BlogWalk Chicago is happening this Saturday (22nd Jan 2005). The furthest-away visitor, Lilia Efimova, is already here and will be visiting with Denham and some others in Indiana during the week. Given the weather forecast, our "walk" will likely be in a local museum. There are still spaces available for BlogWalk. If you are in or can get to Chicago for the day, please contact me.
The topic for the discussion is "social software in corporate/organizational settings." This covers a lot of territory, and the attendees range from librarian(s) to consultants to researchers to technologists. For me, I am interested in how internal communities can benefit and extend their capabilities with the social software tools that are available today. Are blogs and wikis significantly different from SharePoint, eRooms, discussion forums, bulletin boards and other "big" tools for communities? Of course, the question of how to make it happen is important too, particularly as I begin to work with clients who are interested in building better communication mechanisms.
This topic is partially a revisit of the BlogWalk 4, though I am sure we will come up with different ideas because we are different people and a lot has been said about this topic in the past six months. I recap BlogWalk 4 comments here, based on Suw Charman's excellent summary:
We ended up with 11 different groupings which reflect the core issues brought up by the day's conversations:
- Emotional feedback
- The influence of context on groups & individuals
- Value and productivity
- Groupthink
- Risk and loathing in the corporate blogosphere
- Ethos
- Audience and expectations
- Micro/macro-benefits and potential outcomes
- Gradients vs. Boundaries
- Filtering, aggregation and metadata
- Futurespeak
For the very curious, here are some other BlogWalk 4-related entries via September 2004 BlogWalk Topic Exchange: Lloyd Davis, David Wilcox (and here), Martin Roell, Paul Goodison, Julian Elve, Ian Glendinning, Bru, and Lilia. Where is the wiki of the notes?
Update: here are full notes on Headshift.