Category: NV08 (Northern Voice 2008)

Wiki 101 at Northern Voice Internet Bootcamp

Stewart Mader is presenting on Wiki 101 during the nv08 Internet Bootcamp. Somebody asked him about what a wiki is, and he quoted a Business Week article that discussed various purposes of wikis. He mentioned that organizations are often hesitant to using wikis since there is fear about open access with rights.

Organizations can use wikis for keeping and updating agenda items, posting meeting minutes, and team participation with ownership of maintaining and revising content.

Stewart then spoke about a number of wiki tools and programs. I wish he would have had the names of the programs written on a slide or on the blackboard since I could not keep up with all them. I did catch wikimatrix.org, which helps people and organizations select which wiki tools to use.

He suggested running a pilot within organizations when bringing a new tool. Get a few people to begin using a tool and then spread it with a small group. This reminded me of the work in some of the quality and practice improvement work I do in my full-time position.

Wikis, to work, should begin with a BarnRaising so everybody begins together with using the new tool. This seems to be very collaborative, but my experience is that many people within organizations want the work to get done and assume others are “assigned” to do it.

He is using a number of “patterns” of wiki adoption, or rather terms that are used to describe the successful implementation of the wiki within an organization.

“If your staff is doing all this, then what value are you bringing to the organization.” If this is the case, then it seems that level of middle management is not valuable or really needed. This was in reply to a question I had about motivating hierarchical organizations to share in the collaborative environment of wikis. This is similar to the challenges of implementing and using knowledge management applications within organizations.

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Using Virtual Collaborative Spaces

I like the idea of creating space for virtual collaboration, something available within the Intranet, so everybody can access it. This is related to paramedics and having a space for them to collaborate.

They are suing SharePoint, which has a document library as well as discussion space, etc. They have issues with access to their site.

Somebody just interrupted her and asked her to move on so there could be interaction. I just shared a comment about creating content there first, and then trying to sell the system to users. People will not go to the SharePoint system unless there is a reason to go there first.

They are having challenges with encouraging collaboration on their site. A person who used to be an academic shared how there is a body of literature with suggestions for addressing these issues.

Another person shared the concept of starting with the personal and then moving to the professional.

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Using Blogs for Progressive Political Change and Agitation

Kathleen Milberry who blogs at Geeks and Global Justice is speaking about her blog and how it is related and integrated into her dissertation research. She stated that blogs are really amenable to political activism.

Marc Lee then spoke about his work at his website, The Progressive Economics Forum. Marc uses Dreamhost and likes it, which certainly is counter to many of the other recent complaints I hear about the host. He finds this useful for real-time commentary, especially for reaching the blogosphere before things formally hit the media.

This session seems to be about sharing what Kathleen and Marc do with their blogs for political and research reasons. As a session in the Unconference, it did not have a specific and formal “point” outside of sharing their work and vision.

Interesting DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) in the US that allows people to contact a domain host to effectively stop people from using stolen content. Somebody stated that people who are doing political blogging should be familiar with this, since people can complain about things and then the host can shut down the domain very quickly.

Somebody just recommended Alex King’s Share This WordPress widget. Will have to check it out.

People are sharing a lot of great Canadian / American concepts and content. What an open group of people with a wide variety of expertise who are willing to share and help one another. This is one of the reasons why I am so fond of Northern Voice!

Kathleen just mentioned that political and activist blogging is a great act of empowerment. That fits so well with my blog name, Silence and Voice!

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Blogging 101 at Northern Voice 2008

Northern Voice has started with the Unconference today. I will be doing a lot of liveblogging along the way using Windows Live.

I decided to attend Blogging 101, the first of the sessions in Internet Bootcamp. Richard Eriksson of Raincity Studios presented. I decided that I wanted to see the approach that this stream is taking as I will be speaking about Liveblogging 101 later today at 2:00 pm.

Richard just made an interesting comment about adding blog comments. He mentioned that he adds his own comments to his own blog to help make his blog more conversational as well as to add more information

Somebody added a comment about writing about your blog’s purpose, whatever that purpose may be.

Richard then spoke about RSS feeds, and I shared a comment about subscribing to RSS feeds for academic journals. There are a number of academic journals I read (or at least want to see the content that is being published), and I subscribe to them using FeedDemon (which I have used for years, constantly gets better each year, and is now free!).

Richard is giving a good introductory session right now. He made good use of PowerPoint slides, following some of the best practices of having no more than six words per slide. While there are many reasons to use PowerPoint, for a presentation like this the few words per slide is really valuable.

Richard was discussing Event blogging and Liveblogging. He discussed how liveblogging can involve adding date stamps each time a post is updated. I think that may be useful if using a service such as Cover It Live, but that system (with great bells and whistles) is still a little bulky to use.

Twitter is a great microblogging platform, using only 140 characters. I Tweet at http://twitter.com/JeffreyKeefer. Sketchblogging is a concept I am not very familiar with, but it reminds me of Hugh’s work.

Tumbleblogging is something I am not very familiar with, so will have to look into this a bit more later. Mental note to myself.

Now that the time for this is running out, I see that lots of people still seem to have lots of questions. Good to leave a session with continued interest still there.