WikiWednesday

This blog posting continues the theme of working on my future job outside office hours!

So, last night I went to WikiWednesday. What's WikiWednesday, I hear you ask? Well, on the first Wednesday of most months, a bunch of wiki enthusiasts get together to talk about all things wiki. Their experiences, their problems and their motives.

It was actually pretty cool. Not The Fonz cool. More like Planet Earth cool. But definitely cool. There were geeks a-plenty (about 60, including some females, I was glad to see!) and the focus was on how wikis are used in businesses. Topics covered the merits of locking pages (should this be possible or necessary?), other ways of preventing abuse (and the lack of prior examples where abuse had taken place), and what kind of documents should live on a wiki. HR policy documents were a good example; a small team collaborates on them, then they're issued to a company. Subsequent amendments should only be made by HR. Should that be forced in some way?

Interesting stuff.

Before all this though, we (being BT Osmosoft) got the chance to pitch TiddlyWiki. I'd seen TiddlyWiki before, but not plugged into BT's web services. Having collected everyone's phone numbers beforehand, with very little effort we were able to import their contacts into a TiddlyWiki, click a button and a conference call was set up between about 10 pairs of people - quite funny seeing everyone's phone ring at once. YouTube video is on the way...!

It occurred to me that all of us Osmosoftians will need to get good at pitching TiddlyWiki to a mixed audience. Techies are fascinated by how it works, but it is difficult to grasp the benefits quickly if you're a non-techie, and even harder if you're not used to working on wikis. And it needs to be clear why TiddlyWiki and BT's web services are compatible. More on this later.

But the best thing about the evening was that I got to meet my new colleagues. I'd met a couple of them before, and they're a very decent crowd. And they're just as excited as I am about the whole venture. All good!