This month’s speaker will be Maury Markowitz, discussing how Wikipedia is addressing the problem of ensuring truth in articles. Maury is a renowned Wikipedia editor with over 1,000 new articles and over 20,000 edits to his name. Maury works at a Toronto hedge fund firm where he is the programmer-on-call.

Note new Location! The Ferret And Firkin
Date: 8 Jul 2008
Time: 6:30 for 7pm

Event Sponsors:

Synopsis

Over the last two years or so the Wikipedia has faced a number of criticisms in the press about its potential inaccuracies. It’s not so much that the Wikipedia is filled with errors, but that it could be filled with errors, and the reader will never know one way or the other.

But over the last year the hue and cry on this topic has almost disappeared. So what happened? And can these methods be further improved?

When and Where:

6:30pm, Tuesday 8th July at 720 Spadina Ave, (just south of Spadina TTC stop on Bloor) in the back room: http://torontodarts.com/featured/ferret.html

Please sign up at

Who should come and why:
Interested in the topic? Got an opinion? Or just interested to network? Come join our community.

• Managers and leaders responsible for applying such questions to the use of wikis in organisations
• Entrepreneurs wanting to use a wiki as the backbone to their site
• Change transformation agents using wikis to instigate organisational transparency using a wiki
• Consultants and designers who build integration, navigation, visuals and plugins
• Wiki contributors, users and wiki gardeners

About Toronto Wiki Tuesdays and Blended Perspectives:

Toronto Wiki Tuesdays has been running since 2005 and has a mandate to spread the word about how a wiki can transform communication in organisations and the nature of business. Toronto Wiki Tuesdays was founded and is run by Martin Cleaver M.Sc. MBA, Head Blender of Blended Perspectives and a Chair of WikiSym, the International Symposium on the use of Wikis.

Today marks the launch of the Universal Edit Button. Similar to the orange “radio waves” RSS icon, which alerts the user to the availability of a feed for a site, the Universal Edit Button is an icon to appear in your browser’s location bar to alert that the page is editable.

It is hoped that the icon will draw contributions to wiki-based sites, by serving as a reminder to how changeable they are.

Without further ado:

The green pencil icon has been adopted as the standard icon.

It is presently implemented on:

• Moin Moin 1.7
• Socialtext hosted
• TikiWiki 1.10
• TWiki 4.2
• Wikipedia

For further details, check out http://www.universaleditbutton.org/Universal_Edit_Button.

My thanks to Mark Dilley of AboutUs.org for the reminder to post about it today.

Well, its not that I’ve been silent. I’ve just been talking in a different room, i.e. on the WikiSym blog! Here’s a round up of the last few. Most are aimed at ensuring the best companies, consultants and researchers come and share their story.

• Wiki farm companies: which are your biggest growing communities?
• Thanks for all the WikiSym Poster Submissions. Deadline extension: June 30th
• Business Intelligence? Competitive Intelligence? WikiSym is where you need to be.
• Integration wikis? Application wikis? Semantic wikis?
• Call to Wiki Vendors: Come and Display Your Wiki Software!
• WikiSym Participants: Skype Chat Channel
• Wikis as Intranets: Come Celebrate Your Success!

Since its inception 4 years ago, WikiSym has attracted the deepest thinkers in the wiki, hypertext and documentation fields. As other industries catch on and wikis are proving their utility as intranets, extranets and in knowledge collection, retention, and dissemination, and core to documentation processes, my goal is to the conference does indeed get representation across the board, everywhere wikis are making an impact.

Periodically I will summarize here on my blog, http://martin.cleaver.org the entries I post for WikiSym. In the meantime, if you want to watch what’s happening closely, please subscribe to the blog feed at http://www.wikisym.org/

WikiSym 2008 will be held in Porto, Portugal Sept 8-10. It’s sure to be both informative and fun!

Continuing our 2008 Toronto Wiki Tuesday Guest Speaker Series,
Vanessa Peters (PhD Candidate, OISE) will lead discussions next Tuesday at Toronto Wiki Tuesday
at another new location, GROUNDHOG PUB.

http://www.torontowikituesdays.com/twiki/bin/view/TorontoWikiTuesdays/WikisInEducationMay2008

Here’s Vanessa’s description:

In this meeting I will discuss a new wiki-based scripted activity that was created for secondary school biology students. Using a co-design method, the researchers collaborated with two experienced science teachers to create a curriculum unit where 114 grade-ten biology students developed a knowledge base of ideas about human physiology, then drew upon those ideas as resources for subsequent curricular activities. Results demonstrate that this innovative lesson fostered collaborative knowledge construction as well as individual student learning. This suggests that a carefully designed wiki-based activity can complement and enhance the value of a collective knowledge building community within secondary school settings.

Please sign up at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/468369/

Who should come and why:
Interested in the topic? Got an opinion? Or just interested to network? Come join our community.

• Managers and leaders responsible for evaluating the use of wikis
• Change transformation agents using wikis to instigate organisational transparency using a wiki
• Consultants and designers who build integration, navigation, visuals and plugins
• Wiki users Wiki gardeners who improve content clarity

About Toronto Wiki Tuesdays and Blended Perspectives:

Toronto Wiki Tuesdays has been running since 2005 and has a mandate to spread the word about how a wiki can transform communication in organisations and the nature of business. Toronto Wiki Tuesdays was founded and is run by Martin Cleaver M.Sc. MBA, Head Blender of Blended Perspectives and a Chair of WikiSym, the International Symposium on the use of Wikis.

