A Semantic Wiki?

It looks like "Semantic Web" is well on its way to become Web 3.0 most serious contender. But what is it all about?

To make a long story short, semantic web is a revolution currently going through its early stages. An example will make it easier to grasp: imagine you're looking into Wikipedia, willing to search only for XVIIth century French Poets. If nobody took the time to write a list of them, you're in for a long and strenuous time searching through heavy loadsof abstruse web pages.

This is where semantics get in. Imagine that, every time one adds a Poet name, he could "label" it with such informations as his birth and death dates, his nationality and the fact that he is a Poet. Or, to put it another way: that on the Poet's Wikipedia page the Poet's birth date was labelled as such and his death date, nationality and status as well. Now you could launch a search saying "I want to search Poets, and their nationality attribute has to be French, and either their birth or death year date must start by 17"

Instead of strict categories, you now have a loose yet effective way to enrich information all around the place in your wiki. Combine this with the power of people freely allowed to add the bits of information they know about, and you end up with a naturally organized body of knowledge - yet nobody had to decide how to organize it beforehand.

This is what Semantic Web is all about, and I must admit it sounds pretty exciting to me.


Want more ? Stay tuned.

© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

What's Your Wiki Bringing?

There is too much information around for anyone to read all of it. This is why numerous tools have emerged to help people manage, organize, classify, filter and sort information. RSS has been a great step towards personal information independance, allowing individuals greater freedom as to what heir informations sources could be and how often new data was made available.

Breathing Through

Even the best RSS reader will not prevent one from feeling overwhelmed by bits of information. Social news rating websites have stepped in to help people go a bit further and order and give meaning to information together. Digg, Wikio, Newsvine are as many examples of ways to sort information. Wikipedia has done a great job to bring the right information to the right place for the people who are looking after it, or at least it does so most of the time.

Going Further

However, even with the help of those tools irrelevant information keeps popping out most of the time. Could this be avoided? Probably not. Could this be reduced a bit more? Certainly. Interactions between people about blog articles could be centralized for a group in one place to let them discuss and share it more easily. This is exactly what a product like XWiki Watch is aiming at doing, providing a team with a place where it will be able to share information and enrich it collaboratively.

Staying Ahead

The right question however is, why are all those information flows so important? Because, in today's world, information provides you with an advantage over your competitors. It has amways done so, but something changed recentlty: the speed at which relevant data can be exploited. A factory can be built quicker than ever before. Companies have to remain reactive not to get out of touch with their customer bases. A wiki provides a tool to let you communicate with the people who buy your products. Somehow, in their collective knowledge lies the products you will be offering them tomorrow. Isn't that worth a try?


Want more ? Stay tuned.

© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

A wiki for your sports team?

Back after some busy times... This afternoon I had the displeasure to find that my hockey team back home had lost a decisive game and was going down next season. This led me to think about how we could improve our performance, and I ended up thinking a wiki could fit the bill. Now I'm surprised I did not start thinking about it before...

The Problem

As a sports team made of people with day jobs, we can only meet for training so many times a week (usually twice for skills and tactic and once to run) notwithstanding a game on Sundays. Since a training session usually lasts about 2 hours, we hardly ever have enough time to study fancy diagrams about our positioning. This also means that we are not spending enough time reflecting about our past performances and how they could be improved. There is a communication problem here, and wiki are really good at solving that kind of problems.

The Needs

If I were to write a requirements specification, I'd say that I would need the following:

• A place where our coach could put diagrams showing how we played during our game compared with how we ought to have played + a page to explain his choices and talk about them.
  
• Personal pages for every player where they could write about their own game and get feedback from others through comments
• The ability to embed video shot during games or coming from the internet showing specific skills and situations

Generally speaking, we would need a place where to add all kinds of relevant information and organize it. This place would also need to be available to every player easily (through internet).

The Wiki Way

All of the components I talked about are common features of most wikis (though I did not talk about the search engine, the tags or RSS notification feeds, all of which are quite useful too). The main advantages would be to make lots of useful resources contributed by the coach and the players available to the rest of their team easily. No need to take a 45 minutes strategy talk in the cold on a Thursday night when you can discuss it at length on a wiki page (during a break at work for instance). What's more, most people can't be bothered to listen to tactical points when they are not involved in the situation described. The wiki would remove this inconvenient too.

