As I'm sure you're aware by now, Social Connections IV is less than a month away!
Taking place in Amsterdam on 30th November 2012, this is the fourth meeting of the IBM Connections user group. With a stellar cast of presenters, the <a href="https://socialconnections.info/agenda/">agenda</a> is packed with must-see sessions, there's plenty of opportunity to network with some of the most innovative Connections customers and partners, we are speed-sponsoring at the end of the day, and there is a great evening reception planned as well. An action-packed day of Social Business and IBM Connections content! Oh, and of course, it's free!
News
Latest news from the Let’sConnect user group
26/102012
I can not believe it has come round again so quickly, in 6 short weeks the Social Connections user group hits Amsterdam. On the 30th of November the IBM Forum will be invaded with IBM Connections users, developers, managers and administrators!
We are expecting people from across the globe with some even traveling as far as Russia, the US and Australia to hear our amazing speakers.
Joining our keynote speaker Mr Christopher Crummey (IBM) are an incredible list of 30 speakers from IBM, business partners and customers who together will be responsible for 27 highly informational sessions. With a great mix of Management, Case Studies, Technical and Development sessions there should be a something for everyone.
Full details on all the speakers and sessions can be found on this page, and the full agenda is available here.
Not only do we have an incredible day program, we are continuing it right into the night with an exclusive dinner for Social Connections participants. We do this to give participants who would like to continue their conversations in a more relaxed and informal way the chance to do so while enjoying a good glass of wine and a dinner in beautiful Amsterdam. This evening program is free of charge thanks to our fabulous sponsors but does require pre-registration and is only open to registered Social Connections participants. So don’t be late to sign up!
For people traveling who need information on transportation and or hotels check out the FAQ page. We have deals with two nearby hotels: Hotel Artemis and Hotel Mercure Amsterdam Airport that could be interesting but make sure you book in time as we cannot guarantee availability. Information on how to apply for the special event price is included on the FAQ page.
Lastly I have to mention our incredible sponsors – without whom we would not be able to run these events: IBM, Silverside, E-Office, Ilionx, Time to Act, Collaboration Matters, Portico, Ephox and BLUG are making it all possible.
So, not registered yet? Well don’t wait too long as we only have a limited number of seats left and register now.
Time for social business in Amsterdam!
03/102012
We are pleased to announce the keynote speaker for Social Connections IV will be Chris Crummey.
Chris is the World Wide Executive Director of Sales for IBM’s Social Business and Exceptional Web Experience solutions with in IBM Software Group. He leads a global team of thought leaders in the areas of Social Business & Exceptional Web Experience, and represents some of the fastest growing and most profitable segments of IBM’s software business.
Other IBM speakers include : Jim Battle – Director Social Software and Luis Suarez – Knowledge Manager, Community Builder & Social Computing Evangelist
Next week we will start to finalise the agenda and we will be announcing some of the fantastic community speakers and sessions.
There is just one day left to submit your abstracts .. do please do get them into us by midnight GMT Thursday 4th of October, the team are looking forward to looking through them.
21/092012
It is just 10 weeks until the fourth Social Connections Event and the countdown is on for abstract submissions.
The call for abstracts closes on Thursday 4th of October – that is just under two weeks away. We have already had some fantasic sessions proposed in all three tracks – we are looking for more, the three tracks are:
- Admin, Infrastructure & Dev- covering Admin, Development, Technical and Best practises
- Management – covering User adoption. Business practises and Management
- Case studies – covering case studies and user success stories
All session slots are 30 minutes and are to be given in English, to submit an abstract, first please ensure you are registered to attend the event.
Next head over the the abstracts page – Write a brief abstract on the subject you would like to speak on, fill in speaker bio and contact information and ensure it is submitted by COB on Thursday 4th of October.
Speakers will be contacted week commencing Monday 8th of October, with a preliminary agenda to be publish Friday 11th October.
Don’t be put off if you have never spoken at a conference before, speaking at a user group is a great way to start. We’d welcome sessions from Lotusphere veterans and never-spoken-before newcomers alike, and if you have a Connections customer story to tell then you’ll be pushed to the head of the queue!
The team are looking forward to hearing from you 🙂
27/082012
Social Connections IV in Amsterdam is ramping up to be a great event. Sign-up is going great and we’ve already got some great abstracts for sessions in. But we want more. We want the best possible line up for each of the tracks we are setting up and therefore we are looking for YOU.
