Conmergence

How Social Media Is Revolutionizing Community Building – And How Planners Can Manage It

By Mickey Murphy, Association Conventions & Facilities, themeetingmagazines.com

During a major conference that her firm was assisting, Julie S. McKown, communications strategist, Fusion Productions, was sitting backstage during a general session of the meeting. On the projection screen, rolling along in real-time, were tweets from attendees in the audience who were listening to the speaker’s remarks.

From Telework Exchange Newsletter: 

Virginia Governor Timothy M. Kaine today announced that Virginia teleworkers saved approximately $113,000, avoided driving 140,000 miles, and removed 75.89 tons of pollutants from the air through participation in Telework Day on August 3, 2009.

“I commend the individuals and organizations that took the Telework Day pledge,” Governor Kaine said. “The results are clear – telework plays an important role in meeting the Commonwealth’s green objectives, reducing strain and traffic on our roads, increasing savings for our employees, and will provide our businesses with increased employee productivity.”

The “What We Saved; What We Learned” report, compiled by Telework Exchange, also reveals an increase in productivity by participants and reports satisfaction with their teleworking experience.

Key findings:

• 4,267 employees teleworked on Telework Day – 22% of participants never teleworked before Telework Day; 95% of participants located in Virginia
• 69% of Virginia Telework Day participants said they accomplished more than on a typical day at the office
• 91% of Virginia Telework Day participants say they are now more likely to telework in the future
• Teleworking one day per week delivers approximately $2,000 in savings to each teleworker annually

To download the full report, please visit http://www.teleworkexchange.com/teleworkdayreport/.

<ed.note>While legacy newspapers struggle to find a way to monetize their next incarnation (hint: it's aggregating and/or researching data which can be gained nowhere else than from their subscribing readership — imagine think tank-portal-citizen journalism-distributed computing a la SETI@home crunching results), Chuck Martin has been surveying business leaders finding unique real-time insight. My general impression – how many cutting edge leaders are ready for the global digital enterprise enabled collaborative results-only work environment? – um, not so many. An indicator in specific follows: "Business leaders are not confident that their department or organization has an effective plan or strategy to deal with social networking."</ed.note>

August 24, 2009 – Social Networking for Business
Summary (survey results below):

No matter the title or the size of the company, the majority of business leaders have a low confidence level that their department and/or organization has a plan/strategy on how to effectively use social networking for business.

Sixty-six percent or senior executives and managers said they have a low
level of confidence and 12 percent have a high level of confidence.
Twenty-three percent were neutral.
More managers than top executives have a low confidence level in their
business' dealing with a social networking strategy, with 74 percent of managers
having a low confidence level compared to 59 percent of executives. 

By company size, more of those in large businesses have a low confidence
level
(73%) that their organization has a plan on how to effectively use social
networking compared to those in small businesses (64%). 

More of those in small businesses (14%) have a high level of confidence in
their organization's approach vs. those in large businesses (8%). 

Of the businesspeople who use social networking, 77 percent use LinkedIn, 31
percent use Facebook, 25 percent use Blogs and 18 percent use Twitter. 

An earlier study about social networking conducted by NFI Research showed
similar results.
Thanks to all who participated in the survey.  

Detailed Results follow: 

When it comes to using social networking for business, what is your
confidence level that your department and/or organization has a
plan/strategy on how to effectively use it? 

Of those who use social networking, Which of the following services do you use for BUSINESS purposes? (check all
that apply) 

Select responses from NFI Research members: 

- With the exception of LinkedIn, the vast majority of business
executives I encounter have little or nothing to do, from a business perspective, with
social networking sites.
 
- Social networking is a key strategy for our organization.

 - We currently block and have policies against using social networks
for business purposes. 

Thank you for your input!
If you have colleagues (other senior executives or managers) who you think
would benefit from participating in our surveys, you may invite them to
join.

Just have them go to the following link to sign up for free.
http://nfiresearch.com/index.php?option=com_artforms&formid=1&Itemid=59 

Follow me on Twitter @chuckmartin1 

Best regards,
Chuck Martin
Chairman and CEO
NFI Research
chuck@nfiresearch.com

Computer World/Network World – Former Hewlett-Packard Co. CEO Carly Fiorina may be launching a run for the U.S. Senate.
Fiorina, a Republican, “filed for a tax identification number Tuesday and registered a campaign committee named ‘Carly for California,’” allowing her to raise money for a 2010 Senate run, according to the Associated Press. Fiorina would be attempting to win the seat of U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer, a Democrat from California who became senator in 1992."

