Open Spaces

After months of hard work it’s finally here: omCollab, the Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform that powers MIKE2.0 and our BearingPoint internal collaboration site. We have packaged up Mediawiki, Wordpress and omBookmarks (a fork of Scuttle) into a single collaboration platform that can be used to host powerful online communities on the web or inside organisations. It’s a comprehensive collaboration platform which combines the following features in one single, integrated platform:

• Wiki
• Blogs
• Social bookmarking
• Social networking
• Mashups
• Search

Please see omCollab Homepage for full details.

We have released omCollab to the open source community because we want to build the world’s most powerful open source Enterprise 2.0 platform. We will continue to invest time and effort to improve omCollab as it powers MIKE2.0, the open source methodology for Enterprise Information Management. We hope that we can get the open source community engaged to help contribute to omCollab.

If you want to know where we are going, what features we are planning to build and maybe offer your help to achieve this, please check out the omCollab roadmap.

Finally, if you just want to check out omCollab for yourself or maybe even power your online community with it, go to the omCollab download and installation page

Scuttle Bookmarks is another extension to MediaWiki software and provides a key piece of functionality to achieve a single, integrated content repository. It is a twin extension to OMBookmarks, which I have released a couple of weeks earlier. While OM Bookmarks is focused on retrieving and displaying bookmarks from the Open Methodology Bookmarks website (which is part of the MIKE2.0 collaborative environment) in your MediaWiki installation, Scuttle Bookmarks allows you to do the same but from a local installation of Scuttle.

The two extensions also follow two different architectural design patterns. The Scuttle Bookmarks extension is designed to be installed in the same domain (or server) which is hosting both your MediaWiki site and your Scuttle site. The extension uses client side JavaScript calls to query the Scuttle site for relevant bookmarks and then displays the result on the MediaWiki article page.

The OM Bookmarks extension will always be installed in domain different from the Openmethodology.org website which is hosting OM Bookmarks. If it were to follow the same architecture as Scuttle Bookmarks, a user would access his MediaWiki site (e.g. www.mycollaborationsite.com), which would provide a JavaScript that retrieves information from a third party (i.e.openmethodology.org). Sounds like malicious code, doesn’t it? This is called cross-domain scripting and is blocked by default by most modern browsers. Therefore, this extension was implemented with a server side http call which performs all the magic. And the user only sees the final result.

You might ask yourself now why all the fuss about JavaScript when the server side http call could be used for both extensions? Well, the simple answer is that part of us creating and improving the MIKE2.0 collaboration site, is to develop an open source software based solution to deliver enterprise 2.0 collaboration to customers. And JavaScript http and PHP http are just two more guns we now have in our toolkit that we can offer clients.

2 projects, 20 flights and 4 cities later here I am back at the keyboard. Work has been a little crazy over the last couple months. This doesn’t mean, that I haven’t been working on cool stuff for MIKE2.0 with MediaWiki. It’s just that I haven’t had any time yet to tell you guys about it! Over the next couple of weeks I will make time to release some of my work to the open source community again.

One vision with building a standard around MIKE2.0, the open source Information Management standard, is to enable us (BearingPoint) but also the community to hook into the open source standard. Nowadays you would probably call this a “standard mashup”. For MIKE2.0 we termed it “Integrated Content Repository“. Last year, we did about 1,600 projects in Information Management and we are trying hard, to link all of our assets (templates, tools, standards etc.) into the MIKE2.0 standard to prove to ourselves and also to our customers that we can deliver complex IM projects, across many topical areas under one common standard. And that common standard shall be maintained and extended by on open source community. In order for that community to benefit from the standard the same way we do, we need to provide a framework and the tools to link their internal and private efforts into the open standard.

The API Query Extension allows users to query the API of another Mediawiki. In version 1, we focus on retrieving all articles that are part of a certain category and displaying this list within another wiki page. The below screenshot shows how we can include a simple box with a blogroll view of articles within a wiki page. This allows us publish and edit internal, private content on our internal wiki, but at the same time make the user aware that there is open source content (solutions, standards, best practices etc.) available as well.

