Jay Cross, Jane Hart, and Charles Jennings invited participants to join a four-hour discussion and workshop to build the business case for informal corporate learning—convening a small group of thought leaders in social networking and informal learning to discuss the near-term future of organizational learning, given such factors as:

* economic slowdown and corporate reconfiguration
* increasing democratization of the workforce
* pervasive internet infrastructure for social networking
* convergence of knowledge, knowledge work, and learning

The global recession is wiping out traditional training budgets in corporations. This is an ideal time for organizations to adopt informal, bottom-up, collaborative approaches. Nonetheless, most corporations seem paralyzed, afraid to take action. The purpose of the session in London was to identify the barriers to change and discuss what corporations can do to embrace networked, self-service learning.

The meeting took place at Thomson-Reuters in Canary Wharf on December 9 2008.

Participants

• Charles Jennings, Thomson Reuters
• Jane Hart, Center for Learning & Performance Technologies, togetherlearn
• Jay Cross, Internet Time Group, togetherlearn
• David Gurteen, Gurteen Knowledge
• David Price, Debategraph 
• Deborah Findlayson, Diageo
• Norman Lamont, musician/blogger/instructional designer
• Claire Line, Lovells
• Laura Overton, Toward Maturity
• Hugh Greenway, Reed Learning
• Paul Kearns, PWL, Speaker/trainer/author
• Peter Butler, British Telecom
• Fae Longman, CMS Cameron McKenna LLP

Photo Source: Jay Cross, Flickr