Career Space E-zine

Northern Voice Blogging Conference 2008

Moosecamp

The first day of the blogging conference is an “unconference”, affectionately called “moosecamp”. This is modeled on the popular “barcamp” which is usually a day comprised of computer geeks, who initiate informal conversations on topics of technical interests (and there is usually some of beer).

I was particularly interested in Sharepoint, and it was suggested that we also attend the session on Social Enterprise first as the topics are related. The majority of the conversations circled around company culture and how it related to collaborative culture when the software was introduced.

I’ll try to give a summary of some of the points:

Social Enterprise

Why use collaborative software? Some companies found that there were issues of permissiveness in emails. With problems opening email attachments, due to formats used and problems with viruses it was preferable not to send documents as attachments. One such solution was to use collaborative software to share documents. There were also the capabilities of using software systems such as Sharepoint as a closed system, in the case of certain documents not everyone is authorized to see all projects.

What challenges were involved in using software in a social enterprise system? In some cases some companies had difficulty in getting their employees to adopt the system as a tool for their work.This may have to do with some people’s distrust of technology and the fact that it wasn’t part of their office culture. How does it become part of the company’s culture? One participant questioned how much of the resistance to the technology had to do with language. Context and culture are interdependent concepts. In cases where it had become successful it was noted that in order for the collaborative software to be successful it had to mimic the cultural communication within the company and it had to serve the purposes of the group. It should come in from the grassroots. If it came down from management, there was lack of interest. It has to become the culture of the company and not just a project. It was also important to get the search algorithm working and needed to be professional about the search (it had to be meaningful); Google search, for example. Another participant noted that usage of the software went up when there was also some personal meaning in some of the activity that went on within the software structure. Organizing staff socials, for example, gave it personal meaning as well as fresh content which in turn kept people returning to the system.

It’s that time of year again….

 Courtesy of the folks down in Seattle at Common Craft a video explaining RSS

   

Click To Play

 

 

Coming up soon at the Northern Voice 2007 conference Darren Barefoot will be leading a session on Why Do We Blog? In order to gather empirical evidence for his theories he has posted an online survey for his readers to contribute stats and personal commentaries as to why they have been bitten by the blog bug. The link for the survey is here.

A couple of years ago my classmate Terry showed me the blog he was working on. I had never heard of them before but I quickly picked up on the concept. Read the rest of this entry »

The Northern Voice 2007 blogging conference is coming up and it’s at UBC. ‘Fess up! Who’s going?

Vancouver Photobloggers is a cool newish blog with a flickr group post feed for those that obsess with the camera. There are currently 15 members with 62 photo posts and growing. “A collective of Vancouver photographers seeking out others to collaborate with on upcoming shows, share techniques and just see what happens…” (quoted from Vancouver Photobloggers ‘about’ page). The latest offerings of photos are outdoor photographs with warm earthy tones.

This appeals to me as I’m in a mode to stop taking courses and experiment not only on my own but to learn Read the rest of this entry »

Barcamp Vancouver will take place at the Bryght office in Gastown on April 25/26. While all 90 spots are now full there is a very short waitlist so it’s still possible to sign up. What is barcamp? It’s an adhoc unconference where like-minded tech geeks get together to discuss their fave topics. Check out the wikipedia definition. There are a variety of cool topics on the agenda including social software for the introvert, ruby on rails and Kris Krug’s famous photocamp Read the rest of this entry »

Patron’s in the Driver’s Seat: Give Advanced Tool-Sets to Library Patrons by John Blyberg, Ann Arbor District Library: a lecture for the HigherEdBlogCon 2006 Conference. I’m intrigued by a number of concepts within this lecture. As a library staff member for the past 10 years at UBC I’ve seen the growth and hiccups resulted from moving from one library online system to another. Read the rest of this entry »

The HigherEdBlogCon 2006 is an online conference that is being held April 3-28, 2006 - “Transforming academic communities with new tools of the social web.” This innovative conference was planning by participants from 30 north american institutions using wiki social software. Read the rest of this entry »