WikiWhiteboard

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Many moons ago, Danny Ayers reported the successful prototype of WikiWhiteboard, a simple tool for creating editable SVG images on Wikis. Motivated by the simplicity of the design and a little subtle prodding by Danny, I ported it to PurpleWiki. (See PurpleWiki:WikiWhiteboard.) Danny’s writeup on WikiWhiteboard, “Creating an SVG Wiki”, appeared last month at XML.com.    (K4)

The WikiWhiteboard code will be released in the next version of PurpleWiki, although I will be happy to release code early to anyone interested.    (K5)

perlIBIS: The Virtue of Thinking Out Loud

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Read Danny Ayers‘s blog this morning, and saw an entry describing Ken MacLeod‘s recent experiment with IBIS Dialogue Mapping. I took a look, and was surprised and thrilled at what I saw. Ken had used (and improved) perlIBIS, which I had written and last released two years ago.    (JU)

I note this not just because I’m pleased (I am), but because it also shows the importance of knowledge capture and thinking out loud. I had announced this work to members of the small Dialogue Mapping community, and had received some positive feedback but little else. That was fine; my motivation in writing the tool was to Scratch Your Own Itch and experiment with some ideas, and I accomplished that. That said, it was gratifying to see that the ideas and the tool had propagated outside of that community, and that someone else was doing something valuable with it.    (JV)

Perhaps this will be the kick in the pants I need to finally write up some of my notes on Dialogue Mapping, both for synchronous and asynchronous collaboration.    (JW)

Blue Oxen’s One Year Anniversary

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Today is Blue Oxen Associates‘ one year anniversary. Many thanks to all for your support and goodwill, especially those who have worked with us this past year. Special thanks to Chris Dent, our advisory board, and members of the Blue Oxen Collaboration Collaboratory. It’s been a great year; looking forward to another good one.    (J6)

Today, not coincidentally, is also the 35th anniversary of Doug Engelbart‘s Mother Of All Demos.    (J7)

Tonight, a small group of us are celebrating at the Foresight Institute in Los Altos, California. After that, back to work!    (J8)

Blog-Wiki Integration Turned On

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Long-time followers of this blog have undoubtedly noticed my habit of smooshing seemingly harmless words together. I often do it with people’s names — for example, Eugene Eric Kim. Some of you may have guessed why I did this, but most of you probably figured my space key was broken.    (GB)

Starting today, my reasons should be more clear. Notice that “Eugene Eric Kim” is not only improperly written, it is now also a link. Browse through my older blog entries, and you’ll notice that all of the smooshed words are either links or are followed by a question mark link. This is blog-Wiki integration at its finest.    (GC)

Why I Turned WikiWord Integration On    (GD)

My purple plugin for Blosxom always had this WikiWord feature, but I kept it off until today. The main reason for this was that I wasn’t sure how I wanted to use it.    (GE)

I already use several Wikis quite actively — the Blue Oxen Wikis as well as a private one for my personal notes. I try to use the Blue Oxen Wikis for my ideas on collaboration whenever possible, so that they would become part of a collective repository of ideas rather than a personal one. Even though a personal Wiki is publically editable, the individual’s name can act as a kind of branding. Because this blog acts as a work log (my occasional food entries aside), my ideal would have been to integrate this Wiki with the Blue Oxen Collaboration Collaboratory Wiki. Unfortunately, that feature is not available.    (GF)

At minimum, I knew a personal PurpleWiki installation would be useful as a support glossary for this blog (more on this below). Nevertheless, I decided to write as if I had Wiki integration, but to wait a while before actually turning it on. This wasn’t hard for me: using WikiWords is practically second nature. Most of my entries ended up chockful of WikiWords, leading many to question my competence with the keyboard. These questions reached critical mass recently, and so I decided to turn the feature on.    (GG)

More importantly, I decided how I wanted to use my new Wiki overall: as a support structure for this blog, and also as a place for publishing essay drafts, design notes, and other random thoughts. Stuff I publish there will be implicitly labelled, “Work In Progress.” This will serve as a disclaimer that will make me more comfortable publishing my half-baked ideas, while also encouraging others to contribute while the ideas are still half-baked.    (GH)