Wiki
So you want a site on the Intranet…?
This is a really funny post from John Barben who says it’s a real document from an intranet in a company he knows. I’m not doubting John for one minute, it just reads like you would have to try very hard to write a better parody.
exsto: this may be why some organisations find wikis a bit of a risky proposition
What to do if you want a site on the Intranet
* Agree with the Communications Department Ext.xxxx that there is a business requirement for having an intranet site
* Nominate a Web Author who will need to attend the Intranet training course ‘Developing Your Intranet Site’. Contact Mrs xxxxx to arrange this course.
* The Webmaster will then create a template site ready for your new site to be designed.
* If a Web Author is already trained in your area then they can begin to create the site.
* Submit a form with your requirements to Communications Department. Who will review your requirements, complete the resource constraints part of the form and pass it to the Head of Communications who will approve the site.
* On completion the sites nominated Data Content Manager will need to check the site editorially and approve the data contained within the site.
* Decide which business process the site will be placed under by contacting Mrs xxxx
* On approval the Webmaster will technically check the site. If all is well the new site will then be published
I guess they don’t really want any new sites on the intranet at all then, perhaps as a result of a previous craze for people wasting loads of time creating pointless web pages. On the other hand it’s difficult to see how a company which is capable of designing these procedures is going to be able to survive for much longer whilst carrying such an enormous overhead of administrative dead weight.
Students assessed with Wikipedia
Via Linda’s Furl…
BBC NEWS | Education | Students assessed with Wikipedia
Postgraduates at the University of East Anglia are being assessed as they edit existing Wikipedia articles and research and write their own pieces.
Students have to edit eight articles on the online encyclopedia and then write their own article for the site.
When this year’s pilot scheme is completed, Dr Pratt will assess its success and hopes to be able to widen the scheme to undergraduate teaching as well.
“New technology opens up new ways of assessing students and we have to explore those.”
I just wonder if the assessment tail won’t find some way of wagging the learning dog as with Jill/txt’s blogging students
Divshare – Free file hosting for mp3s and blog pictures
I think I can see this one spreading steadily through the blogs and social networking sites.
Divshare allows you to upload as many files as you like, up to 200Mb per file and then serves them up wherever you like for free, as text links, hotlinked from your blog or embedded as an mp3 player. And there’s a divshare uploader plugin for Wordpress.org which makes it so easy to add pictures to a blog without incurring any bandwith or file quota charges, whilst keeping them all organised together under your divshare account, accessible from the dashboard. This would probably have some advantages over using flickr as a file hosting resource for blogs and wiki.
The embedded mp3 flash player could appear on millions of homepages or profiles in mySpace and similar environments, since the code for embedding is available to all who visit the song.
All in all, this confirms to me that we are undergoing a seachange in the pricing models for internet hosting, towards a position where disk space and bandwidth are no longer explicitly charged for. How that works out in terms of the extra electricity required to power the ever increasing number of processors and file servers I’m not too sure.
Action Research to develop Wikiversity
My friend Gordon just alerted me to an Action Research project to develop Wikiversity, which is pretty exciting for me being so close to my own research interests on the application of action research methodology in a distributed environment.
Developing Wikiversity through action research
This is a series of steps that correspond to an action research methodology for facilitating and assessing the development of Wikiversity.
What is Action_research according to Wikiversity:
Action research is essentially a collaborative activity in which people enter into a progressive cycle of reflecting in/on their own practice (or environment) and changing/improving this practice/environment.
What is Wikiversity
Wikiversity is a learning community
Who:
Anyone can participate.
One intended outcome of this project is a PhD thesis. (Comment from Cormaggio: I want to make this explicit from the beginning, however I don’t want to lay personal claim to the research process, as it is genuinely meant to be a fundamentally collaborative activity – see User:Cormaggio/My? research.)
Wiki Patterns
Via Enterprise irregulars, Wikipatterns.com
This was quite an exciting discovery, a group of people trying to put together a pattern language about wiki adoption. This is quite similar in many ways to what I have been developing on the DARwiki’s wiki facilitation page, which gets referred to by some bloggers. Wikipatterns.com launches with a group of people already involved, so I’ll join them and see what I can contribute. My initial thoughts are slightly troubled by the idea that the patterns may be applicable in some contexts but not in others, in particular the difference between enterprise wikis and public ones. Can the two quite different endeavors be described within the same pattern language ? We shall see. There’s another paradox in using a wiki engine which appears to encourage thread-mode, which is listed there as one of the anti-patterns. But at least these kind of contradictions stand a better chance of being negotiated on a wiki than anywhere else.
Wiki Wednesday and Forest Friday
I’ve got two evening appointments to write about this week. London Wiki Wednesday is the first since last March, when I spoke about my online exhibition and barn raising.
It’s at 29/30 Fitzroy Square, in the shadow of the BT Tower – nearest tube Warren Street. The format for the evening is this: lots of speakers get 5 minutes each, a short time for networking and some food and wine. For my turn, I shall be talking about Wiki Facilitation, Taxonomy development from Folksonomy tagging and then introduce the concepts behind PajamaNation.
Then on Friday I’m down on the list of performers for the monthly Forest Roots club in Forest Gate, East London.
I’ll probably sing my latest song, “The Wreckers Prayer” and one other. Not Gernika though, that would take up the entire slot by itself and is better saved for April.
Cognitive Edge: Hubert’s error
Dave Snowden provides a strong response to two comments made by Hubert St Onge ( one of the authors of an important modern book about communities of practice 
1. That Blogs and Wikis are publishing tools not collaboration tools, and in the case of blogs the publishing is individualistic/egotistical.
2. That an organisation should mandate one tool for collaboration, rather than allowing diversity; but that participation in the use of those tools should be voluntary.