Want more ? Stay tuned.

© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

The WikiDroit Case-Study

WikiDroit is a website that was launched by a few French law students. Its aim was to create a database (in French) of law-related resources. However, created in October 2006 the website did not take off. Its example shows how and why a wiki may fail - and what to do to prevent this from happening.

Poor Wiki Integration

The first problem that can be identified is that the wiki does not make one with the rest of the website. Though an important effort has been given to design of the website, the wiki customization (based on MediaWiki) does not go further than a logo. Combined with the fact that the link to the wiki from the website opens in a new window, this means that the 2 entities are poorly held together. If you take the example of Curriki, the website and the wiki are closely integrated together so as to create a strong identity.

Lack of Original Content

The wiki could have survived this first mistake. However, the wiki itself was designed without an aim. Its stated mission is far too wide: "generalization and vulgarization of Law topics aiming at everyone". Wikipedia already exists! A wiki cannot work if it does not reach a breaking point in terms of contributors. In this case, the content added by the first contributors was not sufficient to bring in new ones. The general public already have enough Law-related information available on Wikipedia (Law Article) and Law students have a huge number of relevant textbooks available in any library. Thus there was no incentive for new members to come in and add content.

The Lessons From WikiDroit

How could have WikiDroit been successful? If the website had brought something original and relevant to its target audience. Think about this: every year, Law students go through exam papers and new questions. Would one not like a place where, on top of previous exam papers they would find their fellow students works, made available with the mark they received and tutors corrections? This would bring value to them and give them an incentive to contribute content. What's more, the content they could contribute would be readily available to each of them - but at the same time different for every of them, therefore increasing the interest of every single contribution. This could be linked to the Magnet Pattern: make the wiki a place for exclusive and attracting content.

To be successful, a wiki must bring something to its target audience. It must be an ease rather than a pain. Find a lack of data or ineffective communication: here a wiki might fit the bill.


Want more ? Stay tuned.

© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

9 Corporate Wiki Starting Tips

There has been some buzz running lately on various tech blogs, regarding the best ways to get "social-enterprise" tools adopted faster and more easily. When it comes to wikis, various tips and tricks are suggested (amongst which my favourite is "if you don not want to end up disappointed, do not start") but there is room left for another list. At least this is what I will be arguing by doing in the following.

Get Things Off To A Good Start

• Give your wiki a soul: this may look like an odd advice, particularly in a corporate setting, but it is maybe the most important one could ever give you. Think about any successful project you lead: which one did not include the strong sense of a shared purpose? Starting a wiki makes no exception.
• Refer to the wiki: if you actually expect your people to go and use the wiki, make is as well known as possible. Encourage its adoption through an intensive internal referral campaign. Clearly stating that you will not read any attachment which has not been uploaded on a wiki page is a good idea to begin with.
• Do not start from scrap: asking people to actually edit pages instead of only reading them is a concept weird enough to get to grasp with, do not add the burden of having to create your own pages (at least at the beginning). Think about putting most of the currently available material on the wiki and even start stubs for pages you feel like they deserve one.

Help Your People

• Train them: there is some hype going around, which basically says "one should be able to use any piece of software without training". ... How many hours have you spent figuring out how to use less than 10% of MS Excel potential? A wiki is not complicated to use, but one should always remember this does not mean that everybody was born knowing what to do with one. In fact, most people were not.
• Provide fast and relevant help: the one thing more annoying that a software that you cannot get to work properly is a software that you cannot get to work properly without knowing why. Whenever something does not go as well as expected, provide a resourceful help center. One that actually knows what your wiki software is, for example.
• Listen to your users: elementary? Yes. Done? ... When it comes to a new technology adoption, providing more support than necessary is a necessity. Feedback is always useful: it tells you what actually does not not work and makes user feel they are listened to. Tip: if you decide to take action from these premises, it is even better.

