Scott Walters Exploring Stuff

Socialtext Enterprise Wiki

OK, this is another enterprise wiki that has some good positive info like reducing email overload etc. Well worth exploring

What makes an enterprise wiki? — CMS Watch

This is an excellent article explaining enterprise wiki’s. Well worth a read.

Found some interesting direction for collaboration through wikis. A website wikipatterns http://www.wikipatterns.com lists positive people patterns, negative people patterns, positive wiki adoption patterns and negative wiki adoption patterns.

Extremely well written, and it reminded me not to do all the work myself. I am going to create a real collaboration page about the golf game but Im not going to fill everything in, if I did thats an anti-pattern (do-it-all) and I need to avoid that. I still think a project needs a project lead but that may just be IT experience talking and I need to give this alternate approach a chance.

simonsays: 4 Weeks Of Introducing A Wiki Into An Organisation

OK, I’m very interested in how to bring a wiki into a largish organisation and this is a definite good start.

There is another site mentioned in there http://www.wikipatterns.com that I’ll need to check out.

Content Log: When Collaboration is an Emergency

This is a good article. It equates the requirements for collaboration (ie sharing trusted information is an open manner) with emergency handling procedures. Also some good links to related articles.

I’ve got to say I’ve become a fan of Atlassian an Australian company that develops and distributes the Confluence enterprise wiki and Jira, the bug and issue tracker.

Atlassian’s products are distributed applications targetted at the enterprise. One of the issues with open source is that large organisations do require support from a vendor and that just isn’t achievable with most open source products. Atlassian has a real advantage here in that while its products are definitely proprietary it makes use of open source components.

The concept of distributed applications built on open source components also aids in the flexibility and ability to reuse Atlassian’s products in other areas.

Atlassian are a company that is doing ebusiness right.

Refs:

Atlassian website.; http://www.atlassian.com

This is a short review of online communities as an e-commerce operation. My initial thoughts are to look at myspace, amazon, ebay, and a few others and see how they do the ecommerce thing. Also of particular interest with myspace is that my organisation runs its own community there so I’ll look at how that promotes the business.

MySpace is an interesting e-commerce model. Merlo (2006) describes these sorts of sites as sharecropping systems where the the users provide free labour to build sufficient content to make the system economically viable. I do believe the following is an insightful comment:

“To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it’s simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy.” – Merlo (2006)

… but the term sharecropping is a negative concept and implies a form of debt slavery hence I’d say this is not really appropriate to social web experiences. since it infers the wealthy owner of the property unduely profits from the labour of the worker.

I work for the RTA and one of our communications channels happens to be a myspace profile visible at http://www.myspace.com/rtaslowdown. Now for the RTA this is a small but important channel to get the message of road safety out to the youth market and to allow them to raise issues with the Authority. While the RTA also has websites specifically targetting young drivers this outpost in the myspace community established in October 2006 allows informal communication with a key driver demographic. So, does this myspace profile rate as a ebusiness model for the RTA? My answer would be yes, its about pushing the road safety message which is a primary goal in the RTA corporate strategy.

Refs:

Mello, John P Jr.; (29/Dec/06), The Social Web: Sharing or Sharecropping?; http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/54903.html

http://opensource.sys-con.com/read/287815.htm:

The Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) provides a unique set of end-user and administrator benefits that make it a flexible solution for deployments of all sizes, from SMBs, to multi-thousand seat enterprises, to service providers with one million ”

See website: www.zimbra.com

Exploring IT by Scott Walters

A good article from KMWorld Magazine concerning Wiki’s. Cindy Gordon discusses implementation of Wiki’s at several larger organisations.

http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=15802

Exploring IT by Scott Walters