Wiki

I attended an excellent talk last night about GCPedia that was presented by Jeff Braybrook, Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Canada at a Third Tuesday Ottawa Gathering. It was excellent to hear more about the history of the adoption of the open source tool Mediawiki within the Government of Canada. Jeff described Canada's CTO office as being "Hawkish about open source", and wanting to use it as much as possible. At a time when procurement officers and IT departments are still questioning whether or not open source can be used within government, this was great news.

His view that wiki's would become as integrated in the government workplace as the phone and email were very refreshing too. Grabbing notes off of Joseph Thornley's Tweet, "Jeff Braybrook wants to open source not just because it is cheap - but also for its mentality: participation; cooperation; standards." Doug wrote up a detailed post about the event here in his blog.

I've been watching government slowly getting onto the Wiki bandwagon over the last several months.  It's been exciting to hear about it evolve in NRCan's internal wiki and most recently really take off with GCpedia (internal wiki).  Both sites have gotten a great deal of well deserved attention within the government and have won awards for their innovation. 

Wikipedia has clearly demonstrated that a community of dedicated users can produce high quality, timely documentation about a wide range of issues that concern them. Wikipedia is being used by everyone as a resource these days, and Wikipedia is based on an open source PHP/MySQL application called MediaWiki.  MediaWiki is used by a wide range of companies like Novell, Intel, Pfizer, Siemens AG, and a great many more.

Lawrence Lessig is an American law professor who gave an excellent podcast through IT Conversations on political reform in the United States.  Lessig is known largely for his work on open source legal issues and has been very influential in making open source main stream. 

It is always useful to learn more about the US political system since their country has such a huge effect on ours.  Looking at ways to create reform, even when the whole system is all about supporting the status quo. 

Updated Dec. 18, 2008 (notes in bold)

Recently we set up a wiki for a client as a tool for collaborative documentation. They are running the new version of Drupal, 6, which includes some changes to content types, modules and so on. In this case, the wiki content had to fit in with page, blog and other content without missing a beat.

The great news is hat wiki's are becoming mainstream these days and increasingly we are being approached by people particularly in government who want to adopt some type of collaborative and spontaneous editing environment that made wiki's famous. Unfortunately some of the elements of wiki's that have made them successful also makes them more difficult to adopt by non-technical and more bureaucratic organizations.  

The quicktags module provides a tinymce-button-style solution for formatting wiki posts. Quicktags adds buttons to the textarea and uses on-the-fly generated javascript. It is not a wysiwyg editor, but something far simpler: It simply inserts the basic code into your textarea.

Here is a screenshot of quicktags in action:

We've finally brought our wiki back home, and I am sure glad that we did. OpenConcept has used a wiki for years, but last year we tried to have more documents hosted on Basecamp and to reduce the number of tools we were using on a regular basis. It had some of the functionality that we'd come to expect from using wiki's locally, but the Writeboards just didn't have the flexibility and organic nature that we were used to. Documents were created and edited, but the organization of those documents just didn't flow at all.

To set up a wiki for the OpenConcept site, I followed instructions on how to set up a wiki with Drupal 5 (an archived version of the instructions here ).

Below, I indicate which of those instructions I followed, and where I deviated from the instructions. In any case where I deviated from the instructions, I have indicated this with CAPITAL LETTERS.

Note that there is one patch that was applied, which affects the img_assist module and the pearwiki_filter module.

I was helping provide a short workshop on implementing a wiki for a union last week and was asked about gathering a list of links through a wiki. It is certainly possible, but I thought it was also useful to explore the the idea of using a social bookmarking site like Del.icio.us to gather/organize those links.

I've been listening to some very interesting podcasts lately on Open Source Conversations, the best have been focused on the concept of the wiki. The most inspiring have been Mitchell Kapor's Wikipedia and Knowledge Communities and the panel discussion with Josh Bancroft, Ned Gulley and a few others, available in the podcast's archive, Wikis in Enterprises - Wikimania 2006.

It's been a week or so since I listened to Mitchell's talk. Couple things that struck me from this was the fact that despite the fact that Wikipedia is having a huge impact on how we work, and how we will do so in the future, it has only two staff people - everyone else is a volunteer (including the system administrators). Was also encouraging to hear that it is running using the PHP application MediaWiki and MySQL - it has certainly scaled well! It was also great to learn more about Wikipedia, it's history, struggles in the community and where Mitchell things it is going to be going in the future. It is interesting to think how this type of participatory documentation/communication could have impacts on our society. Being able to provide a comprehensive and growing encyclopedia within the One Laptop Per Child Project is a relatively simple, yet powerful outcome.