I spent a couple of days last week attending the AgileNZ 2013 conference here in Wellington. 2 days of great keynotes and breakout sessions with a variety of speakers, though I think the most valuable aspect of conferences like these are the conversations that happen during the breaks... social learning/communities of practice in action I suppose.

This is my first blog post in quite some time, but it is a doooosie, possibly one of my largest projects to date!

Another speaking engagement at the SilverStripe Wellington Meetup (my third time!) on the 1st August 2012. This time I took the concept of a Communty of Practice outlined by Etienne Wenger et al, and applied it to the open-source software development community that works on the SilverStripe CMS. We later followed this up with a 20-30 minute hands-on workshop in which participants were asked to look at providing ideas around ways SilverStripe Ltd and the Community itself could help build bridges between the different levels of participation present in a Community of Practice.

Whether you prescribe to the cult of Steve or not, in this video back in 1997 he answers a seemingly insulting question in a true forward thinking and honest way (as Jim Collins would say... confronting the brutal facts).

With half the year already over and my blog updates being a little irregular lately I thought I would give a bit of an update as to the goings-ons of late.

Following on from few weeks ago where I presented some examples of Web 2.0 - 3.0 technologies and ideas being utilised in everyday life, I would like to continue that theme.  Highlighting how the 4C appraoch of social media implementation (from Niall Cook's - "Enterprise 2.0" - Communications, Cooperations, Collaboration & Connection) applies using a real world example. Last weekend I attended a "hackfest" set up by the SilverStripe Open-Source Community. SilverStripe is an open-source Content Management System (CMS) developed in Wellington, New Zealand and powers some high profile corporate and government websites. What makes SilverStripe unique though is the fact that their flagship product is free and open-source. Check out a quick video from Siguard , one of the founders for a great overview of their approach to software and open-source.

As I wonder around Wellington lately I started to realise how much Web 2.0+ (2.5, 3.0) concepts and technologies I actually interact with on a day to day basis. After looking into some of the more formal definitions of these evolutions of the web, 2.0 with the web being used as a platform for social interaction, 2.5 with its "mobile" application of 2.0 ideas and 3.0 looking at being the "semantic" web (web that understands what we are trying to find by providing extra data about our context or preferences). Here is a few of the more interesting situations and examples that are not the usual Facebook checking or Twitter tweeting.

I have been lucky enough to have been invoved in the web industry through what would be termed the shift from web 1.0 to web 2.0 but well before the term was coined by Tim O'Riley in 2004, myself and fellow web geeks simply were just trying to push the boundaries as to what we could do with the emerging technology, new scripting languages, techniques and processes with out a thought as to giving it a shiney marketable buzzword name such as the now often mis-used term "Web 2.0".

I mentioned in the last month some of the history behind why Social Media is in an absolute boom at present. Mostly this is to do with human interaction and the our social nature which leads us to find ways to communicate and collaborate over long distances. There has also been a business cultural shift towards embracing these social tools to open up a dialog with customers which is perhaps due to the changing generational mix in the workforce as Andreas Kaplin & Michael Haenlein point out:

It seems that all throughout history, human beings have been trying to utilise the latest technology of the times in order to connect, communicate, cooperate and colloborate (the 4 C's!). When I say technology it might not always be the computers and social networks of today (but I will get to that shortly). Just think of smoke signals, carrier pigeons, the horseback mail courier, the telegraph service (morse code), through to the telephone, finally entering the computer era.

The important thing here is really that humans are social creatures and we are pretty clever when it comes to finding ways to communicate even over long distances. This continues on into our modern computer driven era, if we look at some of the ideas and innovations in communication and collaborative technology dating back as far as the 1940's. From Niall Cook's book "Enterprise 2.0", in 1945 Vannevar Bush, who was then the Director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development, published his article "As we may think" with these visions of the future of communication: