I'm just finishing off a few very productive days in Plovdiv, at the WordFrame development centre, where we've been negotiating and planning with two new prospective partners. Later today I'll be heading to Milan, and driving to Varese to speak at the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0. The conference is being organized by my friend Emanuele Quintarrelli, one of Europe's best known bloggers on the enterprise 2.0 topic, and his company OpenKnowledge, in conjunction with the Università dell'Insubria.

On their website, they describe the conference like this:

• A 360° overview on Enterprise 2.0 business and organizative impact
• A comprehensive exploration of Enterprise 2.0 tools and techniques: tagging, blogging, wiki, feed rss, open innovation, widgets
• A concrete and pragmatic approach with a strong focus on real case studies and well-proven methodologies
• Thought leaders and widely renowned speakers from all over the world

The speakers include Luis Saurez of IBM - I was with him only two weeks ago at Boston's Enterprise 2.0 conference, and I'm looking forward to hear what he has to say in his talk "See the Light - Thinking out of the Inbox! " He recently reminded me of the Doc Searls quote:

"Email is where knowledge goes to die"

The other speakers are Thomas van der Wal, Stewart Mader (we use his Wikipatterns book and resource all of the time) , Laurence Lock Lee and Ran Shribman. I'll be doing a presentation version of the workshop I ran at last week's NLab Social Networking Conference at De Montfort University. It uses our recent implementation of WordFrame at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales as a case study of how to build better web communities that add value to an organization. I'll be going through approaches to building a community, content and community management, highlighting success factors and making practical recommendations to ensure a positive outcome. The ICAEW's IT Counts community just won Best New Web 2.0 Initiative, so it is a great story, with some good conclusions. While I was putting together the material I was trying to investigate other cases studies that highlighted metrics to track whether we were doing well or badly. I found that there are very few good stories, and very limited statistics. After the event I'll be publishing the PowerPoints on SlideShare, and doing a write up here which details what we now track to measure the success of this type of enterprise 2.0 community solution. I'm looking forward to a brief visit to one of my favourite parts of Italy, near the lakes, but more importantly to what I know will be a great conference.