Stewart Mader blogs atWikiConsulting.com

ICANN, the Internet’s primary oversight agency, has voted to allow new top-level domains (TLDs). This could mean a massive expansion beyond the original .com, .net, and .org TLDs, and country specific TLDs like .co.uk, .ca, .pl, and .de, and that raises a timely question - should one of those new TLDs be .wiki?

Building Greater Awareness

It could build greater awareness of wikis, and their uses beyond Wikipedia, especially in an organizational context. There’s a general misconception that Wikipedia is what a wiki is, and we need to do a better job educating people about the wide range of wiki uses, such as: project management, building documents, managing meeting agendas, minutes, and action items, etc.

Is it Necessary?

But, is it really necessary to identify a site as a wiki? As wikis become embedded into the fabric of more and more websites, it seems reasonable to ask whether those sites would specifically call out the presence of a wiki using a .wiki address. Also, it would likely be difficult to ensure that a site using the .wiki TLD really is a wiki, but this isn’t a showstopper by any means.

So should there be a .wiki TLD? What do you think? Would you use .wiki? Let’s get a debate going in the comments!

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Pete Fields of Wachovia recently discussed his firm’s Enterprise 2.0 adoption efforts with Paul McDougall of InformationWeek.

The company is growing use of wikis, blogs, social networking, and instant messaging, but it’s also making use of its most valuable long term asset - it’s people. The company is working to retain younger workers by directly soliciting their input on these new technologies, and pairing them with senior staffers in a unique twist on mentoring:

Fields said that many of corporate America’s young workers’ engagement levels “fall off the table” after about a year on the job because “we give them no means of input.”

To change that, Wachovia is giving its Gen Y workers a role in helping its Enterprise 2.0 makeover succeed. Younger employees are assigned to teach senior staffers about the benefits of using collaborative networks.

This is a very smart approach not only for adoption of the new technology tools, but for business experience and know-how as well. Between the two workers one has the technology knowledge, one has the business experience, and both are needed to be successful.

We often talk about how the millennial generation has an advanced grasp of these social and collaborative tools, but just half of the story in my opinion. I see enterprise 2.0 tools not as the exclusive domain of youth, but as a better connector for multiple generations, so that wisdom, tacit knowledge, and business know-how from the experienced can be shared with younger workers.

In return, those younger workers can show their more experienced colleagues how to better organize information with tagging and folksonomy, streamline collaboration using wikis, build online social networks and use them to discover the right people to work with on projects, involve them throughout the process to get a high quality, refined final product, and inform broader communities in a conversational context using blogs.

To make this vision a reality, we have to draw in as many people as possible from all generations, industries, locations, and levels of experience.

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I’m the first-ever guest blogger for the Wikinomics Blog, and will be writing a four-part series over the next several weeks. The first post is published, so have a read and let me know your thoughts!

In the next post, I’ll talk about the rampant “culture of interruptions” in today’s workplace, and what you can do about it. Then, I’ve got some great topics lined up for the posts after that one - but you’ll have to check back to see what they are! I’ll blog here to let you know when each new guest post is published.

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International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 is underway here in Italy, and I presented “Cultivating wikis to change the enterprise and improve the bottom line” this morning.

Luis Suarez posed an excellent running summary of my talk this morning on Twitter. (Luis’ main Twitter account is @elsua; the summary is on his conference specific account @elsuacon). There’s no good tool to display a specific set of tweets so here are a few highlights from his summary:

• @slmader JUST did my pitch! Showing the example of how to work agendas through a wiki vs. email! YAY!!! Loving it!
• 6 degrees of collaboration: 1. Organise, streamline, inform, involve; 2. Virtual extension of your workplace;
• 3. Adoption takes time; 4. A small, successful pilot builds confidence;
• 5. Start together - wiki with a purpose; 6. Share as much as possible … This and much over over at ikiw.org @slmader’s blog!
• What a GREAT session from Stewart. He did set a nice background for my upcoming pitch & really really worth while going through!
• His deck is one of the best I have seen on wiki adoption with some concrete use cases and recommendations on how to get started!

Here’s another summary of all the tweets referencing my talk, created using Summize, a great tool that lets you search for twitter posts by topic, person, hashtag, etc.

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The current issue of 7thFloor, an italian business magazine, includes an interview with the speakers from the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0.

In the interview:

Laurence Lock Lee explains how social network analysis reveals the connections between people and the resulting knowledge distribution network.

