Wikinomics is a very interesting book about mass collaboration. Oddly enough, it does not actually talk about wikis a lot, more about business collaboration and emergent behaviour, but it is a good read and I certainly recommended it.
As you would expect from a book with such a name, it does have an associated wiki and you could probably say that this is a 'web site with a book' rather than a 'book with a website'.
The best take away that I got from the web site was this diagram:
A picture tells a thousand words. You can see the original post about it here
Wiki Wednesday is on tonight (28th May 2007) in Sydney
If this is the first you have hear about this event, sorry about the late notice! If you want earlier notice for future events, please drop me a line via the information request page and I will put you on the invitation list.
Please join us a the Civic Hotel in Sydney's CBD on Wednesday 28th May to chat, learn about wikis, find jobs, talk deals and generally cavort.
I would like to welcome Kara Whittingham as Saikore's Education Consultant. Kara is a highly experienced educator who has spent time working with children, adolescents and adults. For the past 10 years Kara has been working as a teacher at TAFE, and in recent years she has been using wikis to enhance collaboration between students, teachers, and college departments. Kara has been setting up wikis:
for classroom use, as a teaching and learning tool;
as a space where teachers who share a class can collaborate on the development of class resources and assessments;
as a space for teacher's administration of their department/section.
Kara has become an evangelist for the use of wikis in education, presenting last year at TAFE's ICVET Conference, the Department of Education and Training's Connected Learning Conference, TAFE's ACCESS Conference, and at Sydney Institute of Technology's lunchtime on-line Hot Topic Conversations, talking to teachers about how they can use wikis in their teaching and administration. Kara was also selected to be a part of a team to mentor teachers in the use of wikis at Randwick College of TAFE in 2007.
In 2008 Kara is continuing her work with TAFE teachers and students, and she has started to work with primary schools to develop the use of wikis in primary education.
You can read some of Kara's thoughts on wikis and eduation in her Saikore blog.
I will be giving a presentation at the upcoming Oz-IA retreat in Sydney this weekend (23-24 September). My presentation will be titled 'Information Architecture of Wikis' and I will talk about the architecture of typical wiki sites with a focus on what works and what doesn't, and I will also try to cover the key issues involved in trying to set a successful structure in a wiki.
Those of you who read this blog may have noticed that I did a presentation about wikis to the NSW KM forum's monthly meeting in March. "How did it go?" I hear you ask. Well, it seems that people who are interested in Knowledge Management are also very interested in wikis so there was a lot of interest but there was not enough seating at the venue and many were turned away.
Fortunately for those who missed out in March, James Dellow has very kindly asked me to come back and do it again. If you did make it last time, don't worry, I won't be just doing the same old stuff. This time Andrew Mitchell will be joining me to provide a case study of his experiences at Urbis.
Sorry about the late notice, but if you are interested in attending, please see the details at the NSW KM Forum blog. Apparent there will be lots of seating available, but you might want to RSVP early just in case!
My fellow wiki enthusiast, Andrew Mitchell from Urbis just sent me a link to a short and well written case study of wiki usage at a Sydney based company, Jenssen-Cilag. The CIO, Nathan Wallace, talks about how they used a wiki to rebuild their Intranet. You can see the case study on Nathan's blog
Replacing an existing Intranet with a wiki based solution can be a very successful way to introduce wiki technology into a corporation with a minimum of fuss. Nathan's experience is very similar to that of a number of companies that I have worked with and helps to show an Intranet upgrade is becoming one of the standard wiki adoption patterns.
Once a wiki is deployed widely in an organisation as the Intranet, then other benefits of using wikis in a work environment can be explored in a secure and sanctioned environment.
On Friday I did a joint presentation at TAFE's ICVET Conference about using wikis in Education. As has been the case in other wiki presentations I have done, the widespread interest in wiki techology meant that demand outstripped the expectations of the organisers and the session quickly filled up. Unfortunately, because of the lack of space, my fellow Web2.0 enthusiast Stephan could not get in to record the session.
My co presenter, Kara Whittingham, showed a series of Wikispaces pages that she has used for her language classes, so I can't reproduce her work effectively here, but I have used SlideShare to publish a copy of my presentation below. It would have been great to have the audio that Stephan wanted to capture, but 'due to popular demand', you can't have it!
The first half of the presentation is general wiki stuff, which is probably not very enlightening to readers of this blog, but the end of the presentation contains a few slides about 'wiki behaviours' where I outline some of the behaviours that effective wiki users tend to adopt over time. I would be particularly interested in comments that people have about wiki behaviours.
There are many slide presentations about wikis out there these days and I wouldn't normally bother putting one on this blog, but here is one that really stood out.