Keep The Wiki Going

• Go through the "start effect": after the buzz and enthusiasm following the launch of your corporate wiki, an after-shock state is likely to happen some way or another. This includes the 3-days period when no ones writes anything and the "what's new" page looks like your fridge. Do not be afraid to wait a little, things need time to get on the right track.
• Hire a "wiki gardener": during the beginning, information will be added in places seemingly chosen randomly on the wiki. To sort things out and give coherence to the whole, consider assigning this task as a mission to somebody. It will make a huge difference if the wiki can be browsed easily.
• Find out why this generic checklist did not work for your company: this would be my last reminder: every company is different, and implementing a coprporate wiki will hence trigger problems that are quite different too (depending on your enterprise culture, work habits and management staff...). Find out how a wiki could work for you, not how it ought to work for somebody else.

Want more ? Stay tuned.

© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

PS: For those of you who wonder why I stopped at 9 rather than going all the way to 10, it is mostly because I felt like 10 was too short to provide enough advice on the topic.

How do I implement my own corporate wiki ?

First of all, contact us !

What are the main outcomes you should be aware of when thinking about building and starting using your own corporate wiki ? In order to set up a corporate wiki, you will have to deal with some core issues. Here they are :

Evaluating your needs and expectations

This is the key, the point from where everything else proceeds. The main reasons for that are, first, that when you will evaluate the effectiveness of your internal wiki, you will assess it by comparing what you have with what you would have liked to got and, second, that you have to map the current situation before setting your corporate wiki up.

What should you come through at this stage ?

• What is currently done with others applications (E-mail, Content Management System, Intranet, etc...) and presents shortcomings in their present way of being used ?
• What would I like to see wiki doing as regards the ineffectiveness of these applications ?
• What do wikis really have to offer given the way my society is currently structured ?
• Is my company's culture open enough to embrace an employees-powered information system ?
• Are they able to matches the specific requirements it faces (e.g., security or regulatory) ?
• Is it worth it ? Does the will to get things done exists at the moment or should I wait until a more favourable period (i.e., not three days after the budget for next year is sharply planned and closed) ?

All these questions are of particular importance, for they determine whether the solution that you are going to implement really meets needs that you specifically identified or will deceive you in being an useless technological gadget.

Once you think that the need for a wiki is established, a next step follows.

Which technical solution do I chose ?

Now it's decided, you want yours. Great. But how do you get the wikis of your dreams, the application that will solve all you communication and coordination problems (amongst others) ?

You have to decide between different possibilities, each of which offers advantages and inconveniences.

1. Go for it by yourself. We recommend this solution in only two cases, and you are strongly advised to think it through thoroughly should you decide to select it. Either you are a big company, hence having a strong IT department that should prove able to build the solution you need from an open-source basis and customize it to fit your needs, or, though of a small or medium size, your company includes at least one gifted individual when it comes to programming. The main advantages of this kind of solution are its reduced cost for you do not have to pay a provider, and flexibility for your IT specialists should be able to build what you want them to (although it is acknowledged that you have to master their particular realm of communication to achieve this). The drawbacks are directly linked to the level of skill of your own specialists and may hence be nonexistent, but you will lack the expertise of a specialized firm (don't worry, we are here !).
2. Ask a Provider. There is a growing amount of them on the market, and counting. Their offer are not yet highly differentiated, though their prices may sometimes differ significantly. When it comes to choosing one, it is as much a question of how you like an interface compared with another, in which aspects is it user friendly, do you get an intuitive grasp of it, do you like the colors ?... Although this may seem quite superficial, these are some of the features that will commend adoption of the wiki by your employees. Once again, we have experienced many of them and can get you through the different philosophies that guided their elaboration and help you chose the one that suits best your company's mindset. Their principal features are quite advanced by now and should be able to fit your company, and providers are adding new ones at an accelerated rhythm, so the one you need will be available soon if it is not already. The last point I ought to mention is the existence of a customer service that knows what technical difficulties you might go through and is able to coordinate the wiki with the other systems used by your company.

By now you have a wiki operating within your company. The question is, will your users follow ? This raise a last issue, no to be forgotten.

