New Year, New Path

Last Thursday I resigned from Proven Partners, the change and knowledge management consultancy I have been working for in the past years. Yesterday I informed my colleagues, so now I can announce it publicly as well.

In 2008 I will start working as an independent consultant. In January I will gradually hand over those activities that need to be handed over, and in February I will be my own man completely. Though I am sorry to leave Proven Partners behind I am eagerly looking forward to the new year.

I am looking forward to focus more on revamping knowledge work, innovation and learning with the aid of social media. I am looking forward to being able to work more closely together with tool companies to bring social software within the firewall. I am looking forward to be able to do more research. I am looking forward to being able to do more together with my international network. And above all I am looking forward to work more closely together with my wife Elmine. In the past few years we learned how great it is to work professionally together.

While preparing the step to become independent is not just exciting but also has been scary at times in the past few months, I am very pleased that already enough opportunities emerged in the past weeks to be certain that I have enough work throughout 2008. Next to that I will also continue working with my former colleagues at Proven Partners in several projects.

With Christmas nearly here, Elmine and I both will be celebrating, confident that we've taken an excellent decision.

Climate Conference Bali

If you're not prepared to lead, then step aside.

Appeal to and criticism on the US administration by a delegate from Papua New Guinea, shortly before the US finally agreed to a resolution text all other nations of the world already agreed to. (Official UN Climate Change conference site)

Federating Social Networks

An interesting and creative group of people is coming together today in Amsterdam at Mediamatic.
The event Federating Social Networks is described on Upcoming as:

In all the buzz around social network portability, this one-day workshop will explore how social network services and Content Management Services can work together in a so-called federation. With a few presentation setting the stage in the morning, the rest of the day we will discuss the different protocols, formats and agreements needed to make such a federation possible.

* Aggregration of people, their profile information and works on other services.
* Migration and consolidation of people and their works.
* The ability to form relationships between people and works across services.
* Timely and efficient notification of changes.
* Distributed search.

I can't attend, as we will be in Emden (Germany) today. But in a conversation with James Burke this week I talked about the kind of things I would like to be part of this portability concept.

What interests me most about portability is not the ability to take 'my network' out of one platform and migrate to another platform. I would expect easy im- and export, as well as a format for storage in between (when I don't directly migrate to another platform) to be par for the course. Even if that is a big challenge by itself.

What interests me the most however is what I can do in between platforms. I want to own my data, something I have been talking about before. I would like to propose a type of portability that its reasoning from me being the starting point. A client that puts me in the driving seat of all events in all my current hangouts (the platforms), makes me the owner of the dataset. I own my landscape and must be able to decide how the different translations to maps can be manipulated.
Then I can push different representations of my social network into the platforms I deem fit. I decide on the maps that I give to the platforms in short.

This also introduces interesting possible functionality like:
1) I see you have tried to friend me on Facebook
2) Where I think LinkedIn would be a better hangout for us
3) I then enter into a negotiation with you in which hangout and context we want to connect.
4) In the end we decide to connect on Plaxo Pulse instead.
5) We both now publish that connection on the map we both push out to Plaxo Pulse.

I realise that this calls for a very high granularity of trust/access for different people in different contexts in different platforms, on different moments. A big challenge, but who says I can't dream.

I would like portability to mean practical and functional acknowledgement that me and my buddies are the landscape, and that the platforms we use are mere maps.

(Live coverage on the Jaiku channel #fsn)