For awhile now I’ve worked with and “mentored” various students doing their thesis and doctoral work and I’ve meet some of these students in the past but none quite like what took place at the SAP TechEd Vienna event. This was the first time I had meet a student that I had spent time over the past years working with at one of our own events.
It was kind of nerve racking as this particular student is doing a critical study of external facing communities and we are one of those “targets” so for a whole week I felt as though I was put on the spot to make sure what we “say” is what we are really doing and that we can stand up to the scrutiny of an academic doing their doctoral work.
OK, I was not so much worried that we were not living up to what we are telling the world it was more that they would discover some flaw, hole or otherwise negative aspect I myself missed and was not prepared to discuss or even defend – silly of course since no one can be prepared to be the ultimate defender of their community one has to sit back and have faith in what you have helped build and that it is strong.
So during the week, I got to know Georgia Demetriou better and we spoke in great detail about community, human interaction, social interaction I also introduced her to several community members of the SAP communities as well as many of the blogger present and we asked her to share her thoughts with during a live broadcasted interview.
What I found surprised many people was during our conversations and the interview we discussed other communities and who she should talk to as well. Personally I felt folks like Jake and Justin with Oralce would be perfect people for her to talk to as well as Lauren with Microsoft in addition to those two of course would be other strong external facing communities like Intel, AMD, IBM, etc. I mean there are not many of us in this enterprise level world with external facing communities so I’ve also considered it to be prudent to know the other folks one might or could classify as my counterparts and that we should attempt to keep some open lines of communications.
On many levels there are certain best practices that do not necessarily relate to our companies but to us an individuals in roles that are still relatively new to the world (e.g. Community Evangelists) and therefore I was more than happy to provide those names and emails that I had readily available.
So personally and professionally I want to wish Georgia all the best with her work and I’m very eager on both levels to read her findings when she is done!!
Yesterday the SAP Community Network launched their new concept for the use of a wiki environment (disclaimer – I launched it) and it’s been met so far with mixed feedback. Now I was the primary driver behind the concept and it was something we spent almost two full years talking about and discussing (debating or arguing might be better words) and yet we still don’t know if it’s the right move or not. I launched the “official” announcement yesterday and I followed up with something a bit more personal today, I decided to take that and post it here as well because I truly do want as much feedback as possible from both inside our environment and from outside. I created a short video with my thoughts and added some text…
There you have it a short 13 minute video of me describing the past two years or so working on this project. Thinking back to when Scott Jones and I discussed/debated and worked through the concept (to put it on paper) while I drove him from Walldorf to the Frankfurt Airport and how we continued inside the airport as well. To discussions with SAP Mentors, Top Contributors and others and how they challenged the foundation of the idea and how we evolved it or at least different aspects of it over the course of the pilot and prototype stages.
The project itself was easy to implement the challenge of course was the theory behind it, it was one of the most interesting and challenging projects I’ve worked on because there is no clear defined answer to this topic, it’s a matter of use and how people view it. Yesterday I got one piece of feedback via Twitter which was expected but it does force one to “rethink” – is this approach right?
“Honestly, it does not seem like a wiki to me. Too much control is not collaboration. Not bottom up, organic, community oriented…”
I received a phone call,
“Thank you, we were getting tired of having to move content out of our space to other locations where it was a better fit!”
and
“Does this mean I won’t have to worry about someone erasing the pages and replacing it with a question anymore that should go in the forums?”
an IM came in,
“but I was working with a whole new group of people to fill out a new wiki space, now what?”
For that one I had a quick response, and that was – ping me who they are and we’ll add them! This concept is not meant to keep people out it’s meant to highlight and focus on quality content and those dedicated to creating it!
All in all we are going to be watching how this progresses over the course of the next few weeks and see if we need to either fine tune, leave alone or roll back. Keep that feedback coming please!!!
It’s hard to believe that it was just 5 days ago that I sat down at my computer with 3 cameras hooked up and prepared myself to launch into a 24 hour long marathon for the Doctors without Borders. The idea spawned back in December and I finally picked a date and launched the blog and announcements on my show – I was ready!
The original goal picked was $500, and within 30 minutes $160 had been donated online and $200 offline and I had not even started the marathon yet. A few hours later I raised the goal to $2000 and decided to hope for the best. I had given myself a few weeks time from first announcement to actual live broadcast and thus began calling, im’ing, tweeting, and emailing folks to find others who might be interested in participating (to help take the load off of me and maybe give me a few minutes breaks here and there). The responses to help were immediate and the video clips and scheduling began!
It was an exciting time and many began to ask, “Why”? I did my best to answer this…
The Friday Morning Report, for it’s first ever 24 hour Marathon starting on April 23, 2009 at 15:00pm CET (Central Europe) has signed up to accept donations on behalf of Doctors without Borders. We look around the world we live in and realize that it’s not a perfect place, we know that it has problems and that we as a community need to be more aware of the problems and do what we can to help provide critical care to those living amid armed conflict, epidemics, malnutrition and natural disasters around the world.
Thanks to our support, Doctors without Borders is at work right now saving the lives of women, men and children in more than 60 countries where people would otherwise not have access to medical care.
Donating through this website is simple, fast and totally secure. It is also the most efficient way to support Doctors without Borders.
So join us during our 24 hour marathon and help make the world a little bit better and please take a moment to share your comments and thoughts of the show here for everyone to share in!
I even snagged a audio snippet sharing my thoughts as well,
Shortly before the planned event in February I suffered a back injury, yes I know many think I did it just to have a better understanding of how doctors work and all, but really it was a painful experience and was not until April that I was I able to reschedule and proceed with the marathon.
