SAFIRA 2.0

Congratulations to all the 2009 SAFIRA Awards winners and nominees. May your deeds and achievements inspire others to follow your footsteps, and this acknowledgment push yourselves to excel even more.

Comic Relief Award - Tiago Pinho (TFP)
Team Spirit Award - Filipe Patrício (FMP)
Revelation Award - Francisco Filipe Louro (FSL)
Best Recruiter - Pedro Vieira (PTV)
Best Technological achievement - Luís Alves (LPA)
Best Team Leader - Dinis Luis (DML)
Best Project - SRS ZON (TVCAB-7-2)

Here’s the session plan for this year’s kickoff event.

Once more, my thanks to all speakers and team members that somehow contributed to this morning, of what we all expect to be an energizing, communication rich, team building day, that will jumpstart us all for the year that just begun.

09:30 Keynote - Energizing 2009
09:45 The good, the bad, and the ugly - Lessons learned
09:55 ZON está ON @ SAFIRA
10:10 Projecto Ibéria
10:25 Safira no BES
10:40 PMO Millennium - rebuilding a relation
10:55 Q&A

11:00 Coffee Break

11:30 Quest for talent
11:45 Nurturing talent
12:00 Directions for talent
12:15 DSI
12:20 DCM
12:30 SAFIRA Polska
12:45 SAFIRA Awards 2008
13:05 Closure

Thank you very much for your submissions of presentation proposals for the SAFIRA 2009 event’s. The selected presentations and Team Leaders are:

1. Portal Ibérico, by Nuno Perdigão, Senior Software Engineer (nrp@safira.pt)
2. SAFIRA no GBES, by Pedro Vieira, Senior Software Engineer (ptv@safira.pt)
3. Millennium, hoje e amanhã, by Luis Alves, Senior Software Engineer (lpa@safira.pt)

I believe these sessions will be an essential contribute to this event. One thing I’m extremely pleased to see is that, this year, it is the Seniors that are putting themselves on the stand. WELL DONE guys!!!

To all of the speakers of the last event, but mostly, to all of you in the audience, your feedback is very welcome, and a precious tool for improving the event’s content quality. Post your suggestions here, or if you’re still in web-1.0-land, e-mail the authors directly.

You can also use this space to make suggestions for the overall topics that you’d like to see addressed at the event.

Thank you

Dear Team Leaders,

SAFIRA 2009 Kickoff (SAF2K9), our annual kickoff event, this year will take place on 13th February. As usual, Team Leaders have the opportunity of talking about their projects to the whole SAFIRA community, and share your successes and experiences with all of us.

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Damn right it is!

Maybe more than we think at this point. It wasn’t by chance that I mentioned it in my Enterprise 2.0 presentation at SAFIRA 2008.

EPM deployment in January 2007 has changed something fundamental, but it seems to me that we (as a team) haven’t completely realized the full scope of this change …yet.
The project is thoroughly documented. We had training sessions. There’s an EPM site on MOSS about it with lots of references and reading materials. Still, there seems to be something missing. Here’s my 0.2 EUR on what that is.

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Blogs on blogs.safira.pt, by default, are public. As you well know, this means your posts are accessible to anyone on the internet. We believe this encourages you to create your blog, and contribute to the community of your choice.

By blogging under the safira.pt domain, your opinions and the information you give away on your blog may be regarded by anyone from the outside as being related to, and endorsed by, our company. This carries some responsibilities.

SAFIRA is developing a simple weblog policy and will publish it soon. Until then, be reasonable, and follow some simple, common sense, ground rules when blogging.

Take care not to disclose customer information. Customers trust us with their information, and don’t expect us to be talking about them without their knowledge or authorization. Imagine your doctor blogging about your medical condition.

Take care not to give away customer or company property.  You all have access to digital assets, such as code or documentation, that are a property of Safira or it’s customers. If you publish them on your blog, you might be giving away something that is not yours.

Be responsible for the comments as well. Don’t be afraid to moderate, and remember that it’s up to you to decide if *anyone* can comment or only members of the community.

Be respectful of our company, your colleagues, our customers, our partners and our competitors.

Watch your language.

More than being careful, be respectful when blogging. Be 2.0.

OutMarketing, our marketing outsourced, strongly recommended that DID created a brand name to address the market.

Being that DID is being strongly inspired by Y-Combinator, the brand names that quickly pop out of the thinking hat were the likes of Safira Combinator, Y-Lisbon, and Y-World.

I must say I’m not in love with any of these options, or even with this line of thinking. Being inspired doesn’t mean copying everything and every step of our muses. Being so, I want a new and original brand name that captures the DID spirit.

CMP gave me the idea of launching an internal contest open to all Safira employees to come up with an original brand name. And here it is!

Since you saw on Safira 2008 what DID is all about, I guess you’ll be able to come up with some pretty good ideas that go along with the spirit of what me and PAC showed you.

What I want…

Originality. Can’t be a copy or close adaptation of and existing brand of any 2nd generation incubator out there.

Must symbolize the process of turning something rough into a sexy thing, a lump of coal into a diamond. Get the picture?

Must go along with the current SAFIRA brand. Imagine replacing the “Information technologies” we have under our logo with the new brand. It should still read well and sound cool.

What you’ll get…

If one of your proposals is chosen, it will be rewarded with a ticket to the Cirque du Soleil - Quidam, the very same show we awarded in the Safira Awards.

You may send as many proposals as you like. I’m not obligated to choose from any of the proposals I receive. If I don’t like any of them, I don’t have to choose one, and there will be no winner. Ok?

Until…

I’ll receive proposals until the 7th of march. You have two weeks to come up with a brand name that will symbolize SAFIRA’s innovation efforts.

So start those creative engines of yours, and post your best shots in the DID moss site. It will be on the main page so you can’t miss it. Post any questions you may have as comments to this post, so I can answer in public.

Bring it on.

I just created a group named Safira at ma.gnolia.com.

This is great for sharing bookmarks about Safira applications, blogs, wikis and everything else that is a part of our corporate Web.

By bookmarking this URL, you’re bookmarking the only URL you’ll ever need to find out where Safira’s internal and external sites are

By subscribing the RSS feed Ma.gnolia about Safira, you get the latests links as soon as the moderators team posts them.

By joining the group, you can contribute with bookmarks that you learn about, and help with the tagging.

Will love to get feedback on this.

Have a great day.

The respected IT weekly newspaper Semana Informática asked me to answer some questions for a special about web 2.0. This is what they asked, and my answers to those questions.

Let’s see what comes out of the printer.

( I apologize for posting in Portuguese, but that’s how I answered. Don’t have time to translate)

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