wikiSquared

Gumi's for Google?

In what a cynic would argue is a case of too little, too late, and with too little consideration of competitors, Google is now offering its e-mail customers the ability to create web Home Pages.  Gmail customers can create (in true Google style) a minimalist portal page that links to their mail accounts as well as to a smattering of syndicated news, weather and sports services. 

Yahoo gave its customers something remarkably similar years ago.  Not only can YahooMail customers customize their own portals with syndicated news, they can also link them to more personalized services such as the conversational spaces in YahooGroups.

Here's a way Google could jump ahead of anything being offered in this business 'space.'

Our personal and professional lives are full of finite tasks we accomplish in the company of and with the help of small groups of friends and colleagues.  Our children's school needs people to work on a fundraising activity.  Our Alma Mater wants us to lend a hand for a reunion.  Our colleagues need our contribution to a report, a white paper, or a spreadsheet.   And the list can go on and on ...

You can imagine a business offering -- not for an individual's Home Page, but for these uncountable little group tasks we all work on. 

We refer to these groupings with all sorts of different names.  Some are Hollywood:  "we're part of the same Mafia on this," and some are testosterone-y, "yeah, we're all VCs in this posse."  This kind of affiliation has a generic name in Japanese - it's called a Gumi  (GOO-mee). Gumis are used as a suffix attached to a name or other noun to denote association, affiliation, or group:  "she's part of the Takahashi-Design-Group-Gumi..."

It's as good as name as any, and maybe since it doesn't have (for us, at least) built-in preconceptions, it might be a working title for a new kind of service from Google.

You can imagine an e-mail provider offering a Gumi service that gives a group of people a single email address.  For the duration of the task at hand, email would come from and be sent to this group account - anyone in 'the group' could read and reply.  Never again would there be the need for multiple CC'ing messages and wondering if your colleague had seen a particular message. 

It could be a Gumi environment where any member could attach, insert or link to material important to the group effort.  It could be a place where archives of important past work were temporarily stored.  It could be a place where topics could be discussed.  It could be a place with a real-time 'chat' capability to help resolve 'synchronous' issues.  And it could be a place where all the material in the gumi could be searchable. 

This could be a wholly new genre of online environments...

And one of the most remarkable things about it:  given current wiki tools, it could be prototyped in a matter of days -- if not hours.

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...someone should pick up on this ...

when you get a chance, e-mail me that bike, will you?

At "a certain age" one's eyes glaze over - seriously - when you hear any near variant of the following five words:  This Time It's Really Different.

I've started to hear the earliest, distant musings about the possibility that wikis may be something Really  Different than what we've assumed. 

As a long-ago shipwrecked victim of the dot-com feeding frenzy, my first reaction is to move away from strident boosterism.  It's too easy to see parallels in what's come before;  in the breathless enthusiasm about Really Different innovations that would change the world.  We can all poke fun at the conventional wisdom that led to yesteryear's predictions; descriptions of worlds delivered from hunger and strife by the invention of the railway, the telegraph, or the airplane.  Our recent fin de siecle was meant to be the world of nuclear energy too cheap to meter and a populace burdened with increased leisure time. Radio and film were supposed to kill theatre, television would vanquish both, and just about everything would destroy books and newspapers.

And the Internet -- well, that was Up There with fire and the printing press.

Well, maybe there is something Really Different afoot...

Friends at SeedWiki have pointed me in the direction of a book that seemed removed from any topic we've shared coffees over before.  It's FAB: the coming revolution on your desktop - from personal computers to personal fabrication (Neil Gershenfeld, Basic Books, NY NY 2005  ISBN  0 465 02745 8 ).

Neil Gershenfeld describes the earliest generation of remarkable desktop tools - tools that allow individuals with no design, engineering, or manufacturing background to fabricate almost anything they can imagine.  The power of his argument isn't about tools however.  It's about a shift in thinking that moves us away from seeing ourselves as consumers of problem-solving products towards a more creative mind-set where we create our own, highly individual- or group-specific and immediate problem-solving tools. 

He describes a world where people create machines that no-one else will; machines that solve problems that are too small, too geographically or culturally specific, machines that can't sell at high enough margins or that won't sell to large enough markets.

So?

It's very possible that we can use this 'frame' to understand the importance of wikis. 

Wikis can be thought of as Web Machines that help us make other web machines:  simple to use, idiosyncratic in their application, and capable of getting a job done faster than any pre-packaged, mass-produced, generic software solution. 

Wikis are not yet another variant of Social Computing Software.  They're not feature-challenged versions of Content Management Systems.  They're not highly interactive blogs and they're not the next generation of application-centric collaborative workspaces.

