eekim.com > EEK Speaks

Mon, Feb 26, 2007

Being Ambushed by Terrell Russell    #

GailTaylor told me an excellent story last Saturday that reminded me of an incident at the Internet Identity Workshop this past December. I was doing something that I am deeply opposed to -- participating in a face-to-face conference without being fully present. Basically, I was sitting in the middle of the space doing work on my laptop while everyone else was participating in the conference. I felt guilty about it, but I wanted to talk to some people while they were in town, and I had a ton of work to do at the same time.    (LWP)

So I gave a talk on IdentityCommons, attended a few presentations, talked to a few people, and spent the rest of my time doing my work and ignoring everyone else. It was actually quite nice. I was sitting in the middle of the large conference room at the Computer History Museum, visible to everyone, with people constantly milling around me. People who knew me stopped by to chat for a few minutes; people who didn't just ignored me.    (LWQ)

Towards the end of the second day, I was basking in my productive anti-socialness, when a fellow who was sitting at my table started making small talk. It was harmless chatter, stuff that I could respond to while remaining focused on my work, but at some point, it felt wrong continuing to talk without introducing myself. Turns out the guy was TerrellRussell of claimID fame. I knew about claimID, but I knew nothing about Terrell. The same could not be said of him, who had known all along who I was, and who apparently follows this blog. (Hi, Terrell!)    (LWR)

That bastard must have used that knowledge against me, sharing ideas that he must have known would suck me into conversation. Either that, or he was just a nice guy who was passionate about his work. Either way, it worked. I ended up closing my laptop and having a great conversation with him.    (LWS)

What was he doing that I found so compelling? It was his Ph.D. research on ContextualAuthorityTagging. The basis of the idea is simple: The best way to identify an authority on a topic is not to ask people to self-identify themselves as such, but to ask others to identify the people they consider to be the authorities. We can leverage this principle to locate expertise by building tagging systems where users tag other users with information about their expertise.    (LWT)

Terrell has thought really deeply about this, and several of his ideas are documented at his website and on his blog. PhilWindley and DavidWeinberger have also commented on his work.    (LWU)

I heard more original ideas about tagging in that 20 minutes of conversation than I've ever heard from anyone else. The one that really struck me was the notion of tag disparities: comparing what people say about you to what you say about yourself as a way of measuring reputation. Sound familiar? It's a real-life instantiation of the SquirmTest!    (LWV)

I think there are some interesting tools that can be built on these ideas, and I have no doubt that Terrell will build them. There are also some face-to-face group exercises based on these same principles, and I've actually done one of them before (described below). You could also apply these ideas towards group evaluation.    (LWW)

I've been vividly reminded of our conversation on two occasions. The first happened later that week at the BlueOxenAssociates anniversary party. PeterKaminski decided to do some social engineering of his own, and instead of asking people what they did, he asked them to tell him about someone else attending the party. Real-life, face-to-face, ContextualAuthorityTagging! We actually did this for real at the 2005 anniversary party, where we had people literally stick name tags on other people's back. It was an idea I stole from ChrisMessina, who in turn had stolen it from a previous SuperHappyDevHouse gathering.    (LWX)

The second occasion happened this past Saturday. Gail recounted a story about a group exercise with five people, where each person was asked to write ten words that have to do with "love." Out of the 50 total words, only three were the same! It was a stark lesson on how challenging it is to achieve SharedUnderstanding and how critically important SharedLanguage is.    (LWY)

/collaboration | Posted at 10:57pm

Group Counting Icebreaker    #

One of the sessions I sat in on at last week's Nonprofit Software Development Summit was, "Hierarchy on the Fly: Making Collaborative Projects Work Without Predefined Structures." AmandaHickman and MarkLibkuman, the leaders of the session, discussed some specific cases, and we also had a good discussion about general issues.    (LWG)

The discussion reminded me of an ice-breaking exercise I learned from DeborahMeehan at the LeadershipLearningCommunity: Group Counting. The goal is for the group to count to the size of the group. In other words, if there are ten people, the group counts to ten. Each person may only say one number, with the leader of the exercise starting the process with "one." If two people say the same number at the same time, the group has to start over.    (LWH)

If you have a large group, you generally won't get through the count successfully. After failing a few times, tell everyone to close their eyes. Breathe deeply. Listen to your breathing. Listen to the breathing of your peers. Be present, and be aware of the presence of your peers. Then, with your eyes still closed, try it again.    (LWI)

