I received an invitation to the first edition of 2008, organized by Leeander and friends at the Bastard Headquarters in Milan to showcase the new idea they’re working on: an open source hardware technology to let spimes interact with data and people: the Open Spime project.
I’ve seen the early early stage of this technology, even before the first prototype, and I can say it really rocks!

The event is invitation based, but - as far as I know - you can join us here.

Update April 9: the event will be streamed live on the .

These few lines to say I’ll be at the presentation of “Community Management“, a cool book about enterprise 2.0, that will be held this evening at the SIAM 1838, Via Santa Marta18 in Milan starting at 6pm. See you there.

Live notes

FRANCO VILLANI (Commercial Director bTicino)

+400 sales men in Italy. They created the internal community because of their role in the market: they need innovation to preserve their leadership.
In their commercial area there’s a lot of old style sales style, but they try to differentiate from the rest of the arena: they have young engineers as salesmen who love their own job. They’re passionate about their business.

But as the company was growing both in its dimension and complexity the needed something to make simpler the communication between the centre and the sale network and vice-versa. They also needed an excuse to gain attention on this new opportunity.

The community was the answer.

In the meanwhile they bought two different companies that really brought a huge expansion in their sales network, and the tool was fundamental in the integration of the new colleagues.

6/7 months from idea to delivery. They’ve chosen a strongly mediated approach in order to have the people to exclusively speak about their business and avoid abuses of the software (such as complains about not having supa cool company cars .

GIUSEPPE SCARATTI (Università Cattolica)

Great potential: organizations need people that correctly interpret company philosphy and translate them in organizational methodologies that support company business. Practice bonds people, technologies and behaviours together.

Wenger says that people learn by entering as novices in practice communities.

EMANUELE QUINTARELLI (Web 2.0 expert)

Companies are already using knowledge management tools to aggregate peoples knowledge and help colleagues to have their work done. But technology seldom is successful (44% of people thinks that itranets really improve their works, IDC in 2006 found that 25% of our time looking for informations).

KM is the past.

Every company is a babel tower: multiple applications, silos, UIs; rigid central management and configurations; long change cycles by the IT department.

Enterprise 2.0 is the usage of social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their customers/partners.

Interaction between people stands visible and durable as time goes by. Enterpise 2.0 change our intranet in an ever-changing structure lead by users: enterprise level tagging, wikis, blogs, etc. (Microsoft Sharepoint)

Why adopting these 2.0 tools? Efficency gain (RSS feeds), competitive pressure that oblige you to continuously innovate.

Informal organization brings strong advantages: business efficency, reduced operational costs, improved customer satisfaction and company morale.

MARCO VERGEAT (FIAT CORPORATE UNIVERSITY CEO)

He cited Bravo and 500 FIAT cars cases where customers where strongly involved in the product projects (millions customers’ ideas to create the new 500 minicar).

Collaborative learning: learn by by the knowledge exchange between networks of people;
Informal learning: non intentional learning that represent the main quota of the learning on the job.

Self development: training the managerial skills of each one; huge quality levels of the participants is the assurance for a correct collaborative learning.

Too late. Really gotta go, hope to find the rest of the seminar backed-up online. And - s**t - cannot listen to Luca De Biase’s speech.

I’m going to live blog each event (surprisingly I’m the only guy I see just two guys - yours truly included - with a laptop connected to the open wi-fi lan here).

Stefano Pezzi - Core Soluzioni Informatiche

Stefano comes from Bologna, his company , CORE, is partnering with CRS4 (who’s hosting the seminar) some other companies in Sardinia to work at the SIT project for the Regione Sardegna.

The SIT project aims at the creation a database to host and communicate geographical data of the Sardinia Region giving the chance to use these data in touristic and city planning applications.

Stefano’s presentation is very VERY technical (probably too much, IMHO) he describe the whole layer structure of the SIT app and the usage possibilities. The whole application is based on standards both W3C and ISO while Stefano admints that some of the services aren’t standards yet such as the tools for path retrieval and the tiled map service.

The intersting thing is that they developed a Javascript API set to interface outside applications with the SIT framework: when the project started Google Maps (and its API) weren’t on the market and they wanted to build something that would have been reusable and extendable. Nice move! (but what about porting the APIs to something more compliant with the current de facto standard?).

Stefano Sanna - Beeweeb

Slide

Stefano immediately starts with a humorous intro on himself (his a friend, and I can assure his ALWAYS a laughable guy) and then introduce the difference between Mobile Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0.

He says tha if we speak about Web 2.0 is because Web 1.0 existed, so since we speak about Mobile 2.0 it is because mobile 1.0… existed? sure? Who really used WAP? NOBODY! With wap we were entusiasts with the devices not with the applications; we were just trying mobile!

Web 2.0 is about building a platform: develop applications that can be mashed-up together; Mobile web 2.0 is uding Web 2.0 on mobile devices (eg. widsets); Mobile 2.0 means having native apps on the mobile devices that uses web 2.0 services and dedicated sensors.

What is now a barrier for a lot of applications (eg streaming on Mobile) is the cost of traffic; the mobile companies are now fully aware of this and are about to mass release flat mobile connections. So once the costs of connection won’t be a problem any more Mobile web 2.0 can really arise only if user experience and developing costs will be (at least) comparable.

The next step in mobile applications is to transform monodirectional phisical tags (such as Shotcodes) to bi-directional phisical tags users could write and modify (imagine a bi-dir tag at the supermarket were the choice of the product becomes social).

Marco Guiso - Interoperabile
Marco starts talking about openGIS, a system to create HTTP requests for geodata. This is another highly technical speech: I start doubting I’ll be able to properly blog the talk.

Marco’s aim wa to build a software that could “cannibalize” geodata available on the web from different sources. To do this he used AJAX, some OGG web services (SITR, Landsat5, 3D Marine, etc.) and Google maps.

Now it’s my turn to give a talk. See you later!

Matteo Penzo - Mobup