A few points:
The message is good and very clear. The new starters usage pattern is one that I have used, champion and often recommend.
Is Jessica a real person? It doesn't really matter for the presentation, but for a wiki, identity matters and the reason that 'Jessica' would happily to contribute her good ideas is that they will always be associated with her identity.
Slideshare is a great resource, and it embeds easily into most wikis and blogs
Wiki evangelist, Stewart Mader is a noted wiki/social software researcher, author, blogger and speaker and he is doing a presentation in Sydney on 11 July.
Saikore has teamed up with Optimice to do an preliminary study of applying social network analysis tools to a Wiki. Read on to find a report with our early findings.
Using social networking tools we can make use of wiki transaction logs to visualize the relationship between wiki pages and editors. Who is editing what; who are the most active editors, both in page edits and breadth of pages edited; which pages are being edited the most and by whom etc.
For this study, the Wikipatterns wiki site has been chosen as a subject, mainly because of its subject, community size, technical accessibility and public nature. Wikipatterns is a wiki site about wiki usage. It is built with Atlassian's Confluence wiki and contains a toolbox of wiki usage patterns and anti-patterns. The site aims to be a guide to major stages of wiki adoption and it explores patterns that apply at each stage. Wikipatterns is a relatively new site, it started in January 2007, and can probably claim to have a very wiki literate membership. As of June 2007, there are about 400 users, of which 200 have edited a page and of these 200, about 40 users have made edits to 5 or more page.
Note that the founding member of the site, Wiki Evangelist Stewart Mader (blog), was removed from the analysis because he swamps the network with his connections to nearly every page and every other user. Sorry Stewart!
The map below provides a visualization of wiki pages, editors and their interactions through common page editing (click for a larger version).
The size of the nodes reflect the number of connections between editor and page. For example, the larger editor nodes reflect relative editing activity in terms of different pages edited. The larger page nodes reflect the number of different editors having written to the page. The thickness of the links reflects the relative number of edits an editor has conducted on a given page. In this analysis, the creation of a page was not considered as an 'edit', and so pages that have been created and then never modified will not appear in the diagram because they will appear to have no edits and hence no links. Isolated pages and editors have also been removed. Only page edits have been considered, comments - which are an equally valuable source of connections - have been ignored in this analysis.
Some interesting observations
The home page is one of the most edited pages, but the edits appear to be mostly done by infrequent editors, many for whom the home page is their only edit.
The broad based editors appear to be seeding many new pages.
There is a pattern of many lightly edited pages and many one page only editors compared to multi-edited pages or multi-page editors. This is in fact common in the world of social networks and is called the "small world" effect.
One other interesting thing we can do with the data is to look at which editors are affiliated through editing common pages. That is, we could infer a relationship between editors based on their co-editing of a page. The map below illustrates these affiliations:
The nodes are all editors. The link thickness represents the relative strength of affiliation through common page edits. The size of the nodes reflects the relative number of affiliations with other editors. The colours show an attribute gleaned from the e-mail addresses i.e. whether they were free e-mail accounts like hotmail or gmail; dot gov or edu; Atlassian (company who created the wiki space) or a corporate e-mail account.
What we can see is that the Atlassian editors are pretty much central to the network of editors and all are active. There appears to be two clusters emerging, one of which is around five of the Atlassian editors. Cmiler and fschop are playing "broker" roles between the two clusters. Trevor Pike is also brokering to relatively new editors on the periphery. Of course the above interpretation may be over-reading the relationship aspects as we don't really know to what degree joint editing creates relationships between the collaborative editors. For that we need to do a little more research.
For more information, please contact the authors, James Matheson (Saikore )and Laurence Lock Lee (Optimice)
It is time to mark down the next Wiki Tuesday in your calendar! This will be the third Wiki Tuesday held in Sydney.
Last week's venue, The Grand Hotel, which is pretty much in the heart of the CBD turned out to be a very comfortable choice and I didn't hear any complaints, so I have decided to give it another go.
The workshop, titled 'Learning and teaching with blogs and wikis', will be a three hour session held from 1pm on the last day of the conference (Friday 22nd June 2007).
A rough overview of the workshop is as follows:
Short Description
Wikis and blogs, which are sometimes collectively called 'Social Software', are spreading rapidly throughout today's organisations in many ways. Education is one area that is particularly suited to using such collaborative software, notable in the trend of many software development companies targeting the area. However, getting started can be difficult, because when you first setup Social Software, it is a blank canvas. This workshop will work through some of the issues that arise in setting up Social Software tools and help you use them achieve ultimate benefit for your organisation.
