Speaking and Publications

In addition to the posts contained on this site, I do appear elsewhere on the web and in public. Government 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are topics I write and speak about often in other publications and conferences. For where I will be speaking next or conferences I will be attending, check out the events page.

Opportunities

Schedule Andrea to speak at your event by emailing vindictiveimmunity at gmail. com.

You can also view my profile at Geekspeakr, a site for women speakers.

Speaking Topics

• Government 2.0
• Enterprise 2.0
• Web 2.0
• Community Management
• Creating Communities with Wikis and Blogs
• Women in Technology

Training and Consulting

• Setting up your Internal Collaboration Network
• Establishing your personal brand
• Changing existing work processes to include social software

If you would like to see more of my additional work, you can check out the following links.

Items in Delicious tagged with my name: http://delicious.com/tag/andreabaker

Guest Editorials:

• ZDNet: The (Government 2.0) revolution should be televised
• ZDNet: You Were Never 1.0, but get ready for Enterprise 2.0
• ZDNet: Government as a dialogue: Will the Gov 2.0 Summit contribute?

News Articles:

• Intellipedia’s next act

Blogs about me or my work:

• Just the Guy We Need for Government 2.0
• Why Nerds and Geeks Have Taken Over the World
• Social Governance Won’t Come Easy
• Apps for Democracy
• Traction Software’s Third Annual Traction User Group Meeting – October 6 & 7
• When Intelligence Officers Get Social…
• Social Computing Journal
  

Video

• Blogtropolus at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008

Radio

• WFED – Federal News Radio – The Daily Debrief with Chris Dorobek and Amy Morris
  • More on the possible Obama CTO

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More Thoughts on Work Life Balance

In an earlier post last week, I talked about suffering from the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO). A colleague of mine, The Doyen of Intellipedia – the US Intelligence Community’s classified wiki, Don Burke mentioned to me that he had read my blog, but it wasn’t FOMO he was suffering from, it was HOLI: The hatred of losing information.

I have to agree with him that HOLI is a subset of FOMO. While the fear of missing out is more encompassing to to what’s going on at work, on the television, the news, on twitter, out at a social meetup, it is the hatred of losing information is a big part of that. The knowledge gained when we participate on a collaborative site, watch the news, tweet on twitter, or meet in person is astounding.

The Doyen let me know he hates to see information disappear, information lost when there was an opportunity for it to be captured. I agree. That’s the very thing that Intellipedia is doing for the Intelligence community. The knowledge of government, contractors, and other qualified users dispersed around the world being shared on a wiki that anyone can contribute.

It’s very easy to get wrapped up in wiki-markup and esoteric solutions for me. Many a night I enjoy working late as there is time for me to think and play with code. (I am sure many other code-geeks out there know what I am talking about). To me it is fun, fun to see a solution come to life that can effect massive change. Sometimes just 4 lines of code can make a big impact. Those are the time I really smile and get uber-geeky about my work. But then there are times the solution just doesn’t come, so I go to Starbucks or just have to call it a night and come back the next day or next week to it. We can’t expect to know the answer if we get too in the weeds.

Another colleague of mine who I was chatting with today online was commiserating with me about all the projects we juggle and body aches we suffer as we get older. His quote was “Our passions can easily be interpreted as Obsessions“. Even not having a significant other in my life, I know my family and friends can see this about me. My best friend asked me days in advance to go to karaoke last week, because he knew if I didn’t put it on my Google Calendar, then I would just stay in the office and work until I got hungry enough to come home.

Family matters – As you might have read from my tweets and my blog, I have been getting more involved with the church. Which connects me more with family. I feel good when I participate in church functions because my family has been with the church since before I was born and my pastor knows me not only by name, but what I do for a living and what I want to do with my career and life. I was even the first to volunteer for the Chili Cookoff we had this past Saturday and I did come in Second Place. (Dare I share my winning recipe with you all — nooooo like my votes, it will stay a secret).

Going to church and my mother coming down on the weekends gives me time to spend with my ailing grandmother and youngest brother. She’s been suffering from extremely low blood pressure among her other symptoms of her condition. She used to be able to outlift me when we would go grocery shopping. She’d grab the 50lb bag of dogfood because I have a bad back. Now its a good day when she can leave the house. Spending time with her I can see is good medicine, it lifts her spirits. Now that I could never do from my office.

My youngest brother and I have an age difference of 14yrs so much of his life growing up, I was not there. This is something I am working with him on as he has Aspergers and I learn his idiosyncracies. He doesn’t like chili or spaghetti, but he loves to cook and grill. He’s 18 and just graduated from High School, so he spent time living with me this fall and now he comes down on weekends. He is a big help around the house and I have been teaching him how to drive. I am proud to say he just did his first round-trip from Pennsylvania and back this weekend. He beat that new game on XBOX “Deadspace” in less than a day.

