After the Microsoft swimming pool in April, this week's London Wiki Wednesday was hosted by Conchango on a stylish empty floor of their offices - a converted, trendy Georgian warehouse just South of Southwark Bridge. My thanks to Julian R. Harris and Jemma Gilman for being such great hosts and providing the facilities, food, beer and wine. We had a great turnout of around 55 people - an eclectic mix of consultants, corporate users, software people, project managers, accountants and wiki fanatics with an age range from early 20s to 60. We had a larger proportion of women than usual, as some of the London Girl Geeks came along. To add to the cool atmosphere of this event, Sarah Blow arrived on roller blades (very Californian) and Steve Lamb, our speaker from Microsoft, turned up on a skate board! However, the chat, discussion and presentations were far from geeky - good practical stuff about wiki deployment issues, best practice and particular projects and products.

As well as providing a speaker, Mat Pilgrim arranged for Microsoft to kindly put up a copy of Office Professional 2007 as a prize for the evening. Christoph Schmaltz of Headshift won the draw. Congratulations Christoph and thanks to Mat. During my introduction, I mentioned we have added a Facebook group for this event. I asked for a show of hands on who has signed up to Facebook in the last 3 weeks - around 50% of the audience, which bears out the staggering adoption rates of 200,000 new registrations a day that we are hearing about.

Julian Harris explained what Conchango is all about and related some of their recent wiki projects. Integration with SharePoint is a frequent requirement.
Steve Lamb gave us run through of SharePoint 2007's wiki capabilities. He also related Microsoft's internal culture, which revolves around e-mail, some blogging, limited use of wikis and using their own Groove for collaboration.
Steve Revell led the discussion on the cultural impact of wikis. He talked about a "skunk works" wiki at a pharmaceutical company that had grown virally to 100,000 hits a month. He talked about wikis facilitating creativity and empowerment. The group discussion ranged around the difficulties of getting people to contribute, issues of structure and use of search and tagging. People commented that wikis work best in communities that are bounded in some way, and highlighted that the approach is just alien to some organisations like libraries. Some of the discussion highlighted wiki resources like Wikipatterns (see our Ning page for links to resources).

Guy Dickinson showed his new collaborative outliner product called Thinkfold. The product takes outlining tools on to the web for sharing through browser access. The system has a nice, clean interface, and shows when other people are changing the outline in real time.
Andreas Rindler and Sean McClowry of BearingPoint talked about the methodology they are creating called MIKE 2.0. (Method for an Integrated Knowledge Environment). This is being created as an open community project, albeit under a collaborative commons attribution licence. The particular wiki technology they have adopted and use in projects is WikiMedia, and they are building various extensions that they may consider bringing back in to that product.
Paul Youlten of SocialText talked about some of the efforts they are doing to get their installation time down towards the speed of WikiMedia, and highlighted a couple of great resources. WikiOhana - Ohana is Hawaiian for family - intends to connect together all wikis and wiki people, as well providing advice and best practice. Paul has created WikiPo himself - Po is the Hawaiian word for night, darkness, and hell - and he intends this to be a resource for wiki project problem solving.

Dennis Howlett explained FreeAgent Central. This a new online product he is launching with three developers which aims to provide an invoicing and money management solution for contractors, freelancers and small companies. As well as providing the product, they will have an integrated blog and wiki on the site so that their community can share knowledge and work experiences beyond just the basic administration FreeAgent does.
Alek Lotoczko from NYK explained how they integrated wiki capability in to their corporate Lotus Notes/Domino environment using Ben Poole's DominoWiki. They've enhanced it with things like tagging, and plan a number of further additions which will all be posted back in to this open source project. Alek admitted to me afterwards that in 26 years in IT, this was the first time he'd presented in public - he did a great job!
Angela Beesley of Wikia, gave a comprehensive explanation of the company. 37 staff on 5 continents supporting 3000 wiki projects. They do everything for their customers but the content, which the customers own and control. She's proud of the job they do - there is no wiki spam anywhere on Wikia. They are supported by advertising and venture funding.

We'll definitely have some more discussion topics next time, one of which will be about closed wiki pages versus open pages - having some content that is certified and static as well as other content that is still under collaborative development.

Follow these links to see my Flickr photos of the event, and Lars Ploughman's mindmap notes.

The next event will be kindly hosted and sponsored by Andreas Rindler and BearingPoint at their office in the city, in Paternoster Square. Book your place on the event wiki page.