Social Media Club DC – Mid-Summer Happy Hour (Tonight)

I am pleased to announce that my company Navstar, Inc. will be sponsoring tonight’s Social Media Club DC – Mid-Summer Happy Hour [July 29, 2009 from 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM (ET)] at Bar Louie in Chinatown, Washington, DC.

Larissa Fair – President

Twitter – @lyf108

Andrea Baker – Executive Vice President and Programming Director

@immunity

Anna Gabert and Travis Mason- Vice President & Sponsorship Directors

@annagabert @tgmason

Sarah Wurrey – Vice President & Promotions Director

@sarahwurrey

Nisha Chittal, Meg Roberts, Sara Burson – Event Managers

@nishachittal, @megmroberts, @saraburson

Maia Kotlus-Gates and Beth McNamee – Membership Managers

@maiakg, @bethmcnamee

Gabriel Key – Digital Scribe/Content Organizer

@gabrielmkey

Event Logistics:

Wednesday, July 29
6:00pm – 8:00pm
Bar Louie
701 7th Street NW #D
Washington, DC 20001
202-638-2460

Connect with SMC-DC

Washington DC has its own wiki-in-progress. Please visit: http://socialmediaclubdc.pbwiki.com/ for more details.

Washington DC Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/smcdc

Hashtag: #smcdc

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2419741913

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1820071&trk=hb_side_g

Friendfeed: http://www.friendfeed.com/smcdc

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Starting Over, Yet Again

And no its not that book that is in the self help aisle that Charlotte was looking for in the “Sex in the City” tv show, but its about the newest chapter in my life as a Government Consultant. Last month was my last day as a full time wiki Gardener/Digital Curator for Intellipedia and other social software tools for the Intelligence Community. I am still doing project management for the contract as my/our vested interest of Navstar and Enterprise 2.0 work, in the bigger picture of Government 2.0.

When one does consultant work, especially in the Federal Government, as I do, you tend to rotate to new contracts on occasion. I’ve been on some contracts for years, others for months depending on the work. Sometimes I have been on a contract from inception, others I have taken to a close. But with each one, I learn so much and gain new friends and colleagues.

In fact, since I have been consulting in the same field since I left the Army in 1998, I keep running into the same familiar names and faces. Some even go back to those days when I wore BDUs.  I have worked with several kinds of contracting companies, from Small to Medium to Large. So now, with all this time under my belt, I can tell you my best experience so far has been with the small female owned company by Joanna Alexis, Navstar, Inc.

With Navstar, I have been growing up a lot. When I first joined I was still doing work as a billable employee as a Developer (I even learned a bit of Ruby on Rails). Even though I had previously done work as a Project Manager and even a small venture as an Independent Contractor. Over my time here at Navstar, I have pulled away from being just a developer and back into Project Management and Business Development.

As my mission to continuously grow the Enterprise 2.0 division of work, I have been scouting fine talent inside and outside of the Federal Government to work towards and more Open and Transparent ethos inside and out. Not only have I been recruiting great minds to our team, but I have been growing this business in the same breaths. Which brings me to where I am today and the subject of this post.

A few weeks ago now, back fresh from a mini beach vacation in Ocean City, I started back with the organization I was formerly a developer, in an Agile project management role. The team I join has a stellar background in delivering innovative work with the use of new technologies and agile business development.

Yesterday I spent some time in an Agile Refresher “talk” that was tailored to my work I will be doing with the team as a Project Manager. While in the “talk”, I realized that Agile falls right into some of the rethinking your mind and fits into what I am trying to evangelize when I am talking Enterprise 2.o to my customers. My role now as a PM is not only to be a liaison between the developers and the website owner and stakeholders, but it is also to innovate an agency, if not a community into bigger and better ways to achieve our over all mission. Because, its the mission that is the focus, not just the tools.