Toronto Wiki Tuesday’s May Meeting is sponsored by the Society of Internet Professionals.

–
Martin@Cleaver.org

As part of the 2008 Toronto Wiki Tuesday Guest Speaker Series, Adrian Fritsch (Software Consultant and founder of debatum.org) will lead discussions at Toronto Wiki Tuesday at Epicure Cafe, Here’s Adrian’s event description:

What: Toronto Wiki Tuesdays: using Wikis to Debate

The problem:

To form a well-reasoned opinion, you need the best arguments on different sides of a debate. Wikipedia stresses neutral point of view and so make it’s content hard to contrast with your current understanding. While every wiki houses content, a method is needed to help the community express contrasting opinions.

The Debatum solution:

Debatum is a wiki with a method that guides uses to document and interconnect arguments. Examples it uses include debating controversial issues such as:

1. Can computers think?
2. When is a declaration of independence reasonable?
3. Does God Exist?
4. Should there be Net Neutrality?

Debatum overlays a methodology over the wiki to encourage the growth of disparate viewpoints to inform and persuade readers. This provides users to enrich the arguments and powerfully inform and influence others.

While Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, Debatum wants to be an interconnect of arguments, ideas, and lines of thought. While Wikipedia stresses a Neutral Point of view, Debatum’s goal is to write the best arguments of each side and include weak, yet popular arguments together with (strong) counter-arguments. Unlike Wikipedia, which accepts content only if it is written outside, Debatum seeks to mesh arguments with original thinking from participants.

Debatum’s goal is to well-thought-out opinions, rather than to facilitate “winning” debates. Debatum’s motto is “Knowledge by debate”.

Additional topics:

• We will discuss other attempts to approach online debates (wiki-based or not) and compare them to Debatum.
• We ask whether Wiki is actually the ideal format for documenting debates.
• We question whether (controversial) subjects be learned faster from a “debating construct” instead of a “plain” layout?
• We discuss whether a wiki format discourages rhetoric and ask whether this is a good thing.

After Adrian’s talk we’ll turn the conversation to the audience to discuss how, where and why Wikis are usually used in Politics and in what ways Debatum offers something new. Expect a lively discussion of the opportunities and resistance to wikis in politics.

When and Where:
6:30pm, Tuesday 8th April at 502 Queen Street West in the Front Room: http://www.theepicure.ca/event.html
Please sign up for this event at http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/444745/
Join our mailing list http://groups.google.com/group/torontowikituesday/

Who should come and why:
Interested in the topic? Got an opinion or unique use of a wiki? Or just interested to network? Come join our community.

• Parties interested in expression of contraversal or political material on wikis.
• Wikipedians responsible for promoting a neutral point of view
• Anyone who thinks that wikis are not the place to express dissent
• Technical writers responsible for documentation tasks
• Managers and leaders trying to understand the potential of wikis
• Change transformation agents using wikis to instigate organisational transparency using a wiki
• Wiki users and Wiki gardeners who improve content clarity

About Toronto Wiki Tuesdays and Blended Perspectives:
Toronto Wiki Tuesdays has been running since 2005 and has a mandate to spread the word about how a wiki can transform communication in organisations and the nature of business. Toronto Wiki Tuesdays was founded and is run by Martin Cleaver M.Sc. MBA, Head Blender of Blended Perspectives, a wiki consulting firm based in Toronto, and a Chair of WikiSym, the International Symposium on the use of Wikis.

• http://www.torontowikituesdays.com/
• http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2008/03/03/toronto-wiki-tuesdays-march-april-and-onward-2008/
• http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2008/03/05/wikisym2008-im-chair-for-demos-and-posters/

About our Sponsor:
April’s Toronto Wiki Tuesdays is sponsored by the Society of Internet Professsionals. See http://www.sipgroup.org/ and http://www.sipgroup.blogspot.com/

Upcoming Toronto Wiki Tuesdays
See http://www.torontowikituesdays.com for the dates and the topics for Toronto Wiki Tuesdays for the next 3 months.

> > On the Wordpress professional developer’s forum, Skaneateles Design said:
> > Working with and customizing WordPress MU requires quite a bit of
> > integrative skill, since the development docs are limited for the
> > program (often, the code itself is the documentation!), and the system is not trivial.
> >
> I wrote:
> Please excuse the off-topic, but just to let everyone know, there is an
> (underloved) section on Codex wiki for wpmu, at
> http://codex.wordpress.org/index.php?title=Special:Recentchangeslinked&target=Category:WPMU&hideminor=0&days=180&limit=50
>
> And… until someone revamps the forums to make the wiki prominent, the
> documentation will likely remain just as fragmented and limited.

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 11:33 PM, kingler wrote:

Are you suggesting a better WPMU codex page with INDEX? Maybe it is time to start a new maillist for WPMU users and developers as well?

Hi Liang,

The http://codex.wordpress.org/Category:WPMU page is a reasonable start page. What is lacking is the wiki’s prominence in the mu forums. As the majority of people only use the forums the bulk of the most recent information is in the forums, and the pages on the wiki are not very useful.

Although a wiki provides the means to refine and os to accomplish terseness and high relevancy, blogs and in particular, forums, generate sprawl and disconnectedness. (See http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/28/wikis-compared-to-email-discussion-groups-and-blogs/ and maybe http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2006/11/06/blogs-are-like-plastics-wikis-are-like-leaves/ )

Now, forums have their place for conversation but they are not the means for generating reference material. (People do summarise in forums, but these summaries also get swept away in the flow of conversation). We need both, conversation and reference, and we need the means to harness the people’s efforts appropriately.

Given that most content is already in the forums, we need to find ways to link the forums to the wiki, and indeed, the wiki to the forums.

Our audience has barely embraced the Codex wiki so there’s little mu-specific information useful to them (although the single user wordpress information is pretty reasonable). To make Codex appealing to mu-users and to keep it front of mind, I think we need to automate the linkage between forum and wiki. This will help the community navigate from knowledge socialised in a particular conversation, to information definitively documented in the wiki, and back again, so viewing the wiki shows conversations discussing the concepts of the wiki.

If this linkage can be made convenient and appealing enough for users to traverse, they will iteratively travel the conversation (forum)-documentation (wiki) pathway, pulling the concepts they have just internalised from the new conversations into the reference documentation. Then, the user editing the shared reference has the opportunity to consolidate their new insight or understanding into the logic shared with everyone else. The reference information, being the product of the many, is comprehensive (rather than the conversation, which will typically address only a few points).

Comparing an idea or notion proposed in conversation to the comprehensive helps the editor think through the idea inside constraining context of the knowledge already known. When a user edits the reference she align herselves with the masses, and begins to engage with all the factors needed to pull the masses toward her idea.

In a forum talking in one thread provides little or no exposure to users not following that thread. A mailing list has the same issue. The lack of exposure means good seed ideas can miss growing up, and that bad ideas get pursued for too long because their authors miss a constraint that is known somewhere. A wiki, with a community properly engaged on it, will factor seeds of ideas into pages where the idea can grow, be pruned and cared for. Ideas placed on forums and mailing lists can too easily get lost.

While some communities get away with hosting conversation on the wiki itself (and there are advantages to doing so - my favourite being that the conversation can be pruned of overly verbose, poorly written or just plain wrong information), the simple fact today is that many communities do have that separate forum that the community likes, so the question is not how to eliminate the forum but how to create the relationship between the wiki and the forum.

At mu forums, what I’d like to see is this:

1. On the front page it shows the list of mu-recent-changes as well as the category entry point. This continuously informs people what reference information is being built.
2. At the bottom of every forum post show content from wiki pages. This linkage could be implied from the tags on the post in view, or via a tag generation method.

On Codex, I’d like to see:

1. a method whereby users can expand a twisty or something and get all relevant conversation items
2. the menu bar shows the mu entry points: mu-recent-changes as well as the category entry point

This method could work for both multi- and single- user versions of wordpress. Indeed, I believe for many communities today it would improve the knowledge-information (SECI) flow.

A bit of news - I’ve been asked to be on committee to hold the position of Chair for Demos and Posters at WikiSym 2008 in Portugal this September.

This is great as I’ll not only see breaking ideas as they happen around the world, but also be responsible to evaluate them and help them meet standards to deliver for general interest.

Important Dates
* May 3rd: submissions deadline for research papers, practitioner reports, workshops, panels, and tutorials
* May 17th: notifications for workshop submissions
* June 11th: submissions deadline for posters, demos, and DoctoralSpace proposals
* June 25th: notifications for research papers, practitioner reports, panels, tutorials, posters, demos, and DoctoralSpace proposals
* July 19th: final revised pdf’s are due
* Sept 8th-10th: WikiSym 2008 days

Updates
Keep an eye on the Wikisym blog, and of course here, for updates.

1. This month only, Toronto Wiki Tuesday will be the following week, the 18th March. Damir Sudarevic (Industrial Design Engineer) is talking this month, will talk about on how he uses a wiki to drive a website. We will be in the Front Room at the EPICURE CAFE (502 Queen Street West, between Spadina and Bathurst) for this
2. April’s talk 8th, will be by Adrian Fritsch on a wiki-based debating technology called Debatum.
3. May’s date, 13th will be Nelson Ko, probably talking about Social Networking
4. June’s is by Vanessa Peters (OISE) talking through educational uses.
   • Vanessa’s title is “Co-
     Designing Pedagogical Scripts for Knowledge Building in Secondary
     School Science”
   • As not everyone knows, here’s what http://www.pedagogicalpatterns.org/ says about Pedagogicalisms
     

     Patterns are designed to capture best practice in a specific domain. Pedagogical patterns try to capture expert knowledge of the practice of teaching and learning. The intent is to capture the essence of the practice in a compact form that can be easily communicated to those who need the knowledge. Presenting this information in a coherent and accessible form can mean the difference between every new instructor needing to relearn what is known by senior faculty and easy transference of knowledge of teaching within the community.

5. July is open, let me know if you want to talk about something.
6. August is open, let me know if you want to talk about something.
7. As September’s second Tuesday clashes with WikiSym 2008, in Porto, Portugal, and as I hold the position of “Posters and Demos Chair”, we’ll find another date so I can attend! I’ll likely run this session, to summarize the submissions into the posters and papers track.

I’ll likely and the group with updates from the WikiSym sessions throughout the year anyway, as its good to get your impressions of new innovations as we go along.

Regards and thanks,
Martin

–
Martin@Cleaver.org

At 11:45 PST I’ll be on their Ask The Expert panel answering questions your about wikis.

I’ll actually be in Toronto, attending PodCampToronto at the time, but will nip out to do a video webcast.

Slides here

Despite howling winds driving a blizzard conditions and a late change of venue, 16 people successfully ventured toInsomnia on Bloor and Bathurst. My thanks to Marc Laporte, who was visiting from Montreal to run Tiki Fest Toronto, and who surfaced and reminded several wiki people I’d not yet met in Toronto. Also, thanks a lot to Nelson Ko of Citadel Rock for going well out of his way to make sure we had a projector.

