Stretching the wiki

By Eugene Lee | April 17, 2008, 9:22 am | 0 Comments

Our announcements today are the fruits of a lot of hard work and, more importantly, some deep thinking based on deep customer engagements. On the surface it’s about “putting people in the wiki” and “giving people their own customizable dashboards”, but it’s more profound than that.

What’s fascinating about wikis in corporate environments is watching how quickly people not only put content in, but start having conversations. These often start as “email in public” kinds of dialogs, but over time evolve into a rich web of interpersonal and group dynamics that include co-editing, linking, and tagging. As this rich web of content grows, the knowledge, expertise, and relationships (OK, social networks) of the people contributing to this web becomes apparent through their contributions and interactions.

This is really powerful because the emergence of implicit knowledge, expertise, and relationships is much more relevant and useful than explicitly declared things like “expertise fields” in a profile or “these are my friends” declarations in a typical social networking tool. “What I do says more about me than what I say about me” and “what others say about me is more valuable than what I declare about me” are good ways to think about this (many thanks to David Weinberger’s “Everything is Miscellaneous” for guiding this thinking).

So when I come across a theme or meme in a string of wiki content, Socialtext People now allows me to explore more about the people behind those posts. In large organizations, pivoting between pages, people profiles, and how they and others have “tagged” that person add a lot of rich context around the textual representation of those peoples’ “above the flow” knowledge and expertise, as well as their “in the flow” context of what they’re working on and with whom.

As these wikis grow and companies create more and more workspaces, we’ve found that folks really want to integrate the content and conversations that they are engaging in with the rest of what they are working on. Socialtext Dashboard addresses this by giving each person a place where they can create a personalized view of everything that’s going on – with the wikis they’re involved in, the people they’re working with, and with other company-oriented intranet tools as well as extranet or public Internet tools. Socialtext Dashboard incorporates Socialtext-specific widgets such as “Recent changes in all my workspaces” as well as any standard Open Social gadget.

I’ll be blogging in a lot more detail about these new product modules as well as the 4 Solutions that we launched today. Meanwhile I look forward to questions, comments, and dialog.