This London Wiki Wednesday took place on 1 August 2007, kindly hosted by NYK Line in Moorgate (and Alek Lotoczko). NYK Line is a Japanese shipping line, and it's quite a stretch for their marketing department to use some of their budget for us. They actually put on a really great spread of food, beer and wine. It's notable that the standard has steadily increased at each event - if the trend continues maybe it will be Black Tie by Christmas? Their offices, on the 17th floor of CityPoint, an office block near Moorgate, has a pretty stunning view across the City of London, and highlights the amount of construction going on.
We had somewhere between 35 and 40 attending this time, and everyone I've spoken to since tells me they really enjoyed the mix of people, the discussions, and the presentations, despite a few technical hitches with the projector. We definitely missed Lars Ploughman's presence, and consequently we don't have one of his Mindmaps of the event.
What Happened:
David Terrar led a discussion on 1%-9%-90% ratios. How to improve levels of wiki participation (or at least this is where the discussion started out):
"In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action."
The original intention was to discuss how you might raise those metrics, and put things in place to improve on those ratios, and try and get towards 20% of the community contributing. We were challenged over whether this is actually a problem in any case, and that in the case of a corporate wiki for collaboration, wouldn't the majority of community be motivated to contribute? Other issues discussed included:
- Two Gods - author and reader
- Bottom up adoption versus command and control hierarchy
- Facebook and banning private use of social networking tools (like the phone and email before it)
- Business doesn't give a s*%t if it's effective
- Everyone as an author
- What's in it for me and recognition
- Spontaneity versus expectation
- Barriers, influence and the ROI of wikis and social networking
- The fact that many, many authors collaborating on the last chapter of Wikinomics hadn't really worked
It was a very healthy debate. I would suggest people take a look at Wikipatterns for more on the topic.
Alek Lotoczko intranet manager at NYK Line (shipping), showed us some screenshots briefly illustrating his lotus domino wiki deployment.
Roman Nosov showed us a MediaWiki extension called BlameMap, for highlighting different contributions in different colours
Mark Charmer talked about Akvo.org which he has co-founded. Working with the water development community to deploy a global water and sanitation wiki.
Philip Woodgate demonstrated his use of terrapad for running (and allowing simple administration) of a church community website.
Alan Wood gave us a sneak preview of 'rel3', a new type of collaboration system which folknology are piloting in the coming months.
The group definitely want to have a meeting in September, and we are currently hunting for both a venue and a sponsor to provide the food, beer and wine. If you want to volunteer your organisation, or have any suggestions, then please mail David Terrar. Overall, it was very good session, and we are delighted we are keeping the momentum going.
Blog responses:
- Zbigniew Lukasiak : http://brudnopis.blogspot.com/2007/08/return-of-fora.html
- Phil Jones : http://smartdisorganized.blogspot.com/2007/08/i-see-zbigniew-beat-me-to-blogging.html
- Links and Anchors : http://linksandanchors.wordpress.com/2007/08/06/participation-inequality/
- David Terrar : http://biztwozero.com/btz/2007/08/12/london-wiki-wednesday-1-august-at-nyk-line/
- Andy Roberts : http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2007/08/15/combining-wikis-and-forums
Pictures:
Alan Wood's Photos on facebook.
David Terrar's Photos on flickr (using his daughter's camera - the one that Alex Jerreat was rude about).
Other links:
The original organisational details are at London wikiwed 1 August 2007
The next event's detail are TBA.