I am happy to say, the audience was not disappointed - Gerald Matlofsky, a progressive lawyer and friend of mine emailed me to thank us for the talk.

“After the fact”
Connie mentions in her blog the killer distinction that started my love for wikis:

One distinction is that with knowledge management systems, the emphasis is submitting documents and analysis after the fact. Wiki use emphasizes work in progress and collaborating on the end result.

Arthur Andersen used to have a “repository” where you were supposed to “clean up” and “file” work you had finished with. Using a wiki creates an ongoing meeting context where everyone mushes in their thoughts, creating engagement on both side. Contrast this with boring “after the fact” repositories, after all would you rather:

1. read a book and guess whether it applies to you or
2. listen to the author pitch and then have the opportunity to converse.

Its only when both parties are benefiting that energy is reciprocally produced and sustainable. Knowing where someone else is going seeds specific opportunities for synergy going forward.

So, it was exactly my conviction that wikis could act as a medium for negotiating or “modelling” knowledge: because it makes touched ideas interesting to both parties. And such ongoing discussion, which feeds collaboration between live projects, is a real first step towards giving people in an enterprise the means to collectively join the dots and really think together.

Would you like to talk at Toronto Wiki Tuesday?
I’m committed to making Toronto Wiki Tuesday a venue for your stories. No matter what your use case, e.g. an interesting personal use, powering a public community to generating new levels of harmony or disharmony within the firm, we want to hear about it.

Give me a call. 416-786-6752.

Talks at Toronto Wiki Tuesdays usually last about 30 minutes and speakers will anchor the night in something of personal interest. (About Wikis, of course). As we have a private floor at Rower’s pub we get there about 6:45pm for food, and have the talk from 7:30 and discussions thereafter.

I am pleased to announce the following confirmed line-up:

• Feb 12th: Connie Crosby - Educator / advocator in Libraries and Legal firms - talking about the use of Wikis in law firms
• March 12th: Damir Sudarevic - industrial design specialist - “How to make a stupid website a little bit better” (working title!)
• 2nd Tuesday in Apr: Adrian Fritsch - to be decided.

While Toronto Wiki Tuesday is not in itself technology-centric, wikis would not exist without the technology that powers them. Mike Pilling (a regular at Toronto Wiki Tuesdays) of HighProductivity.ca introduced me to Tiki a few months ago and since then I’ve met more users and seen more sites using this extensive php-based wiki platform.

During the day on 12th Feb, Toronto Wiki Tuesday is hosting TikiFest, (a codefest for Tiki) based on the popular open source project Tikiwiki and chaired by Marc Laporte who will be down from Montreal.

TikiFest Toronto (Facebook event invite) continues their roadshow. To quote Marc:

At the January 08 Codefest held in Montreal, the topics were “Microformats” and “Wiki Translation”. For Microformats, a number of CMS added or enhanced support for it, and support for hCalendar was added to TikiWiki. For “Wiki Translation”, we had a workshop to define user requirements and the overall plan of the project.

To date, topics tentatively lined up for the TikiFest are as follows:

• WikiNetNav
• Wiki Translation
• Improve integration between image gallery and wiki pages

But refer to
TikiFest Toronto wiki page for the latest version. (You should indicate if you are going).

Rowers will be opening the pub early, at 11am, for us on the 12th so we can get started. We’ve promised to eat there to say thank you. They have both a projector and wifi, so its a neat setup.

I hope to see you there!

‘‘I will be heading to Rower’s Pub to this month’s Toronto Wiki Tuesday, Toronto’s dedicated Wiki event. We’ve had some great topics, talking about how using a wiki efficiently creates knowledge, how we can use them to couple thinking to the output of systems or eliminate wasteful email, and how they create a social context that spurs innovation in and between organizations. Plus, Tuesday is 2-for-1 wings night and the pub has terrific beer and a range of food.”

It’s nice to get some press. I’ve been running Toronto Wiki Tuesdays regularly since 2005, with the first event more TWiki centric event back in 2003!

I hope to see you tonight - among other things, today we celebrate Torontopedia’s first birthday!

Here are some recent talks:

• Professional Administrator’s Forum - Aug 16 2007 (Private)
• Office 2.0, San Francisco - Sep 5 (Public)
• McMaster University - Wikis and Social Software as it applies to Knowledge Management - 12 Nov 2007 (Private)

And some upcoming ones:

• Society of Internet Professionals: Talk - Weds 28th Nov 2007 (Public)
• CIBC User Experience Conference (Private)

I love socialising and translating hardcore technology into easy-to-understand terms . Just give me a call. 416-786-6752.

I arrived last night in Montreal for the Wiki Symposium at OOPSLA after a brief trip to the UK. http://ws2007.wikisym.org/space/start is the wiki.

Come join us on IRC channel #wikisym on freenode.net.

I’ll be running an Open Space session on http://WikiConsulting.com/ looking to hear how to quickly add value to our field.

Today I’m wearing a grey with black stripe shirt… I shouldn’t be too hard to find!

Cheers, Martin 416-786-6752

Technorati : wikisym

Google may finally be preparing to re-launch wiki service Jotspot, nearly a year after it acquired the company.

Google acquired JotSpot last year, bringing it into it’s over widening portfolio of office-related services. Jotspot was not only a decent wiki, it contained a veritable suite of groupware features capable of giving any vendor a run for its money.

