Invitation and Call for Papers – 5th Palermo International Conference
on Social Time Retroscapes and Futurescapes -Temporal Tensions in
Organizations June 21-23, 2006 Cala Rossa, Terrasini (about 30 kms
from Palermo, Italy)

The deadline is extended to January 31, 2006
Full Call for Papers available at

http://www.marketingpower.com/content/PalermoTimeConference2006-Call~1.pdf

Notification of acceptance will follow before the end of February,
2006. Full papers are due before June 1st, 2006.
Programme Committee:
- Barbara Adam, Cardiff University, UK;
- Gabriele Morello (Chairman), GMA & University of Palermo, Italy;
- Ida Sabelis, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands;
- Bertrand Urien, University of Brest, France;
- Ven Venkatesan, Rhode Island University, USA.
On behalf of the Programme Committee,
Gabriele Morello
Viale Francesco Scaduto, 6/d
90144 Palermo, Italy
e-mail: info@gmorello.net
tel/fax. +39 091 347142

Emerging Technologies for Web-based Communities (ET-WBC) Workshop 2006 within the IADIS International conference on Web-based Communities /a>

and there’s still a few days til submissions close.

i’ve been doing a lot of blog reading and podcast listening the past week or so with the intent of trying to catch up on what net technologies, buzz and news i’ve missed while my head has been stuck in the mba. i have been concentrating on communities developments (though it seems now social design is the new term to use). my general sense has been … except for the name change, not much has changed. there definitely seems to be a new wave of buzz on the concept and a couple new technologies (as you’d expect) but i haven’t seen anything that has knocked my socks off.

the buzz is defintely part of the whole web2.0 hype and there’s a great piece on a list apart about the hype.

there’s an intersting article about mediation here. any conflict is an ‘unmet need’ and it as mediators we need to look at our own unmet needs in order to help others. the article is really just a teaser, not filled with detail. it did lead me to another article on the same site about a self-inquiry process called the ‘work’ by byron katie. the process consists of 4 inquiry questions to be used when any thought or belief causes pain.

the first two questions are: Is it true? Can you absolutely know that it is true?

the mediator expects to get a yes to the first question and a no to the second question. how can we every absolutely know when something is true. the idea is to put some cracks into the story & truth you’ve been believing and arguing for.

question 3 is: How do you react when you think that thought?
the thought being your side of the story in the conflict. you’re really getting to the impact your side of the conflict has on you.

and question 4: Who would you be without the thought?
if you didn’t feel this way, or keep going with the same story w/in this conflict, how would it change your life?

and you can also work on ‘turning around’ the original statement from something like ‘she’s not nice to me’ to ‘why should she be nice to me’ or ‘i should be nice to her’ as ways to think creatively and differently about the conflict.

there’s an example in the mediate article and lots more ways to elaborate on those 4 questions is on katie bryon’s site.

i had some conflict this afternoon so i think i’ll give this a go with that issue.

knowledge@emory has an article about Dominic Thomas’ paper entitled Making Knowledge Work Successful in Virtual Teams via Technology Facilitation. Thomas looked for collaboration breakdowns and found multiple work stoppages due to technology breakdowns. He discovered it was mainly during those problematic moments that leaders looked at the technology they were using or how to improve the interaction of team members.

our studies were different but it seems like they would share some common ground. the majority of subjects in my study used email, the phone and f2f meetings for the bulk of their team communication. there were very low rates of usage of anything ‘new’ like blogs or collaboration tools. it was beyond the scope of my study to determine why but my feeling was this isn’t an issue. that it’s not even discussed except – ‘this is the way we’ve done it before and this is what we’ll do now’. Thomas’ study seems to confirm this.

Thomas’ summary here, and his website