Collaborative Technologies Conference: Day 3

This morning was my session on “Business Continuity and Collaboration” (Powerpoint delivered as PDF here). My mandate was to lead an open discussion about an admittedly very deep and broad topic and be a “conversation starter.” There was alot of conversation and people really participated.

My objective was to stimulate conversation and provide people with a perspective that BOTH business continuity and collaboration could be viewed as one-and-the-same (where it comes to human interactions and performance support). Pretty tough to cover in 45 minutes, but still the dialogue was refreshing and people made it clear to me that these two areas by necessity required significantly deeper examination and thought.

After my session, I stuck around to listen to Ken Thompson. If you read my blog, you’ll recall that I stumbled across Ken’s Bioteam blog as I’ve been seeking thought leaders surrounding next generation community, affinities, clustering, smart mobs, or however you care to term the accelerating global consciousness, connectedness and culture of participation that’s emerged.

Ken was delightful and more informative than I could’ve imagined. In fact, I went to Jen Pahlka (the woman who runs the conference) and recommended Ken as someone who should’ve been one of the plenary speakers and would make a great one next time around. He was that interesting, his perspective that fresh, and was quite intellectually stimulating to boot.

Ken’s study of biological behaviors (ants, bees, mimicry, all things natural) point the way to thinking about teaming, messaging and behaviors in new ways. He also has developed a swarming, hosted messaging application in beta called Swarm-It, that I’m really keen on using. Why? As Ken described it and the possibilities of mass messaging that this “engine” would enable, I could feel the synapses in my brain begin to fire and the possibilities and opportunities for enhanced communications leapt into view. Expect big things from the approach he’s driving swarm messaging.

Unfortunately I had to fly home today so missed a few must-see sessions. Overall, the conference was a home run and well worth my investment of time, money and energy.