Patterns at WikiMania 2005

When I first met Christine Peterson (now a Blue Oxen Associates advisor), she told me the story about coining “Open Source.” The sign of a good name, she explained, is when people naturally start using it on their own. At a meeting of developers and evangelists in early 1998, rather than argue strongly in favor of the term, she introduced it subtly. Although the response wasn’t enthusiastic at the first, everyone in the room found themselves using the term, and by the end of the meeting, they all agreed to evangelize it.    (JMS)

Similarly, my strategy for introducing and identifying patterns of high-performance collaboration is to subversively introduce patterns into various communities and then to listen. If people naturally use a pattern in conversation, the name is probably good and the pattern itself is probably real and repeating. As people become familiar with the concept, they are more likely to identify and name other patterns. Over time, the language shifts your thinking, giving you a cognitive framework for thinking about, talking about, and improving collaboration and collaborative tools. Moreover, the process itself is iterative and collaborative, which is both the right way to develop Pattern Languages and also another application of collaborative patterns.    (JMT)

I’ve been giving some variation of a stock talk on patterns for over a year now, including last week at Wikimania 2005. It usually consists of a quick introduction, a few examples, and an interactive portion where I tease out patterns from the audience. The audience banter is always the best part. It’s always different, and it’s provided me with entertaining anecdotes, new patterns, and better pattern names.    (JMU)

Last week, I mentioned four patterns that Wikis facilitate: Permission To Participate, Shared Display, Visible Pulse, and Working Draft. Tim Starling followed my talk with an overview of Mediawiki development, and when he mentioned their IRC channel, he said, “This is our community’s Visible Pulse.” I love it when the process works!    (JMV)

The discussion teased out other patterns, especially Celebration and Initiation. (Linda Rising and Mary Lynn Manns mentions both of these in their book. They have a better name for the latter, but I don’t remember it off-hand.) One person told a great story about both. His team met for the first time in Australia, and before embarking on their project, they brewed beer that they planned on drinking after they finished their project.    (JMW)

Other patterns observed and not observed at the conference and within the community:    (JMX)

  • The Celebration at the end of the conference was great, but the Initiation wasn’t particularly remarkable. This isn’t unusual for conferences, where Initiation tends to be in the form of a keynote.    (JMY)
  • One pattern closely related to Initiation is Introductions. At conferences, this generally comes in the form of name badges, which we had at Wikimania. I think there’s a huge opportunity for further facilitating this pattern at conferences, which is something Blue Oxen Associates is working on. Hacking Days also would have been significantly more effective if we simply went around the room each day and quickly introduced ourselves. It’s one of those patterns that sound obvious when you hear about it, but is often forgotten when actually designing an event.    (JMZ)
  • Conferences usually do Water Cooler well, and Wikimania was no exception. We had long lunches, a party on the last night, an IRC channel, and some organized activities in Frankfurt am Main for stragglers following the conference. In particular, the organizers did two things really well. The Haus der Jugend was an excellent choice of venue, because it was an intimate space where social interaction was practically unavoidable. Most of the participants stayed at the hostel, which meant that there was always an interesting conversation to be had by simply going downstairs and hanging out in one of the common rooms. Plus, most of us who stayed there also had roommates, which is not typical for the conferences I attend. The restaurants and bars — touristy though they were — were in very close proximity, which made it easy to grab a beer and talk. (Food is a closely related pattern.) Finally, Hacking Days served as an unintentional Water Cooler, at least for those of us who were not Mediawiki developers. Coming early is something the organizers should encourage more widely next time.    (JN0)
  • I’m very biased towards highly interactive event design, and it seemed like it would have been especially appropriate for a Wiki conference. That said, the panel format worked better than at most conferences, and I think the Wiki culture of Permission To Participate had a lot to do with that. The audience interacted easily with the presenters at all of the talks I attended, and most of the speakers did a nice job of incorporating feedback into their presentations. One thing they did not do well was actively promote and integrate the conference Wiki as a place to take notes and have additional discussions. Again, this seemed surprising for a Wiki conference — yet another indication that making patterns explicit is a good thing.    (JN1)
  • Another favorite — also found in Linda and Mary Lynn’s book — is Spotlight On Others. This runs rampant throughout the Wikipedia community, which is wonderful. Tim cited me when mentioning Visible Pulse, and by the next morning, Sunir Shah had incorporated Permission To Participate into his talk on conflict resolution. I found this time and again in people’s talks. One reason it occurred so often during the conference is that the organizers used a Wiki to develop the program transparently. People watched other people’s talks develop and incorporated their content even before the conference began.    (JN2)
  • A critical pattern, especially for inter-organizational collaboration, is Neutral Space. Wikipedia would not have been successful if it did not have an open content license (which facilitates Neutral Space) and, to some extent, if it were a for-profit company. At the board panel on the last day, several people brought up the question of online ads. On the one hand, ads have the potential of bringing in a tremendous amount of revenue, which could be put to good use for the community. On the other hand, it breaks the Neutral Space pattern that has served Wikipedia so well. The community was more or less split on this issue. My vote: No ads!    (JN3)

