Collaborative Thinking

Thinking In Terms Of Patterns

If I was at the Web 2.0 Expo, I would love to sit in on this session - but unfortunately I am in the middle of writing a report due early May (although I have a brief trip later this week). 

Looking at social software in terms of "patterns" can be very helpful. Patterns can represent real-life usage models. The can be comprised of one or more user archetypes (personas), attributes related to the activity and the relationships between those personas and attributes. Specific personas (“Jane Doe is a utilization management nurse and a subject matter expert on infectious disease”) help bring a pattern to life, allowing people to see themselves in the solution that pattern addresses. Documenting a pattern (or usage model) in such a manner helps articulate the social aspects of work and defines a narrative that people can agree on. Not only does this help humanize a solution, but it also enables an IT organization to leverage patterns as templates into which certain tools can be mapped. 

If you’ll be at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco this week, you’re invited to Wikipatterns Theatre Wednesday, April 23rd through Friday April 25th in the Atlassian booth, #535. Presentations will be held every hour, on the hour during the open hours of the expo. Presentations last about 5 minutes, with 5-10 minutes for Q&A afterward, and focus on wiki adoption and use topics. See the full schedule below for details.

Free copy of Wikipatterns book at Web 2.0 Expo!

Enterprise 2.0: Culture Required?

The post below is worth reading. The issue of (in this case, successful use of wikis) culture is critically important when forming, nurturing and sustaining collaboration strategies. A key point is to understand the influence of "directed" collaboration versus "volunteered" collaboration. If we go back to the definition of Enterprise 2.0, one concept that anchors the meme is the notion of "emergence". Enterprise 2.0, by its very definition, does not address all types of collaboration. If I use a wiki within a business process where people are directed by role, workflow and functional needs of the procedure - that's not all that emergent at all - in fact, it's not really a valid Enterprise 2.0 use case scenario. But it is indeed use of a wiki for collaboration and it can thrive without the culture issues that this post correctly points out. However, it the wiki was open and allowed participation from others in the organization even though their role, workflow or functional duties did not direct them to interact with that wiki group - well, now we have crossed over into the emergence aspects of Enterprise 2.0 - and, we're back to "the culture thing". So you can see how tools, context and whether the interaction pattern is directed or volunteered all collide with each other. So some key points:

1. Not all collaboration is Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 addresses a key facet of collaboration that involves social software and "emergence".

2. Tools are tools. Tools in-and-of-themselves do not signal an Enterprise 2.0 solution.

3. You can be very successful in use tools associated with E2.0 (blogs, wikis, tag and social bookmarks, etc) even in situations where culture is "unhealthy" - and when participation is more or less "directed" by role, workflow, and functional duties.

4. To enable higher levels of participation and influence people to volunteer their contributions, then culture issues do indeed come to the forefront - you have entered the "E2.0 Zone" which involves not just tools, but addressing culture and other types of organizational dynamics. 

5. If you think just tossing tools out there makes you "Enterprise 2.0" - that view is dead wrong. More on this perspective can be found in an earlier post, "Why Is Social Software So Important" which I recommend reading.

Transparent Office: Culture is a destination not a starting point

I was just checking out the results of the recent AIIM Survey on Enterprise 2.0. (My company, Socialtext, was one of the underwriters.) There's a lot of great material there about how managers perceive Enterprise 2.0. I was particularly struck by how prominently culture appears as a theme in the responses. There is a view out there that an organization needs to have a "culture of collaboration" culture in order to successfully employ wikis and other Enterprise 2.0 tools.

That view is dead wrong. I've seen wikis thrive in un-collaborative cultures. I've seen wikis fail in collaborative cultures. I've seen wikis thrive in an organization alongside failing wikis in the same organization.

