When Nairobi first appeared on my radar, I reached out to my friends and fellow-SharePoint aficionados, Joel Oleson and Michael Noel, to see if I could talk them into a visit to Kenya. These guys are two members of a group of intrepid globe-trotters who have taken on the mission of establishing community everywhere they go… and they’ve been a lot of places!
In fact, last month they went to the Kurdistan region of Iraq, as Joel shares on his blog:
Our normal SharePoint presentations weren’t going to fit the needs of the students, so I took a modified copy of my recent presentation on Finding Business Value in Social Media with the intention of helping the students understand the new market of employment around the needs around cloud services, development in enterprise social, and how to “sell” enterprise social networks with emphasis on “engaging” employees and armed them with dozens of thoughts around business value.
The questions we got were quite fascinating. Some asked about cultural challenges of hierarchy and concerns over the empowerment of employees. Others brought up thoughts around open platforms and open source development in and around concerns over Microsoft’s proprietary SharePoint and Yammer platforms. We then talked about sales around services and the open APIs that could be developed against. It was obvious that there were some Google and Linux fans in the crowd of 70 or so faculty and students. Discussions around Google Drive and the contrast of consumer services with enterprise platforms was discussed around the topic of security.
Courtesy Joel Oleson
Reading about their adventures, I’m excited and quite humbled to have been used to make some connections for them in Iraq.
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