[wiki-research] Shaking virtual hands

[Peter Thoeny]

Hi, I'm Peter. This is a virtual handshake to all
participants.

I am the the founder of TWiki, http:/twiki.org/,
the leading wiki for corporate collaboration. I am
leading the open-sourced project for the last eight
years. Early on I thought that structured wikis is
a powerful concept, where free form wiki content
can be structured with tailored wiki applications,
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/StructuredWiki.

Here is a small detour how this started:

It all started in an unexpected way. While working in
Japan I went to Cupertino, CA, for an interview. I got
hired by the CEO of a small Austrian company called
TakeFive software, to build up an R&D group in the
Cupertino office. I went back to Japan, packed and
shipped many boxes, destination Silicon Valley.

On my first day at Work in Cupertino I found out that
there was a new CEO, now based in Austria, and no
longer an American in the USA. Priorities changed,
and with this, the idea of an Cupertino R&D office was
no longer favored. I had a job, but no position! We
agreed that I would do customer support mamangement
for one year. OK, why not.

It turned out that support was really difficult, partly
because the SNiFF+ product, a high end IDE, had custom
integrations, partly because the software factory was 9
hours time difference away, and partly because there
was no documentation for the support engineers.

My first priority was to introduce a knowledge base for
customer support. Initially I intended to buy a
commercial package, but then I thought, what about
combining knowledge base and wiki? A knowledge base is
something highly structured, with workflow, and
publishing process. A wiki, as you all know, is very
suitable to work on content collaboratively. If you
combine these seemingly contradicting worlds you get
something powerful: A collaborative way to work on
structured content. This was the birth place of TWiki.
The customer support application,
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Main/TWikiSuccessStoryOfTakeFive
was probably also the first wiki application. Thus,
1998 was the year when the structured wikis concept
was born.

Fast forward 8 years. Wiki is no longer an obscure
terms for geeks. As Dirk pointed out with the Google
trend map on wikis, it is now a well understood
concept.

My personal interest is wikis in the workplace, and
how to enhance wiki technology and usability for this
environment.

I am currently co-authoring a book on Wikis in the
Workplace,
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/WikisInTheWorkplaceBook .
Co-author Dan Woods and I interviewed many companies
using wikis. The book is still work in progress, but
I hope to be able to share the first chapter by
WikiSym.

Dan Woods and I also created a consultancy startup
called StructuredWikis LLC,
http://www.structuredwikis.com/ . From the book
interviews we have seen that companies are using wikis
in many different ways. Some use it in a plain wiki
sense, that is, very collaboratively but without much
structure. Other companies use wikis in a structured
way, and build many wiki applications. We help
companies to move their wiki into a structured way. In
other words, our services allows groups of people to
use wikis to improve productivity and communication
through basic and advanced application of wikis.

I just made some PR for this list on TWiki.org,
http://twiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Codev/WikiResearchMailingList
and on my blog,
http://www.structuredwikis.com/peter.html

Cheers,
Peter


-- 
    * Peter Thoeny                       Peter at StructuredWikis.com
    * http://StructuredWikis.com - bringing wikis to the workplace
    * http://TWiki.org - is your team already TWiki enabled?
    * Knowledge cannot be managed, it can be discovered and shared
    * This e-mail is:   (_) private    (_) ask first    (x) public