Thanks to Zoli, the 25% of my readers whose first language is probably not English (as indicated by the browser language setting) can now view this site in 50 other languages, thanks to a new widget in the sidebar.

If you read this through Google Reader, then you can set it to auto-translate there, instead: I do that for the few non-English BPM blogs that I follow, and it works like a charm.

If you ever wonder what BPM analyst/architect/bloggers do in their spare time, wonder no more:

Ignite T.O. Sandy Kemsley -The Hungry Geek from Ignite Toronto on Vimeo.

I was invited to give a presentation at Ignite! Toronto this week, and decided to discuss how I’ve been using social media – Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, blogging – and some integration technologies including RSS and Python scripting to promote a new farmers’ market in my community. I’m on the local volunteer committee that acts as the marketing team for the market. Here’s the presentation, it’s not too clear on the video:

If you’re not familiar with Ignite, it’s a type of speed presentation: 20 slides, 5 minutes, and your slides auto-advance every 15 seconds. For a marathon presenter like me, keeping it down to 5 minutes is a serious challenge, but this was a lot of fun.

For a technology view, check out slide 17 in the slide deck, which shows a sort of context diagram of the components involved. Twitter is central to this “market message delivery framework”, displaying content from a number of sources on the market Twitter account:

• I manually tweet when I see something of interest related to the market or food. Also, I monitor and retweet some of our followers, and reply to anyone asking a question via Twitter.
• When I publish a post on my personal blog that is in the category “market”, Twitterfeed picks it up through the RSS feed and posts the title and link on Twitter. These are posted to both the market account and my own Twitter account, so you may have seen them if you’re following me there.
• Each week, I save up a list of interesting links and other tweet-worthy info, and put them in a text file. My talented other half wrote a Python script that tweets one message from that file each hour for the two days prior to each Saturday market day.
• I connected my Flickr account with Twitter, and can either manually tweet a link to a photo directly from Flickr, or email a photo from my iPhone to a private Flickr email address that will cause the link to be tweeted. I could have used Twitpic for the latter functionality, but Flickr gives me better control over my photo archive.

The whole exercise has been a great case study on using social media for community projects with no budget, using some small bits of technology to tie things together so that it doesn’t take much of my time now that it’s up and running. I’d be doing most of the activities anyway: taking pictures of the market, cooking and blogging about it, and reading articles on local food and markets online. This just takes all of that and pushes it out to the market’s online community with very little additional effort on my part.

Via Mashable, I discovered a cool little gadget this morning: Retaggr, which allows me to create a profile page and badge with all my social media links, then embed it on my blog or website:

You can click on the links within it to show the content from those sites directly within the badge, or click through to the whole profile page. The badge here updates when I update my profile on Retaggr. I can also create my own custom badge, although the minimum width is wider than my current sidebar so I can’t put one there.

I’ve already added it to the contact page on my website and the About Me page on this blog in place of the manually-maintained lists of contact information on those pages.

I’ve been absent from blogging for a while – with the exception of the links posts that are auto-generated from my Delicious bookmarks – due to a very heavy client workload and very few conferences to blog about. I have been twittering, but my Twitter stream tends to contain random thoughts and personal observations rather than BPM-related commentary.

The Twitterati may claim that blogging is dead, but there’s clearly a place for articles, reviews and opinion pieces that need more space to expand on a subject. There’s something about writing longer bits of prose (longer than 140 characters, that is) that helps my brain work around problems better, plus the comments and feedback from readers is a valuable part of the conversation. I plan to get back to more regular blogging, and to kick that off, I’ll be blogging from SAP’s SAPPHIRE conference this week in Orlando. I have a detailed review of NetWeaver BPM that has been in the works for a while, and I’ll be updating that with new information from this week and publishing that as well.

Stay tuned, and don’t delete me from your RSS reader yet.

I pledged to write a blog post for today, Ada Lovelace Day, in honour of a woman in technology who I admire. Although there have been some great women in technology throughout history – Grace Hopper comes to mind, and is the subject of many blog posts today – I wanted to write about someone who I know personally, and who I feel has contributed to my personal or professional development.

I didn’t have any women mentors in the early part of my technology career. I went to a high school in suburban Toronto during the mid-70’s where I had to fight to be admitted to the technical courses, and my mentors there were two male teachers who helped get me gain entry into the courses, then taught me the right (and wrong) way to wire circuits and design mechanical gearboxes. I moved on to engineering at University of Waterloo, where I recall one female professor and one woman teaching assistant during the entire time, neither of whom had a lasting impact. I did my work terms at mines, pulp mills and oil companies in northern Ontario and Alberta: again, not many women around. I came to believe that I didn’t need to have other technical women in my life, since I was doing just fine with male mentors (a convenient belief, consider that was my only choice).