Bullet points
The workshop will address the following topics
Using social software to aid learning and teaching
Realising the cultural changes required for working with social software, and outlining the rules and guidelines that can help
Understanding the cultural and behavioral change that emerge from collaborative work methods
A few weeks ago I met with James Dellow and we had a good chat about the state of wikis and knowledge management. As a result, James has asked me to make a presentation on the subject to the NSW KM Forum.
I have reproduced an overview of what I will be covering below. Anyone is welcome, but seats are limited, so I you want to come along, please RSVP to the email at the bottom.
WHAT
This presentation cover the use of wiki technology in Knowledge Management. James Matheson will discuss how wikis are being used as knowledge management tools by detailing a number of real world examples taken from his work as a `wiki consultant' with various organisations. The presentation will also cover some recent research and white papers in the wiki and knowledge management fields. The presentation will give a general overview of what wikis are, how they are being used for knowledge management, how they are being adopted and what the barriers to adoption are.
WHO
James Matheson is an independent Wiki Consultant who has been working with wiki technology for the last five years and has dedicated himself to the idea of `a wiki for every organisation'. James has recently started his own consultancy company which has been establishing wiki technology for a range of uses in a range of business domains, including education, publishing, corporate security, mining and manufacturing.
WHERE
Ernst & Young, The Ernst & Young Centre, 680 George Street, Sydney NSW 2000.
WHEN
5.30pm for 6pm Tuesday 27th March.
HOW MUCH
Gold coin donation. But remember, seats will be strictly limited.
WHAT NEXT?
If you plan to attend, you must RSVP by e-mail to:
nswkmforum <at> gmail.com
(please include the date and/or title of the event in the subject line).
I recently found a very interesting article about how wiki technology is being used at Thomson. Publishing Trends have published an article on their website called 'Thomson Teaches Tech Through Twikis' which gives a good summary of what they have done.
Here are some nice quotes:
"technology took hold much faster than anyone anticipated – only about a month and a half"
"When Ken started using it, it grew exponentially, we outgrew the one server that we originally used, and are now using one in Mason Ohio that supports 600-700 users."
"Now, it's pretty much taken root. It's the place where we post and discuss all of our standard forms, white papers, meeting minutes, ideas, etc. It's become the center for communication."
"Before, you'd be using Word, You'd have to complete everything, make sure your document is perfect, and then send it to the second person. Then they'd go through everything, track changes, and send it to the third person and so on, it would take 2-3 weeks. Now, with the wiki, someone posts, and immediately everyone in the group can respond and manipulate one document. We can get an RFP out in 2-3 days now."
Inspiring stuff! The article complements the ideas that I had published in Publish Magazine in November 2006. You can read the original text of my article at publishing in Web 2.0
If you want to find out more about what Thomson have done, there is also a good podcast of an interview that Dan Bricklin did with Asheesh Birla. You can download a copy here
An informal gathering of wiki enthusiasts will be held at the Greenwood hotel from 6:30pm on Tuesday 27th February.
Join me at the Main Bar for a couple of drinks and some general conversation. There is no formal program, but the event is inspired by SocialText's Wiki events, so you are encouraged to chat, learn about wikis, find jobs, talk deals and generally cavort.
For more details (and a cool RSVP feature), visit the Wiki Tuesday page.
Saikore has just released a demonstration implementation of its Business Development Portal. The portal is a fully functional implementation which incorporates practical functionality that has been tried and tested by Saikore and its customers.
Functionality featured in the site includes:
Standard Wiki features, such as simple editing, page history, page notifications etc.
Enterprise Wiki features, such as full search, rigorous permissions and a slick interface.
A home page view with news, recent changes and a graph of real time sales data.
Template driven sales reports with automated sales metadata
Areas for collaboratively developing projects, plans, proposals and tenders.
Handy hints throughout the site for more functional explanations
Anonymous users have read access, but the site looks better if you have signed up, so please take the time to sign up to see and use more of the great features that are available (click on the 'Sign up' text at the top right of the page).
The Business Development Portal is one example of how Saikore can create an environment that will help your organisation get things done.
In many situations where wikis were initially installed as an experiment, usage grows beyond expectations and starts to address a range of unexpected needs. Wikipedia, for instance was initially setup as a side project to help collect information for Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger's Nupedia project, but Wikipedia grew beyond expectations and eclipsed Nupedia.
In my experience in setting up wikis for various organisations, I have seen wikis grow to be used in all sorts of creative and unexpected ways. A few examples are as a file server, a training manual, for keeping timesheets, an asset register, an organisation's classifieds, and so on.