<ed.note>T'is a shame she decide not to use the Technotarian ticket and unify as many third parties as possible. We are apparently beyond the point in the development of the US political structure for a viable alternative party based on conservative (and transparent) fiscal and monetary policies along with compassionate, yet personal responsibility requiring (PRR) social policy. Given her global perspective and technology/telephony expetise she could have been an incredible boon to rural economic development based on individualized distance education and hybridized cloud and distributed computing.</ed.note>

Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Mr. MORAN of Virginia. Madam Speaker, I
rise in support of Monday, August 3, as
Telework Day in Virginia and applaud Governor
Tim Kaine on this initiative.

On this day, thousands of Virginians will
perform a full day’s work from their houses
rather than their places of work. This practice
empowers workers who feel that they can fulfill
their obligations to their employer equally
well from home as in a brick and mortar office.
My colleagues, teleworking provides enormous
benefits to employers and employees
alike, as well as positive social and economic
impacts. Teleworking, a practice which dates
to the 1960s and then was dramatically expanded
in the ’90s, thanks to a host of networking
innovations, can save employers
premises costs and office overhead fees.

If all eligible Federal employees teleworked
2 days per week, the Federal Government
could realize $3.3 billion in savings in commuting
costs annually and eliminate the emission
of 2.7 million tons of pollutants each year.
Furthermore, it would provide an easy and
necessary means of operational continuity
should the Nation’s Capital be the target of
another horrific terror attack.

Teleworking can also increase productivity,
typically 10 percent to 40 percent per person
in large programs, by eliminating the often distressing
and frustrating commute to and from
work. For example, it eliminates commuting
costs for employees because they do not have
to pay for gas or public transportation. Given
that the average round trip commute is 50 miles and commuters spend an average of
264 hours per year commuting (66 minutes
per day), Americans would be relieved of the
burden of spending so much time on the road
that could be better spent with their families.
Through this practice, employees are allowed
the freedom of working at their optimal
times; some might be more productive in the
morning while others might be more productive
late at night. Telework allows the workers
to get into a personal daily rhythm and work
when they please, thus maximizing individual
liberty and occupational productivity.
At this time, States and localities all around
the Nation are grappling with ways in which
congestion on the roadways can be reduced.
We could facilitate greater capacity for mass
transportation—but that requires heavy infrastructure
investment and the vision to plan
long-term. We could also build more roadways—
but that would simply invite more cars
and more traffic, while doing nothing to improve
the quality of life for millions of hardworking
Americans.

Those options taken together do indeed
form a necessary component of traffic mitigation,
but they take both time and money. Teleworking
is simple to implement, economical to
operate, and reflects the many ways in which
technology has allowed the spheres of personal
and professional life to blend together. It
allows for a young professional to care for her
newborn child or a son to care for his ailing
mother in the comfort of their own homes,
without worrying what would happen should
they have to spend a portion of their day in an
office, away from those who depend on their
presence.

I am proud to say that at the end of 2005,
Fairfax County in Virginia was able to meet
the region-wide target of having 20 percent of
eligible workers engaged in teleworking. I
would invite my colleagues to take note of
teleworking’s success and stand up for a
worker’s ability to set his or her own schedule,
with the expectation that it will allow for a
more flexible lifestyle without compromising
productivity. Rather than relying on the desks,
chairs, and file cabinets that defined the average
employee’s office a generation ago,
telework allows Americans to bring the workplace
to them, not the other way around.

