Catherine Shinners

Office 2.0 - Mind Mapping Panel

Tomorrow is the kickoff for the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco at the St. Regis Hotel. Ideas and live projects will abound on the future of work, the impact of Web 2.0 in education (Classroom 2.0) mobility and productivity, and how to unleash and foster creativity.

I’m pleased to be moderating a panel on Mind Mapping and Collaboration, with guest panelists Lisa Arthur of MindJet, Michael Hollauf of Mindmeister, Jonathan Sapir of SnapXT, Keith Patterson of Itensil, and Martin Cleaver of Blended Perspectives.

I’ve used mind mapping as a planning and collaboration tool for several years now. In my work in high technology, I tend to work with people whose stock in trade is either the written word or program coding. When one gets a room full of people together in a room to work on a project with those skill sets making up the predominant tool kit, the model of thinking tends to get fairly focused and linear fairly quickly.

The Mind Mapping panel will take up perspectives on the impact of visual tools such as mapping to aid a group towards collaborative efforts and promoting relational and big picture thinking as part of “thinking through” a problem rather than “diving in” quickly.

My colleagues and I will discuss mind mapping, Web 2.0 and mapping, and mapping as an element in a spectrum of collaborative work processes. As I mentioned in a recent blog post about my conversations with Toby Moores, collaborative efforts need a variety of mechanisms to get from the “initial first thought to the final finished product”.

I’m excited about bringing this topic of mapping to the subject of collaboration and the enterprise. This year’s conference is sure to surpass last year’s in high energy, latest thought, and live lab experiments.

iPhone: The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread, Actually

As I posted on the Office 2.0 Conference community the other day, it took me 45 minutes to set up and activate my new iPhone. Thirty minutes of that set up time was spent trying to pry the darn thing from my two teenage daughters’  hands.

One of the major themes of this year’s splendiferous Office 2.0 conference is Mobility and Productivity, and Mr. Jobs obliged by having the iPhone manufactured and released by late June. Our peripatetic conference producer and wunderkind Ismael Ghalimi said “aha” and so everyone at the conference, if they don’t already have the device will get one: It’s their conference packet. No more paper please, no more conference totes to hold your chotchka’s. 

Calling it an iPhone is the marketing ploy to fix all other cell phone providers in the cross-hairs. It’s THE portable internet device. My contacts were synched in 30 seconds, my phone account established in a matter of minutes. Here, after 48 hours is my short list of benefits. No, I didn’t pry it apart to see how I could hack it. I have been waiting for years for something to help me get through my very complicated day.   Pay attention Apple marketing focus groups. This is a high tech, working mom version.

1. Family Calm: Keeps my fidgety, teenage daughter quiet while we’re in a traffic jam. I hand her my iPhone “Chill out and watch You Tube.”

2. Fashion Advice: Check the 10-day weather outlook. What’s the temp going to be like in SF during the conf? Sweater Advisory.

3. Calendar: Client appts. Dentist appts., you name it;  no paper, and no spinning up the laptop.

4. Book tickets: A quick trip to SoCal over the weekend. Safari, Orbitz, I’m done.

Next week, at Office 2.0, the iPhone will be put to a great collective experiment. All of us will have the phone, a Etelos-built conference application will keep us together, video feeds of conf. activities will be available. How do we work? Interactively, connected to the net at all times, and therefore connected to one another.  They call it an iPhone. The Important letter in that concept is “I” .

Office 2.0 and Creativity - Meet Toby Moore

Toby Moore is one of those people who can sustain a conversation across time and distance, not-withstanding the Web, and can get into “collaborative” mode at the drop of a hat. Last week we talked at the Left Bank during an interim moment for him between flights from the U.K., to L.A., to San Francisco, onto Canada and home again.

Despite a hectic travel schedule, we picked up where we had left off in person about 8 months ago (with plenty of Skype conversations in between). The topic, as usual was the process of nurturing a collaborative process from initial first thought (IFT) to final finished product (FFP). (We Love Acronyms!)

Toby and his team at Sleepydog in the U.K. produce game software for Sony. But he is also, along with Howard Rheingold, a visiting professor at the Institute for Creative Technologies DeMontfort University in Leicester, facilitating cross-disciplinary creative projects among academic specialists. DeMontfort is an institution that has specialties in the creative professions.  The Web, he says, and new modes of production are changing the classic design-to-final-finished product process to design for “hackability” or “mixability.”

