We polled members of the Global WebSphere Community in January and the response was overwhelming in favor of holding an Unconference at Impact 2011. The WebSphere Unconference gives you, developers and IT professionals, the unique opportunity to present sessions, network and share topics you want to discuss. It’s a great way to speak freely with like-minded individuals and IBM experts in a non-staged environment. We invite you to join peers and influencers at the WebSphere Unconference during Impact 2011 on April 14. Talk with other IT professionals about the changes, challenges and opportunities they are facing and find out more about what they are doing to solve them.

Let us know what you would like to talk about

Submit ideas you would like to present and vote on the topics you would like to see discussed by visiting the WebSphere Unconference Uservoice forum. You can browse ideas already submitted, create new entries and vote on the topics that interest you the most. Ideas submitted online will be posted on-site on a grid posted in the exhibition hall where you can continue to add and vote on topics with paper and pen. Everyone who attends the WebSphere Unconference will be encouraged to participate in some way whether it’s presenting a topic or interacting with developers in roundtable discussions. Ask the deep questions. Pull in the best people to make the conversations worth your time.

Discuss your challenges and opportunities with other customers, peers and experts

During the Unconference, session topics can be added or modified in response to your feedback in real time. You can choose to submit session topics and vote on them in advance or during the Impact conference. Participants are encouraged to move from one presentation to another to engage with their colleagues. Simple guidelines put forward at the event will ensure this all happens smoothly. We're glad to announce that DeveloperWorks and the Global WebSphere Community will be sponsoring this year's WebSphere Unconference. This event for developers by developers. 

Attend the WebSphere Unconference on April 14th at IBM Impact 2011

We encourage Impact attendees to leave comments on the Unconference topics to guide topic generation and revise the agenda as more people join into discussion. Watch twitter for hashtags #unconference with #IBMImpact to see topics, scheduling and live-blogging from the sessions. Interact with the Unconference forum from Facebook. Post your photos and video to your social channels with the same tags. See schedule updates and event information during the conference on the GWC Impact Zone and the Impact event blog.

I attended the 3rd annual Internet Summit in Raleigh on November 17 and 18 2010 at the massive Raleigh Convention Center in North Carolina. The themes of this year's conference were much of what you would expect from a Internet trends and "future gazing" expo: Cloud, Mobile, Social Media, Video, Real-time, Analytics and eCommerce. There was also an expo floor and start-up competition. The IBM Emerging Technology jStart team had a booth and was a conference sponsor. The intrepid leader of the jStart team, IBM Fellow Rod Smith, was a speaker on the Future of the Internet keynote panel on day one. He gave a great Big Data talk discussing Hadoop and BigSheets (Google also spoke here). I found that this was one of the most interesting future technology talks of the entire conference. It was interesting to attend the CIO perspectives panel and sparks flew in the Future of Cloud Computing panel which did not have IBM representation but was balanced fairly well by the outspoken Salesforce.com CTA (Chief Technical Architect?) and the even keeled well-spoken CIO of RedHat. There were comments in the panel about the big vendors "not getting it" but this was contradicted later by assertions that vendor lock-in is not a concern due to emerging standards and open APIs. I was a speaker on the three part Privacy and Security talk, where I shared online privacy implications and considerations from the user perspective for using social networks and location-based services. This is a hot topic given the focus on balancing facebook privacy and social media for business use; and the new LBS trend with smart phones. This session also featured great segments about corporate policy and legal oversight. Another topic that is especially important given IBM's bottom-up social media strategy for employee engagement and our new digital eminence focus is Online Reputation management. I attended a Social Media series but much of it was a rehash of long established best practices; I believe it needed to focus more deeply on practical case studies and ROI instead of theory. I'll admit there are many novices that still need primer information but I think we've moved past the "should we do it?" and "what tools should I try?" discussions and are now dealing with making "social" work in all disciplines of the business organization. All in all, it was a great conference that is really coming into it's own. There were about 1400 people in attendance. 

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Note: I live-blogged these sessions on my personal blog and I have linked here to my live-blog entries for each of these topics. The links will open in a new window for reading.