The salient point is that while we can use wikis for any of these things -- to force-fit wiki-spaces into a comfortable product niche is to ignore their greatest feature:  wikis are building blocks that give regular people ways to build fast, cheap, and highly specific web solutions that no-one else cares about. 

It may well be that this wiki ride is going to become a whole lot more interesting than anyone suspected.

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the title of this post?
There's a story about a group at MIT who were using these desktop fab tools to create highly personalized bike frames out of clear polycarbonate.  For a short while, it seems, these unusual frames were something of a status symbol at that university -- the joke was, it was entirely possible for one of these 'fabs' to make a bike and send the code on how to replicate that bike - EXACTLY - to any other desktop fab in the world. 

It's still a long way from Captain Picard's verbal comand to his Ready Room replicator, "Tea, Earl Grey, hot."

 

The Presidio Dialogues: Where Everyone is Smarter than Anyone

For those in the geographic area (or for anyone who may wish to follow up with a post-facto online conversation,) there's a scheduled round-table public discussion (a dialogue, actually) about some of the ideas that are imporportant to the success of collaboration.  (Online or not)

These are well attended and universally thought provoking exchanges.  Aside from a bald, self-promotional aspect of posting this *particular* dialogue, The Presidio Dialogues Organization is arguably something you may want to keep on your radar. 

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May 24, 2004  Saybrook   Graduate School, San Francisco

Thinking Together:

When Everyone is Smarter than Anyone

Some questions we'll consider...

As our awareness and reach grows geographically, socially and in all other   ways, we're clearly being challenged to learn to “think together.”   Teams of people everywhere are dealing with messy problems or trying to inquire   into complex topics that may polarize ... or may expand and resolve with broader   participation. More than ever, business relies on the work of virtual and diverse   groups engaging difficult business and social issues and exploring unknown territory.
 
  What does it take to amplify our "thinking together", to generate   transformative insights and difference-making solutions that can be successfully   implemented? How can we foster and support conversations that matter so the   results include the best contributions of all who participate ... and are also   useful further on? What do new technologies for collaborative thinking actually   provide? What practices really work, and what gets in the way? What hinders   useful structures for collaboration from coming into more prevalent use?

Conversation Starters

• Bob Horn, Visiting Scholar, Stanford     University; Distinguished Consulting Faculty, Saybrook     Graduate School; author Visual     Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century
• Tom Portante, Social Anthropologist, Wiki     guru, Strategist for business knowledge and organizational change
• John Ward Principal, Many     Minds

 

                                                                                       

Registration	7:00 PM; Meeting Begins 7:15 PM
Location	Saybrook         Graduate School and Research Center         747 Front St. (@ Broadway) 3rd Floor, San Francisco         (see         map)
Schedule	First opening comments from Conversation Starters, then dialogue with         participants; estimated conclusion at 9:30 PM
Admission	$20 in advance by registering online; $25 in advance (by email, phone           or check); $30 at the door.           To register online, go to Registration.

Check   our website at www.ThePresidioDialogues.org   for more information, directions and to pre-register online for only $20.

And   feel free to forward this invitation to anyone you know may be interested.

The   Presidio Dialogues, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center

747   Front Street, Third Floor, San Francisco, CA 94111-1920

www.ThePresidioDialogues.org

two years old and still going strong

The April 03 edition of Searcher (Information Today) had a wonderful article introducing wikis, how they work, some of the philosophy behind them, and suggested uses.   Wiki software- and procedural offerings have come and go, but there's still tremendous value in David Mattison's article.

For anyone who needs to understand these environments - and anyone with ten minutes for 'the read,' this is an article that you really must read.

The URL for the piece:  http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/apr03/mattison.shtml

WikiCities - Alternative Histories - and, btw, a great hosted service

WikiCities (http://www.wikicities.com/wiki/Wikicities)  is a free service -- a hosted wiki environment (running MediaWiki) that gives space to ideas that can garner attention.

One of the recent 'featured' wiki-cities (the spaces given to these idea-rich conversations...) has to do with *alternative* history. The short description of what this means:  Alternate History is most frequently the term used for the fictional genre which presupposes a subtle change of a historical event, producing an incredible series of changes in the world, diverging it from Our Time Line and creating a new, alternate and parallel world.

These are pretty amazing conversational wikis.  I just realised I'd spent about 3 hours just roaming around these very intriguing ideas...

Some parallel worlds being talked about?

List of Althists
From Alternative History

This is a list of Alternate histories existing on this site. Feel free to add your own!

