The Greater IBM Connection - on the blog side:

Greater IBMers interested in American history can take a virtual stroll into the halls of the yet-to-be-built National Museum of African American History and Culture, the 19th and newest member of the Smithsonian Institution.

While the physical museum won't open it's doors on the National Mall in Washington, DC, to the public until 2015, IBM has worked with the Smithsonian to create a virtual presence on the Web prior to the construction.

And members of the general public are invited to collaborate with scholars by adding to the "Memory Book" collection, which will contain family histories, photos, memoirs, and audio recordings. You'll find the Memory Book on the IBM-built home page at http://nmaahc.si.edu/

This is a Web 2.0 social networking project, and you can navigate an on-line map that shows how these diverse memories are linked to each other and to content created by the museum to spotlight people, places, issues and moments in African American history. You help build the map by "tagging" or highlighting key words about your contributions. As museum-goers search through historical events or memories, the navigational map will redraw itself to focus on related associations, creating a visual representation of the way events and people in history are interconnected.

In addition to exploring and/or contributing to the new virtual museum, you can find out more about IBM's contribution by reading IBM's press release at http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/22379.wss

Among other things, you'll find that the National Museum of African American History and Culture is the first museum website to venture this far into the capabilities of Web 2.0 social computing technology. The site is based on cutting-edge, open source programming frameworks such as Ruby on Rails for collaborative website development. The site runs on IBM System X web and database servers.

Submitted by Larry Phipps, editor, The Greater IBM Connection

Though I haven’t posted a new entry in a couple of weeks, it definitely doesn’t mean that living and working in NYC has become boring. Not at all. There have been three major highlights that I’d like to share with you:

I co-hosted the German Welcome Call for new German-speaking members of the Greater IBM Connection together with Sandor Barany, Greater IBM moderator from Vienna, where we organized a Web and phone conference and introduced the participants to the different functionalities of Xing and showed them what the Greater IBM Connection offers them and how they can benefit most from our community. The attendees from Austria, Switzerland and Germany participated actively and gave us very positive feedback at the end of the call, I am already looking forward to the next one this month.

The next – completely different – highlight was a weekend at my friend’s place in Poughkeepsie, which is also in the state of New York, but where you feel like you have travelled to another country! After having spent several weeks in this lively, crowded and never-sleeping city, it was amazing to see that just 1.5 hours north of here, you can find such a beautiful and peaceful landscape near to the Hudson River. For the non-Americans amongst you, I have also added a picture of the fair we visited there – unbelievable: all you can see is food, food and again: food! :-)

Thirdly, I’d like to share a few great impressions of the city with you. I took these pictures from the top of the Empire State Building, where you have got an amazing view of all NYC with its many parks, bridges, skyscrapers etc. The city is especially impressive at night.

Finally, I can announce the first event I’m organizing all by myself. On Sunday, September 30^th, the Greater IBM Connection will host current and former IBM interns living in the greater New York Cityarea for an intern Meet-up at the New York City Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). As several (former) interns have already responded back to me and told me that they would participate, I am really excited about this afternoon at the Museum and the get-together at a bar afterwards will be a great opportunity to get to know each other and exchange ideas and experiences. Please make sure to check out the podcast we will post in the Greater IBM Connection Web site about this event.

Kind regards from New York,

Mona Lisa

July 2008