Over on the Nerd Girls Blog we have posted the speakers and topics for our Spark Ideas session at IBM Connect 2014 on Tuesday at 11.15 am in Swan Mockingbird 1&2. Susan Bulloch and I will be watching the clock and keeping things moving..
There are more great speakers and topics this year , see them all here and we will all see you in Orlando Nerd Girl Blog Spark Ideas Full Details
Let’s start with the thank you’s – I was delighted to be named an IBM Champion again for 2014 and for that I have to thank the (anonymous) people who nominated me. I find the whole nomination / tell us why you’re good process very difficult to work with as I think I lot of English people do. Being self effacing is more our style but this year I made a promise to myself that if I were nominated I would take a deep breath and fill in as much information as I could on why I thought I should be a champion. I think that exercise was good for me and appreciate both the reward and the journey 🙂
Moving On ! It’s January so this month is jam packed. I actually leave for Florida on the 19th so only 10 days to go for me and much to organise. The presentations are written but there’s the Great Geek Challenge to organise, gifts to ship, banners to print, Spark Ideas to blog and a surprise put together by Chris, Julian, Kathy and myself which may be as fun as we think or fall flat as a stone. We’ll see. Meanwhile the week is filling up and I’m very excited about my presentations now they’re complete..
Monday BP304 What We Wish We Had Known: Becoming an IBM Connections Administrator with Paul Mooney
Dolphin S.Hem 1 at 3.45pm
This is where Paul and I attempt to share all the stupid mistakes, bad decisions and dumb moves we made when first starting out with IBM Connections and how much easier it is if you just know.. stuff. We’re trying something very new in the format of this presentation and I’m nervous about that but pleased with the work and what we have to tell you.
Tuesday NERD101 Spark Ideas ! (brought to you by Nerd Girls)
Swan Mockingbird 1 & 2 at 11.15am
This is our 4th year for Spark Ideas and we have a packed lineup that doesn’t include me. I’m just logistics girl and I’ll be acting as MC with my friend Susan Bulloch acting as roper to drag people off stage if they run over their 6 minutes. If you’ve never seen a Sparks session check out our Vimeo channel. 6 minutes to share an inspirational idea. More details on that soon but thanks in advance to Bill Buchan, Colleen Burns, Deborah Cole, Julian Robichaux, Norman Cox, Stuart McIntyre, Tim Davis, Gaby Spaszewski and Jamie Magee. Watch out on this blog and the Nerd Girls blog for details of their talks.
Tuesday BP101 Adminblast 2014! with Paul Mooney
Dolphin N.Hem E 3pm
Another year another new Adminblast – Paul asked me to join him putting this together last year and we’re joining forces again this year.. some new tips, a few favourites and more slides than are sensible. This year I hope not to be ill , nearly pass out on stage and remember almost nothing. Last year I was saved by an ice cold bottle of beer handed to me by Mat Newman as we were about to start (just to keep from overheating)….
Wednesday BP104 : Simplifying The S’s: Single Sign-On, SPNEGO and SAML with Chris Miller
Dolphin S.Hem III 10am
This session will be an overview of all your options with regards to single sign on and single password and will be performed entirely as a series of mimes.
Wednesday SHOW401 : Taking IBM Sametime Mobile with Paul Mooney
Swan Osprey 1&2 4.30pm
This is a Show and Tell , 270+ pages on how to take a standard Domino server and turn that into Sametime on a mobile device , every step explained and detailed including our tips along the way about firewall rules, SSL certificates and performance.
Wednesday Great Geek Challenge
Fountain Restaurant 8pm – 10.30pm
Thanks to generous sponsors the best night out at Connect is back for our 4th year. Come and queue early, when we hit capacity we have to close the doors (well there are no doors but we’ll stand a bouncer at the gate to stop you coming in!)
So that’s my week.. in between I hope to find time to do everything else include visit the labs, meet with customers and hang out with friends. Oh and attend a few sessions! Mostly right now I’m looking forward to some sunshine.
