Wikis in Organizations

Technorati Profile: With the weblog officially out of the box, let’s get the ball rollin’ by settin’ up a Technorati Profile.

[Update] Apparently, Technorati normalizes all its URIs by taking the base URI for the blog. Thus they remove such things as the slash at the end of the URI, index.php, and index.html. While this is fine for blog updates, it doesn’t work with blog claims. Guess I have to find another way to claim our weblog somehow (Apache’s redirects promise to be a solution, I need to look into this).

The University of Bamberg made it official today. Our project is well on its way to research Wikis in Organizations.

Over the next two years, the interdisciplinary research team, led by Prof. Dr. Anna Maria Theis-Berglmair (back row, on the very left) and Prof. Dr. Christoph Schlieder (back row, second from the left), ventures into the wonderous workings of corporate wikis, taking a look at how organizations turn an invention into a (hopefully) successful innovation.

This weblog accompanies the research. It reveals insights into ground-breaking theoretical developments (that’s the vision, at least), follows the enthralling adventures in recursive thinking (there’s the mission), and documents everyday life of scientists (and that’s how it all works).

Stay tuned.

Research ist not exactly a game, although it can be quite fun. Our project is on its way for almost six weeks now. Still, there is no word out that it has officially started.

We’re in the process of developing the theoretical lense to look at corporate wikis. As far as our first interviews within our partnering organizations go, wikis take quite a range in organizational communication. Not so much collaborative authoring as one would expect from looking at wikipedia, but a lot more blogging-style writing with once-in-a-while comments here and there.

However, it’s far to early to draw any conclusions. The project hasn’t even officially started yet.

Two of my colleagues, Florian L. Mayer and Dennis Schoeneborn, presented some of the Limitations and Weaknesses of Wikis in Organizations at this year’s annual DGPuK conference in Bamberg, Germany.

While they put the most emphasis on the basic criteria of wikis (i.e., open access, ease of use, collaboration, and versioning), they also proposed some broader implications, namely,

• Wikis make observations of emerging organizational activities possible
• Wikis change organizations’ relation to their own past
• Wikis change the legitimacy of organizational decisions

These implications are certainly worth one or the other thought. See the slides for some more insights (unfortunately, only available in German).

A’ight, our weblog is not officially online. But there is somewhat of an urgent need for me to write up today’s DG PuK keynote speech given by Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia (as y’all know). The topic is rather broad: ”Wikipedia, Wikia and The Future” (sic!). I guess Jimmy has given this speech a couple of times now, for he never even updated some dates on the slides. Ah, what do you know, he’s some sort of pop idol, so it doesn’t really matter what he talks about. Let’s not focus to much on what he was saying but on how he presented his and apparently the common interest of mankind or, in better words, how he persuaded the audience to embark on his philosphy.

So, there is Wikipedia, there is Wikia, and a search engine like project under the, I assume, working title Wikia Search. We all know Wikipedia, some of us have visited Wikia, and none of us have actually used Wikia Search. My feeling is that there is not a lot there, at least not yet. Jimmy was very excited that Jeremie Miller, who brought us Jabber, is on bord for the new project. OK, that’s one. But it takes a lot more people to bring a Google Killer to life. (Jimmy doesn’t see his project as a threat to Google, particularly since Google is a lot more than just a search engine.) He was reluctant to disclose any details about how Wikia Search will work. It will rely on GPL software, which means all page rank or whatever algorithms are transparent. It will offer open APIs, so anyone can make use of it. And its content will be licensed just the way Wikipedia is. All very honorable steps in building a success story.

Apropos honor. Jimmy is cautious about overrelying on hard- and software. It’s the people, always the people, so, honor to the people. Community of passion in analogy to community of practice comes to mind. Not the least because love and passion are two central issues in Jimmy’s philosophy. Such a universal belief in the greater good of people is unique, somewhat naive, but certainly inspiring.

After the keynote and the usual answers & questions I had the chance to have lunch with Jimmy. My first impression that he’s a genuinely nice guy wasn’t disappointed. There is passion in all he says, that’s for sure. In his own words, literally, he’s just a guy who hangs out with rock stars (Bono, for one) and politicians (Tony Blair etc.). Don’t we all.