Wave (Preview)

http://wave.google.com/

Web Conferencing

http://www.DimDim.com

http://www.gotomeeting.com

http://www.webex.com

Wikis

MediaWiki with PurpleNumbers Examples

http://colab.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/ (fedgov)

http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl/ (ontologists)

Sematic MediaWiki (Paul Allen backs some of Ontoprise's work, if I'm recalling correctly)

http://smwforum.ontoprise.com/smwforum/index.php/Webinars/Schedule_of_webinars#Session_1:_Using_SMW.2B_for_project_management

Blogs

* Open Source

** Links under construction 

LiveJournal, Movable Type, TypePad, and VOX (Six Apart)
Wordpress*

Content Management Systems

Dokuwiki**
DotNetNuke**
Drupal**
Joomla**
PHPFusion**
PMWiki**
PostNuke**

Stuff not to forget to include:

Micro-blogging Platforms

Identi.ca

http://webconf.soaphub.org/conf/room

Twitter.com

Yammer.com

Note: cmsmatrix.org

We invite submission of full papers, posters, workshops and demos and welcome contributions and participation from individuals, organisations and institutions across all disciplines and domains that are engaged in the creation, use and management of digital data, especially those involved in the challenge of curating data for e-science and e-research.

Proposals will be considered for short (up to 6 pages) or long (up to 12 pages) papers and also for demonstrations, workshops and posters. The full text of papers will be peer-reviewed; abstracts for all posters, workshops and demos will be reviewed by the co-chairs. Final copy of accepted contributions will be made available to conference delegates, and papers will be published in our International Journal of Digital Curation. Accordingly, we recommend that you download our template and
read the advice on its use.

Papers should be original and innovative, probably analytical in approach, and should present or reference significant evidence (whether experimental, observational or textual) to support their conclusions.

Subject matter could be policy, strategic, operational, experimental, infrastructural, tool-based, and so on, in nature, but the key elements are originality and evidence. Layout and structure should be appropriate for the disciplinary area. Papers should not have been published in their current or a very similar form before, other than as a pre-print in a repository.

We seek papers that respond to the main themes of the conference: multi-scale, multi-discipline, multi-skill and multi-sector, and that relate to the creation, curation, management and re-use of research data. Research data should be interpreted broadly to include the digital subjects of all types of research and scholarship (including Arts and Humanities, and all the Sciences). Papers may cover:

• Curation practice and data management at the extremes of scale (e.g. interactions between small science and big science, or extremes of object size, numbers of objects, rates of deposit and use)
• Challenging content: (e.g. addressing issues of data complexity, diversity and granularity)
• Curation and e-research, including contextual, provenance, authenticity and other metadata for curation (e.g. automated systems for acquiring such metadata)
• Research data infrastructures, including data repositories and services
• Disciplinary and inter-disciplinary curation challenges and data management approaches, standards and norms
• Promoting, enabling, demonstrating and characterizing the re-use of data
• Semantically rich documents (e.g. the “well-supported article”)
• The human infrastructure for curation (e.g. skills, careers, training and organisational support structures, careers, skills, training and curriculum)
• Curation across academia, government, commerce and industry
• Legal and policy issues; Creative Commons, special licences, the public domain and other approaches for re-use, and questions of privacy, consent, and embargo
• Sustainability and economics: understanding business and financial models; balancing costs, benefits and value of digital curation

Important Dates

• Submission of papers for peer-review: 24 July 2009
• Submission of abstracts posters/demos/workshops: 24 July 2009
• Notification of authors of papers: 18 September 2009
• Notification of authors of posters/demos/workshops: 2 October 2009
• Final papers deadline: 13 November 2009
• Final posters deadline: 13 November 2009

Lake Oswego, OR – February 9, 2009. The Fiber to the Home (FTTH) Council has issued a Call for Papers for its 8th annual conference to be held from September 27-October 1, 2009 in Houston, TX.  The 2009 FTTH Conference & Expo is the only gathering of its kind dedicated to the advancement and deployment of FTTH technologies and benefits. This year's theme, Building the Business of FTTH, will bring leaders, visionaries and decision makers to the Hilton Americas-Houston and the George R Brown Convention Center to share success stories and lessons learned about the business elements needed to generate revenue with FTTH.

With considerable investments in fiber to the home deployment, the pressure is on for operators to add subscribers and to generate revenue from the subscribers they serve. The stakes are high and so are the expectations. The 2009 program will offer attendees an overview of best business practices for advancing of high speed broadband over fiber optic networks.