Formation and Training

We argue throughout this blog that wikis are easy to use and may help you cut on email overload and tackle many other issues. This is fundamentally true, but so is the case of email though some employees may have experienced difficulties when first having to use that technology. The same can be held of wikis. The other prominent point is that you have to convince people to use it. The two steps are as follows :

1. Getting people to use the system. Given the particular framework of your company, the expectations you have for your wiki, what are the best ways to make people use it ? Different strategies are relevant here, that you can combine as you wish. They include :

• Targetting geeks, which mean identify individuals most likely to play with any innovation and let them discover its features, sooner or later they will spread the word and generate curiosity about the application.
• Relying on the basically open structure of wikis to have people using it : they will be empowered and responsabilized by the fact that they are responsible for editing the content of pages and are expected to share relevant information. Moreover, this creates a feeling of investment which is a motivation to get information up to date.
• Put an emphasis on the network structure and let people interact together for a while on the structure before actually asking them to perform work-related tasks using it. You will be amazed by the speed at which the use of such a system can spread. (Some further case studies are to be presented and analyzed soon)
• The fact is that people will be more motivated and willing to use it if managers set the example and are asked to assertively encourage the use of the technology.

1. Helping those who don't grasp it. Working with wikis requires some familiarization with the concept and practice, and some users may feel lost or simply unfamiliar with the system. This is absolutely normal and should be treated as such, by offering quick formations to the people concerned by the change. These formations should be held at three levels :

• Basic presentation : for all the employees concerned with the use of a wiki. This is meant to present the features and potential uses of wikis, give a global idea of what it is and how it works. This is a sufficient start and shall be naturally complemented by a period of free experimentation by the employees. Those could take place in the same day : presentation in the morning, workshops in the afternoon.
• In depth, semi-personalized help : for employees that are strggling with the whole thing. It might take a while to discover the full range of potentialities offered by a wiki, and some peope may start by rejecting the idea. Always remember : an efficiently treated complaint equals a happy customer equals a supporter.
• For the managers : they have to be able to understand how their daily practice can evolve by using wikis. Some challenges are embedded in this shift and they have to be dealt with, for relationships have to be partly rethought in terms of who controls what in terms of information flows.

We have now dealt with the principal aspects of this last part.

Conclusion

When you will come to starting your coporate wiki, remember the three important steps described above : Analysis of the situation, Technical Implementation, Support of the Staff. They are the sole determinants of whether your wiki solution will perform or not. And I'm quite sure that you'd rather see it perform, don't you ?

Want more ? Stay Tuned.

© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

Focus on Teamworking

In many modern companies, the matrix has become the norm. It means that, most of the time, an employee will have to be part of a team created for a specific purpose (such as completing a project) to perform his daily work. This creates challenges and opportunities that can both be faced and worked out by using a wiki.

Basics of Teamworking

A team is group which members are aware they belong to. It has a definable membership structure (one supposedly knows whether or not he is part of a team) and a shared purpose (in a corporate setting, it will often be a piece of work that has to be completed collectively by members from different departments). This creates a challenge, for it means that a group of people who are unfamiliar with one another will have to behave collectively in a consistent manner in order to build something coherent. And this is why teamworking so often fails, for coordination has to be worked on and does not emerge from parallels behaviours.

Why a wiki makes things easier

When it comes to coordination, a wiki is near from a perfect form of answer. Here is a tool that allow people to work together on the same documents (no problems of shared information), at the same time (you do not have to find out who kept the last version of the proposition draft home). If you are tired of members taking excuse of a bad information and coordination system to get away with a low share of real work, using a wiki is a good way to improve situation.

Decide before acting

One of the main reasons for which teams fail is for they lacked a clearly defined goal to begin with. In order to be successful, a team has to spend time on chosing what are its objectives and how to pursue them. A wiki provides a space where members can review the last version of their objectives and comment on them. Therefore you will not be faced any longer with complaints that the guidelines were not clearly settled or updated. Once the task is properly defined (which will be quicker than with e-mail forwarding or even a meeting for this requires a high amount of organization time), the team can start working.

