Symposia

NewWOW’s fifth symposium was held July 13 through July 16, 2008 in San Jose, California. The group explored the impact of culture on best practices for distributed work groups. Our keynoter was Professor Pamela Hinds of Stanford University, who also prepared a research paper on the subject for the Symposium. Her research helped us understand how culture could affect perception and acceptance of distributed work practices, and by implication, whether different work practices would be needed when distant teams included people from different cultures.

NewWOW’s Symposim IV is scheduled for February 3 through 6, 2008. The Symposium theme will be “Work Practices and Processes for New Ways of Working.” Eric Richert, formerly Vice President of iWork at Sun Microsystems and now at 8 Corners Consulting, is preparing a draft document describing the work practices that are preconditions for distributed work.

Attendees at the first annual New Ways of Working symposium, held May 31 – June 2, 2006 in San Jose, California, came to learn more about emerging workstyles and share their expertise on collaboration. Thought leaders from a variety of disciplines discussed The Challenge of a Distributed Workforce.

The conference was organized around a series of roundtable discussions, with attendees actively participating in one or more panels to kick-start the discussion.

SYMPOSIUM III was held on July 29th through 31, 2007. It began with a reception and dinner on Sunday night, and ended with a luncheon on Tuesday. The event was held at the Dolce Hayes Mansion, a beautiful historic resort in San Jose California, which was the site of our first symposium. The theme was Sustainability Through New Ways of Working.

The second NewWOW Symposium was held January 21-23, 2007 at the historic Asilomar Conference Grounds in Pacific Grove, California. The highly interactive discussions explored the role of place in a distributed world. Twenty five thought leaders from a variety of disciplines discussed and argued about whether place still mattered. Participants spent an event-laden two days learning together and sharing their knowledge about the changing workplace.