Social Glass

Apologies for the lack of posts.  I’ve started a new job this week as a Development Manager for a company in San Diego and have been busy coming up to speed on everything (and everybody) I’ll need to know to do my job.  What an interesting 6 months.

1. I worked in Austria from late June to mid August.
2. Moved to Sydney from mid August to mid October.
3. Moved back to Melbourne from mid October to December.
4. Repatriated to the United States in December and was in Colorado to mid January.
5. Moved to San Francisco for a month, and…
6. Took a job in San Diego which I started yesterday.

All that time I’ve been co-authoring a book and have tried to keep blogging.  Man I can’t wait to be settled again.

I safely arrived in Colorado last night.  It’s been 1 year since I’ve been in the US.  I immediately noticed how festive the US is around the holidays. Carols were playing in the LA airport and people said “merry christmas” to me.  This doesn’t really happen in Australia, where if they said it they’d prefer “happy christmas” instead.  It’s also pretty cold in Denver (at least compared with how hot it’s been in Melbourne this past few weeks).  And I had my first Chipotle burrito since last December for dinner tonight. 

What I’ve noticed immediately is that most blog and twitter updates now happen throughout the day.  In Australia it was like reading the newspaper, where when I got to work most of the blog posts and twitter updates from my US counterparts had been completed already, so I’d spend 20 minutes or so catching up on the “news”.  Now my reader constantly has updates.  I’m not sure which way is better actually.

Anyway, I’m hoping to visit more conferences now that I’m in North America and meet some of my blogging friends in person.  I might look into heading to the FASTForward conference this year to get me going. 

It’s good to be back.

Today is my last day with my firm in Australia. I’m heading back to the states after 2.5 years to take a break and then explore some exciting job opportunities. I’ve had a fantastic experience here in Oz and have worked with some amazing people.

I’ve worked on more traditional systems integration projects with large telcos and banks, done some interesting enterprise search implementations, built some cool demo applications, and preached the enterprise 2.0 doctrine to prospects who, in some cases, knew more about the topic than me! I’m very encouraged about the momentum I see in Australia in the social computing space, and I think my firm is well positioned to make a positive impact here.

I wish the best of luck to my colleagues. You can always find me on twitter or here on this blog.

A few days ago I got a request from my Managing Director (Partner) asking if I knew of anybody in the Enterprise 2.0 blogosphere who’d like to join our firm as a consultant specializing in Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 in Australia. We have the go-ahead to bring onboard 3 such consultants at varying levels of seniority.

Most of the work we do is strategic in this space, but we’re gaining a lot of momentum, and I’d be surprised if we’re not part of several E2.0 implementations next year.

If you’re interested or know somebody who might be, send me an email at jeremy.thomas at socialglass.com. I’ll respond with more information about the firm and the opportunities at hand.

Most people who read this blog are probably familiar with Wiki Patterns - “…a toolbox of patterns & anti-patterns, and a guide to the stages of wiki adoption”. One pattern I find intriguing is that of the Wiki Gnome. A Wiki Gnome is somebody who’s detail oriented and makes cosmetic changes to wiki pages, improves information flow, fixes punctuation etc.

We use Confluence for sharing project information, and it’s amusing to see wiki patterns in action. My project is based in Australia and is staffed with Australians. Yet the other day I noticed an edit to one of our pages by somebody based in Washington D.C. A wiki gnome.

The change was minor, but it made me realize that my project’s activities are visible to and grab the attention of a wider audience across my company. After all, wiki gnomes have to read wiki content before they decide to modify it. So perhaps the presence of wiki gnomes is an indicator that an enterprise wiki is accomplishing its task - diffusing knowledge and connecting people.