Moving to Paris
As you may already know if you are friends with me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter, I moved to Paris about two months ago, an internal transfer within my company, to work on a new collaboration platform for all +4000 employees. I thought I would write a description slightly longer here, just to sum up what is going on.
I have been interested in collaboration as a discipline for quite some time now. The idea of using some of the ideas of web 2.0, to make colleagues work better together is very fascinating to me. As a consultant in Denmark I was slowly building up some methodology, references and experiences within the area, but progress was and is slow. So when the opportunity arose for me to work on an actual collaboration project, with people I already knew and trusted, it was a pretty easy choice.
So now I am the Community Manager for our internal collaboration platform, for six months. What does it mean to be Community Manager? Dion Hinchcliffe provides an excellent explanation, but truth is the role is very much being defined at the moment. For now I have chosen to define it as “doing everything it takes to further collaboration on the platform”. At the moment that means handling technical issues in close collaboration with the vendor, providing user support, training users, writing policies and guidelines for the use of the platform and occasionally thinking more strategically about the long-term benefits of collaboration. I find the work very interesting and I am really looking forward to seeing what my colleagues will do with the tools we have set up for them.
I moved mainly because the job was interesting, but of course it didn’t hurt that the physical location was Paris. After we have been living here for about two months, I feel that we are starting to get a feel of the city. Compared to Copenhagen the service is better, the food is great, the smell is worse and the size much much bigger, with all that bigger size entails. The language is still a struggle, but we are making progress, thanks to French radio and TV, French podcasts, patient colleagues and quite a few people who just don’t speak English…
I am looking forward to another very eventful four months of working and playing hard and of living the sweet life in the city of lights.