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I mentioned Ned’s great list of Awesome Melbourne Tech Startups.

Chloe is maintaining a Twitter list of Melbourne’s Tech Meetups.

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These connections have always been there, but the time it takes to make the connection is now much quicker and that is why this is really exciting. As you travel around the planet, being able to talk to a local who shares your interests is amazing on a number of levels. The obvious one is that you can see the place from a locals perspective instead of through the lens of a tourist. They can put you in touch with friends from your industry or who have similar hobbies. Or depending on the language barrier, it may just mean that you have somebody who speaks your language! None of these are meant to substitute the spontaneity of travel – but they can be a good supplement particularly if you are traveling over long periods of time.

You never know what will emerge from the people you talk with. I met with Colin Wright because I stumbled onto his blog post describing how he shifts location every four months based on where his blog readers vote for him to go, and that he would be passing through melbourne. I suggested we get a coffee but since we both had a flexible day that turned into a drive down the great ocean road stopping in at some awesome local cafes and a great organic burger shop. When I mentioned I would be going through LA on the way to SXSW in Austin a few weeks later Colin mentioned I should couchsurf with his buddy Andrew Elkins who lives there. So when I stepped off the plane Andrew gave me a lift from the airport to Venice Beach / Santa Monica and pointed out the landmarks to explore. I paired that with some recommendations from people from all around the world through Twitter and had a really interesting day. That night we had a great dinner and discussion about some shared interests before a good nights sleep and a trip back to the airport for my onward journey. The experience was so much richer because I had locals to talk to and stay with. Locals that weren’t complete strangers. I repeated this for much of my trip.

Your network will grow over time, and as the mass builds so will your gravity – attracting great opportunities. Here are three things to keep in mind as you build your network on the fly:

• Introduce the people you know to each other and become the connection. This will mesh your network tighter and ultimately lead to richer opportunities. You can probably think of two people you know now who would should catch up – make it happen.
• Be interested in what people do. Try to understand their stories and where they are going. To do this you need to talk to interesting people. Go find them!
• Follow up quickly and relevantly when you meet people. It can be as easy as a simple email or twitter reply but it makes a big difference and gives them a chance to raise anything they didn’t get to in the initial conversation.

It’s not a business network or a personal network – it’s simply your network. It is a foundation that can enable amazing things for you, if you are open to them.

This is the piece I contributed to Colin Wright’s ebook, Networking Awesomely.

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When Ev spoke with Umair Haque at SXSWi 2010 he explained the principles that now drive Twitter. Notice the evolution from Inside Twitter from a year ago.

• Principles, not product.
• Be a force for good.
• Openness as a survival strategy.
• Organizing for experimentation.
• Doors v. windows.

These stated principles are very interesting, but if you read between the lines of conversation there are some more foundational ideas that emerge.

• Ev aiming for win win win situations, but it is difficult.
• Letting a thousand flowers bloom, why limit it?
• Ecosystems need shepherding
• Fully open isn’t necessarily a good thing
• SMS is super important for the digital divide, and SMS is how twitter started
• Riding the wave of the promise of the internet, that anybody can put content there.
• Region based perspective, referring to ‘countries’ on twitter.
• Wondering how long the firewalls will hold up in China, Australia, etc
• “We don’t expect it all to be profound” in the message content
• “The only guy who loses is the one who isn’t adding any value to the ecosystem”
• What would i do to make Walmart better?

Where will this lead in a few years time? How about 10 years time?

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Colin has a heap of experience in business networking and today is releasing an ebook on the topic, titled Networking Awesomely. He asked me (and 20 others) to write a piece on how I network for the book. It is a huge read at 251 pages but made up of small parts so it is easy to flick through to pick out the pieces from individuals you might recognise or particular topics.

At $20 it is a steal for the amount of insights that are included. You can find out more and buy Networking Awesomely at Exile Lifestyle.

You can also follow us all with the Networking Awesomely list on Twitter.

Along the networking awesomely theme, I recently posted some notes from my time at SXSW, and this weekend I will post my contribution to the book. If you can’t wait, grab the book now.

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More important than the session topics is the people doing them:

• You should think of an event like a magnet for good people. You can meet most of the important people in an industry in a single day. In a single day you can catch up with people it would usually take weeks or months to organise.
• The content is already online or in a book. Go to the event to hear the subtleties of how it is presented, and to see who else is attracted to the area.
• If you want to actually meet a speaker, talk to them 20 minutes before their session – because you know they will be swamped afterwards.
• Particularly if it is a large event, don’t schedule something into every block. Pick the two or three people whose talks you want to see that day, then fill the rest with the most interesting nearby room you can find. You don’t want to be running around all day missing things, so don’t set yourself up for it.
• Keep a list of the ad hoc meetups and parties that happen outside the official schedule. You might even run one yourself – it is a good excuse to get some interesting people together for a simple drink or meal.
• Know why you are there. Is it to meet somebody? To get the word out about something you are doing? To have a fun few days? Whatever it is, keep this in mind each morning as you start the day.

What is your personal strategy at conferences?