Roles in teamworking

Most managers met Meredith Belbin's classification of roles in a team at one time or another in their careers. For those who have not came through it yet, Belbin's classification offers a quick orverview of what are the functions that members of a group have to fulfill in order for that group to be succesful. Belbin lists 9 roles :

• Company worker/implementer : the person who creates system that will produce what the team want
• Chairman/co-ordinator : checks that everyone's point of view has been taken into account
• Shaper : provides drive and impetus to the team, keep things going
• Plant : is a source of creative ideas (sometimes too abstract for the others)
• Resource investigator : he is the networker of the group and is linked to other groups, he can provide the group with what it needs
• Monitor evaluator : the person responsible for questioning unfounded assumptions
• Team worker : take care of relationships within the team
• Completer finisher : the person that keeps an eye on details
• Specialist : brings knowledge to the team

Now that these roles have been presented, it becomes clear that a collaborative interface where team members can interact and edit each other work is highly useful : the evaluator can immediatly point out in a comment what has to be worked on, the plant can propose ideas in an area where they will be discussed with others, the shaper can evaluate the level of everyone's work and what has to be done... A wiki offers a space for everyone voice to be heard, which facilitates the role of the coordinator.

Although most of the time individuals have a preference for a particular role, a wiki allows teammembers to play various roles at one time. Peer reviewing is made easier, a space for new ideas is easy to set up, and the strenghts of each member can be tapped into more easily.

A platform for more efficient teamworking

A wiki is not by itself a perfect solution for teamworking. It should rather be considered as a platform that allows usual teamworking issues to be tackled with more efficiency, more quickly. It eases the role of many members by centralizing information and documents and allowing them to coordinate with others effectively. By cutting on email (sometimes as much as 40%) it speeds up a whole process. Coupled with a blog, it can provide current information and replace a mailing list. RSS feeds make it easy to find out what is new and who has contributed recently. Try it, and you won't consider teamworking as a punition any longer.

Want more ? Stay tuned.

© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

Why, though I am promoting Wikis, am I writing on a blog ?

Good Question.

And as such, it deserves an in-depth explanation. To address the problem properly, some structural analysis is de rigueur.

What is a Blog ?

Basically, a blog is a web page that one person, its Admin (it might be you), creates using one of the numerous providers available on the web. After a basic setup the process is quite straightforward : you easily publish your writings and get feedback in the form of comments from other users (who can be anybody or a selected bunch of guests). The main advantages of this form of publishing are that the original contribution stays visible while the comments are ranked by date, hence making the identification of contributors and their writings easy. It fits perfectly the needs of an editor or specialist who wants to express his / her opinion on a given topic and see what other's reactions will be. You know who is thinking what at a glance.

The matter, as anyone who wandered along the path of teens (or politicians) blogs will be aware of, is that the contributions are quite ... unstructured. Two discussions may cross another on a given page, the contributions may not be all viewable on the same page, many comments are roughly related to the topic (if not irrelevant) ... To summarize, when it comes to organizing information, a blog matches very closely the perfect definition of a mess.

What Wikis bring to You

Facing a situation where you want to tap into the knowledge of a group of people, you just realized that your idea of creating a blog was ... compromised, to say the least. What are your alternatives ? You could send a global mail and hope that the respondents will answer in a coordinated manner and that their answers will complement each other. You could.

Or you may try to use a wiki. The basic difference between a wiki and a blog is that anyone you chose can edit the pages of your wiki. This means that if you show it to the right persons (and there can be plenty of them, for one would always be surprised by the unexpected resources of knowledge of even a basic crowd) and give them some time, they will come up with their point of view and aggregate it in a coherent manner to those of others. This happens in real time : one can always see what has been written prior to his / her addition, correct what he / she thinks is inexact, organize the page in order to keep it clear and readable and left it for others to participate. Some kind of an automatic correction phenomenon takes place here : as long as the writers are relatively reliable and not merely undesired spammers the very best of available information get extracted and viewable. And the process goes on. Sounds like magic ? Check any Wikipedia article and you will see information most of the time sound, structured and accessible. And the people who wrote it do not even know each other.

Uses and Misuses of Wikis

Although what has just been said about wikis gives a pretty good image of them, there is clearly situations where their use is all but recommended. The LA Times learnt it some time ago, when the paper tried to run an editorial freely editable by anyone on their website. Soon, the page was full of obscenities and even strong admin work did not manage to prevent that. It looks like wikis are weaker than expected, doesn't it ?