See you there
Gab
If you’ve been to IBM Connect (formerly known as LotusSphere) in the past 3 years you may have heard of the Great Geek Challenge organised by the Nerd Girls. On Tuesday night of the conference we take over the Fountain restaurant at the Dolphin hotel (the one that sells Ice Cream) and have a fun, loud, stupid, competitive, quiz evening. Carl Tyler and Paul Mooney have been hosting the past few years and although we are limited by the capacity of the restaurant and the number of events on a Tuesday night, we’ve packed the place out every year.
If you’ve been you know how much fun it is (hopefully) if not – well trust me , it is. We provide prizes and free food and drink, courtesy of our sponsors. The GGC has never made a penny in profit in its 3 years. It’s done purely to give our friends an opportunity to have some fun.
This year I’m starting off by trying to find out if people would be interested in us doing the GGC again and if sponsors want to contribute*. I hate asking for money and if there’s no interest in sponsoring or attending I won’t put any of us through that 🙂 I did consider asking for contributions on the door but it just doesn’t feel right. A quick poll seems like a good idea here..
Hope to see you in Orlando in January
IBM Call for Abstracts is open as I’m sure you’ve heard from 100 other sources but I wanted to talk a bit about some of the tracks and especially the Show and Tell track that Paul and I have been working on with the track manager Christian Holsing at IBM since its inception. You’ll notice if you go look (oh go on, here’s a URL if you can’t wait) that the Lotusphere Technical Program at IBM Connect remains a big component of the overall Kenexa World / IBM Connect event.
As part of the Lotusphere component the content breaks down into tracks some of which are designed for IBM, some for customers and some for BPs. Getting your abstract accepted is about two things
1. Writing a decent abstract. I can’t emphasise this enough. Don’t submit something half thought through or constructed because you think it’s so important you”ll “get to that later”. First pass, if the abstract isn’t good , you’re out. Plenty of people in the Community including myself are happy to talk to you about your abstract pre submission, I know I run mine by friends before submitting. Don’t make the mistake of a bad abstract on a good subject
2. Submit to the right track. Not all of them. The right one. Last year I was very sorry to see sessions I would have loved to have had in Show and Tell miss us because they were submitted to the wrong track. That’s true of all tracks. The content team try to share / move abstracts to better tracks but it’s a manual process and 90% will simply get lost in the shuffle.
Do not pass up the opportunity to present at Connect. I can’t emphasise this enough. Every year the content team wants new ideas and new speakers and there is no better exposure for yourself or your company than sharing your knowledge with the variety of attendees at Connect. Plus if you’re weird like me you just like standing on stage to shout “look how cool this is!”.
The Show and Tell has, over the years, gained the reputation for being hard-a** , we take only the most technical sessions. However we recognise that although we want in depth technical detail on a niche aspect of an ICS product, the products and technology themselves have become more complex and the depth of step by step instruction we wanted can become a death march for both presenter and attendee. So this year we’re changing things around, we still want highly technical , we still want demos, but here is the abstract for this year which I hope gives you an idea of the changes in style.
The Show ‘n Tell track brings you the best in live technical education. SNT sessions explain in comprehensive detail a specific technology with detailed instructions, picture screenshots and live demonstrations that show how it can be used and applied for your environment. With 90 minutes per session you can share your expertise with an audience who has come to learn something new.
This year we are interested in technical content on any of the IBM Collaboration Solutions products demonstrating how people can get the best out of them, as well as how combining IBM technology can deliver an integrated Social Experience. Whether you’re an administrator or a developer consider only that our attendees are working with complex technologies and demanding new ideas, at IBM Connect we want to give them content they can’t get anywhere else.
As far as the other tracks are concerned. If you are a Business Partner or a technical consultant or an individual your best tracks to submit to are Best Practices, Jump Start and Show and Tell. Not Infrastructure or Application Development which historically are 99% IBM presenters. In addition if you’re a Customer or Business Partner you have new, what i’d call technical marketing, tracks to submit to talking about cool things you’ve done. For Customers (“Track Seven: Customer Case Studies (from an IT perspective”) and for Business Partners (“Track Eight: NEW! Spotlight on IBM Business Partners “).
If you have an idea for a session don’t twist yourself in knots trying to decide whether to submit, just write the abstract and submit, you won’t regret it. I’ll be sending in some submissions myself and keeping my fingers crossed but whatever happens I hope to see you in Orlando in 2014.
The Turtle Partnership Blog 