Off to see The Mann

Today I’m off to see the mann - René Obermann, CEO of Deutsche Telekom (DTAG) - with the DNA Digital guys in Bonn. There we will hopefully get to workshop interesting challenges of the Enterprise2.0.

What would you talk about? I’d like to know! Feel free to leave a comment on the blog or drop me a line on twitter.

Disclaimer: I work for a company that does business with DTAG. However, I'm not getting paid or instructed to write this blog or to participate in the Enterprise2.0 discussion.

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DNA Digital Workshop - Summary

As I wrote yesterday, I attended a DNA Digital workshop held in the 4010 Telekom store in Berlin to discuss how so called digital natives, social media and web2.0 can positively influence and help shape the future of Deutsche Telekom (DTAG). [Big fat disclaimer: I work for a company that does business with DTAG] Here’s  the follow-up as promised.

The goal of the workshop was to select the members of the DNA Digital community that would attend and speak at the next and perhaps more exclusive workshop with DTAG CEO René Obermann.

The workshop itself was more or less organized in the style of a open-space meeting. Any attendee was free to step forward to present a topic that they’d like to discuss and the rest with no topic of their own could chose to join in group discussion of the topics of interest. Topics ranged from “apps development via social media” to “cultural change and credibility”.

Kickass mindmap!

I chose to participate in the latter, “cultural change and credibility”, sparked by Lutz Hirsch and Basti Hirsch (if my memory serves me correctly) as it is a topic that highly engages me personally. The number of challenges, ideas and thoughts that were addressed in that discussion is probably symptomatic of the complexity of the subject matter. I will not try to repeat them all here as they have already been posted on the DNA Digital blog (German).

At the workshop I found myself pimping the book Tactical Transparency by Shel Holtz more than one time. I think it’s a good primer on the transparent enterprise - and no, I’m not getting a cut for saying that. ;)

I also promised to post the link to the NewPR Wiki’s comprehensive list of social media policies. NewPR Wiki is worth checking out. They also have a comprehensive list of blogging CEOs.

In conclusion I was positively surprised by the variety of people, opinions, ideas and experiences shared. I was also very pleased to register a high level of authentic personal engagement among the attendees. My cynical suspicion before the workshop - that the whole thing could be an embarrassing play to the Telekom gallery - was definitely put to shame.

Basti Hirsch summing up the \"cultural change and credibility\" discussion.

Looking forward to see you DNA Digital guys again at the Obermann gig in Bonn on the 17th of June!

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DNA Digital Workshop - Hello again, Berlin!

I’m attending a workshop (German) held by DNA Digital, an initiative to “connect the Internet generation with CEOs”.  Let’s find out what that means. I’ll keep you posted on how the workshop went.

For the third time in less than a month I find myself in the city of Berlin again. Life is but a long line of coincidences. .  .

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SIGINT 20090 - Day 1

I’m attending SIGINT 2009 in Cologne this weekend. It’s an event organized by the Chaos Computer Club about civil rights, social issues and hacktivism in the digital age.

SIGINT09

The excellent keynote for today was held by Jens Ohlig claiming the politicians and legislators of today are so out of touch with the reality of the Internet, only reading pages printed off the Internet by their secretaries, thinking

Internet is just another medium like TV and newspapers that we can censor and control.

Another highlight of today’s keynote was a performance by Jonathan Mann featuring a creative adaptation of Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem “First they came…” tweaked to decribe our endangered civil rights in this digital age.

Looking forward to be meeting more new and interesting people at SIGINT. Stay tuned to the #sigint09 hashtag here there and everywhere.

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Twitter muzzled?

This morning I read a blog post over at Read Write Web (RWW) that caught me by surprise. I recommend you read it too. It seems that twitter has removed what I consider an essential feature in their latest update.

I was so surprised that I wrote a comment in the emotional heat of the moment over at RWW and I decided to republish it here later on. My initial thoughts were as follows:

I’m quite appalled that twitter seems to me to be self confident - if not almost smirk - with removing a setting that potentially alters the mechanics of conversing and discovering on twitter on a fundamental level; In other words making twitter less like, well, twitter.

I find the idea of not listening to 2% of their user base quite grand. Did they do the maths? That’s not a tiny amount of people, is it? My guess is, that there are a lot of the early twitter adopters and evangelists in those 2% too.

Another bet of mine is that most of those 2% are most certainly not confused by the @ reply ’system’. It’s inaccurate, not threaded and tracked - but who cares? It’s ‘the twitter way’ and some learned to live comfortably with it.

I’m also willing to bet that a much higher percentage was living under the illusion that they were getting every single public tweet from the people they were following and didn’t know that twitter was censoring and deciding what they could and could not see.

As to the topic of context, I personally find parts of the 2008 twitter blog post referred to in the comments over at RWW completely out of touch.

From the post:
“1) You should feel free to @reply people and not worry about it being out of context to some of your followers. In general, they won’t see it.”

To me, twitter is not instant messaging or email. To me, one of the most important aspects about twitter is enabling discovery, stumbling upon new interesting people, sparking curiosity, reading different perspectives. Why take all that away? I’m flabbergasted. Speechless.

Would it hurt too much to just leave the [promiscuous] setting as default OFF, but there to turn ON for the users who are comfortable with it?

Are there economical incentives involving either business plans or prohibitive cost-benefit ratios precluding it? If so, twitter should be up front and transparent about it.

Please bring ‘promiscuous’ back. I don’t want to have to subscribe to the RSS feed of every single user that I’m following in my reader of choice to get the complete unadulterated twitter stream (even from users that may have blocked me).

@blacktar

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