Transparent Office: Culture is a destination not a starting point

Wikis, Sensemaking & Advocacy

Great example of a "wiki moment". You come across a topic or issue that is confusing. Information sources, including subject matter experts, do not provide enough insight. The topic though has enormous implications. So you collect information for personal clarification (in this case, using a wiki). The body of information grows as you pull content together. It evolves into a participatory environment - beginning with your own social network of friends that contribute their perspectives. But the wiki has the potential for network effects to kick in as friends invite friends and so on to the point where perhaps the wiki will "'go viral". At some point - the community gets noticed more broadly and mainstream conversations are altered as a result.

I'm pretty sure this scenario could be duplicated within your own enterprise.

SuperDelegates.org

SuperDelegates.org grew out of a simple question: Who are the "super delegates" that get a vote in the Democratic National Convention? They represent 20% of the vote, and in a year in which the Democratic nominee may well be chosen at the convention, it seemed like we should know more about these individuals.

This site is designed to shed light on the super delegates. If you have information you'd like to share, feel free to add it to the site.

I started this site as a personal project to try and figure out who the delegates are, which candidate they support, and where they're located. (I'm Rick Klau, by the way.) I started with the list of delegates and endorsements at DemConWatch, a terrific blog that's been following convention news and super delegates in particular. From there, I found a DNC membership roster to verify names and locations, and used searches at Google to get basic biographic data on the delegates, links to endorsements, etc.

Once I had enough data to feel that the site was marginally useful, I started reaching out to friends who might be interested in participating. As word grew (TechPresident, CNN and others), a few visitors turned into tens of thousands - and now the site is largely self-sufficient.

Thanks to everyone who's contributed content, and a major thank you to Juliano Ravasi, author of KMLExport, the MediaWiki extension that makes the KML layer possible.

Retrieved from "http://superdelegates.org/SuperDelegates.org:About"

Main Page - SuperDelegates.org

Integrating SharePoint And Confluence

Very thorough article and worth reading if you are trying to leverage existing SharePoint investments but take advantage of one of the better wiki platforms in the market. It would be valuable for Microsoft to continue down this path of providing well-defined and public interfaces (as opposed to vendor point-to-point deals) so that other blog and wiki vendors could integrate with the platform. While Confluence is popular, customers should be able to integrate other blog and wiki vendors as well(e.g., MindTouch, Six Apart's Moveable Type, Socialtext, Traction Software, and WordPress). Microsoft should avoid the appearance of dictating to customers what options they have for third-party integration and would be better off letting the partner ecosystem act in a more viral and customer-driven manner.

SharePoint Connector for Confluence - How We Did It

A few months ago, we and Atlassian announced their SharePoint Connector for Confluence, which impressed both customers and analysts. Now, ThreeWill, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in developing SharePoint-based solutions, which helped design and implement the SharePoint Connector, will describe how they did it.

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Integrating Content and Search Results with SharePoint

Have you ever needed to integrate an external system with SharePoint, showing content from each system within the other? What if you needed to integrate search between SharePoint and the external system? How do you keep the user experience seamless if the systems use different authentication mechanisms? Have you wondered if this can be done if the external system is written in Java?

If you answered "yes," then read on. Along the way you will learn some of the internals of SharePoint 2007 web parts, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 enterprise search, and Microsoft Single Sign-on (SSO).

Overview

This blog entry discusses how three developers integrated MOSS 2007 with Confluence, an enterprise wiki, in about 2 months time. It discusses work behind implementing the features for the SharePoint Connector for Confluence as shown in the diagram below.

Those features are broken out as follows:

Feature	Primary Technology
Content Embedding	Web Parts
Integrated Search	MOSS Enterprise Search
Single Sign-On (SSO)	Microsoft SSO Service

Microsoft SharePoint Products and Technologies Team Blog : SharePoint Connector for Confluence - How We Did It

Social Software Vendor Roundup

Quick partial listing of vendors that frequently come up in my client inquiries (either from clients themselves, or referenced by myself):

