Wikipedia goes to great lengths on it’s NPOV (Neutral Point of View) policy page to explain how and when an article can be considered “neutral:”

The neutral point of view is a means of dealing with conflicting verifiable perspectives on a topic as evidenced by reliable sources. The policy requires that where multiple or conflicting perspectives exist within a topic each should be presented fairly. None of the views should be given undue weight or asserted as being judged as “the truth”, in order that the various significant published viewpoints are made accessible to the reader, not just the most popular one.

This sounds great, but I’m concerned that the Wiki system as a whole might have considerable bias built-in. First, consider what Wikipedia is. It’s the “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” but not anyone does — instead, most prefer just to read (it’s the 7th most visited site online). Just as visiting the site is an opt-in process, so is editing it; the community that creates and polices content is very much self-selecting. This is where I think the problem arises.Something is only neutral within the context of its community. That is, an issue is neutral (in my mind at least) when it exists perfectly balanced between the centres of gravity of two or more conflicting views. Given that the population of people who edit Wikipedia is necessarily drawn from the people who read Wikipedia — but also have the inclination, be it technological or ideological, to edit the site — there is the concern that the editing community has a different makeup with regards to their opinions on issues than the reader community, and the world at large.

Wikipedia attempts to address this by saying that in order for something to be cited as a reference, it needs to refer to a reliable source — one that has a reputation for fact checking and integrity. There are two problems with this:

1. “Reliable sources” have bias built in too. Al Jazeera is reliable to one subset of people, FOX News is reliable to another. Fans of either source would be offended to hear that the other is placed on the same level as their own.
2. The community gets to decide what sources are reliable (because who else is there to, Wikipedia is a community based effort).

The first problem doesn’t have any easy solutions; individual bloggers may be telling the truth with every word they write, but until they have a sufficient following and track record, there’s not really any reliable metric to decide if what they’re saying is admissible. Wikipedians could do research to bolster one-off claims found on blogs, but this practice would be awfully close to original research, something the site strives to avoid.

The second problem is simultaneously easy and hard to solve. The more people edit Wikipedia, the more accurate the alignment of “neutral” to the Wikipedians and “neutral” to everyone else becomes (unless of course people with a specific agenda flood into the site en-masse to try and shake things up). But this is counterbalanced with the issue of getting people involved. Not everyone wants to edit Wikipedia, and not everyone who wants to knows how.

Interestingly, I read this result as meaning that Wikipedia is consistent from first to last. In principle, the more people edit Wikipedia, the better it gets; similarly, the more people edit Wikipedia, the more its version of neutrality becomes one that reflects the world at large. It’s a fantastic resource, and if we want it to continue to improve, at some point, we’re all going to have to get involved.

(A special thank you to my friends Danielle, Eve, and Josh, with whom I had the conversation that resulted in this post. Also of note is that XKCD, did, in some measure, address this long before we did.)

Since I do not want my private conversations looked at by those out to embarrass, the only course of action is to not correspond in cyberspace. This saddens me. I have enjoyed conversing with each of you.

In other words, he had to give up email. It’s quite an amazing contrast – while Obama’s team seeks to use the Web 2.0 to more closely connect with Americans, the leader of the party is being forced to pull back to to what I’d call Web 0.1 for his own communications. And why it’s Web 0.1 is that the major leap forward for the office, technologically speaking, may be having (for the first time) a President with a laptop computer on his desk.

One of the great questions here, which I’m sure many business leaders have and continue to face, is how this might affect Obama’s productivity. As the second article noted, Obama seldom had memorandums and briefing books printed for him – preferring to read and respond on his blackberry or laptop whenever he could find a spare moment. It’s a major work-flow shift to have to revert to printed documents, hand written notes, etc. I wonder, in a “perfect world” where security breaches were not a concern, how much more a President might get done if instead of reverting back to the old ways, he set up a wiki instead…

It will be intriguing to see if the leadership of the private companies over public continues to persist, and/or whether the Inc. 500 adoption is a leading indicator of what the public companies are going to do. Wikinomics readers might also be interested in following the “In contrast” link above, which is a wiki page that was created by Chris Anderson and Ross Mayfield to enable a cooperative, volunteer effort to review the blogging activity of Fortune 500 companies. My favorite link here is the “spectrum of corporate social media“, which hopes to flush out a taxonomy of ways to engage in social media (with specific examples). I think it still has a long way to go, but here’s how it currently stands:

• Sue and fire Employee Bloggers (e.g. Delta Air Lines Inc)
• RSS Feeds of existing content (e.g. Intel Corporation)
• Internal Wikis and Weblogs (e.g. DrKW)
• Executive Bloggers off-Site (e.g. guest blogging)
• Host Consumer Blogs (e.g. most media companies, Google)
• Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy for Employee Blogging (e.g. Apple Computer, Inc)
• Group Blogs on-Site (e.g. Yahoo! Search Blog)
• Executive Bloggers on-Site (e.g. SAP Executive Blogs)
• Public Wikis (e.g. Intuit)
• Encourage Employee Blogs (e.g. Scoble)
• Host and Employee Blogs (e.g. Sun Microsystems Inc, Microsoft Corporation)
• Carpetbombing (e.g. commenting anonymously in blogs)

Note: I don’t think “sue and fire employee bloggers” is a good category to be in .

In the previous post I walked through the examples provided in the book, which took a “day in the life” approach by focusing on a fictional executive named Linda. The basis for understanding the argument starts with platform theater – where one “scripts in advance every line and every gesture, practicing each over and over again until she can confidently give a performance so accomplished that it comes off as fresh and spontaneous.”

Platform theater represents the way many companies operate, from the most basic call center designs right through to the experience created for customers. It’s a comfortable way for many companies to operate, and relatively low-risk as well thanks to the controlled environment. But as anyone who’s taken Investing 101, it is through taking calculated risks that rewards are achieved.

So now let’s take a look at the definitions of more “evolved” forms of theater:

matching theater – where “disparate facts and events (are pieced) together (into) a unified whole, much like a film editor or director.”

street theater – where “small, atomic units of activity are called on demand to construct a performance.”

improv theater – where “surprising” problems must be handled immediately, and where Linda had to draw on “the reservoir of managerial techniques she has stored up from past experience.” The chapter notes that “Improv requires systematic and deliberate methods of originating creative ideas, fresh expressions, and new ways of addressing old problems.”

I would argue that various social media applications be be used to help move from “platform theater” to each of the other options. The most involved, of course, is “improv theater” – and here is where I think we could really dig into the opportunities that social media tools can create for companies. How much better could those “systematic and deliberate” methods be if wikis, blogs, social networks, reputation profiles, ranking systems, and the like where fully capitalized on? I also like the idea of taking improv theater to the next logical step – pulling customers on stage to participate in the experience directly (see: prosumerism).

So what do wikinomics readers think – would this be a useful framework to develop in relation to social media and customer experiences, and if so how might you go about expanding on it?

Airlines make money when planes are in the air. So getting people onboard efficiently is key. Your organization makes money when projects are running smoothly. So getting new people “on board” and up to speed quickly is key.

When you board an airplane, the airline needs to communicate a certain amount of information to you and all the other passengers to get everyone working together toward the same goal: taking off on time. The airline can do this with a PA system, since all the passengers are in an enclosed space, in close proximity both at the gate and on the plane.

In your organization, people might be spread around a building, a city, country, or the world, so a PA system isn’t going to do it. Something else is needed – something that can communicate to people both as a group and individually, and be available wherever the organization does its work. This is where a wiki comes in.

When our team has has a wiki at the center of its operations, new employees have immediate access to the body of knowledge they need to get up to speed quickly. Here are two tips to help them:

1. “Must-Know” Information: Make sure there’s a page in your wiki that points new people to the essential information they should get familiar with right away. This list should link to meeting agendas & minutes, project plans, status updates, and profile pages for others on the team.
2. Profile Page: The first thing a new employee should do is create a page in the wiki with their contact information, photo, job title, brief bio & information about their relevant experience, and what they’ll be working on. Next, they should send out an email to the team, briefly introducing themselves and linking to their wiki profile page. The email shouldn’t contain too much information – people should click through to the wiki page to know it’s there, read the new person’s info, and leave comments for them.

Now, when your new employee meets others in person, they’ll feel like they know each other already. This helps build deeper relationships, and a strong, highly productive team.

Editor’s Note: you can see the Stewart’s earlier posts by clicking on his tag below. Also visit www.ikiw.org.

The probable new owners will manage the club, voting online to choose match lineups and buying new players. To help run the team, the fans will be able to view all the matches online and, after the game, receive statistics on how each player has performed. They will also get weekly updates from the team’s head coach on how each player is doing during practice.