Are you a customer with a great IBM Connections customer story to share?, Can you explain to others how to develop widgets or add-ins? or explain how it all works and how to best maintain it?, Do you have any other story that is relevant to IBM Connections? or have something to say about how to implement Social Business? Then this is the time to submit your abstract.
The tracks are:
- Management: How do you make your business social? Implementation strategies, best practices, business cases and any other topic that can help organizations plan and implement their own social Business environment.
- Administration: How to do it? What do you need to set up and maintain a good IBM Connections environment? Installation, setting-up, security, integration and anything else that you need to know to administrate a stable environment.
- Development: How do you developing for IBM Connections? Building plug-ins, widgets or doing customizations and integration. Anything related to extending the IBM Connections platform.
- Customer Cases: Why did you chose IBM Connections and what has it brought your organization? Got anything to share about your implementation experiences, the reasons why Social Business is enhancing your business potential or streamlining the processes then we would love to hear! Thinking about social business is one thing. To get a first-hand story from an organization that has actually done it or is doing it can be a real eye-opener. So don’t hesitate and submit!
All session slots are 30 minutes and have to be given in English.
Social Connections is a real user group and therefore open to everyone. Not sure yet but think you’ve got something to say? Then don’t hesitate to contact us. We can help you determine if your topic is suitable and answer questions if you have them. All sessions will be evaluated and we will select a comprehensible program from that.
We want to make this a great event and for that we want to offer the best possible sessions. So don’t hesitate and submit!
19/072012
The below review of Social Connections III was blogged to the Greenhouse IBM Connections Users community by attendee Lynn Russell. Lynn is a Communication & Collaboration Tools Training Specialist at WL Gore & Associates and kindly allowed us to copy her insightful review to our blog. Lynn has been an active contributor to the Connections User community in Greenhouse and is a true evangelist for IBM Connections.
Social Connections – Are you considering attending Social Connections IV?
Social Connections III
IBM Dublin Labs – 22 June 2012I wasn’t sure what to expect from Social Connections III, I have worked with Notes & Domino applications for over 10 years and in the past I’ve been lucky enough to attend Lotusphere and The View Admin conferences so I suspected that this would have a similar feel to it with several presentations targetted towards technical and business streams, the big question in my head was “How much was I going to get out of this?”.
Gore started implementing IBM Connections just over a year ago and although our implementation is going well, we were experiencing pressures from various groups within Gore to speed up our implementation. Although we could open IBM Connections up to all Associates within Gore tomorrow, one of our objectives with the implementation is for IBM Connections to be used effectively hence we have a more focused approach. I travelled with my colleague Brian O’Neill to Dublin. Brian has a technical role at Gore looking at the architecture, server/admin side of IBM Connections and my role looks at developing and delivering training to our users. We were looking to gather information and contacts to help us with our implementation and Social Connections III didn’t disappoint!!
My day was full with presentations, mainly focused on the business stream. There were 4 presentations in particular that I attended that have had a lasting effect and I have taken back to Gore:
- Alfonso Lopez de Arenosa from Sogeti shared a customer implementation of IBM Connections they had carried out. This customer implementation was large compared to Gore – 20,000 users and I was surprised by the short space of time it had taken them to roll out IBM Connections to all these users. This started to challenge my thoughts and open my mind to expanding our own IBM Connections implementation at an increased pace.
- Simon Vaughn & Jon Scott from Cardiff University shared an insightful presentation entitled “Targetting an exceptional education experience – IBM Connections in education”. I have to admit being sceptical at the start of this presentation as I wondered how relevant what they were doing at Cardiff University would be to Gore as a company. I couldn’t have been more wrong, what an engaging presentation this turned out to be as Simon shared the mix of ages and expectations amongst their students that they are faced with, I soon realised that this is the same for any company! Jon then went on to share some of the cool things they have been doing to help manage these differences and expectations. As someone who develops the training material for IBM Connections at Gore this got me particularly excited and sparked my energy to get more adventorous with what we create.
- Femke Goedhart’s presentation on “A social revolution…….”Can I control that?” was the one presentation that made my head hurt but in a really good way!
