WikiMania Hackfest Day 4

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Bits and tids:    (JM7)

  • I didn’t plan my Hacking Days schedule very well. I missed most of the first day, when the Mediawiki developers apparently made progress on a new metadata design. Days 2 and 3, from which I based most of my criticism, focused on servers and reliability, an area to which I really couldn’t contribute, not because I’m ignorant, but because I’m powerless. This morning, they discussed Single Sign-On and usability, two areas that I do know something about. Sadly, I missed these sessions, because I was too busy spouting on and on about how we really can save the world. Owen Davis, Fen Labalme, Kaliya Hamlin, and the rest of the gang will undoubtedly kick my butt when they read this. In my defense, I managed to talk a bit about Identity Commons later in the day. I also plugged the FLOSS Usability Sprint, and met Zeno Gantner, who’s done some usability studies on Mediawiki.    (JM8)
  • I was one of the featured participants for the afternoon “Wiki developers informal discussion,” along with Ward Cunningham, Sven Dowideit, Christophe Ducamp, and Brion Vibber. Domas Mituzas, Wikimedia Foundation‘s head of operations, asked Ward, “Why Camel Case?” I won’t go into the explanation here — I have a long interview with Ward, to be published eventually, that explains this in detail — but you should know that hating Camel Case is a running joke among this community. I laughed along with everyone else, but when Sven mentioned his desire to remove Camel Case from TWiki, I felt compelled to pipe up. I gave a balanced defense, describing Camel Case’s advantages over free links, but also acknowledging the appropriateness of free links in Wikipedia. Then I got a very amusing introduction to Erik Moeller, one of Mediawiki‘s core contributors and the Wikimedia Foundation‘s chief research officer. Erik had a strongly worded response. It got a bit heated, but never overly so, and I closed by saying that we were in violent agreement. We laughed about it over dinner, but then we got serious again. We also talked about Purple Numbers. I’ve explained many times why I may seem like a poor evangelist, but I think Erik was one of the few people who appreciated my perspective. He was clearly not a big fan of Purple Numbers — as it turns out, he was somewhat familiar with my work — but after hearing my explanation, he responded, “Only intelligent people are going to understand what you just said.” Fair enough. Fortunately, regular folks don’t need to get Granular Addressability for Granular Addressability to become ubiquitous.    (JM9)
  • A group of us broke out into a small group to discuss a Wiki Interchange Format, knowing full well that this is an issue that’s been discussed many times before (Wiki:WikiInterchangeFormat, MeatBall:WikiInterchangeFormat). Nevertheless, I think our discussion was not only constructive, it has a high chance of succeeding. See my summary.    (JMA)
  • Magnus Manske, the original creator of Mediawiki, participated in our Wiki Interchange Format discussion. He also mentioned a clever idea: a “shopping cart” where people could aggregate and possibly export Wiki pages they were interested in.    (JMB)
  • Sven Dowideit demonstrated the prototype WYSIWYG editor for TWiki, based on Kupu. He also showed a WikiText editor with real-time preview, which was pretty slick. Also, Ross Mayfield showed me a prototype editor for KWiki in response to my previous post. Very good to see these things.    (JMC)
  • So many people have come to this gathering to learn from others with different experiences. Granted, all of these experiences center around Wikipedia, but I’m still envious. My neverending quest is for folks interested in collaboration to look beyond their own narrow domains for deeper insights.    (JMD)

Observations from Portals 2005

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

When I worked at Dr. Dobb’s Journal, I did the software development and IT conference circuit regularly. Most of those conferences were incredibly boring, but they were rarely a waste of time. What made them compelling were the attendees.    (IM0)

I’ve been spoiled in the six years since. Not only have the conferences I’ve attended been more diverse and interesting, many of them have exploited collaborative processes that emphasized participant interaction. That’s obviously an advantage if the reason you’re attending is to meet interesting folks. Additionally, most of these events were more about social good rather than corporate productivity. As a result, the energy is much more positive.    (IM1)

Attending Portals, Collaboration, and Content Management 2005 these past few days was a blast to the past for me, which was exactly why I chose to attend. I wanted to reconnect with the corporate IT community and discover what they were thinking about these days, especially regarding collaboration. I also wanted to test my ideas with this crowd, to see if I still remembered the language of this community and if my message would fly.    (IM2)

I gave the first talk in the collaboration track, and it was very well received, moreso than I expected. There was a snafu with the program, which listed my talk as, “Collaboration: What’s In It For Me,” when the actual title was, “Collaboration: What The Heck Is It?” One woman approached me afterwards and told me that she was originally planning on attending my talk, then saw what the real title was and decided to attend a different one instead. Afterwards, she ate lunch with several people who did attend my talk, and much to her chagrin, they raved about it.    (IM3)

Several people told me they enjoyed the interactivity of my presentation. That was intentional. It engaged the audience, and it gave me a chance to learn from them. My plan wasn’t to teach, it was to stretch people’s minds, to give them an opportunity to think about things in new ways.    (IM4)

Folks who know me well or read this blog regularly know how much I tout highly interactive conferences. I think there is a huge opportunity for such an event for IT workers. I heard very little that interested me in the conference tracks. The attendees were far more interesting than the speakers, and most of my learning occurred during the meals. Several people even said as much, completely unprovoked by me.    (IM5)

Some other observations:    (IM6)

  • I ran into a number of people who had been with their companies for 15 years or longer. One person suggested that the reason for this was that companies liked to put their most experienced people in charge of portals. It makes perfect sense. These folks have an innate understanding of the organizational dynamics, which portals should parallel.    (IM7)
  • Kaliya Hamlin suggested that people attending this conference would be really interested in Identity Commons. Sure enough, several people said they were looking for good Single Sign-On solutions. However, despite my active involvement and evangelism with Identity Commons, I don’t think Identity Commons provides what these people are looking for right now. The real value of Identity Commons as an identity solution is inter-organizational, whereas most IT people are dealing with intra-organizational problems.    (IM8)
  • I was blown away by the proliferation of SharePoint in organizations. During my talk, several audience members realized that they were all dealing with similar challenges with SharePoint, so they gathered afterwards to discuss. I discovered many others in similar situations. I mentioned this to some folks at the SAP Netweaver booth, and they said they were blown away by the same observation. SharePoint seems to be making real viral headway in organizations, largely from the bottom-up. Ironically, some IT people are expressing the same misgivings about SharePoint as they do about Open Source software.    (IM9)
  • I love warm, summer nights. Yes, I realize it’s still spring. An April evening in Phoenix is about equivalent to a July evening in Los Angeles.    (IMA)