Thomas Vander Wal explains folksonomy - using social taging to organize knowledge based on interconnections between people.

Ran Shribman says that companies can tap into the skills people are developing from their use of consumer Web 2.0 tools by using similar tools behind the firewall.

Luis Suarez outlines the advantages for companies that encourage social media use at work - a more responsive organization, better able to engage millenial generation knowledge workers, and involve experienced workers who hold a wealth of knowledge.

Stewart Mader compares organizational and public wikis (Wikipedia vs. enterprise wiki), offers several examples of organizations actively using wikis today, and outlines the main business drivers and use cases inside organizations.

Read the full article:

• Enterprise 2.0: La Rivoluzione dei Social Media entra nelle Imprese (Italian)
• Enterprise 2.0: The Revolution of the Social Media enters the Enterprise (English)

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Grow Your Wiki is going on the road (again)! I’ll be in Europe next week to speak at two events: International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 and The New Knowledge Forge.

International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 - Varese, Italy, 25 June

Università dell’Insubria and OpenKnowledge are hosting the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 to give Entrepreneurs and Top Management, Human Resource management, and Commercial and Marketing Directors a look at how to increase efficiency, transparency, employee engagement, and conversational interaction with customers, business partners, and the community at large.

The New Knowledge Forge - Porto, Portugal, 30 June

Late next week, I’ll be in Porto, Portugal for WikiSym 2008 planning meetings, followed by the one-day symposium An International Discussion of Work Towards The New Knowledge Forge.

The Symposium will be held on Monday, 30 June from 2-7 PM at Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto/The Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto.

We’ll discuss the future of social software in organizations, new ways to gather, analyze, and disseminate knowledge, and the impact of improved knowledge sharing for your employees, customers, and the broader community.

The incredible potential for wikis, blogs, and other social software tools has only just begun to be felt by the organizations that have embraced them, and so many others are just beginning to look at these tools and see their potential. I’m looking forward to this symposium.

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Do you use a wiki to support a software engineering project? Have you integrated a wiki with other software engineering tools (IDE, configuration management, etc.)? Want to share how you use a wiki in your software development project, and get ideas, tips, and best practices from others?

The call for Papers for the Third Workshop on Wikis for Software Engineering is now open. The Wikis4SE workshop will be held in conjunction with WikiSym 2008, on September 8, 2008, and will include short paper presentations and workgroup discussions.

Interested in submitting a paper? Experience reports and position papers of not more than six pages are invited. The submission deadline is July 31, and notification of acceptance will go out August 11.

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I’m on my way home from Web Content 2008. I first spoke at this conference last year, and It’s wonderful to see an already great conference get even better. The conference sold out for the first time this year! Scott Abel and Michael Silverman have done an excellent job putting together a conference that is refreshingly focused on what people are actually doing, not what the Web 2.0 insiders are pushing as the latest and greatest.

The leading edge is necessary - and what’s happening there is exciting - but many organizations are still at the point where they’re getting to know blogs, starting to hear about wikis, and struggling to understand how these tools can make a positive impact on their work. Conferences like Web Content 2008 that focus on demystifying Web 2.0 and demonstrating good, practical examples are an excellent venue for people to get their questions answered and find the products and services they need to be successful.

One of the best sessions I attended was More Than Just Another Pretty Face by Charles Cooper, Vice President of The Rockley Group. He talked about the importance of getting the structure right for your website, and using good visual design to make it bth usable and attractive. His advice was timeless because a good website - whether it’s a static site marketing a product or service, a blog of any type (personal, corporate, news, topical, etc.), or a wiki used for collaboration with clients and teams - can and should adhere to these principles:

• concentrates on the needs of the user
• loads quickly
• doesn’t have a splash screen
• clear purpose
• easy to navigate
• labels, titles, and buttons must be clearly named
• easy to find information

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Looking to hire someone great for a wiki or content management job? Want to get hired for an exciting new gig? Grow Your Wiki now offers job listings!

The new job board is available today, and already has some listings ready for you.

If you’d like to post an open position, I have a special offer: use the coupon code wiki to get one free job posting. This offer expires June 25, so act now! You can use the board to list any type of position: full-time, part time, contract, freelance, consulting, etc.

There’s a new Jobs link in the navigation bar at the top of every page that will take you to the job board. There’s also a job listing section in the right sidebar, so whenever you’re browsing articles, don’t forget to check out the listings and see what’s available!

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