The parameters of the extension allow you to specify the type of query and to restrict the query with search terms. The Mediawiki API is still in its infancy, but already provides some great opportunities for integrating multiple wikis based on loose coupling (web services or http queries). As the Mediawiki API will grow in functionality, so I hope that the community will help to build out the API Query Extension to provide better and greater results.

The new API Query Extension is the first mosaic stone in the set of tools we need to make this integrated content repository work. More will follow in the near future…hold tight!

Ever heard of Twitter? If yes, then you are part of the social networking software crowd. If not, there is still hope for you…

Twitter is a micro-blogging service where users post mini-updates on their whereabouts, what they are doing and how they are feeling. It adds another dimension to the personalisation of the internet. User can update their personal profile via SMS, instant messaging or email. This creates some kind of a blog, although the information content of the posting is only valid and valuable for a short amount of time, because of its immediacy in nature.

And why do I write about it? The mantra of Enterprise 2.0 is to “release early, release often” and to tap into the user community for feedback to drive your future functionality and releases. This makes it inevitable to have downtime on your site when you are rolling out new software.  But you can be funny and honest about it, as the guys at Twitter have shown us the other day:

A quick search on the internet for Twitter then showed me where we are in the hype cycle of Web 2.0. 9 out of 10 hits were talking about how to make money off Twitter-like technologies. Are we back in the bubble? Or is it different this time? If you believe the latter, then read on the Influential Marketing Blog about “a few non-boring ways to use Twitter for marketing“…

I just came across a KPMG whitepaper called Enterprise 2.0: Fad or Future written by Gary Matuszak. It contains a nice collection of case studies of companies using social software (wikis, blogs, RSS, mashups etc.). Gary sees the value of Enterprise 2.0 in:

• Knowledge sharing and management
• Problem solving
• Innovation
• Collaboration

I think we also need to realise that in the enterprise cost reduction, revenue generation and customer service can never be left out of the equation. Enterprise 2.0 performs well in these categories as well. Here are some simple examples for each category:

• Cost reduction – Wikis and blogs as customer-facing publishing tools improve customer self-service levels and therefore reduce help desk costs
• Revenue generation – Blogs can personalise a company and put a face with its services and products. This removes a barrier to engage with people in the online world and will increase online sales
• Customer service – Social software adds another channel to the communication with customers. Empowered customers are happier customers!

The full paper is available here.

It’s here, finally! A Mediawiki extension that combines a tag cloud and Google Suggest like features to categories. It’s called SelectCategoryTagCloud and version 1.0 is available on http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SelectCategoryTagCloud.

Let me explain how and why we did this. A couple of weeks ago Jeremy wrote about how taxonomies and folksonomies are complimentary. In a simplified view of Mediawiki and Enterprise 2.0, categories are as close to a taxonomy as you can get. You can pre-define categories, nest them to create a hierarchy or automatically include them in templates that you force on certain pages (and therefore the page itself becomes a member of the category). However, categories also allow users to create horizontal or lateral views on content that is otherwise stored in a hierarchical or sequential manner. In wikis you create a link from a top page or home page to a sub page to a sub page and so on. You can then link from one sub page to another one, but if you want to see what pages deal with the same topic, you have to navigate through them one by one (either hierarchically or in sequence). Categories allow you to group pages that share a common topic into categories by simply ‘tagging’ the page with a category name. Here is a screenshot of an article with 4 categories applied to it:

If you want to see all pages in that category, you just need to click on the category name and Mediawiki displays all pages that are part of the category. The following screenshot show all pages in the category MIKE2 Activities:

A couple of extensions to Mediawiki exist that have attempted to solve the problem of suggesting categories to users, visualising what categories are popular and applying the style of Web 2.0 applications to categories. But none of them have achieved to provide the usability and simplicity of applying tags to bookmarks as Deli.cio.us and Digg have done.