One last pattern that I both observed and missed was Users Talk To Developers, a pattern I first described in, “An Introduction to Open Source Communities.” Previously, I criticized the Mediawiki developers for not practicing it enough. With the whole conference finally behind me, I want to both soften and and strengthen my statement.    (JN4)

Many of the Mediawiki developers came to the project as Wikipedia contributors. Brion Vibber, one of the leaders of the project, probably never would have joined had it not been for the Esperanto Wikipedia, of all things. After having more time to interact and observe the developers, I think that on average, community interaction is more prevalent among the Mediawiki developers than it is with many other projects.    (JN5)

That said, it’s still not nearly what it can and should be. During the sessions on politics and developing countries, several panelists complained that the tools had a way to go to meet their needs, and yet, none of the developers were attending their sessions. Hossein Derakhshan noted that techies are generally not interested in issues outside of their sphere.    (JN6)

Not all the blame falls on developers, however. As great as it would have been to see more developers abandoning the technical sessions in favor of the more social ones, it would have been fantastic to see more Wikipedia contributors attend some of the technical sesssions. Both communities need to learn and respect each other’s language if they truly want to engage collaboratively. Bridges are critical to make this work. Note that this applies not only to Mediawiki, but to all Open Source projects.    (JN7)

Collaboration Talk in Phoenix

I’ll be giving a talk on Tuesday — “Collaboration: What the Heck Does It Mean?” — at the Portals, Collaboration and Content Management Conference at the Scottsdale Plaza Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona. (Yes, the title is wrong in the program.) It’s a more refined version of the talk I gave late last year for the 2005 Reuters Digital Visions Fellows at Stanford. Fitting that I’ll be speaking in Phoenix, because the kernel of this talk emerged from my ChiliPLoP workshop in beautiful Carefree, Arizona almost exactly one year ago today. You can download the slides.    (ILQ)

In addition to meeting folks at the conference, I’m looking forward to catching up with Linda Rising, who’s recent book, Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas, is getting some excellent buzz, including from my former Dr. Dobb’s Journal colleague, Mike Swaine. My turnaround is pretty quick — I’m flying back to San Francisco on Wednesday afternoon — but if you’re in the area and would like to meet up, let me know.    (ILR)

ChiliPLoP, Day 4

Last Friday was the last day of Chili PLoP. Ofra Homsky, Josh Rai, Linda Rising, Joe Yoder, and I met at our usual spot outside of the dining hall for our morning kickoff. We had two items on our agenda: workshop the patterns we had discussed the day before and that Josh and I had written up, and discuss next steps.    (1DF)

Stone Soup    (1DG)

We started with Collab:StoneSoup and decided to temporarily combine forces with the GivingSpace group, which had independently come up with a pattern of the same name. That experiment resulted in some constructive feedback but was short-lived. The most important lesson was that “Stone Soup” was a completely inappropriate name.    (1DH)