That started to change when I owned a software services company, and was growing it to its eventual size of 40 people. As CEO, CTO and chief cook and bottle-washer, I was involved with pretty much every technical hire that we did. And something completely unintentional happened: I hired a completely female technical management team, all of them talented computer scientists and engineers, and also capable of leading teams. It wasn’t about equal opportunity or any crap like that, it was about finding people who not only had mad tech skillz, but who I trusted to run some part of my company, who understood my vision for it, and who could mentor the people on their teams. They just happened to all be women. That changed something for me. I realized that although I had learned a lot from the male mentors in my life up to that point, I had a lot to learn from the technical women around me, too. These women taught me that collaboration and compassion are not at odds with technology, but enrich it: this was in the late 90’s, when technology was still hard-edged, and the word “collaboration” wasn’t a part of most of our vocabularies.

That’s a lot of preamble, but when I sat down to write this, I felt compelled to explain why my first women tech heroes didn’t come along until I was already 20 years into my technical career. Since then, there have been many more, but I want to go back to one of those first ones with whom I entrusted a huge part of my growing team, Marion Cameron. Marion is a former developer, the best project manager who I’ve ever worked with, and was a tremendously calming and mentoring influence over my growing team of (mostly male) developers. She had stopped programming before I met her, but she has a degree in computer science (also from Waterloo) and spent some amount of her younger years working on contract as a developer in other countries, including a stint in Vietnam while there was a little armed conflict going on there. When I met her, she was a project manager working for one of my customers; she moved on, but when I was later looking for someone as our first project manager hire who could grow into a much more senior position, we tracked her down. As we grew, she took on the management of all project managers and developers, although we eventually split the role so that she could focus on the project management team.

One thing that Marion taught me is that you don’t need to raise your voice to make yourself heard. Petite and soft-spoken, Marion commanded respect from our team and our customers because she knew her stuff, and because she was committed to making sure that the right thing happened. I have heard her raise her voice only once in anger the entire time that I’ve known her, and she did that in private in my office rather than in front of our team or customers. I can’t say that I’ve stopped raising my voice or saying totally inappropriate things sometime, but it certainly seems to be a lot less frequent, and I credit her with helping me to understand the value of taking a moment to think about what I’m saying before I blurt it out.

Another key thing that she showed me was how to bring collaboration into a team. She is a natural collaborator, and manages to find the right path to a solution while gaining consensus, but without that devolving into endless rounds of meetings. I know that if we had had collaborative tools such as wikis back then, she would have been the first to find a way to use them to great effect.

She also taught me a lot about managing people, particularly that strange and wonderful group of developers that made up our team at the time. Most of them were young, talented and a bit full of themselves, prone to bruised egos and always testing the limits. She nurtured them in a variety of ways depending on the individual and the circumstances: part skills mentoring, part coddling, part constructive criticism, and always a healthy dose of respect.

Marion helped me to be a better technical leader, and ultimately a better person; for that, I dedicate my Ada Lovelace Day blog post to her.

I just replaced the WPtouch iPhone Theme with MobilePress after seeing it on Doug Cornelius’ blog. I think that it supports a wider range of mobile devices; I also like the clean interface, and that the pages show at the bottom of the main posts list.

Feedback is welcome, especially from anyone on a non-iPhone/iTouch device.

Barton George tagged me on the latest internet meme to tell you seven things about me. Given that less than two years ago, I played along with the “five things you don’t know about me” meme, I figure that I only owe you two more:

1. I prefer to go barefoot, or at least sock-less, whenever possible. Given that I’ve lived most of my life in Toronto, I can only imagine that this is a flat-out subconscious rejection of winter.
2. I tried to semi-retire at the age of 41, but it didn’t take. After three months of walkabout in Australia, I couldn’t resist heading home and starting up another business.

I’m supposed to inflict this on tag seven other people with this meme, but I just can’t bring myself to do that. I also don’t forward chain letters, regardless of the dire warnings therein.

In a post about collaboration, of all things, a Gartner analyst shows how not to interact with his blog’s readers. If you’re a frequent reader of Jim Sinur’s blog, you know that in most posts he invites conversation with open-ended questions at the end, e.g., “What is your experience with this issue”, presumably to feed ideas into his research on the topic at hand.

In this post, he refers to the increasing number of BPM vendors that are including collaboration features, and his first commenter asks him to list some of those vendors. Jim’s response? “We will be writing research notes on this topic going forward that will identify those vendors that have unique solutions.” In other words, “I’m happy to collect your ideas for free as part of my research, but you have to pay for the results.”

I’ve just upgraded this site to WordPress 2.7, which means that I never had to do the download-upload-upgrade cycle again. I upgraded two other sites earlier with no problems, and I don’t expect any here, but if you see any strange behavior, please let me know by posting a comment.

It’s time for the Canadian blog awards, and I’m nominated in the “Best Sci/Tech Blog” category. Feel free to head over there and cast your vote; you do not have to be Canadian to vote.