A World Divided
    After Mikhail Gorbachev is killed just prior to him assuming power in the Soviet Union, the Cold War continues until today and many people meet a different fate.

British Louisiana
    Disease in 1762 prevents the British takeover of Cuba, preventing the Spanish loss of Florida. Britain takes Louisiana instead.

Cabotia and Brasil
    The Castilian queen does not support Christopher Columbus who is not lucky in France either. The English and the Portuguese discover the Americas before 1500, though.

Capitalists of the World, Unite
    The German railroad car smuggling Lenin into St. Petersburg is intercepted by Tsarist forces. Russia bleeds itself dry by the end of the Great War, but Communism never takes root. Equally pulvarized against the Russian anvil, Germany sues for peace in 1917.

Cambridge Computing
    Computing visionary Alan Turing and iconoclastic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein establish an interdisciplinary program in Mind, Machine and Mathematics at University of Cambridge. By the year 2000 robots with human-like intelligence are common.

Chinese World
    A divided China partially resists the Mongol invasion, while the Mongols devastate western Europe. At the downfall of the Mongols, the Chinese states are ready to conquer the unknown world.

Federalist Failure
    The Federalists lose in their attempts to ratify the new Constitution, and the United States falls apart, leading to the rise of a Virginian "empire".

Germanic Power
    The Franks and Visigoths hold more staunchly to their languages thus developing Frankish, Hispagothic, and other germanic languages, eliminating Spanish, French and Portuguese, but allowing the Langue d'Occ and Catalan come to the fore as independent languages.

Greater Colombia
    San Martin manage to convince Bolívar he still has a role to perform in South America, letting Bolívar more room to prevent Venezuela seceeding from Colombia, and concentrate in freeing the Caribbean.

Henry II Dies In 1100
    The early demise of Henry II causes a drastic change in succession and the royal houses of Scotland, England, France and greatly affects the politics of western europe.

Kornilovshina
    General Lavr Kornilov begins his coup earlier, and is succesful. Russia fights on to the end of World War One, with various changes major and minor throughout the world.

The Loose Bandage Timeline (LBTL)
    What if William McKinley was not assassinated in September of 1901? The story departs from our own when the bandage concealing the assassin's .38 caliber revolver slips off his hand, revealing the gun in time for a bystander to knock the failed assassin to the ground, thus sparing McKinley's life and delaying the years of progressivism which began under the tutelage of McKinley's Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt.

Montezuma's Revenge
    Cortez and Pizarro fail in their conquests of the Americas and to this day the powerful Aztec and Incan empires exist. The Mississippian Mound-Builders remained strong, and with the support of a technologically vitalized Aztec Empire fended off the attacking western cultures. Also, the enigmatic Anasazi exist to this day...somewhere in the Southwest.

The Napoleonic Empire
    Napoleon waited on his invasion of Russia, and instead turned his attentions to England, committing the 600,000 men that he sent to Russia in an attack across the Channel, effectively humbling the thorn in his side, and allowing a French
Empire of Europe.

New England 776
    A group of Anglo-Saxons cross the ocean in 776 and settle along the Wiko Miki River, in what would have been southern Maryland.

No Christianity World
    Jesus of Nazareth is released by the governor of Judea, Christianity dies out by around AD 100.

Oswaldia
    John F. Kennedy wasn't assassinated, the shot missed and killed Governor Connally instead. Because JFK was around to see the Space Race to completion, and it took a very different route...

Penda Dies
    In 642, Oswald of Northumbria kills Penda of Mercia at the Battle of Maserfield. Northumbria remains under one king, Oswald does not become a martyr.

President Gaitan
    In 1950, Gaitán is elected president of Colombia. A populist leftish government, but supported by the CIA as a way to prevent true comunism to become a major power in Latin America, Gaitan is neither one of the best or worst presidents. But butterflies from him surviving 1948, also prevented Castro to become leader in Cuba.

Pure Arabica
    The Bubonic Plague decimates Europe, killing nearly 2/3 of the population and reducing the Renaissance to ashes. The world was ill prepared for the Arab aggression and resurgence.

Rebellion of 61
    This althist has two primary PODs. In the first, the nascent Confederate States of America is defeated at the (First) Battle of Bull Run, ending the brief Rebellion of '61. In the second, the Komei Emperor of Japan lives several decades longer than in our time line.

The State of Canada
    The Canadians answer the call of the Americans Rebels for revolt. After the American Revolution the state of Canada is created and nearly all British influence on the east coast of North America have been eliminated.

