Dave Jenkins

I was at dinner with one of our good friends from Zimbra, and we were talking about random histories of the big players (MS Apple, Google, etc) and how the OS is rapidly becoming a commoditised moot point. As the conversation progressed, my tin-foil hat started to show, and I began to wonder if Microsoft may be playing a Hudsucker Proxy on our hapless friends in Orem:

1. Microsoft has enough business analysts on the payroll to realize that Open Source is unstoppable. Individual companies may falter, but the code and model are pernicious and maleable enough to resist any attack. It’s like sweeping ants in the jungle– there will always be more.
2. Microsoft knows they must come to Open Source eventually– but where? where to pull in OSS without damaging the cash cow? The OS. Noone really pays for the OS anymore, not real money. Sure, we all pay support contracts, but not big cash. Eye candy makes money. For Redmond, the money is the apps. So, where to find an OS partner… Red Hat? too religious. Ubuntu? too foreign. Mandriva? unknown. Debian? communists. Novell? aha– desparate for the bandwagon, jonny-come-latelys, good market share, lotsa cash laying around. In a word: suckers.
3. Microsoft does a deal, and Novell signs over their souls, and the partnership has begun. Here’s the problem– does Mircrosoft ever really partner with anyone for very long?
4. The next day, sure enough, Steve Ballmer is out making fun of his new friends. Novell desperately tries to paint on some lipstick for their new boyfriend because he’s out trash-talking. The community begins to turn, Novell stock drops
5. Now, a few months later, Novell fesses up and starts to admit that MS is the better ROI. That’s right, bitch– make me a sammich and get me a beer, too. The stock will only drop further.
6. Soon, maybe 18 months from now, the stock will be cheap enough that Redmond will get out their checkbook. What’s worse, with that whole SCO nightmare still loose, MS may find itself the owner of some core UNIX intellectual property. If/when that happens, all our lives get washed down the toilet.

Am I crazy? God I hope so.

*sigh*
Project Redstripe seems to be a sorry attempt at getting in on what the kids are calling Web2.0 these days. The Economist, a magazine I read religiously every week, and have held in high regard (although this may be slipping on this move) seems to want to get in on the whole participatory content community thing. So they took six staff, holed them up somewhere in London, and told them to come up with inventive interactive ideas. The one idea the interns came up with? start a blog and ask for ideas. Genius!

I can tell the editors at what is probably the smartest weekly available are getting antsy about this. Their recent feature article focuses on the 800-pound gorilla of mass participation: The Wikipedia itself.

A corporate blog does not make you web2.0, it just means that the suits are going to tolerate one of the better writers in the office spewing out random thoughts on– from what I can see from most corporate blogs, how cool it is to spew out random thoughts on a blog and get paid for it.

Community interactivity, real participatory involvement with the course of a site, requires much more. It requires a trick, a hook, a passion that brings people in, let’s them alter or enhance or goof over some digital property in the commons, and then get a pat on the head for their contribution. On one hand we have the wikipedia building the Encyclopedia Vulgaris Populi, on the other hand we have farkers building a library of photoshop cliches that are still funny after 6 years.

I am proud to say I have contributed to both. I am also proud to tell those clowns at project restripe that they had better come up with a better idea. I don’t get the feeling that The Economist tolerates lay-abouts very long.

The legal term corpus juris is used to note a book or record that has legal ramifications. The U.S. Code is so massive, unfortunately, that judges or lawyers will often use the overwhelming volume as a tool for their judgements, even if the plantiff or defendant had no idea what was written in there. Who has time to read through the whole thing? nobody. Nonetheless, that ‘ignorance’ does not diminish the validity of the code.  Similarly, a wiki with thousands of pages can assume a similar characteristic: massive amount of data with poor visibility from the sheer size.

The wiki is a wonderful thing for producing documentation and letting 10,000 flowers bloom. As an intranet, we are seeing processes, proposals, ideas, vendor backgrounds, monthly reports, and a myriad of details throughout the company. There are over 11,000 pages so far in the company. Unfortunately, no one has time to read it all. Worse, the very passive nature of it, and now the sheer volume of text, loses the punch for communication between managers.

“Where are you on project X?”
—- “DId you look at the wiki page for it? We wrote everything down.”
“No, I don’t have time. So where is it?”
—- “Okay. Let me esplain it to you in a meeting.”

Ah, the meeting. Like an over-friendly guest, there is no escaping the meeting.

Even then, the dense textual nature of the wiki (great for encyclopedia or software documentation) discourages the interactive dialogue that people use to sell each other on their concept, or their interpretation of the data. Alas, we are still slaves to the Powerpoint presentation.

There is some redemption here– and this seems to be the best use: insist that everyone at least skim through the wiki page before the meeting. If you write well enough, they may actuall read the whole thing. The wiki page becomes the primer for the discussion. If everyone has read the script, the play will unfold much more smoothly in the meeting. Also, the wiki makes a great place to gather all the source material for that *gack* Powerpoint (or OpenOffice presentation as I prefer) slides when you have to put them together.

So, what have I learned in the last 2 years with a wiki as an intranet?

1. Wikis are passive. They do not shout out and grab people’s attention. They are like great sponges that soak up facts, but are no good at reaching out and giving you those facts on a plate with a nice side salad.
2. Wikis are very good at collaborating texts from disparate contributors. This requires some force to get going, but once people catch on, they’ll never go back to attached MSWord documents
3. Wikis are good source material from which to build a presentation
4. Wikis are lousy at the actual presentation (no showmanship)
5. Wikis require a handful of bold editors and combiners, who will mash pages together and build those collaborative texts (see #2). Otherwise, every department would keep their own version of the story
6. The Recent Changes page is addictive.

So, all told, I am very happy with the wiki as an intranet. I overestimated people’s level of reading through the liber. There is no escaping the showmanship and the summations that managers want to see. It’s a great tool to get everything written down– if anything to make sure your peeps are doing their homework and actually researching things. In otherwords, just about anyone can bullshit their way through some bullet list powerpoints, but it is very difficult to bullshit your way through the longhand text of a wiki page: people cannot write lies that long, unless they are going for absolute fiction, which shows up in the text soon enough.