In the past days I visited Vienna, on the invitation of the ZSI, Centre for Social Innovation. They organized a workshop on the fringe of the yearly conference for the European distance and e-learning network (EDEN). The workshop was titled Social Software in Professional Learning Environments, and an initiative of both the PROLEARN and iCamp European projects, and took place at the technological university of Vienna.

Sebastian Fiedler and Barbara Kieslinger kindly invited me to speak at their Social Software workshop about the pioneering our company Proven Partners does in working with social software, both internally and for clients. In my presentation I talked about the rationale for using social software in our organization, and our experienced benefits, challenges and obstacles. Based on the questions I also introduced some of the examples in working with our clients with social software.

My presentation was the first, which worked out nicely as I approached the subject in broader terms, and as seen from the ‘user’-perspective. Subsequent presentations were by Thomas Burg (on tagging), Karsten Ehms (on internal weblogs at Siemens), and Ralf Klamma (on research perspectives and projects around social software). Ralf does interesting stuff on visualization issues, reminiscent of the work of Marc Smith at Microsoft Research. The few dozen people attending were active listeners, with a good number of questions.

Apart from the workshop this was also a good chance to talk to Karsten, Thomas and Sebastian again. It’s always a pleasure to meet them. And the ‘beer gardens’ in Vienna, such as Altes AKH and the Hermann’s beach bar (photo) were good places to have those conversations. And of course new faces and names were part of those exchanges as well. Such as Norm Friesen, Jan Mendling, Ralf Klamma and Fridolin Wild, and a whole bunch of others. All in all a very pleasant experience. Looking forward to returning to Vienna in the fall for the BlogTalk Reloaded conference, for which we just heard a proposal by me and Elmine got accepted. Photo’s are up on Flickr, ofcourse.