I'm finally getting round to writing about the last London Wiki Wednesday, kindly hosted by Alek Lotoczko and NYK Line. NYK Line is a Japanese shipping line, and it's quite a stretch for their marketing department to use some of their budget for us. They actually put on a really great spread of food, beer and wine. It's notable that the standard has steadily increased at each event - if the trend continues maybe it will be Black Tie by Christmas? Their offices, on the 17th floor of CityPoint, an office block near Moorgate, has a pretty stunning view across the City of London, and highlights the amount of construction going on.

We had somewhere between 35 and 40 attending this time, and everyone I've spoken to since tells me they really enjoyed the mix of people, the discussions, and the presentations, despite a few technical hitches with the projector. We definitely missed Lars Ploughman's presence, and consequently we don't have one of his Mindmaps of the event.

We started with a discussion around Jakob Nielsen's Participation Inequality Rule:

"In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action."

The original intention was to discuss how you might raise those metrics, and put things in place to improve on those ratios, and try and get towards 20% of the community contributing. We were challenged over whether this is actually a problem in any case, and that in the case of a corporate wiki for collaboration, wouldn't the majority of community be motivated to contribute? Other issues discussed included:

• Two Gods - author and reader
• Bottom up adoption versus command and control hierarchy
• Facebook and banning private use of social networking tools (like the phone and email before it)
• Business doesn't give a s*%t as long as it's effective
• Everyone as an author
• What's in it for me and recognition
• Spontaneity versus expectation
• Barriers, influence and the ROI of wikis and social networking
• The fact that many, many authors collaborating on the last chapter of Wikinomics hadn't really worked

It was a very healthy debate. I would suggest people take a look at Wikipatterns for more on the topic.

Alek Lotoczko, the intranet manager at NYK Line, showed us some screenshots briefly illustrating his Lotus Domino and Confluence wiki deployment.
Roman Nosov showed us a MediaWiki extension called BlameMap, for highlighting different contributions in different colours.
Mark Charmer talked about Akvo.org which he has co-founded. This is an initiative working with the water development community to deploy a global water and sanitation wiki.
Philip Woodgate demonstrated his use of Terapad for running (and allowing simple administration) of a church community website.
Alan Wood gave us a sneak preview of 'rel3′, a new type of collaboration system which Folknology are piloting in the coming months. Read Phil Jones interpretation of Al's session.

The group definitely want to have a meeting in September, and we are currently hunting for both a venue and a sponsor to provide the food, beer and wine. If you want to volunteer your organisation, or have any suggestions, then please mail me. Overall, it was very good session, and I'm delighted we are keeping the momentum going.

Links and other blogs of the evening:
My Flickr photos (including the views over London)
Zbigniew Lukasiak
Phil Jones
Alan Wood