I can see exactly why Dave would need to take to his blog and strongly oppose these ideas, but on the other hand I can also imagine possible contexts in which the comments can be valid.
Certainly blogs tend to be individualistic, and the much vaunted “conversations” which they may faciliate can tend towards the networking type of interaction rather than the many-2-many model which I believe to be more powerful in some ways.
Whilst Dave’s experience of blogging has been something to enthuse about:
Cognitive Edge: Hubert’s error
In over 15 years of taking part in collaborative spaces I have seen less intimacy, less exchange and less learning than in the six months that I have been writing this blog.
he still likes to invest a fair amount of thought and time into taking people to task in the various “listserves” (email groups), and develops the practice which I do a bit of myself, namely finding inspiration through conversation in groups, and then working the content up into a blog post, or sometimes the other way around.
The second point, about standardising on one tool, could also make some sense in terms of avoiding the draining effect of dissipation of conversation through the proliferation of channels, but it really depends again on the context or organisation concerned.
I think my own views about this have been evolving and I no longer see the opportunity presented by blogs for anybody to self publish as being something which may threaten to supersede or diminish the established format of online communities, in fact the boundary crossing nature of the tools is just as likely to pull new people in to them.
Wikipedians at war
Admin and SysOp privileged wikipedians slug it out in access protected IRC channels.
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2007-02-05/Arbitration and IRC – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Only fragments of the story make it through into the public sphere but you can get an idea of the rancour which develops when you start setting up groups within groups within groups at the same time as sending out the impression of a democratic process for general consumption. An all too familiar pattern, unfortunately.
Word of Mouth
A Normandy cider producer asked where she could find UK cider enthusiasts with a view to taking out an advertisement, for example in the specialist press – monthly magazine.
So I wrote to the ukcider list, but I’m publishing here as well because there are some generalised ideas contained within which are also directly relevent to a couple of other projects I’m currently starting on.
…
There are two things I want to suggest, arising from your request. The first continues the discussion I was having with Andrew recently about competion. It strikes me that here in the UK, craft ciders are in competion for people’s money with other “luxury” products to a much larger extent than between each other. Beer and wine are probably the main competition, but also other beverages, fine food and perhaps even entertainments. But I won’t stretch it too far.
Secondly, In the modern connected world there is the idea that “word of mouth” is becoming more important than advertising. 
UK cider enthusiasts are right here on this group/forum/wiki and you can engage with us by simply writing about your own product and activities on a regular basis, as long as it takes the form of participation in a conversation not just posting one way announcements. It’s always a good idea to enhance and keep your own details up to date on the wiki as well – in your case this could be on the France page – Cidernaut_guide_to_France
as well as on the buy cider page if you are intending to provide an online order service to the UK
One active example, not a producer but a publican, is Steve Marquis of
the Blue Bell at Halkyn in North Wales.
.
Finally, there is now one trial commercial linked graphic advertisement on the http://ukcider.co.uk/buy.htm static page which is not exclusive and helps toward the annual bandwith fees for the wiki. I don’t believe that impinges on the community in any way by being there, and if you are interested in something similar then do get in touch.
Encouraging participation in the wiki world
The DAR wiki doesn’t have trackbacks enabled like a blog but I can trace some connections back through my webstats referrals. Thus I found two blogs which have picked up on my wiki facilitation page and added some thoughts. The irony is not lost, of course. There I am having written about how to try and facilitate collaboration on a wiki and one of the tips is “don’t do it all yourself” So somebody writes “is it just me or did you do all this yourself?” Ha! thanks for helping…
Then some more people find the page, possibly through Nancy White blogging it – and they seem to find it useful and have some comments of their own to make. But they don’t edit the wiki to enhance the information there, they blog or blog-comment about it instead!
Meredith Wolfwater: Encouraging participation in the wiki world
Agnese Caruso: improving-participation-in-wikis
Both of these posts have attracted some comments, so there’s a bit of conversation going on which would normally get buried in the archives after a few days.
Now that’s something which it is possible to get all frustrated about, but I don’t any more because it’s an issue I’ve been tracking for several years now, and I can switch between viewing through the group perspective and the individual one more easily now.
I started out wondering whether individual bloggers will tend to withdraw to their blogs and post less to discussion groups, to the detriment of the traditional listserv and other types of many-to-many community. (Dave Snowden has been wondering this more recently, but I can’t find the reference)
the-question-of-blogging-and-communities
control-in-blogs-and-communities-and-flickr
About a year ago I asked this question:
How are we going to hold the more fragile communities together when some of the key contributors may be increasingly tempted to publish their ideas mainly on their own blogs to the detriment of the overall level of interaction?
It’s all to do with the ownership of spaces, both real and interpreted. So now I’m trying to pull together some seperate ideas which I’ve been mulling over for a long time, and I won’t succeed today, but will make some progress, and in public. My learning about collaborative wiki facilitation came originally from the ukcider wiki, about a domain which has clear goals, practical outcomes and tends to be subscribed to by people with a more naturally cooperative consciousness. The domain with which DARnet concerns itself on the other hand, is mostly on the meta-level and is perhaps mainly of interest to people who are generally more predisposed to owning and controlling their own spaces, even on the topic of collective knowlege building. I think I knew that when I started, deliberately setting myself a much harder nut to crack, but with contingency plans and other side benefits. So what I’m trying to say here is simply that this:
* the domain type affects the style and level of collaboration
* individual blogs are not going to bleed discussion groups dry anytime soon
* wiki proliferation has already ended the ‘field of dreams’ scenario
* webstats are invaluable for tracing backlinks
Thanks for reading Andy Roberts articles about Wiki on Darnet
Andy Roberts is a writer who initiated DARnet. Catch me on 