The correct answer to such a remark is that you do not use a duster to dry yourself, but a towel. What the journal asked was an opinion, and those can be quite fuzzy -- and disparate to say the least. Add a dose of malevolence and the result all but fails to meet expectations. There is tasks at which wikis are better than others. For example, they are more efficient when it comes to facts than to personal views. Still, their flexibility remains. Look at it this way : with people showing even a slight inclination towards ethical behaviour, it would have worked. You would have ended with a piece of material showing different opinions in a consistent way. The point is, if anyone in your company tries to destroy the work others did on a wiki, they will (almost, for every version of the page is saved for ulterior comparisons) manage to do so. But they will not think about it in the first place, for you would know that they did it. And everyone else would.

Validation by the community

This is the last feature I would like to put an emphasis on. Wiki pages are place virtually everyone can read and contribute to (if allowed). In a group such as a company, everyone has a reputation to build and protect. Writing and contributing to a corporate wiki becomes part of that, for the quality of what you write will be appreciated by everybody. So, in the context of a company, you get all the advantages : reservoir of common knowledge (the fact that Peter who knew everything about the procedure X goes on retirement matters less since he wrote extensively about it), opportunity to assess the competencies of your staff...

What should you remember ?

Fundamentally, wikis and blogs are tools that complement each other, even though you could see blogs as a mere variation on wikis. Their combined possibilities are impressive (e.g., you can work on intern with a wiki and communicate externally with your blog, which is what WikiBC is currently doing). As long as you do not use one for the other, you are sure a winner.

Want more ? Stay tuned.

© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC

Are You Wiki ?

What is that supposed to be ?

Some new Internet Extravaganza ? The next nightmare you will live when your children will ask you whether they are allowed to start one ?

Internet is innovative. As you know well if you felt even a tiny amount of dejà-vu when you were reading the previous sentences, this can sometimes lead to misunderstandings, or a feeling that everything goes too fast. This is quite true. New products appear on a regular basis and keeping up to date can sometimes look like a constant struggle. And that is why the aim of this blog will be to present a new way of communicating by using IT means off expression that is more than likely to take-off widely in the years to come.

In fact, in some ways its spread has already started. Wikis are appearing in many companies and there is no surprise here, for one of the main advantages they provide is about cutting off a frenzy of unnecessary e-mails and transforming it into an useful and readily exploitable source of information.

Think about this : instead of, say, 10 of 15 mailboxes closed to each others where the same mail is present in various states of advancement, updated (- or not, for who knows whether the accountancy department did not send a mail to the management team about those marketing expenses...), put a single web page. A web page that any involved person could edit and keep relevant. Where three linked discussions are at last put in the same place. Where information flows and get available. Where you can instantly tap into the knowledge of colleagues not overloaded with emails. Where ...

Now stop thinking. This web page exists, and it is called a wiki (for the record, the name comes from an Hawaiian word meaning "quick"). You may certainly have heard of Wikipedia, the online Encyclopedia that anyone can contribute to and that covers an unbelievable range of topics with an accuracy that has not yet been proved significantly faulty? You can do the same thing within the boundaries of your company. Get everyone to contribute to the common knowledge, assess the relevance of ideas, and maybe even see your reborn Intranet while you are still alive (even if it is difficult to believe, this has already happened in many societies around the world).

Do you feel interested ? The best is still to come. Wikis are the most efficient ever tools when it comes to team-working. They are hosted on an external server and necessitate nothing else that any web-browser to be accessed, which means that you can work on them from everywhere, at any time. You will not have to wonder any longer about coordinating with your team during your next week-long business trip to Sydney. Real-time means that whatever modification you make appears instantly and can be taken into account by other people.

And, last but not least, think about building consensus with your 15 mailboxes (and as much contradictory opinions) ? Here everyone can argue his position in open ground, and only those who resist the careful examination of everyone subsists (no more "sorry, I did not get your last mail" when a disastrous launch strategy is planned). Dialogue has replaced arbitrary behaviour.
And the final written piece you get is almost ready for exploitation (no new quarrels arising during the formatting process).

These are some of the most prominent features that you can expect from wikis. It might be time to start trying them, shouldn't you ?


Want more ? Stay tuned.

© Guillaume Lerouge for WikiBC