Wikizen

Wiki banned for 5 weeks?

This highlights the dangers of non-semantic search (from a Google email alert for the text "wiki"):

(for those out there utterly confused, Ruben Wiki is a New Zealand rugby leage player who just happens to have an unfortunate surname. Perhaps we should sponsor him?)

Opening shots in a wiki war?

Briefly - no, I don't think so.

It all started with Matt Marshall's article coining the term 'wiki war', which got picked up in various places, Graham defended Jot, Ross went on the offensive, Graham again played D, more follow up and finally Oliver came through with a well balanced summary (although I'm not sure yes, his title of "Murder, Death, Kill" is intentionally ironic). Are you still with me? Aren't blog threads fun?

A Little Aside
Before I get to my main point about openness, I would like to make one small aside. Despite how it looks (and sounds) from reading Jot and SocialText's blogs - there are more than 2 companies which sell wikis. I know of at least 5 or 6 in fact.

I say this not as the petulant kid in the corner  jumping up and down screaming "Pick me! Pick me!" but as a wiki vendor with more than 300 enterprise customers.

Customers switch vendors regularly, one customer moving from one vendor to another does not maketh a war. Once wikis are as prevalent as email in organisations, one could conceive of a war. Right now, we're all battling more to get wikis into organisations than stealing away customers. Grow the pie, don't fight over the crumbs.

Apart from this recent scuffle, the wiki industry (can we call it that?) has been very cordial and friendly. Insightful blog posts, frank discussions and generally open, friendly business practices. I hope these trends continue.

A Question Of Openness
Perhaps the most interesting actual discussion in all these threads is about the various degrees of openness involved.

Ross is trying to cast Jot as the "bad proprietary vendor":

Proprietary Platform vs. Open Source Application 
Zero-sum thinking is lazy, and quite frankly, old-school.

Here I have to agree with Graham:

I’d like to suggest instead that it’s “old school” to focus exclusively on the openness of the code when the openness of the data is at least as important.

We compete with Open Source solutions every single day, with both our products. We're used to it. Customers don't buy "because it's Open Source". Source access is only one of a number of value points customers consider when purchasing (along with price, service, features and a host of others).

(On a side note - Ross - your Kwiki page is the same as your Products page so it's impossible to tell how open source SocialText really is :))

As a customer, I'd use an application with open access to data over an application with only open source.

Data Opens Doors
Take mail clients as an example. I don't feel locked into a mail client which uses mbox format for storage - no matter how proprietary it is. I know I can take my mail boxes and move to another client that supports mbox. I don't use Outlook, not because it's proprietary, but because I can't get my mails out of the damned PST file if I need to.

We build products which support this vision. I think I'm right in saying we have more ways to interact with our wiki than any other. Confluence supports HTTP, SMTP, REST, RSS, full XML-RPC and SOAP interfaces, as well you can deploy Java code into the application, use the plugin system to deploy extensions, talk to the database directly via a published data model or use the full XML import/export facility. That's 10 full data access methods for those out there keeping count.

(For reference, all Atlassian commercial licenses come with the full source code to the application under a developer source license.)

Graham says that "open data is at least as important as open code", I'd say it's more important.

Open Source Company Generations
One of my pet theories (for those at Javapolis at Belgium who heard me propound this theory ad nauseum, you may read on) is that we're in the third generation of software companies, when talking about Open Source.

Generation 1: Proprietary Fear
The first generation of companies are traditional proprietary software companies - eg Microsoft. Their business models were forged in the last two decades, their source is proprietary, their components are proprietary, they've been around a long time and they're afraid. They think Open Source is going to put them out of business because everything is "free", hence noone is going to buy their software.

Pretty much every software company was in this boat when Open Source appeared over the last 10 years, and quite a lot still are.

Summary: Open Source = fear & doom.

Generation 2: Open Source Tunnel Vision
The obvious knee jerk reaction to this? All software will be Open Source. Open Source will completely dominate and eliminate proprietary software. Therefore we're going to make everything open source and make money off services, installation support etc. These are your classic Red Hat, MySQL or JBoss type companies.

This was a very common 'late 90's' phenomenon, and you still see it happening.

Remember - Open Source is very good at infrastructure software - stuff where there's a protocol to implement, or a server to connect to. Those software components are all about function over form, which developers love. Open Source is very bad at applications in general (possibly with the exceptions of IM clients or IDEs, but those don't really count). A good application has to be usable, form over function.

Summary: Open Source = the one true way.

Generation 3: Living In An Open Source World
What we've seen over the past 2 years though is the re-emergence of profitable proprietary software companies. How can this be? Hasn't Open Source has doomed all proprietary software companies to fail? Not at all.

In almost all cases, Open Source has enabled these companies to exist. It provides a lower cost of software development, smaller software teams and thus better, cheaper software products. These companies have grown up with Open Source both as a competitor and an aid. They respect it, but don't fear it.

(As an interesting general rule, all the examples of generation 3 companies I can think of have only 10-20 employees - like Jot (10?), SocialText (10) or Atlassian (17).)

They realise on the one hand that they must provide more value than an Open Source solution to survive, but on the other they realise the value of using and contributing to Open Source components that reduce their overall cost of development.

Summary: Open Source = pragmatic software tool

The point of the theory? When looking at companies I no longer classify them as "Open Source" or "not", I look at how much they get Open source as a useful tool to their business and how much they respect Open Source as a competitor.