When we tried this with a group of 14, it worked. When we tried it the following day with a group of 35, it also worked.    (LWJ)

Playing this game successfully with large groups seems to be a task that is crying out for top-down hierarchy. Maybe our intuition is wrong. Maybe we can -- as a group -- be aware of each other and learn to act as one without having someone tell us how to act. The group counting exercise seems to imply as much.    (LWK)

I'm planning to try this exercise on a teleconference sometime. If you try this exercise with your group, please let me know how it goes.    (LWL)

/collaboration | Posted at 9:40pm

The Blue Oxen Way    #

Back when ChrisDent and I started BlueOxenAssociates, we often referred to something called the TheBlueOxenWay. It was something that we both understood and recognized, but that we never actually articulated. Over the years, I tried to rectify this, and I generated pages and pages of notes (including three years worth of rambling blog posts) in the process, to no avail.    (LVU)

Recently, Chris articulated his visions for "Wiki Everywhere," where he referenced some of our early conversations. As I read it, I relived many of these discussions, and suddenly, it all clicked for me.    (LVV)

The essence of TheBlueOxenWay can be boiled down into three ideas, each of which form the framework for our entire philosophy about collaboration:    (LVW)

The SquirmTest    (LW0)

The SquirmTest is a thought experiment for measuring the amount of SharedUnderstanding in a group by observing the amount of squirming in a room. SharedUnderstanding (which is not the same as "same understanding") manifests itself in the formation of SharedLanguage. SharedLanguage is a prerequisite for collaboration.    (LW1)

Much of the messiness of the collaborative process can actually be attributed to lack of SharedLanguage. Great collaborative design accounts for this rather than wishing it away, which is how most of us deal with it.    (LW2)

SharedLanguage is TheRedThread that binds all of the crazy things I'm involved with, from PatternLanguages to Wikis, from face-to-face facilitation to organizational strategy. The SquirmTest is a wonderful embodiment of SharedLanguage.    (LW3)

Be LessDumb    (LW4)

If SharedLanguage is the tie that binds, then being LessDumb is the state that we are all striving to reach. Why are we playing this game in the first place? To be LessDumb, of course! As you go to bed every night, if you can't look in the mirror and say, "Today, I became LessDumb," then you're not doing your job.    (LW5)

LessDumb is the negative framing of "augmentation," but it sounds a heckuva lot better, and it embodies the same philosophy. Tools should make people LessDumb. Processes should make people LessDumb. How do we measure collaboration? One way is to see if we're LessDumb in the process.    (LW6)

That's obvious, you say? If it's so obvious, why do most tools and processes make us MoreDumb rather than LessDumb? And why are we so often willing to live with that? It may sound obvious, but are we really paying enough attention to this?    (LW7)

Bootstrapping    (LW8)

With LessDumb and SharedLanguage (as embodied by the SquirmTest), we have our target and the glue that keeps us together. Our process -- the way we get to our target -- is bootstrapping. Bootstrapping is building on top of things that already exist, then building on top of that. (The notion of bootstrapping is also the reason why we called ourselves BlueOxenAssociates.)    (LW9)

The most vivid images of my best experiences collaborating have to do with movement -- my actions resulting in other people's actions, which result in even more actions, which inspire me to act further. This is bootstrapping at its best.    (LWA)

PurpleNumbers are ultimately about building ideas on top of pre-existing ideas -- knowledge synthesis (i.e. becoming LessDumb) by reusing existing ideas. Also known as bootstrapping.    (LWB)

/blueoxen | Posted at 5:49pm

Collaboration as a System    #

I spent this past Saturday in Sebastopol "tutoring" GailTaylor, ToddJohnston, and TiffanyVonEmmel on online CollaborativeTools. I lured MatthewOConnor into helping by boasting of Gail, Todd, and Tiffany's deep thinking about and practice of collaboration.    (LVC)

One of our exercises was to walk through all of our respective digital workspaces, demonstrating how we read and wrote email, and worked with online tools. I had gotten some idea of how Matthew worked when we paired at the Wikithon earlier this month, but I was still blown away by his walkthrough. He's really thought deeply about his work processes and has optimized his online workspace accordingly.    (LVD)

Matthew expressed surprise that he was the only one who had done this, especially since I had proclaimed these folks to be gurus. I didn't have a chance to discuss this with him on Saturday, so I thought I'd post some thoughts about that here.    (LVE)

To be good at collaboration, you have to treat it as a system. That system includes things like communication, community, KnowledgeManagement, learning, and leadership.    (LVF)

