Archive for février, 2009

The future of the Internet

27 février 2009 · Classé dans Com, Lift'09, web · Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

liftThere are some moments in life where you have a chance to flirt with history… This is what happened when I was listening to Vinton Cerf, one of the creator of the Internet at lift conference.

The talking dinosaur (as he called himself with a smile) captured the audience and everyone listened carefully to this hyperactive man still re-inventing the web on a daily basis.

He gave us a glimse of what the future of the Internet might be through the description of some of his projects.  First, he took time to surf on the WWW timeline to remind us of where we come from… Nothing new but when told by Vinton Cerf, it makes even more sense… I tell you… especially when the man can make you laugh so much about technology vint_cerfand his projects… Here are some quotes I wanted to share with you :

  • There’s no central power or authority that causes Internet to work – one great thing about the web…
  • Internet showed that people are willing to cooperate and willing to share information freely with others on the web
  • There’s an increasing number of mobile devices connected to the internet. And for millions of users, their first experience of the web is done through mobile phones…
  • Asia is leading the number of actual users on the web with only 15,3% penetration (vs 73% in US and 48% in Europe)

According to Vinton Cerf, here are some of the near term changes he (and others) are working on :

  • IPv4 -> IPv6 – 128 bit addresses (3,4 X 10p38)
  • DNSSEC (.se, .pr, .bg, .br, others?)
  • Internationalized Domain Names: Non Latin Unicode characters, …
  • Increasing need to segregate, compartment, protect data (privacy, legal protections, corporate trade secrets, …)
  • Huge data collections (sensor networks, WWW, digitized everything)
  • Bit-Rot problem (it’s 3000, can you interpret 1997 PPT?) – interpreting older files
  • Crowd / Cloud computing: inter-cloud data exchange (formats? Meta data?), inter-cloud protocols (TCP/IP? Other)
  • Legal Framework: Privacy and Law enforcement in a global system, Domestic/international support for e-commerce, legal value of digital signature, dispute resolution in interneational settings
  • Intellectual property protection (what new models can we invent?): existing copyright framework, new ideas (creative commons, copyleft, …), automatic detection of abuse (e.g. YouTube fingerprinting)
  • Digital libraries (Vint is working for Google at the moment :-): prospective acquisition, retrospective digitization, – user, author, publisher, library rights and responsibilities, Books that talk to each other through the web

And then, the next step Vinton Cerf is working on… :

  • creating another protocol that make interplanetary Internet possible (delay and disruption tolerant protocols) – Space Station testing planned in 2009 (so far very successful…)

This guy embodies the history of the web…. and still he’s about to create its future! Amazing isn’t it?!

… And take some time to watch the video of his presentation at Lift!

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How about Government 2.0?

26 février 2009 · Classé dans Com, Lift'09 · Tagged , , , , , , ,

liftAt Lift conference, Olivier Glassey gave a talk about eGovernment on the open stage. As an employee in public administration, I was interested by his point of view on what web 2.0 can impact a government’s action… Here are a short summary of suggested ideas :

When talking about functions of the state, what are we looking at?
– sovereignty, welfare, education, economic development

In the recent past, governments used technology to do : Electronic Data processing, Performance Management, Web 1.0 / online content and eServices Delivery… Well, doing the same thing as usual… but online…

Right now… what can we expect from the use of technology in governmental action ?
– Transparency and User experience ? (how to communicate about what judiciary and executive power do…)
– Participation ? (at the legislative level)

So, that’s more about campaigning, lobbying, monitoring, benchmarking, policy making, polling, petitioning… eReferendums and eInitiatives in Switzerland and maybe even a wiki-Constitution in Geneva…

Governement 2.0 is an empty word… it is more about politics 2.0, digital governance, eParticipationnouvo

To see the video of this short presentation: TSR.ch website or NOUVO.ch ! (open stage – Olivier Glassey)

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My CV in 2020

25 février 2009 · Classé dans Com, Lift'09 · Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

liftWhile attending Lift conference 2009, I had the opportunity to attend an exciting workshop about reinventing the CV in a Google world.

Charles Nepote who works at Fing.org gave us a good insight of the question we should ask ourselves for the near future about how our personal data online are available to anyone (and for recruiters, for example).

Below, you’ll find compilation of ideas and questions we shared during the workshop :

Present Environmental trends :

  • Digital identities are part of our lives even if some of us are not aware of that fact (try to Google your name!)
  • Identity has become a public good
  • We live in a world where identities are « user centric » (facebook, linkedin, blog, professional identity…) and reflect parts of our life
  • The matching process of all these scattered information is enhanced through semantic web
  • Can we imagine, in the near future, some crowdsourcing and wikification of CV ?

So, what will a CV look like in 2020? Will it still exist in a form of a specific document? Will it be an agregate a mashup, a matching process of digital data? What information will it contain? (skills, accomplishements, competences, network… ?)

