March 13, 2008
August 17, 2007
What if Brittanica had created their own wiki?
Launching a new wiki, like launching a new blog, is hard work. Simply putting it out there isn't enough.
I've successfully launched two wikis, one at the major corporation at which I work, and one at Bainbridge Graduate Institute. What defines success for a wiki? I define it as the point at which the wiki is self-sustaining. The users of the wiki reach a critical mass, at which point the original founder can go away, and the wiki will continue to be used. (My first wiki, launched in January 2001, is still in active use despite the fact that myself and almost all of the first round of early adoptors have all moved onto other projects.)
Information makes a wiki useful. Usefulness is what brings users back to the wiki over and over again. If the wiki isn't useful (in other words, it doesn't have information in it), the users won't contribute. So this is apparently a catch-22.
This is where the role of a wiki founder comes in. The role of the wiki founder is to seed the wiki with content. When I launched my first wiki, I thought this meant that I would put a few documents in the wiki, and presto - everyone would start using it. Of course, that wasn't enough. Odds are that people in the community of users that you want to attract are already sharing information - even if they're doing it in a disfunctional way. So it's not enough to put a few tidbits in there. You've got to make it compelling.
In our corporate group setting, that meant that I seeded the wiki with a few documents, AND then I continue to take every reuseable piece of information that crossed my email inbox and put it in the wiki too. That meant that when a team member send out build documentation by email in a Word document, I spent the time to put it in the wiki. When another team member started emailing out updates on server configuration, I put that in the wiki. When an updated copy of the build documentation showed up in my inbox again, I updated the information in my wiki. I didn't conjole anyone, I didn't whine about it, I didn't blame anyone. I just keep force feeding the wiki. Each time I did take something sent via email, I'll email back the group with the wiki URL for the documentation. Gradually people learned over the course of a few weeks that anything important was going to be found in the wiki, so that's where they started looking for it first. The early adopters started editing documents on their own, and I walked others through the process one on one. (This was 2001 afterall, and few people understood even the concept of a wiki.)
Over the course of a week, the number of contributors increased from one to about five. Over the course of a month, the number of contributors increased to about a dozen, and we were close to critical mass. The flow of email that was really knowledge base type stuff decreased to a trickle, and over the next month it was necessary only to handhold a few more users through the process of contributor.
Once the content reaches that critical mass that it becomes useful and people are drawn to the wiki to use that content, the founders role changes from force feeder to gardener. You start running into questions of community conventions (do i just change this, or do i comment on it?) and access (how do I find what i'm looking for? why is the content organized this way?) But that's a whole separate discussion.
When Mike and I were talking over this process of seeding a wiki, we had a real interesting revelation. What if the folks at Encyclopedia Brittanica had been observing Wikipedia more closely? What if they could have seen the future, and decided to start their own wiki encyclopedia. What if, back when Wikipedia was in its infancy and had only 5,000 or 10,000 articles, Encyclopedia Brittanica had started a wiki encyclopedia and seeded it with their whole library of 40,000 articles? Encyclopedia Brittanica would then have had more content, and therefore would have been more useful than Wikipedia, and therefore attracted more users and more contributions to their own wiki encyclopedia.
This intellectual exercise suggests that organizations that are contemplating Web 2.0 type community projects, and whom have assets in the form of closed knowledge bases can use those knowledge bases to seed wikis, creating an instantly useful source of information. This instant content/usefulness is a strong force for attracting a community of involved participants, one of the single most important criteria to the success of a wiki.
June 19, 2007
People and their avatars
Side by side photos of people and their avatars. Very interesting. (via rebecca's pocket.)
April 20, 2007
Winner: Harvard Business School, Loser: Major Corporations
It was exciting this morning to realize midway through an interesting post on Enterprise 2.0 (i.e. the application of Web 2.0 to the enterprise environment) that I was actually reading the blog of Harvard Business School faculty Andrew McAfee. If discussion of blogs and wikis is making it into mainstream business education, that's pretty cool. Hurray for HBS for incorporating this into their curriculum.
But the topic of the post was, unfortunately, the perception the MBA students had, based on prior work experience, that those who use Enterprise 2.0 tools heavily, "will be perceived as not spending enough time on their 'real' jobs":
So I should have been less surprised when my students talked about the negative perceptions associated with E2.0 contributions. They were likely just relating how these contributions would have been seen in their former companies. In environments that value 'busyness' enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts can be seen as laggards, goof-offs, and people who don't have either enough to do or enough initiative to find more real work to do.
Companies that are full of knowledge workers and that have built cultures that value busyness face a potentially sharp dilemma when it comes to E2.0. These companies stand to benefit a great deal if they can build emergent platforms for collaboration, information sharing, and knowledge creation. But they may be in a particularly bad position to build such platforms not because potential contributors are too busy, but because they don't want to be seen as not busy enough.