Most CollaborativeTools companies are either in the communication or the KnowledgeManagement business. They're usually selling pipes, PIMs, or document management tools. All of those things have something to do with collaboration, but they are not in and of themselves collaboration. Then again, no tools are. A hammer is a tool for hammering, but it is not itself hammering.    (LVG)

When I think about HighPerformanceCollaboration, I envision groups with excellent GroupInformationHygiene. Ideally, you'd also like every member of the group to have outstanding PersonalInformationHygiene (like Matthew), but it's not a prerequisite. You'd like to see every member to be past a certain threshold of competence for all aspects of the system, but I don't think it's necessary for everyone to be great at all those things. On a great basketball team, you'd like everyone to be in good shape and have good fundamentals, but some players are going to be superior shooters while others will be great rebounders. It's not necessary, nor realistic, nor possibly desirable to have 12 MagicJohnsons on a team.    (LVH)

Implicit in my OneSmallChange post is that there is no one thing. I can think of a number of small, concrete changes that could result in significant improvements in collaboration. This is one of the main reasons why PatternLanguages -- collections of named, concrete patterns -- are fundamental to TheBlueOxenWay.    (LVI)

PersonalInformationHygiene is a critical pattern, because it fosters trust. My advice to groups with trust issues would be to eschew squishy exercises and look at people's PersonalInformationHygiene instead. However, past a certain level, I don't see great PersonalInformationHygiene as being the primary hallmark of a great collaborator.    (LVJ)

/collaboration | Posted at 11:41am

One Small Change    #

How do you improve the productivity of software developers? Software engineering guru, MartinFowler, has a surprising answer: Give them bigger screens.    (LV4)

Thinking like this fascinates me. In Super Size Me, filmmaker MorganSpurlock suggests that the way to improve U.S. schools is to eliminate junk food from cafeterias, and cites studies correlating physical education and test scores. Learning guru (and BlueOxenAssociates advisor) MarciaConner recently cited studies showing how outdoor education affects learning in the classroom.    (LV5)

In previous posts, I've speculated that improved geography skills will lead to better foreign policy decisions, and I've also discussed the role that more and better dialog might have on the world.    (LV6)

What would be OneSmallChange that would drastically improve the way you or your team collaborates? Post your ideas to your blog (and link back here), or Ideas send them to me.    (LV7)

/collaboration | Posted at 10:29am

Sat, Feb 24, 2007

Nonprofit Geek Trivia Winner    #

I spent two days this past week at Aspiration's Nonprofit Software Development Summit. I've organized several events with AllenGunn (Gunner), so it was fun to take off the organizer hat and just be a participant. I had no agenda going into the conference, which was also quite pleasant. I attended because I love the people in this community and because Gunner asked me to facilitate a session on usability. The summit did not disappoint. I caught up with old friends, made several new ones, gave the ol' noggin a vigorous workout, and had a ton of fun overall.    (LUH)

I ended up participating more actively than I had originally planned. It started with my usability session, which caused many to mistakenly assume that usability was my specialty. I decided to rectify this the following day by offering an ad-hoc skill-sharing session on throwing kick-ass collaborative events. We had a great group of high-energy people in that crowd, and the wisdom sharing was decidedly bi-directional.    (LUI)

At the last minute, Gunner asked me if I would do a SpeedGeeking session on HyperScope. I was hesitant at first, because it had been months since I last spoke about HyperScope and because I had never quite gotten my presentation down to five minutes. The best I had done previously was half an hour. Plus, people were already confused enough as to what I did for a living. Nevertheless, the hesitation quickly dissipated. I live for challenges like this.    (LUJ)

It turned out to be even more difficult, because there were 14 presentations. For those of you counting at home, that meant giving the same five minute presentation 14 times in a row, with no breaks in-between. My first and last two presentations were mediocre -- it took me a few rounds to get my pitch down, and I was exhausted by the end -- but I had a nice little streak in the middle.    (LUK)

Here's some cute historical trivia: I presented at the very first SpeedGeeking session (at the first AdvocacyDev three years ago). In my commentary then, I expressed doubts as to whether SpeedGeeking was a great format. Since then, I've seen it performed several other times, and I've watched it become popular in other venues, although I hadn't participated in another one until this past week. I'm now a full-fledged convert. My original criticisms still stand. What's swayed my opinion is that, when done right, SpeedGeeking is all about movement and positive group energy. (Gunner, of course, always facilitates them beautifully.) When executed poorly, it's an energy suck that degrades into hallway conversations.    (LUL)

