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Enterprise 2.0 Stays in Wikipedia

Common sense prevails, the deletion debate I’ve previously criticized is now closed:

The result was keep. The arguments for deletion are not to my mind persuasive, and it turns out that rather than being a neologism, the term has in fact been around for some time. There is no question that we need an article about this subject…”

Here’s the current article for Enterprise 2.0.  Now, let’s show how wikipedia is really used by working on refining the current definition!

As a member of the Editorial Board for the Office 2.0 Conference, I happen to know we’ll be discussing highly relevant subjects, so if you’re interested, you can register by clicking the banner:

 

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Why the Wikipedia Enterprise 2.0 Debate is Irrelevant

The ongoing almost finished debate about the deleted Enterprise 2.0 article in Wikipedia is quite educational, at least for someone like me, who uses Wikipedia a lot but don’t contribute myself. Not that we had that insight originally; the entry was first wiped out without a discussion and it took Ross Mayfield’s clout to resuscitate it for debate, albeit semi-sentenced for deletion.

The key learning for me is that Wikipedia is governed by far more rules than I would have expected. Like it or not, I can rationalize that any organization, organism, collective initiative..etc. of this magnitude will sooner or later develop self-defense mechanisms, and for Wikipedia these are the (sometimes rigid) rules and an army of Praetorians … I mean Deletionists.

The key arguments for deleting the Enterprise 2.0 article are that it’s not notable enough, is neologism , original research which is not verifiable by reading reliable sources. (links point to Wikipedia policies)

Notability is a rather dubious requirement – that is if we consider Wikipedia *The* encyclopedia, which is what I think it has become for millions of readers. The “Sum of Human Knowledge” (see ad on right) is constantly increasing, forcing paper-based encyclopedias to be selective/restrictive for obvious reasons. Wikipedia does not have such physical limits, and has an army of volunteer editors, so why be restrictive? “When in doubt – look it up” is still what I think encyclopedias are all about, and that approach is what propelled Wikipedia to the No. 1 spot leaving the Britannica in the dust.

Neologism doesn’t belong in Wikipedia”: as several commenters pointed out, the term neologism itself is a neologism:-) But let’s get real: considering the body of knowledge already covered in Wikipedia, an increasing ratio of new articles will by definition be neologism. An overly exclusionary approach by Wikipedia administrators will relegate it from being *The* encyclopedia to being just one, in fact likely still #1 of many, giving way to the Refupedias so eloquently defined by my fellow Irregular (and I might add, subject matter expert on this debate) Niel Robertson.

While I question the principles behind the notability and no-neologism rule, I understand that the debate on deleting an actual submission is not the appropriate forum to discuss the validity of Wikipedia rules.

Yet I am surprised by the sharp contrast in the two side’s approach: defenders of the article, mostly domain experts in enterprise software but Wikipedia-newbies discuss the merits of the article itself, while the deletionist side avoids such conversation strictly focusing on adherence to policy only. In fact it’s this part of the discussion that convinced me we’re not seeing a constructive debate (side note: why isn’t there a Wikipedia entry on this?), instead the most active deletionists are pre-determined to kill the article, and are shutting down reasonable arguments / citations in a rather dogmatic manner.

The trio of no original research, verifiability and reliable sources should be more or less self-explanatory, and one would think references to “Enterprise 2.0” in respected publications like MIT’s Sloan Management Review and Business Week certainly meet these requirements. Not really. Our Praetorian Deletionist discards both:

“The problem is only readers that have access to this journal can verify the information. It must be available to anyone (by heading to the library, searching online, or stopping by a book store)”

“Journals that the general public can not easily access are not valid sources. Period. That is wikipedia policy.”

Wow. Not accessible… well, I don’t see any restrictions on these subscription pages:

In fact the individual article is available for $6.50, but (don’t tell anyone!) it can also be found as a free PDF file on the web. Now, I am not claiming these publications have as wide circulation as the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Time Magazine, Newsweek – all papers that our gatekeeper finds acceptable – but why should they? We’re not talking about architecture, medicine or gardening – for the cross-section of business and technology it’s hard to find more authoritative source than the SMR or HBR.

All other citations the “defending team” comes up with are refused, for formal reasons, without looking at content.

Business Week: “the article itself is not about the term “Enterprise 2.0”, but about “Web 2.0” “. In fact “Web 2.0 in the Enterprise” is what the entire article is about, and that is indeed Enterprise 2.0, but the Wikipedian here does not understand the content, he is just looking for a verbatim match.

ZDNetBlogs” by Dan Farber or Dion Hinchcliffe are rejected for being blogs, and self-referencing, being about the deletion process, not the original term. Once again, this is a rigid, dogmatic argument: true, the deletion debate is referenced in the articles, but it was just the trigger, the authors (recognized subject matter experts) explicitly discuss the validity of Enterprise 2.0. Ross Mayfield then cites further articles, including one by Dion Hinchliffe, ZDNet specifically referencing Enterprise 2.0: “Fortunately, the title of McAfee’s piece says the important part” – and that title is: Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration . Not accepted, after all it’s just a blog.

I can’t leave Wikipedia’s exclusion of blogs as reliable source without a comment. Tehcnorati is tracking over 50 million blogs, and we know it does not track everything, so who knows what the total number is: 70M? 100M? How can they all be lumped in one, “unreliable” category? As non-PC it may be, I have to side with Robert Scoble here, there is a slight difference between content-light (LiveJournal) diaries and professional blogs by industry experts. The ZDNet blogs mentioned above really shouldn’t be personal blogs, they are professional publications. And by whose standards should the HBS Faculty Blog, bearing the logo of Harvard Business School not be considered a reliable source, in fact an authority on matters of business and technology?

The concept of authority is not unknown to Wikipedia, just check the following excerpt from the guidelines on reliable sources:

“Advanced degrees give authority in the topic of the degree.”

“Use sources who have postgraduate degrees or demonstrable published expertise in the field they are discussing. The more reputable ones are affiliated with academic institutions.”

Guidelines or not, Mr. Deletionist has his own view about Harvard Prof. McAfee:

“While I respect your knowledge and status as an Associate Professor, I take a dim view of a person who coins a term also being the person that is the main editor and follower of that term’s wikipedia article.” (for the record Prof. McAfee did not edit the disputed Wikipedia article at all)

Oh, well… instead of talking about Wikipedia, let’s focus on why this whole debate is irrelevant. Because “Enterprise 2.0” is really just a label. Opponents call it “marketing buzzword”. So what? Labels, Marketing buzzwords can be quite helpful:

  • In the beginning of this post I spent 2 paragraphs detailing my point of view on Notability and Neologism, when I could ave simply referred to a “label”: I am an Inclusionalist. (I believe in editing rather than killing posts)
  • In the very early 90’s I was implementing SAP systems (yes, guilty of being a domain expert). The concept of an integrated cross-functional enterprise system was rather unusual, it took lot of “evangelism” to spread the idea. A few years later Erik Keller and team at Gartner coined the term ERP, and it is the industry definition ever since.
  • Here’s a fairly lengthy explanation of how a web application can look and feel like a desktop application. (alert: it’s a blog!). The post is from January 2005. A year later the term Ajax was coined, and now the author of this article could save half a page and just say: Ajax.

Perhaps the above examples make the point: in business and technology, marketing “labels” are typically coined to describe an already existing phenomenon. Enterprise 2.0 as a term my be relatively knew, but it’s not some theoretical concept a bored professor is trying to sell the world. It’s a disruptive change, a confluence of technological, social and business changes in how corporations conduct business using new IT tools. No Wikipedia gatekeepers can prevent this seismic shift. Let’s move on, do our work, and in less than 6 months Enterprise 2.0 will find its way back to Wikipedia.

Update (9/1): The debate is now closed, Enterprise 2.0 stays in wikipedia.

Related posts:

(Note: this is just a partial list, pros and cons from domain experts – all this representing zero value, per wikipedia policy, since they are blog posts.)

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Watch Out for Zoho

I declared the Zoho Suite complete exactly 2 months ago, when they released Zoho Show.  However, there is always complete … and even more complete 🙂  And the Zoho guys are getting cute: they want you to guess what’s next.

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Office 2.0 – Under the Radar Event at SAP Labs

IBDNetwork’s Under the Radar event at SAP Labs was a lively evening with full house, good discussion and four exciting companies.  Prior to the presentations moderator Mike Arrington (TechCrunch) and the panel discussed pro’s and con’s of Office 2.0. 

Part of the discussion was whether “Office 2.0” is just an attempt to replicate existing functions on the Web.

Peter Rip’s take was that  such replication is pointless: the web-based apps cannot come close to the incumbent (MS Office) in functionality and they stand no chance to unseat it in the corporate world.  The real promise of Office 2.0 in Peter’s view is creating processes-mashups, supporting business in entirely new ways.

Ismael Ghalimi’s response was that partial “replication” is OK, in reality the MS Office products are way too complex, 90% of users probably only use 10% of the functionality.  The added value is the ease of collaboration, and also easier integration, as it would be demonstrated by Zoho in a few minutes. I tend to agree with Ismael, as I stated before.

 

The Panel: Peter Rip, Sam Schillace, Etay Gafni, and Ismael Ghalimi

The Panel

(photo credit: Dan Farber, ZDNet)

 

After the initial discussion the four invited companies each had 5 minutes for a presentation/demo, followed by another 5 minutes of Q/A.  Although the theme of the evening was Office 2.0,  2 out of 4 presenters were not strictly speaking “office” companies – the Web 2.0 moniker would better fit them:  Wetpaint and Collectivex.  They also have something in common: a strong focus on groups, communities – but they take rather different approaches with CollectiveX being rather structured, whereas Wetpaint is an open book that the users get to write.

 

Wetpaint was presented by Ben Elowitz, Founder and CEO.  Technically Wetpaint is a wiki, but the best part is that one really does not have to know wikis, just happily type away and create attractive pages without the usual learning curve. More than that: these pages can be shared, other users can contribute, entire communities can grow and thrive. 

It’s an ad-supported free web-based service that combines the best of wikis, blogs, and forum software.

  • It’s like a wiki: you can create any number of pages, arrange them in a hierarchy, navigate through them top-down in a tree fashion, or via direct links between pages. Anyone can edit any page a’la wiki (optionally pages can be locked, too). There is version control, audit track of changes and previous releases can be restored at a single click.
  • It’s like a discussion forum: you can have threaded/nested comments attached to each page
  • It’s like a blog: editable area in the middle, sidebars on both sides with tags and other info.  Personally I’d like to see more blog-like features, like pinging blog indices (Technorati and others), trackback support, etc.  Ben confirmed some of these are on the way – when it happens, I believe Wetpaint will take off big time – after all, discoveribility is critical in building online communities.

All panelists were impressed with the simplicity and elegance of the UI, but someone (don’t remember if panel or audience) commented this is just one of many similar products available.  
I beg to differ.  Yes, in a room of 60-80 techies we can all use (?)  any other wiki easily.  Not so in “real life”. I’ve set up wikis for companies, ad-hoc workgroups and events for the general public – there’s a whole world of difference. In a company you have a common purpose, set objectives, can provide training – not so in the consumer/ community space.  Take a look at the Wetpaint site we set up for the Techdirt Greenhouse (un)conference, or Road Trips USA (pic link above) on the fun side. 
I challenge anyone to find another “wiki” with comparable features yet is so easy that anyone who can type and click (i.e. use a simple editor) will be able to contribute without any learning.

Update (8/18): Robert Scoble hits the nail on the head:  it’s all about the Blink Test.  Wetpaint passes it. Other wikis don’t.

 

Collectivex Founder and CEO Clarence Wooten described his service as LinkedIn meets Yahoo Groups.   Mike Arrington’s definition (not as moderator, but earlier on TechCrunch): “CollectiveX is what LinkedIn should have been.”   It’s social networking based on groups, rather than individuals, facilitating communication, providing file sharing, messaging, calendaring and exchange of leads/contacts.  Revenue model: free base, subscription for a few premium features.

 

I admit I suffer from Social Network burnout.  I do find some of them useful, especially LinkedIn, and I can think of a few groups I am a member of where we could use CollectiveX – I am simply tired of creating zillion version of my profile.   I’d like a “Profile Central” where all these new services could pick up my data from. Am I dreaming?  Wasn’t AlwaysOn/GoingOn supposed to somehow resolve the profile portability problem?

Of course this is just my ranting, although the audience questions pointed in the same direction, albeit indirectly: nice functionality, but isn’t incumbent LinkedIn too entrenched for new social networks to challenge its position? 

 

Echosign Founder and CEO Jason Lemkin’s task was perhaps more difficult, perhaps easier: unlike the other three, his service could not be identified with a few words, he had to explain a new process flow. On the other hand he is addressing an ugly enough problem that he captured everyone’s attention: No matter how well computerized we are, when it comes to signing contracts, we’re back to the world of paper, faxes, lost documents.  Echosign is a web-based service that takes care of the entire process flow( see slide below) : getting documents signed (electronically or hand-signature by fax), filed and distributed as pdf, routed, approved, managed, archived. 

While technically this is SaaS, I guess Software Enabled Service is a better description than Software as a Service:-)  EchoSign addresses a painful enough problem with a simple and elegant solution that it won the Panel’s Award. Congratulations to Jason and team!

 

 Zoho Founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu did not bring us just one product but an entire productivity Suite. How do you demo 4 products in 5 minutes?  (Not that he only has four, at my last count the company has 10 Zoho-branded products).  The solution: you don’t.  Instead of focusing on individual products, you demonstrate the power and ease of integration between them.

Sridhar pulled up a sample spreadsheet of sales figures and a chart; he changed some numbers in Zoho Sheet and of course the chart changed, too.  Next with a few clicks he dropped data in a window and voila! – a Zoho Creator application just got created. We then saw the data entry form show up on a slide – part of Zoho Show.  The same form, or other data views can also be embedded in Zoho Writer documents, or even in an email.  As Sridhar kept on switching screens, one could almost get lost, but he got his point through: whichever application he changed the data in, it would show up real-time in the other application.  I don’t have his presentation, but can present a similar scenario I used on my blog earlier.  First I collected votes in a blog post using a Zoho Polls entry form –here are the results.  Useful chart, not as impressive as the spreadsheet’s charting capability though, so I dropped the results in Zoho Sheet, which generated the pie chart below:

Do you like the new Technorati?  Poll results in % - http://www.zohosheet.com

 The chart has it’s own URL, it’s easy to embed in a blog (this post), document or presentation,  and so does the entire spreadsheet itself.

Clearly the format of the Zoho presentation was a compromise, focusing on integration, but I think it paid off, the audience clearly got the picture that instead of randomly selected applications Zoho has a complete office/productivity Suite to offer.  The tradeoff of course was not seeing detailed functionality – which is probably why panelist Peter Rip commented that the creation of these documents did not appear to be a collaborative process.   As I have played with the Zoho Suite before, I know it is indeed very collaborative and the Zoho folks might want to call Peter and offer him a more detailed demo.   The audience was very interested, in fact after the official event Zoho set up a demo station outside where they continued answering questions for a good half an hour or so.  Some of those inquiries were about the ability to buy and implement the Suite behind a corporate firewall – something that Zoho is not ready for at this stage, but the interest level certainly bodes well for a future corporate business model.  The immediate reward to Zoho came in the form of votes: Zoho won the Audience’s Choice for Best Product Award.

Congratulations to Sridhar and his team!

Last, but not least, thanks to IBDNetwork for organizing another successful event.  

This was just the beginning: Office 2.0 enthusiast, or just about anybody interested, come join as at the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, October 12-13.

 

 

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Lessons from the TechCrunch Wiki War

Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch Parties have become “THE EVENTS TO ATTEND” in the Valley – in fact not just in the Valley: last time around I remember participants driving up all the way from San Diego, and this time people will fly in just to be there. The last party as well as the next one this Friday both sold out within hours after the announcement, and a lot of readers felt frustrated:

  • Some felt that first-come-first-served is not fair enough with such a short notice (an hour or so)
  • Some publicly asked for special consideration to get in
  • Some proposed to pay for “tickets”
  • Just about everyone complained for the lockups in the registration wiki.

I don’t envy Mike in this situation. It’s his party, his house (well, at least for the previous events), it would be perfectly OK for him to have an invitation-only party. Yet he obviously wants to see new faces, so he opens it up to anyone, but then of course he can’t please all… This time around, for the seventh TechCrunch Party hosted by August Capital there was more than the usual rush: the registration wiki has become constantly locked up and Mike was forced to move RSVPs to comments on his blog, closing the wiki.

Mike received ample feedback on why the wiki was not the right platform to handle hundreds of almost simultaneous registrations, and several entrepreneurs seized the opportunity to announce new offerings. Central Desktop announced a free public event wiki, and since it’s a hybrid not-just-a-wiki solution, Founder and CEO Isaac Garcia claims they do not have lockup issues (they use a form with a database in the background). Zoho Creator would have been another elegant solution.

However, what almost no-one talks about is that this was not simply a technical glitch. Having been lucky enough (?) to wake up 4am the day the wiki opened I managed to register myself at exactly position #100 in the wiki, then observe the wiki-war that soon ensued. The major “sins” I witnessed were:

  • Individual users registering entire blocks (dozen or more) names
  • The same users sitting on the wiki (blocking), probably while coordinating with their buddies who else to sign up
  • Previously registered names getting deleted

One can perhaps justify registering others, although I don’t know where the reasonable limit is ( I only signed up myself), but deleting others is the absolute cardinal sin. Apparently fair play is a strange concept to some.

This raises another issue though: are these people not aware that wikis provide a perfect audit trail and what they did can easily become public? Or do they simply not care? Is getting in on the TechCrunch party worth being displayed on a virtual “hall of shame”?

This particular incident aside, I think the major learning here is the overall lack of awareness of a typical wiki’s capabilities and how to “behave” while using it. I know many who’d like the collaborative capabilities but are afraid of “chaos” and the potential lack of civility… in short a major ‘wiki war’ if they open up editing to anyone. Most wiki platforms offer technical controls to limit chaos: even consumer /community focused WetPaint introduced several security schemes in their latest updates, and enterprise wikis like Socialtext and Atlassian’s Confluence have for long had elaborate security schemes – heck, that’s why they are “enterprise”.

Just as important as the permissioning is the role of social- behavioral norms, which clearly are more common and more forceful in a corporate environment, where all wiki “contributors” work for the same company. “Ross Mayfield said that in four years of building wikis for corporations Socialtext has seen precisely 0 trolls and 0 instances of vandalism.” He also maintains a Best Practices wiki (hey, it’s the new skin!). Now, remember, it’s a wiki – you can contribute, not just read.

As for the TechCrunch Party, the guest list is currently at 738(!) and here’s a preview of who’s coming, courtesy of CustomCD.us. (who may have intended to keep this a surprise, but I found it anyway….)

Update (7/28/2007): Here’s another case of wiki “who done it”.

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Atlassian Taking On the World

(Update: apologies for the dead video links, Youtube is apparently down, here’s their message: ”

We’re currently putting out some new features, sweeping out the cobwebs and zapping a few gremlins.“)

I’ve recently had a chance to meet Mike and Jonathan in Atlassian’s San Francisco offices, and frankly was blown away by their enthusiasm, the company’s growth, but most importantly by a demo of Confluence, the market-leading enterprise wiki.

Market-leading? Never heard of them, you may say …. Certainly they enjoy a lot less brand recognition than let’s say JotSpot or Socialtext, both of which enjoyed abundant PR from the moment they launched, largely thanks to Joe and Ross‘s star-power. (Hey Joe, you were my early inspiration to get started with blogging, time for YOU to post again!). Lacking the “instant brand”, Atlassian spent their money on product development instead of PR, and it has obviously paid off. Watch this video for background:

Less PR or not, they are not exactly unknown to customers, as Confluence’s corporate market share is more than the others put together. From what I understand Confluence’s sweet spot is larger organizations, where administration, sophisticated permissioning schemes (groups, pages, activities…etc.) scalability, performance are increasingly important. (Yes, permissioning kinda goes against the social, “we’re-all-contributors” nature of wikis, but it’s a fundamental corporate requirement). The largest implementations currently run up to 30k users, but Atlassian is working on a clustered release that will be scalable to hundreds of thousands of users. Pricing also reflects the focus on large corporations: while at the entry-level Confluence is typically more expensive, at the high end (large user-base) it costs less then either Socialtext or Jot.

