After being "spaced out" on the empty floor at Conchango last month, London Wiki Wednesday got "intimate" at BearingPoint's London office in Paternoster Square. I guess we had around 50 attendees, with a room designed for 30, but that just meant we had to be more friendly. First I have to thank Andreas Rindler and Sean McLowry of BearingPoint for being such good hosts, and laying on great food, beer and wine. Then I have to thank Jeremy Ruston, who provided some excellent champagne, but then got called away at the last minute so he could work all night in an office in Watford avoiding some technical disaster or other. The champagne was by way of a bribe for allowing his BT Osmosoft team to be first up, with extra time on the agenda to show off their latest mashup.
Martin Budden stood in for Jeremy, ably assisted by Paul Downey on the keyboard. The BT Osmosoft team had taken many people's mobile phone numbers during the evening. They were all put in to a contact list in a TiddlyWiki, which they had hooked up to the BT SDK, so that they could connect people with a click. The VoIP system then called each person in turn and connected them for a 1 to 1 call or a conference call. The demo had been put together that afternoon, and the developer kit is available free for a limited number of test calls per day. Go to their site for further details, but this has enormous potential to add voice connections within online collaboration solutions at affordable costs. They also videoed the event, so you may see us all on YouTube very soon.
We then had an excellent discussion around the wiki collaboration concept about the need for locked, certified pages in areas of the corporate wiki, used as an intranet. Some were worried that controlling access and locking pages was counter to wiki thinking, and might stifle the collaboration that a wiki approach would bring. Others argued that there were areas of policy, or procedure where it would be unproductive to allow anyone to change them - for example an HR policy, or a specified cancer treatment. It was suggested that fixed information should be transferred to a CMS with links to the wiki, whilst others argued that wiki tools should allow different publishing workflow approaches for different categories of content. Some pages might be certified, but with a release cycle of controlled versions, others might be published and locked, but allow comments, while other pages are available for all to collaborate and change. We discussed anonymous comments and changes versus named access as a means of encouraging real feedback. The BearingPoint guys highlighted their Mike 2.0 methodology which addresses these issues. It was a valuable discussion. At the next meeting we will discuss approaches and techniques for increasing contributors and contributions from the community, to improve on the 1:9:90 rule.
I showed ReutersInteractive, their first online community site covering carbon emissions, green issues and clean technology. Anyone can sign up. The site is built on the Blogtronix combined blog, wiki, document management, RSS feed aggregation and social networking platform for web publishing. In addition I related the fact that Toby Moores and I have decided to start an Open Coffee Club style networking event focussed on creativity. The event will probably run every other Tuesday from 10:00-12:00 and alternate between De Montfort University and a London location. We hope to get a mix of both academic and business people interested in discussing and fostering creativity in all its forms. We'll also have a Blogtronix based social network, blog and collaboration site, which should be available within a month at CreativityCoffeeClub.com.
Lars Ploughman talked about a recent Headshift project where they replaced a failing, CMS based intranet with a wiki approach inside a few months. The wiki is owned and driven by the marketing department in this big, unnamed company. One of the ways they encouraged adoption was to allow all users their own wiki space they could use as a sandbox, as well allowing people ton get used to the concept by applying for an award, entering their details in to a wiki page.
Andy Roberts talked about communities of practice and social objects. They have been around as long as we have, probably since the division of labour and he discussed how they can be applied in the online world.
Steve Coast explained OpenStreetMap - a free, wiki style, editable map of the whole world. The project aims to do for mapping what Wikipedia has done for encyclopaedias. The map is being created by volunteers using GPS technology, plotting traces of streets as they travel. The organisation is a foundation, funded by sponsors, donations, and key partners, like UCL who provide hosting services. As well as mapping, they are slowly collating points of interest too. Some parts of the country and the world are covered better than others at present, but this is a very exciting project. There was also some interesting discussion on companies doing mashups using Google maps being open to copyright infringement under the Google terms of service, as their work is derivative of the maps that Google licences.
Paul Youlten closed out the sessions with a two minute explanation of Wiki widgets and SocialCalc, SociatText's collaborative spreadsheet technology developed by Dan Bricklin, the father of the spreadsheet.
There was plenty of opportunity for good discussion around the presentations, and everyone seemed to really enjoy it. The next one is scheduled for 1st August, with a venue and sponsor to be announced.
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