Ken Williams on Shared Understanding

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Yet another lesson on collaboration from the world of sports. In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times Sports page, Ken Williams, GM of the Chicago White Sox, explained his working relationship with the team’s manager and the rest of the staff:    (JUR)

“While you want people to push in the same direction, not to the point where they’re acquiescing,” Williams said. “If you’ve got a situation where you’re waiting for Kenny to speak, that’s a dangerous situation.”    (JUS)

(The Los Angeles Times needs Purple Numbers, dammit!)    (JUT)

There’s a valuable lesson in Williams’s words that applies especially to large-scale collaboration. All too often, when folks in large communities want to rally around some concrete project, they say, “We should all agree,” when what they mean is, “You should all agree with me.” If the latter happens, more power to you. It generally won’t.    (JUU)

Effective collaboration happens when people push towards a common (and finite!) goal together. If they have to be pulled, it’s not effective.    (JUV)

Unit Tests: A Reliable Friend

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Mike Mell and I were IMing today about a project we’re working on together, and he said off-hand that he’d like to be more rigorous about writing unit tests. His comment struck me, because I’ve been hacking PurpleWiki again after being away for literally months, and once again, unit testing has made my life considerably easier.    (JUO)

I’ve written about unit tests before, using PurpleWiki as an example. Writing them can be a serious pain, especially when you’re on a coding roll, and I’ve been known to cheat. But the more you refactor or code intermittently (as I’m prone to do), the less inclined you are to cheat in the future.    (JUP)

Unit tests are the ultimate in peace of mind. There’s just no reason not to use them.    (JUQ)

Meeting Uncle Eric

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Today, my nephew, Elliott Marcellus Watras, turns one. In honor of his first birthday, he’s guest blogging today. -EEK    (JU6)

A few weeks ago, I was napping peacefully in the car, when I heard this clicking noise. I opened my eyes and saw this strange looking fellow taking pictures of himself and staring at me. As soon as I woke up, he started gurgling at me inarticulately. I was wondering how this freak got into the car and was about to use my newly acquired motor skills on his crazy butt. Then Mommy explained he was my uncle. Shakespeare once wrote that blood was thicker than water. I’d be a fool to ignore the Bard, so I decided to give my uncle a chance and to get to know him better.    (JU7)

   (JU8)

Uncle and I had a pretty good time together. He gave me this sweet bowling set for my birthday with stuffed animals for pins. I couldn’t quite get the hang of actually rolling the ball, so I pretended I was Godzilla and swatted away the pins myself. Then he taught me how to give him a five. At first, I thought he had gone nuts again, but the experience grew on me.    (JU9)

   (JUA)

I showed my newfound affection for uncle by head-butting him repeatedly. For some reason, he found that hysterical, so from then on, I greeted him every morning with a head-butt.    (JUB)

   (JUC)

Uncle let me play with his iBook. He started telling me about how Firefox was the best browser out there. I tried to tell him that while usability played a critical role in its success, the real potential is in Mozilla as a platform. Uncle responded by singing a silly song. I can’t believe people pay this guy for his brains. I did enjoy the song, though.    (JUD)

   (JUE)

Mommy, Daddy, Uncle, and I went to Camp Washington for some Cincinnati Chili. I got hungry, so I powered through a package of oyster crackers. Daddy said he had never seen me eat solid food like that on my own accord and that I was one step closer to becoming a man. Then Daddy and Uncle started getting teary-eyed. Apparently, the man gene sometimes skips a generation. Then again, you wouldn’t know it from watching them eat.    (JUF)

   (JUG)

Uncle saw me flirting with some two- and three-year old girls at the zoo, and he told Mommy and Daddy that I would be trouble when I got older. Then he and Daddy started arguing about where I got my “player” genes. Mommy just looked pained. I used to think she only got that face around Daddy, but apparently not.    (JUH)

All in all, Uncle was an okay guy. I especially enjoyed chewing on his glasses.    (JUI)

   (JUJ)

Okay, back to my nap!    (JUK)

   (JUM)

The day after I got home, I called my sister and asked to speak to Elliott. Upon hearing my voice, he started head-butting the phone. I love that kid. Happy Birthday, Elliott! Can’t wait to see you again. -EEK    (JUL)

Katrina PeopleFinder Volunteers at Planetwork Tonight

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I’m hosting tonight’s Planetwork Forum from 7-10pm at Pheedo’s offices in Emeryville. I’ll start by giving an interactive presentation on patterns of high-performance collaboration.    (JU2)

I’ll then be moderating a panel on the Katrina People Finder project with Kieran Lal and Ka-Ping Yee. I’m thrilled to have Kieran and Ping on my panel, and I think folks will find their experiences fascinating and informative.    (JU3)

How do collaborative patterns tie in with Katrina People Finder? For starters, read my essay, “Everything Is Known: Discovering Patterns of Emergent Collaboration,” which will also appear as a chapter in the upcoming second edition of Open Sources (O’Reilly 2005).    (JU4)

The Brilliant Essence of Wikis

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had an unusually large number of discussions about the essence of Wikis — why they are so beautiful and important as Collaborative Tools. I realized I’ve never posted my thoughts on the topic, so I’m correcting that here.    (JTE)

Wikis have this brilliant feature, a feature that’s so simple and obvious, it’s often overlooked, yet it’s largely responsible for the success of Wikis. Incidentally, it’s also an intentional feature, which is yet another reflection of Ward Cunningham‘s design genius.    (JTF)

In a nutshell, that feature is the ability to Link As You Think by writing the name of the page, even if the page you want to link to doesn’t currently exist.    (JTG)

While you’re letting that sink in, let’s look at a measurable way this feature is valuable. A lot of folks view Wikis as a crude CMS. I don’t dispute this perspective — you can certainly use Wikis that way — but it’s not what makes Wikis interesting. Nevertheless, I see queries all the time on various nonprofit technology lists asking to compare Wikis to other CMSes, so here goes. It takes at least three steps to link to a new page with most CMSes (create new page, go to old page, create link), whereas it only takes only one with Wikis (write page name). That’s significant.    (JTH)

What really makes the Wiki’s Link As You Think feature special is that it facilitates the creation of Shared Language among the community that uses it. As I’ve said so often here, Shared Language is an absolute prerequisite for collaboration. The lack of Shared Language is the most common roadblock to effective collaboration, be it a small work team or a community of thousands.    (JTI)

Look at the page index of any Wiki, and you’ll see the vocabulary of that community. Thanks to the other affordances of the tool, that vocabulary accomodates multiple definitions while encouraging convergence where appropriate. Most importantly, that vocabulary is Shared Language that has emerged from the community itself and that continues to evolve.    (JTJ)

Here’s a real example. At the AdvocacyDev Wiki, which Blue Oxen Associates hosts, the top six most linked-to pages (out of 363 total) are:    (JTK)

From this very small sample, we can see that VoIP (and Asterisk in particular), IndyVoter, and CivicSpace are all much discussed tools among folks working on online advocacy tools. We can also see that Carl Coryell-Martin is an active member of this community (or at least one of the more diligent members when it comes to documenting).    (JTR)

The Wiki’s ability to facilitate Shared Language — a direct consequence of Link As You Think — is what makes it so important as a Collaborative Tool. In the future, when enough developers recognize this, we’ll see widespread integration of Wiki functionality in other Collaborative Tools, such as blogs, online forums, and more. It’s already started. Blog-Wiki integration (such as what I use) is not uncommon, and software like TWiki and JotSpot are showing the benefits of custom applications that use Wikis as the fundamental data structure.    (JTS)