In our conversation at the Left Bank, we expanded our “back of the napkin” architecture for collaboration, this version incorporating more visualization and social networking elements than our last hand-drawing.   We bemoaned the continuing issues around "HITL" or "human-intervention-transport-layer." which means we need some sort of flow and context-switching services between the conversational and visualization process to definition via wiki tools to full fledged project/production tools.  If only I could scan that napkin onto the web, we'd be zillionaires.

Last year, Toby was an attendee at the first Office 2.0 conference. He and I kibbitzed on the sidelines during the 2006 conference. We were excited about all the new technology we saw, but we agreed:  there needed to be more about the human experience of collaboration at future conferences. Well this year, Toby gets his wish. At Office 2.0 in San Francisco, he’ll be on a panel, moderated by Jevon McDonald, discussing ‘one year later’ experiences with his work with DeMontfort University.

Toby is a consummate creative catalyzer. After his participation at Office 2.0, he’s back in the U.K., launching a creative “open coffee club” for people in the creative professions, and in October, the first European Machinima conference in the U.K. 

 

 

 

 

Money and Mouth: Now in Same Location

I’ve been working on large, complex, high technology projects in Silicon Valley for a couple of decades. To me, there’s nothing worse than watching a room full of bright, deeply educated and professional people fumble through a project as they struggle with paltry mechanisms to capture their insight, experience, world views, and personal networks and leverage all those “intangibles” into tangible productivity for the marketplace.

Sometimes those teams are hamstrung by form-fitting to yesterday’s technology. Sometimes form-fitting to command and control models rather than collaborative forms of interaction.

How we transition the nature of productive work is both about changing the modes and models of work as well as the tools .  

To making those transitions we need to experiment, meet, exchange, foster, promote, explore, review follies, celebrate achievements, mark milestones, send specifications back to development, journal our discoveries.

It’s perhaps no accident that the Office 2.0 Conference and Silicon Valley are situated along both geographic and mental fault-lines of tectonic movement;  disruption and exploration happens along lines where worlds collide. Office 2.0 is a live-lab, showcase, cross-roads, expose of what’s happening and what’s possible with pointers to what’s next.

I’m most excited about how the technology and tools get into peoples hands and expand their value and footprint.  So, I decided to put my money where my mouth, or blogs posts, reside, and have jumped on board with the Office 2.0 team to craft the Enterprise and Collaboration track of the Office 2.0 conference.

The good news; I get to collaborate with Susan Scrupski     Jevon Mcdonald,  and the ceaselessly energetic Ismael Ghalimi. Our goal; to put together a set of “user" (a word I dislike) or Web practitioner and implementor panels to tell real stories of what happens when you have the right tools and environment to collaborate.  Panel we intend will encompass technology and culture changes.

So we’ll be bringing together pundits and curmudgeons, early explorers with their tales of penetrating old models and exploring the right value points with new models. It’s about, collaboration within the enterprise, collaboration without, collaboration on-the-go, collaboration and visualization.  So…come and see for yourself…and pick up your iPhone when you do.

 

Office 2.0 Conference - The iPhone and You!*

*Or – “Aren’t you glad you didn’t stand in line all night in June?”

Last year at the inaugural Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco, attendees received an iPod as their virtual conference brochure…All speaker bios and conference schedule were pre-loaded on the iPods.

Now, this year’s Office 2.0 conference is coming out of the gate with the iPhone for this year’s attendees. Yes, you read it right. If you’re an attendee the iPhone will be your conference badge, your business card exchange, your window on demos,….you get the picture.

Ismael Ghalimi, conference producer and CEO of Intalio, just announced it today in his blog, IT|Redux. 

Office 2.0 is a conference cum live lab and experiment, and this year’s event will focus on bringing users and implementers to the panels, with two forum tracks on Collaboration in the Enterprise and Mobility and  Productivity, as well as  two demo tracks. And yes, while it’s great to exemplify virtual collaboration, there are moments when face to face interaction is warranted….Mark your calendars for September 3-5 in San Francisco, and whether you have an iPhone already or not…Be There.