Just a few hours since the first
Rebel Jam has ended and not only I’m starting to miss it, but I’m already thinking of the next one. Hope us
rebels don’t have to wait long :)It has been an amazing 24-hour marathon, travelling all around the globe from Europe to the Americas, to Australia and back to Europe, with very interesting ideas, great presentations, inspiring conversations and most of all, fantastic people. Cause in the end, it’s all about people, isn’t it? And one day of contribution from truly creative persons, to both business and society, has to be properly taken into consideration and recognised.
We heard rebels talk about social movement, workplace innovation, dealing with failure, humor “treatment”, leadership and leadingship, sustainable charity, human capacity, distributed teams, innovation culture, grassroots movement, rebels’ motivation and many others.
I have to admit, with no intention to undermine other subjects, that I especially liked Dominik De Buyser‘s topic; and his presentation. Taking school to the street (with StreetwiZe) will make you see that education is just a side-effect. And there was also a good advice for rebels coming out of it: “If you did not grow up as a street kid, you’d better start thinking like one”. Cause maybe if we do so, we would stop surrendering community excellence and community values to the mere accumulation of material things (paraphrasing Robert F. Kennedy).
I would also like to take this chance to thank Peter and his team for this awesome experience offered by the Rebel Jam, the flagship event so far for the Corporate Rebels. As I told you in my previous posts, we had our own slot in the Jam, during which Sorin, our CEO, talked about the reason to liberally give and take. We enjoyed quite an audience, and it seems that the duality technology-human transpired from the presentation was appreciated. Also the fact that we declared ourselves haters 🙂
I would also like to take thischance to thank Peter and his team for this awesome experienceoffered by the Rebel Jam, the flagship event so far for the CorporateRebels. As I told you in my previous posts, we had our own slotin the Jam, during which Sorin, our CEO, talked about the reason toliberally give and take. We enjoyed quite an audience, and it seemsthat the duality technology-human transpired from the presentationwas appreciated. Also the fact that we declared ourselves haters:)
We:
- Hate innovation – love creativity
- Hate manipulation – love free thinking
- Hate secrecies – love sharing
- Hate indifference – love involvement / daring
In few words, we basically hate not to assert our usual selves.
We also talked about our daring to change our business model, to go open source and about the hardships of forming the basis of a community (FINkers United). But what better audience to seek ideas from? What better people to come to our aid with their knowledge and expertise? Cause we do need help in this rebellion, we do need co-thinkers in rocking the boat of financial transactions processing. And, as someone during the Rebel Jam said, we can start small, but we cannot start alone. And if the hate-love list above means something to you, maybe you’ll consider joining us.
And just so you can meet some of us, say hello to the Allevo rebel team 🙂
Will the real rebels please stand up!!!
I was not the true crazy rebel though, as I did need my bio break and could not stay throughout the night. Apparently, there was no difference in substance between Europe and America, but just that change in cultural tone. It would have been interesting to see that. Maybe next time 🙂
With the interesting talks now over, guess it’s time for acting. We should bring corporate rebellion to the next level, a more actionable one, beyond the nice narratives, with a lot more clarity. So… let’s go really change something, because is behavior that drives culture. We are not troublemakers, we are believers: in change, in creativity, in sharing. And also romantics… at least some of us 🙂
And never forget that what us, rebels, should be looking for is “authenticity of being”.
Bye-bye Rebels and good luck wherever you are! ’til the next one!
PS: This is on an even more personal note: so happy the rebels liked what I made for the Rebel Jam 🙂
By Ioana Moldovan, 31 May 2013.
Corporate Rebels United, in a joint initiative with Rebels at Work thought of having a 24-hour online Rebel Jam, that will bring together individuals from various cultural and professional areas, people who share the believe that this world should act NOW to remodel the relationships at both individual and community level, people who defend free thinking and speaking and the fair access to world’s resources – including ideas and achievements.
Just register and you will be able to witness some inspiring entertainment and provocative discussions on leading networked organizations, on reinventing sales management, on reasons to build a distributed team, on how office design can improve collaboration and innovation, on taboos in the workplace that block innovation and how to solve them by humor, on leadership for someone or leadership for everyone, on corporate spring – a journey from fear to love, on the human capacity project, on being a rebel inside the government, on how to tackle the issues everyone cares about but no-one owns, etc.
