Wiki, a Shared Blog for Distributed Teams, and for Everybody

Writable webs empower people to share knowledge effectively and to be more productive

Wiki, a Blog (Weblog) for groups: Communities can organize and share content in an organic and free manner
Extended with the right set of functionality, a Wiki can be applied to distributed teams to schedule, manage, document, and support their daily activities
The web as a whiteboard for everybody.

Conference talk at VCWI 2005 IT Seminar in Eindhoven, Sept 2005BR Jun Hu BR MailTo(j.hu@tue.nl)BR Slides available from [http://id00243.id.tue.nl/JunHu/WikiYourWeb]

What is Knowledge?

Knowledge
- The fact or condition of knowing something with familiarity gained through experience or association;
- The body of truth, information, and principles acquired by mankind
Knowledge management:
- Control over content (conventional CMS)
- Processes for the creation, dissemination, testing and utilization of knowledge
- Knowledge_management

Can knowledge be managed? Von Krogh, Nonaka and Ichijo in Enabling Knowledge Creation, 0195126165, believe that knowledge can only be enabled
- Management in the sense that you cannot force someone to innovate. We can only create an environment where knowledge can be created
Five key Knowledge enablers
1. Instill a knowledge vision
2. Manage conversations
3. Mobilize knowledge activists
4. Create the right context for knowledge creation
5. Globalize local knowledge
How can this be achieved? With processes and tools

WikiWikiWeb = Writable Web
- As quick to contribute as e-mail
- As easy to use as a website
WardCunningham implemented the original WikiWikiWeb in 1995 to collaborate on software patterns
Inspired by HyperCard; some call it a Blog for groups
Wiki design principles:
Open
Should a page be found to be incomplete or poorly organized, any reader can edit it as they see fit
Incremental
Pages can cite other pages, including pages that have not been written yet
Organic
The structure and text content of the site is open to editing and evolution
more
WikiDesignPrinciples

Blog: (Weblog)
1. Key: Easy to publish opinions of individual in regular intervals
2. Media to express individual voice
3. "Post media" (like e-mail), sometimes with feedback and talkback
4. Usually hosted service (e.g. Six Apart's [http://www.typepad.com/ TypePad])
Wiki: (WikiWikiWeb)
1. Key: Easy to create and refactor on content owned by group
2. Media to express group voice, deemphasizing identity of individuals
3. "Refactor media", content may change at any time
4. Usually open source software, installed on own server
Some Blogs have Wiki-like features, some Wikis have Blog capabilities
- Merge over time?

attachment:email.png	attachment:wiki.png
email	wiki

Open Source WikiEngines: Download and install
- MoinMoin: Used by internet communities (Python)
- [http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl UseModWiki]: Used by internet communities (Perl)
- [http://phpwiki.sourceforge.net/ PhpWiki]: Popular Wiki (PHP)
- [http://www.flexwiki.com/ FlexWiki]: .NET based (C#)
- [http://snipsnap.org/ SnipSnap]: Wiki + Blog (Java)
Hosted Wiki services: Wiki farms
- [http://www.socialtext.com/products/workspace/ Socialtext Workspace]: Open source Wiki (Kwiki) with Blog extensions; for corporate use ($$$)
- [http://www.editme.com/ EditMe]: Simple Wiki and Blog ($4.95/month)
- [http://www.teamflux.com/FrontPage Teamflux]: Simple Wiki ($20/quarter/person)
Wiki appliance: Wiki in a preconfigured box
- [http://www.socialtext.com/products/appliance/ Socialtext Appliance]: Based on Kwiki with some proprietary extensions

attachment:wikipedia.png

[http://www.wikipedia.org/ Wikipedia]: Wiki + Encyclopedia
A free encyclopedia that is being written collaboratively by its readers
Project started in January 2001
The most active public Wiki: There are over 290,000 articles in English; more in 50 other languages
Anyone in the world can edit any page.
Doesn't that lead to chaos?
- Domain experts contribute
- Well defined policies for contributing and handling content
- Graffiti gets removed quickly (rollback available)
  - IBM's [http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/ research] on history flow of articles ([http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/history/gallery.htm gallery])
Content can be freely distributed and reproduced under the terms of the [http://en2.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Free_Documentation_License, GNU Free Documentation License]

Issues with conventional Wiki systems in the enterprise:
- Perceived as chaotic
- No security
- No audit trail
A Wiki system with the right extensions can be used in a corporate environment
It can address some internal challenges:
- Maintenance of static Intranets
- Knowledge sharing for distributed teams
- Deployment of CMS (content management systems)

Some content is outdated
When was the page last updated?
Incomplete content
Difficult to find content
Inconsistency across departments
Special tools, knowledge and permission required to maintain
Content is static, it has a webmaster syndrome
- If someone discovers a page with incorrect or insufficient information, (s)he will often ignore it because it takes too much time to find out who the webmaster is and to write an e-mail requesting an update

Open questions:
- How to get virtual teams working together efficiently?
- How to get everyone in sync?
- How to avoid duplication of efforts?
Typical answers:
- E-mail
- Scheduled conference calls
- Occasional visits
- Shared network disks
- Instant Messaging (IRC, AIM, ICQ, etc)

E-mail and mailing lists are great, but:
- Post and reply vs. post and refine
- Great for discussion, but ... hard to find "final consensus" on a thread
- E-mail is not hyper-linked and is not structured, content can't be grouped easily into related topics
- E-mail and attachments are not version controlled and it is difficult to determine the history of a document

Rigid structure (can be good and bad)
Control over content more important over free form knowledge sharing
Content is typically structured hierarchically or in table format, with limited cross-linking between pages
Limited support for unstructured content, or content that has "structure and exceptions"

E-mail Habit - I prefer e-mail
- E-mail doesn't scale - new people, new technology, new customers, new partners...
Shared knowledge vs. 'Owners' - I don't want to edit someone else's page
- Wiki culture: nobody 'owns' pages, and any change can be built upon
- First person to create page is not the owner!
'No control' syndrome - This leads to chaos
- Wikis provide access control.
- Soft security, audit trail, peer review
Wiki syntax - yet another language
- Wiki is just plain text, e.g., just '''do it''', you will do it
- Use the help pages, doesn't take long to learn