Wednesday I took part in a panel during the 19. medienforum.nrw in Cologne. It was my topic and my language but not my language.
The panel was in German, which I speak but it's certainly not my native language and so it was quite a new experience for me.
The panel started off quite well, I was contacted about participating it sounded like a good idea. The topic was right and so I contacted others inside of SAP to see if someone was interested - that's how I met Charlotte from our KPS group who deals with all of the internal podcasting. We discussed and all was good -- then we got "the mail", the mail was from the moderator and gave us reason to "pause" it seemed as though the topic changed midstream on us. After a few calls and emails though we were assured all was in order and things were as we expected.
Fast forward to day of the event. I take the train and arrive pretty much when I planned and met up with Charlotte so we can chat and take a look around before things get started. We run into two others from the panel and then the 5th from the panel and are getting to know each other and discuss what is happening and the details of how "we" think things should work while waiting for the moderator to show up. We then find out that the moderator (flying in from Berlin - funny I am on a train to Berlin right now) is delayed, a problem with his plane so at this point we've no idea if we are going to have a moderator or not. 5 minutes to go and the moderator has finally landed but is stuck in traffic at the moment. We start, Nicole was nice enough to step in and act as the moderator - we introduce ourselves and hit the first question (while answering Nicole steps out and our moderator who has finally arrived steps in).
The next questions start coming pretty quick, our moderator had quite well prepared cards and notes and things get rolling. It's a pretty good mix from 100% internal to 100% external roles around the corporate environment. A decent size crowd I thought and from my understanding quite a bit more impressive turnout than the year before.
The event itself was quite cool looking (totally did not get a chance to take any photos so will be looking for some to mooch). Our panel setup was the 5 of us and the moderator on stage (big screen behind us) followed by the audience all sitting out in front. I took some notes for our own SAP TechEd this year.
The audience itself I think was a mix of skill/knowledge level around the topic and I realized near the end that one topic which provoke some thought was one that we did not actually really get into, Wikis. It was after the panel was over that I had several people come up to me and begin to ask more about our experiences with Wikis and adoption...
3 comments:
From what I gather from the feedback this panel was well received especially for the different perspectives.
I can deal with having wikis not on the table as one main focus was supposed to be podcasting and I think you need not to be in worry about you getting on with a german panel. :))
Next time then or another event perhaps we'll have to talk about how a combination of Blogs and Wiki can make things more efficient in a large work environment or a small one :-)
Speaking of TechEd, it would be cool to see this type of panel discussion with a couple of the top SDN'ers during SDN day or in the clubhouse.
Cheers,
ewH
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