Category	Vendor/Product	Comment
Blogs
	Apache Roller	Open source, also used in IBM Lotus Connections
	BEA Pages
	Jive Software Clearspace	Blogs one component of platform
	Microsoft SharePoint Products & Technologies
	Six Apart, Moveable Type
	Traction Software TeamPage
	WordPress	Open source, backed by Automattic
Wikis
	Atlassian Confluence
	BEA Pages
	IBM	Wiki capability within Domino, QuickR and QEDwiki
	Jive Software Clearspace	Wiki one component of suite
	Media Wiki	Open source
	Microsoft SharePoint Products & Technologies
	Mindtouch Deki Wiki	Open source community at OpenGarden.org.
	Socialtext
	Traction Software TeamPage
	Twiki	Open Source
Social Bookmark Systems
	BEA Pathways
	Cogenz
	Connectbeam
	IBM Lotus Connections	dogear component
	Scuttle	Open source
Feed Syndication Platforms
	Attensa
	KnowNow
	NewsGator
Social Network & Community Sites		Typically offer a mix of user profiles, blogs, wikis, social networking, etc.
	Awareness Networks
	CollectiveX
	Communispace
	HiveLive
	IBM Lotus Connections
	iCohere
	KickApps
	Lithium
	Microsoft SharePoint Products & Technologies
	Ning
	Ramius CommunityZero
	Select Minds
	Sparta Social Networks
	Prospero
	Telligent Community Server
	Tomoye
	Wetpaint

Common Craft Adds Additional Videos

Blogs is the latest addition. Nicely done and great for level-setting experience for an audience unfamiliar with social software. Even if you are familiar with these tools, the presentation is so engaging in its simplicity that it is still enjoyable to watch. The ability to simplify what can become a complex collections of topics is an admirable skill:

Video: Blogs in Plain English

Video: Wikis in Plain English

Video: RSS in Plain English

Video: Social Bookmarking in Plain English

Video: Social Networking in Plain English

Wikipedia's Awkward Adolescence - CIO.com

Interesting insight that outlines some of the complex relationship dynamics that often occur "behind the scenes". These dynamics are especially relevant to enterprise strategists that might try to duplicate Wikipedia's success internally within corporate intranets.

Like a startup maturing into a real business, Wikipedia's corporate culture seems, at times, conflicted between its role as a harmless nouveau-digital experiment and its broader ambitions. The "power and prestige" to which Carr refers results from management practices that were less noticeable when Wikipedia was smaller and its editorial community newer and less formal. However, these practices were noticeable enough that Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger departed in 2002, later citing issues with the project's "antielitism." The issues have become more visible since Wikipedia has grown.

Wikipedia claims anyone can edit an entry and, superficially, that is true for most pages (due to edit wars, administrators can now lock pages). Popular culture even identifies Wikipedia's loose access as its primary weakness. Stephen Colbert mocked Wikipedia on The Colbert Report, editing an entry while on live television, and CalTech graduate student Virgil Griffith embarrassed thousands of companies, organizations and individuals with Wikiscan, an interactive website that can "list anonymous Wikipedia edits from interesting organizations," revealing self-serving edits from organizations as diverse as Diebold, Bob Jones University, and the Republican and Democratic parties. What is not explained is that edits made by those outside the informal circle of leadership may not stick very long. The quieter rumblings about Wikipedia have less to do with vanity edits or poor maintenance of content than they do with the organization's increasingly arbitrary editorial overrides and deletions and rapidly thickening in-group culture.

Wikipedia's Awkward Adolescence - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership

'Wiki City Rome' to draw a map like no other - MIT News Office

Interesting application - food for thought: something similar could be done for a variety of events (such as large conferences). While this system is designed around real-time movements of people (a "where are they" pulse) - similar pulses could be derived around "what are they reading", "what are people talking about" - we see evidence of these signal correlations, or pulses, in XML syndication and social filtering platforms. As I've posted about before, "social analytics" is perhaps the most compelling aspect of the entire Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 meme. 

'Wiki City Rome' to draw a map like no other

Residents of Italy's capital will glimpse the future of urban mapmaking next month with the launch of "Wiki City Rome," a project developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that uses data from cellphones and other wireless technology to illustrate the city's pulse in real time.