The FTTH Council is seeking papers in the following target areas:

Conference Tracks

1.    Building FTTH Revenues: Explain how to build the top line as an FTTH service provider. Describe your marketing and service packages and how they attracted subscribers.  Provide an overview of the video content and internet packages that were considered and selected, and how to increase market share away from the competition. Experience-based service provider submissions are requested.

2.    Success Stories: Share your experiences as a provider of FTTH services to help others build successful FTTH based businesses. Explain the benefits realized from linking your customers and community to FTTH, to better quality of life and prosperity.  Experience-based service provider submissions will be given first consideration.

3.    New Technology: Educate prospective and practicing network builders on new technologies that enable profitable FTTH services. Target topics include MDU technologies, in-home connectivity, video and IP video, green benefits, and new electronic and optical systems. Special consideration will be given to system-level papers that help decision-makers improve the business case for FTTH.

4.    Advanced Network Design, Construction and Management: Explain innovations in efficient network design, construction, installation and testing. Describe new options for efficient management of the network and subscribers. Target topics include network design cost modeling, construction techniques and equipment, testing and tools for managing subscribers.

5.    Finance and Regulatory:  Elucidate the new funding and financing options available, and teach how to access capital.   Explain how to navigate through the application process to reach government loans and grants. Clarify the latest regulatory changes and implications to FTTH service providers.

Abstract Guidelines

Abstracts should be a maximum of 500 words, without pictures, and must be commercial free. The abstract should describe the primary conclusion or results of the paper including pertinent details of the work indicating the significant findings. Learner outcomes must be included. Papers must contain significant new material not presented or published previously.  Papers may range from introductory to advanced, but bear in mind that your audience may be just getting started in this field. As such, "FTTH 101" papers will also be considered within each category.*

NEW for our 2009 Program…we will be offering a few repeated track sessions in Spanish.  As a perspective speaker, you may wish to indicate that you wish to repeat your presentation in Spanish during the online submission process.

For complete information on deadlines and submission guidelines, please visit www.ftthconference.com…Become a Speaker. 

*FTTH 101 Papers do not need to meet the new or unpublished requirement.

About the Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) Council

The Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH) Council is a non-profit association consisting of companies and organizations that deliver video, Internet and/or voice services over high-bandwidth, next-generation, direct fiber optic connections – as well as those involved in planning and building FTTH networks.  The Council works to create a cohesive group to share knowledge and build industry consensus on key issues surrounding fiber to the home. Communities and organizations interested in exploring FTTH options may find information on the FTTH Council web site at www.ftthcouncil.org.

About Legend Conference Planning

Legend Conference Planning is the official project management and event planning firm for the 2009 FTTH Conference & Expo and the FTTH Council Secretariat. For further information, email at info@legendconferences.com.

Contact:
Speaker Liaison, Jennifer Cakir
Legend Conference Planning
Tel: 613-226-9988 x4
Email: speakerliaison@legendconferences.com

The inauguration of a new president takes place tomorrow. Like
many Americans, I am proud that our country is an example to the world
of what peaceful and orderly change in government means in a democratic
society. The Obama Administration has developed a website called Change.Gov, where they are asking for input from indivdual citizens on how to change government. Following is the post I entered today:

I work for United Cerebral Palsy of Middle Tennessee. In our state,
people with cerebral palsy and developmental disabilities other than
mental retardation do not receive dedicated DD services. In fact, our
State Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities
doesn’t even serve people with Developmental Disabilities. In my job, I
interact daily with young families who need intensive home and
community based supports that are not available to them. To make
matters worse, because our state has no intention of serving this
population, their critical needs are not even registered on a waiting
list.

More here.

I replied at the DNJ link saying (after seeing the Venture Nashville blog post):

One thing we need to consider is making a Results-Only Work Environment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE ; http://www.culturerx.com ; http://caliandjody.com/blog ) the DEFAULT work condition in both schools and businesses. One should have to make a business case for being required to "drive into work". With so much employment moving toward knowledge work, the costs of not promoting telecommuting (Net-Working) have not been studied by area CEOs and they would be astounded how much money they are wasting on real estate, etc.; costs which were necessary in 1980 — but not today. That is not to say that their competitors are also wasting these resources unnecessarily — think about why cloud computing and virtualization have been in the IT press lately. ROWEs are not a panacea — but definitely an option that very rarely shows up on the C-Suite table.

What think ye?