The pattern had arisen from a point I had made the previous day about faith in process. I stated that people about to participate in a new process had to demonstrate a certain amount of faith up-front; otherwise, they risked subconsciously hijacking the process. You want to give the process the chance to succeed or fail on its own merit.    (1DI)

Joe suggested calling this pattern, “Fake It ‘Til You Make It.” Ofra was reminded of a story, “Stone Soup,” which went like this.    (1DJ)

A weary soldier discovered a village in the desert and knocked on every door asking for food. Everyone turned him away.    (1DK)

Undaunted, the soldier took his pot, filled it with water and a large, round stone, and put it over a roaring fire, constantly stirring and tasting.    (1DL)

The curious villagers came out of their houses and watched, until finally, one of them asked how it tasted. The soldier replied, “It’s good, but it needs some salt.” So the villager went inside her home and brought out some salt.    (1DM)

She again asked the soldier how the soup tasted, and he responded that it could use some carrots. So another villager brought some carrots. The process repeated itself until eventually, there was enough tasty soup to feed the entire village.    (1DN)

During our group writing exercise, it quickly became apparent that we all had slightly different understandings of the pattern. Mine focused on the point of view of the participant and on adopting new processes. Everyone else seemed centered on initiating new collaboration, setting up enough structure to make the collaboration seem real, at least until the collaboration became real.    (1DO)

When I started refactoring and combining our work into a single pattern, I decided that there were multiple contexts for the same pattern, but that the solution was the same. I also decided to call it, “Stone Soup” instead of “Fake It ‘Til You Make It,” mostly because the former was a noun phrase. I had reservations, however, and our final day’s proceedings confirmed them. When we combined with the GivingSpace team, it became clear that there were at least three different versions of the Stone Soup story, each with different morals.    (1DP)

After we split with the GivingSpace group, my team continued giving feedback about what I had written. I picked up lots of good advice and promised to incorporate their comments into a revision.    (1DQ)

Kick Off    (1DR)

I was happy when Josh willingly took on the Collab:KickOff pattern, because I didn’t think we were close to Shared Understanding. That said, Josh’s work on the pattern helped us make that leap.    (1DS)

Originally, we called the pattern, “Kick Off Meeting.” I had asked whether the Kick Off meeting was, by definition, the first meeting. Ofra and Joe had said that it was not. However, as we started fleshing out the pattern, it wasn’t clear to me what the distinction was. People were mentioning a lot of things that supposedly happened at Kick Off meetings that I felt would happen regardless of whether or not a meeting was designated, “Kick Off.” The key distinction, in my mind, was whether or not those things would happen well. It wasn’t clear to me that denoting a meeting “Kick Off” was enough to make those things happen well.    (1DT)

Josh’s work on the pattern made some of those flaws apparent. Having something concrete to work from allowed us to quickly zone in on the vital piece — benefits from the ritual celebration of initiating a new project. We decided to remove “meeting” from the name.    (1DU)

In the end, this made perfect sense to me. We had defined collaboration as needing shared, bounded goals. We had also cited a pattern, Grand Finale (discussed in Linda and Mary Lynn Manns‘s upcoming book). It made sense that we also had a pattern for the beginning of a project as well.    (1DV)

Next Steps    (1DW)

One of the things I made clear to the group was that I considered this workshop to be the Kick Off to Blue Oxen Associates‘s ongoing Pattern Language effort. One of my broader goals is to do an ongoing series of workshops involving philanthropic foundations, nonprofits, and a variety of other organizations. These workshops would involve telling stories, mining for patterns, capturing those patterns, reinjecting them into the conversation, refining them, and so on.    (1DX)

In the meantime, I plan on further developing the language that began forming at our workshop with the help of our Collab:PatternsWorkGroup. I also plan on submitting some patterns to the PLoP conference in September.    (1DY)

I had an exceptional time at Chili PLoP. Lots of great people were there, and Arizona is warm and beautiful this time of year. More importantly, I was fortunate to have a great group of participants. Ofra, Josh, Linda, and Joe brought a tremendous amount of experience and enthusiasm to the process, which made the process both enjoyable and productive. I’m looking forward to the challenge of continuing what we started here, including another date at next year’s Chili PLoP.    (1DZ)