He’s not with me now in the house because I haven’t been able to spend much time at home as I juggle all my work responsibilities. I sat him down and told him he can come stay with me again in the future, but right now I can’t do much for him to help him get a job or education when I am not at home to help. He is scheduled to get his license soon and that should help out tremendously. Maybe then I could have a driver? I keep saying I need a personal assistant.

Anyways, back on point to this work-life balance, I know we all are trying to find it in our lives and what might work for others, does not work for all. With the openness of the web and new tools for collaboration and communication coming out every day it seems, we can’t know or share all the information. We will miss out and we will lose information. But now, we don’t have to be the only one who knows, goes, and shares. We can work together.

I hope reading my experiences let’s you know, we can’t be expected to do it all at 100%. I mean, even Barack Obama doesn’t do the dishes and Michelle Obama never slept at his DC townhome while he was a Senator. But they have identified and verbalized with each other what their priorities in life will be once they move into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Obama is going to work on the Economy & hunt down Al-Qaida and Michelle is going to work on being Mom-in-Chief for the first year. (You can thank 60 Minutes for this knowledge tidbit)

My final thoughts are that time spending with loved ones is time always well spent. I think we should take a moment to remember that as the holidays come around.Be thankful for your health, your loved ones and for the passion that drives you.

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Groundswell is the new Grassroots

In this post, I thought I would take a moment to let you know a little more of the story of my background and how while my career has taken me all over, the lessons learned from one industry to another carry over:

Years ago I ran my own promotions company (Emerging Sounds) for the music industry. My focus was creating a methodology for success in helping bands get noticed and get signed, it was all about grass roots marketing.

This was around the time when e-groups was bought out by Yahoo, so we created groups for our bands that we supported. In addition, we would take thousands of pictures of our bands so while we traveled from show to show, city to city, we had images to capture their essence. This was before digital cameras were affordable and as mainstream as the are today. So we would have to go to CVS or another photo development place, as for the pictures not only in print, but on floppy disk. Those were the “glory days”.

We were the “gardeners” of the Mid-Atlantic Music Scene and we were happy to do it. Why? Because we believed in our product: The bands we selected to promote. This just wasn’t any old band of the street, but ones we felt we knew and could get to know better as people. We became a family with them and in turn, we’re able to put 1000% efforts in to pushing them out to the rest of the world and record labels. This was the beginning of a new era for the music industry as MP3’s on the web were a way of getting your music into the hands of fans. I was working with industry reps giving them the inside scoop of what fans in our area were listening to and who we wanted to see on MTV (they were still playing some videos) and the short-lived Television show “Farmclub“. To me, this is as close to a point when I can remember a user-generated web beginning to form. Before we started calling it “Web 2.0″.

If you take a look at the bands listed on the Mid-Atlantic Music Scene page, you might see names of bands that you still know of today. Some had regional success, some even more national an world exposure (Remember Sev’s Pepsi Blue commercial), and some well are dating world famous socialites.

Sev – Pespi Blue (Same Old Song)

Now to my point of this blog post title. This was all grassroots work. Done by those who loved what they did and it didn’t matter if it wasn’t their “official” job or even if they were getting paid for it. It was for the love of the game. This is what I see happening with social media tool adoption with the communities I am involved.

Just as I took an initiative to create a company for recognizing and promoting the talent in a music industry that was on the verge of a technological change, I wanted to do the same for my organization. I believe I started using Wiki’s in 2005, with Confluence and at least in May 2006 with Wikipedia (when I finally decided to get a user account).

In early 2007, I became the first ever paid Intellipedian. My job as lead wiki gardener (a position I have since passed on to other colleagues) was to maintain the wiki and other social web tools for the Intelligence Community. I used my position to mentor and shape the “edit swarms” that have helped Intellipedia grow into what it is today. I have to believe a lot of my mentoring and efforts in shaping Intellipedia come directly from my experience in managing a music promotions community, all grassroots.

If you were at Fastforward2008 this past February, you might have heard Professor Andrew McAfee mention the story above as a part of his keynote.

So this grassroots term is now being referred to as groundswell, when it comes to the growth of any social web tool. For Intellipedia, it has been a wonderful ride as to see my suggestions to the gardeners who I have mentored use their “spare-cycles” with managerial buy-in. Their work has been to me the great success of the wiki, as we are not only capturing knowledge, but organizing it in a robust way.

