Wikisym 2007

wikisym

Gestern ging Wikisym 2007, das Internationale Symposium on Wikis in Montreal, CA zu Ende. Oberthema der Konferenz war “Wikis at Work in the World: Open, Organic, Participatory Media for the 21st Century”.

Interessantes Programm, u.a. ging es um den Creole Markup Standard und weitere Wiki-Technologien. Daneben wurden verschiedene Tracks zu Wiki-Einsatzarenen und -Potenzialen angeboten – u.a. eine Session zu Wiki Patterns von Stewart Mader, aber auch zu Potenzialen von Wikis im Blended Learning.

Die Papers der Konferenz stehen größtenteils zum Download zur Verfügung, ebenso sind die Ergänzungen und Diskussionen im Konferenzwiki offen. Im Wiki sollen dann auch Blogbeiträge zur Wikisym 2007 erfasst werden, bspw. erste Einträge und Einschätzungen bei Axel Bruns und Andreas Gohr.

More wiki interviews …

Via Stewart Mader: At the RealDeal Rafe Needleman and Tom Merritt of CNET look at wikis – they discuss Wikipedia, uses in organizations, uses for social groups, and discuss how they’re used at CNET. It’s a short podcast with about 14 minutes, my favourite quote just at the start: “Wikis are wonderful”.

Get the mp3.

In the comments (Buzzmarketing-guy) Paul Dunay points us (again) to an interview he made with in April Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, which I’ve blogged about already here.

Information R/evolution and Emergent Taxonomies in the Enterprise

Via Luis: Another stylish and cool video by Michael Wesch of Kansas State University (yes, the team behind the other videos)

Interesting user reactions at the YouTube site for that part, like e.g.:

Also explains why I hate Sharepoint so much. It’s all about top-down organizing. It’s completely counter-intuitive for me.

Yes, but we can be sure that SharePoint will add more functionality concerning emergent and freeform information tagging etc. (as IBM is pushing integrated solutions that allow for emergent information organization, think DogEar etc.) – adding enterprise wiki connectors is only the start.

Letting (informal) communities and networks evolve, and then allowing for the emergence of meaning, folksonomies and tag clouds is part of the same game …

A critical analysis of Social Graphs (and some learnings for social networks in the Enterprise)

There’s a critical analysis of the recent Facebook craze here in the Economist, arguing along solid economical reasons ….

There’s less to Facebook and other social networks than meets the eye
[…] the future of social networking will not be one big social graph but instead myriad small communities on the internet to replicate the millions that exist offline. No single company, therefore, can capture the social graph

This article also holds some learnings for the design of social network infrastructure in the enterprise, but the one above is central in my mind: You better start with the individual knowledge worker that is embedded in small communities of practice – and provide the means for a range of networks, organizational settings and “blended arrangements”, i.e. allowing for diverse mixtures of real-life and virtual networking.

After all, this is what McAfee’s SLATES concept calls for – emergent, freeform collaboration, i.e. letting the communities and networks evolve and emerge from the factual interactions and work practices.

And yes, the importance of small networks and platforms to support them could also be discussed from a business model innovation perspective, well at least for “people who are interested in how Social Networks will play out“, especially in the NGO- and nonprofit-space (more on the upcoming NGO-BarCamp).

Robert Scoble interview with MindTouch CEOs

More good wiki stuff, and again it’s Robert Scoble (see also the other wiki guys interview). Now he’s interviewing Aaron Fulkerson and Steve Bjork, co-founders of MindTouch, talking extensively about APIs and the platform future of wikis (behind the firewall). This is another peek into the growing role of wikis in the “social stack”:

Nice quote: “wiki markup is so wiki 1.0” – yes, but … Then, Aaron Fulkerson give him a nice little demo of DekiWiki’s functionality:

Web 2.0 is gaining traction in the corporate world …

is this really reality? Now, I’ve been collecting and compiling some serious stuff on Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 adoption lately, some of them are worth pointing out … especially given a discussion I’ve had lately and that was revitalized today.

There’s this HBS Case on How Wikipedia Works (or Doesn’t) and the related discussion (“Wikipedia in Pinstripes”), that handles a lot of the adoption challenges social software has in the enterprise:

[…] Wiki is another experiment in how to generate more collaboration inside companies, but I’ve seen mixed results. It can be as simple as “We’re having an office party, please sign up on a wiki page, and tell us what you’re going to bring,” to “We’re going to run this project, bring in all your knowledge assets together, and then we can self-organize.”

What Wikipedia has shown is that self-selection is critical. Peer review is critical. So there is a challenge for firms that are used to managing employees and allocating the resources in a very top-down kind of way. Now we have a technology that enables self-selection, transparency, openness—how does a manager or management deal with the technology? Do they implement it in a way that’s true to the spirit, or is it top-down? And, again, there are some very successful examples and some not so successful examples.

From ‘lifestream’ to ‘workstream’

Via Jon Udell’s tweet: “From ‘lifestream’ to ‘workstream’ is a short conceptual leap“.

I like the concept of “streams”, social presencing and the above quote very much, yet I doubt that change management or organizational adoption of Enterprise 2.0 will profit from this nearness.

Even when the concepts are similar, these remain two separate worlds: Always-on, hyper-connected, cutting-edge knowledgeworkers are rare in the corporate setting – and there are some deep-rooted reasons for this … I don’t say that these are good or sensible reasons, but they are in effect anyway.