Speaking of trivia, I couldn't bow out of the conference without participating in the Nonprofit Geek Trivia Contest. EvanHenshawPlath, MichalMach, LenaZuniga, and I formed The Flying Luas and dueled several other teams over questions such as:    (LUM)

Clearly, only the deeply disturbed had any chance of winning this competition. Guess who won?    (LUQ)

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/141/399585464_384c7e0280_m.jpg    (LUR)

I'm on a bit of a roll with these things. My secret? I'm the JohnSalley of the conference contest circuit.    (LUS)

The last question of the night was a five-point bonus question: Write a haiku about data loss. I took a short video of the results. In our collective defense, we consumed much alcohol that evening.    (LUT)

/events | Posted at 12:47am

Mon, Feb 19, 2007

What is Collective Leadership?    #

One of the reasons I joined the board of the LeadershipLearningCommunity (LLC) is that leadership and collaboration are closely related. But what exactly is the nature of this relationship? That is a question I've dutifully ignored for the past four years. Thankfully, the good folks at the LLC have unwittingly encouraged me to get off my lazy butt and think a little bit deeper about this question. Much of our discussion at the Evaluation Learning Circle last month was about CollectiveLeadership, which is also the theme for the upcoming Creating Space gathering. What the heck is "CollectiveLeadership"? I'll try my hand at that one too, but first things first.    (LTZ)

On Leadership    (LU0)

What does it mean to lead? When I think about the word, I envision movement in some direction. It could be shared movement among a group of people, or it could be individual movement (e.g. how you lead your life"). If it's shared movement towards a bounded goal, then by definition, it's collaboration.    (LU1)

There are many ways you can create shared movement. You could describe a vision, and encourage people to get there anyway they can. You could start moving in that direction yourself, and hope that others follow your example. Or you could pull people along, kicking and screaming. All of these are forms of leadership.    (LU2)

The word, "leader," implies the existence of a "follower," which suggests a power relationship. However, leadership is a role, not a title. Roles can be shared, and they can be reversed, depending on the context. They can be pre-assigned, and they can emerge.    (LU3)

People often assume that collaboration implies shared leadership. This is incorrect. Take dancing. Dancing almost always necessitates a single leader. The only exception I know of is contact improvisation (first explained to me by BradNeuberg), although I welcome other counterexamples from people who actually know how to dance.    (LU4)

The single leader is a pattern in many fields. In cooking, for example, there is almost always one executive chef. The word "chef" is French for "chief." In music, there is almost always a single leader. Orchestras have conductors, string quartets have first violinists. Even in jazz ensembles, someone always leads, and everyone else riffs off that person.    (LU5)

In rowing, you have the coxswain, who is responsible for navigating the boat and keeping the rowers in sync. Even though the coxswain does not physically contribute to the movement of the boat, the coxswain always trains with the rest of the rowers. Why? Trust and respect. If the coxswain did not participate in the training, the rest of the crew would not accept him or her as a member of the team, much less the leader.    (LU6)

On CollectiveLeadership    (LU7)

What about driving? Would you want multiple people driving a car at the same time? I sure as heck wouldn't.    (LU8)

Is the driver a leader? To the extent that he or she is moving the passengers in some shared direction, absolutely. But the driver is not necessarily the only person determining where to go. Who decided on the destination? Who is telling the driver how to get there?    (LU9)

All of these roles are legitimate leadership roles, and some of these could very well be shared among multiple people. Are they better when shared? That depends.    (LUA)

There are two factors that help us think through this question. The first is the boundedness of the goal. When you must achieve your goal very quickly, you don't necessarily have time to gain consensus on an issue. In these situations, having a single leader can be more efficient.    (LUB)

The second factor is the wickedness of the problem. When JeffConklin describes WickedProblems, he often shows people this chart:    (LUC)

http://www.cognexus.org/4660c8d0.gif    (LUD)

In the collaborative design process, there are people who ponder the problem first, and there are people who immediately dive into the solution. Neither is wrong. In fact, when problems are so complex (wicked), you don't even know what the exact problem is, then you need to attack the problem both ways. Our traditional notion of efficiency is no longer an option. Because we need to attack these kinds of problems in multiple ways, there are multiple opportunities for leadership. More importantly, there must be a shared vision for the end state, even if the path for reaching that end state is not universally shared.    (LUE)

For more thoughts on CollectiveLeadership, see my post, "Dumbells and Collective Intelligence."    (LUF)