It contained several light bulb moments for me as Femke shared a definition of communities that was a little different to how we had been introducing communities at Gore. Femke also warned against being too controlling, it is important to stimulate rather than regulate, ensuring you allow for experimentation in your implementation and building appropriate support for success through leadership, training the trainers and champions. What Femke shared in her presentation challenged parts of our implementation at Gore and caused me to spark discussion within our project team.
- Stuart McIntyre delivered a presentation on Profiles in Connections stating Profiles as the most important feature in Connections, I had my sceptical hat on again! In Gore we have been focused on Communities, Profiles is the feature that some of our business users associate with Facebook so its harder to get some of them to hook onto to that feature hence our energies have been on other features in Connections. Stuart challenged this by explaining your profile is your identity, therefore if you choose not to complete your profile any posts you create in a community or elsewhere in Connections have little chance of standing out, how can you expect trust and your post to be taken seriously if you have a grey anonymous image with no detail next to it. It is key to building trust and relationships when working virtually.
I believe 100 people had registered for Social Connections III and this meant the presentations had an intimate feel to them unlike the size of the likes of Lotusphere, for me this made me feel more comfortable asking questions, talking with other attendees and I felt a true part of this event, special even!!!
Brian and I also attended the reception at the Guinness Storehouse at night, which gave us an opportunity to continue those discussions from earlier in the day, doing the networking bit. There was one presentation that I wish I had attended and that was one by Sasja Beerendonk looking at leveraging user adoption with gamification. Unfortunately it was scheduled at the same time as the presentation on What’s New in Connections 4 which I chose to attend instead. The reception however gave us the opportunity to talk with Sasja about gamification so despite not seeing her presentation I feel we did not miss out entirely.
From this one day I came away with a heightened level of energy thinking there are many more things we need to consider now in our implementation at Gore, Brian and I have a lot to share with our project team when we get back and if that wasn’t all we have started to build a network of contacts who we can reach out to for help as we continue.
So, if you are thinking if Social Connections IV is worth the trip – I’d say absolutely!
source: Greenhouse , author: Lynn Russell
It contained several light bulb moments for me as Femke shared a definition of communities that was a little different to how we had been introducing communities at Gore. Femke also warned against being too controlling, it is important to stimulate rather than regulate, ensuring you allow for experimentation in your implementation and building appropriate support for success through leadership, training the trainers and champions. What Femke shared in her presentation challenged parts of our implementation at Gore and caused me to spark discussion within our project team.Thanks, Lynn !
17/072012
No sooner has Social Connections III in Dublin been and gone than thoughts turn to the next event!
As may know, so far the IBM Connections user group has visited England, Wales and Ireland. Therefore the next step is to head to mainland Europe and to one of the most ‘social’ European cities, Amsterdam!
On Friday 30th November, Social Connections IV will take over the IBM Forum in central Amsterdam for a day of tremendous IBM Connections content, Social Business education, customer case studies, ‘Birds-of-a-feather’ style discussions, networking and fun.
Registration has just opened, and thanks to the generosity of our sponsors is completely free once again.
An action-packed day of 30 or so sessions is planned, and we are inviting abstracts from potential speakers – we’d love to hear from you if you would like to present on a business-related or technical subject, or if you’d like to chair a panel or BoF-style session. We’d welcome sessions from Lotusphere veterans and never-spoken-before newcomers alike, and if you have a Connections customer story to tell then you’ll be pushed to the head of the queue!
We are also very keen to sign up additional sponsors, so if you have solutions or services to sell to the IBM Connections community, please do get in touch!
The entire day is completely free to attend, and there will also be a reception on the Friday evening – details will be shared ASAP.
As you can see from the wrap-up video from Social Connections III below, the day will be incredibly informative and also great fun, so there is really no time like the present – register today!
06/072012
Were you there? If not then you’ve missed something. No, correction, you missed a lot! It was a wonderful day with so many attendees, great speakers, fantastic sessions and a absolutely wonderful atmosphere. But don’t let me say so let the day speak for itself!
A big thanks to Jon Scott of Cardiff University for making this fantastic round-up!Social Connections III – Dublin from Social Connections on Vimeo.
A small selection of the hundreds of tweets with the hashtag #soccnx that day!:
‘@oneillbp311: #soccnx today! #ibmcnx’
‘@oferguetta: Fantastic turnout of customers and partners at #soccnx here at IBM Dublin Labs this morning!! Great to see all the familiar and new faces!!’