It sounded really good – and most commentators particularly focused on the ability to vote on line ups as a key driver of participation. This functionality went live recently, but was hardly a resounding success – less than 2,000 of the over 30,000 members voted on the line ups for some recent games, and the vast majority that did bother to vote elected to let the coach decide. This lack of involvement has led to several articles like this one, which sees it not only a hugely negative development, but as potentially foreshadowing the collapse of the entire experiment. But is it really that bad?

Let’s start with the issue of team selection. When MyFootballClub was launched, numerous sports “experts” thought it would be a massive failure because the “crowd” wouldn’t be knowledgeable enough to select the squad. Now that the option is available, most of the crowd is choosing not to vote – opting rather to let the coach decide. While this is now being spun as a “failure” of the model, might it just represent that the crowd is rational enough to realize that the coach is in a better position to select the squad on a day-to-day basis, and they are happy leaving him to do so (until perhaps he proves himself unworthy?).

Connected to this, articles like the twohundredpercent piece make a quantum leap in logic – given that the majority of participants don’t appear interested in contributing to the day-to-day decision making, it appears they are unlikely to renew again next year. Given that these people did opt to purchase the membership, and many have never engaged in the voting process, isn’t it hard to argue that the ability to vote on everything regularly was the reason they signed up? To use an analogy, if I think people are coming to my hotel for the pool, but few of them use the pool, rather than meaning they’re not going to come back to my hotel, it might just mean that the pool wasn’t the reason they came in the first place.

I can’t say for sure, but I bring this up because it represents a common mistake we see in relation to collaboration – presupposing the reasons why people engage in something, and then declaring it a failure when behavior is actually quite different – when the behavior might just reflect the fact they had different reasons than you initially thought. I’d be very interested in a survey of the membership that asks them why they joined – and what they expect.

Maybe a lot of people are just attracted to the democratized ownership, and the ‘joy’ of co-owning a team rather than having it dominated by one person or a large corporation. And maybe many of these people are happy to let the professionals run the team on a day-to-day basis, but will actually demonstrate the wisdom of crowds in the event things seem to be heading in the wrong direction (i.e. demanding a coaching change, etc.).

I’m not saying these things will happen – I really don’t know, and only time will tell. But we should let this thing play out for awhile before it’s declared dead – and let this crowd prove whether it is truly wise, mad, ambivalent, or otherwise. However, I also don’t want to let MyFootballClub off the hook entirely. To quote Joe’s post:

Online communities, like any organisation, are not fully democratised. Various roles are assumed, such as contributors and leaders, to fully utilise the talents of individuals. The likes of MyFootballClub.co.uk would do well to use the community to discover and exploit the pool of resources available rather than a direct democracy. In football terms, this could have very interesting implications.

This is an important point – there are different ways to leverage a crowdsourcing model that aren’t built on purely democratic principles. Joe talks about the potential to engage part of the membership in the scouting process, similar to the “One for the Birds” contest the St. Louis Cardinals rolled out for their baseball team (I wrote about it here). Might there also be an opportunity to engage parts of the crowd in marketing, mashing up video clips for either entertainment OR game preperation (as Joe also suggests), etc.?

It is notable that approximately 3x more people voted on the uniform designs than the roster selection… which I’m sure few people would expect. MyFootballClub would be well served to seriously think about the best way to engage their community in a variety of different ways, and ideally leveraging all of the web 2.0 tools available to them, rather than just relying on democratic voting process as the differentiator.

Technology empowers users.  Apple’s GarageBand, for instance, enabled just about anyone to make professional sounding music (provided a certain level of musicianship).  A while ago, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails released his music as GarageBand files so that fans can remix them as they please (think open-source music).  GarageBand has been popular since the source of the music is standardized, people can send it around and collaborate with friends — basically “playing tennis” with works in progress.  However, the distribution of these edited files has effectively been limited to e-mailing music attachments back and forth. Very 1.0.

RiffWorks T4 solves this problem by making the music itself wiki based.  It lets four people work on the music at once, but there’s no upper limit to the number of potential collaborators.  It also synchronizes the piece across the computers of all of the contributors, and keeps a copy on the web that is always up to date and universally accessible.  RiffWorks T4 has wikified music. Because of its centralized, collaborative nature, for the first time ever we can have crowd created music,  I wonder what it will sound like.

When an organization has a wiki at the center of its operations, people can gather and share the kind of information that others need – including everything from projects, products, initiatives, strategies, and other pieces of the big picture, to the everyday: how to process an expense report, access an office’s network, get business cards printed, or reserve a meeting room. On a wiki, this information can be gathered by the small efforts of many.

