Teblog

Eco-efficiency: a global online gathering (Jam)

Well, IBM's Global Eco-Efficiency Jam has been going for 15 hours now. It aims to avoid science, politics and beliefs and focus on pragmatism and practical actions individuals and organisations can take now and in the near future to innovate, clean up their acts and gain commercial advantage.

It will last for another 36 hours. So get over there if you are interested in contributing to and learning from the discussion. If you just want to stir things up, don't bother.

As you might expect, a lot of the themes are not new, but it's probably the first opportunity for participating organisations to gather together and share what they know and to debate and bring new perspectives to bear on the subject matter. When strangers meet and people of different disciplines come together with a common purpose, new knowledge and insights tend to be created.

At the very least, the jam provides a pool of the collective expressed knowledge of the participants. This is available to all who register. You can do it immediately if your organisation appears on the drop-down list or request an invitation by sending an email to ecojam@us.ibm.com with "RSVP"  in the subject line. Joel Makower, a highly respected green business expert, kicked off the event by interviewing a Yale professor, a researcher from the Economist Intelligence Unit and an IBM Fellow in a webinar. Details here and the webinar recording is here if you'd like an orientation and, maybe, inspiration.

You can search Twitter for #ecojam or #globalecojam. To be frank, you won't find many tweets but they may lead to blogs and other resources related to the event. And Greenmonk's Tom Raftery is the official blogger.

At the time of writing 1480 individuals had logged in and 861 posts had been made. The top ten most active discussions range from 62 comments down to 19, which  means you can join the jam and get up to speed on your favourite topics very quickly by navigation or by search. You can create watchlists of topics or authors and you can kick off your own new discussions. (And, yes, you'll need to agree to some common sense rules.)

See you there maybe?

It's taking longer than I thought

This is just a post to let you know I'm still here. Apart from contractual agreements, I have largely avoided writing stuff while I get my act together. This has meant hundreds of emails and address cleaning/updating. In fact, 555 emails started around 100 conversations, seventeen of which could turn into business relationships, three of them reasonably imminently.

Martin Banks and I have done some training (how to handle the press) in exotic locations - well, Ireland and France, to be precise. It's still an incredibly satisfying experience and well received by clients. (A little more information is on the greybeards site, but we need to add more.) I helped a chum out with editing a mini-book. My talents seem to lie in distilling clarity from complexity. It's most enjoyable when the subject matter is somewhat ground-breaking. (There's a bit of information on the mini-books site. Again, more needs to be added.)

One fascinating exercise was to analyse the text of 180 or so of the articles, columns and blogs that Freeform Dynamics listed in its sidebar while I was there. I fed this into TagCrowd and it created a word cloud from the 50 main themes. The result is that you can look inside my head - you'll find a link just under my photo on my home page.

I thought of linking the individual cloud words to the articles they refer to but you'd just end up with a list of article titles, none of would will help you much. Instead, I set up a Google search on the same page which looks just at my material and which allows you to create your own, more contextual, multi-word search. All the articles, blogs, papers etc are also listed (most recent first).

In terms of social networking, I find Twitter a very serendipitous way of keeping up and I'm tipped off by emails when I'm DMed and an RSS ego search in netvibes tells me if someone's reaching out. Sometimes it's impossible to go through the tweets and, despite many attempts, I can't get on with the 'swim lane' approach of TweetDeck. Blogging, you know, I've gone quiet on for now. I really only want to write new stuff or new angles - still trying to figure that out. The aim is to reduce noise and deliver value. (Apart from status posts, like this one.) LinkedIn is a great way to find out who cares. I only invite connections from people I actually know and, if they respond, then I feel we can sustain contact by other means. Like Twitter, status updates are serendipitously interesting. For me, Facebook is mostly 'friends and family'. I don't use it for business contact at all, although a few business contacts crept in a while back. Finally, SlideShare is a great way to share, not just presentation decks, but slide notes as well.

I have some photos on Flickr, most recently of Dandy the dog, but I'm not into photography that much - I find the lens gets in the way of life itself.

On that note, I think I'll close this post. Feel free to keep in touch. I will, very soon, burst out of my self-imposed purdah. Have a great 2010 (those who've managed to read this far.)