Women Rockstars

I have submitted a proposal to use my 5 minutes at Ignite DC on May 14, 2009 to highlight DC Women in tech, enterprise, and social media. Please comment on the proposal if you would like to see this make it as one of the final 16 presenters. The organizers of Ignite DC clearly said they wanted to see more women submit proposals, so you can do that too. I figured I can use my time to promote more women.

Additionally, if you want to be one of the women featured in my 5 minutes presentation, please connect with me here in a comment on my blog or via twitter @immunity.

Thank you for your time.

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This year, I finally get to see the hype first hand. I will be going to SxSW Interactive starting this Friday. Last year I watched the overflow of Information spill out from the event from my office back here in Northern Virginia and said to one of my contract customers, “I have to go next year!” Too late to put together a panel or a talk (I would have done one on Community Management), I am going this year mostly to network and sink in as many talks and panels as I can. But the point is I AM GOING!

Thanking my lucky stars for much of the pre-planning information this year, as  I am working out much of my trip as I can in advance with the help of some non-SWirgins. I am flying on the Big BWI Blogger Boeing on Friday morning (Flight 2262) with at least 6 other twitter/bloggers. If you are also on this flight, let us know so you can join the group. I am also looking to either carpool or take public transportation to the airport.

To get prepared, I have been doing a lot of reading of my trusted friends and experts who have done this thing before. Aaron Brazell aka @Technosailor has a nice write up about what to expect, some considerations, and even packing tips.

Andrew Mager (@mager) from ZDnet has a guide he put together with his picks for sessions to attend, as well as parties and extras.

And if you are looking for parties and other thing related to the event, you might want to check out the growing list over at http://sxsw.razorfish.com/

I have also signed up for my.sxsw.com. The official social networking site of the entire conference. It was developed by my good friends over at the social collective (follow @bucchere for more details). We used this networking software before for WIREICES last fall and they have improved it a lot since our experience and hopefully with our feedback.

Mostly I will be hanging out with other SWirgins Amy (@sengseng) and Steve (@robotchampion). We’ll be at Amy’s salon on Spying 2.0 (see below) if anyone wants to come say hello.

If there are any other tips or things I should know about please do not hesitate to let me know. I will be trying to twitter and live blog as much as I can during the event, but if my laptop becomes an anchor, there might be more twittering and less blogging until after the event.

I haven’t finished picking out my interested events and some are subject to chance, since some are at the exact same time as others I am interested in, but right now here is a brief list:

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The Expo and Conference is one week away and the big question is, will the Goverati be there? Even though it seems like March is the month of the BarCamp, please don’t let this event skip your radar. The organizers of the event have been reaching out to get their target audience using social media tools such as Facebook, LinkedIN, and Twitter. This event is the perfect meat to the sandwich that was Transparency Camp last week and the upcoming Government 2.0 Camp at the end of the month.

The event is March 11-12, 2009 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. As a part of the bigger FOSE 2009 conference this is the part of the event you should focus on if you are someone with interests as my own with Transparency and Collaboration in Government. If you use Intellipedia, you might want to think about attending. First responders and those in Government security fields might not be reading my blog exactly, but if you know of someone who fits the bill and should attend, please pass along my blog and the link to the conference to encourage them to go. It is free to attend the expo for both GovSec and FOSE 2009 and if you have already registered for FOSE don’t sweat it, because you are covered for this event as well.

Louis Freeh, Former Director of the FBI

The former Director of the FBI, Louis Freeh will be the Keynote speaker of this event discussing the Convergence of Homeland Security on Thursday, March 12 at 9am. Mr. Freeh tenure as Director was during several major events that I can recall that brought national attention to the FBI. He was the director at the time of the infamous Robert Hanssen espionage case. Personally I am very eager to hear him speak about his time in office and his thoughts on the progression of the FBI and Homeland Security in a post 9/11 world.

Other sessions I am interested in are New Technologies for Interoperability, Cyber Security and Information Sharing , Terrorism and Information Technology and the panel moderated by Christoper Dorobek of The Daily Debrief on Federal News Radio.

Register today, and pass on to your colleagues.

FOSE 2009
March 10-12, 2009

Registration: 8:00AM – 4:00PM
Keynote Sessions: 9:00AM – 10:00AM
Expo: 10:00AM – 4:00PM

Walter E. Washington Convention Center
801 Mount Vernon Place NW
Washington, DC 20001

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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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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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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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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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