Let’s look at an example – the expense report. It’s a standard process, with a common form that people need to access, complete, include receipts, and submit for approval.

If the organization’s accounting office uses a wiki, a staff member can add a page, explain the process for filling out an expense report, attach the blank report template, and make sure the page can be viewed by employees logged into the wiki. That staff member might also decide to make the page editable, so that others can refine the instructions based on their experience. Another option is to restrict direct editing of the page, but enable comments so that people can leave feedback and notes in addition to the instructions. The accounting staff can then update the instructions and procedure based on comments, and leave reply comments to let people know that their feedback has been incorporated.

Either option is more participatory than a static page, and more efficient because people throughout the organization can add useful knowledge where it makes the most sense – on the wiki page, in context, instead of cluttering email inboxes with messages that will be mostly ignored.

But what’s really important about the wiki is not just that one example of the expense report, or even that the report itself is available on the wiki. It’s the idea that employees are working together to put the information they’re carrying around in their heads on the wiki, where others can more easily access it, use it, edit it, and improve it. That builds a culture where all employees can become contributors – both to the goals of the organization, and the evolving knowledge about how to reach those goals.

Showtime launched the first “Fan Wikis” about a year ago, and has since added pages for each of its shows. Since that time, pages have grown from basic content such as user-created cast bios and episode guides to complete guides of, well, everything related to the show.

Tudors’ fans maintain wikis from everything from costume design to a complete list of Tudor executions. Weed’s fans meticulously study characters’ wardrobes and post where to buy the exact article of clothing online. And it’s not a rogue few participating, either. The L Word wiki boasts more than 7,000 members.

Participation is simple. All a fan must do is register with Wetpaint and then check out what tasks are listed on the wiki To-Do list.

I haven’t decided what I think is more genius: Showtime outsourcing website content development to volunteers, or enabling fans to create fan sites on the actual Showtime site, keeping precious traffic right where they want it.

Showtime’s Fan Wikis are powered by Wetpaint, which describes itself as a place where “you can create websites that mix all the best features of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks into a rich, user-generated community based around the whatever-it-is that rocks your socks off.” The company announced May 19 it had raised $25 million to “accelerate the company’s growth.” According to TechCrunch, Wetpaint has now raised more than $40 million in all. On Wednesday, Wetpaint announced that more than 1million free social Wetpaint pages had been created since July 2006.

I’d like to see how Ben Letalik would grade Showtime in his weekly Wikinomics report card. Fan wikis combined with The Tudor’s multi-platform campaign launch of Season 2 (Showtime aired the entire season premiere for free on more than 60 sites, including Netflix and MSN) are very good examples of openness and sharing.

I started watching The Tudors (and subscribed to Showtime) after watching the Season 2 premiere on Netflix for free. I fell for Showtime’s 2.0 marketing plan hook, line, and sinker. Will Showtime’s innovative strategies and social networking features help it get an edge on long-time enemy (and market leader) HBO?

In Lost in E-Mail, Tech Firms Face Self-Made Beast, New York Times writer Matt Richtel looks at the growing problem of fractured attention in the workplace – thanks to email, instant messaging, and other interruptions that are costing employees 28% of a typical workday – and the cost isn’t just measured in time:

In the United States, more than $650 billion a year in productivity is lost because of unnecessary interruptions, predominately mundane matters, according to Basex. The firm says that a big chunk of that cost comes from the time it takes people to recover from an interruption and get back to work.

I often talk about email as a “push” medium – that is, you push messages out to recipients, and each person gets their own copy. This seems simple enough, but two problems emerge in practice. Each new email message can be an interruption, and the fact that a separate copy goes to each person means that it isolates people from each other.

Also, with email there is the perception that you have more control because you can select recipients, but in reality you have less control over the message because you can’t control where it ultimately goes. Any of the original recipients can forward it, and this can leak sensitive information, take things out of context, and give you a whole new set of problems that require a lot of time and work to deal with. That can mean even more lost productivity from more important work.

A wiki, by contrast is a “pull” medium – it pulls people in to look at content on a single, shared page that everyone can edit. That means people see all the changes that everyone else makes, and in builds a stronger connection & community instead that’s just the opposite of isolating. allows you to do two things:

Explicitly set access permissions on a page to restrict who can view and edit it. Others can’t change this so information the needs to be protected really is secure.

For information that isn’t restricted, the awareness that it can be widely read requires you to think about what you include and how you present it so that it will be clear and useful.