One of the more interesting areas that wikis are encroaching on is the content management system space. CMS Software, like wiki software, can be broadly defined as applications to manage web pages, but they become very difficult to define more precisely when you start looking at the nuts and bolts. An appreciation of how diverse and complex the CMS and wiki application space has become can be seen from the contents of the CMS matrix and the wiki matrix sites. CMS Matrix is tracking hundreds of applications with about 150 features compared, and the wiki matrix site is tracking about 30 applications with about the same number of features compared.
So according to the two matrix sites, Wiki and CMS software have about the same number of features and a deeper analysis shows that many of the most important features area actually common to both. So it is more interesting to look at the differences than the similarities. For me, the difference that tells the most about two applications is workflow. Wikis are typically weak in workflow and CMS are typically strong. Some see this as a weakness in wiki software, but to me the lack of workflow support in wikis is symptomatic of the way they work, developers have not bothered to add much workflow to wikis for the simple reason that there is little demand for it. After you have worked with a wiki for a while, you soon find that you just don't need workflow. Features such as version control, favourite pages, recent changes and the advantage of a low barrier to entry make workflow redundant in most situations.
So if you are making a decision about using a wiki or a CMS application for your web site, and you feel that workflow is important, then you need to analyse why you need workflow.
If you think you need workflow because the process of publishing stuff on your web site is so onerous and painful that you don't want to go through the process more than necessary, then think again. It is so easy to publish in a wiki that you don't even need a 'webmaster' to do it for you. You don't need a workflow process to hold your hand and make sure you don't forget anything along the way. With a wiki, just go to the page and edit it! If you make a mistake, revert to a prevision version, or just edit it again!
If you think you need workflow because you want to control the content, then think again. The collaboration features that are fundamental to a wiki lend themselves to content control. Because a wiki is so easy to use, the responsibility for publication of content can be in the hands of the people who are responsible for the content itself. Wiki software gives users many tools that allow them to take this control, for instance, you can subscribe to get notified of changes to a particular page, you can check the recent changes or get a daily digest of any changes to the whole site. At an organisational level, perhaps you could assign someone to review all recent changes once a day and give feedback to authors. You will find that your staff will not vandalise the site and the correction of mistakes and errors can be managed to provide a positive learning process.
Other than restricting anonymous or public access, I don't like adding permissions to a wiki, but if necessary, it is possible to restrict edit and/or read permissions of sensitive content to just the people who control the content (many enterprise wiki software applications can do this).
When considering workflow and CMS, consider using a wiki instead. Ask yourself, is there a significant risk that a bad page might be visible to the readers for a short time? How likely is it and how bad could it really be? Balance that against the advantages of content that is alive and updated regularly.
I see a CMS as a way of putting content on the web, but a wiki is that and more. A wiki is a place to get things done.
For many organisations, knowledge is the most critical asset, and in modern work environments that might be spread across geographically diverse regions or organised into virtual teams, managing knowledge is growing more difficult. The formalised practice of Knowledge Management has been the subject of research and corporate application for more than two decades now, but many of the initiatives have not delivered the promised business improvements because of their complexity and their focus on technology rather than human aspects of knowledge.
Today's wiki software has matured to a point where the technology 'just works'. The concepts are simple and developers have put a great deal of attention into the usability and social aspects to make wikis fun and easy to use. Even though wikis are not traditionally described as 'Knowledge Management' tools, they are now in a position where they can deliver many of the long awaited benefits of Knowledge management.
The knowledge management benefits are actually a side effect of using a wiki. A wiki site is usually installed for reasons other than knowledge management, such as as a intranet, a project management tool, a collaborative working tool or as a solution to some other important business function. The knowledge management features of a wiki site can emerge from its usage as users incorporate wiki work methods into their day to day work processes. The key knowledge management processes of capturing tacit knowledge and disseminating explicit knowledge can happen automatically without any extra effort from users. Features such as recent changes, document history through version control, comments and simple hyperlinks can turn a simple page from a container of information into a source of knowledge.
The open nature of wiki software encourages communication and collaboration and capture of information about the organisation that remains as a permanent and accessible knowledge base. The low entry barrier to wiki usage promotes its use and further more, the dynamic nature of a wiki site allows it to change and grow with the organisation and its people.
As a wiki consultant, I find that the knowledge management aspects of wiki installations are one of their great selling points for enterprise adoption.
Changes in the way people are using the internet are a constant source of interest in the publishing industry. Events such as Rupert Murdoch buying mySpace for $US629m in July last year show how the industry is watching and investing in new media.
The internet is a constantly evolving place. New ideas and new communities are springing up and disappearing at a rapid rate, changing the network as they go. Some ideas are more significant and lasting than others, with the potential to affect the way we live and work.