Allevo will be part of this jam, with our own presentation slot – 15:30-16:00 CET – 30 minutes during which we’ll talk about the reason to liberally give and take – about having the courage to disrupt the comfort of immobility, about shared cultural achievements, about hating the new given ring to innovation, but loving true creativity, about hating manipulation, but loving free thinking.
You can read all about tomorrow’s jam on the blog.
Only tomorrow is not Thursday 30 and then it’s time for Reeeeebel Jaaaam 🙂 Remember I told you a while back that at the end of this month you have the chance to spend a cool corporate 24 hours? And no, there is no incongruity here, not if Corporate Rebels United has something to do with it!
So, until the clock strikes noon two days from now (12.00 CET) you have enough time to register, if you haven’t done so by now, clear your schedule, arrange your chair, turn up your volume and be up for some inspiring entertainment and provocative discussions. On what? Well… on leading networked organizations, on reinventing sales management, on reasons to build a distributed team, on how office design can improve collaboration and innovation, on taboos in the workplace that block innovation and how to solve them by humor, on leadership for someone or leadingship for everyone, on corporate spring – a journey from fear to love, on the human capacity project, on being a rebel inside the government, on how to tackle the issues everyone cares about but no-one owns… for example 🙂
And because it feels great to be a rebel with such a cause, we will be part of this jam, with our own presentation slot. For 30 minutes (15:30-16:00 CET) we would like to talk to the other rebels about the reason to liberally give and take (this is what we like to call the Allevo team rebellion :)). It’s about having the courage to disrupt the comfort of immobility, about shared cultural achievements, about hating the new given ring to innovation, but loving true creativity, about hating manipulation, but loving free thinking.
Of course, it all has something to do with us trying to rebel against the status quo of the current financial transactions world, reshaping our business model in order to launch the first open source platform for financial transactions processing – FinTP – and build a community around it – FINkers United.
But there’s a pitfall; that of not knowing very well how to inspire a large pull of people. And that’s where we are searching for ideas from bright minds like yours and of the corporate rebels around the world.
That being said, let’s rebel together and let’s start doing it this Thursday. Oh, and just to remind you that you can join at anytime the Corporate Rebels United group on Facebook or the Romanian Hub, created to show the world our country has rebels too 🙂
By
Ioana Moldovan,
28 May 2013.
This was the theme of this year’s
EBAday forum, the annual conference organized by the
Euro Banking Association and
Finextra Research. Payments professionals from all across Europe have gathered in Berlin for two days of intense networking and debate on topics like payments innovation, liquidity management,
SEPA readiness, supply chain finance, electronic and mobile payments, payments regulation, as well as collaboration and partnerships. And we were there, as usual 🙂
Many interesting sessions, raising a lot of questions. But, as Vincent Brennan, Head of Group Payments, Bank of Ireland said, nobody would be there if they had all the answers, people are looking for information and opinions. There’s been a strong desire to learn and to collaborate on a wide range of subjects.
Mentioning collaboration, it seems it was THE WORD of this year’s forum. Hearing someone say that collaboration is not just team work, it means pooling off resources and knowledge between banks, vendors, consultancies, regulators etc, made me immediately think of FinTP, one of our topics at EBAday. If collaboration is vital for operational efficiency, if now is the time for banks to share, why not consider building together an open source community around a financial transactions processing platform? It’s too bold? But innovation was another word frequently mentioned these two days. Just think about it. Anyway, I found it cool how most of the concepts at EBAday – collaboration, innovation, sharing – all lead to FinTP!
But what am I doing? Writing and writing and still no mention of SEPA? Well, I kept the best for last 🙂 Of course, SEPA readiness was on everybody’s lips and minds, generating all kinds of questions and even worries. What are banks going to do if customers simply don’t migrate, what will they do with those payments? Who is going to pay for all the investments SEPA compliance involves? Who will have, if any the full benefits from these mandatory changes: the banks, the corporates, the software vendors? Is the fact that the SEPA scheme is so different to the national ones the key difficulty for corporates? What about BIC/IBAN usage? And so on. But even if there are still some uncertainties about SEPA, one thing is sure: everybody should know it is coming! And even if SEPA is not really single yet and there’s still a long way to go, as countries tend to have their own rules, we need to make sure that in the end, after all these changes, we shall still have a common language.
But that’s another reason we were exhibiting at EBAday, to show people our easy way to SEPA readiness.
Missed the sessions? You can check the detailed live coverage of the event by Finextra, for both day one and day two.