So today, I am opening my mind even more by attending Blog Potomac #blogpotomac in Falls Church, right down the street from Navstar Headquarters. And in two weeks, I am looking forward to meeting some of the Enterprise 2.0 luminaries at Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. #e2conf

But no matter what the case, I promise I will still be a rockstar, realist, and edgerider to deliver quality work to my Government customers.

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The Enterprise 2.0 Life-Cycle

Over the past few years I have been collecting knowledge and growing best practices for my business area of Enterprise 2.0. I recently changed my position at Navstar to focus on this exclusively and now I am no longer the Director of Technology, I am the Director of Enterprise 2.0. (new business cards have been ordered).

With that, the past few years I have been growing our Enterprise 2.0 business at Navstar, Inc. This growth comes from my personal experience in managing communities over the past 15 years with the various tools available. As the community grows, technology is growing and evolving with or without it. Some communities embrace change, others do everything they can to resist.

With that, I have developed the Enterprise 2.0 Life-Cycle or ELC2.0

The Enterprise 2.0 Life-cycle

This life-cycle is the stages in which I have seen organizations, communities, and businesses adapt to the changing and available technologies that help their organization grow and thrive. This may ring a little familiar to those who are familiar with the Software Development Life-cycle (SDLC), the long, costly, and project creep way of doing business. In this approach, we do not wish to reinvent the wheel. We firmly believe that there are many excellent open-source solutions that are ideal for business collaboration, communication, networking, and transparency.

• Evaluation – The Enterprise 2.0 team evaluates the customer for their needs, conducting focus groups and attending meetings of those in the target community. A requirements document is developed based on the discussions and presented to management for a proposed solution.
• Enterprise Implementation – All activities and tasks are derived from capabilities, actualized by deliverables, and produced into an implementation document.
• Customization – During the pilot introduction and eventual community roll out, the Enterprise 2.0 works with customers to tweak the enterprise solutions (toolkit), to fit the communities needs. Not just an out of the box solution.
  
• User Management – An experienced Community Manager will work as a part of the larger community to bridge the technology and cultural gaps, develop guidelines, and tutorials for new users. As well as act as initial Tier 1 support until additional staff has been trained.
• Training – As you introduce new tools to your community they will replace existing business practices. With new technologies and tools, comes a bit of a learning curve for some. This is why we believe training is essential to the deployment of Enterprise solutions.
  
• Evolution – As the community comes on line with the tools replacing old business practices with new techniques, comes the desire to do more. This becomes the natural cultural evolution of the community.
  
• Revolution – The cycle continues as the revolution takes over. The community suggests new tools and new technologies on their demand bringing back the circle to evaluation, in which the Community Manager and Enterprise Architect consider the community input to take it to the next level.

Now this is not the entire strategy I am posting, but rather the highlights [excerpts from our Navstar, Inc Whitepaper on Enterprise 2.0 for Business] of the overall implementation of Enterprise 2.0 within a community, be it business in the private sector or the Government. If your business or organization would like to learn more or are looking for a company with Enterprise 2.0 experience and solutions that encompass the entire life-cycle, then feel free to reach me at my work email account [abaker at navstar-inc.com]. I would be happy to listen to your needs and open a dialog for a solution in which Navstar can help you.

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Enterprise 2.0 for Government Event Feeler

I wanted to put out a feeler for a conference I am planning on behalf of my company Navstar, Inc to happen sometime in June October* (as soon as I get a venue confirmed). The conference is already in planning mode, in fact I am heading to a dinner shortly to work on this in more details.

Target Audience and Goal

I would like the target audience to be High Level Government Employees with decision making capabilities, to the likes of Vivek Kundra and other Government CIOs, CTOs, and their staff. Ideally the end customer would be high level decision makers in Federal and Local DC Metro Government, as this will be somewhere inside the DC-Metro area. However, general participation is being planned for transparency and openness.

The goal of the event is to really make aware of other Government members of projects that highlight efficiency, collaboration, cost-effectiveness, and reusability. I would love to extend this to be bigger to include more areas of Government, but since this is the first time event, I would like to keep it manageable in the first run, with hopes that this turns into a bigger and annual event.