/collaboration | Posted at 1:57pm

Leadership Learning Community    #

In the second half of 2006, I took a hard look at my list of projects and opportunities. I decided that I needed to be brutally honest about what I wanted to accomplish with BlueOxenAssociates, and that ultimately, I wanted two things:    (LTL)

  1. To have a wider impact    (LTM)
  2. To give more quality time to fewer projects.    (LTN)

That meant not renewing existing commitments and saying no to a lot of great people.    (LTO)

In the midst of all this, I got an email from ElissaPerry asking if I'd be interested in becoming a board member of the LeadershipLearningCommunity (LLC). LLC is a community that takes a network-centric approach to leadership development, focusing particularly on the graduates of the many foundation leadership programs across the entire sector. Elissa had participated in our first two FLOSS Usability Sprints, and we had chances here and there to chat about our respective work and organizations. We were definitely on the same philosophical plane, and I loved hearing about the great work LLC was doing.    (LTP)

That said, my first instinct was to say no. But I decided to sleep on it, and I started having second thoughts. When I started BlueOxenAssociates, I originally wanted to focus on the nonprofit sector, and while we shifted our strategy midway through our first year, my heart never left that space. Over the years, I met many great people in the sector, I worked with a number of foundations and two nonprofits (PlaNetwork and People for the American Way) as clients, I joined the board of a nonprofit (TomorrowMakers), and I did several projects with Aspiration, most notably the usability sprints. But I never got the chance to really get my hands dirty with one particular group. Focus was always the issue.    (LTQ)

Joining the board of LLC would give me the chance to focus my energies on one nonprofit and simultaneously impact the entire sector. If I were going to make that commitment to one organization, I wanted to make sure it was a good fit. I decided to research LLC a bit more, and the more I read, the more I felt kinship to the mission and the execution. In many ways, they were trying to do the same thing for leadership that I was trying to do for collaboration. I loved their emphasis on learning as well as their methodology. Most importantly, I saw ways that we could learn from each other.    (LTR)

In the end, I said yes. I was confident about my decision, but after participating in a board meeting and in one of their learning circles last month, I am ecstatic about it. Everyone there is smart, action-oriented, and full of heart, starting with the executive director, DeborahMeehan. That also goes for its board. The board meeting felt like... well, like one of BlueOxen's workshops. Except it wasn't a workshop, it was a board meeting! This was not your typical, sign-off-on-the-budget-so-we-can-go-drink meeting. This was a welcome-to-the-family, stretch-your-mind, now-get-down-to-business meeting, and it was infinitely more effective and fulfilling that way.    (LTS)

The learning circle, for me, sealed the deal. Not only did I get to watch the LLC staff do their thing, I was also blown away by the caliber of the participants, who were mostly from foundations. I live in an area and work in a field where I am constantly surrounded by brilliant people, and to be very frank, I have always been underwhelmed whenever I've attended gatherings of foundation people. This was a notable exception. I was struck by the breadth of experience, the depth and rigor of thinking, and the respectful and authentic discourse among the participants. My brain was overflowing by the end of the workshop.    (LTT)

As I said a few weeks ago, a week with the LLC generated enough thoughts to fill a thousand blog posts. I won't write that many, but I hope to spit out a few, starting with this one. In the meantime, if you're interested in leadership, check out the web site, participate in one of the learning circles, and come participate in the annual Creating Space workshop in Baltimore, April 11-13, 2007.    (LTU)

/forbenefit | Posted at 12:41am

Wed, Feb 14, 2007

Worldview, Diversity, and the iRAN Project    #

From KellanElliottMcCrea: Check out the iRAN Project, a Flickr collection of photos that show another side to life in Iran.    (LT5)

I'm a child of immigrants, and like all children of immigrants, I have a deep, almost biological understanding of what it's like to live in a world with multiple worldviews. On the surface -- well, perhaps just underneath the surface -- I'm as American as apple pie, but my ethnic heritage has had a significant impact on who I am. Perhaps my greatest skill is my ability to reconcile different worldviews. I attribute this ability to my ethnicity, to my upbringing, and strangely enough, to growing up in this great country.    (LT6)

MarkCuban recently said:    (LT7)

When you do something that the whole world thinks is difficult and you stand up and just be who you are and take on that difficulty factor, you're an American hero no matter what. That's what the American spirit's all about, going against the grain and standing up for who you are, even if it's not a popular position.    (LT8)

