Canadian legal technology conference Legal IT 3.0 is coming up on April 20 & 21 in Montreal.  Connie Crosby will be speaking on a panel the Monday morning with Steve Matthews and Kevin O’Keefe about how lawyers and law firms can go beyond having a website to build a better web presence. Dominic Jaar is once again heading up the organizing committee and has put the program together along with Xavier Beauchamp-Tremblay.

It is the largest and the most important event of the year in Canada on information technology for law. Dozens of experts from Canada and internationally (United States, France and Australia), including the keynote speaker Ronald J. Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, will be there. In addition to me and Steve Matthews, will also see other Slaw folk including Simon Chester, and of course Dominic Jaar and Xavier Beauchamp-Tremblay.

There will be 32 sessions to choose from, with something for most types of practice and areas of expertise.

Date : April 20 and 21 2009
Time : 8:00 am to 5:30 pm, followed by cocktails
Location : Montreal (Centre Mont-Royal, Metro Peel)
Fees : from $400 to $667
Free sessions are also offered
Details and registration: www.legalit.ca

See also:

Slaw post: Dominic Jaar’s write up for Legal IT 2.0 in 2008

Slaw post: Patrick Cormier’s write up just after Legal IT 2.0 in 2008

I have recently teamed up with Martin Cleaver and Stephanie Barnes to create a Toronto interest group for Knowledge Management professionals. This will be a speaker series across industries, meant to foster discussion and cross-pollination of ideas.

We have taken the name Toronto Knowledge Workers, and have our first meeting lined up for  Wednesday, January 28, 2009, 6:30 p.m. featuring management consultant Joel Alleyne.  Joel will be talking to us about the notion of “Expertise Networking,” which embraces emerging concepts such as expertise management, expertise location, and expertise sharing. Expertise networking also embraces the social, cultural, organizational, and technical dimensions associated with managing, locating, and connecting expertise in organizations. Expertise networking is a framework that provides technical scaffolding to support experts and expertise in organizations.

You can find additional information about the group at http://knowledgeworkers.org/. If you would like to attend the meeting next week, please sign up for the group and RSVP so we have a correct tally of numbers (and hopefully enough room!). The atmosphere will be informal (it’s in a pub, after all), and the cost is free except for whatever food and drink you order.

If you are a knowledge management professional, I hope you will join us. If you are a speaker/presenter in the area of knowledge management, feel free to contact me, Martin or Stephanie to propose a talk for a future meeting. Already we have a good crowd signed up before we even have one meeting–I credit Joel’s high profile for that–but we hope to keep the ball rolling with equally interesting talks in the future.

- Connie Crosby

Well, I’ve resisted blogging about this up until now, but the excitement has gotten the better of me. A short while ago Canadian marketer Dave Forde started putting together a list of most influential Canadian women in social media. I was nominated to the list (a fantastic honour!) and then Dave opened it up for voting. The vote is open until 11:59 pm ET December 31, 2008 (i.e. just before the stroke of midnight tomorrow night!).

I encourage you to head on over to Dave’s post to check out who else is in the running to be Canada’s next top social media diva! Lots of my friends and women I admire are there–it is quite a list. Vote for your favourite. And if you happen to want to vote for me, fantastic. It’s all in good fun, but I’m sure whoever wins is going to be bragging big time!

By the way, you do not have to be Canadian to vote. In fact, the further afield you are, the more widespread the influence is proven I suspect.

On a related note, after opening this up, Dave also initiated a contest for Canada’s most influential men in social media. You can vote on that one, too.

Cheers,
Connie

Photo credit:  image by Jeff Milner on Flickr, made available under Creative Commons.

As a follow-up to my post yesterday, here is an interview with Duarte De Silva via Skype with CityOnline (on City TV in Toronto) talking more about the hohoTO event and giving to the Food Bank, kindly posted to YouTube by AstroRobb. Duarte mentions the blog post by Mathew Ingram Is Charity the New Greed? (Dec. 8/08).

Want to find out more about donating to the food bank? City TV has a guide here. Or go directly to the Daily Bread Food Bank website.

‘Tis the season, and in our quest to get those cards posted and presents bought, we can often lose sight of what is important at this time of year. It seems that the more we connect in online social networks, the more many of us become aware of and sensitive to the needs of others. Perhaps not all of us, but I do see it happening. I certainly have been opened to more perspectives than before.

In this light, someone in the Toronto Twitter community (specifically my law blogger friend and mesh conference founder Rob Hyndman; or maybe it was Paul Marshall?) posted a message (a “tweet“) wondering about a seasonal meet-up for the Toronto “geek” community. A few ideas were bandied about, and a charity (The Daily Bread Food Bank) was chosen that we might sponsor. A number of people got together informally and laid the groundwork for the event. A fast website, hohoTO.ca,  was created. Links to the registration site were sent out via Facebook and Twitter.

Aimed at the Toronto social media, tech and small business community, they invited companies to make this their seasonal party and donate what they would have spent otherwise. Those who took up the call turned into the long list of event sponsors. Most of the resources and work behind the event were to be donated, so that most of the contributions would be directly given to the charity in question.  A tag was decided on “#hohoTO” so that all photos, tweets on Twitter, and blog posts could be found on the web.

Connie Crosby at hohoTO’s p#hohoTO booth. Photo courtesy Canon Canada and Rannie Turingan.

Two short weeks later, we had a fantastic party of over 600 people on Monday night at The Mod Club! Best of all, the event raised an astounding $25,000 for the Food Bank in addition to boxes and boxes full of food donations. This video does a great job in explaining just how this “crowdsourced” event worked:

Thanks go out to all the amazing organizers, sponsors, the Mod Club, and my fellow participants!

hohoTO organizers. Photo courtesy Canon Canada and Rannie Turingan.

I especially like the post Rob Hyndman wrote about how this is also a lesson in creativity (Dec. 12/08), how businesses need to open themselves up to saying “yes”. So much can be done by saying “yes” and harnessing the creativity of employees instead of finding reasons to say “no”!

Overall, this was an event that the social media/social networking community in Toronto can be proud of. Well done!