The project will debut Sept. 8 during Rome's "Notte Bianca" or white night, an all-night festival of events across the capital city. During that night, anyone with an Internet connection will be able to see a unique map of the Italian capital that shows the movements of crowds, event locations, the whereabouts of well-known Roman personalities, and the real-time position of city buses and trains.

The map will also be broadcast on a big-screen display in one of Rome's main squares in the city center, giving Romans real-time feedback on the human dynamics in their immediate surroundings.

...

By looking at a city using a "real-time control system" as a working analogy, the Wiki City project studies tools that enable people to become prime actors themselves in improving the efficiency of urban systems. In coming years, the Wiki City project will develop as an open platform where anybody can download and upload data that are location and time sensitive.

'Wiki City Rome' to draw a map like no other - MIT News Office

Evolving our Wiki - A Presentation

Follow the link to see the slideshow presentation:

The Avenue A | Razorfish wiki has evolved considerably since its launch late last year. It does some things well, a few really well and a couple terribly. So we're redesigning it. With that in mind, we're going to start talking about the redesign process here on the blog. We think it might be fun and educational to share the decision making and get some feedback too.

The Workplace Blog (Wiki Slideshow)

Related Post: Practicing what we preach, our own intranet wiki

Taking the long view: the system is actually working as it should...

Despite some media and blog coverage predicting the demise of trust in Wikipedia entries, I believe the system is working as it should - there is an ebb and flow to ensure community balance. People that exploit the system are discovered by tools provided by other community members (or interested parties) that shine the light of those activities.

If you look at these events over time, the reaction I believe/hope is bit more pragmatic.  In the case of Wikipedia, these recent revelations are a necessary part of the continuing maturation of an open platform that still needs additional tools to make sure that interactions are made visible over time - even if they are thought to be "anonymous" at the time. I don't believe that you have to impose significant controls, people to act as "official" editors, or have forced registration if you can provide supporting information to the content which allows people to make an informed decision.

The UCSC tool mentioned in the article below adds some interesting capabilities  that augment what WikiScanner delivers. The cat-and-mouse game will certainly continue  - some Wikipedia topics are emotionally charged, or sensitive in other ways - but hopefully the community will continue to respond.

Wikipedia Trust Coloring

paleshadows writes "Researchers at UCSC developed a tool that measures the trustworthiness of each Wikipedia page. Roughly speaking, the algorithm analyzes the entire 7-year user-editing-history and utilizes the longevity of the content to learn which contributors are the most reliable: If your contribution lasts, you gain 'reputation,' whereas if it's edited out, your reputation falls. The trustworthiness of a newly inserted text is a function of the reputation of all its authors, a heuristic that turned out to be successful in identifying poor content. The interested reader can take a look at this demonstration (random page with white/orange background marking trusted/untrusted text, respectively; note "random page" link at the left for more demo pages), this presentation (pdf), and this paper (pdf)."

Slashdot | Algorithm Rates Trustworthiness of Wikipedia Pages

WikiScanner

WikiScanner is a relatively new site that will track the edits made on Wikipedia.

The purpose of this service is to see who’s behind edits made, and how these actions generally lend themselves towards the self-interested corporations hoping to promote and protect brand identities. Created by CalTech student Virgil Griffith, WikiScanner searches the entirety of the XML-based records in Wikipedia and cross-references them with public and private IP and domain information to see who is behind the edits made on the online encyclopedia. With WikiScanner, there are a few levels on which you can search for info, including organization name, exact Wikipedia URL, or IP address, among others.

In what could be considered a sociology experiment, Griffith found that a good portion of edits for company entries are being made by the companies themselves. This isn’t surprising at all–it’s something that’s been speculated upon, and tested on a smaller scale. The team behind Wikipedia is also aware of it, and has been working to deal with issues such as this. Wikipedia’s policies have changed since it’s onset, and the user-generated system has been improved as a result. There is also a new edit-marking system that’s currently being tested on Wikia for possible use on Wikipedia in the future, making it even easier to track changes made to entries.

WikiScanner Identifies Editors on Wikipedia