The Third Rome
    The Russian royal family didn't intermarry with the English, and thus didn't have the hemophiliac genes that produces Tsar Nicholas II. Because this family had such a shift, Russia continued its expansion into Asia, remaining strong. The Communists weren't able to take control of the Government of Russia and instead came to power in Marx's native Germany.

Toyotomi Japan
    Japan did not become isolationist as it did here, and expanded to fill the Pacific Ocean, colonizing California.

Transbellum
    8 uchronies (alternate earths) learn of the existence of one another after the event known as the Grand Unveiling. They discover that the central empire of one timeline is little more then a backwater in another. Wanting to restore what they perceive as the natural place of their religious, ethnic or political groups but unable to have more then a limited presence elsewhere, they wage a transdimensional cold war.

United States of New England
    The War of 1812 goes from being a war against Britain to a full-flung civil war.

Viva California
    The Mexican-American War was a bust. The California Gold Rush causes a rush of American population to the valleys of California. The Mormons are all Spanish speaking and the US's sentiment of Manifest Destiny is turned Northward, at least at first.

Zera
    Some hominids reached the Americas before the modern Homo sapiens. This lead to a different fauna evolution in the Americas allowing later come Homo sapiens to domesticate suitable burden animals.

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http://althistory.wikicities.com/wiki/Main_Page

first, you give them what they want, then you give them what they need

Years ago when Lotus Notes was fresh on the scene, the consulting group I was with was asked to help that company 'position' its new product.  Notes, for all its current button-down-big-corporate-IT feeling, was truely a revolutionary product.  It was one of the first robust and scalable attempts to bring online exchanges into the world of Serious Business. 

In terms of selling -- that was both a good thing and a bad thing.

The short of it:  Notes was described in a way that made corporate IT buyers comfortable.  According to almost all the, ahem, Marketing Collateral, Lotus Notes was a Database Development System.

... which was true...  if you squinted a bit...

I'm intrigued by how wikis are going to sell themselves. 

One of the more interesting attempts at staking out familiar ground is being done by the folks at Tiki Wiki. 

According to the folks at TikiWiki, what's being offered is a Content-Management-System/Portal-Development/Groupware platform.

Hot buttons, all. ..

Take a look at the tikiwiki site:  http://tikiwiki.org
at reviews: http://tikiwiki.org/TikiwikiReviews
and at one Tiki site:  http://www.thetransitioner.org/wiki/tiki-index.php

weak forces in innovation

We often think about innovation in cartoon-y ways -- the light bulb in a bubble drawn over an individual's head. 

Organizational myths are not all that different from that cartoon panel. 

They tell us about CEOs, enlightened by way of Olympian bolts of inspiration, single-handedly forcing our companies to be innovative.  They reinforce the idea that *once* our companies ratchet up abilities to innovate, we'll REALLY be an unstoppable force. It's entirely possible we're missing something important.

Here's a story about a company that was looking for a magic innovation pill.

A decade ago - an unnamed global systems development and management consultancy almost missed something really big.  All of a sudden, it seemed, clients were asking for a particular technology platform.  The consultancy hadn't seen that demand growing, and by the time clients were convinced it was The Next Big Idea, it was _almost_ too late to ramp up the required expertise.  So ... the decision was made that this would Never Happen Again.  The decision was to bring in appropriate innovation tools that would allow the consultancy to maintain its industry leadership. The first effort was to bring in experts -- consultants to the consultants if you will.  Internationally famous hired guns were asked to share their opinions about new tools and processes with the in-house experts; the senior management team at the consultancy.  To the consultant's dismay, much of what they heard was pretty much along the lines of an official tools-and-methodologies future they'd already been selling to clients.

Plan B was set into motion.  My job was to find -- or create if need be -- an Innovation Engine.

Over time we pretty much figured out what the abilities of this engine would be.

--We needed to be able to look at, and comment upon, the libraries of completed consulting projects the firm had completed.

--We needed to be able to look outside our corporate boundaries for new ideas:  'net newsgroups, listservers, threaded conversational places like the WELL, and, of course, other corporate web sites. 

--And most critically, we needed to be able to create links between these two worlds in ways that allowed us to add our own observations to these sets of gathered information.

The reality of how we met this challenge is less important than pointing out what could have been a terribly easy solution.

The perfect foundation for our Innovation Engine would have been a wiki.

It would have been trivially easy to set up.  It would have been orders of magnitude cheaper in terms of IT overhead support required.  And it would have given us an enormous amount of freedom in ad-hoc re-structuring, re-formatting, and re-using information.

The moral of the story is this: if your organization would benefit from being able to see opportunities and threats that are typically still too far out into the fog to see -- take at look at wikis as a tool for amplifying those 'weak forces' in business and technology.