Encore un nouveau WikiBlog !

Un simple article dans le Wall Street Journal (abonnement requis) sur la manière façon dont les wikis pourraient remanier les façons de travailler en entreprise... et c'est l'avalanche de réactions dans la wikisphère anglo-saxonne. J'en profite pour pointer quelques articles récents à propos des wikis. Une chose est sûre, outre le développement d'outil mieux orienté utilisateur... (Tiens que de mal aujourd'hui avec l'interface de ViaBloga !), notre travail d'évangélisation reste à faire en francophonie ! J'en profite donc ici pour jeter un brouillon d'une compilation de citations qui pourront se remanier, se traduire et se commenter pour reconstruire l'article complet du WSJ ? .. .et puis circuler sur CraoWiki ou ailleurs :) Stéphane, j'ai vraiment trop de mal à écrire vite sur ViaBloga...

John Battelle

A reader (thanks!) sent me this link to a Journal article* (sub required) - written by Kara Swisher - good to see Kara covering this space again - about Wikis. I've been using Wikis for the past 9 months or so on a couple different projects and I certainly see the potential, but far as I can tell, they are not quite there yet. However, there are some developments in the works, one of which will be demonstrated at Web 2.0, that are very exciting (Joe Kraus will be there with his new company Jot). From the piece:

Now, venture capitalists are funding several startups that are attempting to take the idea to a bigger and more lucrative general-business audience. Their goal is to try to solve one of the workplace's most vexing problems: how to have employees collaborate and communicate better electronically....
....Getting average people to think about controlling the Web as comfortably as they might an e-mail or a Word document has not been easy. But the rise in popularity of Web logs known as blogs and other "social software" is changing that. Blogging, say wiki proponents, has revived the idea that a Web site can be an ever-changing organism that can be linked with other Web sites to create a larger and more informative picture....
....Jot's Joe Kraus says that to make wikis more widespread, companies like his and Mr. Mayfield's must make wiki software simple to integrate into existing applications that workers commonly use, add more features beyond document editing and make it even more enticing for people to deploy them. "People have to perceive that they only need to add a little information in order to get a lot out of it," says Mr. Kraus.

Ross Mayfield : Wikiland News

Socialtext was featured in the Wall Street Journal today in an article by Kara Swisher on wikis at work. What's really interesting is what's happening in the Kwiki developer community -- new SubEthaEdit and Technorati plugins. Plugins on the open source Kwiki framework also run on Socialtext. There's also an interesting thread on wiki implementation failures on Many-to-Many, where Adina provides a great comment, which I share in full:

• A wiki without social conventions for organization is like a meeting without an agenda.
• If you gather a group of people together around a table, they will have an unfocused conversation, unless someone has thought through and communicated the topics and goals for the meeting.
• The agenda is not a "feature" of the table (!) Yet people know to create an agenda, because that is a social norm for an effective meeting.
• The table does not enforce the agenda -- chairs doen't give shocks to people who speak out of turn. The meeting agenda is carried out, with some flexibility, by the meeting facilitator and participants.
• When people are looking for wikis to "be organized" by themselves they are looking to the wrong place. People plan meetings, and people organize wikis.
• There are social practices for organizing wikis, just like there are social practices for organizing meetings.
• Most business software is like a table with a built-in set of agendas that are generic for a few kinds of meetings, and chairs that shock a speaker if she talks out of turn. The agenda designer is invisible, and long gone.
• A wiki is more like a normal meeting room, which you can use for any kind of meeting. But the participants need to do the organizing and facilitating.
• Implementation takes experience and understanding.

SocialText Ross : Altering How Employees Work Together

Enter the wiki, which has aims to revive the idea of the "writable Web," which was how the medium itself was originally conceived by many of its earliest proponents. Using simple software, it allows anyone with Web access to post a page of information that is accessible to anyone else in the same group or organization. Others in the group can then modify, enhance or update it. To keep track of changes, old versions are retained. A wiki has been likened by some to a giant digital white board in a constant state of movement and creation.

Et c'est de bonne guerre, Ross profite de cet article pour extraire 3 citations d'autopromotion pour sa société SocialText qui implémente de nouvelles fonctionnalités sur Kwiki

Until now, most of the development of wiki software has been led by noncommercial, open-source efforts such as TWiki, whose free software has been downloaded by tens of thousands of people, who then typically unleash it within companies on their own. "Of course it comes from the bottom, since information technology departments in companies don't naturally embrace things they perceive they can't control," says Peter Thoeny, Twiki's founder.

But they should, say entrepreneurs who are now trying to improve and streamline wiki software so they can sell it to companies as the collaboration silver bullet.

"People have tried very hard to take fragmented knowledge within corporations and put it somewhere that it can be used, but it's been an uphill effort," says Ross Mayfield, founder and chief executive of Socialtext, a Silicon Valley startup that has been leading the drive to sell wiki technology to companies since late 2002 by developing more sophisticated software and services for it. "Our focus is literally to get everyone on the same page."

Clay Shirky pour ManyToMany

Dans un autre registre, ce billet de Clay Shirky sur ManyToMany relate deux expériences de wikischool plus malheureuses dont une de Heather James ("wiki débutante"). Heather a su tirer de bons enseignements de son premier échec. Restons optimistes : le marché du wiki reste à ouvrir... Il appartient ainsi aux développeurs de poursuivre les travaux pour s'adapter aux exigences de l'utilisateur. Et puis il nous appartient à tous de former les évangélistes de ces nouvelles pratiques sociales !

Getting average people to think about controlling the Web as comfortably as they might an e-mail or a Word document has not been easy. But the rise in popularity of Web logs known as blogs and other "social software" is changing that. Blogging, say wiki proponents, has revived the idea that a Web site can be an ever-changing organism that can be linked with other Web sites to create a larger and more informative picture.

But if the blog is a soloist, a wiki is an orchestra. Not surprisingly, its sound can also be cacophonous if managed incorrectly and can be open to those whose changes are unwelcome or even damaging. That's why features such as access control, saving of revisions, stressing accountability and encouraging peer review of postings come into play. In addition, most users say an effective wiki must be pruned and weeded regularly to remain manageable.

Jot's Joe Kraus says that to make wikis more widespread, companies like his and Mr. Mayfield's must make wiki software simple to integrate into existing applications that workers commonly use, add more features beyond document editing and make it even more enticing for people to deploy them. "People have to perceive that they only need to add a little information in order to get a lot out of it," says Mr. Kraus.

The prospects of moving wikis into the office are good, especially since they are already working well in nonwork situations, such as the well-known Wikipedia. This free online encyclopedia, compiled since early 2001 by volunteer writers, now has hundreds of thousands of entries, making it bigger than any other encyclopedia...

Voilà un premier brouillon. J'essaierai ici de reconstituer plus tard cet article du WSJ mettant en exergue de nouvelles pratiques du Web tout spécialement à l'intérieur des entreprises, là où les dépots de documents numériques se multiplient dans un sens souvent unique du haut vers le bas de la hiérarchie... On revient ici au broadcasting du management pratiqué sur l'intranet. Les nouvelles organisations intelligentes muteront tout simplement comme c'est écrit dans le cluetrain manifesto. La manière dont les gens collaborent avec les technologies n'est pas toujours en phase avec leurs pratiques d'échanges dans l'entreprise. Qui saurait à cet égard m'éclairer sur l'initiative de JoeKraus (co-fondateur d'Excite) actuellement en cours de développement de Jot. "Ce qu'un wiki fait est simplement de codifier les chemins que les gens ont déjà produits eux-mêmes".