Will surely be a worthy component in the Office 2.0 contenders

Technorati : Google, Jotspot, Wiki

I’ve accepted an invite to speak on two panels (Thurs-Fri) at Office 2.0 in San Francisco, California this week:

• Cultural and Technology in Enterprise 2.0 rollouts (hosted by Jevon MacDonald).
• • This will explore the cultural nuances related to designing, developing and deploying Social Software in the Enterprise. Being a wiki kind of guy I’ll bring some perspectives on challenges on wikis, and how wikis help establish cross-organizational language.
• Mindmapping (hosted by Catherine Shinners)
• • This asks: what’s motivating the use of mapping as an element in collaboration? Discussion from vendors of MindMeister, SnapXT and Itensil as Enterprise 2.0 mapping and mashup solutions.
  • Being a keen advocate of concept mapping I’m curious as to whether these solutions address semantics of mapping, as embedding machine parseability into the maps will be necessary for the world to rely on them during the shift to the Semantic Web.

Included in the registration deal is either a free Apple iphone or a Linux based Playstation 3. If you want to come you better book today as the hotel has capped registration to 550, and there are just 50 spots left.

I’ll be there from the 5th… which just happens to be my 35th birthday! I’m touring around on Saturday, taking the red-eye back on Saturday night - so if you’d like to meet up give me a shout! 416-786-6752.

Technorati : Conceptmapping, Culture, Mindmapping, Web2_0, Wiki

A wiki can be a posting board, knowledge base, project tracker, photo album, and discussion forum. It’s all of these, yet none alone does it justice. Even for the most experienced, a Wiki can be infuriatingly difficult to classify!

From a linguistic perspective, the word ‘Wiki’ is Hawaiian, it means ‘quick’. From an innovation and organisational alignment perspective a Wiki is a power tool: a universal feedback channel, a web-based mechanism to place and reflect on otherwise random observations people have about every aspect of the firm. It is a place to reflect, to innovate and to collectively strategise.

Wikis are used by corporations such as Yahoo R&D, Disney, SAP, The New York Times Motorola, by communities of practice such as the AstroGrid project, by communities such as the towns across the world, and by individuals as their personal knowledge base or website. Mentions of Wikis in the press have been numerous, especially in the past year (2004 saw articles by Business Week, Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, Wired and InfoWorld), and Gartner put Wikis as an emerging technology, primed at the trigger point.

Since the original Wiki inception by Ward Cunningham in 1995 (fuelled by his past addiction to its forerunner, HyperCard), many Wiki technologies have emerged. 2004 has seen the onset of the first commercial, venture funded operators. And the largest Wiki, an online encyclopaedia called Wikipedia, has some 400,000 pages and approximately 140,000 registered editors.

This Article

The rest of this article reminds us that departments often locally optimise without appreciating the knock-on effects on the rest of the firm; that suppressed insights hold a key to innovation and that Wikis are a cheap, proven and widespread way to collaborate on the implications and thus actions needed to act on these insights. It likens a Wiki to a morphing crystal of reflections, that unexpected events are but fractal shards of many bigger stories, and that a Wiki provides room for discourse about the world. Through collectively building definitions around individual and almost unremarkable data points, the conversations collectively build a strategic asset that empowers a community to grapple, analyse and debate realities and that this asset can be harnessed by executives as a key means to engage, depict and inspire a community.

Organisational Disharmony

A common scenario: Sales get a series of unusually large orders. Manufacturing struggle to meet demand, they expense overtime. Meanwhile Marketing quietly congratulates itself on its promotional run: they’ve exceeded targets. Disaster strikes two months later: sales are at an un-seasonal low while consumers slowly use the stocks they’ve hoarded and made available at those promotional prices. Manufacturing is practically idle.

Isolated, individuals and thus departments ignore small signs. Such goal misalignments incur serious costs in the real world, and unnoticed, can be repeated for years on end. Yet such leading indicators, here the trouble experienced in other departments, can be suppressed by the drive for operational efficiency until both the issues and ultimately, tempers, flare. In this context a Wiki is a mechanism for painlessly and uniformly publishing small insights - the little messages not worthy of involving management, for which the observer does not necessarily know who to address, and for which there might not even be any interested parties until a further snippet of information materialises.

Decentralised self-organisation

A Wiki can be a place for collecting intelligence. Better cross-functional understanding facilitates cross-functional harmony and unity. The process of understanding one another on a Wiki results in a deposit, a mine rich of conversations, reasoning and lore. This repository embodies culture, is subject to analysis, can be cheaply introduced to newcomers and can be used to provide channels between strategic and operational staff, tightening the relevance and guidance of decision criteria. A decentralised self-organising coordination mechanism, a wiki creates an interaction point for self-managed teams and lessens the communication burden on managers. The result is more frequent, more direct and more meaningful cross-functional communication. Mistakes get more quickly surfaced and their origins more fully determined, enabling policies and strategies to be more quickly changed, resulting in lower costs and frustration levels.

More, after the jump:

(more…)

Some of my readers will know me from presenting with Bill Ives at KMWorld on the topic of Blogs and Wikis. Well, Bill, Cindy and I have teamed with IBM to provide a training version for corporations and the public.

Here’s an extract from our marketing literature:

Blogs and Wikis in Business: A New Training Course!

Blogs are in the news with increasing frequency. Fortune Magazine named blogging in the top ten business technology trends, and the Harvard Business Review included business blogs in their list of breakthrough ideas. They have made the cover of Business Week and other leading publications. The combination of accessibility, transparency, and archiving that blogs provide has the potential to enrich business communication.

Many firms are also turning to wikis. Their collaborative capabilities align with the rise of project teams as an organizing principle in business processes. Because of their unrestricted editing capabilities wikis foster group thinking and work best within a trusted community. For these reasons, they become an indispensable team tool.

What can blogs and wikis bring to business communication, learning, and knowledge management? How are successful early adopters using them?

IBM leads the way with Canada’s first Web 2.0, wiki and blog training course, delivered to you by the practitioners at Helix Commerce International.

When we sent the campaign, a customer asked IBM whether “this course is theoretical or [whether] there are some hands-on exercises.” See my answer, after the jump… (Or to read at IBM.com or to register)

(more…)

Meaghan McKnight and Rex Lee - BELL SYSTEMS AND TECHNOLOGY

Rex and Meaghan from Bell Canada talked through some pretty exciting Enterprise 2.0 internal projects at Bell Canada. The one that got my attention the most was ID-ah!, a collaboration system their engineers built over the last year based on blogging, wikis and internal voting.

A bit of searching revealed Bell Canada’s Trademark application:

Internet services, namely providing access to a website through which users submit, exchange, review and collaborate on ideas and concepts for innovation and improvement in the fields of technology and telecommunications by means of blogging; providing access to an online electronic database where recently submitted technology and telecommunications ideas and concepts are stored permitting users to vote online to assess the strength of these newly developed ideas or concepts; chat room services; receiving feedback and comments from bloggers, Internet newsgroup discussions; promoting employee incentive award program by recognizing and rewarding employees for their suggested ideas and concepts for innovation Proposed Use in CANADA on services. (page 131)

As I understood it, ID-Ah! is an internal software platform on which anyone in the firm can raise an idea. It publicizes and socializes these ideas across the entire company, opens them up to feedback by allowing anyone else in the firm to build on them, wiki-style, before finally giving all employees the opportunity to vote on those most interesting for submission for formal funding.

They were fairly tight lipped about details, but it was clear that the system has sparked excitement and a degree of healthy early adoption in Bell Canada.

What was perhaps the most interesting thing about the Bell Canada case was that many employees do not wait for formal funding to start applying the ideas they’ve seen suggested elsewhere in the firm: they applied what they read inside their own jurisdiction. An example of this was one person suggested they tried to cut paper consumption: several iterations got to various managers defaulting their printers in the Enterprise to double sided print-outs.

Practically every huge organization has monolith processes, age-old divisions and stalwart cultures. These companies can have the hardest time getting the most out of their new employees. Bell’s ID-ah! system facilitates conversations across their enterprise, providing the means for ideas to be judged by merit, to be iterated by the community at large until workable, and to connect and develop ideas cross-functionally. Sure, not everyone has to participate, but it sounds like Bell Canada have found ways of making contributors feel that they can make an impact. Such systems preserve the spirit of new employees keen to make their mark and energizes the old guard.

Look out for more like this - Bell are early adopters in this case, but many other firms in the telecoms industry and others alike are sure to be keen to replicate such successes.

Technorati : Bell Canada, Conference, McMaster

Take, for instance, the case of IBM, where 40% of the total population is mobile!

TWiki has got code that can facilitate it to do a similar thing, in TWiki’s case you’d run an instance of TWiki on your laptop and synchronize with TWiki’s SyncContrib. SocialText unplugged is based on TiddyWiki.

The difference that SyncContrib is not production code - I cracked what I thought was the hardest (most interesting) problem, the peer-to-peer synchronization, and have hitherto offered to finish it if someone is willing to pay for my time. I did have one offer but I could not be sure I could complete in the budget they were offering, so I turned it down.

This can be a problem with Open Source projects. Maybe someone will contact me about SyncContrib: I do have some time available in the next couple of weeks to crack on at it if someone can throw me a contract.

Technorati : socialtext, twiki, wiki

HyperScope is a high-performance thought processor that enables you to navigate, view, and link to documents in sophisticated ways. It’s the brainchild of Doug Engelbart, the inventor of hypertext and the mouse, and is the first step towards his larger vision for an Open HyperdocumentSystem.

Hyperscope mocks up the vision of Paper Airplane and the Two Way Web.

Paper Airplane and the Two Way Web [will be] an extension of WikiWiki’s, special web sites in which anyone can add and edit content within the browser. Paper Airplane generalizes Wikis across the entire web, bringing them into the browser and transforming what the web could be. Why can’t the browser natively support powerful editing, collaboration, and messaging tools so that every web site can choose to be as transparent and grassroots as traditional Wikis are? Further, the browser itself becomes a platform for hosting this new web; every web browser is also a web server that collaborates with other browsers in a peer-to-peer network, creating a rich system of nodes that provides decentralized and transparent services such as storage, search, naming, and more.

I’ve met Eugene Eric Kim a few times now. Eugene hangs out in the wiki community, but like myself has an eye for the broader view. The team also includes Les Orchard, and if anyone can call himself a computer scientist, it’d be Les. I’m clear they have an awesome set of contributors.

Makes me wish I lived in San Francisco. Any collaborative idea structuring/concept mapping/wiki-centric people in Toronto really should contact me. +1 416 786 6752.

Technorati : englebart, hypertext, wiki

Bringing online what other’s have observed in the past (in addition to what’s available in the here-and-now), and extending one’s reasoning into the knowledge of others (in addition to what one knows themselves) is a key value-add of participating in an online community. Clues from eBay reputation scores or from http://www.ratemds.com (where you can see just how well a doctor is liked by others) extends the reach of your peripheral vision and intuition with amplifications from observations of others.

Modeling reasoning is not easy due to the intricacies of semantics, and compositing reasoning from multiple parties is even harder. That’s where the Semantic Web, and conceptmapping come into play. But for all the technology helping to model, the most difficult is that compositing requires a group to align on their joint position. What’s fascinating about wikis is that they are a negotiation tool (unlike blogs, which are merely for communication), until people go through a joint modeling process, there will only be an exchange of views, not a deep integration and agreement on them.

Innovators & Influencers: From Web 2.0 To Enterprise 2.0 (Digg) http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196602773

Lots of CIOs pay lip service to Enterprise 2.0, the sometimes esoteric movement toward using consumer technologies like blogs and wikis to create a more collaborative business environment. JP Rangaswami not only is driving those Web processes internally as CIO of BT Global Services, but he’s also helping the carrier’s customers get on board.

A new emphasis on social networking and connecting people, rather than e-commerce, which consumers did not trust in 2000.

Given the dismal failure of so many KM implementations - which were often poorly thought-out and brittle databases - a shift to the use of Social Media for collaboration is proving itself as a worthy (albeit horribly late) successor to email.

A role for unmuddling

There is a huge lag between the multitude of Web 2.0 tools available and the average skill-level of the general population to adopt these tools. Workers have a dizzying array of choices, and the need to get Corporate Knowledge rationalized as an asset for the firm fuels corporates to adopt standards, and fuels a boom in demand for training.

Promise in Collaboration Power

Imagination is more important than knowledge… Albert Einstein

Social Media is a powerful addition to Org Chart and HR-driven Incentives, as employees don’t need support of their boss to find out what another department does and to start working with peers in far flung part of the company. The reduction in the manager’s responsibility to explicitly transmit communications make interacting across the enterprise much cheaper, opening up all sorts of new possibilities for very different types of innovation because thoughts aren’t just being amplified by the people you’ve already met and agreed with, instead they are being looked at by fresh minds, who can fill in gaps and use your case to amplify their own needs. The transparency affords the company’s staff with the ability to swarm to what they find most interesting, raising engagement and productivity in the firm. Social Media is Middleware for Thoughts.

New Leadership Demands

However, the number of people you can maintain a sequence of interactions with changes from 7-12 (the typical Span of Control) to theoretically proportional to the square of the number of employees in the firm, which gets to 1,000,000 connections with 1,000 people. Such a radical increase in complexity is a step off into the unknown for leaders. Moving to this model requires a strategy centered on collaboration rather than control, methods to recognize complexity (in place of problems that are merely terrifically complicated), a culture dedicated to the aims of the firm, and a (sometimes blind) trust that it will all actually turn out for the best.

This can be difficult for Today’s Leaders

Every generation discovers the world for itself and adopts the best tools available to it, but the bulk of today’s workers and leaders don’t have this experience.

Consultancies can help

My job is helping leaders and managers see this new world. I can help support your business case with adoption models, stories from the field and using minimal interventions to affect and inform change. We help clients enhance Growth and Innovation using key interventions across a set of interrelated systems in ten dimensions: Governance, Strategy, Process, Information Technology, People, Culture and Change and Measurement and how these play out through Purpose, Identity, Reputation, Trust, Commerce, Transparency, Networks, Boundaries and Real Time Collaboration.

The result is a strategy facilitating the development of Collaboration and Culture that takes advantage of such Complexity.

To: Value-Networks@googlegroups.com
From:Andrew.Webster, kingbridgecentre.com
Subject:Networks and Collaboration

Wow, now that is a ridiculously broad subject line.

To begin concisely, I was hoping there may be some good ideas out there for how to use social networking tools as a means to begin conversations virtually and asynchronously before meetings or conferences. I have experienced several, but nothing satisfactory (not certain if platform, administrator or both are to blame.) They are like dating services, they are underused for a variety of excuses, and I’ve never seen a visual output to represent the dynamics of conversation that take place, only the dynamics that the profiling aspect recognizes. If anyone has seen a good model or a promising idea, please share.

The use of wikis as a pre and post meeting tool is becoming more widely adopted. They can be easy and cheap to create and maintain (www.wikispaces.com, www.wetpaint.com). I’m a big believer, but I’ve seen the ugly side as well. Are there alternatives anyone feels strongly about? How are you thought leaders and innately curious folk extending collaboration among a network beyond a central physical meeting?

I replied:

In terms of existing, IBM’s history flow is one static representation of conversation sediment build up over time.

What would be more useful is the means for participants going to conference to profile themselves and their goals and have this match people with one another before, during and after the event. The profiles would act as a weighted graph of attractors, pulling conceptually adjacent conversations into nearby virtual or real locations. Conceptually adjacent conversations would suggest new topics. I imagine a model of spring-weighted connections that represent the conversation choice dilemmas individuals would be faced with, and taken holistically, these dilemmas could be used to plan the timing of when the real-life conversation should occur. A mapping method could paint the idea value chain, in an idea landscape, and correlate who’s interested in each part and match that up with who has experience or network connections with such experience.

Virtual spaces such as Second Life are full of promise. Why limit to physical space? Why limit people to real time? You can replay time in the virtual world, and bring people back into conversations. In the virtual world you can multi-task so to participate in multiple conversations simultaneously.

What’s your take?

The BBC reported today in “Virginia police sign out on code words”

Since they were first introduced in the 1930s, abbreviations such as 10-4 and 10-20 have been the natural language of the American cop; part of police folklore.

After many years on the force the commander of the Arlington police department’s operations division is adjusting to life after the 10-codes.

On a drive through the streets of Arlington, Capt Nuneville explained that the problem was a lack of compatibility.

Individual counties have their own 10-codes, and while some are common to all police forces, many are not.

When talking to organizations, I often contest that a key value of a wiki is to surface language used by siloed groups and to provide a mechanism to blend language as a common way of looking at the world.

(more…)

[Inspector Lohmann] explores one of the central reasons why (IMO) blogging and connecting with each other to work at building new relationships is so important now, and why it will grow in importance.

Hierarchies have always worked through the control of information and power, hence the well-known adage “Knowledge Is Power”. It is the core of how hierarchy works (don’t believe me? Take a quick look at any work design methodologies in use by corporations around the world, and you’ll quickly see that almost all decisions are guided by assessments of hierarchically-arranged knowledge).

It takes a lot of effort to keep the majority of the population in fetters, and the greatest fear of the power elite is that one day the subordinate population will remove the rheum from their eyes and see the ways in which they are manacled, and they will see that they have the power of numbers on their side.

Social justice is inevitable. In our time, the world cannot sustain corporate globalization’s grotesque injustices and insane exploitation of people and land - humanity will not permit it if it seeks to survive. There’s only so long a society can continue to enslave and repress the vast majority of its citizens before they rise up and demand that they be allowed to live their own life.

The world is smaller now. The world is connected now. We cannot but see how we are all connected, and that we have a responsibility to each other.

I don’t agree that corporation leaders actually want to “keep the majority of the population in fetters” (indeed they have a duty to harness the initiative of their workers, and its rather a waste in today’s war for talent) and I don’t need to comment on the many injustices in our society, but I do stress that social software decimates the fundamental assumption that transmitting information is expensive. Social Software technologies such as blogs and wiki make communicating and negotiating ridiculously and fantastically cheap.

This inversion, from explicit to implicit communication, shifts organizational transparency thus creating a paradigm of mass-socialization. In turn, this enables flatter team structures and allows a transient workforce to function effectively. Giving voice to a despondent workforce using these tools creates both accountability and engagement at both the corporate and individual levels.

If knowledge is power, one might surmise that unfettered access to knowledge, i.e. mass-socialization, will let loose the power. In fact, it might indeed unseat a few paranoid control-centric managers (who would surely think that their actions would be effective or useful in blocking this earthquake of change) and it won’t replace the need for effective processes needed for compliance purposes.

Collaboration is the new competitive paradigm. When we can see how we are all connected, and ideas flow around those who don’t want to work with them, ideas can speed to innovation at a faster rate.

Canada should hear this call. Other countries such as the UK have.

If your organization needs wiki consulting, or you want to be part of a team that makes it happen, contact me. I’m only a phone call (416 786 6752), or blog comment, away.

Technorati : Blogs, Culture, Organisational Transparency, Organizational Transparency, Wiki
Del.icio.us : Blogs, Culture, Organisational Transparency, Organizational Transparency, Wiki

Galan Bridgeman’s article at Microsoft.com explains some good software options at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/web/expert/bridgman_05november21.mspx

This report compares Confluence and TWiki from the point of view of pasting of HTML content.

I made this report as I was surprised by what happened when was trying this first on our corporate Confluence extranet and thought I better check that the latest version of Confluence, as run on Atlassian.com was consistent with our install.

(more…)

This is the slide I’d shown him. Based on some notes I’d made a few years back, I’d compiled this for our Blogs and Wiki Workshop at KM World 2006 but I didn’t get chance to show it due to time constraints. Bryan found it useful so here it is

All forms of sharing conversation online:

• eliminate the masses of copies inherent with email,
  • and reduce total disk space and the management problems that ensue;
• this therefore:
  • ensures consistent results from searches,
  • means messages can be pointed to by links,
  • provides a starting point whereby everyone that can view the same, online copy

Blogs and Discussion forums are Conversation tools:

• Discussion forums (such as phpBB) centralize conversations, creating an asset for the organization that runs them.
• Blogs thread together conversations dispersed across blogs mostly belonging to individuals. The generates a real sense of identity on blogs, the blog effectively becomes an individual’s face on the internet - bringing together everything that person says - raises the stakes and enhancing engagement. Discussion forums seldom provide such a contributor-centered perspective. Bill Ives can tell you a wealth of information about blogging.

Wikis do more than exchange views, they facilitate the integration of views. Wikis are Negotiation tools.

• Wikis are means for a group to truly negotiate over meaning, align on values and build action plans together. The open nature of Wikis, where anyone can move or reword content facilitates collaborative idea structuring. The very lack of structured barriers between postings enables the next person to cut & paste conversation fragments around the wiki . Working on the same document (rather than linking between posts, or tacking on yet another comment) creates a workspace for situated cognition, where participants are forced to co-author the document. Co-authoring, in turn, ensures participates find a wording that summarizes the content, first by acknowledging differences and often by bridging through super-ordinate, more profound, concepts that explain a dilemma.

Such bridging on helps co-authors find common understanding and align on principles for go-forward actions. Because a wiki is online the content of the wiki is visible through an enterprise. This provides process and decision transparency across the whole organization’s idea value chain. Further, the nature of a wiki is to provide the means to surface simplicity. Anyone viewing the wiki has the ability to reword the content that has accumulated and make it easier to read.

Such reinterpretation and rewording provides real value to readers. Readers no longer need to wade through multiple views, often containing duplicate and obsolete content. Instead readers can read the summary.

Neither of the other forms of communication listed above provide that.

I hope you find this explanation useful. And as always, I welcome feedback.

Technorati : Blogs, Discussion Groups, Email, Wiki, km06, km2006