My first step was to review existing extensions to see how much code reuse is possible. As a professor of mine at university used to tell me, copying code gets you expelled from school, but awards in the corporate world . I found two extensions that were particularly useful (SelectCategory and WikiCategoryTagCloud). Credits to the developers of these extensions, because their code was to become the basis of my new extension which I named ‘SelectCategoryTagCloud’ in their honor.

The first step was to refactor the Wiki Tag cloud to be displayed on the edit page (and then further on the upload file page) of a Mediawiki article. Users are now able to see what categories are popular on the site and what categories are already assigned to the article. Take note of the simple visual marki-up of the existing categories.

The second step was to extend the functionality by adding an input box that would list all categories that are already assigned to the article. So instead of having to type the category command [[Category:CategoryName]] into the regular edit field or having to hunt down where the original user had put the command, users now have one single place where all categories are managed. Users can click on any of the categories in the tag cloud which adds it to the list of categories. Clicking on a category that already exists in the list removes it.

Finally, I needed to solve the problem that a tag cloud can only display so many categories as feasible to show on screen. Wikipedia has something like 150,000 categories, can you imagine how their category tag cloud would look like?! In my extension the number of displayed categories can be limited by setting a minimum count number for articles that are part of the category.

But how about all the other categories that don’t fit into the tag cloud but which we still want to encourage the users to reuse?!! So I added a category suggestion feature, similar to Google Suggest. When the user starts typing the initial characters of existing categories, the extension will display suggestions of existing categories right below the category input box. This not only encourages reuse of existing categories, but also reduces the amount of categories with similar names and typos. Check out this screenshot to see suggestions on the initial characters ‘Bu’:

The user is presented with 3 suggestions (Business Activity Monitoring, Business Intelligence Offering Group, Business Solution Offerings) and can select any of them with a simple mouse click. And because it’s all AJAX based, the lookup and suggest feature is kicked off in the background and doesn’t interfere with the user’s typing.

So what’s the next steps? Well, this is a first stab at applying some of the Web 2.0 features like tag clouds and suggestion to Wikis. Next I would like to apply a more formal approach to social bookmarks to complete the circle of taxonomies and folksonomies. Specifically, I will work on how to apply categories created in Mediawiki to Scuttle, an open source bookmarking software. This great software hasn’t really received any development support over the last year or so, but we have been using it internally and we believe that this will be another piece in our work to glue Web 2.0 technologies together to provide a solid, open source Enterprise 2.0 offering for collaboration.

Since having started working on the MIKE2.0, I had to rethink the way I personally participate in the Enterprise 2.0 world. I have been publishing a personal web site for quite some time and have been using instant messaging and profession networking software. But I have en large ignored the new breed of Web 2.0 technologies. As they are seeping into our professional lives, one has to adapt his work practices in order to keep up. Don’t stay stuck in the age of email and voicemail. Here is my list of things you need in order to upgrade yourself to the age of Enterprise 2.0:

1. A new life starts with a new browser. And none is cooler than Firefox. With all the add-ons available, it’s arguably the best browser out there!
2. Immerse yourself in the world of Google:
   • Get rid of your Hotmail account and sign up for Gmail.
   • While you are at it, download Google Talk. Everyone of your colleagues and friends who uses Gmail will automatically be available for chat and free phone calls.
   • Free the hidden gems on your hard drive and download Google Desktop.
   • Get your pictures sorted with Picasa and Picasaweb.
3. And because one also wants to make VOIP calls to regular phones, sign up for Skype.
4. You also need to get your bookmarks sorted. Why not put them online so that you can access them from wherever you need? Check out Del.icio.us or Digg.
5. Build your professional community with LinkedIn.
6. Blur the line between personal and professional friends on Facebook. Don’t get scared by the plain front page. Once you are in, there are 25 million people waiting to ‘get back in touch with you’.
7. Extend your shelf life by getting your own avatar and diving into your Second Life.
8. Get serious about sharing your knowledge and experience on your corporate Wiki. Ask around, chances are that someone in your organisation will have already put up a Wiki somewhere and that a whole bunch of people are already wiki-ing away…
9. Pick a topic where you have professional expertise and which you are passionate about and start a blog (Typepad, Blogger, Wordpress or Livejournal)

So what’s all of this about? This is about getting yourself sorted out. Call it your personal brand. You are worth it!

