Corporate Heresies, Technology Rants, Personal Observations
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Tuesday, November 30, 2004 Why wikis will make a differenceOld-timers -- at least by computing standards -- remember the early breathless enthusiasm over what's now called Social Computing. Twenty-some years ago early adopters of the 'Inter-Network' exchanged technical tips by way of newsgroups. A lot of what filled those newsgroups was Deep Geek. A lot wasn't. Newsgroups had distinct personalities and moderators held court over the flavor of each online gathering. Some were convivial, some confrontational; some existed to help newbies find out how to do stuff, some existed to help participants find 'cheap eats.' All were beneficial insofar as they reminded us that sometimes it isn't only a matter of WHAT you know as it is WHO you know. In those days of pre-GUI computers with 300-baud modems, unix-hosted internet newsgroups had desktop analogs; BBSs (Bulletin Board Systems), and later, dial-in conferencing software that allowed groups of people a way to share ideas about just about anything they could get away with. What's important here is to note that the basic model for how collaborative environments work -- created a generation ago -- continues to influence how a large chunk of social computing software is defined. English Lit 101: threaded conversations Remember those high school and college essay questions that prompted us with the leading phrases of: Read and Comment or Compare and Contrast? Conferencing tools are still beholden to this way of organizing ideas. Bringing hi-tech to those dreary English-Lit assignments has helped us move the venue of where we do the reading and responding. Imagine that every few days you went to your (real world) mailbox and took out a stapled sheath of papers. The cover page had the Big Idea that someone figured we should talk about. In college it tended to be ideas like, oh, the role of Marlow in Conrad's Lord Jim. Times and personal roles change. Business topics definitely lead toward the prosaic -- say -- finding out what new technologies can help our sales force. Our job with this sheath of papers is to look at the prompting question, read through the signed soliloquies from our co-workers, and come up with our own contribution to the whole mess. We attach our own comments with new staples, send it off, and wait for the ever-larger bound collection to return to our mailboxes. This is computer conferencing. It doesn't matter whether it's a venerable software system like Picospan, Caucus or PARTIcipate. It doesn't matter whether it's part of a Groove workspace or a company-wide Notes conversational database. What matters is that someone else posts a Big Idea and we're supposed to Read and Comment about that idea as well as all that follows. Boxes and boxes of Big Ideas ! : the way of the web-log Blogging has democratized this process -- that someone else has become us. A new college-year metaphor is in order. Years ago when I was a Physics undergraduate, we teamed up with classmates to share notes on the various lab sessions scheduled around specific topics. This was entirely kosher -- students got credit only for labs they personally attended and wrote reports for: sharing notes was a way for us to find out about what our fellow classmates were doing. One person was assigned to every lab session. Their role was to attend, to take *really* good notes and to share their lab results -- noting whenever possible, the results folks at other lab benches were getting. Each lab session had a cardboard box in our dining hall. At some time after each session, our assigned note-taker would plop down the lab-book on the growing pile of lab books. Wonks that we were, we'd wait for the newest lab report, rush over and read it through -- hoping we'd get some insights on the study topic. Once in a great while, we'd staple in copies of pages from our own lab reports. Sometimes these were meant to help the note-taker, sometimes they to help whoever would read the report next. This is pretty much how blogs work. Someone has an idea they think is worth my while. It can be anyone. Or anyone_s_. An annotated reference to someone else's idea (typically a URL) gets posted. Another reference, another light bulb of an idea happens. It gets plopped on top of those that've come before. Whenever I go out blog-trolling, what I'm looking at is the collection of ideas that are in the forefront of the posters' minds. Now and then I'll write a comment, but for the most part, it's like that box of lab reports sitting at the college refectory -- we're trusting the latest thinking of the person who's doing all the writing. A change in the metaphor is needed For business, both threaded conversations and blogs share a potential for doing something that organizations try to avoid. They fritter expensive attention. They diffuse what should be a sharper focus on solving particular business problems. In the case of conversational software, the possibility of moving away from the topic at hand is so common that it's been given the genteel label of "topic drift." What happens is that while a business topic starts out as the Big Idea we're all supposed to respond to, side comments move the conversation to whole new places. What might have begun as an attempt to evaluate the marketing potential of GPS-equipped