ChiliPLoP, Day 3

Last Thursday, my workshop met for a second day. Having agreed on a working definition for collaboration (see Collab:Collaboration), we started working on the Pattern Language. As was the case the previous day, I knew exactly what I wanted to accomplish, and I made that clear when we got started. What differed this day, however, was that Linda Rising, Ofra Homsky, and Joe Yoder — our three experienced Pattern Language authors — led the way in terms of process.    (1CT)

We began by laying out the index cards we had collected the previous day onto a table. The goal was to see what patterns we had and what seemed to be missing. The definition that we had collectively agreed on the day before helped us tremendously with this process. For example, because collaboration — as we defined it — required bounded goals, that meant there were patterns related to the start and end of the collaborative process. There were also patterns related to interaction (meetings for example) and knowledge exchange (Shared Display).    (1CU)

Mapping out our cards also helped us identify gateways to other Pattern Languages, such as Linda and Mary Lynn Manns‘s patterns for introducing new ideas into organizations, Ofra’s patterns for leadership, Jim Coplien and Neil Harrison‘s organizational patterns, and GivingSpace‘s patterns of uplift.    (1CV)

Lots of brainstorming and storytelling happened throughout. My favorite was a story that Joe Yoder told about a factory where he had previously worked, which literally left its financial books open on the factory floor. Anyone who worked at the company could examine the books and suggest improvements. The open books were a form of Think Out Loud that showed that the company treated its operations as a collaborative process involving all of its employees, regardless of position. Tremendously empowering stuff.    (1CW)

Linda, Ofra, and Joe constantly stressed the importance of iteration and cautioned Josh Rai and me about getting too caught up with formality too early in the process. Ever fearful of being berated by Ralph Johnson or Jim Coplien, I would periodically complain, “That name isn’t a noun phrase!” Fortunately, the rest of the group kept me on track. We had plenty of time to weed out and refine our patterns after the brainstorming process.    (1CX)

We ended our brainstorming at lunch, at which point we had 36 cards. After lunch, we picked two patterns — Collab:StoneSoup and Collab:KickOff — and Linda led us through a group pattern writing exercise. (I’ll say more about these two patterns when I describe Day 4.) She gave us a letter-sized piece of paper for each component of the Coplien Form (name, problem, context, forces, solution, rationale, resulting context, known uses, and related patterns). Each of us took one piece of paper, wrote down our ideas, then exchanged it with someone else for another piece of paper. The cycle continued until we all had our say to our satisfaction. Afterwards, we discussed what we had written.    (1CY)

This was the first time Linda had tried this particular exercise, and I think it worked very well. It was particularly good at helping us reach Shared Understanding. We all had slightly different views of both patterns. Actually going through the group writing process helped make these differences explicit, at which point we were able to talk through our differences.    (1CZ)

Because Josh and I were the pattern-writing newbies in the group, we each collected the sheets for one of the patterns and promised to combine, edit, and rewrite them into a readable draft. I chose Collab:StoneSoup; Josh took Collab:KickOff. The plan for Day 4 (which was only a half day) was to workshop our results.    (1D0)

I ended the day with a brief overview of how blogs and Wikis integrated with Backlinks could be used to tie stories with corresponding patterns.    (1D1)

Chili Beer    (1D2)

Since that night was our last in Carefree, I decided to organize a margarita BOF. Earlier, somebody had told us about the Satisfied Frog, a legendary Mexican restaurant and bar that had “a thousand different kinds of margaritas.” This was the obvious place to hold our BOF, so Josh, Jerry Michalski, Gerry Gleason, and I trekked on over.    (1D3)

As with most legends, the facts had been slightly exaggerated. The Satisfied Frog only served one kind of margarita, although in fairness, it did give us the option of frozen versus on-the-rocks and with or without salt.    (1D4)

The restaurant did, however, brew its own special beer — chili beer — which was bottled with a serrano chili pepper. It had a nice kick to it, but it wasn’t overpowering. I recommend it to those with a a penchant for adventure and a bit of a heat tolerance.    (1D5)

