Tag: social

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Social Connections III – 3 weeks to go

Only a few weeks until the 3rd Social Connections user group, held in the IBM Labs Dublin.

We have a few places left if you are interested in attending this unique user group. We have some fantastic sessions such as:

and many more … the full agenda can be found on the Social Connecitons site here

 

As well as a full agenda planned for the day with two tracks – one for business and one for technical and admin – we have some other plans for the day in store.

If you can join us after the event we have an evening dinner and reception planned for at the Guinness Store House

There will be a tour of the storehouse, information on the history of Guinness and the chance to pull your own pint – followed by dinner and drinks in the fantastic surroundings of Arthur’s Bar.

Arthur's Bar 1 Arthur's Bar 2

Arthur’s Bar: A new edition to GUINNESS STOREHOUSE but as old as Ireland itself. It’s a traditional Irish pub, a place of hospitality. This communal gathering space is somewhere to relax and experience the heart of the Irish community whilst enjoying the breathtaking views of St. James’s Gate Brewery and Dublin city

 

The spaces for this event are limited and will be on a first come first served basis. Please sign up and let us know as soon as you can if you would like to attend.

Looking forward to seeing you on the 22nd of June in Dublin.

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Social Connections II a grand day out

It’s taken me a while to post this – mainly becuase I am still recovering from the ‘Zombie Flu’ – aka the hideuos cold and chest infection which is now on week number 4!!

Social Connections II was in a not so sunny Cardiff Wales and my adventure started when I picked Ms Lisa Duke up at Gatwick airport very early the day before the conference.

To cut a long story short,  5 trains, a quick lunch, much social and work related brain storming, a very wet walk in some ‘angry rain’ and much cussing the googlemaps mobile app, we arrived in Cardiff.

We had a great afternoon / evening on thrusday – finalising a few things at the venue, finishing off the badges and then off out for a meal at a fish resturant in Cardiff centre.

 

Friday AM we were all go, reception desk to set up, badges to sort, signs etc … the catering appeared at the correct time and so did most of the speakers (Mr Paul Mason from my own company Applicable was coming at lunchtime), and virtually all the attendees appeared when they were supposed to – so all in all a good start.

We had a few minor issues with the streaming sorted out very quickly – and judging from the #soccnx has tag on twitter we had lots of people watching and interested.

All the session slides will be available shortly as well as the video’s – please watch the Social Connections site for details.

Highlights for me:

  • Finally getting to meet mr Louis Richardson – what a top man, he was engaged through the entire day and it will be fantastic to catch up with him again at lotusphere
  • John Scott and Joe Nicholls presentation on students and social – it was brilliant and I am looking forward to watching that back
  • Meeting many new people, the social interaction was fantastic – many questions at the end of sessions, good two way diaglog and conversations inbetween sessions, over coffee and lunch and at the after conference dinner.

I would personally like to thank Mark, Gary and the boys from the Salvation Army who did a fantastic job of the videoing again – they are superb. Thanks guys you are amazing 🙂

Claire from Cardiff Uni who assisted on the reception desk and generally helped throughout the day – thank you xx

and to Lisa Duke for not only being an awesome friend, pod casting queen and social media “finder-outer”, but she was my able bodied assistant for the day as I was completely disabled by the “zombie flu”

So thanks guys from me and Stuart and Simon .. and here is to the next one 🙂

 

 

 

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No Email Day

Friday 11th of November 2011. In the spirit of trying to be social and stay current with what is going on in my technical world, I attempted a day without email.

 

Inspired by No Email Day, a number of my techy friends that were also attempting this and Mr Luis Suarez himself, who has been free for almost 4 years now – I wondered,  just how difficult it would be?

 

I set my out of office message – explaing no email day and how I could be contacted instead, my email footer has the company website, my contact number and twitter id on it anyway and an internal out of office told my colleges I would be available on the company Sametime server.

After announcing on twitter I was attempting a day with no mail I started the day. I was suprised as just how receptive people were to contacting me by other meens. I am normally on skype through the working day monitoring the community chats and I spoke to a few people via a chat, plenty of sametime messages to different members of the Applicable team and full backing from my boss. Who after emailing me a message instantly sent me a twitter DM instead 🙂

All was going fantastically, until we noticed an issue with the internal connections server (which actually turned out to be a db2 process that had got stuck), we managed a priority one incident with only 3 email (none sent by me) – but the communication between the support teams and incident manager were all handled over sametime.

I am so impressed I managed a day without mail.

I don’t expect to be getting rid of email anytime soon as its a tool which I do find I need, but I am already cutting back – I try not to send attachments anymore. If I have something to share with-in the company it goes in Connections in someway, file, video, link etc. I blog interested things or put them in a wiki and point people to that these days.

I try to share with the community on my blog, in the Lotusgreen house etc. Skype and Sametime are my weapons of choice for real time communication or I even make a phone call everynow and then 🙂

Maybe every Friday should be a no email day – I can cope with that – could you ?