Speakers: Thomas Vander Wal

Session

Freely Seeping Through the Garden Wall

Organizations love their hierarchy, but it quite often hinders their progress as well as the progress of the members or participants in their organization. The walled gardens create barriers to creation and sharing, which has great value. But, walls do have value for many who need smaller groups of known participants to build a sense of comfort. These walls need to be permeable and leak, at a minimum to let the understandings find those who need it (as well as the converse).

We know walled gardens do not provide the best value for society and organizations, but we also know many people work best in small groups in familiar comfortable surroundings. This talk will build a path that examines both sides of the wall and how to use the comfortable surroundings to aid those who need it while creating openings to let the created value through and out.

Bio

Thomas Vander Wal is an analyst, strategist, advisor and popular speaker on social tagging/folksonomy, social web, social intranets/enterprise, and web applications around well structured information. He helps organizations better understand the benefits, values derived, and how to best approach deploying the new social tools inside organizations to fill gaps in their existing tool offerings. He is often recognized as the person who coined the term ‘folksonomy’ in 2004, as well as some of his other terms and conceptual concepts: Elements of Social Software, Perceptions Matrix, Personal InfoCloud, Local InfoCloud, Come to Me Web, digital model of attraction etc. Thomas is principal, and senior consultant at InfoCloud Solutions, a social computing consulting firm. Thomas has been working professionally on the web since 1995 (with professional IT background beginning in 1988) and has breadth and depth across many roles and disciplines around web design, social web development & research and general web development.

Thomas is currently writing a book for O’Reilly Publishing titled, "Understanding Folksonomy". He helped found the Information Architecture Institute and Boxes & Arrows web magazine and is currently part of the Web Standards Project.