Last week I was in Boston for Enterprise 2.0 and delighted to connect live for a change with TheAppGap contributors Patti Anklam and Bill Ives. It was a REALLY busy conference meshing workshops, formal conference sessions, vendor presentations and the Open Session hosted by SocialText’s Ross Mayfield.  Bill Ives report here has highlights.

At the conference we learned there were multiple related conferences happening around us:

 i. Enterprise 2.0 Boston speakers Dion Hinchcliffe and IBM’s Jeff Schick travelled on to the June 12 Web 2.0 Strategies Conference in London. 

ii.  Clara Shih, the Salesforce presenter on Mathew Lees Social Software Shoot Out panel mentioned O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns conference taking place in Washington DC. Subheaded “The Business & Technology of Social Platforms”, the conference is billed as: 

 ”the premier conference for developers and marketers building and distributing apps for MySpace, Facebook, OpenSocial and other social networking platforms”

 iii.  Appropriately as inventor of the term “Enterprise 2.0″ Andrew McAFee attended the Boston conference, quizzing an excellent panel of practitioners about their experiences implementing Enterprise 2.0 tools. In a quick exchange I learned Professor McAfee was en route to San Francisco and on  his blog today I see must read reports from the  mLab conference, organized by Gary Hamel, Professor of Strategic and International Management at London Business School. (My 21st Century Organization blogging partner Victoria Axelrod wrote about Hamel’s “Moving Management Online” article for Harvard Business Review Online last fall.)

What does this flurry of gatherings past– Enterprise 2.0 Boston;, Web 2.0 Strategies,London; Graphing Social Patterns, Washington DC; Management 2.0, Half Moon Bay–  and on the horizon, Supernova 2008 taking place this week in San Francisco, the International Forum on Enteprise 2.0 in Italy June 25, and the 4th Annual WikiSym gathering in Portugal come September tell us?

Can it be that 9 years after Stowe Boyd drew our attention to “Social Tools” the impact on organizations at the grassroots is finding it’s way into executive suites and the potential for wider adoption and organizational adaptation to take advantage of “Collaboration, participation, collective intelligence: Innovation” as Enterprise 2.0 Italy suggests?

At Enterprise 2.0 Boston I had the chance to interview Stowe Boyd for his forthcoming Inside Knowledge magazine profile. The video in which Stowe looks back and forward about the adoption of social tools in organizations is posted here. Social tools are also being put to work to gather insights for Stowe’s IK Magazine profile. Context and an invitation to contribute Stowe stories are posted here. If you’ve been influenced by Stowe Boyd’s writing over the years, please do share your insights..
~ Jenny Ambrozek