The first big idea to gain widespread familiarity was email. From its beginnings in 1971, it has steadily grown to become today's fast, efficient and ubiquitous one-to-one communication. The next big step was the World Wide Web - web pages - which really kicked off in 1991 and brought to a peak the concept of one-to-many communication. Since the introduction of the web, internet growth has mushroomed; in Australia alone, more than 14 million people use it.
The next big step, which is happening on the internet now, has been popularly called 'Web 2.0'. The term Web 2.0 has been criticised as a meaningless marketing buzzword, and it is difficult to find a common definition, but with millions of Google citations, it has clearly taken hold. Web 2.0 can be broadly characterised by one basic concept: many-to-many communication. Blogs, mySpace and Wikipedia are good examples of Web 2.0, where many thousands of people communicate directly with many thousands more on sites that completely bypass traditional media channels.
So where does this leave the publishing industry? Recently released statistics from the Commercial Economic Advisory Service of Australia show that online advertising spending in Australia actually exceeded magazine advertising expenditure for the first time. As a publisher, if you don't have a spare $US629m lying around to purchase the latest Web 2.0 phenomenon, how can you benefit from the new digital world? Will today's publishing companies be displaced by the new business models of startup companies?
One way to answer these questions is to take a look at some examples of what people are doing in the publishing world on the Web 2.0 front.
Pacific Magazines have recently taken a bold step and rebuilt their intranet's web site based on an enterprise version of the same technology that has been used so successfully by Wikipedia. Rather than use a traditional content management system, Pacific have chosen wiki software. Wiki software is web server software that allows users to easily create and edit web pages using their web browser, the software provides many of the same features as content management software, but its simplicity and ease of use give a low entry barrier, which in turn promotes more users to get involved. Pacific Magazines now has a solid platform on which it can experiment with new ways of working with the new technology, all within the security of its own firewall.
Meanwhile, ACP is looking at the potential of web-based collaboration software to manage editorial workflow. Most of their current workflow systems are basically paper based, with a file server being used to store digital versions. The existing systems work well enough, but being manual they are inherently limited and can't provide things that editors want, such as a dashboard that shows the progress of an issue's production in real time.
Wired magazine is experimenting with collaborative journalism at its Wired Wiki site. Their experiment involves an article about wikis (what else!) and a huge range of people, including some of the big names in the wiki world, have contributed hundreds of quality edits.
The Wired experiment follows on the heels of a similar experiment by the LA Timesa year ago, where an editorial about the war in Iraq was chosen as the topic. To the publisher's dismay, the experiment quickly descended into a chaotic edit war, where opinions polarised and consensus could not be found. The site was pulled within a day.
So why is the Wired experiment working where the LA Times experiment failed? The reason is probably because the contributors to the Wiredarticle have a common interest, which is to promote wiki technology. Fierce competitors in the crowded wiki software space have come together to communicate what wiki is because it is in all of their interests to get the word out as lucidly as possible. In contrast, the contributors to the LA Timeshad no common interest and if they couldn't get their opinion heard, they were satisfied just to spoil the opposing one.
But that is not to say that conflicting opinions cannot collaborate successfully in the new Web 2.0 world. Abortion is an issue that has spurred some people into murdering and bombing in defence of their beliefs, and some of that passion is on display in the history of the Wikipedia entry on abortion. Yet the current version (excluding transitory vandalism) is a very good resource on the subject. Its success derives from the success of Wikipedia, which has been attributed to its openness and its strong policy of maintaining a neutral point of view. The point to take away from the Wired and LA Timesexperiments is that harnessing the power of the masses is not as simple as just pointing the latest Web 2.0 technology at them and expecting them to build something fabulous. The philosophy and rules are at least as important as the enabling technology.
The perennial question that necessarily drives most publishers, however, is how to make a buck out of it. Murdoch invested his millions in mySpace, yet Wikipedia, which has an even bigger presence on the internet, earns nothing for its founder, Jimmy Wales; it employs two people and asks for donations. In contrast, the greatest success on the internet today is Google, which capitalises on its search engine and advertising programs to make billions.
The first step is to learn how this new technology can improve your internal processes. For instance, how can two people at Wikipedia HQ manage to build in just a few years an encyclopedia that is 20 times bigger and almost as accurate as the Encyclopaedia Britannica? One thing is sure: they didn't write it themselves. Pacific Magazines has taken the first step down a similar path by using wiki technology to improve the way its intranet works, and the most powerful way to harness this technology is to incorporate it directly into your critical business processes, the processes that can differentiate you from the competition.
Given the speed with which new technologies change our environment and the way we operate, one thing is clear and that is that early adopters have the advantage.