Cuban was talking about gay athletes in professional sports, but his statement resonates strongly with how I feel about this country's values in general. America isn't about tolerance. It's about embracing those who are different from us, embracing them because we know that we will be all the richer for it.    (LT9)

Forget about politics for a moment, and just think about people. When we speak from ignorance, when we act on simplistic assumptions about people who are different from us, we destroy the very value that makes this country strong. I don't even want to start a conversation about politics unless I know that those of us who are talking truly understand who we are talking about.    (LTA)

Two years ago, at the first WikiMania in [Frankfurt]?, I spent every evening breaking bread, talking, and laughing with folks who grew up in different countries, from Europe to Asia, from Latin America to the Middle East. Having been properly primed, I spent the following week in [Berlin]?, visiting friends and colleagues and absorbing my surroundings.    (LTB)

On my last day there, JanMuehlig told me that c-base was celebrating its 10th anniversary that evening, and he invited me to come celebrate with them. c-base is the German center of the underground artist and hacker universe. In addition to incubating a number of extraordinary collaborative projects, they regularly throw parties and host live music in their space, which looks like the remnants of a wrecked UFO.    (LTC)

I showed up at 9pm, and I didn't know anyone there. (Jan, like most people, didn't show up until after midnight.) I wandered out back, where people were eating and drinking in the cold, wet air on a river bank overlooking the city. Despite my lack of familiarity with the surroundings, I felt strangely at ease. People welcomed me, this complete stranger from America who had wandered into their space.    (LTD)

I had a long conversation with a tall, skinny fellow who had grown up in East [Berlin]?. He was a teacher and a new father, and he was about to marry his life-long sweetheart and the mother of his child. We talked about our day-to-day lives, the trials and tribulations of turning 30, and the state of the world.    (LTE)

At one point, I noted that twenty years ago, we were enemies. Now, we were sitting on a river bank in the former East [Berlin]?, drinking beers, laughing at each other's jokes, and sharing stories about our lives. Twenty years ago, I couldn't even imagine ever being where I ended up that drizzly evening. Now, when I think about Germany, I can't help but remember that night, the people I met, and the conversations I had.    (LTF)

Every time I travel, whether it's to the Midwest or halfway across the world, I am always moved by the experience. You can't fully replace the experience of travel, but you can evoke similar emotions and learnings in other ways. Projects like iRAN are beautiful, because they help us remember what it means to be human.    (LTG)

/collaboration | Posted at 1:52am

Tue, Feb 13, 2007

Visualizing Wiki Life Cycles    #

On the first day of WikiSym in Denmark last August, I spotted AlexSchroeder before the workshop began and went over to say hello. Pleasantries naturally evolved into a discussion about PurpleNumbers. (Yes, I've got problems.) Alex suggested that unique node identifiers were more trouble than they were worth, because in practice, nodes that you wanted to link to were static. Me being me, my response was, "Let's look at the numbers." Alex being Alex, he went off and did the measurements right away for CommunityWiki, and he did some followup measurements based on further discussions after the conference.    (LSP)

As it turned out, the numbers didn't tell us anything useful, but our discussions firmly implanted some ideas in my head about Wiki decay rates -- the time it takes for information in a Wiki page to stop being useful.    (LSQ)

I had toyed with this concept before. A few years ago, I came up with the idea of changing the background color of a page to correspond to the age of the page. A stale page would be yellowed; an active page would be bright white. I had originally envisioned the color to be based on number of edits. However, I realized this past week that I was mixing up my metaphors. There have been a few studies indicating a strong correlation between frequent edits and content quality, so it makes sense to indicate edit frequencies ambiently. However, just because content has not been edited recently does not mean the information itself is stale. You need to account for how often the page is accessed as well.    (LSR)

(At the Wikithon last week, KirstenJones implemented the page coloring idea. She came up with a metric that combined edits and accesses, which she will hopefully document on the Wiki soon! It's cool, and it should be easy to deploy and study. IngyDotNet suggested that the page should become moldy, a suggestion I fully endorse.)    (LSS)

This past Sunday, I had brunch with the SocialText BloomingtonBoys. Naturally, pleasantries evolved into Matthew and me continuing along our WikiAnalytics track, this time with help from ShawnDevlin and MattLiggett. We broke Wiki behavior into a number of different archetypes, then brainstormed ways to visually represent the behavior of each of these types. We came up with this:    (LST)

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/149/388587151_3f730b0a5c_m.jpg    (LSU)

