chieftech’s blog

I was really disappointed that I missed the public forum with Ezio Manzini, held in Sydney last week. However, I did manage to find this recorded excerpt from a presentation he made in 2008 where he talks about service design and social innovation.

I was recently asked what is a fairly frequent question... what's the difference between the popular social suite software options, aka enterprise wikis, which includes products like Confluence.

Personally I think one of the stand out features of Confluence is its rich text editor + macro capabilities. In some respects, if you aren't thinking about Confluence with this in mind, then really I'm tempted to ask why are you even considering Confluence. Confluence isn't just a wiki, its an enterprise social swiss army knife. Or as I like to think about it, its the social computing equivalent of the spreadsheet. :-)

However, it can be difficult for novice users to get into using macros and other advanced Confluence features. But this sneak peak of Confluence 3.3 from Matt Hodges really shows how its becoming easier and easier for anyone to become a Confluence wiki ninja and make existing ninjas even more productive.

I'm only just starting to catch up on the commentary from some of the recent run of Enterprise 2.0 related conferences. I really enjoyed this recording of CSC's Mark Masterson's lively and rapid presentation at the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 held in Milan back at the beginning of June. You can read more about C3 in Claire Flanagan's case study post, including her slides from the Enterprise 2.0 conference in the US this month.

In fact, a big hat tip to the forum's organisers as almost all of the presentations appear to be available on Vimeo and many presenters have also shared their slides online. I haven't even begun to work through all this content.

Meanwhile, over at the Enterprise 2.0 Boston 2010 conference, Dion Hinchcliffe shares his thoughts on that event and identifies his two biggest take-aways:

• Designing Enterprises for Loss of Control; and
• Enterprises Are Going Social.

Likewise, you can also watch recordings from Boson online too.

I'm sure there is more I've missed, but I'm still working my way through some unread feeds!

A good follow on from my last post, this video is great on two levels. The animated sketching really enhances this great talk by Daniel Pink about what drives us to perform.

There are more sketch videos available from the RSA's Animate series. I also particularly enjoyed Jeremy Rifkin's talk on the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and our society.

Hat tip to Headshift and Channel N.

Digital Nation is a US PBS produced documentary by Rachel Dretzin and Douglas Rushkoff, which examines the digital culture we how inhabit. There is a lot of focus on the impact of digital technology on how we learn and think, particularly the impact on the current generation of children and also virtual reality.

Rushkoff you might recall presented at the Headshift/Dachis Group's Social Business Summit. He was also recently interviewed on one of my favourite podcasts, Australia's ABC Radio National's Future Tense. Both the podcast and the documentary are both well worth a look.

Hat tip to Radio National and a big thanks to PBS for allowing non-US residents to watch it online.

This is a montage of short clips filmed (using my Flip video camera) at Barcamp Canberra 2010, which explores some of the themes of Government 2.0 and Social Innovation from the day.

BTW My slides from Barcamp ('Remixing Gov 2.0' and 'Hello. My Name is, Social Business Design.') and the session I ran on Gov 2.0 on Friday (which is really the extended version of my Barcamp presentation) are also all available online.

It all started on July 6th and since then we’ve had 2,400 people on the plinth - remember the laughs, the tears and the just plain nakedly outrageous. One & Other, here are your best bits…

This video of highlights from One and Other in the UK made my morning. Go on, take a break for 4 minutes and watch it. Hopefully you'll see, this wasn't simply a remake of Big Brother style reality TV. Its something quite different.

BTW There are a few moments that probably aren't safe for work, if you work for philistines that is ;-)

The online production was also a Headshift project.

Just in case you thought augmented reality (AR) was all about marketing gimmicks involving mobile phones and barcodes, this example from some Finnish researchers shows how some people are thinking about other ways of applying augmented and virtual reality to business. Actually many of these ideas aren't new but perhaps what is more interesting is that the technological barriers are falling and in easy (or very close) reach of consumers. I suspect that the only real barrier is probably the headsets! However, these experiments all pave the way for new, innovative methods for collaborating and manipulating data to come.

Hat tip to Games Alfresco.

You can find my slides and other notes from NSW Public Sphere elsewhere on my blog.

Social Innovation Camp is taking place in Australia next March, with initial meetup events taking place around the country. But what exactly is Social Innovation Camp all about? Watch this video from SI Camp Scotland:

Social Innovation Camp (Sicamp)is an experiment in creating social innovations for the digital age. The third Sicamp took place at Saltire Centre in Glasgow on Friday 19th June to 21st June 2009 and proved a huge success. Over 60 people joined in to turn six back-of-the-envelope ideas for web tools to change the world into real social start-ups complete with working software - all in under 48 hours. This video is a quick summary of what took place over the 48 hour period from beginning to end.