Style

I am looking to do the conference in the style of TED in which speakers/presenters can showcase their work/idea/thought/project with a 15-20 minute slot time. In addition, would be able to showcase their stuff in an exhibit hall for more of a deep dive.

I am also looking to see if there would be interest in a barcamp, if this was a multi-day event. Right now, I am thinking it would be 1-2 days depending on the submissions to present.

Content

This event is not to compete, but to continue and expand upon connections and networking achieved from the Government 2.0 Camp and will be promoting as well as soliciting presenters/speakers from that and other events. In general, we are not so much focusing on contractor solutions but tools and ideas that are in place now that are connecting the enterprise to meet the points I stated above.

As I mentioned, this would fit the specific purpose of communicating to decision makers and other programs of best practices, successes, and failures.

Sharing and virtual participation:

I was thinking I would run a live channel on mogulus with a twitter hashtag (#e20gov) and feed running on the program. I’m planning to keep this unclassified and transparent.

If you are interested in helping out (volunteering), presenting, or sharing ideas. I would love to hear from you.

You can reply here or follow me @immunity on twitter

I originally posted this feeler on Govloop and have reposted this here for maximum exposure and discussion. Please feel to ask me any questions about the event if it has not been covered already.

* Changed date to October to prevent June conference fatigued and to not compete with Enterprise 2.0 in Boston, in which I might attend.

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She’s Geeky

Last night I attended an event to help plan the East Coast version for the b-annual (un)conference event known as “She’s Geeky” The concept of She’s Geeky (cue the Beastie Boys), comes from a woman whom I had the pleasure of meeting when I was attending the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco back in April. Kaylia Hamlin, otherwise known as “Identity Woman” is a very smart gal, but doesn’t consider herself a technologist.

And neither did some of the women in the room that came out to the event. It was a small gathering and its main purpose was to talk about the planning and ideas for the conference in New York to be held later this year. One of the immediate ideas was to move the conference from October to December 2008, for several reasons. The women in the room agreed that the elections are a big factor not only in technology and the DC area, but going forward as a country have many ramifications.

It seemed I was the only semi-associated Federal Government (albeit contractor) in attendance. But my cause was heard, maybe its because I am not afraid to speak up and actually would be happy to speak at any event should I be asked (this was a side [tangent] conversation of course that happened and we will continue to address).

I will probably help develop a track at the conference around Enterprise 2.0 in Government or quite possibly just speak about my experiences as a woman climbing the corporate ladder to become the Director of Technology for Navstar, Inc.

I have also agreed to help with the marketing and promotions of the event, as those of you who know me, know of my former life in the music industry. As such, this was something I was very good at and still continue to use these skills in my evangelism of social media in Government. So who knows, I might even take up the committee lead on that. We are coordinating the planning of the event through a wiki and I do believe I know my way around a garden

Most of the other women, were from non-profit organization such as DC Web Women, Women in Policy and Technology (WIPT – yes they are aware of how the acronym sounds), Care2 (OXFAM), United Way, and Women Thrive WorldWide, just to name a few. I think I made some great new friends and contacts and I am more inspired now for the cause to raise awareness for women in tech and all geekdom.

I want all my female readers to reach out to me in some shape or form if you consider yourself a geek in any way (not necessarily in tech, but maybe a scifi or D&D geeks). This blog is your sanctuary and I will help you find ways to find other women like you.

If you would like to find out more about this event, please feel free to contact me or search for yourself, by googling “She’s Geeky”. Hope to see you out in December in New York.

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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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Navstar Inc. Blog

Last week I started the launch of our blog presence at Navstar Inc. The website and blog are still undergoing cosmetic reconstruction and therefore the link to the blogs is not linked on the company website, yet. But I am putting the link out there so those who meet me at conventions and conferences can start seeing my social web technology specific blogs appear over there.

I will still blog over here on my personal blog, but my professional voice and opinion can now be found over, there. So check it out.

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