Here’s an example of this from Nate Nash:

Frankly, I sort of like the idea that if some moron in my company drops an F bomb on a blog post, that slickness is immediately exposed to the entire company. I hope he gets fired. And HR keeps the post up as an example of “what not to do with the enterprise Wiki.” If you are that dense I am 1) glad other people know, 2) convinced you don’t deserve a job here, and 3) now aware that we might need more stringent hiring practices. All good things in my book. This staffing action can happen in our Wiki.

Dropbox is a service that synchronizes files between computers and the web. Once you add a computer to your Dropbox account, the Dropbox software creates a folder in your My Documents folder, the contents of which are synchronized across all computers linked to your account, as well as the Dropbox server. Whenever files are changed, only the difference in the file is updated across the network, minimizing bandwidth requirements. You can also have shared folders with other users, the files update as they normally do across all computers in the network. Finally, all old versions of the files are stored, and are accessible via a web interface at the Dropbox website. While my friends use this mostly for swapping photos and legally acquired mp3s, the possibilities for business are many.

Given the versioning, synchronizing and web accessibility, integrating Dropbox with a company wiki would fantastic. No more uploading and downloading the latest version of files, you’d just open the file in your Dropbox share and save it when you’re done. Then, if you had to grab it from another computer, you log in through the web interface and download the latest version. It basically makes every file a wiki.

This system is similar to the new Mobile Me platform that Apple has announced, and is a solid step towards the world of cloud computing and storage. The concept of Wikinomics brings about lots of potential, but software like Dropbox really empowers users to collaborate en-masse easily and quickly. I highly recommend it.

Also, I’ve got 10 invites to give away, post a comment with your e-mail if you’d like one.

I believe you can love what you do at work.

When I look at the sore subjects of work – email overload, unfocused meetings, and the confusion & misunderstandings that drag down projects – I see opportunity. A grand opportunity to take a step back, get a clear perspective on what really matters, and fix these things so that work can become meaningful and fulfilling.

Hi, I’m Stewart Mader, and I’m pleased to have been invited to guest blog with the Wikinomics team. That paragraph above is from my blog Grow Your Wiki, and it’s my call to action to people inside organizations who feel disempowered by existing tools and business processes.

I’ve been working with wikis for five years, ever since I built my first wiki community for collaborative science curriculum development, and I think the paradigm shift it represents – direct user editing of the content on a web page – is as significant as the Internet itself. When Tim Berners-Lee created the WorldWideWeb, he envisioned it as a “creative space to share and edit information and build a common hypertext (info.cern.ch)” and wikis enable people to do just that.

Growing wiki use in your organization is worthwhile because it creates an environment where everyone is empowered to directly make things happen, which gives people a deeper sense of purpose and accomplishment. That’s not something I can say for most other tools, like email. It’s essential if you want to build a successful new venture, or ensure the relevance and success of an existing organization in this rapidly changing world.

This is the first in a series of guest posts, and in the next one I’ll discuss how a wiki can address the growing problem of lost productivity because of interruptions during work. Have you ever said this? “I just can’t work in the office because there are too many interruptions and distractions.” If so, my next post might be able to help.

Indeed, under the new Britannica scheme those who wish to contribute will need to create a profile outlining their qualifications and expertise in the area they are commentating on. They will then be able to add comments to encyclopaedia entries, or write their own. This content will then be reviewed by the expert editors of the site, and if any of it is deemed worthy of inclusion, added to the main article with a credit. 

I’ve certainly got an intuition as to which articles will be ‘commented on’ first. While this seems like a sensible move for Britannica, it will be very easy to paint them as hypocrites given how critical they have been of Wikipedia in the past. People want to be engaged, so I think that Britannica’s real challenge will be fine tuning the process: submitting a comment or revision, only to have it disappear into a bureaucratic black hole is not a good way to encourage participation and engagement. At the same time, editorial standards are important to keep useless content to a minimum.

Maybe there’s some nice middle-ground?

Take a look at the Linux kernel, wherein distributions have stable and unstable releases. Normal users use the stable releases, and enthusiasts use the unstable releases. Maybe the ideal encyclopedic-middle-ground (which I don’t exactly expect from either Britannica or Wikipedia) would use a similar approach: users can update pages on the ‘unstable-edition’ site, but for content to make it’s way to the more public facing ‘stable-edition’ site, it has to be vetted for by experts.

