This London Wiki Wednesday took place on 3 October 2007, kindly hosted by ?What If! near Marylebone High Street (Anne-Fey Townsend and Julie Callick).

What Happened:
Theevent was hosted in ?What If!'s rather funky, stylish meeting space called the Old Laundry. This has a great atmosphere, rather like Skype's Chill Out Lounge at their London HQ, with comfortable sofas and bookshelves full of books and other interesting stuff - examples of mobile phones through the ages, the first Amstrad Notepad NC100 computer from the early 90s, or yellow plastic hair that rather suited Toby (see Flickr photos). Our thanks go to Anne-Fey Townsend, and the wiki-chick Julie Callick for being such great hosts, and laying on the pizzas, beer and wine.

Shelli Baltman, ?What If!'s CEO, kicked off proceedings with an intro to the type of strategy and creative consultancy they do, and we have to give her special thanks for funding the event out of her marketing budget.
Toby Moores and David Terrar then failed abysmally to Skype/Video connect London Wiki Wednesday with the first meeting of the Bay Area CreativeCoffee Club, which happened to be going on at exactly the same time in a coffee shop in Menlo Park, California. Maybe next time.
Anne-Fey Townsend and Julie Callick spoke about ?What If!'s own use of wikis in all of their projects, explained how every employee gets their own wiki page, and is encouraged to contribute. They also gave their thoughts on how social media can be used within corporations.
David went on to explain the rationale behind CCC. It's an OpenCoffee Club style meetup, aimed at getting the worlds of business and academia together to talk about creativity, make connections, and discuss how we can encourage our organisations, public or private, to make creativity part of their everyday processes.
Gordon Joly spoke about some personal examples of the injustice of Wikipedia's approach, where some topics are deleted by "the editors", even though there is clearly a user community interested in contributing or discussing that subject. He also highlighted some successes he has had, like adding a page on 70s soul and funk band Kokomo (which just happens to be one of my old favourites - re-release of their first two albums out this month).
Paul Youlten talked through his experience of creating the first wiki style Yellow Pages - yellowikis - and then how his "Saturday morning project" fell foul of copyright issues. Yellowikis still exists, but not in the UK.
David Wynn presented the World premiere of Itensil's new workflow and wiki based product Minuteman. This is a free service which uses a subset of the Itensil product to automate meeting actions. In theory you should be able to copy in your minutes from Word or some other text editor, and the system will automatically create a workflow from the actions to help you manage the process. However, a bit of finger trouble invoked the first rule of live demos - that they invariably go wrong. Derek Miers then chipped in to explain a bit more about the reasoning behind Minuteman, and its typical web 2.0 business model - a free service that is useful, but which might prompt you to upgrade to the full Itensil licence for project management and other business process functionality. Even though the demo went wrong, everyone seemed to like the concept and want test accounts, which should be available in a few weeks.
Richard Drake talked about the history and development of the wiki. He highlighted that Ward Cunningham was the real genius and commented on how disingenuous Jimmy Wales has been in talking about the development of the wiki and wikipedia with no mention of Ward. On Wikipedia he commented that sometimes the neutral point of view was a bit of a shame, and predicted that it's glory will peak.

We finished earlier than usual at 8:30 and then repaired to the local pub for more chat and networking. Everyone I spoke to thought it was a good mix of people and topics, and another great success.

The next event will be on November 7. Stewart Townsend and Sun Microsystems are kindly providing the venue, but at the moment we haven't got a sponsor for the food, beer and wine. If you can suggest someone, or if there are any volunteers, please contact me.

Blog responses:

David Terrar's Photos on flickr

Other links:
The original organisational details are at London wikiwed 3 October 2007

The next event's detail are here London wikiwed 7 November 2007.