Incidentally it just occurred to me that the whole concept of 'openness' in this post is exactly what wikis are about - making the knowledge of a team, department or organisation open. Editable by anyone. Can you get any more open than that? Can we call a wiki an "Open Source website"?

Wikis as the corporate third place

When explaining to people what a wiki is, I often struggle - not because I don't know, but more because wikis actually are so many things. Responses like "Oh, so it's a website?", "It's an agile content management system?", "Is it like groupware/Lotus notes?" are all very typical. And in a way, they're all correct.

Well, today I thought of a completely different way to explain what a wiki is - wikis are the corporate "third place" for information. Let me see if I can explain this, slightly off the wall, theory.

The Third Place
The concept of the "third place" was invented by Ray Oldberg, and can be defined as:

A place other than home or work where a person can go to relax and feel part of the community.

I first came across the term in Howard Shultz (the man behind Starbucks) book "Pour Your Heart Into It" where he likes to define Starbucks as the third place in our lives. In his case:

• The first place (the home) provides a comfortable atmosphere, with little social interaction.
• The second place (the work place) provides social interaction, but without the comfort of a home.
• The third place (Starbucks) provides a happy medium - more social interaction than your home but with more comfort than a work place.

Corporate Information Places
I think one can look at wikis in a similar fashion, when comparing them to their alternatives.

What are the first and second places in terms of information within an organisation?

The first place for information within an organisation is the humble Word document. Like it or not, corporations have billions of thoughts, specifications and ideas tied up in Word documents. Word isn't going anywhere, but Word isn't perfect.

The second place for information within a company is email. Email is a communications medium that has morphed into an information store. Our email clients are part communications device, part to-do list, part personal information archive - and, despite recent improvements, they're still only really good at the first!

So in a corporate information environment,

• the first place (Word) provides good structure and persistence for documents, but very poor communication and agility
• the second place (email) is great at communication and very agile but very poor at structure and persistence

The Wiki Place
Wikis then can be seen as our third place for corporate information:

• the third place (a wiki) is provides better communication than Word, but more structure and persistence than email.

Emails are deleted, filed-and-forgotten or just lost - a good wiki doesn't have this problem. At the same time, writing or editing a wiki page should be as easy and as fast as writing an email.

Word documents on the other hand are terrible at communication (no, track changes does not count as good communication) but they are good at structure - headings, sections, bullets etc.

Of course, wikis have other advantages not mentioned (simple linking for one) but I think it's a different way to try to explain what exactly it is this whole 'wiki thing' is all about.

Like I said, it's maybe a little off-the-wall - but give it some thought :)

(Note that in both cases, third place does not replace the others. Mr Schultz may not like it, but Starbucks isn't going to replace your home or work anytime soon. By the same token, your company is not going to get rid of Word documents or email, but they will get value from a wiki in certain circumstances)

Year of the Enterprise Wiki

Well, John Udell named 2004 "Year of the Enterprise Wiki", but I'd say it's going to be 2005. Wikizen is my little corner of the world to tell you why I think that.

So who the hell am I?

... and why should you listen to me? That's a damn good question and probably a very appropriate place for a blog to start.

My name is Mike Cannon-Brookes and I'm a founder of Atlassian - an innovative Australian enterprise software company that helps dynamic teams within large organisations work better together on knowledge projects. A mouthful? In a nutshell, we help people do their "knowledge work".

We have two products aimed at the two different sides of a knowledge project - tasks and text:

• JIRA - our revolutionary project management tool tracks the project's tasks (issues, improvements, problems, things-to-do), and
• Confluence - our professional wiki manages the team's text (documents, notes, thoughts, ideas).

You may not have heard of us - but I'll bet you a pineapple you've heard of a few of our customers. From tech giants like Oracle, HP and Cisco to the planet's biggest banks, from manufacturing powerhouses like GE and 3M to world leading research organisations like NASA and CERN - we have over 2000 customers in 35+ countries across the globe. Helping teams talk is our business and I think we're pretty damn good at it :)

I'm guessing if you're here - you're probably more interested in wikis than project management esoterica, but they actually work very well in combination - I'll tell you why in the future.

Confluence
Confluence is our enterprise wiki - and it appeared in 2004, so perhaps Jon was right in one way. Like any wiki it allows you to share information by editing pages, browsing links and all the features wiki users are accustomed to.

It does a hell of a lot more than that though - with enterprise permissioning, full text searching, integrated blogs, hierarchical page structures, page refactorings, group email archiving, PDF exports and a whole lot more.

Anyway, I'm here to talk about wikis not sell them - so if you're interested, you can learn more or just try it.

Wikizen
All the English sticklers in the world (Hi mum!) are probably groaning, but a wikizen is more of a  concept than a word.

Originally just meant to be a contraction of wiki and zen - hence enlightenment about wikis, it has also been pointed out to me that it's a contraction of wiki and citizen - hence people who use wikis in their work, citizens of the wiki world.

Anyway, its a neat word, a catchy blog title and I like it :)

My goals for this blog are to talk about wikis and how they fit into broader categories like social software (is anyone else sick of that term already?), groupware (viva the early 90s!) and the world of knowledge work. I spend a lot of my time travelling the world talking to customers about how and why they use our wiki in their daily operations, and I hope to impart some of that knowledge to you - the fine reader - here! We'll see how it goes...

Well first posts are always hard but the good thing is you only have to do them once.

If you're still reading - let me bid you welcome, thanks for reading and "watch this space"!