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Mark Mansour, Ned Dwyer and John Barton ran an awesome Ignite event in Melbourne recently, and the videos are all online now for everyone to see. Take a look at them below.

Buenos Aires – My five weeks as a Four Hour Work Week cliche
Michelle Matthews

A regular day at the office vs. getting stranded in a foreign dictatorship
Chris Berkhout

Fast and Furious Startups: How to Iterate to Awesomeness
Collis Ta-eed

Open-source biotech; green solutions to human health.
Robert Shepherd

Growing old disgracefully
Rachel De Sain

Web services and the age that we live in.
Ben Schwarz

In bed with Arduino: 6 Months in an open hardware relationship
Paul Szymkowiak

Lean Manafacturing and Thought Experiments
John Barton

It’s complicated: Twitter, my business and I.
James Farmer

Things I have learned from a lifetime of failure.
Toby Hede

So when is the next one?!

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1. Focus is the most important thing to master
This is the difference between getting the right thing done, and procrastinating. You need to figure out what works for you. Here’s one idea: choose the task you want to work on, whether that is reading a chapter of a book or writing a few hundred words on a topic – plug in your headphones and play an album from start to finish. Then when it ends get up and go for a walk or have something to eat, have a break, then play another album and do another task. How do you know what to work on? Learn some sort of productivity system like Getting Things Done or Zen To Done. However you do it – it is vital that you learn how to let yourself focus.

2. Learn to teach yourself
You have the internet. The answer to almost anything is just a few clicks away. You need to know what to ask for to get the results you are looking for, and then how to filter the results to find the answers you need. Be aware of the topics and ideas that interest you and deep dive into them to teach yourself more. You might search google, you might ask your twitter friends, or you might find a local meetup on the topic to broaden your knowledge. Don’t wait for teachers to show you things – follow your intuition and teach yourself.

3. Share what you learn
The best way to consolidate what you learn is to teach it, because every person you teach will ask you to clarify different elements of the topic and in doing so this will lead you to clarify both for them and for yourself exactly what that piece means. You don’t have to know everything to help somebody, in fact you will probably do a better job if you have to learn together. Take your sharing beyond the people you see face to face. It has never been easier to share things online – start a blog at Tumblr or Posterous and share something every day. This will pay off in more ways than you can imagine.

4. Build your mafia
You have been told that your network is important, however what matters is not who you know but who knows you. This means getting into conversations, following up with the people you meet and having coffees every few months to keep in touch. Remember to learn from the stars in your own galaxy. It is easy to look at the people in the top of your industry but you are not there yet – when you are climbing a mountain you don’t look at the snow capped peak, you look at the bottom and you take your first steps. Talk to the locals in your industry. I started an interview blog called Hatchthat which gave me something to reach out with and I interviewed Jason Calacanis, Aaron Fyke, and many others. Then I started The Hive and got to know Pete Williams, Scott Kilmartin, Sahil Merchant and others. If you find the right set of people you will develop an interdependence that means you all win from knowing each other.

5. Do, learn, do, learn.
The most important thing is that you get started with the simplest possible thing that could work. The best lessons come from trying something and seeing what happens. Learning the theory is important but it is worthless until you validate it with your own positive experiences. I hear the phrase fail early and fail often a lot – many people seem to wear it as a badge of honour especially in the entrepreneurial world, but it’s bullshit, because whatever you do will either work, or you will learn something. There is no failure because there is always going to be some little piece that was successful – you need to find that piece and learn why. Then do something new and repeat the cycle. Above all else be consistent – none of these things matter unless you do them consistently. You will build momentum and your projects will evolve. At the end of your degree these projects become your resume and the world is yours.

Do, learn, do learn.

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For those who haven’t had a chance to explore Google Wave yet, have a look at this two minute video explanation and my notes on what makes it so interesting.

Watch the Meetup video here (thanks Steve Hopkins for filming). During the session we had a live demo wave, and I have included my highlights below:

Examples and usage cases

How we integrate Google Wave documents with the Deloitte Innovation Academy at our weekly Innovation Councils at Deloitte Australia. (Qik Video)

There is a wave robot to help you manage your references in research work.

Wave concepts could be applied to bushfires and other emergency situations where realtime information flow and self-organising collaboration is vital. (Qik Video)

Of course there are also some funny examples, such as the Declaration of Independence Wave and Pulp Fiction Wave.

Doctor Wave refers to Wave as a document collaboration tool, not a social network. I have personally also been asked a few times if this replaces Yammer (where Deloitte also has a very active network (link)) and I suggest that they occupy very different spaces – Yammer and Twitter is messaging, while Wave is document collaboration. Email will be around for a long time still too, as another messaging system.

Gadgets (widgets that can be embedded in a wave) let us move beyond rich text to other formats, like drawing illustrations together (Doctor Wave should keep his day job!), and the Yes/No/Maybe poll.

Lots can happen when you leave your laptop for a few minutes! Doctor Wave was doing a demo and suggested drinks at a local pub (using the map).. when he returned half an hour later he found that his team had expanded the discussion, invited others, voted on a time and date, and plotted what was now a pub-crawl on the map!