Again the excitement starting to grow, I mean just the idea of putting so much of yourself into any single event can be overwhelming as well as breathtaking. On top of that add the total support of family and friends, especially my wife, a huge thank you goes to my wife for supporting me and helping me make this happen. We discussed it for a long time, should I do it? Was giving money every year enough? What can we do more and how can we set a positive example for our growing children? Our final decision was for me to do what I spend so much time doing anyway, be online and do it for a good reason something more than my hobby, interest and career but to help those who are helping others.
The marathon I associated with my Friday Morning Report show, an experiment in technology and social networking in itself I’ve become very fond of doing the show and so it made sense to associate the two together.
The program developed as such,
15:00 – 15:30 Kicking it off and tuning in 15:30 – 16:00 Laying out the program and activities for the remaining 23 hours 16:00 – 17:00 Doctors without Borders, Who they are and what they do. 17:00 – 18:00 Girls Day 18:00 – 19:00 Sneak Peek – FlyCam 19:00 – 20:00 ASUG Simulcast – Community, CSR 20:00 – 21:00 smeepe 21:00 – 22:00 The Day of German Beer 22:00 – 23:00 Tom Raftery, GreenMonk, Sustainablity 23:00 – 00:00 Product Review: LiveScribe 00:00 – 01:00 Doctors without Borders, Who they are and what they do. 01:00 – 02:00 Earth Day 2009 02:00 – 03:00 ITSInsider interviews Tina Williamson – Women Worldwide 03:00 – 04:00 Product Review: Acer One Netbook 04:00 – 05:00 Geeks and all nighters 05:00 – 06:00 Doctors without Borders, Who they are and what they do. 06:00 – 07:00 Ginger Gatling, Our book and Doctors without Borders 07:00 – 08:00 Starting your day off positively 08:00 – 09:00 Using Tech to optimize your day 09:00 – 10:00 Homecamp crowd 10:00 – 11:00 Doctors without Borders, Who they are and what they do. 11:00 – 12:00 12:00 – 13:00 13:00 – 14:00 14:00 – 15:00 Where we stand, what we learned and who we meet! 15:00 Say goodnight!
I did my best to record each hour and capture it as we proceeded, however there were unfortunately a couple of times where the recording simply did not work but for the most part I managed to capture 23 hours of show, if anyone actually watches all 23 hours I’d love to hear how long it took you and what you thought.
Almost becoming our official commercial during the show was this little piece from Jim Spath.
Of course what action would be complete without having it’s very own cartoon made about it? Thank you Blag!
Also throughout the show I made the point that if silly, irrelevant or even crass things can reach such unexpected heights within the various “social” tools we have available today why can things that need to be share not reach the same heights? Therefore we tried a little experiment, around 6pm (about 3 hours into the show) we picked a video from the Doctors without Borders from their YouTube site that had around 70’s, when then encouraged everyone to “tweet” about it and ask others to retweet it. As of writing this post it’s about doubled the number of views.
I also had two other videos made, both having made big impacts on the audience. The first was from Ginger Gatling about a new SAP book where each author has decided that all proceeds from the sale of the book will be donated to the Doctors without Borders and the second was from Susan Scrupski and an interview she did with Tina Williamson from Women Worldwide (see Part 11).
Some of those that joined me via remote video were Abesh, Graham, Marilyn, Tom, James, Dennis, Chris, Andy and many many more! Some even wrote about my little adventure afterwards like Eddy. Many many more shared their thoughts on Twitter which @eventtrack tracked beautifully (it helped of course that I encouraged the use of the tag “fmr24”)!
In particular Jim (mentioned above) also organized a “simulcast” through ASUG which had roughly 40 participants. The setup was quite straightforward yet complex. My camera was pointed at my monitor which was logged into a remote session with Jim and I was dialed in via voice to his session as well. The end result was that both audiences were seeing the same presentation from Jim and both were hearing both myself and Jim – it was quite interesting and worked very well.
Broadcasting, as I mentioned earlier went very well, there were only 3 specific times that I had to break the “endless” broadcast and restart a process or two as my system got overloaded so viewing the stats of the show proved quite easy.
6:00am on Apr 23, 2009 until 9:14am on Apr 23, 2009 Broadcast Length: 3 hours, 10 minutes Viewer Hours: 48 hours, 9 minutes Unique Viwers: 82 Total Viewers: 172 Avg Viewers: 15.2
9:57am on Apr 23, 2009 until 8:53pm on Apr 23, 2009 Broadcast Length: 10 hours, 53 minutes Viewer Hours: 195 hours, 32 minutes Unique Viewers: 180 Total Viewers: 410 Avg Viewers: 18
8:59pm on Apr 23, 2009 until 6:04am on Apr 24, 2009 Broadcast Length: 9 hours, 1 minute Viewer Hours: 182 hours, 33 minutes Unique Viewers: 161 Total Viewers: 311 Avg. Viewers: 20.2
All of these activities generated (as of time of writing) $4,400.10 with many more offline donations I’ve yet to totally calculate. Not to mention how many actually took my show challenge and “dropped a coin” after each hour of watching?
The question that became apparent after spending the weekend offline and relaxing and recovering was, “did I achieve something?”, and I have to say that I achieved several things. I learned something about the technology I use, I learned something about people, about friends and associates, I learned something about my family and I certainly learned a lot about myself and at the same time I learned a lot about the world out there that I am often shielded from.
The question also arose on whether I and the Friday Morning Report would do this again, the answer is a clear and definite YES (just not so soon).
My plea from throughout the show as well as now is that everyone please take a few minutes from your day, week and/or month and share a story, link, video, etc. from a group or organization that is doing good in this world and share it with your own social networks.
Brussels, Belgium