Frode Odegard

Oslo coordinator @mortenrovik opens the GTD Tweetup with some instructions..The Oslo GTD Tweetup on September 23 was a blast, especially with the surprise live call-in from David Allen himself, who happened to be in London that day.  Without GTD, and without a fantastic group volunteers, we could never have pulled this off.  We hope to make the recorded video as well as the slides available in the next few days on www.odegard.tv.

We learned a lot from this project, and our next event will benefit tremendously as a result.  As I wrote about in an earlier post, the whole idea is to Fail Fast Forward, and we did amazingly well considering this was an all-volunteer event. We had 70-80 people physically present, and 200-300 who tuned into the live video stream and/or webinar.
  
Social media is very mainstream here in Norway, and virtually everyone is on Facebook.  The tweetup scene is probably lagging about ten months behind San Diego, though. The main monthly tweetup in Oslo draws perhaps 60-70 people, according to @skipet (Theodor Marinius), CEO of Colt Kommunikasjon here in Oslo.  Theodor's company helps Norwegian businesses take advantage of social media.  My talk included a brief discussion of my childhood in Norway 

With about twice the population, San Diego now draws as many as 500 people for its main tweetup, which has become too big to hold every month. Our monthly wine tasting tweetup has seen as many as 200 attendees.

Someone told me that about 80,000 people in Norway is on Twitter, most of whom are in Oslo.  I don’t know if that figure is correct, but it appears that there is a LOT of potential for Twitter as a catalyst for social/business networking events.   

I don’t now that there is a cultural root cause for the disparity between Oslo and San Diego (though our whether is nicer most of the year, which probably does help for attendance).  I think it has more to do with a few individuals like @downtownrob (Rob Marlbrough) and @jbruin (Jenn Van Grove) who put a tremendous amount of time into helping create a cool Twitter social scene in San Diego.  Clubs, bars, restaurants, and even wineries are on twitter or want to get on it; no one wants to be left behind.  I am sure this will happen very soon in Oslo too, as Twitter becomes more mainstream here.

Another big difference I have noticed is the relative lack of WiFi hotspots in downtown Oslo as compared to San Diego. Since my iPhone is roaming, AT&T is charging me a million billion dollars for using the local 3G networks. No problem, I thought; surely cafes, restaurants, and clubs would have free, public WiFi hotspots all over the place. Wrong, wrong, and wrong again.  Wandering around downtown Oslo, I only found one café with free, public WiFi. People didn’t seem to think this was a big deal, perhaps because the local 3G networks work much better than AT&T’s overburdened network in the United States.

(Secret trip for travelers: apparently Burger Kings have Wifi here. Worked exceedingly well, too!  And McDonald's on Karl Johan, the main street from the train station to the Castle, also has WiFi. Go figure.)

I am curious to learn more about what statistics are available for Twitter adoption and in-person meetups around the world.  When I return to San Diego I will be meeting for coffee with @marismith, a social media expert who is famous for having reached the upper limit on the number of friends you can have on Facebook.  I am sure she will have some good answers for me.