With yet another EBAday edition passed, we start looking forward to next year, in Helsinki, the first in the brave new SEPA world. So, hopefully, when we’ll see each other again in 2014, SEPA compliance will be just another thing we’ve successfully overcome.
By
Ioana Moldovan,
27 May 2013.
Towards a Borderless World for Payments – this was the theme of this year’s EBAday forum, the annual conference organized by the Euro Banking Association and Finextra Research. Payments professionals from all across Europe have gathered in Berlin for two days of intense networking and debate on topics like payments innovation, liquidity management, SEPA readiness, supply chain finance, electronic and mobile payments, payments regulation, as well as collaboration and partnerships. And we were there, as usual.
Many interesting sessions, raising a lot of questions. But, as Vincent Brennan, Head of Group Payments, Bank of Ireland said, nobody would be there if they had all the answers, people are looking for information and opinions. There’s been a strong desire to learn and to collaborate on a wide range of subjects.
You can read more on our impressions from EBAday on the blog.
We already start looking forward to next year, in Helsinki, the first in the brave new SEPA world.
Busy week at Allevo: started with arranging the final details for what we’ve preparing for a while now; and that is the FinTP hackathon on Wednesday and the 22nd User Group on Thursday. I won’t bore you with the preparations, as you’ve already seen part of what it all meant on the blog. So, I’ll fast forward my post to the morning of May 15.Wednesday, May 15 – the day of the FinTP hackathon; an important day for all of us at Allevo, as it was the first event of this type that we have ever organized. 9 o’clock and we were a bit scared but enthusiastic a lot, a bit impatient but eager a lot, a bit agitated but hopeful a lot, waiting for the participants to come. And they all came. And they were as enthusiastic as we were and that felt really good.
Starting a little shy, getting acquainted with the code, with the documentation, with the platform; getting curios, deciding whether to try to build something on top of it or try to hack it and find its vulnerabilities. But we were there to support them.
And with this, adding some eveningwork to gather the conclusions for the next day, a not so long andnot so good night sleep 🙂 and we arrive to Thursday, May 16 – theday of Allevo’s 22nd User Group.
We chose to have the events soclose one to the other, in order to debate the conclusions of thehackathon while they were still hot 🙂 Even if we waited for thesecond part of the event to do so.
On this user group’s agenda we havealso included the reports on the activity on SiT!, our applicationfor customer support and maintenance services, and the hot subjectof SEPA. Six months after the successful launchof the SCT part of SEPA-RON project in Romania, we have discussedabout the SDD part and the near launch of EURO-SENT, about thecorporate-bank relationship aspects, about the main benefitscorporations expect when implementing SEPA. This discussionbenefited also from the valuable insights and opinions of Ruud vander Horst, a Dutch consultant we invited for the event.
I cannot say that and not share my compliments to the Allevo hackathon crew; you have been outstanding in there. So… a big thanks for all your efforts!
And for the participants: armed with enthusiasm, good will and diligence, you helped us keep a very pleasant atmosphere and have a great day. Not to mention a useful event. Many thanks for your valuable feedback and for sharing your opinions with us.
Mentioning feedback, I will summarize the ideas we left with, given our participants input:
- every single one of them mentioned the documentation is very well written, relevant, easy to work with – very happy to hear that, so we’ll use the same mechanisms to generate it for the rest of the code as well
- the code is clean and intuitive
- pay further attention to the security aspects (authentication and authorization) – even if nobody tried to actually hack it, they still tried to find some vulnerabilities. And they found some little ones that we’ll address the soonest
- using C++ might limit the number of community members that could come from banking, as they mainly know and use Java – but maybe this can be one of the first tasks of community members, the integration with ESB Java
- building a consistent community and attracting the right people is essential to the FinTP project.
And as an overall note, the participants found the event cool, and they liked us, the organizers 🙂 Yeeey!
In approaching the end of the story about Wednesday, I have one other mention, but an important one: this hackathon brought the first application built using UDAL from someone outside Allevo. It’s a chat app, with an archive, developed by one of the ROSEdu students 🙂
Oh, quick note: for those of you interested in continuing the work started during the hackathon, the infrastructure we have set for the event will still be available to you, just use the same credentials.