I used to use the term “Community Manager” to define my role, however I never felt manager was the right term, I believe myself to be more of an advocate. A “Community Advocate“. I have shaped the term and role from past experience to what I have learned from the likes of Tim Ferriss, Gary Vaynerchuk, Jeremiah Owyang, and others in the world of social media. I am an advocate not only for the tools, but for the people on both sides of the application, the developers and the users. I have walked in both sets of shoes in my life and that experience helps me make the communication flow between the two parties. Then there is marketing… you know the fun stuff. The stuff that drove me to want to do more when I was in the music scene. I believe those skills I have sharpened over the years, so I can tell what potential users, listeners would probably want to hear and see to get them to use their tool or buy their music or go to a show.

I hope that in all my work, in all the talks, in all the blog posts, and online chats: inside the community, my company, and beyond; that my work inspires others to be community leaders. I would love my grassroots work to make the groundswell happen within these “families” to take-off and build bigger and brighter things. And I know they do, I see the work of others and I am proud to call them a colleague.

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Reinventing Myself

Hello World. I recently decided that in order to clearly demonstrate who I am and efficiently communicate with the rest of the world about all aspects of my transparent life, that I should consolidate my blog/web presence to one location. This is where you, my colleagues and friends can go to find my opinion on emerging tech, community building and best practices of Enterprise 2.0 in Government.

I am also available to speak at your event or conference and you can find me on GeekSpeakr.com. You can see the about me page for my official bio and the events page for past and upcoming events I will be either attending or speaking. Feel free to engage with me. I enjoy conversations, listening to others experience in business and government and would welcome a discussion.

Additionally, aside from business and technology, I will also include on this site my personal experiences with music and sports. The things that make me happy in my free time. Please feel free to follow me on twitter @immunity.

Over the next week, you will see more content as I add past blog posts and information from other aspects of where I have contributed on the social web. Going forward, I will continue to post vibrant content from both professional and personal aspects of my life.

One last thing to note, please remember, this site represents only me and not of my employer or any professional association, this also includes my twitter stream and any other social network I link to from this site, except where identified as professional.

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Getting my text messages online ? Say it ain’t so.

I don’t know about everyone in the world, its not my job. But I do know there are people like me who travel frequently and sometimes they can’t bring their phone with them into their workspace or have to have it off during the day. That can be a pain when you are “expecting a call or important text”.

Fortunately technology is starting to catch up with the demands of the likes of us. We can participate in massive social messaging with sites like twitter, pownce, ping.fm, friendfeed and so on. And by using these services we can see our messages online. OK cool. Then there is something called Grand Central.

Grand Central is cool, as its in beta, I can choose my own phone number from anywhere in the country and use this as my “semi-anonymous phone number”. I use this in a few ways. Its the number in my email signature I give out via business email communications and eventually will be on my new business cards (along with my twitter name: immunity). But I can also use it to screen calls and forward calls to multiple lines at the same time. And where I can also check the voicemail online as it comes via email. Very nice huh?

But all that takes a little work to set up and disseminating those numbers and practices to your business contacts and tech savvy friends.

What happens if its your family and close friends, who might not be as techie as you. In fact, they are the ones that call YOU for IT support when their computer is b0rked.

This is where a service like Dashwire might come in handy. I recently stumbled upon the site, from a curious question posted by a fellow smartphone user on my twitter contacts. After reading some reviews on a zdnet blog and checking out the site, I decided to give it a trial run.

Dashwire essentially syncs up my smartphone (T-Mobile Dash) to a personal site for me so I can see all my calls, texts, pictures, and contacts. This is something T-mobile can do normally if I was using a sidekick, except for the text messaging. So this is why I like it. I can see the texts I am missing.

It’s able to make this work by sending text messages to the dashwire service, as a forward, so an unlimited text messaging plan is essential if you want to try this out. Additionally, be forewarned, this is a resource and battery drain, especially while synching. So while it maybe cool, consider this downside, especially if you are not able to charge your phone (charging in your car maybe a necessity).

Also to note, they didn’t have an exact match of the HTC phone for my dash, so I picked the closest model and it still works.

I started using this about 2 weeks ago and think I will give it at least one month more before I make my final call, but for this trial run (self-imposed trial, the service is free), its been very helpful.

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My Cell Phone Is Making Me Dumber

As much as I love and preach the rapid growing technologies that are making life and work easier and more effective in less time, the more I hate technology as well.

I am so addicted to all things mobile and how it connects me to the world. I can remember the shortcode for Twitter (40404), but I can’t remember my best friend’s phone number. In fact, I can’t remember anyone’s phone number post 2002, when my father finally bought my very own cell phone. I was late to the cell phone game as most of my friends had been using cell phones for a few years by then, but even 4 years out of the Army I was still clamming for a hard line. Now even my alarm system in wireless and I haven’t had a home phone in three years.