Despite it’s impressive feature-set and favorable price Confluence is not an available choice for some customers; namely those who are determined to use SaaS solutions. Confluence is strictly on-premise, download and install-behind-the-firewall software. Being a big believer in SaaS of course I would like to see them offer a hosted version, but today’s market reality is that only 10% of all software sold is SaaS. Atlassian’s own customer experience is that a lot of larger organizations do want their wiki behind the firewall, and competitors must have been receiving similar feedback, as both Socialtext and JotSpot are adding an installable product to their offering. However, Confluence may be missing out on the bottom-up, grassroots adoption by business users that both Jot and Socialtext are enjoying – at least until it becomes available on-demand.

And while the Founders did not have the star-power of their competitors 4 years ago, they are getting closer, having just received the 2006 Ernst & Young Eastern Region Young Entrepreneur of the Year award.. Watch the video of the Awards Ceremony here:

Congrat’s, Mike and Scott!

 

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Exciting Office 2.0 Events

IBDNetwork will organize another Under the Radar event, this time with an Office 2.0 theme on August 15th in Palo Alto. The event will showcase 4 companies:

Mike Arrington of TechCrunch will be moderating, and the presentations will be judged by a Panel of experts:

  • Etay Gafni, Director, Technology Innovation Center – SAP
  • Ismael Ghalimi, IT|Redux & CEO – Intalio
  • Peter Rip, Managing Director – Leapfrog Ventures
  • Sam Schillace, Software Engineer – Google/Writely

There’s more information on the Zvents site Zbutton and you can register here. You can also participate in advance even if you can’t attend, by visiting the event wiki and posting questions, stories on this page.

Tomorrow’s gathering will be the prelude to the larger scale Office 2.0 Conference to be held in San Francisco, October 12-13, 2006, organized by IT Redux. I will post further details as they become known.

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Do You Like the New Technorati? Poll Results

Here are the poll results, based on 347 354 votes:

Do you like the new Technorati? - http://www.zohosheet.com

Since I am still getting quite a few page hits (thanks for the link, Robert), for now I’ve left the poll open and will continue to update the numbers.  The poll is now closed, thanks for your participation.

(Poll taken by Zoho Polls, chart created by Zoho Sheet.)

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Helping Bloggers in India

India is a democracy, I simply don’t believe the current blog censorship will stay in force for very long… but for now it hurts. I myself have Indian readers, and I also follow some blogs based in India, in our global world I’m sure most of my readers do so. Bloggers from all around the world are trying to help. Here are just two of several resources: India Censored, Bloggers Collective.

I’d like to do my little bit, in case the ways to circumvent to blockage don’t work for someone, I’m offering my fellow bloggers from India a temporary home for your thoughts; email me your articles and I’ll publish them on my blog, under your name. (My email is the domain name of this blog at gmail)

Related posts:


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Email is Still Not Dead

( Updated )
Yet-another-email-is-dead-article, this time from the Chicago Tribune, via Paul Kedrosky. It’s the same old argument: teenagers using IM, or increasingly SMS, instead of email which they find cumbersome, slow and unreliable – hence email usage will decline.

I beg to disagree. Sure, I also get frustrated by the occasional rapid-fire exchange of one-liners, when by the 15th round we both realize the conversation should have started on IM. Most of teenagers’ interaction is social, immediate, and SMS works perfectly well in those situations.

But ask teenage entrepreneur Ben Casnocha how many emails he receives and responds to daily on his Blackberry, even while sitting in class – I know first hand he responds fast. We all enter business, get a job..etc sooner or later, just not at age 12 like Ben with. Our communication style changes along with that – often requiring to a build-up of logical structure, sequence, or simply a written record of facts, and email is vital for this type of communication.

Email is being “attacked” from another direction though: for project teams, planning activity, collaboratively designing a document, staging an event… etc email is a real wasteful medium. Or should I say, it’s the perfect place for information to get buried. This type of communication is most effective using a wiki.

No, email is not dead, and it won’t be any time soon. But we all have to learn to use the right tool in the right situation.

Update (7/20): A day after my post the Email is Dead discussion flares up again:

Update (9/7) Rod Boothby created this chart:

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