ChiliPLoP, Day 2

Today, my workshop began in earnest. My goal for today was to collectively
develop a working definition of collaboration, and I’m happy to say
that we achieved that (see Collab:Collaboration). Tomorrow, we’ll
start exploring patterns in earnest.    (1BW)

I have a great group of participants:    (1BX)

We began the day by introducing ourselves to each other. I asked each
person to relate their best collaborative experience. Most people
found it a difficult question, which jives with my overall
experience. Nevertheless, we managed to get enough out of the stories
for a barebones definition to emerge.    (1C2)

I then sent the participants off to read Chapter 4 of Michael Schrage’s
No More Teams! while I refactored my Dialog Map, captured using
Compendium.
(I’ll post the final map at the end of the conference.)    (1C3)

After lunch, I showed the participants my Dialog Map for the first
time. From that point forward, the map became part of the
conversation (Shared Display). We walked through several scenarios —
some of which had emerged from the earlier discussion — deciding
whether or not they constituted collaboration and why.    (1C4)

Afterwards, I refactored the map again, and we started refining the
definition. The end result is at Collab:Collaboration. I’ll post
more commentary on the patterns mailing list.    (1C5)

Throughout the day, all of us recorded possible patterns on index
cards. We’ll use those as a starting point for our discussion
tomorrow.    (1C6)

Side Notes    (1C7)

I had made my expectations very clear at the beginning of the day: My
goal for the day was to have a working definition of collaboration.
(A pattern Ofra calls Set The Pegs.) So, having accomplished that at
the end of the day, we all were satisfied.    (1C8)

On the way to dinner, I ran into another workshop participant who
asked me how my workshop went. I said, “Great. We defined
collaboration.” He thought I was joking. We had spent the entire day
defining one term, and I was actually happy about that.    (1C9)

This was very much by design, and to be perfectly frank, I was glad
that we managed to come up with something workable by the end of the
day. I am a strong believer in Shared Understanding as a prerequisite
for effective collaboration. I’ve also been influenced by the
MGTaylor process, which suggests that spending about two-thirds of the
allotted time on Shared Understanding and Shared Language and the rest
on the concrete objective is actually more effective than attempting
to spend all of the time on the concrete objective. The reason is
that you are not capable of effectively attacking the concrete
objective without first developing Shared Understanding. The end
result is that you end up trying to solve both problems simultaneously
(and often unconsciously) and up doing both poorly. Additionally,
because you were not realistic with your expectations up-front,
everyone walks away disappointed.    (1CA)

The proof, of course, is in the pudding. It’ll be interesting to see
how my participants feel about our overall productivity by the end of
the day tomorrow.    (1CB)

Earlier that day, I described Blue Oxen Associates to another attendee,
who wondered, how will we make money if we give our pattern language
away? He was actually trying to tactfully ask how we make money,
period. I don’t think he realistically thought that we could make
money selling a “proprietary” pattern language.    (1CC)

My response: The real value is in the experience, not in the text
itself, which without context is simply more information in the
infoglut. If you can gain value from merely reading our material,
outstanding. We give it away to heighten the potential impact.
However, to truly appreciate the research, you need to experience it
firsthand. I see Blue Oxen Associates as a new type of learning
organization, where members learn by experiencing and participating in
what we study and what we learn. The value is in the experience and
in being part of our community, and that’s what we expect people to
pay for.    (1CD)

Finally, in the evening, Jerry Michalski demonstrated The Brain, a
Personal Knowledge Management tool. Sadly, it was late in the evening,
and only a few people saw the demo; tomorrow, I’m going to suggest
that he do it again. I had seen The Brain before, but Jerry’s demo is
particularly compelling because he’s been adding data to it since
1997.    (1CE)

One thing that really comes through with The Brain is how little
semantic richness you need for a tool to be useful. The Brain supports
typed links, but Jerry doesn’t use them. Instead, he uses topical
nodes to relate other nodes. In essence, it’s a barebones graph model
with a great UI, but its utility is tremendous. We don’t have enough
tools like it.    (1CF)