So since 2002 I have been becoming dumber. And I blame it on the cell phone. I mean think about it, before you owned a cell phone, you probably knew all your friends numbers that you called from your private line in your parents house and you could dial those numbers fast as lightening. But now, every time you lose your phone, reset it, or upgrade, you send a message out to Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, or whatever ever social network to ask for everyone to send you their numbers again. Even those whom you have weak ties.

Why bother remember 10 little digits when your SIM card can do it for you?

So what happens when we rely on that technology so much, it fails us in life? We can end up looking like real assholes.

This was the case for me back in April this year for instance. I was flying up to spend some time with my best friend in New Hampshire before heading to Boston to meet with Andrew McAfee, of HBS and to sit in on one of his classes. As the plane landed in Manchester Airport, I turned my T-mobile Dash HTC Excaliber smartphone back on so I could text him that I was on the ground. I was able to see that he had txt’d me he was waiting just as my phone froze. I restarted again and my phone started going into what I call the loop of death. This had happened once before so I knew my only recourse was to hard reset the phone. This meant 30 minutes of unavailability to do anything with it, even make a simple call.

So without a phone, I had no number to let him know I was there and I would be waiting for him. Luckily after 30 minutes and just as my phone was normalizing as I was sitting on a bench outside, he walks up, furious. Why didn’t call blah, blah, blah. He said a true friend would have the number written down elsewhere and couldn’t believe I didn’t have it memorize. To which, if I had, asked someone in the airport to borrow a cell phone for a local call or go to a pay phone.

This was not the first or the last time we had issues getting in touch because of not knowing each other’s numbers. I thought we had rectified this because we had exchanged business cards and (we are best friends mind you) that maybe by now we would have remembered or at least keep the numbers in our wallets.

Um no. It happened again. He lost his phone. His billfold is in storage where he thinks my business card might be. He had no access to get online (the Internet seems to be a novelty for laid back New Englanders) and thus excuses, excuses, blah, blah, blah.

OK so this is a long story to make a point. But as I sit here, many paragraphs later I can only remember the first three digits of his number (603). I still cannot muster up the remaining 7 with absolute certainty and it kills me. I mean I learned Arabic to fluency (which I have also mostly forgotten now), but I cannot remember 10 numbers.

My cell phone does all my day to day brain work for me, besides store numbers. It also emails me my daily calendar from google, I get my news, weather and traffic (see @thebeltway on twitter) via FriendFeed, twitter, and text messaging. I even read interesting feeds while getting iontophoresis during physical therapy in the mornings. I even email myself quick directions for meetings from google maps and in bad traffic on 95 I used Windows Live Search for finding alternate routes home.

Essentially its like my brain saying, try as I might, since some device that fits in the palm of my hand can remember all that information for me, why should I retain it in my head? I mean I don’t know how many times I have gone to t-mobile.com to look up the number of someone whom you would think I would have the number engraved on my knuckles.

Next up … getting my text messages online ? Say it ain’t so.

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Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2008 Day 2

Yesterday was an amazingly different and wondrous day. It started off with the hotel finding us the biggest chocolate croissants evar! Then Steve Mandzik and I walked down to E*Trade. After which, we started walking back to the Moscone West when we were stopped by News Channel 5 in SF to talk about the presidential campaign so far. I am hoping my soundbyte made it on air. (If someone can find me this clip I will love you forever and pimp your site, blog, twitter, whatever for you.)

Update: My friend Mike B. found the clip, I am standing next to Steve and his soundbyte made it, but mine did not. Next time eh?

After that, I sat in on Joseph Smarr from Plaxo’s presentation “Data Portability, Privacy, and the Emergence of the Social Web“. I saw Joseph earlier this year at the Future of Web Apps in MIami. This time he had more time to speak and talk about the direction in which the social web is going and the ever growing need for our connections to travel with us, instead of re-friending your friends. I also saw Kevin Marks again from Google and I met Identity Woman, Kaliya Hamlin.

I spent a lot of time back and forth in blogtropol.us and on the expo floor. I was really impressed with the Tell Me app that works with voice on your blackberry to keep your hands free when looking for information. I also got a demo of saleforce.com powered by google apps and the possibilities I can take with me back to Navstar. I still have 4/5ths of the floor to explore. A little each day.

Most of the time spent here is actually networking and talking to developers making cool hacks, scripts and apps. But the afternoon we got to listen to the Keynotes of Day 2 (Tim O’Reilly and Clay Shirky surely were the standouts).

So far the new apps I have been working with since I got here Fireball, powered by Fireeagle. Alertthingy, a desktop app for friendfeed.com. And ribbit, another way to make your phone do so much more for you.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMW52Z_a5xM]

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