The International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration

WikiSym 2010 website
July 7-8-9 in Gdansk, Poland.

Co-located with Wikimania 2010 (Intl. Conference on Wikimedia Foundation projects, Wikimania 2010 website).

Peer-reviewed and archived in the ACM Digital Library.

Important dates

1. March 7: Submission deadline for research papers.
2. March 21: Submission deadline for Doctoral Symposium proposals, posters, demonstrations, workshops, panels, tutorials.
3. May 4: Notification of acceptance for research papers.
4. May 11: Notification of acceptance for Doctoral Symposium proposals, posters, workshops, tutorials, panels.
5. July 7-9: WikiSym 2010!

Summary
WikiSym, the International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration, will be held this summer in Gdansk, Poland. Starting this year, WikiSym aims to explicitly broaden its scope, exploring not only the thriving wiki community, but also other open movements and open collaboration initiatives. This includes related areas such as open online communities, collaborative creation of multimedia content (with or without wikis), and open journalism and publishing, just to list a few examples.

Furthermore, our goal is to establish WikiSym as a venue for the exchange of information, experiences and practices among an interdisciplinary audience, including researchers, practitioners, industry representatives and experts with a wide variety of different backgrounds.

As a result, WikiSym has established 3 complementary tracks to merge the contributions from such a diverse community:

Wiki track: Focused on research in wiki technology, wiki websites, wiki communities, and in general any kind of initiative pivoting around wiki software.

Industry track:This new track will focus on the specific needs of enterprises and private companies interested in sharing and promoting their experiences around wikis and open collaboration projects/products/initiatives.

Open collaboration track: This track is a dedicated venue for sharing research results and experiences in initiatives that may not be built specifically on wiki software, but share the “wiki way” of organization. These may include open collaborations, open communities, and open movements that allow the interchange of ideas and contributions from participants with a range of interests and motivations.

Read the rest of the entry at the WikiSym 2010 Website

For the past two years I have held positions at WikiSym. From Demos and Posters Chair in 2008, Publicity Chair in 2009, this year I am Industry Track Chair, focusing “on the specific needs of enterprises and private companies interested in sharing and promoting their experiences around wikis and open collaboration projects/products/initiatives.”

Unlike the call for papers, which follows academic procedures, the Industry Track takes it’s own course. I’ll be inviting a myriad of vendors to suggest topics, bring customers and participate on panels and round-tables.

However, in the spirit of open collaboration, the more help I can get the bigger and better we can make the WikiSym 2010 Industry Track. I’ve presently a great deal of work on and I’d appreciate being able to depend on a team around me.

So, there you go, a call for papers, industry topics and help. Come to WikiSym: it’s a great mixing pot.

Any Beatles older fans (40s, 50s, 60s) so excited about The Beatles: Rock Band that will start gaming for the first time because of its release?

In case you don’t know:

Rock Band is a console video game that allows up to four players to play popular rock music songs using with controllers modeled after musical instruments. Players can play the lead guitar, bass guitar, and drums parts or sing through a USBmicrophone. The game scores the players based on accuracy to match scrolling musical “notes” while playing instruments, or by the singer’s ability to match pitch on vocals.

It’s great fun, and you can buy it for home or play Rock Band in social settings such as at http://www.semisolidmedia.com - which runs a Rock Band night at Rocky Raccoons in Yonge & Eglinton here in Toronto, first Sat of each month.

Anyhow, the game makers have just released a new edition that instead of playing recent songs focuses on the Beatles songs. With this (new/old!) focus, so might come new demand.

I’m forwarding this request as I think it is a good example of how technology is changing society, and I hope someone here might be able to provide an interview for the Globe & Mail.

Please respond to Dakshana directly, thanks!

Thanks!

On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 3:05 PM, Bascaramurty, Dakshana wrote:

Via Paul Hunter, NextGen Player, Canada’s Premier Gaming Blog), forwarded to me through Eric Brazier (http://www.semisolidmedia.com)

Don’t know if you remember me — I got in touch a few months back for a story I was working on about diversity in gaming.

I’m working on another piece now about how The Beatles: Rock Band and Guitar Hero: Van Halen are out to appeal to older gamers or perhaps even introduce older people to gaming for the first time. Is this something you think you’d have some time and expertise to talk to me about? Also, if you know any older people who were maybe Beatles or Van Halen fans a few decades ago that are excited about the release of these games, think you could put me in touch with them?

By older fans (I’m taking 40s, 50s, 60s), who you know of that are excited about The Beatles: Rock Band and maybe wading into gaming for the first time because of its release?”
Thanks so much!

Dakshana Bascaramurty
Reporter, The Globe and Mail
Desk: 416-585-5509

My opinion?

Not exciting. Overpriced. Broken.

I am livid that Macspeech Dictate 1.3 is broken beyond usability, that it would cost me so much to buy and ship 1.5 to Canada, and that even 1.5 is reported to be so broken.

Injury to ship beta software. Insult to demand so much for an “upgrade” that still doesn’t work. I bought in January, but the free upgrade is only if you bought in the last month…

I was looking forward to unshelving it. Looks like ebay with caveat emptor is my only option.

To which I reply:

Thanks Ray. I am glad it works for you.

Did you read http://www.macspeech.com/extensions/forums/topic.php?id=323 “Pay an upgrade fee to get the software to work?”

Have you never had it write backward in the dictate notepad? http://www.macspeech.com/extensions/search/search.php?search=backwards…

The technology is cool, but definitely beta quality.

Granted, if your typing is poor, it offers value. But if, like me you can type quickly, it needs a usability hike to make it usable.

1.3 and 1.5 are reported to not even work in MacOS 1.5.7.

They’ve produced 1.5.1 since 1.5. So where is 1.3.1?

Let’s do the math. I paid ~$200 for it. Upgrade is $54.95 USD, shipping to Canada: $31.06 FedEx. USD Total: 86.01 Convert to CAD: $93.77. Now add expected FedEx brokerage fee: $20. Total: 113.77

So, the beta quality software I have is worth $200-114 = $86.

Except that it doesn’t work in 10.5.7, and there is no upgrade path. So, what’s it worth?

Net loss: $200.

The protests on the MacSpeech forums are loud and clear. I sure hope MacSpeech will start listening.

What an un-Apple like experience.

I can understand charging an upgrade fee for software, but only once your product works. And MacSpeech say that they don’t do digital downloads because 1.5GB download is “too big”.

Shelfware. Sadly.

Each of these episodes explored a swathe of gaps, which after debate, workers, industry leaders, government drew some conclusions about issues. The issues and opportunities that arose are documented on http://wiki.theagenda.tvo.org/ and there are some 45 short videos from each breakout session listed on You Tube http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=1341CA7B9BA9C666

TVO presented at http://www.meetup.com/TorontoWikiTuesdays/calendar/9904930/

Atlassian, a leader vendor (I have done many wiki deployments of Confluence: it’s a solid product), is offering a new multi-user license of their flagship product for just $5. Further, this price will apply to support and maintenance. The offer expires in five days!

If you need advice on how Confluence stacks up strategically or technically against competitor wiki products, I’ll happily spend a few minutes with you explaining.

I hope this helps, I think it’s a great deal.

Best, Martin Cleaver
Skype: mrjcleaver
416-786-6752
http://www.blendedperspectives.com/

JIRA & Confluence for only $5 each!

While you may still be evaluating an Atlassian product, we have a special announcement. This week, we’re offering 5-user licenses of JIRA and Confluence for only $5 each. We’re calling it the Atlassian Stimulus Package and it’s our way of supporting small teams and small businesses in this difficult economic environment. Best of all, we’re going to donate every penny to charity!

There is no catch and no strings attached. You’ll get fully functional, supported copies of JIRA and Confluence for only $5 each. After a year, you can renew support and maintenance of your license for just $5.

The Atlassian Foundation is donating all proceeds to Room to Read (www.roomtoread.org), a charity that helps the world’s future entrepreneurs by building libraries and schools for children in developing nations.

Get all the details at www.atlassian.com/starter. Hurry, offer ends in just a few days!

Cheers,

The Atlassians

PS Twitter this http://bit.ly/AtlassianStarter and tell a friend about the starter licenses — they’re great for small teams and help charity.

–
Martin Cleaver MSc MBA
http://twitter.com/mrjcleaver
+1 416-786-6752 (GMT-5)

I object that:

1. If there was really a scarcity tariffs should be priced at decreasing marginal rate, not at a punitive one
2. This affects everyone but the deadline is tonight, and there’s been no public consultation

Dear Valued Customer,

We are writing to you today as many activities are underway to shape/reshape Internet use as you all know it. Over the last year some of you have been made aware and/or have seen activities on throttling in the news or in your daily lives. Another proceeding relating to the Internet in Canada required Telecom providers (Bell/Telus/etc.) to provide ISPs with wholesale service speeds that match those that they offer to their own retail customers.

Specifically, Bell has been directed by the CRTC to provide matching speeds which would allow us all to have more flexibility in our day to day online requirements. Instead of adhering to these directives, Bell decided to take this issue to the federal Cabinet and at the same time file a tariff application with the CRTC proposing to introduce Usage Based Billing (UBB) on its wholesale customer accounts.

What does this mean for you, the consumer?

Bell provides TekSavvy with last mile, wholesale DSL access services, which TekSavvy uses to provide you with your Internet access. If Bell were to be allowed to introduce UBB on this service, a cap of 60GB would be imposed on all of its users, with very heavy penalties per Gigabyte afterwards (multiple times more than our current per Gigabyte rate of $0.25/GB on overages). This would inherently all but remove Unlimited internet services in Ontario/Quebec and potentially cause large increases in internet costs
from month to month.

If you’d like to make your comments/concerns known about what Bell is attempting to do, please do so here:

http://support.crtc.gc.ca/crtcsubmissionmu/forms/Telecom.aspx?lang=e

Select the word “Tariff” from the drop down list.

Add the following in Subject Line “File Number # 8740-B2-200904989 - Bell Canada - TN 7181″ and make your thoughts known!

The deadline for filing your comments is today at midnight, so hurry!

Regards,

Rocky

Rocky Gaudrault
Chief Executive Officer
TekSavvy Solutions Inc.

Reserve you spot & get on the announcements list: http://www.meetup.com/TorontoWikiTuesdays/calendar/9904930/

Speaker: Keith Robinson
This month’s speaker is from TV Ontario and will speak about the use of wikis for TVO’s The Agenda

When and Where:
6:30pm, Tuesday 16th April
See http://www.meetup.com/TorontoWikiTuesdays/calendar/9904930/ for location

Synopsis

The idea behind the AgendaCamp (http://tvo.org/agendacamp) concept was to marry the barcamp (http://barcamp.org) model with the production of a live current affairs television program in order to engage the community to help create television as the Agenda with Steve Paikin went on a five city tour across Ontario.

AgendaCamp is a unique new concept that marries the best aspects of public broadcasting and emerging social media. At AgendaCamp members of the public, expert guests, and host Steve Paikin join together face to face in a local venue for a series of workshops focused on regional economies. Any participant can propose and lead a discussion. Participants capture the event by live blogging, shooting video and uploading to Youtube, taking pictures and creating an interactive wiki. The online audience can follow the conference as it unfolds, and continue the discussion after the event.

Despite the high tech veneer, AgendaCamp is not simply about preaching to the converted. Several locations were remote in communities (including AgendaCamp Thunder Bay which took place at the Fort William First Nation Community Centre). A big part of the experience is teaching ordinary citizens how to use these new digital tools.

Over the course of the first four events, AgendaCamp has had more than 300 in-the-flesh participants including: mayors, MPPs, MPs, cabinet ministers, native chiefs, policy wonks, students, professors, factory workers, and factory owners. It has generated more than 100 user created Youtube video clips, and hundreds of wiki entries that have been viewed tens of thousands of times.

And while AgendaCamp is designed to stand on its own, the ideas generated by it have reached many hundreds of thousands through the Agenda on the Road broadcasts. Clips from the camp are rolled into the broadcast and participants are able to ask the panel questions as part of the live studio audience.

Keith will take us through how TVO used the wiki to: plan the events, engage participant interaction through, during and after the events and how the wiki became pivotal for both production and Agenda Camp outcome purposes.

About our Speaker and his organization
Keith Robinson is the supervising editor of tvo.org. TVO is Ontario’s public educational media organization and a trusted source of interactive educational content that informs, inspires, and stimulates curiosity and thought.

Who should come and why

Interested in the topic? Got an opinion? Or just interested to network? Come join our community.

* TV professionals * Those interested in using wikis to amass and disseminate opinion * Managers and leaders responsible for evaluating possible use of wikis * Change transformation agents * Organizational design professionals interested in creating organisational transparency * Consultants and designers who build integration, navigation, visuals and plugins * Those interested in Deki Wiki * Wiki users Wiki gardeners who improve content clarity, and, if you are still reading, * You!

About our Sponsors
Citadel Rock provides extranets and intranet strategies based on the Tiki Wiki platform.

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 Wikis and Open Collaboration.

Verna Allee is speaking at Knowledge Workers Toronto tomorrow night (no cost to attend) and giving a training all day ($199 USD) at Toronto’s Centre for Social Innovation.

Verna’s paper, “Value Network Analysis: Value Conversion of Tangible and Intangible Assets,” just won “Highly Commended Award” in the 2009 Emerald Publishing’s Literati Network Awards for Excellence.

For more information or to reserve one of the few remaining places, please see http://www.meetup.com/Knowledge-Workers-Toronto/

See you at the Groundhog Pub!!
Best,
Martin.

–
Martin Cleaver MSc MBA

This month’s Toronto Wiki Tuesday speakers are from Toronto Public Library. They will speak about their work on Wikis for Healthcare

Date: 10 March 2008
Time: 6:30 for 7pm

Event Sponsor: Citadel Rock

When and Where:

6:30pm, Tuesday 10th March
See http://www.meetup.com/TorontoWikiTuesdays/calendar/9716560/ for location and sign-up

Synopsis

In a large public organization it can be a challenge to quickly adopt new technologies, especially technologies such as wikis which promote decentralization of control.

Donna MacLeod and Sandy Arbuthnot of the Toronto Public Library will discuss how the library has come to use collaborative web tools, the challenges they faced and what they did to overcome these challenges.

The talk will also guide us through two wikis created for the the people of Ontatio and hosted on a low-cost wiki provider: Consumer Health Information Service (CHIS) and CHIS asthma information. Both sites provide reliable health information, written in understandable language, from a Canadian perspective.

They will also describe ways library staff use wikis internally, and an give us an insight into possible future directions for wikis in their online services.

Other Announcements

Derek Wong will provide a short recap of Recent Changes Camp 2009, a 3-day conference on wiki that took place in February in Portland, Oregon.

About our Speakers

Donna MacLeod

Donna MacLeod is a consumer health librarian, providing reference and information services in English and in French to all Ontarians through Toronto Public Library’s Consumer Health Information Service. She also edits and maintains the FACT website, a complementary and alternative health website. In addition, Donna freelances as a writer (articles and computer documentation), researcher, editor and translator (to and from English and French).

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

* Healthcare and Library professionals * Public interested in the use of Wikis for Toronto Services * 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 wikis and open collaboration.

Capturing Information for Billing
Being self-employed it’s very important to me to ensure that I bill my clients correctly. While my clients keep telling me that they appreciate the level of billing I give them, that billing has always incurred a great deal of overhead cost to document.

Last year I used product for the PC called http://www.timesnapper.com. I loved this program: it gave me a breakdown of what I was doing and when I was doing it. (It also collected screenshots which were pretty handy but the analysis was where the value was for me: reclaiming a few minutes was easily enough to pay for the program).

When I moved to a Mac I had to find something new because Timesnapper didn’t make a Mac version. After a brief flirt with RescueTime, I settled on Slife, from Slifelabs.com. The main reason I preferred Slife was because, unlike Rescue Time, which sends your personal information up to the Rescue Time Website, Slife maintains a local database.

Slife captures your web and document histories so you know where you browsed and what you edited. After the fact you can quickly easily figure out when you’re working and when you were “relaxing”, and knowing you’ll be faced with the history adds another level of motivation to get my day started earlier

Capturing for Personal Knowledge Management

I have always been very keen on personal knowledge management. Capturing enables reuse and refinement, and later, delegation.

As useful as Slife it is for billing and productivity, it doesn’t tell the complete story. e.g. What if I’m not a computer?

Well, I do have an iPhone. With this I make phone calls and I go places. So, of course, the iPhone call log knows who I have spoken to. I found and hacked a program (calllog2ical.rb) that queries this database and fixed it so it creates a log of the output instead of writing details to ical. For the GPS my (jailbroken) iPhone has an application called “Locatable”. Locatable really is a tool for programmers that knows your current GPS location and can call a script you write. So I use it to call back to a script that writes a log every 30 minutes noting wherever I go.

I work a lot in a Linix command shell. Whether configuring servers or installing software, a lot of it is tedious detail-oriented expert work. A problem can easily take 45 minutes to solve and result in a command of one or two lines. If six months later, you can hit the same problem, and wish you could remember what you had typed. So, I wrote a modification to my UNIX command line profile (based on the Bash External History method) to record exactly what commands are given to the command line, and I log these too.

When editing I mostly use Emacs. For this I wrote, using emacs-lisp, a script to log which files I was saving. (And, while I was there, created a mechanism whereby (almost) every edit a file would result in a RCS history file to be saved alongside. RCS is very commonly installed, blatantly obvious and doesn’t conflict with modern revision control systems). Now from the log I can see which files I edited, and from the history RCS file, see what I changed.

I’ve hacked together an IRC conversation extractor too. If I was involved in a conversation, it copies that part into the log file, and on to the wiki.

And recently, I built a client to pull in my history of tweets from twitter. These now get filed into my wiki too.

None of the code is production quality. It is all Perl scripts, Shell scripts, and nasty things that invade application’s private databases looking for data.

I’ve discovered it is really neat, albeit sometimes a little anal, to know exactly what I did the last three months, who I spoke to, where I went and what I worked on.

There’s always more I’d like to add: e.g. a call log, such that I can make voice notes or written notes after I’ve concluded a call. And why not share those notes with the person with whom I’ve conversed?

I should, of course, make all this code available. Open source it. I have no objection to doing so: ask me and I will. Indeed many of the components that comprise my solution are already using is open source. Frankly, I wouldn’t want to maintain the code for a community, for it really is not central to what I do. But I would prefer to move my code base into an existing system.

I know companies are working on products that do this type of thing. Do you know of any? How about Open Source ones?

Sometimes I’ve gone so far as to record them as audio files.
And now, I hope, I’ve found a means to blend these two worlds: MacSpeech Dictate.

We’ll see…

So I went down to the Toronto Eaton Centre Apple Store today and bought MacSpeech. Retail. (I realised that the CAD is doing so pathetically against the USD that even with cheaper software prices in the US this was less expensive to buy in Canada. And, I had to get the packaging because it includes a hardware USB noise cancelling voice-enhancer. When I bought VMware Fusion, for which I had Amazon.com post the CD + packaging to a friend in the US and then got the friend to email me the registration code and throw away the CD etc: insanely cost 50% less than buying online, but, forgive me, I digress. )

I installed MacSpeech this afternoon, tried to set up a profile and it crashed. Repeatedly. For you geeks: SIGBUS. In the background I could see it waiting to update the software, but was unable to do so until I got past the profile set up. Eventually, after giving up on waiting for a reply from @macspeech on twitter, I did discover how to update the software from the MacSpeech site. There’s no “Download” link apparent, but you can find it on http://www.macspeech.com/pages.php?pID=13

So! I have audio recordings, many of them. Some of just me, others of me talking to clients. I want transcripts. Not perfect ones, just transcripts good enough to find the piece of audio that matches a given keyword.

I determined that MacSpeech “doesn’t support” audio files created outside the context of either the supplied headset or one of a set of specific digital voice recorders. Well, I’m not looking for perfect transcripts and, given that I already have the audio files, and have an iPhone so will be using that to record (if at all possible), I want a way to input from plain audio, accepting that the higher the bit rate the better accuracy I can expect.

I’ll find out tomorrow if the following little gem works:

I installed Dictate yesterday, and tested it while recording a podcast with Audacity, using Soundflower and the “Software Playthrough” feature (look in Audio I/O prefs) on Audacity.

I first had to set up a profile with Soundflower (2ch) as the audio device, but Software Playthrough made that work just fine. I was able to read the text in the Dictate window into Audacity, and Dictate picked it all up seamlessly.

A note on practicalities: I had intended to dictate the whole of this blog post, but doing that will have to wait as I am writing this from the comfort of my bed whilst my wife and child are nearby, and sleeping. For now I am typing, inspired by the possibilities. And soon, I’ll dream them too.

Our talk events, Knowledge Workers Toronto, aim at the practices and management to benefit the needs of the worker, such that the worker, and consequently the organizations that hire them, can make sustained and best of their talents. Our aim is to bridge the insights of the worker, corporates and academics in a practical, lighthearted and informative way.

We would appreciate if you would extend our invitation to those in your network who may wish to attend.

Regards and thanks,
Martin

PS. I also run Toronto Wiki Tuesdays, which has a similar format but is focused exclusively on the applications of the wiki paradigm, technologies and culture. More details about our past meetings can be found at http://www.torontowikituesdays.com/ and signed up at http://www.meetup.com/TorontoWikiTuesdays/

–
Martin Cleaver MSc MBA
Principal, http://www.blendedperspectives.com/
Founder, http://www.torontowikituesdays.com/
Publicity chair, http://www.wikisym.org/

———- Forwarded message ———-

New Business Strategy and Networking Meetup Group!
Knowledge Workers Toronto
Knowledge Workers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_worker) are the primary drivers of business activity, with knowledge workers outnumbering non-knowledge workers 4 to 1. The term, defined as one who works primarily with information or one who develops and uses knowledge in the workplace, was coined by Peter Drucker in 1959.

Knowledge workers are faced with high levels of autonomy in their day-to-day work roles yet are expected to pull together en-masse with the rest of the workforce. To thrive in today’s society Knowledge Workers need to be both information and technologically literate.

Come and meet other locals from all knowledge-intensive industries to discuss the goals, issues and opportunities facing knowledge management professionals. Share your experiences of issues and network across industry boundaries.

This group’s first Meetup is already scheduled! Knowledge Workers Toronto

January 28, 2009, Knowledge Worker Meeting, “Expertise Networking” Joel Alleyne — Wednesday, January 28, 2009

His story highlights how the OLPC project (which I reported on in 2006) is changing culture, getting kids to be more open and sharing as well as giving them much more meaningful avenues to both learn and teach each other.

Here’s an extract of Ivan’s Story. Go read it.

Kids started talking to each other outside of school hours over the mesh, and working together more while in school.

It’s not that the kids are starving, it’s just that they don’t have very much; what they do have, they’re reluctant to share. With the laptops, the kids had to turn to each other to learn how to use them. Then they realized it was easy to send each other pictures and things they’ve written — and it became commonplace. The sharing, asserts Mrs. Cornejo, extended into the physical world, where once jealously-guarded personal items increasingly started being passed around between the kids, if somewhat nervously.

“Children’s fathers used to seethe with fury when the laptops were passed out, because the kids no longer wanted to help work in the field all day,” he continued.

“I didn’t know how we’d stop the fathers from revolting and making the kids return their XOs,” he says, shaking his head slightly. “The kids solved the dilemma for me: they taught their fathers how to use the Internet and a search engine.”

The fathers, I later heard, all decided an education could stop their children from having no choice but to work the field all day as they did. With the laptops in place, the school was no longer a black box whose efficacy had to be taken on faith: the kids could prove they were learning. Schooling had gone open source.

http://radian.org/notebook/astounded-in-arahuay

The power that Rogers exert in the market for wireless, wireless data and broadband internet is utterly ridiculous. The competitive situation for these services in Canada has always been poor, but the situation was made much worse when they bought Microcell.

Since we’ve had GSM monopoly the ONLY way to use innovative GSM products is through Rogers-Fido. Canada has the highest pricing for wireless data in the world. The result is the public shy away from using such products, and a knock-on effect is that this threatens our industry’s willingness to build services upon these products to innovate.

Broadband and wireless data pricing reflects that company’s need for these services are inelastic with respect to price. Rogers are market skimming.

At the very least all the wireless carriers should be made to include their System Access Fees in their advertised price.

http://www.reportonbusiness.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080630.wiphone30/CommentStory/Business/;

Today, the CRTC responded:

Dear Martin Cleaver,

Thank you for your correspondence dated July 2, 2008 regarding Rogers Communications Inc. (“Rogers”).

The Competition Bureau (the “Bureau”) is an independent law enforcement agency that contributes to the prosperity of Canadians by protecting and promoting competitive markets and enabling informed consumer choice. As part of its mandate, the Bureau is responsible for the administration and enforcement of the Competition Act (the “Act”), a federal law that governs most business conduct in Canada. The Act contains both civil and criminal provisions aimed at preventing anti-competitive practices from taking place in the marketplace.

As a general principle, the Bureau does not regulate prices or dictate distribution policies to firms. The purpose of the Act is to ensure that firms do not create, abuse, or artificially maintain their power within a market. However, legitimate exercise of any market power, including setting prices, is not a violation of the Act. In general, businesses are free to set prices as they see fit and let the market determine if these prices are viable and can be sustained.

The abuse of dominance provision of the Act (section 79) seeks to prevent dominant firms from engaging in anti-competitive acts that harm competitors and significantly impact competition in a given market. In order for conduct to violate section 79 of the Act and for the Bureau to obtain an order to stop it, the following three conditions must be met:

(a) one or more person substantially or completely control, throughout Canada or any area thereof, a class or species of business,

(b) that person or those persons have engaged in or are engaging in a practice of anti-competitive acts, and
(c) the practice has had, is having or is likely to have the effect of preventing or lessening competition substantially in a market.

Under paragraph 79(1)(a) of the Act, the Bureau must be able to show that a firm, in this case Rogers, holds a dominant position in a market and that it has used this dominant position to enhance or entrench its market power. Furthermore, under paragraph 79(1)(b) of the Act, the Bureau is required to show that Rogers is engaging in a “practice of anti-competitive acts” with an intended negative effect on a competitor that is predatory, disciplinary or exclusionary.

It is the Bureau’s view that Rogers does not hold a dominant position in the market for mobile wireless telephony services in Canada. Rogers is in direct competition with two other major wireless providers, in addition to a number of smaller carriers, all of whom offer handsets that are functional substitutes for the iPhone. Moreover, Rogers’ recently-announced pricing plans for the iPhone do not constitute an anti-competitive act as these pricing plans do not have an intended negative effect on a competitor that is predatory, disciplinary or exclusionary. Rather, they reflect an attempt by Rogers to market a product consumers find desirable and set prices accordingly. This may ultimately be disciplined by competitor responses, and/or by consumers rejecting such a strategy. In either case, market forces will determine if these prices can be sustained.

For more information on the Bureau’s approach to enforcing section 79 of the Act, please consult our Enforcement Guidelines on the Abuse of Dominance Provisions at http://www.competitionbureau.gc.ca/epic/site/cb-bc.nsf/vwapj/aod.pdf/$FILE/aod.pdf.

Again, thank you for taking the time to bring this matter to our attention.

Sincerely,

Stephanie Paolin
Agent du droit de la concurrence | Direction générale des affaires civiles
Competition Law Officer | Civil Matters Branch

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r20824864-URL-Manipulation

What Rogers has done is review the URL structure used by this feature when using the Microsoft Live.com search provider. This particular provider takes what is typed into the address bar, when DNS name resolution fails redirects your entry too:

»search.live.com/results.aspx?q=y···-Address

The important aspect of this URL is the src=IE-Address component. This particular component is what Rogers is using to decide if they should steal the request and redirect it to their own service. If you browse to the link […] your request will be stolen and sent to Rogers.

Rogers has made the decision for all Internet Explorer users to prevent [them] from using the Address Bar searching feature for Live.com. [Rogers] are preventing individuals from accessing a public search engine as intended. This is not only something to be reported to the various sites already mentioned, but to Microsoft and Live.com themselves.

My thanks to Hondra of @fmc-law.com for the post and to Colin Smilie of Refresh Partners for verifying the behaviour.

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.

* especially by me
** net neutrality issues, system-access fees, extortionate plans for mobile data, typically a 3 year cell phone commitment, use of CDMA technology, no competition for GSM customers
*** technically pre-WiMax

I’ve used a Portable Internet modem since last summer, both at home, and in my bag as the main way I connect to the internet. Last night, I purchased a higher-powered modem with enhanced reception for use at the cottage.

Despite what seemed like Rogers actively doing everything possible to prevent me buying this (at the service availability, billing, and technical support levels) I happily report that I’m now connected. Let me tell you, it’s a world of difference from dial-up.

How did I get on with their Outdoor Modem?

And how come Rogers’ made it so difficult to buy? It’s not like Rogers have avoided taking money from the Canadian public before.

(more…)

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.

MartinCleaver_: I have a ext3 in lvm filesystem on an external USB drive. How can I mount this on my mac? I have macfuse installed in case that can help.

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

When I first arrived in Toronto in 2004 I found very little in the way of Tech community. I was told that the Dot Com Crash had pretty much annihilated every shred of enthusiasm this city had left to offer.

Today, in 2008, there’s no doubt in my mind that we have a vibrant community, with many events competing for our attention.

Here’s tonight’s choices:

1. Startup Camp - startups get together to practice their pitch (closed event) http://www.startupnorth.ca/2008/04/22/startupcamp-toronto-2-what-we-expect-from-you/
2. Toronto Tech Talks - in preparation for Toronto Tech Week (Sept), “The event brings together professionals from the technology industry, and other industries such as advertising, accounting, public relations and finance come out to exchange ideas and make new business connections.”. http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=14399969049
3. Case Camp - PR and Media firms look at case studies of Social Media http://www.casecamp.org/index.html
4. CIPS Unified Messaging http://www.cipstoronto.ca/activities/event_info1.php?402

Finally, if you are interested in Tech in Toronto, no matter where you go before, you need to end up here:

SummerCamp Dance Party, A Toronto Creative Mashup
“If I can’t dance, I don’t want any part of your revolution.”
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=12682267965

Start Time: Tuesday, April 29, 2008 at 9:00pm
End Time: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 3:00am
Location: CiRCA - Ballroom and Kid Robot Room
Street: 126 John Street

See you at CIRCA!

Last year I commented:

Legal precedent states that your ISP is a Common Carrier. This means that they are not responsible for policing what kind of packets they deliver to your house, nor do they have any right to go poking around in the packets delivered to you. So, if you want to read the political views of an ousted dissonant your ISP is not responsible for enforcing that rule. Their role is to get the information from one place to another, with neither interest nor responsibility for the content.

While it is fair that ISPs should be able to charge for the amount of traffic, (this bears down on their infrastructure) why should they have the right to select what that traffic is used for.

From a business standpoint, your ISP doesn’t want to provide just the roads. It wants to sell Ice Creams and to transport Diamonds. More than that, it wants to levy a toll on anyone that uses its roads for such value added services. They want their fingers in every pie.

Last week, Bell Canada took this to a new level. They started not only filtering their own customer’s traffic, they started impacting resellers, wholesale providers that buy bandwidth in bulk from Bell and sell to their own customers. In filtering the types of traffic those ISPs could deliver doing so they excised force in the market, trashing the business models of tens of ISPs across the country, directly impacting millions and scuppering technology innovation by organisations such as Canada’s Broadcasting Corporation:

On Sunday, CBC offered a final episode of reality TV program Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister for download via BitTorrent, a file-sharing service. The release was an experiment for the public broadcaster in new ways of offering its programming.

However, downloaders who blogged about the experience on the Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister site complained about very long periods required to download the show.

One user received a notice that it could take 2½ hours to download, while another was quoted 11 hours. The bottleneck is occurring because ISPs such as Rogers and Bell limit the amount of bandwidth allocated for file-swapping on BitTorrent.

Michael Geist reports:

“The CRTC has to date largely avoided the net neutrality issue, however, that is about to change. The Canadian Association of Internet Providers, Canada’s largest ISP association, has filed a Part VII application with the CRTC asking it to direct Bell Canada to cease and desist from throttling its wholesale Internet service. The application, which was filed late yesterday and is not yet posted on the CRTC site, is the most significant legal development in the Canadian net neutrality debate yet since it places the issue squarely before the Commission. The filing provides additional insights into Bell’s action - the throttling has reduced speeds by as much as 90 percent - and marks an important milestone since the outcome will provide a clear answer on whether Canadian law currently protects net neutrality or if legislative reform is needed.”

What you can do
Check out Steve Anderson’s Campaign for Democratic Media and the Stop the Throttler campaigns. Share your story.

1. http://www.stopthethrottler.ca/
2. http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=10734109708
3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5UvAKcxTGE
4. http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/news/business/story.html?id=4ac678a5-38e7-40dc-8d80-80e6e8e01aeb&p=2
5. http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/04/02/tech-bell.html
6. http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/407730
7. http://blogs.itworldcanada.com/insights/2008/04/03/and-then-there-was-two-bell-canada-seeks-to-wipe-out-isp-competitors/

My thanks go to my friend Sandy Kemsley for the link.

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.

From the team at Avaaz:

Dear friends,

In just 7 days over 1 million of us have signed the petition supporting human rights and dialogue in Tibet - the fastest growing internet petition in history! After decades of injustice, the Tibetan people are crying out to the world for change, and the world is answering.

As China’s leaders decide whether to respond to Tibetan grievances with increased repression or dialogue with the Dalai Lama, an International Day of Action has been declared for Monday, March 31st. In 4 days, thousands of people in cities across the world will march to Chinese embassies and consulates, and stack hundreds of boxes containing our petition outside them. 1 million signatures makes a mountain of boxes - it’s a powerful way to deliver our message.

We have just 4 days left until the petition delivery, so we’re redoubling our efforts to build the petition even larger - to 2 million signatures - in that time. Please sign below, and then forward this email to all your friends and family:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/tibet_end_the_violence/73.php/?cl=67201776

China’s hardliners are lashing out publicly at the Dalai Lama–but many Chinese leaders believe dialogue is the best hope for stability in Tibet. Governments around the world have begun calling for dialogue, and there are many hopeful signs that, if we can keep the pressure up, China will agree. Already, we have had constructive discussions with Chinese officials about the message of our campaign.

Chinese President Hu Jintao values his country’s international reputation, and he needs to hear from us that the ‘Made in China’ brand and the upcoming Olympics in Beijing will succeed only if he chooses dialogue over the hardliners’ repression. An avalanche of global people power is moving to get his attention. Our petition recognizes the concerns of Chinese leaders that riots and separatism could lead to dangerous instability. But we support the position of the Dalai Lama, that the best path to stability and development for China lies through dialogue and respect, not repression.

This is the most promising moment in decades to address the injustices of Tibet - but already the media is moving on to other stories. We need to seize this moment with a massive statement of global support this Monday — for the next four days, let’s pull out all the stops for Tibet.

With hope,

Ricken, Graziela, Ben, Iain, Pascal, Milena, Galit, Paul, Esra’a and the whole Avaaz team

PS - Here are some links for more information:

Reuters reports unrest continues:
http://www.reuters.com/article/vcCandidateFeed1/idUSPEK369654

China allows first journalists back into Lhasa, monks speak out:
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/china/local%20news/tibet/2008/03/27/149167/Tibet-monks.htm

Europe and the US step up calls for dialogue:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/27/europe/27europe.php

Prominent Chinese Intellectuals call for fair approach to Tibet:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/24/asia/chinasub.php
———–

DSL: Not only has Bell imposed this on their own customers but also on their wholesale resellers, organisations such as Teksavvy, who they have started traffic-shaping, cutting off many of the newest services on the internet.

Cable: Rogers have been traffic shaping for a couple of years now, but this week stated that they will charge overlimit fees.

That both operators act so definitively, so drastically, and within such a short pace of time must get the attention of our government and the CRTC who must act on their responsibility to ensure competition in the marketplace. From an economics standpoint, these simultaneous industry moves look nothing short of collusion.

While it is in industry’s interests to promote high fees and high profits on data delivery, technologies exist to make data delivery very cheap to deliver. Industry has a mindset and investment model for traditional business models. It is in the public’s interests, and society’s to get to low costs.

> > 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.

Feedwordpress is documented at http://projects.radgeek.com/feedwordpress/ and is run by the incredibly busy Charles Johnson (RadGeek). I think it would be better if Charles put a wiki for Feedwordpress at radgeek.com, and indeed I asked him to do so a few months ago, but until he does, at least people who need to use his software can collaborate with one another. You can find this wiki at http://feedwordpress.pbwiki.com/

It is a basic human need to collaborate. Cooperating with others saves us time, and helps us share our expression so at a minimum guarantees that we did what we can. Commenting on blogs does not provide the deep blending of perspectives needed for real value to be added to knowledge. In the FeedWordPress case users have asked for a forum or another means to collectively pool their time, but a wiki not only adds this but changes the sequence in which information is presented. (Actually, the password reset on the feedwordpress blog doesn’t work for me!)

Whether this Feedwordpress wiki will take off will depend on a lot of things. Whether it is seeded compellingly (including from the gems of existing content), whether people subscribe, whether people share their problems and help one another solve theirs, and what signal:noise ratio occurs on it.

We can each do our bit. Pooling our bits to be together can save us all time and energy. I hope this feedwordpresswiki will help.

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

http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/04/3m-to-showcase-a-micro-projector-for-handheld-devices-at-ces/

http://www.letsgomobile.org/en/3032/samsung-mbp-100-microprojector/

Fancy that, using just a full-size roll out keyboard, a 32GB SD card and a pocketsize projector capable of a 1m+ picture, you’d end up with full sized facilities in an ever-so lightweight and tiny 9″ bag.

I suppose though, with a roll-out keyboard and a micro projector throwing a full sized picture, some would find carrying the 7″ keyboard / screen combination less desirable than something phone sized that you can just carry in a pocket. Indeed, maybe the logic for the pc can be modularised to plug into the handsized projector.

Oh, the ever stomping march of technology!

PS. Projector rumoured to come out in March in South Korea, and world-wide shortly after, starting prices around $200-$300. I found no decent pictures of the projected output nor mention of screen resolution.

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.

Anyhow check out on http://www.slingcommunity.com/group/discussion/26840/Slingplayer-Linux-Install-Script-1.0b/

I just love this eeepc!

PS. If you think that slingplayer on the eeepc is ridiculous, check out this effort to run vmware player on the eeepc.

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!

For some reason Slingmedia has no Linux version and, bafflingly, is silent on the prospect of one. (Though I did see it acknowledged on SlingMedia’s Where Should SlingPlayer Go Next The Top 10 Unsupported Platforms)

The following is an extended version of posting I made to their forums.

Anyone fancy bundling up Andrew Butkus’ Singbox on WINE solution as operating system vmware (or maybe xen) image?

This will reduce the steps needed for someone to install to just one, and get the WINE (Windows software emulation on Linux) setup usable and quickly testable.

It’d then need listing under http://vmware.com/appliances/

Quoting: http://www.news.com/Virtualization-homes-in-on-desktops/2100-7339_3-6208181.html

VMware Workstation is geared for power users such as administrators who want to test software patches before distributing them across a company, said Jerry Chen, senior director of enterprise desktop software at VMware. Chen himself uses it to run three separate virtual machines: one for work, one for home and one for his Slingbox video player.

That said, http://www.slingcommunity.com/forum/thread/10288/Verizon-Wireless-Cellphone-Access/#3333 has an unverified claim that slingplayer and VMware can’t co-exist.

And http://www.game-over.com/reviews.php?id=571&page=features says:

We also tried installing SlingPlayer on a remotely accessible virtual machine with VMware but the virtual machine lacked the requisite graphics card to even get to the screen where you can change network settings.

Jerry Chen from VMware does not say whether he is running it under Linux or Windows. If Andrew Butkus’ solution bundled up as a xen or vmware image works it would provide access to those many of us who have dropped Windows in favour of Linux.

If I can’t get my Slingbox to work on Linux I’ll investigate using MythTV to work remotely. The whole point of paying Slingmedia is to gain easy access to remote TV content. Having to jump through hoops like this defies the allure of the product’s promise of an appliance for placeshifting TV.

This is especially pertinant at the ultralight end of laptops. My Asus EeePC is a diminutive (7″) laptop running Xandros, a windows-look-alike version of Debian Linix, had a 4GB solid state drive, built in wifi and webcam. The cheaper ones (surf models) don’t have webcams. Here’s the http://wiki.eeeuser.com/eee_hardware_faq

It’s great for being on the move and mine’s officially my backup laptop. (I’m planning to buy a Mac subnotebook, announcement due at Macworld Jan 14th 2008, i.e. next week).

Now, Asus just announced at CES2008 the 2nd generation eeepc, due in April, and featuring slightly larger screens and built in Wimax. But the hacker culture doesn’t wait (http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=5417 already has people adding bluetooth and increasing internal capacity 20 fold).

With my IBM X30 down, one has buy when one needs: I couldn’t handle not being able to work when mobile.

My XP laptop (an IBM X30) died last month. As the data was backed up this was not catastrophic disaster in itself.

I’d been running my accounting system(QuickBooks) under Windows 98 in VMware Player, reasoning that I needed isolation (no other software could interfere with it). I stored the data on what looked like a network drive, mapped through a virtual network drive to a regular directory on my laptop.

I’m in the process of shifting to light-as-possible on the road (I just bought a 4G solid state drive Asus EEEPC 401) coupled with a beefy server (quad core) at home running CentOS hosting the free VMware Server plus a Synology Cubestation 407 Network Attached Storage device with mirrored disks. Made possible by ubiquitous network connectivity. Many of my clients use VMware environments now, so both increasing my own competency and having the facility to host their environments in intrinsically important to me.

My company, Blended Perspectives Inc is relatively young. In itself I don’t have to use QuickBooks. Indeed, Wikipedia shows a tremendous range of packages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_accounting_software

Further, as http://www.hostingforum.ca/2017288-post15.html puts it:

Forget about it, once you are in Quickbooks its nearly impossible to move
to anything else. The export from Quickbooks leaves lots of things out.
I’ve been using Quickbooks for 15 years so I’m stuck, I run it in VMware
and I grit my teeth and pay the subscription fees. For someone who is
just starting a business I’d recommend that you look at alternatives but
it you have been using it for a while there are no good options for
switching to anything else.

I don’t much like Quickbooks. I find it outdated, confusing and the interface somewhat clumsy. Yet, book-keeping is not my strongest competency, for that I rely on my accountants, Bass Murphy. While I need to enter data, my needs become somewhat subservient to whatever os needed to keep my company firmly on course and compliant with regulation. So I defer, to the preferences of my accountants. I’m assuming they want Quickbooks. (Writing this prompted me to email then to check today, as I realised that I’d never actually asked them about alternatives!)

Nevertheless I suspect there is currently no decent, free, solid, alternative. I suspect it’s still a time off before something will have the features, the fiddly region-specific tax table updates, and the support from accounting professionals.

Further, although there are Open Source personal solutions, such as an interesting http://www.thezeal.com/software/index.php?Money_Manager_Ex, I rather agree with the opinion from the same thread:

Any one of these things that says “personal money manager” will not make the grade for any business, large or small.
One has to have inventory control, purchase orders, billing, asset accounting, and payroll.

Further, I use Neat Receipts about which I have many opinions, both good and bad. That is targeting Quickbooks as its center of gravity for integration. I’d wager it’ll be a very long time before they support anything open source.

So my current plan is to continue to submit defeat to the almighty Quickbooks:

Virtualization is a great solution. I run a Win2K VM on top of Fedora. Win2K has the advantage of
not having the Activation requirements of XP, it’s also faster. As a
Linux user I don’t give a damn about any of the OS improvements that they
made in XP, none of that matters to me. All I need is for Quickbooks to
work, which it does. I’m also not interested in any of the fancier
Windows networking features, all I care about is that the VM be able to
see a SAMBA share, which works fine in 2K. However if you don’t own a
copy of 2K then XP works fine on VMware.

Further, Neat Receipts works under VMware too:

I’m running VMWare Fusion so that I can use Windows XP when I need to, for example, I have a Neat Receipt scanner for my scanning my expense receipts. It won’t work on OS/X but absolutely works nicely on Windows, without a hitch. VMWare is working nicely and again I can thank Richard for his recommendations as I would have probably gone with ether Basecamp or Parallels. Glad to be using VMWare.

Not only will I be able to use this setup from home, but from the road. And not just me, but so too will my accountant. (If I use Win2K I’ll install Terminal Services). Time to sharpen my firewall.

• Slipstreaming Windows + Service Packs

After too many years of frustration with Windows XP and confirmation from most of my friends that Windows Vista is a disaster, I have resolved to switch to MacOS. I’d been holding out for a mac subnotebook, and rumours were plentiful last October that this was imminent. Finally that rumour has now been “confirmed” by Apple for a 15 January 2008 announcement at Mac World.

I’m buying my first desktop in years, having been laptop-centric since I went to Australia to do my MBA in 2002. I figured I need a desktop for 1) multimedia playback 2) downloads while I am disconnected 3) to efficiently work with virtualisation technologies such as Xen and VMware, which I am increasingly using with my clients in my wikiconsulting practice to help fit rationalise their infrastructure. I of course will still get a laptop but with everything going web-centric and with my change to being self-employed I want my laptop to be less powerful but more portable than ever.

With the Mac laptop purchase imminent I did consider purchasing a Mac desktop. But, those Mac desktops are really extremely expensive for the processing power they provide. And besides, I’d need another machine for running Linux and a few MS Windows Apps I can’t do without. (Some of these I ran in VMware workstation on my defunct X30).

So there I was, thinking through the dilemma, should I buy an overpriced desktop Mac or get a PC? Or both? (I also own a Playstation 3 running Yellow Dog Linux and on which I am typing this article). Here’s my conclusion…

Like the PS3, older Apple Macs (G4’s, iBooks, etc) run on the PowerPC chip making them fundementally unlike PCs which use the x86 family of chips. However, newer Apple Macs (iMac, MacMini, MacBook, MacBookPro) do run on x86 chips, making them very like PCs. So alike, in fact, that since the 2006 switch to x86, Apple Macs are, operating system aside, pretty much using commodity piece of PC hardware inside those branded shiny (and overpriced) Apple boxes. Branding does nothing to detract escape hardcore techies who of course immediately jumped on the challenge of making MacOS run on PCs.

A year or so ago the effort needed to get OSX running on generic X86 was out of the reach of most tech-centric people. Not enough was known about which hardware components and not a big enough community was looking at the problem. I think that has changed. The OSX86 (or Hackintosh) project is really alive, with very well documented lists of what works and what doesn’t and thriving message boards talking through issues. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still the realm of techies: there’s a lot of configuration steps to follow.

So, with this in mind, I set out to buy components that wouldn’t just satisfy my virtualisation needs but to function with osx86 too. After all, in the world of Windows and Linux PCs practically everything can be made to work so the hardware cost is never going to be wasted if I happen to get the exact components that the OSX86 project works best with. My criteria was very simple: buy cost-effective components that demanded the fewest headaches and workarounds. The choice of graphics card is especially important.

With that in mind, here’s what I bought in Toronto, totalling $1060 CAD + taxes, yesterday:

• Gigabyte GA-P35C-DS3R - $155 CAD
• XFX 7600 GT 256M PCI-E - $145.00 CAD
• Intel Q6600 Quad Core 2.4/1066FSB 8M Cache - $279.99 CAD
• Pioneer 212D 18xDVD-RW SATA - $31.50 CAD
• Seasonic S12-550 550W Energy Plus - $119 CAD
• WD500AAKS - $101.99 CAD
• Silverstone Lascala SST-LC13-B Black ATX - $113 CAD

The above were from Filtech, except for the case which I bought from Canada Computers. I usually shop at Canada Computers but they were out of stock of the CPU and graphics card and when things go wrong its easier to have just one company to resolve issues with. The people at Filtech seemed like nice guys

I’ll pick it up this afternoon as Filtech kindly offered to put it together at no charge.

So, what’s next?

1. Partition disk (OS only - I keep data on a RAID Synology Cubestation I bought last month)
2. Hypervisor install - XenExpress or VMware Server on a CentOS base
3. Operating System install - at least Ubuntu, Windows XP - get all programs up so I can work productively again
4. Think about running osx86 inside either Xen or VMWare

If (4) doesn’t work out I can dual boot the machine osx86 and vm, but hoping to get everything subserviant to the hypervisor. After all, what’s the point in having a quadcore machine if you can’t tax it a little?

More than ever, right now is a really busy time. I can see my evenings being booked for weeks ahead!

Footnote:

Apple do prohibit the use of MacOS (OSX), their Operating System, on non-Mac branded hardware. Nevertheless, in this world of increasing remix, such a stance is ignored by many in the tech community. Indeed, many believe that Apple would be well served to encourage the use of their Operating System on PCs whilst Microsoft is hurting from the widespread distaste of Vista. (IfI recall correctly, Apple’s penetration of the laptop market jumped from 23% to 27% from June 2007 to December 2007 while their desktop penetration remains less than 10%).

‘‘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!

The web has seen a plethora of sites become platforms, each site now holding some fragment of our digital lives. From that stems a problem: many of us find our attention fragmented across these sites.

David has come up with a differently positioned site that competently aggregates across many of these different media. Onaswarm will go off and fetch snippets of webfeeds and stitch them together into a coherent lifestream for you.

Further than that, it can place you in the context of others you associate with, and who associate with you.

Check out http://network-toronto.onaswarm.com/ or, indeed, see what others from the Toronto tech community have lately said about onaswarm, using the following embedded search: http://network-toronto.onaswarm.com/:search:onaswarm

It’s useful stuff and a worthy tool for regular use.

Technorati : aggregator

Shove over Rogers, Bell and Telus.

I’ve been long griping about the Canadian Telcos and their stupid, exorbitant data rates:

[Canadian oligopolistic Telcos] will only voluntarily drop their prices if they thought that they’d make more money by doing so. Their duty is to please their shareholders, not the public, though they could stand to make much more if they can get usage up:

“That’s because […] Rogers/Fido and Bell Mobility do not understand the idea of a mass consumer commerce model. They would rather have 50 pissed off customers and charge them $1000 a month each, rather than have 1000 happier customers and charge them $50 a month each.

I even e-mailed the investor-relations departments of each of Bell, Telus and Rogers:

Dear Rogers Investor Relations:

As an investor and customer at Rogers, I am concerned that the opportunity to serve the Canadian mobile data market is hugely under exploited. Rogers could make a lot more money by serving a larger market at a lower price than fewer customers at a high price.

Like many I know, I turned off the data on my wireless account rather than feel swindled by today’s pricing.

Also, there is a risk that this issue could get the attention of the Canadian Government - regulatory control is not in investor’s interests.

Well, last week (reported here by http://www.wirelessnorth.ca) public protests have finally taken notice of:

In announcing the rules to the upcoming (May 2008) advanced spectrum auction, industry minister Jim Prentice has blasted open the doors to new wireless competition in Canada. Here is a quick overview of the new rules:

• 40 of the 105 available megahertz will be set aside for new entrants
• Incumbents will be required to allow roaming on their networks at reasonable rates (this is crucial as any new entrant may start regionally and take up to a few years to establish full national coverage)
• Incumbents will be required to share towers with new entrants (significantly reducing startup costs and redundant infrastructure)

So, in short, Telcos of Canada, you lost your trusted position through your own actions. Let this be a lesson to the other cartel-like industries. (Indigo-Chapters-Coles: you and your monopolistic pricing could be next).

Lastly, a quick plug for Wireless North.ca - this site is was launched just a few days ago by my friend Thomas Purves. Tom is probably best known for his expose of Canada’s Mobile Rates being worse than 3rd World Countries.

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’ll be giving a short talk at Social Networking night at Society of Internet Professionals on Weds 28th Nov, starting 6pm. I’ll discuss how wikis and related technologies work as open intranets and extranets, and how Social Networking techniques have and can been applied to wikis.

Their event will be at the Metro Convention Center, room yet to be announced.

This is an open event, with discounts available to SIP, AIC and CTN Members.

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

The reason Rogers is tight-lipped about why it hasn’t struck a deal to bring Apple’s iPhone into Canada is because it would involve an embarrassing admission: To make the iPhone financially attractive, Rogers would have to cut the rates it charges its customers for data. And what company wants to cut its prices when there is no pressure on them to do so?

Well, that pressure is beginning to rise.

Canadians would have to pay $400 for the iPhone, and to use all the iPhone features, about $300 a month in voice and data fees (the iPhone is a heavy user of mobile data transfer). By comparison, AT&T, the sole company offering the iPhone in the United States, allows a plan for $100 that includes 1,350 minutes of voice calls, unlimited data, video voice mail, 200 text messages and unlimited use nights and weekends.

We can’t blame Rogers for their monopoly position. The blame belongs to the CRTC for allowing Rogers to buy out Fido, the assimilation handing the entire GSM space into only notional competition. Indeed, I’d have advised Rogers to buy Fido, it was a win for them on every level.

I had the opportunity to take an iPhone as part of my deal to talk at Office 2.0 last month in San Francisco. But really, what’s the value to me if I’d be paying through the nose every month on the bill? Nope, I just become a non-consumer.

My thanks to David Janes for the link.

Called Pseudo Cron (or wp-cron), the facility alleviates the need for external programs to trigger internal events, using for example, the unix cron command.

Users of a Wordpress site can’t usually see the events scheduled, so I built a simple plugin to show what’s due to run.

(more…)

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:
privacy@idatecorp.com
Technical details of permanent failure:
PERM_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 13): 550 : Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table

That said, I left a voicemail with Rob Stauber, Inc. their special council lawyer, asking him to confirm receipt of my email, which I had CC’d to him.

To: privacy@idatecorp.com

CC: http://www.stauber.com/lawoffices/

Dear iDateCorp,
I would just like to point out that the actions of your website quetchup.com to hijack the address books of your users and use the entries to falsify further invitations is:

1) a violation of decency
2) theft
3) classified as phishing (passing off)

2) and 3) are a criminal acts. 1) alone is enough to sink your firm’s reputation and to put into jeopardy those of your directors.

iDateCorp company is receiving a great deal of bad press due to this activity. See my blog post on it and others: 1 , 2

I don’t know whether it is to late to avoid a class action lawsuit but it is my opinion that you should cease and desist immediately and seek legal counsel.

Respectfully,
Martin Cleaver

–
Martin@Cleaver.org MSc MBA
+1-416-786-6752

In my opinion, this could well become a landmark legal case that sets out not only new law but also safeguards.

For instance, how come sites can actually masquerade the email as coming from a third party? The inbound mail programs should alert, the owner of the email address should get to veto, etc.

Technorati : idatecorp, legal, phishing, quetchup

To quote Dwight Silverman:

If you get an invitation from a friend inviting you to join a social networking site call Quechup delete it. Joining up and making the wrong decisions in the process could result in the site spamming everyone in your address book.

Googling confirms the bad press:

To me, this is Phishy :

phishing is a criminal activity using social engineering techniques.^[1] Phishers attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. [Wikipedia]

In this world, trust is everything. Most people are trustworthy: if they err, it’s seldom through malicious intent, rather bad judgment. But when sites overstep the mark, and refuse to take corrective steps, the world needs warning.

Maybe bad press is Quechup’s owner (iDate) intention. After all, bad publicity is still publicity, and once they hit a certain limit they can change a policy, no skin off their nose. Well, I wonder how they’d like so much spam? The site owners have their site registration details public in the domain name registry:

They’ve also got a US address, in Las Vegas.

This led me to http://www.idatecorp.com/management-team.php who’s bio’s read like those of decent people that value their reputation. Are their http://www.idatecorp.com/advisors.php (Loeb & Loeb LLP, Ronald J. Stauber, Inc.) doing a good job? It doesn’t seem that Quechup even conform to iDate’s own privacy policy

iDate Corporation Privacy Policy

This site is owned and operated by iDate Ltd. Your privacy on the Internet is of the utmost importance to us. At iDate, we want to make your experience online satisfying and safe.

If users have questions or concerns regarding this statement, they should first contact iDate by sending an e-mail to privacy@idatecorp.com.

Request and Address Please send notices by care of e-mail to: legals@idatecorp.com

Maybe someone local would like to pay them a visit? Or send their privacy or legals internal teams or council a few carefully chosen words?

World, be warned. iDateCorp, get smart or be damned: your Quechup policy is splattering your advisory teams, as well as yourselves.

Technorati : phishy, quechup

It’s the wrong vision to take today’s apps from the desktop and put them out to the web. Instead, innovation will be from finding new simple apps that do new, different things.

You have to look at the value proposition: reduce costs, improve productivity. Look back at the fundamental changes in the past such as e-commerce, search and email. These were not clones of existing applications, but something new.

If you listen to today’s market, and provide people what they are asking for, you don’t need to sell. If you have to sell, you are working to hard. Small business are where the innovation happen: these are not constrained by existing IT infrastructures and they will move where they see value, but they don’t have the ability to invest for 3 year in technologies. Departments have similar characteristics. There much need for small, applications.

An example of need is that we need applications that are smarter, that filter out the noise and work with existing content, such as email. Mobile applications have to work when offline, just being online is insufficient.

Innovation hits reality in the integration. The efforts to standardize the plumbing (REST, SOAP) are elevating interoperability. Feeds really help, using the feed as a trigger, and we will see more applications that filter and action on it.

The shift to Software as a Service is having a massive impact on IT: all these thousands of external applications. Yet, IT is made responsible for corporate adherence to process regulation e.g. through SOX.

Solid integration capabilities needs to become part of the fabric of the internet, we are only at the start of these technologies. Once standardized plumbing becomes ubiquitous, we can blend platforms and their widgets, and rapidly deploy custom solutions,

Technorati : o2con

Therefore, I’ll pushing for shorter posts, especially when reporting events such as Conferences.

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

I’ll be back in Canada on the15th and presenting on the topic of Social Media at the Professional Administrators forum on the 17th.

I can be contacted on my UK mobile: +44-7956-646799.

At the present count there are some 84 pictures of the event on Flickr:

And our slides at SlideShare

Most people seemed to enjoy the night, despite the fact that one can really only provide a teaser in 2 hours. Michael, David and I intend to run a series of Concept mapping focussed talks, probably starting in the Fall. Stay posted for details, or contact me if you get impatient

My thanks to Ryan Coleman for making the VizThink series reality, Mark Dowds for providing space at Indoor Playground, Joe Novak and the IHMC/Concept Mapping community for all their work and my co-presenters for keeping the night flowing along nicely.

VizThink does often get blog coverage, so I’ll keep an eye out for more reports and will relay here.

PS. Malcolm (”sketch guy”) posted this portrait of me to Flickr!

Technorati : vizthink, vizthinktoronto4

I’ve been busy under on a client project, which is now complete.

I am now building my new company website, Blended Perspectives Inc. where I’m continuing to do my Wiki Consulting work. I’ve also been constructing two other public facing sites… more on which later.

Cheers!

Martin.

Many ordinary internet users are unaware: there’s a war being fought by the net savvy for everyone’s right to get to the internet. Net Neutrality centers on the argument that:

Everyone pays for their own Internet connection.Google is paying lots of money for lots of bandwidth for its Internet connection. Individual subscribers are paying, relatively speaking, lots of money for their residential Internet connection. When individual pay $40 a month for their broadband connection, part of what they are paying for is their ISP’s backbone connection. When Google pays lots of money for its connection, it is paying lots of money for its ISP’s backbone connection. All of these networks come together in the Internet backbone, interconnect, and exchange traffic. It is paid for.

Legal precedent states that your ISP is a Common Carrier. This means that they are not responsible for policing what kind of packets they deliver to your house, nor do they have any right to go poking around in the packets delivered to you. So, if you want to read the political views of an ousted dissonant your ISP is not responsible for enforcing that rule. Their role is to get the information from one place to another, with neither interest nor responsibility for the content.

Common carriers are carriers of goods, people, and information such as trains, planes, buses, and telephone companies. They can not discriminate with regard to what they carry or where they carry it.

Moving up to ever more Value Added Services

From a business standpoint, your ISP doesn’t want to provide just the roads. It wants to sell Ice Creams and to transport Diamonds. More than that, it wants to levy a toll on anyone that uses its roads for such value added services. They want their fingers in every pie.

Your ISP controls what you see, and how good (what sites load, how slow vs. fast, how smooth vs. choppy) it is:

The Internet in the [middle] is distributed. As one moves to the residential edge of the network, the network becomes less distributed. At the edge, there may be only one available route [from the ISP to you].

As consumers, we are all vulnerable to the might and power in the market of corporates. If we need a service, and only one company provides it, we have no option but to pay their asking price. To quote U.S. v. Microsoft:

Microsoft enjoys so much power in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems that if it wished to exercise this power solely in terms of price, it could charge a price for Windows substantially above that which could be charged in a competitive market.

Want another firm so powerful as Microsoft squashing other firms? To quote http://www.cybertelecom.org/ci/neutral.htm :

If you review the literature of the proponents of Network Neutrality, there is rough consensus as to policy - network neutrality is about preventing a network with market power from discriminating - acknowledging the important role a network plays as a carrier of information.

From 1990 to a bit after 2000, no one ISP had sufficient market power to deviate from this precedent. As the ISP market became competitive, neutrality was provided by the discipline of competition. At the height of the ISP market, the average American had a choice of 10+ ISPs […] and there were over 7000 ISPs in the United States […]. Strong competition meant strong incentives to provide fully functioning Internet access.

They could not demand that the customer pay extra for applications or services they did not want; they could not block access to competitive applications or services. Customers in the competitive ISP market would simply change providers.

Power in the ISP Market

Translated to Canada, this means the big Internet Service Providers (read: Rogers/Bell) have so many customers that they can levy an charge on businesses providing services over the internet (read: Google, Accenture, Freshbooks or your child).

But, not only CAN they, they DO. For example: Rogers interfere with traffic:

For the past 18 months, Rogers traffic shaping has been an open secret. While Rogers at first denied the practice, it effectively acknowledged it in late 2005, arguing that peer-to-peer file sharing was using a disproportionate percentage of network resources and that the traffic shaping was needed to maintain the functionality of core services such as email and web browsing.

In response to the implementation of traffic shaping, many file sharing applications now employ encryption to make it difficult to detect the contents of data packets. This has led to a technical “cat and mouse” game, with Rogers now believed to be one of the only ISPs in the world to simply degrade encrypted traffic.

Discrimination:

Networks have discriminated against what equipment can be attached to networks, what applications can be used over a network, whether calls go to one competitor or to another, and even whether subscribers can criticize the network service provider. Examples of discrimination include:

• Blocking VoIP competitors like Vonage and Skype.
• Blocking access to websites that criticize the service provider
• Contractually bar subscribers in the AUP from criticizing the service provider.
• Prohibit virtual private networks
• Prohibit attaching servers.
• Limit the amount of streaming media that can be viewed.
• Prohibit Wifi networks in your home.
• Prohibit P2P applications. [YouTube / Skype / BitTorrent ]
• Refuse to let certain content, including competitor’s advertisements, over their networks.

And now, who is trying to silence the public?

In Canada, at Net Neutrality.ca, over 2351 signatures from the public were collected protesting against ISP. Last night we discovered that Net Neutrality.ca had been taken down because of “Legal Concerns”:

What does this mean for democracy? Who knows what this means? Too early to say.

What you can do

Up until today I had resisted the urge to write, although I had signed the petition. With this post, this has changed.

Last night I ordered TekSavvy, a DRY DSL replacement for Rogers Cable Internet. Yes, the Bell Sympatico adverts showing me choppy YouTube videos struck home but all the reviews I’ve read show I have no reason to trust Bell any more than I did Rogers.

For more, see http://www.willpate.org/2007/03/26/3-easy-ways-to-support-net-neutrality-in-canada/ http://ambermac.typepad.com/ambermac/2007/03/the_net_neutral.html

For your reference, after the jump, text that used to live on Net Neutrality.ca,

(more…)

Given I am currently on Rogers, and the sort of service I would pay extra for (mobile data) is just a rip off, I’m looking at other options, and scaling back my ambitions. My contract with Rogers is up in about 10 days (and what’s with a 3 year commitment? In the UK 1 year is pretty standard), and my friends (some of whom a real geeks) have been recommending prepaid.

“Customer satisfaction is more important than ever in the wireless industry [with] number portability[…], removing one of the main obstacles customers face when switching providers.” http://www.jdpower.com/corporate/news/releases/pdf/2006256.pdf

And its not just my friends proclaiming prepaid, industry experts JD Powers said:

Although prepaid service doesn’t have the same penetration rates as contract service, it is significantly less expensive on a monthly basis. The average monthly fee paid by contract customers is $74, compared with $29 for prepaid customers. Forty two percent of prepaid customers had previously used a contract service.

J.D. Power and Associates Canadian Wireless Customer Satisfaction Study Gives Top Marks to Virgin Mobile in all prepaid categories

(TORONTO, ON) November 22, 2006 - For the second year in a row, a major study on wireless customer satisfaction has revealed that Virgin Mobile has the most satisfied prepaid customers in Canada. The study conducted by J.D. Power and Associates, shows Virgin Mobile has outranked every other network and topped the competition in all five categories measuring: (1) Customer service (2) Billings (ease of ongoing use, i.e., top-up) (3) Cost of service (4) Service plan options (5) Call quality.

http://www.jdpower.com/corporate/news/releases/pressrelease.asp?ID=2006256

Prepaid by itself is not enough, I need an MVNO!

MNVO’s [..] treat incumbent infrastructure such as radio equipment as a commodity, while the MVNO offers its own advanced and differentiated services based on exploitation of their own [..] infrastructure. The goal of offering value-added services is to differentiate versus the incumbent mobile operator, allowing for customer acquisition and preventing the MVNO from needing to compete on the basis of price alone.

MVNO’s have full control over the SIM card, branding, marketing, billing, and customer care operations. While sometimes offering operational support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS) to support the MVNO, the incumbent mobile operators most keep their own OSS/BSS processes and procedures separate and distinct from those of the MVNO.

http://www.telecomspace.com/latesttrends-mvno.html

Canada’s Operators, including MVNOs

Bell and Rogers, bottom rated for satisfaction, of course have the most customers and so don’t compete on price. Or anything, really.

Company	Overview
Aliant Mobility	Service in four maritime provinces.
Bell Mobility	#2 national carrier. CDMA network. Teamed with Virgin Mobile to serve youth market. Owned by Bell Canada (BCE). Coverage maps.
Fido (Microcell)	GSM network. Billing by the second. Microcell resellers: Cityfone, SimPro and KORE wireless. Owned by Rogers Communications.
Mike (Telus Mobility)	Walkie-talkie (2-way radio), digital cellphone, pager and wireless data service. Roaming agreement with Nextel for use in US uses iDEN network.
MTS Mobility	Service in Manitoba.
PC Mobile	MVNO. Prepaid calling plans. President’s Choice owned by Loblaws Inc.
Primus Canada Wireless	MVNO. Owned by Primus Telecommunications, Inc. Coverage map.
Rogers Wireless	#1 national carrier. AMPS, TDMA and GSM networks cover 93% of Canada’s population (including Microcell Fido). Acquired Microcell in 2004. Acquired Cantel in 1999. Owned by Rogers Communications. Coverage maps for GSM, TDMA, BlackBerry and paging services.
SaskTel Mobility	Service in Saskatchewan.
7-Eleven Speak Out Wireless Services	MVNO uses Fido network. Prepaid plans. Owned by 7-Eleven, Inc.
Telus Mobility	#3 national carrier. CDMA network. Purchased Clearnet in 2000. Owned by Telus (merger of Telus and BCTel). Coverage maps.
Virgin Mobile Canada	Launched prepaid service in March 2005. Service in four provinces. MVNO uses Bell Mobility’s CDMA network. Owned by U.K.-based Virgin Mobile. Coverage maps.

http://www.mobilook.com/Carriers.asp

Why do the infrastructure owners allow MVNOs?

The MVNO approach allows for these niche markets to be developed which allows MVNOs to offer wireless products customized to the end-user lifestyles, thus maximizing this growing demand for wireless data services. MVNOs will benefit by their vast expertise which allows them to deliver lifestyle products that are in demand. Wireless service providers will profit from the additional revenues and the utilization of their unused network capacity. These arrangements also do not pose any competitive threats such as the MVNOs cannibalizing the carrier market.

http://www.marketresearch.com/product/display.asp?productid=1188657&g=1

The risks are high, but so are the potential rewards, according to the white paper. While countries with comparable purchasing power such as Italy, the UK and Germany have reached 80-105% mobile penetration, the USA market is only at 65%. In addition, U.S. wireless carriers have yet to embrace personalization and customers are hungry for compelling content customized to meet their needs and match their interests. DiamondCluster estimates that there will be 30 million U.S. MVNO subscribers by 2010.

http://www.cellular-news.com/story/13622.php

Regulations, regulations

There are arguments from both sides as to whether the MVNO model will bring otherwise unreachable revenue or unwelcome competition to the MNOs. For instance, the GSM Association, […][was] keen to see legislation that helps companies provide and take advantage of the financial potential of MVNOs, but it is equally keen that network operators should not be legally required to open their networks to anyone wanting access. At the same time, some UMTS licence-holders, particularly in Germany, are fighting the regulatory authorities for the right to share their spectrum.

http://www.e-principles.com/MVNO.htm (2001)

If you want more insight on Canada’s MVNOs, http://www.howardforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=326 has a forum dedicated to them, for example:

Or maybe VOIP Wifi?

Thing is, I use my phone quite a lot. Maybe now is the time to go for a wifi phone? Rather than spending several hundred dollars per month on calls I could replace my aging treo with one of those new Nokia N91s, but some report that they are still shaky, and other friends say the Nokia E-series rocks. VOIP wifi is coming. I can almost taste it.

In sum, I find the lack of competitiveness in the Canadian Telco scene just obscene. The entry of wifi should really disrupt!

Oh, wait a minute. Bell & Rogers co-own Inukshuk. What is with regulation in this country?

In the same the theme as my posting Rogers: 1.124 mb? That will be $57.55 please, my friend Thomas Purves just posted the above stark graphic contrasting the rates people living in Canada pay compared to others around the world. In the following I summarize an investigation of my own and what I think are some of the more interesting comments to date. In a brief moment of hope I thought the CRTC was going to fix things, only to find that it is out of their hands…

More countries

There’s been some debate and furore on Digg as to the validity of comparing to more densely packed countries as the costs are supposedly higher in sparsely populated Canada, but this was refuted using the comparison with Australia. I look forward to seeing this table Canada’s ranking in fuller context of more countries: I’m sure Tom will give us an update in due course.

What can the CRTC do? Nothing.

Roger Martin, (Dean of the Rotman School of Management) has long been pushing Canada’s government to address Canada’s competitive conditions. Even the CRTC knows Telecom Deregulation is long overdue and pledges to fix it:

Mr. von Finckenstein, [on his first day of chairman of the CRTC on February 23, 2007], says that the question is no longer whether telecom deregulation will continue, but how fast it will occur.

“Make no mistake - less regulation in telecom has been and will continue to be the commission’s prime objective,” von Finckenstein said, while noting that “excessive and untimely deregulation can end up stifling rather than stimulating competition.”

Though Michael Newton (comment #33 on Tom’s posting) reported said

The CRTC does not regulate the cellular phone industry.

You may not be aware that the CRTC does not regulate the rates, quality of service or business practices of cellular (wireless) service providers and cannot pursue complaints on these matters on your behalf.

If not the CRTC, does anyone regulate it? The Globe and Mail’s Catherine Mclean did report on 26 Feb 06:

The market is abuzz with speculation the federal government may recommend creating a fourth national wireless carrier. It’s seen as a way for Ottawa to stimulate competition - the percentage of Canadians with cellphone service lags the United States and other countries.

It’s in the Telco’s interests, dammit!

It’s the nature of oligopolies that the Telcos here will only voluntarily drop their prices if they thought that they’d make more money by doing so. Their duty is to please their shareholders, not the public though they could stand to make much more if they can get usage up:

“That’s because […] Rogers/Fido and Bell Mobility do not understand the idea of a mass consumer commerce model. They would rather have 50 pissed off customers and charge them $1000 a month each, rather than have 1000 happier customers and charge them $50 a month each.

Also, since all the wireless cel-sites across Canada are owned exclusively by Bell and Rogers (and bandwidth leased to other wireless providers), and since they self regulate the price - there is no price competition in Canada, since all the powers that be agree to charge the same basic highly overinflated prices.”

The MNVOs can’t cut it for early adopter services

I’ve posted before about Virgin mobile here in Canada, well one respondent alerted Tom to a bunch of other such “Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs)” that layer their service upon the main carriers:

The smaller guys that not as many people know about offer much nicer rates though, although they don’t offer the data plans you would use with a blackberry. Virgin Mobile is rising fast (no data plans yet, but their normal plans are a fraction of the price, and no extra fees or contracts). We also have 7-11 Wireless [on the Rogers network], President’s Choice Mobile [on the Bell network] where you get unlimited internet access for $5 a month [I have yet to validate that], and Petro Canada Wireless [on the Rogers network]. I’m a happy Virgin customer myself Just don’t fall for the shiny “free” phones from rip-off Rogers and Bell.”

Apparently, the others in this category are 7-Eleven Wireless · Amp’d Mobile · DCI Telecom · MoreMobility · Ontera · PC Mobile · · Primus Canada · SearsConnect · Solo Mobile · Videotron · Virgin Mobile, but data users tend to be cutting-edge users, who are not going to be satisfied by the cut down services provided by the MVNOs.

So, if the early majority of cutting-edge users cancel their data plans then where is the demand for advanced services going to come from? Nowhere. This country’s innovation will continue to stagnate, putting would-be mobile users at a loss.

Absurd, but a US plan might just work in the interim

The only decent work around I’ve seen so far was provided by Lee Wipper (comment #20)

For data I hear T-Mobile is the way to go for around $70 US / Month you can get unlimited data worldwide. It is a sad commentary on the state of Canada’s wireless providers that for robust mobile services the answer is to obtain an account from a carrier in the United States that has a deal to use Bell’s or Rogers’ networks at a price you could not come close to with one of those carriers native Canadian plans.

What a state to be in

Again, I am left observing what I’ve seen over and over again as a classic sad state of Canadian industry. You can make a difference. Here’s how.

Call to Action

We, TorCamp, Toronto’s Startup Tech Community, call on you, people of Canada to exert pressure.

1) Ring your Telco. Now.

Ask to speak to the supervisor. Then a) get the fax number for your telco’s board of directors b) get the supervisor’s opinion c). Fax the board of directors.

Tell the board of directors, or investment relations that 1) it is in the Telco’s interests to lower their rates as you would then use their data services - demand to know what calculations your telco is using to make them think they would lose money by continuing to charge high rates.

2) Blog and Digg Tom’s article and those that follow. Cross-post them on Facebook. Print out the articles.

3) Tell and email your friends. Let 1000 blooms blossom.

At 12:37am, 7h16min after posting, Tom’s article had gotten 948 diggs and 151 digg comments. This is just the start.

Mad about these ridiculous data rates? What else should people should do to compel change?

The Buzan Centre promotes many memory aiding techniques. The underlying theme to these systems is to incorporate the creative and logical functions of the brain. By synthesising informational, perhaps abstract facts with experiences we are able to commit them to memory. This is related to an issue raised in [MIM] that questions the significance of the human brain being divided into two broadly specialised hemispheres. Apparently, this specialisation is a characteristic unique to humans; animals other than man have a symmetrical brain with no apparent hemispherical differentiation in brain function beyond the:

normal contralateral pairing of the left side of the body with the right-brain and vice-versa. This symmetry would appear to provide vital information about the extensive area of the spatial environment, thus enhancing the animal’s ability to construct accurate representations, or “topological maps”.…

Because of the development of language, human beings have been able to abandon total reliance on a topological map of the environment, which is expressed in the form of visual, auditory, or tactile imagery. The left brain language function permits an alternative mode of expressing spatial relationship. It permits abstract thinking, which is removed from or independent of actual objects present in the external world.…

… perhaps it is the two together that serve to make the most truly useful representation of the world, partly map-like, partly abstract.

This, then, is the essence of item number 9 in Figure 2-1 - by using these two hemispheres in synergy we keep our mind interested, stimulated, and hence able to use its spatial skills in the cognitive field. Item 10 elaborates and suggests that Mind Mapping is advantageous because we do not have to worry about expressing grammatically the interconnections, furthermore we have some place to put the ideas so that ideas in proximity (point 7 again) are somehow related, these ideas may even be approximations to each other.[1] Of course, there may be questionable issues related to this, for example: if so many thoughts can come to us simultaneously then maybe we can become overwhelmed? Whether or not this is true, it is surely preferable to have a lot of thoughts than to have none and should confusion descend then we are always at liberty to revert back to text.

Point 12 is to “be on a roll” - to have gained momentum during thinking; as the mind stops less often to let the writing catch up, the thinking process is less stunted than would otherwise be the case.

——————————————————————————–

[1] Both words are derived from Middle English, from Late Latin approximâtus, past participle of approximâre, to approach : Latin ad-, ad- + proximâre, to come near (from proximus, nearest).

To explain point 9 of Figure 2-1, we note that a principle law of Mind Mapping is to emphasise. [p. 97, The Mind Map Book] advises ‘Always use a central image’ and ‘Use images throughout your Mind Map’. The justification for this is simple:

“While both words and pictures are symbols, they are different in many ways of the greatest importance. So little are they equivalent to each other that if communication were confined to either alone, it would become very limited in its scope. All words need definitions, in the sense that to talk about things we have to have definitions for them. Verbal definition is a regress from word to word, until finally it becomes necessary to point to something which we say is what the last word in the verbal chain of definition means. Frequently the most convenient way of pointing is to make a picture. [pp. 158-59]”

[NOM, quoting from Ivins (1953)]

Specific images are something that our minds can grasp and because they persist beyond transient thought, they are directly shareable with others and open to comment or criticism.

[NOM, p.48] continues:

… furthermore, picture symbols are far more specific than word symbols. For example, the word “chair” is a term with a general meaning quite distinct from specific details of style, colour and so on, but on the other hand, any picture of “chair” must refer to a particular chair. This specifically makes the picture either more or less useful, depending on the need one has for “chair information”

The extent to which a specific picture connotes a particular chair is dependant on the representation. However, an iconic form is usually intended to show the features of the ‘class’, and none of the features of any particular member of that class, denoting the spirit of the generality that we label[1] “chair”.

The Roman Room memory technique[2] is a mnemonic system invented by the Romans that exploits imagery. A forgetful person is instructed to imagine a tidy room and in this, to mentally place specific objects to denote specific thoughts. Then, by regularly visualising and mentally exploring this room, thoughts can be kept at hand. The key aspect is to use bright and memorable images, so that the creative side of our minds will want to revisit this bright and pleasant scenario.

2.10.1 Omitting background words - a key principle in the Mind Mapping Technique

An important principle in Mind Mapping is the deliberate omission of the many background words; these are simply not needed because the purpose of these words in the text would be to imply structure. The mind map has a less discursive format and so has several advantages, most notably these which are listed in the Mind Map Book.

Advantages of Mind Mapping over linear note-making/taking

Figure 2-1: Advantages of Mind Mapping over linear note-making/taking (p.89 Mind Map Book)

2.10.2 Comments.

Referring to Figure 2-1, justification for items 1-5 should be immediately apparent. The effect of item 6 can be equalled in text by using emphasis and point 8 is a consequence of switching to a non-discursive format. Point 7 is interesting and is now discussed further; this explanation might also be relevant to point 11. In The Mind Map Book, Buzan does not distinguish between the terms ‘brain’ and ‘mind.’

]]> http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/03/23/conceptmapping-thesis-chapter-2-part-101-omitting-background-words-%e2%80%93-a-key-principle-in-the-mind-mapping-technique/feed/ http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/03/22/conceptmapping-thesis-chapter-2-part-9-explicit-appearance-2/ http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/03/22/conceptmapping-thesis-chapter-2-part-9-explicit-appearance-2/#comments Thu, 22 Mar 2007 20:22:00 +0000 Martin Cleaver http://martin.cleaver.org/blog/2007/03/22/conceptmapping-thesis-chapter-2-part-9-explicit-appearance-2/ 2.10Projection onto a representation space

What is included on a map is the choice of the map-maker. Several sources [NOM, LTL] indicate that any transformation of reality into a symbolic representation is a PROJECTION. This transformation often acts as an abstraction, from a person’s particular viewpoint and indeed, may distort facts to fit into the model. An example of this is the Mercator planetary projection; this cylindrical projection of a globe is constructed by artificially increasing the separation of naturally equidistant points - the latitudes from the equator - so that it may preserve shapes. However, this process produces a distorted representation. For instance, Greenland is shown with enormously exaggerated size although its shape is preserved, whereas the countries around the equator are shown much diminished and the poles cannot be shown at all. Hence this type of projection gives an incorrect impression of the relative sizes of the world’s continents.

The transformation which facts undergo when they are rendered as propositions is that the relations in them are turned into something like objects.

Furthermore, the projection process involved in language includes a system which requires that names and named relations or activities be strung out side by side, in an order that may or may not have anything to do with the spatial or temporal order of the topic, concepts or other things discussed. Langer calls this property of verbal symbolism “discursiveness,” and “by reason of it, only thoughts that can be arranged in this particular order can be spoken at all; any idea which does not lend itself to this ‘projection’ is ineffable, incommunicable by means of words.”

visual forms are not discursive. They do not present their constituents successively, but simultaneously.

- [NOM]

A word-based description is usually enough to mentally recreate the ideas if those ideas were the reader’s head in the first place; the re-reading process serving to deepen the pathways of associations in the mind. If however, the text was the result of note-taking from another source, such as a lecturer, then they are likely to be hurried and to be mere glimpses of what was considered important at the time. This is often inadequate because what is written is influenced by what the student already does or does not know. Even if the notes are taken from a text book, the nature of the interlinked concepts can be more important than the rote facts. In whatever way the text expresses the relationships, the representation does not have a structure that mimics the network of relationships between components in the subject matter.

Mind Mapping[1] is a note-taking and note-making technique in which ideas are represented graphically. A focal idea, the subject matter, is illustrated at the centre of the page, and around this are drawn related ideas with the most important related concepts shown on the arcs outwards on the first level and then successively, items of further interest.

Plate 1 shows a Mind Map from the Mind Map Book; by Lorraine Gill on the nature of creativity and the perspective of the artist; it begins to illustrate the freeform tendencies of Mind Mapping, this map is much less freeform than many others featured in this and other books. Achieving the same artistic feel in software could be difficult.

A map’s value is gained from its explicit appearance. It is open to gestalt feeling and can be usefully viewed in part or as a whole, from varying distances and it can be addressed from any starting point; the same is simply not true of a piece of writing. A piece of text held so that none of the characters of the typeface on the page can be read holds no useful information until all of the text comes into focus; it has just one level of information. A map, however, can be read in any order and for a purpose determined by the reader. Whereas language enforces a strict ordering on the subject matter and so has to be mentally processed against knowledge to get anything other than the author’s intent, the map is “route neutral”. Finally, a map is a continuous space and so can better express situations in the real world that is also continuous space. Hence, the mind can interpolate or extrapolate without requiring explicit attention from the reader.

Toronto has corridors already for trains, use these for the city, not just to the suburbs!

The recent Toronto’s Transit Camp re-prompted me to look again. It’s clear: the Go’s Train Lines permeate Toronto along corridors distinct from existing mass transit, but they just aren’t used for passengers. Picking just one line for example purposes, there are only 4 passenger trains each way on the Bradford line per day, at peak times. Otherwise you’ll have to go by road.

Why are these lines mainly used for freight? I am told there is a lack of demand for long distance travel by train, but this does not explain why Toronto can not use the Go Lines for passenger transport within the reaches where population density is high.

For example:

Currently this line to King City, Vaughan, Aurora and Bradford: there are no stops between York University and Union Station.

Lansdowne & Bloor, Lansdowne & Lawrence, Lansdowne & Steeles.

For example, Bloor & Lansdowne could be great as a Go station, plus the land where the lines cross is relatively cheap . (Near Weston and Bloor.)

All the Go Train lines exiting Toronto could have stations at major intersections. e.g. Lansdowne and Lawrence. And the trains could go as far out of the core as demand warrants, say to Steeles or Vaughan off-peak: simply reverse the train around and bring it back to Union.

All these lines: do they have Multiple Tracks? Would they fit?

Infrastructure wise, a primary constraint would be multiple tracks along each corridor. I’d guess they ideally need at least 4 lines: fast and slow in each direction. Is there a map of which lines already have multiple tracks?

As Mark Kuznicki said in the Transit Camp back channel:

I love Summerhill station! a new Beltline would be very cool…across midtown and then down the valley to downtown. The Beltline [has been] turned into a hiking trail.

(And of course, to such trails, the city could add overhead light rail transportation, or even elevate other existing lines)

$6bn to get to York University? Can’t we Just Go?

Yet there is a plan to spend $6bn on extending the subway to York University. Why bother when the Go Train line already goes to York University, and beyond?

More fully using Go Lines, to the Airport

So, discussions are already on the table ? The nearest I could find is http://transit.toronto.on.ca/gotransit/2102.shtml :

Another change is the building of a high-speed rail link between Union Station and the Airport. The only thing confirmed at this point is funding for the project, and the amount of that funding hasn’t even been specified. Some backers of this project would like a dedicated high-speed line, while others believe a better option would be to route the Airport people mover to a new GO train beside Woodbine Racetrack, and to increase GO Train service between Union and Brampton to half-hourly, seven days a week. (Remains the same)

Environmental Assessments are underway for several corridor improvements, including the West Toronto grade separation project, which is well advanced. As well, there is also an EA for a second track between St. Clair Avenue and Weston, which would permit more train movements. Another EA set to begin will address the bottleneck in Downtown Brampton, where the line is single-tracked for a short stretch on the busy Halton Subdivision.

http://www.stevemunro.ca/?p=66 has the most detail on the subject.

Is there some great reason why great progress can’t be made over the next ten years (2017) using these train lines?

NB. My thanks to Kieran Huggins for spending time with me clarifying some of these issues.

Technorati : Go Trains

The key word is structure. Korzybski concluded that the map was so useful simply because it retains the structure of the territory that it mimics.

Whatever the medium for the target representation, reality has to be translated in order to fit it onto a representation, if the complexity of the structure is beyond that afforded by the medium then some information is lost and the operation cannot be perfectly reversible.

Donald Norman covers the idea of structural similarity in his book, ‘Design of Everyday Things’, arguing that to be intuitive, devices should mimic the natural structure of the components being controlled. For example, light switches on a wall should be laid out in the same structural manner as the lights on the ceiling. This provides the brain with implicit knowledge and, by doing so, bypasses any need for the conscious mind to interpret. This idea is called the Map-Territory relationship and is well known in cognitive science.

Graphical representations, and in particular, maps, are a rich topic for cognitive research:

Each person carries with him his cognitive field as a map of the world. He responds not to the world, but to the map. When he receives the stimulus of a communication, the meaning it has is the way it can be fitted into the map. When the communication fits readily, one’s confidence in his map is increased. … Since the effects of a communication depend on the manner in which it “meshes” with an existing cognitive map, we might readily entertain the notion that these efforts will take more readily when the cognitive maps of the communicators are similar in structure. [NOM]

[Korzybski], the founder of the field of “general semantics ” is renowned for having written:

Any map or language, to be of maximum usefulness, should, in structure, be similar to the structure of the empirical world… The map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.

Adult humans have had plenty of practice in mentally modelling space and, because of this, we become adept at recognising patterns in it. So when we are presented with a conceptual instead of spatial problem, it can be both advantageous and natural for us to draw analogy and to attempt to translate the patterns - by means of analogy - into a similar spatial problem. Indeed, this process has become so natural that a spatial point of view is now reflected in everyday language even where no spatially separated items are being considered. For instance, the conceptual likeness of two similar objects is defined hence:

In this definition, conceptual likeness is defined in terms of objects in a spatial field, things being ‘close’ if they are similar.

It is possible that by placing conceptual objects in a space, this allows us also to use geometrical, or perhaps topological, operations on intellectually bound concepts.

We’ll question how IBM have extended the concept of a wiki as a mashup of content to wiki as a mashup of data & content and how this relates to their other product suites. We’ll then look at this from our Wikinomics lens, talk about flexibility for processes and how it scales into a strategy of agility for the firm, rounding out with some comments of how wikis (and Web 2.0) addresses major knowledge management notions such as Social Capital and Relationship Capital in the Enterprise 2.0 context.

Then it’s open question and an opportunity to share-your stories, with plenty of opportunity for break out to socialize, and constant joking and our usual merriment.

Throughout we’ll take a fun few minutes to take video clips toward a YouTube advertisement, which, all things going well, I’ll stitch together to help promote our April meeting.

* Please sign up on http://upcoming.org/event/151768/ so the pub knows how many people to expect.

I didn’t have a plan for data but, ouch.

I’m not going to judge Rogers for this, but, to quote my friends:

what a cash grab..

yikes

and:

holy x*#@

And I said to customer service:

I had already told you (in November) to block that service

Meanwhile, we’re happy to see that Virgin now have a $0 monthly charge, 25c plan for their service. Perfect, for my mother-in-law and my wife who seldom use their phones.

Ah. The joys, of Local Number Portability. Now, at last. In Canada. (The UK had portability since 1999)

Maybe all these dissatisfied but no longer trapped customers will attract Vodaphone and Orange to come play in Canada now?

I found http://infosource.gc.ca/inst/imc/fed05_e.asp which says:

Thanks to Gwenna for mentioning this,
Field Operations Support System (FOSS)
Description: The FOSS database is a central repository of information on all persons who have been, may be or are wanted to be seen by Immigration staff. FOSS is the main operational support system for immigration operations in Canada. The system is comprised of numerous components including query functions, status entry, document creation, refugee monitoring, case processing support, medical profiles, registry functions, client name and address, statistical functions, airport primary inspection line functions, access and security, appeals and litigation, quality assurance and records maintenance. FOSS also provides query capabilities for lost, stolen and fraudulent documents. All Immigration staff that work with the public and the staff that support these officers use FOSS. It is also used at all international airports by customs inspectors and by a number of specialized groups, such as: Case Management, Query Response Centre, Social Insurance Registry, Immigration Health, Immigration Statistics, External Affairs Protocol , Canadian consulates in various locations in the United States. There are over 18.75 million client records and over 32.5 million document reference records.
Topics: Immigration, Visitors, Students, Foreign Workers, FOSS, Computerized System and System.
Program Record Number: CIC APB 010 (formerly CIC IMM 110)

Computer-Assisted Immigration Processing System (CAIPS)
Description: CAIPS is the Department’s automated system for immigration application processing outside Canada. Information is entered in the system from application forms and supporting documentation submitted by applicants for immigrant and visitor visas, returning resident permits and student and employment authorizations. This information is transferred electronically to FOSS to facilitate inland processing. In addition, CAIPS users have real-time access to FOSS via the CAIPS-FOSS Integration module.
Topics: Overseas, Immigration, Visitors, Students, Foreign Workers, CAIPS, Computerized System and System.
Program Record Number: CIC APB 011 (formerly CIC IMM 110)

Language, especially its permanent textual form, is a format that virtually every human has the ability to use and is undeniably powerful, emotive and expressive. Carefully selected, words can ring an air of stark truth and clarity, and can drive a deep understanding directly into the human subconscious. However to achieve the degree of expression needed to describe a complex quantity takes skill and perseverance on the behalf of the writer and reading usually takes considerable time [1]. Grammatical rules aid comprehension by allowing the writer to remove ambiguity in intent, but the application of these rules requires yet an extra level of verbiage.

[1] There are some quite simple techniques that can be applied to enable “speed reading”. To exploit the empirical characteristics of our eyes we should fixate less often and over a wider area of the page; apparently, it is only while our eyes are stationary that we can take in information.

Brought into an Enterprise context, its sister “Enterprise 2.0,” now promises to provide a similar revolution in the way firms compete: engaging the heart, souls and minds of the many as a viable and credible means to distribute many other tasks into the hands of the common worker.

This short article glimpses at two US Navy papers simulating combat using “Edge Organization” structures that I, (Martin Cleaver,) think are in many ways like the Enterprise 2.0 tools of today and the community-driven Knowledge Management tools from over the last decade.

The authors have been involved in over 40 studies using these designs, including the oversight of graduate theses at the Naval Postgraduate School, problems addressed in and beyond Project Albert International Workshops, and studies for DoD clients.

So, in truth, I don’t know what the US Navy use put in practice, but these studies show at very least sustained interest in the paradigm.

Command and Control and Organizational Rigidity

The nature of Social Media is to create community around a problem, to leverage the benefits of the Wisdom of the Crowds, such that mass numbers of people can view an issue, make comments, get feedback from one another and collectively decide on the best course of action. Contrast this with typical companies where hierarchy and authority “declares the best” course of action and everyone else is “required” to follow.

Leaders often lament that their workers are not engaged in their jobs. In many firms, workers “show up”, do the task at hand and go home. Sooner or later intelligent workers become disenfranchised by contained task roles with many resorting to career moves to gain a new level of autonomy. In turn, most companies suffer from organizational rigidity and lag and stumble in the markets in which they compete.

What is regrettable is these companies don’t make use of the observations and insight of their workers, and don’t provide toolkits for maximizing the intelligence within. Enterprise 2.0 is a shift towards mass collaboration that can significantly help.

Management Theory

For decades, Management literature has been awash with patterns for structuring the organizational hierarchy, with the Matrix Organization recently popular. Lately management theory is following more organic models that might better correspond to Web 2.0: (Wikipedia)

The chaordic model of organizing human endeavours emerged in the 1990s, based on a blending of chaos and order (hence “chaordic”), comes out of the work of Dee Hock and the creation of the VISA financial network. Blending democracy, complex system, consensus decision making, co-operation and competition, the chaordic approach attempts to encourage organizations to evolve from the increasingly nonviable hierarchical, command-and-control models.

Similarly, emergent organizations, and the principle of self-organization.

Decision Making in Critical Situations

Making decisions that people will follow goes from “nice to have” to critical when life-and-death is at stake. An interesting field to look at is the military, as they have a reputation for being extremely hierarchical yet they must make the most use of every resource they have in combat, regardless of the rank of the person.

In Exploring Edge Organization Models for Network-Centric Operations Adam Forsyth, Susan Sanchez, Hong Wan, Kok Meng Chang and Paul Sanchez cover creating a Computer Simulation of Command and Control vs. Social organizational methods:

Armed forces around the world are considering radical transformations to their structures and strategies because of the information revolution and the changing global environment. Senior leaders continually face decisions on how best to structure, modernize, organize, and employ forces in an increasingly uncertain future. To support their decision-making efforts, defense analysts must explore and provide insight into how future network-enabled forces would perform across a broad range of threat capabilities and scenarios.

Interactions, Sense-making and Group Dynamics in the Military

This corresponding powerpoint pdf by Adam Forsyth nicely illustrates a set of corresponding dynamics:

more, after the jump.

(more…)

The extent of our experience thus dictates an arbitrary limit on the dimensionality that we understand. However, there is no such limit on the complexity of relationships between objects. It is these relationships that dictate the pattern of a system that we seek to comprehend, and it is these which we attempt to represent, model, or imitate, usually for the benefit of others when we write a passage of text or design a computer system.

For the First Time in Toronto…

Webcom is aimed at Communication Professionals, Intranet and Internet developers and managers, IT project managers, directors and vice-presidents.

Communications, Human Resources and IT departments in Public and Private sectors.

Over 40 World Renowned Speakers

• Cindy Gordon, Helix Commerce International
• Jon Husband, Wirearchy
• Jerome Nadel, Human Factors International
• Dave Pollard, Meeting of Minds
• Hubert Saint-Onge, SaintOnge Alliance

Complete List of Speakers (including me!)

Webcom Program

Webcom Toronto focuses on the tools and practices necessary to build smarter organizations which can compete successfully in a global economy

Creating organizations that are innovative, competitive and flexible is a challenge in today’s competitive marketplace.

Prepare your organization for a strong position in the Web world by tapping into knowledgeable presentations on innovation, strategies for sharing knowledge and supporting the mobile work, enterprise discovery and search, intranet infrastructure and content management, as well as social media and collaborative tools.

Building Smarter Organizations:

• Tools & Practices
• Knowledge Sharing / Innovation Intranet / Infrastructure Content / Community
• Usability
• Web Analytics
• Collaboration Tools

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…)

The environment or “milieu” that we live in is partly composed of a space and as such, some of the earliest things that we need to describe during childhood exist in a spatial field. We become accustomed to understanding the spatial dimensions and become experienced at describing them. Survival, [MIM] claims, has become our motivating force to understand spatiality. On the whole, human conception is restricted to those things that we have observed and for most, dimensionality of orders greater than 3 is beyond everyday experience and hence very difficult. Such a skill is attainable by practice* and [MIM] claims that it is purely familiarity that has made it ‘transparent’ to us.

A space is only distinguishable from that which it contains when the space encompasses more than one object. It takes its form only when it has to enclose two or more items, and it is only when an observer is standing in the space that observer can perceive a separation of any spatial relationship between the items. Hence, the space defines what we can see. ‘Flatland’ (a short account about the ability to conceive dimension), illustrates this point brilliantly in an explanation of a two dimensional world; to an observer living on a flat plane everything appears as a straight line. In the book, it is only when the observer is lifted above this plane does the observer realise that the third dimension exists.

Here’s a little video clip, typical of the singing and joking, taken with my Treo and uploaded to YouTube.

Quick update: it’s clear that the London office has started processing my visa application! They returned this yesterday…

My status on e-client is unchanged…

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…)

http://weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/forecast/trends_graph_e.html?yyz&unit=m reported Toronto weather this morning:

The funny thing is, the place I felt coldest living was in Melbourne, Australia while an MBA student.

Why? Well, our house there had practically no insulation and really poor heating.

Today, Giveaway of the Day (GoTD) is giving away - for free - the personal edition of ConceptDRAW, a “mindmapping and brainstorming” software tool. This is a U$120 value, and it can be downloaded free from here - http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/conceptdraw-mindmap-personal/ - activation
instructions are included in the download.

Who or what is GotD you ask:
“…Every day we nominate one software title that will be a Giveaway title of that day. The software will be available for
download for 24 hours (or more, if agreed by software publisher) and that software will be absolutely free. That means - not a trial, not a limited version - but a registered and legal version of the software will be free for our visitors*.

The software product will be presented n its full functionality, without any imitations save for those mentioned in Terms and Conditions.”

Tari continues:

MatchWare’s OpenMind BE - http://www.matchware.com/en/products/openmind/ -
remains my favourite software in this category, but it is pricey, as is the
better-known MindJet’s MindManager - http://www.mindjet.com/us/

And of course, open source FreeMind - http://freemind.sourceforge.net -
remains an excellent option, and is available for Windows, Macs and Linux
users. Excellent PDF manual, put together by a technical writing student can
be found here - http://www.geocities.com/shaila_kishore/Freemind

Thanks Tari!

Verna Allee and Oliver Schwabe are visiting The Toronto Value Networks Cluster http://www.vncluster.com/YYZ.htm at The Kingbridge Institute, www.kingbridgecentre.com on March 23, 2007.

Also talking at this event is Anthony Williams, one of the two authors of the best-selling book, WIKINOMICS: how Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.

If you live in Ontario, can get to King City, and are interested in how Knowledge Management intersects with Web 2.0, you’d be remiss to miss this!

About Value Networks

Example Value Network, from Verna’s whitepaper: A Value Network Approach for Modeling and Measuring Intangibles (PDF)

Value Networks trump Value Chains under the light that no organization’s activities can be statically defined:

Most of the management tools we are familiar with are “engineering” type tools. They were developed to break down a … system into its parts or processes and fine-tune them for maximum efficiency and output with the lowest possible amount of inputs and “friction” in the process. However, when it comes to understanding organizational dynamics, engineering tools are very limited. Something that is complicated, like an airplane, can be engineered. All the parts are ultimately knowable and predictable according to rules of physics and can be managed.

So, it simply doesn’t work to try to break a living enterprise down into functions or individual processes, then paste it all back together as an engineered whole system. When you cut a horse in two, you don’t get two horses - you get a mess.

In short, complex systems are not knowable, and not decomposable. (For more about complexity vs. complicated, follow Dave Snowden’s blog at http://www.cognitive-edge.com/)

Intangibles

Many of the most important relationships aren’t monetary: they are intangibles, such as Knowledge and Benefits:

Intangibles are those “little extras” people do that help keep things running smoothly and help build relationships. These include exchanges of strategic information, planning knowledge, process knowledge, technical know-how, collaborative design work, joint planning activities, and policy development.

Intangible benefits are advantages or favors that can be extended from one person or group to another. For example, a research organization might ask someone to volunteer time and expertise on a project, in exchange for an intangible benefit of prestige by affiliation. People can and do “trade favors” in order to build relationships. Intangible benefits often reveal the real motivational factors for people to engage in relationships and activities.

On-Demand Integration as a form of Value Networks

In today’s ever-more hypercompetitive world, organizations are less and less often in static relationships in relation to one another. For instance, when Software As A Service (SaaS) / On-Demand vendors integrate with one another, they create network effects, lock-in and other intangibles that make the system as a whole more attractive than if unintegrated.

Increasingly, vendor functionality is becoming plug-and-play from the customer organization point of view, allowing adopters to leapfrog to a new baseline of functionality if they are willing to just sacrifice standardizing some processes to the conformity that the value network of on-demand firms have defined.

Adopting such commoditized basics really helps small firms hit the ground running, focus on innovating and building their differentiators and get on the climb to sustainable revenues.

Beyond Commodization: Ruby On Rails

In a later post, I’ll talk about what I learnt from Jay Hancock of Kibbles Software about the cost, reliability and speed-to-market impacts of Ruby on Rails and how, as a consequence, a whole new world of custom software is shaping up.

Conclusion

With all these pieces, it’s an exciting time to be a consultant in the collaboration-meets-integration space. The very notion of “collaboration” has taken on new meaning with such massive scale. This scale gives rise to new complexities that can be analyzed with value networks and likely poses many new questions for Knowledge Management.

And just what are those questions? This I will ask, on March 23rd. If you want a questions asked on your behalf, please comment here. I promise to follow up with the answers I get.

The story here is about business webs, and how taking one SaaS service, such as Salesforce.com can lead to adoption of another, compatible, integrated service. Salesforce.com is leading the way in its Application Exchange, with most being natural extensions of Salesforce.com. Likewise, the recent Freshbooks.com integration with Basecamp directly makes both of their value propositions much higher.

However, some Salesforce.com integrations, like those in the Wealth Management category, are completely tangential. While such applications don’t add direct value to core Salesforce.com users they do add complementary functionality, expanding the very definition of the scope of the Salesforce.com mandate and why you’d want a relationship with them. (In time, Salesforce.com might consider a more application-neutral brandname).

Given that systems integration is difficult and expensive (and although XML / messaging layers like TIBCO and MQSeries made it easier), vendors doing the work for you make integration and business relationships much easier still.

As vendors integrate their services, the Value Chain diminishes, as does the notion of integration creating just a halo around the firm. More and more it becomes important to understand and appreciate the value of networks of firms, interlinked in an ever-morphing kaliedoscope of relationships.

And, to make sense of these relationships, you’ll need an appreciation of Value Networks.

People construct internal representations, called mental models, of the situation in the world that they want to reason about and then change those models, in ways corresponding to the ways the world can change, to try to find solutions to their problems.

[Mind in Action, p 68]

The creative process is essentially the formulation of models and their repeated reformation. The act of creating a representation is fundamental to the cognitive process because it allows us to test and question the nature or existence of relationships between concepts. Cognitive Science investigates the model on which we base our thoughts; just how do we store and manipulate the symbols that comprise our ideas?

Two slides were particularly prominent for me:

This one - which talked about the propensity of a function to be served from outside the walls of the business (Yellow marking adoption this year). What struck me about this is no functions were left untouched, and even ERP and SCM which have typically been well served by decades worth of investment and central to the business have healthy expectations of software as a service.

And this one, which illustrates just where firms lose productivity and agility in traditional desktop configurations:

The slides and audio recordings are available at www.eseminarslive.com
http://event.on24.com/event/38/28/8/rt/1/documents/slidepdf/3-5-07_saas.pdf

Technorati : saas

People tried on several occasions that this era is just Knowledge Management repackaged. I feel like I am missing something drastic here. The change now goes deeper, has immediate impact and is focused on PEOPLE, not knowledge. Rebuttal needs work.

“Knowledge Management” has been around since about 1988. It’s mature enough as a goal that it does not take a single lens of goal of just ‘knowledge’. Major notions such as Human Capital, Social Capital, Relationship Capital and Structural Capital reflect the perspectives of different stakeholders, and Knowledge Management is about fueling the dynamics across these concerns, and providing toolkits such as Social Network Analysis to measure them. KM should power the organization, and the promise of KM should not be, as it got it’s poor reputation for in the late 90’s for being, a way to sell glorified databases that ignored all any human aspects of interaction in work.

In my mind much of the KM literature is sound, and many KM ideas have never yet made it into software, so KM shouldn’t be judged solely from KM implementations, even though many massively over-promised in the early days.

The importance of the differing depth of understanding and priorities of people in leadership positions across the firm can too easily be underestimated. While the VP of HR should care about people, people are not a lead concern for the VPs of Marketing, Technology or Finance. They have their own portfolios of concerns to worry about.

While a great social media platform bolsters all functions, the story needed to sell into the different functions needs to lead with each of those departmental concerns, and break those concerns down into how allowing your people to converse, surface notions, collectively plan and collectively refine makes a difference to the VPs goals. Ironically, social media make the biggest impact at the pan-organizational level, for whom only the CEO has prime concern.

Organizations make progress where people put their focus. But too few people are able (often due to lack of skills or time) or willing (due to incentives) to focus on the big picture. Many don’t see or consider the big picture because people around them don’t. And what we don’t understand we filter out. What results is a morass of people all pushing parts of something they don’t understand. Maybe the greatest gift of the new generations of workers is their fresh perspective and questioning.

Knowledge Management as a discipline provides frameworks for understanding some of the dynamics of the big picture: from a strategy standpoint building the types of capital, from the individual, group and organizational levels. Much of KM theory was developed way before this Web 2.0 stuff came along yet many products and practitioners are unaware of just how many KM aspects have been reinvented in Web 2.0.

So like I said in Knowledge management is dead. Long live Knowledge Management, thank goodness the KM incarnations from the late 90’s are dead and buried, but, make no mistake, this discipline is alive and kicking.

“It is in symbolic, visual terms that the designer ultimately realises his perceptions and experiences; and it is in the world of symbols that man lives. The symbol is thus the common language between the artist and spectator”

Brian Lawson - How Designers Think

In this chapter, we survey various texts to get some ideas of what makes language difficult to instantly comprehend. We disseminate the ideas of structure and their relationship to representation in a ’space’, and conclude with some interesting results, leading to the design of the software prototype presented in Chapters 3 and 4.

To gain any understanding of a subject requires the ability to extract and manipulate its essential details or concepts. To become expert requires a thorough knowledge of the subject matter, to know where the boundaries for the concepts are, and to know what it is that constrains them to be this way.

2.1 What is a concept?

A definition for the term “concept” has yet to be agreed on by the academic community a fact that is indicative of the inherent ambiguity and difficulty of the nature of the word. The meaning presented here should be viewed in its intuitive, dictionary definition:

1a general notion; an abstract idea (the concept of evolution), …
3 Philos. an idea or mental picture of a group or class of objects formed by combining all their aspects.

- Oxford English “Complete Wordfinder”

Alternatively:

Concept is a regularity in events or objects designated by some label. (Emphasis added)

- [MIM]

For a long time, Cognitive Science held the belief that the human mind dealt in discrete units of comprehension and although nowadays it is accepted that these units can be very fluid in their nature, it is still groups of these units that we seek to exchange.

It is worth explaining the meaning of the word ’symbol’ because we use symbols to communicate and denote ideas. In this context, a symbol represents an abstraction of a real world entity or a concept in a person’s mind.

No matter what we experience, our minds will attempt to construct a set of symbols to represent the experience:

Langer shares the belief, with many others, that “this basic need, which is certainly only obvious in man, is the need of symbolisation. The symbol-making function is one of man’s primary activities, like eating, looking or moving about. It is the fundamental process of the mind, and goes on all the time.” [Nature of Maps]

Every stimulus that we perceive is subject to the process of reason within our cognitive capabilities. We attempt to make sense of these stimuli, and to fit it into a flexible framework on which we model the world.

Scientists say rising temperatures are warming the polar regions faster than the rest of the planet.

One of the key questions that scientists will hope the research effort will shed new light on is the potential rise in sea level caused by melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica.

The southern polar ice sheet holds 90% of the world’s fresh water.

If it all melted, global sea levels would rise by 200m (650 feet).

Politically, 31 Jan ‘07:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal scientists have been pressured by the White House to play down global warming, advocacy groups testified Tuesday at the Democrats’ first investigative hearing since taking control of Congress.

The hearing focused on allegations White House officials for years have micromanaged the government’s climate programs and have closely controlled what scientists have been allowed to tell the public.

“It appears there may have been an orchestrated campaign to mislead the public about climate change,” said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California. Waxman is chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and a critic of the Bush administration’s environmental policies, including its views on climate. — CNN.com

So, who should be most vocal about Global Warming? According to the University of Arizona, Washington DC and New York should be among the most concerned!

This Vanity Fair photo illustrates a dramatized eventual effect on Manhattan:

In sum, here’s North America under threat:

Florida

In Europe, Denmark* Netherlands has everymost reason to worry:

In Asia, Cambodia, Papua New Guinea, and Singapore are under threat.

For the rest of the maps, see http://www.Geo.arizona.edu/dgesl/research/other/climate_change_and_sea_level/sea_level_rise/sea_level_rise_old.htm#images

Technorati : Global_warming, politics, science

“The horror of that moment,” the King went on, “I shall never, never forget!” “You will, though,” the Queen said, “if you don’t make a memorandum of it.”

Lewis Carroll ( 1832-98 ) - Through the looking glass (1872)

To exchange thoughts is a fundamental need of every human being. No person sharing an environment with others can hope to fulfil their ambitions without the co-operation and consideration of those around them. Only by communicating can we allow ourselves to be heard and therefore it makes sense to become good at communicating, and to get our point across in a timely and efficient manner.

For most people, language forms the basis for all communication. It has developed from our natural ability to emit and comprehend sounds and has been refined to allow us to represent concepts as words and sentences in both verbal and written forms. Language is not, however, the only means by which we can communicate, nor is it always the most appropriate. Language has certain disadvantages, for example when reading text, concentrated study is required in order to elicit that which is important to the reader. People rarely have the time to listen to a whole detailed story and a summary is often all that is required.

The process of revision recreates the ideas in the reader’s mind and hence reinforces a pathway of memory associations. The more often that these pathways are used, the better the chance that the mind will remember the subject matter. A key issue addressed in this thesis is that the reader seldom has time to continually review notes made on a piece of literature previously covered, and that this reviewing can often be a tedious process, and as such, non-constructive. This thesis examines some reasons behind this phenomenon and goes on to investigate why certain experiences are instantly memorable.

Also examined is the idea of maps being used exclusively as an alternative to using language. The justification for this is that diagrams can give instant gestalt feeling as to a subject matter, and further they appear to exploit our mind’s natural capability to recognise pictures as a unit of comprehension, and also plays on our natural fascination and memory for pictures.

Psychologists have done much research into “cognitive mapping”; this is examined with a study of some popular techniques of note-taking and note-making. In particular, a technique called ‘Mind Mapping’ is based around the notion of drawing diagrams as an aid to creativity and memory.

This project investigates the nature of concepts. It discusses forms of their representation and of the relationships and structure between them. It looks at the mediums that we use to exchange thoughts and the way that these mediums affect the content of the message.

Graphical forms of representing concepts have long been proposed as more immediately accessible than textual. Methodologies that endorse this view include Mind Mapping and Concept Mapping, and these are described in Chapter 2. As part of this project these two methodologies are compared, and the advantages and disadvantages of each are highlighted. Computerised Mind Mapping has been implemented by others and some such implementations are investigated.

In Chapter 3, a look is made as to how the best features of the two techniques can be combined to produce a piece of software named ThinkMap. Decisions are made that shape the overall look and feel of this product and a design document is presented. In essence, ThinkMap allows Concept Maps to be displayed over the World Wide Web.

Chapter 4 discusses the implementation of ThinkMap; its structure and the internal communications techniques employed. It goes on to describe some of the lessons learnt and discusses the viewers built for viewing the concept representation from different software platforms.

Chapter 5 shows a possible extension to ThinkMap to allow it to have a live connection to Web Browsers and then shows ThinkMap’s relevance in the context of semiotic theory.

Chapter 6 draws some conclusions and proposes some future possible uses of the framework that has been produced.

Technorati : Conceptmapping, MSc

Abstract

When referring to a problem, we often speak of a space in which the problem’s parts exist. This allows us to speak metaphorically and to apply knowledge constructed in a given field to be useful in a less familiar one.

Concepts are universally separate from representation, yet the representation often subtly distorts or obscures the ideas. This is undesirable yet almost inevitable; the trick, it seems, is to choose a medium appropriate to the purpose and structure of the message.

This report discusses the nature of concepts, how representation affects a message and how human characteristics affect learning and remembering. A prototype implementation of a concept representation system is presented.

I am blogging some of my thesis now as I’d like to network with others interested in the field and that I hope that it makes interesting reading. I submitted my M.Sc. in Computer Software and Systems Design on 16 October 1995. However, although more than 10 years have passed, much of the conceptual discussion is timeless, it continues to frame how I think, and it has new relevance in the light of Social Software.

If you have interest please give me feedback. This will encourage me to revisit the work, and maybe to release or rework the software tool.

Thanks,

Martin

Technorati : Conceptmapping, MSc

Reading http://www.rourkem.com/2006/12/04/tibco-activematrix-one-container-to-rule-them-all/ I was struck by the significant progress that TIBCO has made in the last few years, in particular the further abstraction of the Enterprise Java Beans concept to the point where modules written in practically any language can be hosted and flexibly deployed into the TIBCO Active Matrix Service Grid:

[Say] you break your application down into four pieces, or services. You decide to build one of those services in .Net and the other three in Java. You deploy all four the same way, using AM Service Grid. Your application can now run as one OS level process with all the services communicating in-process even through one of those services is .Net. You have an XA level transaction that spans all four services and you didn’t need to do anything fancy to make that work. Database connections are shared across all four services. When your .Net service invoked one of the Java services it did so with a single line of code, as if it were simply invoking a function.

Four months have gone by. Another department in your company wants to re-use your .Net service as part of a new application they are building, but they don’t want to host their application on your server. No problem here - they still invoke your service with one line of code, but now that call flows from their node to your node, and the response comes right back. Time to put their new application into production. Maybe the sysadmins decide that this new application should be deployed to the same node as your application. No problem, no code needs to be changed, and now the communication is in-process again.

Two years later your company’s compliance officer tells you that all the social security numbers flowing between the application services must be encrypted and a log must be created with a dump of all updates to a certain list of employee records. Still not a problem. You purchase the ActiveMatrix Policy Manager, create a policy that does exactly what you’ve just been asked to do - but graphically, without writing code - run through a quick test cycle in your QA lab, and then deploy this policy to your applications without changing a single line of your service code or redeploying your services.

From a technical standpoint, TIBCO is providing unprecedentedly abstraction in platform capability for building new interoperable applications. From a business standpoint, it looks to be a winner for revolutionizing and rationalizing an organization’s existing technology portfolio, and contributing new heights in flexibility for ongoing works.

What do I mean by this? Well, a huge factor in making real successes touted in Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) activities is whether the technical platforms powering the prospective firms will jive. Whether an M&A activity is deemed worth it depends on cost savings and new opportunities afforded from increased automated interactions across the firm. Just as good technology speeds the flow of information, poor technology implementation seriously hinders flow and is a crippling drain on manpower and cash alike.

The neat thing about the TIBCO Service Grid is that it wraps brittle technologies and code fragments into smooth padded coats of loveliness. Applications that were designed a long time ago for limited contexts can be reused and orchestrated into grander schemes alongside the whizziest of SOA buzzword compliant modularity.

This padding that software components get in this environment allows them to ride along next to one another without the usual casualties, emergencies, sticky-tape and glue you get when practicing ad hoc-integration.

So TIBCO Service Grid should further help reuse, scale and make interoperable old works. In turn, the new confidence that problems can be solved should accelerate rationalization, and therefore improve the accuracy of returns predicted by M&A practices. From a strategic point of view, I hope fewer technology constraints will allow firms to make M&A deals along vectors that makes best sense from company value-proposition point of view.

In the billion dollar M&A deals that typically mandate a sudden acquisition of these technologies the stakes are high and pressure is intense to deliver rapidly. Integration architecture solutions do have high price tags, but they are known price tags and in exchange they promise substantially reduce uncertainties about whether the deal will work and what it will cost.

These infrastructures are becoming increasingly ubiquitous: all large firms should have an integration capability at its core. With integration at hand, firms can afford to be both more sharply focused and more loosely coupled, able to automate the efficient exchange of operational data with a multitude of different partners. As such, they reduce the need to conduct M&A in the first place, instead allowing firms to innovate across loosely coupled business webs that reconfigure as business conditions morph.

In both contexts, M&A and loosely coupled business webs, solutions such as TIBCO are indispensable for keeping your staff, and shareholders, from tearing their hair out.

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

Okay, with this, my first post of the year, I am back in the blogosphere

Back in 2003, I studied for 3 months at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management as an MBA exchange student. In that time, I swapped a course so I could study Knowledge Management at the Michael G. DeGroote’s School of Business, the management school of McMaster University, Hamilton under Professor Nick Bontis. And it was because of that course that I heard of McMaster’s World Congress, which caught my attention because of the stream on Intellectual Capital and Innovation.

Innovation and Intellectual Capital are central to the concerns of every CEO in the world. Knowledge Management is recognized by the Economist as a core enabler of those goals. And I personally have solid conviction in the case for wikis and web 2.0 to radically impact how companies grow their intellectual capital base and to innovate.

This year the congress has three streams:

1. 9th World Congress on Intellectual Capital and Innovation
2. 4th World Congress on Corporate Governance
3. 1st World Congress on Strategic Business Valuation

Here’s the agenda: http://worldcongress.mcmaster.ca/2007/agenda.pdf

I plan to do at least a couple of write-ups during the next three days. I am in Hamilton from Weds-Friday. I’ll be staying at the Staybridge Suites at 111 Market Street.

If your coming along, I look forward to meeting with you: if you are there, and a blogger, do get in touch!

Call me: 416-786-6752.

Technorati : conference, innovation, intellectual capital, mcmaster

To pick a replacement, here’s that DSL report for Canada showing service provider speeds. I then checked the providers to see if there were any faster than Rogers I could not use. Those are crossed out:

Key: deeper red = faster

The Fastest Broadband ISPs
#	Users	TL domain click for detail	Type	Down kbps	Upload kbps	ISP, and notes ..
1	48	mountaincable.net		9080	1499	Mountain Cablevision [Only near Hamilton]
2	314	cgocable.net		6575	576	Cogeco [Maybe available??]
3	2	candlelight.ca	?	6418	4242	candlelight.ca [Central Ontario: East Lake Simcoe, Muskoka, Haliburton, Georgian Bay, Almaguin]
4	96	eastlink.ca		6277	854	Eastlink: Also offers phones and business services [Out in Halifax]
5	3	powergate.ca		6231	642	Compton Communications [Uxbridge and Port Perry?]
6	75	cgocable.ca		5588	492	Cogeco Cable [Same as #2, above?]
7	555	videotron.ca		5001	694	VideoTron: [Quebec]
8	10	aci.on.ca		4955	812	Aurora Cable Internet [Up north somewhere]
9	1	qc.ca	?	3987	1745	qc.ca
10	16	accesscomm.ca		3835	758	Access Communications: Saskatchewan based cable company
11	335	rogers.com		3691	464	Rogers Communications Inc.
12	2	terago.ca	?	3680	1711	terago.ca
13	8	dccnet.com		3558	396	Delta Cable Communications
14	2	magma.ca		3517	659	Magma Communications
16	19	b2b2c.ca		2824	955	B2B2C High-Speed Internet
17	8	look.ca		2752	596	Look Communications
18	154	shawcable.net		2710	549	Shaw Cable
19	28	teksavvy.com		2699	562	tekSavvy Solutions: Bell Canada reseller
23 479 bell.ca 2373 525 Bell Sympatico

Rogers’ numbers (3691/464) are actually higher than their advertised numbers (3000/384 regular high speed) shown at http://www.dslreports.com/faq/5073 ; these are way lower than the top rankers though. From a stats validity point of view, I can’t tell whether these numbers are comparing similarly costed packages, further, some companies appear twice without explanation.

What stunned me was that most of these services are unavailable to me in Toronto.

In the UK, broadband is deregulated yet shares common infrastructure. Every household is connected via British Telecom connectivity back to the local exchange, and this cost cable companies recompense back to BT to pay for the common infrastructure. The impact of this is that there are literally hundreds of service providers available to the point that many providers are bundling broadband internet free with cellular plans.

As many things in Canada appear on the surface so similar to my way of life back in the UK, it really stops me in my tracks when I realise something is fundementally different. In matters of broadband providers it’s distances: its impractical to put down a ubiquitous infrastructure so there has to be incentive for companies to provide to a local area. Maybe that incentive is a monopoly? I don’t know.

What I don’t understand is why there aren’t more broadband cable/dsl companies for the metropolitan areas.

Anyhow, I would appreciate if any of you have comments on Cogeco. I am not even sure that they are available here: I did just email them but the feedback form just returned a blank page and didn’t send me a copy of my request so who knows whether I’ll hear from them.

In the meantime, I’ll look for a means to determine what speed I’m actually getting. It seems much slower than 300kps upload.

The idea is that readers can register and get emailed about certain categories of topic I write about, as many people are not yet using an RSS reader. This would especially be a boon to my friends and family back home most of whom missed out on visiting me in Canada at low cost. FeedBurner provides email-subscription, but its an all-or-nothing not per-category affair, and my friends interests are likely not that interesting to potential clients, and vice-versa.

Subscribe2 is a plugin for wordpress, not for wpmu. There are some holes in the user-interface design and not everything works. After the jump I’ll go through some technical details. Its a great idea and I appreciate the effort gone into creating it. I might be tempted to help fix-up or pay someone else to help when the code becomes publicly writable.

In the meantime just know I’m trying to make my site more friendly…

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