Here are some of Charles Nepote suggestions :

  • Where will this CV be ? : my lifestream, my ePortfolio, our intranet, their mobile, their index, interlinked?
  • How will it be presented ? : Process, Agreggation, Dynamic, Feed, WebID, maps, tags, visual representations, adaptive, contextual, alert processes, will anonymisation be needed ?
    So is CV 2020 just a search result ?
  • Why a CV ? : introduce a relationship, get an interview?

During the conversation between the participants, we also discussed some of the following elements :

  • It is difficult to separate private from personal infos
  • When applying for a job nowadays, is it good or bad that no info can be found on the web about me ? (also problems, sometimes, with outdated information still available on the web…)
  • It seems important to be aware and careful of what you write and put on the web about yourself (difficult sometimes, think of friends. The web has a memory you cannot control
  • Tagging pictures of you on facebook… do you have control over that? Whenever information about you is published on the web, you lose control on it! So why not change identity to write about
  • Everyone has to become his own communication manager… if you don’t want anything to be discovered about you, don’t share it online !
  • At some point, everybody might have bad things about himself on the web… and it will be a matter of balancing what positive and negative elements…id_actives

To read more about this, take time to go through Fing.org pages like these ones (in French) :

And also :

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Collaborative tools

18 février 2009 · Classé dans collaboration, Com · Tagged , , , , ,

Taking a few minutes to write during a very snowy holiday week, I chose to promote two useful collaborative tools I’ve been working with a lot lately : getdropbox and mindmeister.dropbox

First, for those who need to share documents with other people working outside of the same intranet… and on different plateforms… Getdropbox is made for you !

Once installed on different computers with the same account, for example, it allows you to share documents on as many computers as you want regardless of the plateform (Mac, windows, Linux). The MyDropBox folder appears as a local folder on all of these computers and once a file is updated on one of them, you get notified of every changes on the other ones. This also works perfectly when you need to share on specific folder with a group of colleagues… Just send them an invitation and they’ll be able to access files and modify them in this folder only. Finally, if you cannot install getdropbox on your computer because you don’t have administrator access, you can use the web interface with (almost) all the same features (and more… check the « restore » function for instance)! After a few months of regular use with different groups of colleagues, I can only recommend this great software.mindmeister

Then, for those who already find an interest in the power of mindmapping… Mindmeister is for you !

With the same ease as getdropbox, start a map and invite people to join you to share ideas and organize them. The map will dynamically update on every change, so everyone can work efficiently together. Coupled with skype, it’s definitely very powerful. Again, I’ve tested it with different groups of people and it works fine !

Oh, and I forgot… both of these great tools are FREE :-)

Collaborating as never been so easy…

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Social Media Optimization

12 février 2009 · Classé dans Com, corportate blog · Tagged , , , ,

Again, writing about corporate blogging, one interesting new tool for businesses among other social media, there is a short (but great) presentation that sums up in a few slides the essential about social media metrics (tracking and measuring impact of campaign through social media).

As a reminder, on the fifth slide, Kelsey Ruger writes the following about PR and social media :

PR in this new era needs to be focused on listening in order to facilitate conversations between companies and their constituents.

I think the « listening » part is crucial as it helps organizations to scan their environment for change and identify potential trends. This is part of a comprehensive and proactive communication strategy… a matter of survival in certain fields !

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Useful resources to start blogging

9 février 2009 · Classé dans Com, corportate blog · Tagged , , , , ,

steph_booth

Before I keep on writing about ways to implement a corporate blog in an organization, I would like to stop to thank a good friend of mine who collected very useful information about this theme. I can only recommend that you take time to go through Stephanie Booth‘s different blogs and especially the following pages covering what I’ve tried to write on in my last posts. Those pages are full of links and meaningful examples :

Besides, I strongly recommend to read through the following articles to complete Stephanie’s posts :

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Blogging to change

2 février 2009 · Classé dans Com, corportate blog · Tagged , , ,

Exploring the relevance of corporate blogging in (big) organizations, I found a few articles linking John P. Kotter’s great book « leading change » and the use of blogs to support change.

As John Kotter writes « Managers under-communicate, and often not by a small amount. Or they inadvertently send inconsistent messages. » Moreover, one of the eight step to succeed in leading change is the following :

Communicate the visionleading-change

  • Use every possible means to communicate the new vision and strategies
  • Teach new behaviors using the example of the guiding coalition team

Even if « teaching new behaviors » in not really in the two-way conversation mode, sharing the vision and strategies can definitely be done efficiently by using corporate blogs.

Coca Cola in 2006, in which blogging is used to support organization change and to promote its vision and mission through dialogue with its employees, is often given as an example, but I’m interested in discussing with anyone who experienced blogging in his working environment. Indeed, I’m trying to promote such a tool in the public administration I’m working in :-)…

Well, we’ve done already a bit of the road to collaboration with the setting up of a wiki (not totally open… I’m afraid… but that’s a start !) and I’m looking forward to seeing other moves toward the use of blogs… Maybe before the next century !

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