Watch out – the E20 community is heading to Milan and Boston!

Just let me guess – the hashtags “#e20forum” and “#e20conf” will reign the E20 Twitter discussions during the next weeks. There is not much to add on this but that I expect some interesting discussions and forward-thinking on the E20 adoption problem during the next week.

But for those who might not be familiar with this ever on-going conference circus I would like to introduce you to the upcoming events.

The International Forum on Enterprise 2.0

As a starting point for the E20 discussions in June you might listen (or still join the conference crowd) in Milan. Emanuele Quintarelli (aka @absolutesubzero) has put together again a very international set of speakers to come and discuss the E20 topics in the heart of south of Europe. With a workshop part on June 9th and the main conference on June 10th (plus an open event) the Milan event will be a compremised discussion about E20 and beyond – because Emanuele also included the external marketing 2.0 view on the conference agenda. This is interesting as the discussions on the internal and external “social business aspect” are joining at the point of “social CRM” – though I believe for an E20 conference it might still be very early putting together both stakeholder groups (the internal information/process/collaboration people and the external marketing/communications people). But anyhow – the conference line-up is very interesting – with a lot of E20 evangelists but also some interesting cases as there are De Lage Landen, Intel, CSC, Barilla and others. We are looking forward to the conference and are happy to meet you there.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston

An interesting point of these two conference is that quite a view speakers of Milan will also speaking the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston (held on June 14-17th). There is not much to say about the Bosten event as this is the E20 event of the year. Though for our German and European community the line-up would be running too short on corporate representatives it will definitely set the path for the further discussions of the Enterprise 2.0 problems as most of the experts and evangelists are attending this conference – just have a look at the speaker’s list. I am very much looking forward to this as Kongress Media is a conference partner for this and I could arrange some spare time to attend the event – so please contact me to meet up.

Value of the conference towards the E20 discussion

In regards to my expectations about what will be the outcome of these two conferences I would say that the discussions will definitely point our that there is no way of return towards the “social business concepts”. Reflecting our discussions lately at the E20 FORUM Cologne and the Intranet SUMMIT (that is addressing the corporate intranet people that are mainly coming from corporate communications and are still very much top-down organized and thus very much reluctant towards the social idea so far) the E20 virus has reached the next stage – the management awareness for the topic is high, corporate development departments are interested to dive into this and the early stage people from internal communications are looking to find a way to justify their existance. So there is a strong movenment within the enterprise towards the topic and the discussions at the upcoming conference will hopefully support this and drive it towards the next level. What are your thoughts – just let me know!

Upps – I nearly missed this one … my Skype interview with Emanuele about the Milan conference. Unfortunately I somehow mis-arranged the sound settings – I hope you can still get some value out of it:
[kongressmedia xxhpm]