Boo for companies valuing busyness over collaboration.
Godview of World
My friend Dave said to me today "TwitterVision is how God must feel":
April 11, 2007
Seven ways to find the time to blog
After a friend
recently posted about trying to find the time to blog, I got
to thinking: How do I find the time to blog?
After some thinking, I came up with a few principles. In some ways, I'm the worst person to give advice, because my frequency of posting is terrible compared to any decent blogger. On the other hand, I'm the father of 3 children under the age of 4 (doing attachment parenting no less) and I work full time, so if I can find the time to post, then anyone can.
First, make sure that you know why you're blogging. If you don't know, the issue may not be a lack of time, but a lack of clarity or motivation. Rebecca Blood's articles and references on blogging and book, The Weblog Handbook, are useful if you are just finding your voice. Once you know why you're blogging, the following tips may help you find the time to actually get those blog posts going.
After some thinking, I came up with a few principles. In some ways, I'm the worst person to give advice, because my frequency of posting is terrible compared to any decent blogger. On the other hand, I'm the father of 3 children under the age of 4 (doing attachment parenting no less) and I work full time, so if I can find the time to post, then anyone can.
First, make sure that you know why you're blogging. If you don't know, the issue may not be a lack of time, but a lack of clarity or motivation. Rebecca Blood's articles and references on blogging and book, The Weblog Handbook, are useful if you are just finding your voice. Once you know why you're blogging, the following tips may help you find the time to actually get those blog posts going.
- Repurpose: If you are an information worker of any kind or a student, you're probably already doing research, generating reports, analyzing information. If you can find a way to take your initial work and repurpose it for use in two places, then you can generate content for your blog with only a little additional work. Be aware that depending on your employment contract, work policy, and employment laws, there could be all sorts of issues about who owns your work, the confidentiality of your work, and a slew of other issues. On the other hand, judging from recent Wired magazine articles, many companies are now opening up and encouraging transparency in all its forms, including blogging. Research this ahead of time so that you're doing the correct legal and ethical thing.
- Substitute: You probably already bookmark websites, send emails about interesting articles or thoughts to friends and you may even write the occasional letter or holiday newsletter to family and friends. All of these are material that could be published on your blog. When you publish your bookmarks on your blog, not only do you benefit, but so do your readers. Blog instead of bookmarking, blog instead of emailing, blog instead of writing a letter, blog instead of publishing.
- Get creative: Take the creativity advice of Gifford Pinchot III, and always keep index cards or a quarto on you. The time when you have a creative idea to post is most likely not when you are in front of a computer. So grab that handy pen and paper, outline your post, and it'll be quick and easy to post when you next sit in front of a computer.
- Scratch an itch: My own
blog originated from my desire to keep track of books that I
had read. As I borrowed more books to read (instead of buying), I found
it difficult to keep track of books and authors I liked. That make it
difficult to decide what books to read next. I could have simply kept a
lot on my computer, but how much more fun to share it with everyone.
Now using my blog helps me do something I already wanted to do, and
that's true even if no one ever reads it. The epilogue to MIT's open
source book has an interesting discussion
of the open source principle applied to writing:
"While every writer will tell you they write for themselves, this is more a statement of principle than an actual description of process—a piece of writing, whether a textbook or a novel, needs an audience to succeed. A programmer who claims to writes code for him or herself, on the other hand, is often telling the literal truth: “This tool is for me to use. Additional users are nice, but not necessary.”If you can manage to write and simultaneously create value for yourself through your writing, then you have a double motivation to write.
- Eliminate barriers: If posting on your blog requires you to jump over a dozen hurdles, you won't do it. Eliminate barriers, and you'll find that even five minutes can be enough to start an interesting post. Use simple blog software with a WYSIWYG editor so you aren't spending time messing with HTML. Keep a browser window open to your blog editor at all times, so it is always easy to get to. Start a post, even if you won't have time to finish it now, and keep the edit window open. You'll come back to it later when you do have time.
- Have modest expectations: I'm sure I could have made this a "top ten" list, but seven items came easily, and still fulfilled the purpose of the post.
- Set a goal: E set the goal of posting at least once a week, and while she may have missed one week somewhere in there, for the last two months, her blog has had plenty of fresh, interesting articles. Way to go!
- Technological Winter offers similar ideas and some new ones in Six tips to find the time to post.
- A VC in NY writes about finding the right time of day in When Do You Find The Time To Blog?
- Blogsite.com offers some useful ideas about substituting blog postings for other kinds of output in Can't Find the Time to Post?