But I’m getting off topic… I think that this move by Britannica is, at the very least, a concession that while the facts may well be set in stone, the way we go about presenting them isn’t. That’s good news. If the Encyclopedia industry is waking up to the new world of Wikinomics, I only hope that other industries aren’t far behind.

Ok, not quite.

My friend Abram Hindle is doing some fascinating research: he’s working on ‘mining artifacts from versioned software.’ Here’s what that means:

In software development, programmers use a central database to keep track of every change made to the code of their software. This database keeps copies of all earlier versions of the software, as well as the current version (and maybe some unstable versions for testing).

Abram is writing a piece of software that analyzes a development database like the one described above. This software looks through every iteration of the project’s code and determines what changes were made, by who and when, and stores that information in it’s own database. Based on this data, mined from comparing and contrasting previous versions of in-development programs, Abram’s software is able to figure out how much time the programmers spent on each part of the program. What’s more, the software can even determine which programmers create or fix the most errors.

These techniques and methods allow programmers to be socially linked by virtue of what parts of the code they edit — regardless of when either programmer makes their contributions and changes. On being able to map programming contributions socially like that, my buddy Phil says “I think if we did that here at my work, I’d be best friends with a guy who quit 10 years ago.” And he’s right: lots of companies have version control databases that reach back 5, 10, even 25 years. With this software you could look inside of the old code and take a long view at the effectiveness of programming teams over the years under different management regimes, or just track the lifetime growth of a given subroutine.

This form of data mining isn’t only applicable to software programming, though; it will work with any kind of version controlled document (I’m looking at you, wikis). With a mining program like this, you could examine your company wiki and see — nicely summarized — the types of contributions that each editor makes, how long they take to do it, and where they like to spend their time editing.

All of this isn’t without its dark side, though. Programming can be an involved and complicated process, often too much so to be neatly summarized by a graph. That is, there’s the danger that normal programming practices could be misunderstood by managers, who penalize programmers for generating errors, all the while losing sight of the fact that those programmers are generating, by a wide margin, the most code.

I think that this is just one example of a larger theme: that we’re able to extract useful data from the very process of creating and sharing useful data. I’m very excited to see where research like this goes over the coming months.

Click on the Dilbert tag below to see past mash ups on this site… or go to Dilbert.com to see the original and all the other mash ups that have been done.

four-forms-of-theatre.ppt

The basic idea I am building towards is that wikinomics and collaborative experiences is about moving more and more of the business away from platform theatre and into improv – with street and matching theatre being steps along the way. But before getting there, some background on each is required.

 In chapter 7 Pine and Gilmore present a “typical” day for Linda, who is leading new offering development for a U.S. automobile manufacturer. The time that she performs improv theatre is when a subordinate comes to her with a problem that must be handled immediately - and she draws on “the reservoir of managerial techniques she has stored up from past experience.” Platform theatre is when she “scripts in advance every line and every gesture, practicing each over and over again until she can confidently give a performance so accomplished that it comes off as fresh and spontaneous.” Street theatre is used when improv is too risky, but where “small, atomic units of activity are called on demand to construct a performance.” Matching theatre is when she pieces together “disparate facts and events together as a unified whole, much like a film editor or director.”

So that’s Linda – an executive. Now think about it in terms of a typical enterprise in regards to “front line” employees. For many years, companies have worked very hard to improve their platform theatre – a script developed by the executives to communicate the company message to customers (think: call centres, retail staff, etc.). The typical reason is/was that improv or even matching theatre is some combination of too hard and too risky – and it’s far too difficult to pull people together for street theatre on demand.

Now think about it in relation to new, collaborative web 2.0 tools. In the old model, only Linda was “qualified” enough to do improv – based mostly on her accumulated experience. But what happens when much of that accumulated knowledge (all the “Linda’s” over time) is accessible via (say) a company wiki – could you enable more and more employees to provide a more fulfilling experience that appears (to the customer / subordinate) like it is improv? Moreover, how much could Linda’s improv improve if she had access to everyone else’s knowledge? As the chapter notes, “Improv requires systematic and deliberate methods of originating creative ideas, fresh expressions, and new ways of addressing old problems.”

As an in-between step, it seems easy to argue that the tools enable improved “matching theatre”, doesn’t it? Where the appropriate tools can pull together disparate facts and events on demand? Similarly, and there ever-greater opportunities for street theatre, where various social-networking-like tools (supported by information on individual specialties) enable small, atomic units to come together on demand to solve a problem? To take the thinking a little further, by pulling customers directly in to co-create experiences (think: prosumption), is it similar to pulling audience members on stage to participate in the “improv” and make it that much better?