cars, for example, ends up as verbal fisticuffs about online privacy. While one can make the argument that topic drift goads innovation -- it usually makes this genre of software a hard sell to corporations who see, at best, a faint line between employee participation in these exchanges and ROI. Blogs can cloud the picture in a different way. Consider blogs as a form of 'ideational proliferation.' You have a blog. I have a blog. The guy in the next cubicle has two of them. Our company has one where we read about what's on the CEO's mind. Our Marketing Department has one where we learn about how our company is helping save the wetlands. Several workgroups have blogs that bring people up to speed on specific topics. So many blogs, so little time... Critics argue this deplorable signal-to-noise ratio is even more damaging to productivity than the dreaded topic drift of older collaboration software. Conferencing starts out, we're told, with at least the possibility that there can be a focused effort to solve a problem. To the cynical observer, while blogs may be good for individual creative expression, their business value is more a matter of faith than of evidence. Something wiki wends this way To talk about wikis in any definitive way is to ignore the reality that, as a genre of software, they're still evolving at a terribly fast pace. What I can talk about is what's common to all wikis. And what's shared by all wikis is something that should become very important to our organizations. Wikis are inherently collaborative. To stay with an educational metaphor, wikis are like classrooms equipped with a blackboard-covered walls, an endless amount of chalk, and almost as many 'clap-able' erasers. People can go into the room singly or in groups, huddle 'round the board, write great expanses of text, add a comment, re-write a sentence, or draw a funny picture. In the world of online wikis, anyone can 'go' to the classrooms' blackboards, add, edit, or delete what's come before. Anyone can intersperse a colleague's prose with pointers to other material (something read, something heard, something posted elsewhere). And while everyone is encouraged to collaborate on this shared 'blackboard" (or,"wiki-space"), anyone can opt to create their own threaded conversation, or their own wiki-ish blog. Lowering barriers to entry Think about how many times you've been part of a team working on a shared problem, or about times you've been involved in estuarial online conversations. To be sure, there are times when there's textual heavy lifting to be done. Colleagues need to -- and often do -- add substantial material to move the conversation forward. But sometimes it's different. Think about how many times a major contribution to the direction of your group's work could have been made by way of a very small comment. Sometimes a conversation needs a little tweak here or there. Sometimes it needs a few minor clarifications. Sometimes there can be tremendous value by adding a parenthetical note. One of the things I've observed from years of moderating online conversations is a bit of common sense: there are people who are comfortable adding their ideas and suggestions to online forums -- and there are those who aren't. In talking to people who tended to 'lurk' in our forums, I was reminded of an element in corporate culture. There're a lot of people who really don't like placing their names on anything unless it's a thoroughly professional effort; people who feel their ideas need either vetting or editing, people who are wary of taking a position for a particular situation and feeling that they'll be held to that idea in the future. My suspicion is that the need to *sign* ones words in online collaborative efforts -- conversations or blogs -- is one of the barriers many of our colleagues regard as too high. Another hunch is that the implicit (or, at least, perceived by some) need to present tightly argued positions in any conversation is something that keeps people away. One of the key reasons I believe wikis are going to become important to organizations is that they can be helpful in both these cases. Wikis allow contributions to be as small as, say, changing a colon into a semicolon. We could add a "I don't get this" comment as easily as we could add a "(YES!)" to the text in our shared wiki-space. While our names are still attached to what we've added -- our egos are considerably less so when the entirety of an addition might be something as tangential as, say, "did you see the article in this week's NY Times magazine about this?..." There's an old lesson technology- and process- innovators too often forget. We need to pay close attention to the corporate culture as we deploy new tools and procedures. My wager is that the relatively simple and protean nature of a collaborative 'wiki spaces' will allow them to find niches in a wide rage of organizational cultures. Speaking as a former Anthropologist -- this is A Big Deal. The bottom-line? Everyone is smarter than any one. Wikis help focus the 'smarts' of a work group towards a specific end. All wikis do this. Add some bells and whistles, add some structured information functionality and you end up with tools with an enormous potential for adding bottom-line value to our companies. ...But that's a whole n'other story. posted by Tom | 1:49 PM |
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