. Are we the new hippy generation – now tentatively called “digital bohemians”?!
All these unconferences are an opportunity to meet like minded people and talk about things that matter. reboot’s system of values (scheduling the talks participants showed most interest in) is not very common. Most of the conferences count on reviewers. Nobody comes to reboot looking for ready made solutions, immediately applicable in their practice. People go there for having their minds rebooted. Listening to out-of-the-box ideas. Bumping into interesting people. Having their own ideas challenged.
June 17 2007 | reboot9 conference copenhagen | No Comments »
My department organised a great event yesterday – the first Irish Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. About 50 people from different universities, companies and public institutions attended the event, which turned out to be a success! Several research groups from Cork, Dublin, Galway , Limerick and Maynooth presented their current research and projects, and I must say it was very interesting to find what was going on – not only in the other universities, but also in our own!
I found a lot of interesting connections in the presentations of Tim Hall (EMRC), Mark Magennis(NCBI) , Aphra Kerr(NUIM – NIRSA).
Mark Leslie(Martello Media) presented three of their projects, and the “fun palace” designed for the Visitor Centre at the Cliffs of Moher really caught my attention. I’m as mad as everyone else for the horrible impact that building had on the environment, but I’d still like to see what came out!
The ScanCam one of the participants was wearing at his neck raised privacy concerns (taking shots at every change detected in the environment- 5000-7000 pics/day). Our colleague introduced an interesting application that was actually trying to make sense of these images by selecting the less frequent situations out of the huge pile.
I was fascinated by the story around the design of a digital piece of jewelry presented by John Mc’Carthy from UCC. Different interactive artefacts made me think of the wide spectrum of opportunities for augmenting human intelligence made possible by technology: the topographic torch, the touch table, the search of digital archives, or artistic events such as the re-creation of the 1831 riot in the Queen Square in Bristol.
I also had the chance to discover that one of our colleagues in TCD is actually studying meetings and the electronic support for meetings (unlike us, who are focusing on software engineering, he’s looking at the medical domain).
The breaks allowed for a lot of networking, and the gorgeous weather brought us outside, in the nice ambiance of the Kilmurry village.
In the afternoon, we had a group discussion on possible future actions for keeping in touch, creating awareness mechanisms on each other’s work, and becoming more visible in Ireland as a community. The ideas kept buzzing, and we put together a wiki page to keep track of what was said and remains to be put into practice.
A few other people blogged the event: Mike Bennett, Eoin Brazil.
And of course we had a short note (and some comments!) on the IDC blog as well!
Although several people were involved in the organization, my colleague Luigina Ciolfi was the heart and the force behind this event. Kudos, Lui, for all the hard work! I enjoyed every minute, and judging by what I’ve heard, so did most of the participants!
May 03 2007 | conference and IDC and iHCI and Ireland and Limerick | 2 Comments »
I’m dreaming about blogging day and night. Then why I’m not doing it?!
I’m a Virgo, you know, and we Virgos have the tendency to excessively analyse everything…
It took me quite a long time to analyse the reasons for my erratic blogging: mad workload (self-imposed!), lack of work-life balance and… a fair amount of good old procrastination…
I’m writing things in so many places that it’s difficult to keep track anymore… I’m kind of lost in the jungle of web 2.0 tools, and I realise more and more that, despite of being somehow “permanent”, most of the content I generate is ephemeral. My blog was a sort of central point where I used to be able to retrieve everything I needed from my past… Actually, this is what it was meant to be:
“A place where stories, thoughts and ideas come together“
Now this map of my past three years has a lot of blank zones… a lot of stubs, unpublished drafts… but I lost hope of ever getting back to them, and I decided to focus on the future…
I’m feeling much better now – got rid of my anxieties, accumulated some experience in my research domain and I’m more positive about finding ways to invest more time in this violon d’Ingres of mine which is social networks… playing my Connector role;-)
March was hectic, but great! The Webcamp on Social Networks in Galway, the Global Sourcing workshop in Val d’Isere, and BocSe (the Bosch Software Engineering conference) in Ludwigsburg, where Ita Richardson and myself were invited to give a tutorial on Global Software Development. I must confess I was a bit wary about calling it “tutorial”, because I doubted we could teach the Bosch software engineers anything new, but formally, there was no other way of doing it… It went amazingly well, and we enjoyed it as much as the participants…
April looks a bit less hectic – more time for producing stuff…
But May and June… oh, my! What’s on my list right now:
Exciting…and scary on the same time:-P
April 14 2007 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
« Prev - Next »