With the first FinTP hackathon already in the past (if you want to remember some of the moments you can always check the event’s live blog) we are looking forward now to the next one, somewhere in the first half of October. Hope to see you there, but until then say hello to this hackathon’s great team 🙂
And with this, adding some evening work to gather the conclusions for the next day, a not so long and not so good night sleep 🙂 and we arrive to Thursday, May 16 – the day of Allevo’s 22nd User Group.
We chose to have the events so close one to the other, in order to debate the conclusions of the hackathon while they were still hot 🙂 Even if we waited for the second part of the event to do so.
On this user group’s agenda we have also included the reports on the activity on SiT!, our application for customer support and maintenance services, and the hot subject of SEPA. Six months after the successful launch of the SCT part of SEPA-RON project in Romania, we have discussed about the SDD part and the near launch of EURO-SENT, about the corporate-bank relationship aspects, about the main benefits corporations expect when implementing SEPA. This discussion benefited also from the valuable insights and opinions of Ruud van der Horst, a Dutch consultant we invited for the event.
In terms of memorable quotes from the User Group (we could actually have a special section to record them all), I especially enjoyed: “Everything is possible, including (collection taxes through) Direct Debit.” 🙂
And like this we are back to FinTP, our very dear open source project and the theme for the second half of the event. Sorin, our CEO, talked about the complexity of reshaping our business model to perfectly fit in an open source community, encouraged the participants to get actively involved in building a consistent community, as having access to the source code represents a great value for the current users and also an insurance for the future. Discussions followed: about the changes FinTP will bring, about the hackathon conclusions, about our experience gained with the EBRD consultancy on the FinTP project.
And because we talked about different ways of doing things, I could not let the occasion slide, so I told the story of Corporate Rebels United and what they stand for, and invited everyone to join the 24-hour online Rebel Jam on 30-31 May, where I remind you we have a slot between 16:30 – 17:00 Romanian time (15:30-16:00 CET).
And now is Friday afternoon, and I sit at my laptop, writing this post about the story of these past two days. And I don’t want to write “The End”, because it is only the beginning. So I’ll finish with something Ruud said, while addressing concerns about open source:
“Our best protection is our mutual trust and we are not going to play with that.”
By
Ioana Moldovan,
17 May 2013.
Just half a day after the FinTP first hackathon had ended, we organized our 22nd User Group, so we could all debate the conclusions of the hackathon while they were still hot.
On the user group’s agenda we have also included the reports on the activity on SiT!, our application for customer support and maintenance services, and the hot subject of SEPA. Six months after the successful launch of SCT part of SEPA-RON project in Romania, we have discussed about the SDD part and the near launch of EURO-SENT, about the corporate-bank relationship aspects, about the main benefits corporations expect when implementing SEPA. This discussion benefited also from the valuable insights and opinions of Ruud van der Horst, a Dutch consultant we invited for the event.
For the second half of the event, we turned to FinTP, our very dear open source project and to the conclusions of the hackathon. But you can read all the details on the blog.
May 15th was the day of the FinTP hackathon; an important day for all of us at Allevo, as it was the first event of this type that we have ever organized. The goal of the event was to enable collaboration for developing the FinTP platform and offer the relevant resources for the community.
We used this occasion to also launch the FinTP portal, the place where we’ll gather all the info about FinTP, about the 3 component projects we’re starting: UDAL (+ pre-requisites ), API REST and DB, where we can have all sorts of related discussions on the forums, where we can share ideas and build a great community.
The event had two themes: use our servers and hack our servers, giving participants the choice to pick what they want to do. Armed with enthusiasm, good will and diligence, they helped us make it a useful event, with a pleasant atmosphere. Not to mention we received valuable feedback.
Interested on the feedback we’ve got? You can check the full hackathon’s story on the blog.
And remember, if you wanna keep close, just stay tuned with the event’s live blogging page.
By: Ioana Moldovan
Less than 5 days left until the first
FinTP Hackathon next Wednesday. We’re kind of counting the days here 🙂
In the meantime, we have been busy launching the FinTP portal, the place where we can gather all the info about FinTP, about the 3 component projects we’re starting: UDAL (+ pre-requisites ), API REST and DB, where we can have all sorts of related discussions on the forums, where we can share ideas and build a great community. A place where we can let you know about the future hackathons and FinTP events.
Oh, and for the curious ones of you, we’ll also have live blogging coverage of this Wednesday’s hackathon. Tune in and maybe you’ll find that the FinTP frequency is your kind of frequency 🙂
By: Ioana Moldovan
We:
