wikiSquared

Coming up ... Long Tails and Situated Software....

• Wired Magazine readers - a few months ago - will remember an article on the Long Tail of business.  Wikis have an important role in this still under-tapped marketplace.   (Long Tail entry in Wikipedia)

• a propos the Long Tail argument:  consider Situated Software. (Situated Software - originating article)

• Online Social Networks 2005:  online conference 9-23 February http://www.socialnets.org

•  wikis as the Secret Efficienty Weapon for project management

uttered once, used often

Understanding wikis in terms of the metaphors of empty classrooms or great white walls in office corridors - is ALMOST good enough.  But not quite.  And in an important way. 

Companies launch wiki efforts -- rightly so -- with specific goals in mind.  Examples are more limited by our imagination than by the underlying tools:  wikis are used for in-house Best Practices exchanges, for keeping in contact with distributed sales forces, for employee timetable scheduling, for community-of-interest building, and the list goes on and on...

What happens is that rare business event of benefits exceeding expectations.  Sidebar comments -- the dreaded topic drift of most collaboration environments -- becomes something quite valuable.  The data model for wikis is elegantly simple:  everything (just about) is an addressable page.  What begins as an offshoot of one conversation becomes a 'data point' for other wikis. 

• A sales rep's comments about what she's hearing about a competitor's product can find its way into market research wikis.
• A sidebar comment in an employee timetable wiki can become the kernel of an idea for a new IT effort.
• A cluster of pages and comments in a community building environment can suggest a future wiki topic.  Or a new kind of service offering from the organization. 

What makes for the terribly appealing feature of this re-usability of wiki pages is that doing so  is as simple as making a selection in a WYSIWIG editor. 

For individuals and organizations, this ease of this kind of information re-use and re-combination is a Big Deal.   

wikis as discussion amplifiers

Let's say you and a colleague attend an industry seminar.  For the sake of a story, imagine it's a meeting where an important supplier company is making the case for, oh, some new line of service.  You're jazzed by what you hear and you look forward to getting back to your company to share some of this. 

Next Monday morning comes.  You try to bring up some of the ideas with colleagues you bump into in the hallways or you try to float one of the ideas in the next staff meeting.  You even try to wax poetic in the obligatory "Trip Report" you give to your boss to justify your three days in some posh resort.  No sparks.  No collective 'Wows!'   

What's happened?

Your colleagues lack a broader context of the ideas you're excited about.  You're asking them to be relatively passive consumers of new ideas.   It's a tough sell. 

Wikis provide a venue where you can make the ideas more relevant to your colleagues. 

1. With a few minutes of work on your browser, you open up 'the space' for a new wiki. 
2. You create a label for the wiki-space that makes sense to the topic.  ("Interactive Media 2005- Phoenix AZ,"  "EFF Annual Cybercrime Session,"  ...)
3. You figure out whom to invite to this online agora. 
4. You attach some of the material you received at the meeting.  (Pointers to articles, speakers' bios, somewhat edited meeting note you and a colleague took, scanned material).
5. You pose your ideas - your hunches, your thoughts about how this particular seminar event could be important to your company.

... And magic happens...

• Inevitably, the wiki attracts attention.   It gives people who didn't have the chance to attend the seminar a way - and a venue - to add their perspectives.  It gives people a hook where they can attach information pertinent to, tangential- or orthogonal- to the general tack of the wiki. 
• Your wiki creates the platform for numerous business What-Ifs, for Yes-And and Yes-But perspectives.
• Your wiki amplifies a germ of an idea you and your colleague received in an out-of-town seminar, and it makes it the starting point for an important exchange of business ideas.  An exchange, by the way, that is a fully searchable source of ideas for some future business problem solving. 

There's a social contract aspect to this.

Your wiki needs to be considerate of your colleague's time and attention span.  Here are three hints that come from what I've seen work in other venues.

• Your wikis need to have a focus.  Consider your 'space' as an environment where you and a collection of co-workers are there to solve _a_ problem.  Unquestionably (and to the better, I should say) the exchange and sharing of information will tend to meander.  You  - or the wiki moderator - have a job to  kindly remind participants that you're there, primarily, to 'solve for' a business problem.
• Your wiki needs to have -- up front -- a fixed duration.  No one wants to get sucked into what could be seen as an interminable and pointless chat room.
• At the end of the fixed duration, you owe your participants a summary of what's been discussed.  It's a return on their investment of time and creative juices.  It's also an important retrieval tool for future discussions. 

The Wall at Northbrook

Chicago-ans refer to a large tract of their city's northwestern suburbs as The Land Beyond O'Hare.  It's a place of broad roads slicing geometric patterns on land that was, 'til recently, so many cornfields.  It's a place of corporately tasteful office parks, mini-malls and great new housing developments made possible by Midwestern real estate prices.  And it's in one of these 'burbs -- Northbrook -- that once sat Andersen Consulting's (now Accenture) technology research division.  The facility was a squat, organically sprawling kind of place, surrounded by neatly trimmed grounds and populated by equally trimmed 20-something Andersen researchers.

For better or for worse, I was something of a disruptive element in that culture.  At one point I was given the task of creating a way to help these researchers keep abreast of what their colleagues were working on. I decided that something out of the ordinary was called for.

Bottom line?  There's business value in knowledge recombination

I commissioned a great white wall to be built along one of the inside corridors.  It was almost 30 feet long and it went from ceiling to floor.

The Wall became a kind of IP playpen.  Researchers would slap up an article they'd seen in Science, or an IEEE publication.  Others would print out a set of comments from a Lotus Notes conversation.  Still others would scribble notes about related issues they'd heard about while assigned to some remote client site.  And more often than not, someone would take a great marker, circle a sub-section of the board's flotsam, and write some pithy summary of why it was important.  Descriptions of huge projects would appear like mushrooms - and when some other group decided to commandeer the whiteboard real estate, whole sections of stuff would disappear -- only to be replaced by new stuff.

Solving problems by way of honing my experience against those of others...

A great deal of our ability to solve business problems comes from information almost never captured in 'organizational best practices.' The Wall helped us cast a broader net over the collective experience of our colleagues.

What The Wall did for Northbrook wikis will do for YOUR organization.

Everything we ever attached on that great whiteboard has on-line analogues.  Our colleagues can insert files.  They can create pointers to 'soft' and heuristic information. And they can add anything from pithy rejoinders to polished soliloquies.

AND the big Kahuna -- ONCE information for one project, for one team, for one meeting follow-up has been captured the wiki's seine, it becomes part of an organizational strata for future prospecting and mining.  It's an argument that's as simple as saying wikis reduce the cost of acquiring and re-using important business knowledge. 

the toolbox on your desk

When we talk about the application environments most of us spend our days in, we're usually talking about the Big Three:  spreadsheets, word processing, and e-mail.  (there's a fourth these days -- web browsers, see note below)

We spend most of our time in these environments, I'd argue, because these applications are so open-ended.  We pull, we tug, and we tweak these malleable families of software in order to accomplish tasks that probably go well beyond what their creators intended.  We use Excel as a tool to print text in neat columns or to create lightweight databases.  We use Word's search capabilities to manage free-form customer information files or to create presentations. 

And then there's e-mail, the ultimate protean tool.  The tool we use to query colleagues and to share lists of "to-do-s," the tool we use to get multiple feedback on document drafts and to schedule meetings. 

These three are grass roots tools - the hammers, hacksaws and nails of our workaday business lives.  We like them precisely because we have so much control of where or how we use them. 

And so it will be with wikis. 

When we strip all the bells and whistles away from all the current offerings of wiki products, we're left with something remarkably simple.  And useful. 

Wikis create the online analogue of an empty office waiting for us with unmarred corkboards and shiny new whiteboards.  Wikis are environments where we can slap up copies of documents or spreadsheets -- and ask our colleagues for their opinions.  They are environments where anyone can belly up to the whiteboard and scribble notes on a current project and where anyone else can drop by and annotate or correct those notes. 

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note:  Browsers as the new addition to The Big Three.  While it's true we spend an inordinate amount of time doing all manner of web work -- the browser tends to be more the portal to these other things than the do-anything stand-along tools I'm focusing on.

show me the value

What's in this for companies?