‘@mikroche: Great turnout for #soccnx in IBM Dublin lab – thanks to all for travelling! #ibmcnx’
‘@mikroche: Gamifying the event at #soccnx – we have a resident caricaturist making Profiles pictures in the lobby ;-)’
‘@SimplyS1mon: Great to catch up with so many great IBM’ers at the Dublin Labs! #soccnx @mikroche’
‘@maxverbong: Hard to chose sessions #soccnx Would be great if i could split myself up. Next: Social Business for patient care coordination’
‘@synapticity: Thanks to #soccnx in Dublin. Excellent use of my time and nice to catch up with many people. Good content as usual!’
‘@oferguetta: #soccnx Wonderful day at Social Connections III in Dublin, wonderful content, great catching up with our wonderful customers & partners.’
‘@proseccocalling: Great day@ SocialConnectionsIII, many interesting sessions with lots to mull over. Have enjoyed meeting new people too :o) #soccnx’
‘@cardiffmark: Excellent day at #soccnx. Well worth it. It’ll be good if we get many of our business users at the next event’
‘@pdhannan: Had a really great day at Social Connections III. Did I learn lots? …. YEAH!!! #ibmcnx #soccnx’
‘@SimplyS1mon: Social Connections III – A user group that keeps on growing and exceeding expectations! #soccnx’
‘@ShvetsovaNata: #soccnx There was true community atmosphere: experts with shared passion, talented in listening, posing tough questions, collaborating’
‘@proseccocalling: Good Guinness, good food, good company. A gid nite as we’d say in Scotland #soccnx’
‘@kil0ran: At the airport waiting to fly home from #soccnx , great conference, thanks to all orgs and sponsors. See you in Amsterdam!’
02/072012
A selection of pictures that were taken during social Connections III in Dublin on June 22
25/062012
So it is over, a couple of hectic days are coming to a close in the Dublin airport coffee lounge while I’m awaiting my flight back to Amsterdam.
It was a great event in so many ways…
- The great venue at the IBM Developer labs and the hospitality IBM and especially Fred Raguillat, Eamon Muldoon and Jon Mell showed us opening up their Innovation centre and auditorium, helping us organize this, navigating the bureaucratic hurdles and making us feel welcome at the heart of IBM’s Connections developers facility
- Meeting so many familiar and new faces (over 100 people signed up!) from all over the world including places as far away as Norway, The United States, Brazil, Poland and Russia
- The fantastic line up of speakers, eight of which IBM Champions, who delivered a staggering 21 sessions in 2 tracks all in one day
- The new technical track that opened up Social Connections to a new more technically focused audience
- The speakers dinner on Thursday night to thank all those wonderful speakers who invested their time and effort to share their knowledge with the community
- The support and help we got from so many who make it possible to do things like recording the sessions and manning the desk (thanks to Jon, Jess & Huw)
- The after event at the Guinness Storehouse where everyone could enjoy a pint & good meal while discussing all they had learned that day and practice that one thing that this is all about: building Social Connections.
- And last but certainly not least The absolutely wonderful sponsors: IBM, Sogeti, TimeToAct,TeamStudio, Connections101.net and Collaboration Matters without whom it would simply not be possible to organize all this free of charge to participants.
Organizing an event like this is daunting: “Is there a big enough audience for this to justify organizing it?“, “Will they come to Ireland?“, “Do we get enough good speakers?“, “What about sponsors??” and most importantly: “How do you coordinate something like this while none of the organizing committee are actually onsite, or even in the same timezone, until the day itself?!?”
The answer to all this is simple, it’s pure dedication, community spirit (so many people and organizations contributed to this in so many big and small ways I can’t name them all) and using a host of social tools to collaborate. With such a globally dispersed organizing committee organizing something like this would simply not have been possible without the internet, chats, phone conferences, a wiki, communities, blogs, twitter and other social tools. After all, what better way to show the power of social connections and collaborations then to practice what you preach!
So… almost time to board and leave wonderful, generous and social Dublin. But I won’t have to wait for long as I hope Amsterdam will be just as wonderful and social come November 30th when it opens up its doors to host the next Social Connections user group event!
I hope to see you all there for Social Connections IV!
Kudos to Simon Vaughn, Lisa Duke, Stuart McIntyre and Sharon Bellamy for making it all feel so effortless and making me part of a truly social and dedicated team.