Anyways, I think it’s an interesting model to think about collaborative enterprises – moving towards a world where companies enable good improv theatre by ever-more employees, and ideally even pulling customers on stage as well. Any thoughts?

They say a picture is worth a thousand words and I think this one sums up the power of wiki collaboration better than any 1,000 word essay ever could. The model was developed by Manny Wilson of U.S. Central Command and was shared with me by Chris Rasmussen at US National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. I presented this slide during a talk I gave at Nokia today and someone pointed out that the happy faces on the left probably ought to be frowning — he had a good point.

I’m curious to see how this map of Napoleon’s advance and retreat to Russia (considered by many to be the greatest graphic ever) would look in this application.

On the location: nice part of Detroit; fun workstations; colour scheme strong on primary colours; and the expected great cafeteria. Kudos for the healthy food, and the plates and cutlery made from sugar cane and corn starch. Everything was compostable, and they tell me they do in fact compost it with the food.

Oddly, the building was empty. I gather they’re new in Detroit, and I’m not totally sure why they need such a big space anyhow for a sales office. Perhaps growth will make the place buzz, but it’s not obvious how.

The Apps themselves have made a bit of progress over the past year, when I last looked at them. Most notably:

• Google Sites, launched just Feb 27, is a decent start as a wiki. As the name suggests, the idea is for each page to look more like an html page than a mediawiki text page. Editing is very simple and intuitive, but there’s very basic formatting functionality (html, not any wiki markup).
• The most impressive feature is how easy it is to embed a Google Apps document in a wiki page. Just drag and drop (or insert URL), and the info appears as in the original document. For instance, you can stick a spreadsheet in. Anyone can edit the document just by double-clicking, and the content is automatically updated in real-time. For instance, if the embedded spreadsheet refers to a stock price (see below), then whenever anyone views the wiki page, the latest stock price will appear automatically, and will update real-time while you stay on the page.
• This *dynamic content linking* is the most interesting thing I saw at Google. It applies to all the Apps. You can even turn bits of App content into Widgets. For instance, here’s a quick rundown on the possible:
  - type “Pfizer” in a spreadsheet cell
  - in next cell, type a lookup for the stock symbol, from Google Finance; the spreadsheet automatically fills in PFE
  - in next cell, type a lookup for stock price of the symbol, and spreadsheet automaticaly fills in the current price; this updates automatically
• you can even create a gadget based on the price field, and that can appear anywhere, and it will update automatically.
• (I wish I could insert a sample spreadsheet here, but we don’t seem to have the spreadsheets enabled in this community.)
• By the way, we got a quick preview of an upcoming release of Google Docs, and it looks like a significant upgrade. Still not for power Word users, but at least closer.

It’s the dynamic linking that provides the opportunity to turn “shadow IT” inside-out. Normally, one of the big complaints about all the spreadsheets / Access DBs / etc. that proliferate in corporations is that they’re isolated, not dynamic (need to access user’s PC to get information), don’t link back into main systems, etc. But if the documents reside on a SaaS platform like Google’s, many of those complaints go away.

In fact, I could develop a sophisticated calculation / algorithm to process data from multiple sources within a Google Spreadsheet, then make the result available through a gadget to anyone else in the organization. Presto! My home-grown VAR system becomes the bank’s whole infrastructure for managing risk! (Just kidding.) But really, my personal work *can* become a critical component in an Enterprise activity, even some degree of automation.

Sadly, of course, it’s a bit early to declare victory in this direction. The Google Apps seem to crash often (e.g., when embedding a large PowerPoint in a Site page); the Sites editor is clunky, and goes wonky now and then; the slideshow loses all the graphics when it imports from PowerPoint; the spreadsheet can’t do any very sophisticated formulas; etc.

But the direction is clear. A platform, even something as simple as Google Apps, can provide a huge leap in flexibility and productivity just by making dynamic information available, and manageable, by regular users using familiar tools.

The theme of FASTforward 08 was ‘the user revolution’ and it is the user/employee that is at the center of successful Web 2.0 solutions. The theory is that because employees are now informationalizing your IT systems being a fast follower is more difficult. The reason for this is two fold. First, implementation is no longer a matter of rolling out the tools, but rather convincing employees to adopt a collaborative mindset and way of working. Second, in the past the success of an ERP or CRM rollout revolved around a small team of experts and consultants which could to a certain extent be replicated by another organization. With collaborative tools success hinges on the entire organization contributing and developing the tools.

