London Wiki Wednesday - standing room only!

Last night’s London Wiki Wednesday was quite a success.  About 40 people packed in to a room that was really only intended for about 25, but that just made it all a bit more friendly and fun.  My thanks to Philip Woodgate of Goodman Jones for providing the room and the food, and Daren Oliver of Fitzrovia IT who provided the technical support on projectors and the network.   The folks at Stormhoek made this a relaxed and civilised occasion with some great examples of their wine.   You can see 39 photographs from the evening on Flickr, to get a feel for the atmosphere and to see who was there. A lot of people wanted to speak, but we tried to accommodate everyoone by allowing 5 minutes for a “show and tell” and 5 minutes for questions.  We did alright, but we probably went 3 speakers too far.  Next time we’ll make sure we have less speakers, and we’ll try and allow time for an open discussion.  After some food and networking, we moved in the chairs, but some had to stand in the corridor. Following introductions and some adverts from our sponsors, I kicked off speaking about the Enterprise Irregulars use of Blogtronix - a platform which combines blog, wiki, document management, RSS and social networking .  As well as their current functionality, the guys in Bulgaria are integrating EditGrid and PageFlakes.  In a different vein, I also mentioned my use of Wikispaces for low cost knowledge management wikis, helping my local parish council. Jeremy Ruston showed SocialText Unplugged.  This integrates his TiddlyWiki technology to allow you to take a page or a workspace off-line on to your PC so you can carry on working, and then synchronise with the host wiki when you get back online.    Corporate IT like the approach because no software needs to be installed on the PC to make it work. Euan Semple talked about his experiences implementing wikis and social software at the BBC.  The forum is now used by 18,500 of 23,000 employees.  He talked about how they got  89 bloggers to collaborate to produce a corporate blogging policy.  There are now around 3,000 wikis in use in a variety of scenarios from creating corporate policy to developing programmes.  They have a social networking tool to bring together like minded individuals.  Euan favours separate tools, loosely joined rather than trying to tackle the problem with  one corporate combined approach.   Guillaume Lerouge explained his Xwiki technology, which combines RSS feeds in to wiki pages.  He has set up a Wiki site for this Wiki Wedenesday which links to all of the attendees blogs. Matt O’Neill talked about community building with the British Council, Western Union, GE and English Heritage.  He is using blogs, podcasts and live chat for pre-event networking and post-event follow up. Lars Ploughman related some stories from the FOWA event he has been attending. Nick Swan showed us Microsoft SharePoint 2007, which now has wiki capability.  Some functionality comes free, and some is licensed.  It has a normal wiki feel, with some nice feature for rules based metadata tagging, workflow to control publishing of pages and the ability to “check out” pages so they are locked while you are updating. Dennis Howlett spent some time explaining why the Enterprise Irregulars chose Blogtronix for their site which aggregates all of their blogs and allows them to collaborate on group developed content.  Part of the value of the Irregulars is their diverse backgrounds, giving a “360 degree” view on enterprise software matters. Simon Revell talked about using wikis in a corporate environment at Pfizer.  He related the story about someone who started Pfizopedia on a server under their desk.  This low key implementation grew to 647 registered users, 50,000 pages, and was getting 100,000 hits a month.  He related a story about presenting this at a conference, just ahead of another speaker who’s much larger intranet was only getting 5,000 hits a month.  Apparently she wasn’t happy.   Simon also talked about a training video he had used on “how to make a page about yourself in 60 seconds”. Antonio Chagoury of SMBLive talked about how his product is being used by BT for their Workspace collaboration service, and their Tradespace website service aimed at SME/SMBs.  The product uses MS SharePoint technology, although they’ve done significant development over the top of it.  There is a free option for Workspace, but it only allows 2 users.  Additional users cost £7.50 a month.   It looks good, but we speculated whether BT will get their marketing right. Alan Wood of Folknology talked about the kind of projects they do integrating EditGrid with other operational and MIS systems for their clients.  EditGrid provides them with an Excel style user interface that they understand, and allows anyone to edit and collaborate with the same spreadsheet. Barry Shrier, in my opinion, misjudged this audience and did a sales pitch for his new service The Good Club.  This is an insurance and financial services offering, that applies some social networking with the functionality of insurance comparison sites.  The site has a kind of “concierge” reminder service, a bit like you might get with a platinum or gold credit card.   Andy Roberts guessed that it was getting late for some and issued a handout.  He did tell us a bit about ukcider.co.uk and Pajamanation.co.uk - the latter being a reverse-auction electronic marketplace for home workers.   Gordon Joly was last up and told us about his use of wikis to support various community projects, like one Lansbury Voices, compiling the local history of the Lansbury Estate in the East End of London.  He talked a bit about incorporating video, or the need for a spell checker to help less advanced users.   You can see the wiki page describing what happened, with comments from attendees here.  If you want to come to the next one, which will be on 4 April 2007, go to the wiki page and book yourself on.   Everyone seemed to think it was a good evening.   Technorati Tags : Enterprise+Irregulars, wikiwed, wikis, blogging, Goodman+Jones, StormhoekPowered By Qumana