Joan DiMicco recently took the stage at Ignite Boston. During her five-minute spot, she described IBM's internal experiment with social networking and the surprising lessons learned from bringing a social networking tool inside the workplace. She observed that although the tool may be similar to an outside social network site, because it is part of a large enterprise, its use and the relationships among the users are actually very different. For example, employees discuss a mixture of professional and non-work topics and have fewer privacy concerns behind the firewall than expected.
Ignite Boston was part of a series of informal gatherings that O'Reilly sponsors in different cities where people can network, share ideas, and get to know each other. Over twenty speakers gave 5-minute talks on topics ranging from social media, to personal energy consumption, to an algorithm for political redistricting, to tips for running a start-up to the enthusiastic audience of local entrepreneurs, social media enthusiasts, and high-tech professionals.
Watch a video of Joan's Ignite talk here.