Alex around the World

LIFT07 Conference, Geneva, Switzerland

Day 1 - morning session: “D.I.Y Monitoring and Evaluation”

This was an interesting workshop about how to monitor and evaluate any type of project when you don’t want / can’t spend too much money on it. The workshop presentation is made available by the presenter (Glenn O’Neil) on his blog, Intelligent Measurement. The main thing I noted was that there are easy and cheap ways to monitor (know what is going on during a project) and evaluate (see what happened) your projects. Educating stakeholders and getting their buyin in order to be able to use monitoring and evalations methods is a related issue that needs to be considered.

Day 1 - afternoon session: “Collaboration and Innovation in Workspace that Works”

Clark Elliott made a very nice presentation about workspaces and how they affect collaboration, working habits, corporate culture, cultures, employer-employee relationship. We covered many topics related to how office spaces are designed: architecture, furnitures, space, interactions, online vs. offline collaboration, new working tools, wireless, mobile workers, etc. His presentation will also be made available soon. I will provide the link as soon as I have it.

Thanks to both presenters, I really enjoyed both sessions and am looking forward to meet new people at tomorrow’s first conference day. Read more about the LIFT07 Conference.

I know, I haven’t been writing that much lately, but I was busy and travelling. Yeah, it also happens to me!
I’m formatting some pictures Nath and I took during our last weekend in Amsterdam and will post them later.

In the meantime, read this interesting article about how web technologies (syndication, Java, Ajax, wikis, blogs, etc.) are currently being used and how they will be in the near future.

Over the last months, I’ve discovered and started to use new tools available from Google. As for many Google users, it all started with the basic search engine, available through local domain names (I use google.ch). Some of the free Google tools Google that I currently use are:

• Picasa
• Gmail
• Google Calendar (related post)
• Blogger (I now switched to Wordpress)
• Google Earth
• Google Talk
• Analytics (related post)
• Google Groups
• etc.

For a complete list, see: Google Help.

I’ve become a sort of Google-addict, in the way that I’m really happy with the tools they provide and use them almost everyday. But isn’t this going to put me into trouble? I mean, it’s an addiction, and addictions are dangerous, right?

Seriously, I guess while some people are happily using all these tools Google is providing, some others think: “watch out, Google is slowly but surely storing all your private information on their servers.” I’m not a techie, just a lambda user, so I don’t really know how much information Google has about me. I don’t know if it’s interesting to them either, but the questions people are starting to ask around keep me thinking about it.

And then, a few days ago, I went to a book shop and I found this book: “The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture“, by John Battelle. I’ve started to read, because I’m really curious about this Google-mania. Let’s see if I can find some answers to my many questions.

I’ve recently discovered Google Calendar, another free online tool from Google (Google Search, Picasa, Google Earth, Gmail, Google Analytics, etc.). I started to use it as a personal calendar but soon realised that my colleagues and I could share information about meetings, appointments and leaves using this the “Share this calendar” functionality.I was also thinking about including information we need to share about ongoing projects (project-related meetings, task deadlines, milestones, etc.).It seems that lots of people are starting to use Google Calendar for work-related tasks (project management, admin stuff shared among colleagues, etc.).Read more:

• Matt Cutts’ review of Google Calendar,
• Lisa Reichelt’s post,
• StopDesign’s tips for Google Calendar.