Robots have the ability to act on a Wave with the same access as a person. Rosie is a realtime language translation robot. There is a book company who have set up a robot so that when you type in a book title it returns the current stock levels instantly.

Tim says that RFID chips now have the capacity to store a URL, and that with companies like Amazon planning to have an RFID chip in every product in 5 years time there is a lot of potential to use wave as the communications backend for those applications.

Jason Smale asked about Microsoft Exchange integration or migration. Doctor Wave shared that they put two man years of development time into an email integration but couldn’t create something that was practical. Notifications are difficult but a big challenge they are working on. Pieter Peach mentioned that there is already a robot to add email notifications when a wave changes but that it can be quite overwhelming depending on the activity of the waves that you subscribe to.

Steve Hopkins mentioned that during the recent Trampoline event there were quite a lot of people taking live notes on the public wave. He is thinking about how they can build on this idea for the ADC’s 2010 Future Summit.

Ari mentioned the ‘garden variety accountant’ and how something as simple as being able to collaborate in realtime could totally transform the way people work.

Harriet Wakelam related the concept to education and the idea that a lecture theatre full of students on a shared wave will transform the way lecturers deliver a course.

Peter Spence related it to high-end sports coaching where the coach is often physically remote from the player and needs to show them data to analyse their performance.

Michael Specht reports that recruiters are already using the platform to mine data on people. Doctor Wave responded that there will soon be features where only people you trust can add you to a wave, while everyone else goes to a ‘requests’ folder.

Platform insights

Wave experience comes first, integration later. Two person-years worth of work went into making Google Wave work with an email gateway.

Wave is a protocol, and Google Wave is one implementation of that. Because it is an open protocol anybody can build their own clients to access it – just as you can use thousands of different programs to access your email.

Deloitte Australia currently has the most active Google Apps Wave domain in the world.

Some very interesting wave etiquette is forming as people adapt to the system and create social boundaries. These include asking if people are okay with adding new participants to a wave, adding tags to indicate if you don’t mind people edit your wave, and of course it is considered very rude to edit a person’s sentence as they are still writing it!

You can open multiple wave windows in the same screen by clicking on a wave while holding cmd/ctrl.

Doctor Wave says there is no trademark on the word ‘Wave’ however there are policies on logo use and anything implying Google endorsement. Doctor Wave says there is a page full of lawyer-speak that people can refer to on their website somewhere that also covers usage of the logo.

There are a lot of aspects of Google Wave that are not ideal right now. They’re working on it. That’s why it is called a Preview edition!

Federated servers will allow organisations to run their own wave servers behind their firewalls. Similar to the way email works, this means that if you are having a wave with people within your company the data never leaves your equipment, but if you add somebody external the data is then obviously sent to them as well (just like it is right now with email). These servers aren’t available yet but they are certainly a priority for Google.

Every wave ‘blip’ (message) is digitally signed so that nobody can spoof messages. Damian Miller, the security expert from the wave team explained this in more detail – if you want the technical details you’ll have to find him in the video! One important enterprise distinction was that not everything necessarily needs to be hosted in the cloud (or on a local federated server), there is definitely capacity to create a blended solution.

The next Melbourne Google Wave Meetup

We are planning to run another Meetup in February – if you want to leave a comment below or email me onrhill@deloitte.com.au I can let you know when we have the details. Make sure you also follow @MelbWave on Twitter for updates and track the #melbwave hashtag for the community messages (maintained by @drwarwick).

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How many of us actually enjoy sitting in a lecture for hours and hours being drip fed information? Who wants to listen to a panel go on and on without engaging the group?

With really diverse groups you can’t predict what they want to see and hear, so you need an adaptive event format to provide the foundation for emergent conversation. We need to be space creators.

I have had the opportunity to play with a variety of event formats across The Hive, Creative Performance Exchange, provincial tours, Innovation Cafes and Eyeopener sessions at Deloitte, and more. This is in addition to participating in events like Jelly, Social Media Breakfast, Trampoline, and Hack Days.

The most recent was the Pre-Briefing Session for Govhack Melbourne that we hosted at Deloitte. Pete and I with Jeremy Yuille decided to run the event a week before it happened, and with a few days of promotion filled the room with a really diverse array of people – from professionals to students and ideas people to developers. The format we used was inspired by a session Shawn Callahan facilitated recently at the CPX.

On the tables we had strips of paper each with a different government data source, and the people around each table would take them and physically mash them up to describe an idea for a potential new service. We did this for a few minutes before shuffling the tables to mix up the groups, before going around with another round of similar conversations. This was of course aided by beer and pizza, brain food and lubrication for the neurons!

After two rounds of discussion we got everyone to stand up and then put their hand on the shoulder of the person who shared the most interesting idea. What happened in the next 10 seconds was pretty amazing – an instant human visualisation formed in front of us. Realtime social filtering and collective intelligence. It is easy to visually identify the most connected nodes in the structure, and then we asked those people to share their ideas with the whole group.

At the end of the session we had all come together and effectively summarised the masses of ideas to come up with the most interesting, as voted by the collective.

What effective and emergent event formats have you seen in action?

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