The x-axis represents time. The blue line is accesses; the green line is edits. Edits are normalized (edits per view) so that, under normal circumstances, the green line will always be below the blue (because users will usually access a page before editing it). The exception is when software is interacting with the Wiki more than people. The whole graph should consist of a representative time-slice in that Wiki's lifespan.    (LSV)

The red line indicates the median "death" rate of Wiki pages. After much haggling, we decided that the way to measure page death was to determine the amount of time it takes for a page to reach some zero-level of accesses. We'll need to look at actual data to see what the baseline should be and whether this is a useful measurement.    (LSW)

The red line helps distinguish between archetypes that may have the same access/edit ratio and curve. For example, on the upper left, you see idealized Wiki behavior. Number of edits are close to number of accesses, both of which are relatively constant across the entire Wiki over time. Because it's a healthy Wiki, you've got a healthy page death rate.    (LSX)

On the upper right, you see a Wiki that is used for process support. A good example of this is a Wiki used to support a software development process. At the beginning of the process, people might be capturing user stories and requirements. Later in the process, they might be capturing bugs. Once a cycle is complete, those pages rapidly become stale as the team creates new pages to support a new cycle. The death line in this case is much shorter than it is for the idealized Wiki.    (LSY)

Again, one use of the Wiki isn't better than the other. They're both good in that they're both augmenting human processes. The purpose of the visualization is to help identify the archetypes so that you can adjust your facilitation practices and tools to best support these behaviors.    (LSZ)

This is all theory at this point. We need to crunch on some real data. I'd love to see others take these ideas and run with them as well.    (LT0)

/tech/wiki | Posted at 3:24pm

Wiki Analytics at the Wikithon    #

I got to put on my hacker hat for a day (a very rare occurrence for me these days) last Wednesday at the Wikithon. After trolling around for ideas, I decided to work on WikiAnalytics with MatthewOConnor. We ended up dominating the competition and winning the contest for best hack. (So what if there were only two teams eligible for two prizes?)    (LRI)

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/150/386792217_6d63faa621_m.jpg    (LRJ)

Our driving question was: How can we measure the health of a Wiki? I don't think there is one best way to use a Wiki, but there might only be three or four. If we can start teasing out patterns of Wiki usage, we can better understand how people collaborate with Wikis, which will help us better facilitate Wiki communities and improve Wiki software. Our goal was to tease out the patterns.    (LRK)

We used data from 266 public SocialText workspaces and SocialText's internal corporate workspace. You can read the details of our brainstorming and work on the SocialText STOSS Wiki. Our approach was to simplify our tasks so that we could have something to show at the end of the day. It was decidedly practical, but it also reflected a deeper philosophy about WikiAnalytics. Start simple and evolve. You can learn interesting things from even simple measurements.    (LRL)

Results    (LRM)

We chose to focus on two types of analysis: page name and graph (link) analysis. I hacked on the former; Matthew on the latter.    (LRN)

Frequent followers of this blog have heard me say it before: LinkAsYouThink is what makes Wikis powerful. The better your page names, the more interlinked your repository will be as you LinkAsYouThink. In order to see if I could measure "good" page names, I looked at three things:    (LRO)

The hypotheses are straightforward. Shorter names are better. Names with fewer tokens (words) are better. Names without non-alphanumeric characters are better. (This last hypothesis is complicated by internationalization.)    (LRS)

You can read the results of my analysis. The workspaces on the index page are ordered largest to smallest. The top two workspaces are full of spam and can be safely ignored. The numbers on the index page are buggy; click through to the individual pages to see the correct numbers.    (LRT)

Matthew studied the graph characteristics of the Wikis, specifically:    (LRU)

Islands of one are orphan pages (not linked to anywhere) and are undesirable. Large islands are better (or at least more interesting) than small ones.    (LRX)

You can view Matthew's results on his site.    (LRY)

Analysis    (LRZ)

To give you an idea of what the stats mean, let's look at four Wikis:    (LS0)

The mean number of characters and number of tokens for page names on each Wiki were:    (LS5)

On the surface, the two Wikis in the middle -- stoss and speakers -- seem to have hit the sweet spot for page names: between two to three words per name. Since stoss is meant to be a collaborative workspace for a larger community, this seems to be a healthy number. The speakers Wiki is a repository of potential speakers. Since the majority of pages consists of people's names, the numbers (two, sometimes three words in a page name) make sense.    (LSA)