If the above list isn’t exhaustive enough for you, then check out Todd Stephens’ “15 Ways to Professionally Brand You” for more ideas.

50 (!) people showed up at the last London Wiki Wednesday that Sean and I hosted at BearingPoint’s offices in London. The sign-up sheet gave us a little bit of a scare because we didn’t expect more than 25-30 people, but in the end it was a great success. Check out what happened. The format of the event has slightly evolved over the last couple of months. The early ones were marked by a series of speed presentations on various topics (software demos, website demos, business pitches, project experiences etc.). Last evening we had a couple of longer discussions. I think that this might be the way to go forward as it really raised the bar in terms of depth and value of the discussions.

One of the key topics discussed was the security and contribution model of Wikis. Wikis have been popping up all over the place because of the inherent need of online collaborative authoring. A Wiki is a place for open collaboration with many users contributing content or making changes to existing content. However, out of my experience in deploying Wikis in corporations, this notion of open Wikis for the enterprise requires some extra thoughts. For MIKE2.0, the open source Enterprise Information Management methodology, we have developed and having been discussing for quite a while now four alternative release models:

1. Open Model (minimal protection only against vandalism)
2. Hierarchy Model (a governance body controls the changes and release cycles to the core content)
3. Federated Model (domain leads ‘own’ their sections of the content)
4. Branch Model (create an alternative page when a protected core page is edited)

The discussion during the event got heated when we suggested that Enterprise 2.0 requires control of content beyond what we have seen in familiar web Wiki communities. Adopting anything else than an open model brought up the question whether this would diminish the value of using Wiki technology altogether and whether alternative technologies (like content management systems) wouldn’t be better suited. The discussion moved on to specific examples from the corporate world (HR policies, employee handbooks etc.) where Wiki technologies are a great enabler for online collaborative authoring but where access controls (read for many, write only for a select group) needed to be in place.

MIKE2.0 is currently set up with the hierarchy model. We believe that in order for MIKE2.0 to be successfully adopted by organisations to run large scale Enterprise Information Management projects, there needs to be a certain level of trust that the underlying methodology is not going to change every other week. We will establish a governance body selected from a community of active contributors and experts that is meritocracy based. We will continue to monitor how effective it is and whether we need to adapt it.

Anyone considering to deploy Enterprise 2.0 technologies (be it Wikis, blogs, forums, IM etc.) needs to give extra thought on what can be gained by adding extra layers of security on top of basic requirements and what will be lost in regards to contributions, community and culture. This requires a case by case decision based on experience and based on the culture that exists within your corporation.

I have started working on BearingPoint’s collaboration environment for our new Information Management (IM) Solution Suite. IM is one of our two global solution messages for 2007 (Risk and Compliance being the other). It encompasses all of our information and data management focused solutions including:

• Business Intelligence
• Information Asset Management
• Access, Search and Delivery
• Enterprise Data Management
• Enterprise Content Management
• Information Architecture, Strategy and Governance

In order to support the collaboration on more than 100 solutions in this solution suite, we are deploying Enterprise 2.0 technologies (including Wikis and social bookmarking tools). I am working with a team of smart and energetic people (Jeremy Thomas, Sean McClowry and many more) on developing an innovative approach for knowledge management and collaboration. The vision of this project is not only to deliver an effective collaboration environment in support of our solutions, but also to develop an innovative approach to Enterprise 2.0 and collaboration itself, by virtue of solving the key issues of deploying Enterprise 2.0 technologies in a large corporation.

BearingPoint’s front page to IM is called MIKE2.0, an open source methododology for delivering Information Management projects. Follow our progress on the site over the next couple of months. And if you are an Information Management Professional, please contribute.

The journey begins…