So much of this comes down to finding the places in corporate environments where the nature of wikis will really shine.  Or, more to the point, the groups where wikis will work best.

• Ad hoc groups working toward immediate goals.  An example might be a business development team working on a new PowerPoint sales presentation.
• Employees, contractors, outside contributors who work from remote locations and/or at different times.  Examples?  (1) A bulletin board for a company's sales force, (2) a similar 'posting place' for news organizations with distributed bureaus.
• Tasks that lean toward the qualitative and are either comment- or document- centric.  Example.  A venue where a company solicits customer feedback or - if in-house - the organization's a 'suggestion box.'
• Research efforts or Skunk Works that benefit from sharing queries and findings.

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There's an obvious thread here.  These are all opportunities where groups need to get something done -- quickly.  They're also situations where whatever tools are deployed, so little investment takes place in their creation that they're seen as disposable. 

These are situations where 'good enough' IS indeed good enough.  These are situations where savings come about because of the speed of development and deployment of small wiki applications.  These savings can be measured and seen as adding to the bottom line. 

The Book by The Guy

And for those who like their reading material in a bound form:

Ward Cunningham - the man who brought us the world's first Wiki - has written The Book on the subject.  The Wiki Way: Collaboration and Sharing on the Internet  (by Bo Leuf, Ward Cunningham)

The Amazon review of the text is *here*

definitions - and a slew of information at (where else?) wikipedia

Ten years ago this March, a remarably simple piece of software was launched on a server.  The goal of this little 'throw away' application effort was to create a place where a community of programmers could exchange chunks of code.   It was a place where you -- as a programmer -- could essentially throw a piece of your coding up onto a blackboard for anyone to look at, comment upon, or edit.

It was called, simply, Wiki. 

And, like so many temporary hacks, it found its way into all sorts of new business-environmental niches.

Here's a collection of definitions and pointers about what has become a genre of software.

Wikepedia's articles about wikis

wikiwiki shuttles at Oahu airport

At other places and other times, wikis mean something a whole lot different than the collaborative environment that's the subject of this blog.  Anyone familiar with getting 'round the airport in Honolulu has seen these little busses  -- the WikiWiki Shuttles.  ("wiki wiki" =  "QUICK" in the indigenous Hawai'ian language)

Yep -- it's a silly sounding, it's geeky, there are people who froth about how off-putting it is -- but it looks like we're stuck with it...

(a snap of a wikiwiki shuttle in paradise)

welcome to WikiSquared

Welcome to wikiSquared!

My interest in wikis stems from an unlikely place:  doctoral research in Social Anthropology -- the topic investigated being what it takes to 'build communities.'

Since jobs for anthropologist have rarely been standing about thick on the ground, my career veered toward management consulting.  For a very long time I've been eyeball deep in knowledge management and both processual- and technological- issues of online collaboration.   A Corporate-Speak one-sentence description of my background could be "a technology strategist and with a passion about the use of technology for collaborative communication within organizations -- the means of introduction, the structure in different situations, and the role it plays in contributing to 'organizational memory'."

Closer to matters of the heart, I'm a dad and a budding fiddle player.  There's also stuff I could mention about living in the East Bay hills overlooking San Francisco Bay, bread baking, woodworking, and distortion-rich 'holga' photography. 
_______
But, as they say, those are whole 'nother conversations.

I'm starting this wiki for a couple of reasons. 

Part of it has to do with a visceral sense that there's something terribly important about wiki environments.  This isn't a comment offered lightly.  I've been working with related families of tools for nearly 14 years.   I've seen breathless cheerleading for things ranging from stand-along BBSs with slow modems, character-based 'conferencing' software, the rise of Netnews groups on what was called the Inter-Network and most recently the whole gaggle of 'social software' offerings.   Against this backdrop, I'm convinced wikis will truly shine. 

The other reason is that there's a market need for (and this shows a streak of hubris) *a* place where a lot of web chatter can be aggregated.   

Let's just see where wikiSquared will take us.

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Tom Portante
Monday 24 january 2005