The remaining two Wikis diverge enough from this minute data set that we can infer some different patterns of usage. st-rest-docs documents SocialText's REST API, so there are a lot of one word page names representing method names. Even though the average number of tokens is smaller, the average name length is comparable to the two Wikis in the middle. This also makes sense, given that the methods in a REST API are actually URI paths, which can get somewhat long.    (LSB)

On the surface, ivrwiki seems to exhibit the classic signs of a newbie dumping ground, with page names that are too long to be useful. However, if you dig deeper, you can see that that's not the case. The standard deviation of number of tokens is quite large (4.2), indicating a flat distribution curve. In other words, while there are a lot of long names, there are also a lot of short names. If you dig even further, you'll see that the community is using the Wiki as a question repository, and questions naturally have lots of words. Additionally, there seems to be a lot of more traditionally "Wiki-like" behavior on that Wiki.    (LSC)

This was no accident. The reason I'm showcasing ivrwiki is that Matthew identified it as an "interesting" Wiki from his graph analysis. Look at the numbers. There are three sizes of islands: 19 of one page, one of 16 pages, and one of 353 pages! That's one big island! It indicates a fairly tight set of linkages across the majority of the pages on a Wiki. Dig a bit deeper, and you can see the hub of the cluster: the Knowledge Base Index page. It links to every page in the knowledge base, and every page in the knowledge base links back to this page.    (LSD)

The st-rest-docs Wiki exhibits similar behavior -- one big island of 81 pages. This makes sense, given that this Wiki represents documentation, which is structured in a similar way to the ivrwiki knowledge base.    (LSE)

The stoss Wiki is the most Wiki-like of the four when you dig into the graph analysis. There are five sizes of islands, the largest containing 10 pages. The distribution is fairly regular -- based on my guess of what "regular" should be, at least. To really get a sense of what "regular" should be, we'll need to identify several Wikis that we consider to be "Wiki-like," and examine those numbers.    (LSF)

Finally, look at the numbers for the speaker Wiki. The numbers are in reverse of the other Wikis. There is basically no clustering; all of the pages consist of islands in and of themselves. At first glance, this is surprising. You would expect it to look somewhat like ivrwiki and st-rest-docs. The reason for the lack of clustering is that this Wiki relies on SocialText's tagging interface for navigation. Tags could be treated as a type of link, but we don't treat them that way in our analysis.    (LSG)

Thoughts    (LSH)

As with any simplified analysis, there are always caveats. A lot of them are specific to the Wiki implementation. For example, several people at SocialText use the stoss Wiki as a blog, which creates long page names and thus skews the statistics. Other Wikis may be similar to the speakers Wiki in that they use tags as navigational links.    (LSI)

There's an open question as to whether or not to consider a Wiki a directed graph or not. We chose the former, but you can make a good argument that the SocialText Wiki acts as a non-directed graph, or at least a bidirectional one, because BackLinks are displayed on the page itself. The same holds true with any other Wiki depending on the navigational context. If I start at the home page and start navigating around, I can often use the browser back button to go back, or at worst, I can click on "BackLinks" to figure out the context.    (LSJ)

I'm not sure the page name analysis is that interesting by itself. I think it gets very interesting when applied to the specific islands on a Wiki. People may be using a Wiki in a number of different ways, as demonstrated by the ivrwiki. Analysis on each individual cluster will potentially surface the different kinds of behaviors on a Wiki, which is more appropriate than trying to slap on a single archetype if one does not exist.    (LSK)

Finally, what level of clustering is healthy? In systems theory, networks that are either too tightly clustered or too lightly clustered are problematic. With enough analysis, we may be able to speculate on the right number for Wikis.    (LSL)

Matthew and I will release our code at some point, and we'll hopefully have some time to follow up on it as well. Specifically, I'd like to examine a lot of other Wikis, starting with the ones that BlueOxenAssociates hosts.    (LSM)

There were a lot of other hacks at the Wikithon that were cool. My favorites were IngyDotNet's Social Zork (which was not only hilarious, but is actually potentially useful) and ShawnDevlin's Word Cloud, which I hope to use on other Wikis. ChristineHerron wrote a good summary of the day's festivities.    (LSN)

/tech/wiki | Posted at 12:42pm

Tue, Feb 06, 2007

February 2007 Update    #

A month has passed, and the blog has been silent, but the brain has not. Time to start dumping again. But before I begin, a quick synopsis:    (LR8)

In addition to a flood of blog posts, other things to look forward to this month include:    (LRE)

/blueoxen | Posted at 6:35pm

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