Yesterday we held the second of the revamped London Wiki Wednesdays at Microsoft’s Great Pulteney Street office, in a swimming pool. For some strange reason, the office building had a swimming pool which Microsoft converted in to a meeting room. It was slightly surreal sitting within the pool itself expecting someone to turn on the water. Microsoft are moving to Victoria, to a much more practical (and boring facility) so they’ll lose this this lovely folly. I must thank David Rowe for coming up with the idea of pizzas, along with the beer and wine, and Matt Pilgrim for hosting us on the night (as well being thick skinned and ignoring the Microsoft sniping).
We had around 40 people from a diverse range of backgrounds. You can see the attendees on the wiki page here. We kept to the format of 5 minute presentations with up to 5 minutes of questions. Not so many people wanted to speak as last time so we finished the formal part by 9:15 and then settled down to finishing off the wine.
After a welcome from Mat Pilgrim, I kicked off proceedings and related using a Wetpaint wiki to get SaaS evangelists and competitors to collaborate together on an article for AccountingWEB - The Financial Software as a Service manifesto. The Wetpaint approach will be used for follow on articles, and has been one of the factors leading to Dennis Howlett becoming a regular correspondent for AWEB on things web 2.0.
Scott Gavin of Pfizer described a plug-in for Outlook that he would like someone to build. It would be a button that turned a meeting in to a wiki page for notes, and created sections from the agenda bullets. Apparently Outlook can build a SharePoint page, but it would be good to make the plug-in configurable. Can somebody build this please?
Simon Revell of Pfizer presented his take on the wiki capabilities of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Overall he was surprised at the capabilities, even though Microsoft have said that it “wasn’t designed to be a class leader”. It does all the things you would expect of a wiki and he highlighted the WYSIWYG editor, spell-check, and page permissions as good points.
Guillame Lerouge demonstrated his Xwiki platform, and showed a template approach to make it easy to create structured wiki pages where the user enters data on a form. The system creates re-usable objects, so you could change the format of the template, and all of the associated pages would be updated. This is part of the balance between the free-form wiki philosophy, and adding some structure to help new users.
Rather than present Philip Woodgate and then Andrew Black asked questions which triggered some discussion about the enterprise aspects of Wikis. Wikis like Confluence and the MOSS 2007 wiki allow page permissions, so specific pages can only be modified by selected users. This is the kind of thing that most enterprise wiki users would need, but several people argued that this is against the wiki philosophy. The whole site should be open to empower users to contribute. Since all changes are always tracked to a specific user, and anything incorrect or damaging can easily be rolled back, there shouldn’t be an issue. However, some felt that some structured control for some topic pages would be desirable. Somebody suggested a mechanism of a sign off stage, to allow changes but for page to eventually be “certified”. Angela said that they are grappling with this issue at Wikipedia, and are heading towards the concept of having a choice between a certified “stable version” and a page that has been further developed and open for contributions.
Elsewhere in the Q&A Stefan Szckelkun suggested that most of the sessions had focused on the technology and not strayed in to the cultural aspects of use of wikis. We agreed to add a speaker and discussion on this to the next event.
Paul Youlten of SocialText and Mark Baker of Spikesource role played a scene between the traditional CIO grappling with this “web twenty” stuff, and the enlightened CIO who has go his act together. They developed that in to an explanation of SuiteTwo which is the Intel product which pulls together the SocialText wiki, Movable Type for blogging, Newsgator for RSS aggregations, SimpleFeed for RSS publishing, and Spikesource to pull the whole lot together in a common user interface. They explained that the whole can be purchased as an easy install appliance.
Stephan Tual showed his Terapad platform for anybody or a small business to build a web presence. Many people were excited by the capability and ease of use of the platform which has an easy to configure content management system, with a WYSIWYG editor, and the ability to add a blog, forum, image gallery, event calendar, job board and even a PayPal ready shop to your site. This has a lot of potential. It’s available hosted with 2GB of space. It’s either free supported by adverts or $5 a month. An ASP deployment, where an organisation could host it themselves, is planned to ne available as well.
Toby Moores of Sleepydog, and a visiting Professor at De Montfort University, explained how they use wikis. Sleepydog is a games author, writing the popular game Buzz for Sony. In the business they use 4 wikis as a knowledge repository for the contributors and contractors who build and provide content for the game. The game’s design document is held on one as a “single point of truth” for everyone to see. The reason for the multiple wikis is because of the need to control access to certain content and data as a requirement of SOX compliance. Toby uses both SocialText and MediaWiki. He also related the use of SocialText for collaboration on a book he is writing with myself and David Tebbutt, and commented that occasionally we attach Word documents to the wiki to get a better visual track of changes to a particular passage.
Everyone seemed to really enjoy the atmosphere and the speakers, and there was plenty of discussion and networking before and after the formal part of the event.
You can get a full report of what happened here, and see more pictures of the event on Flickr here. The next event will be kindly sponsored by Conchango on 6 June at their offices just South of Southwark bridge. Please book yourself on.
Update: Stephan Tual blogged about it here.
