Collaborative Thinking: The issue of (in this case, successful use of wikis) culture is critically important when forming, nurturing and sustaining collaboration strategies. A key point is to understand the influence of "directed" collaboration versus "volunteered" collaboration. If we go back to the definition of Enterprise 2.0, one concept that anchors the meme is the notion of "emergence". Enterprise 2.0, by its very definition, does not address all types of collaboration.

Complete Story

"Lessig, known for his decade-long role in trying to loosen the entertainment industry's vice-like grip on popular culture by shaping copyright law, is betting that the energy and dissatisfaction exhibited by voters against the status-quo in Washington DC, and the emergence of collaborative software that enables vast numbers of geographically-dispersed citizens to become politically active on their own schedule, will enable a new kind of transparency and accountability in political campaigns."

Complete Story

Wikis are useful business tools. With planning and some staff time, you can make your own online collection of useful articles, tailored to your organization's needs, to communicate about business processes, manage collective know-how and more.

Complete Story

Updated versions of MediaWiki to address some security issues has been released for MediaWiki 1.11.1, 1.10.3, and 1.9.5.

This is a security and bugfix release of the Fall, Spring, and Winter 2007 snapshot releases of MediaWiki. A potential XSS injection vector affecting api.php only for Microsoft Internet Explorer users has been closed.

To work around the vulnerability without upgrading, you may disable the API if you don't need it:

~ $wgEnableAPI = false;

Complete Story

"Over the past two years, Drupal's wiki capabilities have expanded exponentially. Yet, still we get support requests on the forums, "How can I make a wiki with Drupal?" Well, here is a detailed plan that gives wiki functionality to Drupal. This tutorial assumes you're starting with an installed version of Drupal 5.x, and that you're familiar with installing modules."

Complete Story

"John Newton: I have been interested in wikis in the enterprise for a while. Do you have any general comments on how they can be used?

Jimmy Wales: Wikis have been used to collaborate on all sorts of documents. They have even been used to manage schedules. I have seen people abandon [Microsoft] Outlook and schedule in a wiki as a better alternative.

The big difference is a design change in process. People don’t necessarily want to use a CMS. You need to drop the a priori assumptions on how you do workflow. The old notions of workflow are too cumbersome. Wikis provide enormous flexibility in how users can work together."

Complete Interview

"Individual developers can use sites like SourceForge.net to host multiple projects, but such sites are not well suited to college environments that have many student programming projects to host. DrProject is a multiple project hosting application designed for schools. It gives each project a wiki, bug tracker, and source code repository.

DrProject is a fork of the Trac project, which can only host project at a time. DrProject has a different look and feel but the navigation menu is very similar to Trac's."

Complete Story

August 2007

New Website Launched that Promises to ease the Software Installation Process

InstallationWiki.org is a new website designed to provide users with comprehensive, free guides to installing software. Launching on August 6, 2007, the website will largely be driven and populated by content supplied and edited by experts, and hopes to bridge the gap between software experts and software users.

Quality, relevant and free information on installing software is often difficult to find, especially when new versions and editions are being released on a regular basis. The aim of InstallationWiki.org is to provide people with a one-stop source of information for installing whichever piece of software they’re working with.

The Installation Wiki will provide myriad benefits for a variety of individuals; acting as a resource for software users, whilst supporting the software community through gaining exposure for their respective programs.

I have been struggling to decide what I think about the Wikipedia/WikiScanner episode that played out last week.  Collaboration Loop had some thoughts of their own in the article, The Death of Wikipedia?

But with the release of Wikiscanner we now find that organizations are actively trolling Wikipedia to help themselves, or to hurt others.   We find that our level of trust in Wikipedia has been significantly impugned.  We find that the social computing model is suspect to abuse from those who aren’t playing by the rules.  In effect, our naïve view of the world of wikis is destroyed.

No doubt there are many organizations and individuals that attempted to edit their "own pages" about themselves to correct what they honestly thought were mistakes or untruths.  But even when all parties are open and honest, there will be conflict.

"Formally recording what we have learned in the workplace is a worthwhile process that is often forgotten or not undertaken because there is no time or immediate incentive to do so. Web-based technologies such as wikis and blogs have demonstrated that enabling people to quickly publish and publicise their knowledge within their peer group is potentially a very powerful means of undertaking collaborative knowledge capture. This article explores how Drupal, an open-source content management framework can be used to facilitate this process in a community centric manner."

Complete Story | Article found via Black Mountain