Look at some of the mainstays in the Web 2.0 suit of technologies – wikis, blogs, social networks, tags, RSS, predictive markets. The collaborative, social, user generated nature of these tools makes it almost impossible to duplicate the value from one organization to another. Sure, technically speaking it’s simple to install and configure Web 2.0 tools, but when you are talking about information technology, getting the information into those tools is an art form. This means that organizations that can leverage Web 2.0 technologies will gain competitive advantage based on the skill in which they use those technologies.

From the article:

[The site]… invites people to post leaked materials with the goal of discouraging “unethical behavior” by corporations and governments. It has posted documents said to show the rules of engagement for American troops in Iraq, a military manual for the operation of the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and other evidence of what it has called corporate waste and wrongdoing.

This brillliant legal mind didn’t consider that the magic of the Intrawebs, could somehow keep it going in Europe.

Great discussion on the legal blog at the Wall St. Journal (great site, btw, I referenced it in an earlier post) about the ethics involved. Free speech is a concept valued highly by free society. But should anonymous free speech be held as sacrosanct? Surely, if someone is giving the right to say whatever he or she wants, they should endure the responsibility of the consequences.

And how will these residents get this glimpse of the future? Well, that would be on the big screen display in one of Rome’s main centers, as the project ties into “Real Time Rome,” which was presented during the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale, the prestigious biannual exhibition of contemporary art. Alternatively, anyone with an Internet connection will be able to see a unique, up to the minute map of the Italian capital which includes the movement of the crowds, event locations, the real time positions of buses and trains, and even the where abouts (for now) of well known Roman personalities. The data, of course, is coming from the exact same places and people (anonymously for the most part, in case you were concerned).

This could be a really intriguing experiment on such a grand scale, and the groups that are coming together to make it happen include the MIT SENSEable City Lab, SEAT Pagine Gialle, Telecom Italia, Telespazio, the Rome public transportation authority ATAC, La Repubblica, and Trenitalia. Among the insights they hope to gain, MIT researcher Kristain Kloeckl offers:

“How do people react towards this new perspective on their own city while they are determining the city’s very own dynamic? How does having access to real-time data in the context of possible action alter the process of decision-making in how to go about different activities? These are among the questions we may be able to answer.”

These and many others – with privacy issues and tracking concerns first and foremost in many people’s minds. But done properly, such an offering could not be a valuable tool for everyone in the city to leverage, it could also be a “living” piece of art that provides a new perspective on our world today. As SENSEable director Carlos Ratti notes (using a lot of lingo I am quite comfortable with):

By deploying developments of the ‘Web 2.0′ and the ‘Semantic Web,’ Wiki City can be a significant leap forward towards a pervasive ‘internet of things’ to support human action and interaction.

To check out the wikicity data site, click here. The Web Urbanist also has an interesting post on this topic.

In order to determine the reputation of an author the take into account “how long their contributions last in the Wikipedia. Specifically, authors whose contributions are preserved, or built-upon, gain reputation; authors whose contributions are undone lose reputation.” There is a much more in-depth explanation, complete with mathematical symbols, available for download in presentation and article format.

Researchers hope this shift to what they are calling ‘content driven’ reputation can help users sift through the large amounts of ‘junk’ in the world of user generated content. You can see a beta version of the tool in action on a few hundred Wikipedia articles at the UCSC Wiki Lab.

“My wiki is my textbook now,” he said. “This platform is infinitely better and gets better information from a variety of sources. It takes a year and half for a textbook to get published, and by the time that happens it is outdated. [The use of] textbooks will begin to fade … and these more collaborative-based, environment will probably rise to the surface.”
It’s quite an interesting idea – though I wonder what the publishers of $120 textbooks that are forced upon captive audiences think about it?

The goal of this project is to produce the world’s largest and greatest library on the Internet. It is intended to be fully open and a product of the people: allowing them to create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. The demo, source code, and mailing lists were all opened up in hopes of drawing interest from the public at large.

Utilizing their own database design, ThingDB (tdb), as well as the team’s independently created wiki software, Infogami, the Open Library project team hopes to expand its framework in order to build exciting site-specific features on top of it. It has already been connected to the Internet Archive’s book scanning project, so that one can read the full text of all the out-of-copyright books they’ve made available. They also hope to add a print-on-demand feature in order to print copies of the scanned books, as well as a scan-on-demand feature, so one could fund the scanning of that out-of-copyright book they’ve always wanted.

For more information on the project, or for a demo, click here.