WikiOrgCharts CEO Farhan Memon got the idea for the collaborative org chart while he was working at AOL . During his time there, his team had monthly meetings with external partners. Because they lacked insight into the partners’ knowledge and reporting structure, the AOL group struggled to figure out how best to work with the outside team. A colleague drafted an org chart of the other company, and Memon thought, “this org chart is good, but what I’d really like to do is work with colleagues to fill in the blanks and append information to the org chart.” Having a clearer picture of the roles and relationships makes it easier to know where the bottlenecks are, how decisions are made, and how to manage the underlying connections throughout the project, explained Memon.

Building a wikiorgchart is similar to creating an online family tree. (Memon says that they looked at genealogy websites for user interface inspiration.) You drag a person into position and then use linking lines to show the relationship between people. The privacy settings let you shift from the default of identified contributor to anonymous contributor. When members contribute people and relationships to the org charts, they gain the points they need to do their own searches. (The premium membership does not rely on points.) You can start your own profile by linking to your Facebook and LinkedIn pages. This quickly provides information about where you sit in your organization(s), and earns you more points for adding to your profile.

When it comes to getting your resume into the right hands, WikiOrgcharts has some advantages over LinkedIn . Search results on LinkedIn can be limited by a person’s position relative to your existing LinkedIn network and the type of account you have (free versus a variety of paid levels). WikiOrgCharts provides unlimited access to the available information — as long as you have accumulated enough points through participation, or, similar to LinkedIn, have a paid account.

Like Wikipedia, WikiOrgCharts is always growing, but the company has given the site a head start. Said Memon:

We built out the site using a number of different data sources, including social graph information, SEC data, and data from federal government employees. We’ve accumulated 9 million profiles. Our system automates some processes such as bucketing people from different companies, but we’re improving other processes such as sematic matching of companies.

Sensemaking, social intelligence, and the ability to connect are critical skills for modern work. WikiOrgCharts provides a tool to gather the data you need to begin those activities.

Images courtesy of WikiOrgCharts.

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During sign-up, you’re asked to provide your website with a name, which is used as a subdomain of the Papyrs site for your wiki (for example, you could have https://yourcompany.papyrs.com/). Building pages is a matter of specifying the category and who can access the page — you can limit access to specific team members and people outside your company or open it up to the whole web — and then dragging and dropping widgets onto the page. Each widget has a little tool-tip explanation to explain what it does, which should prove handy for less-tech-savvy members of the team. The range of widgets means that you can build a variety of different pages using the app; there are some useful examples on the Papyrs website. Text and widgets can be edited by clicking on them, and they can be repositioned by dragging and dropping them.

The pages themselves look great, although as an admin it’s possible to customize the default theme, such as by changing the banner graphic or modifying the colors and fonts used.

Overall, Papyrs is incredibly easy to use, with virtually zero technical knowledge required. I’d recommend it if you’re looking for a wiki-based intranet or collaboration product: It makes for a great alternative to Google Sites, and it is much simpler than most self-hosted wiki products. However, you should note that it is currently in beta, so you may come across the occasional problem, although I haven’t in my testing so far. Papyrs is currently free; unfortunately there’s no indication yet as to pricing when the product moves out of beta.

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While there is no single accepted way to kick off a group in a collaborative process, my experience and the available research says you should start small with a specific, achievable goal, rather than trying to implement a full technology platform at the same time as you’re organizing the project.  Stewart Mader, author of the book Wikipatterns, says that you should focus on the work; help people see the value from the work and the rest will follow.

Organizational scholar Karl Weick wrote in 1984:

A small win is a concrete, complete, implemented outcome of moderate importance. By itself, one small win may seem unimportant. A series of wins at small but significant tasks, however, reveals a pattern that may attract allies, deter opponents, and lower resistance to subsequent proposals. Small wins are controllable opportunities that produce visible results.

This still holds true today. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer followed 238 professionals in 26 creative teams across seven companies and three industries, gathering over 12,000 person/days of data. They report their results in the forthcoming book, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. In a recent talk I attended, Prof. Amabile described how progress in meaningful work is the most important factor in people’s engagement. This progress doesn’t have to include a breakthrough — just maintain forward momentum.

Keep these ideas in mind when you start your next collaboration project. Go for the small wins, rather than the stretch goal, and focus on the work rather than the tools. Follow Georgina‘s advice and take a “tools last” approach to collaboration. She says, “tools are not the process, nor are they the work. Tools are there to make complex tasks easier or more efficient for your team.” Get the team’s work started, then see what tools will be most helpful.

What is your experience?  Do you agree that small wins beat out stretch goals for kicking off a new collaborative project?

Photo courtesy Flickr user Snap.

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A shared wiki is the logical place to store this type of information. A wiki is accessible to anyone on the team; a good wiki will become the clearinghouse for any and all information that needs to be documented. While there are many wiki packages, after a diligent search we chose editme.

I had identified a few very specific needs when looking for our wiki solution:

WYSIWYG Editor. Even as a tech-savvy company, my experience has shown that most users don’t easily adapt to using specialized wiki syntax. My goal was to make the platform as easy and accessible as possible; if people don’t understand it or the process is difficult then they won’t take the time to use it. I found editme had an easy-to-use visual editor but with the option of using some more powerful syntax as well. The ability to add images, formatting and links to other items and pages is crucial for maintaining an appealing and useful environment. editme does this quite well.

Permission Levels. Even though our team is very open, there is certain information that needs to be segmented and made available to a more limited audience. I liked that editme let me keep the wiki overall private and secure within our team but then also gave me the functionality to create groups for users and then easily assign pages to specific groups. Overall, I am happy with the way that I can assign and manage these permissions. (However, on a related security issue, I’m not fond of the way that that it sends password reminders and logins via plain text in an email. I would much prefer a reset link or other reset or reminder options.)

It is also possible to make the wiki site public, or a mix of public and private; the ability to segment access and permissions in those scenarios becomes even more critical.

Affordability and Support. As a software company ourselves, we have no problem supporting other products and services that we find useful and that contribute to our own success. I know that there are also open-source alternatives that we can install and maintain but as a business critical service we decided that going with a hosted and maintained offering was our best option. With unlimited users at even the cheapest plan and pricing ranging from $5 – $79 month, it was well within our budget, and as new employees join the team we simply point them to the wiki to get them started.

In the six months we’ve had our editme site up and running we’ve found that the adoption has been good, particularly in our Customer Experience group where we focused our initial efforts.

Initially, we had some trouble with the menu creation and the page organization features; they were functional but confusing. That has since been revamped and the new Page Organizer feature is really slick. We can now drag-and-drop pages around to easily change the structure of the site.

Billed as both a wiki and a collaboration platform, editme straddles the line between wiki and web site creator, comfortably living in both worlds. While we were primarily looking for a data organization tool, the additional web site creation and styling features are easy to use and a nice bonus.

Pricing for editme starts at $5 per month, and 30 day trials are available on all plans. It’s a hosted solution and works across all major browsers.

Find out more about how software is enabling companies to improve collaboration — check out our Net:Work conference, coming to San Francisco in December.

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Today, for example, I met with someone who is moving into her first community manager position. After the meeting, I sent what looked like a pretty impressive list of 17 links to relevant information, but it took me less than five minutes to compile what she needed because I had most of it available in canned responses and other online documentation. Being prepared and ready with common answers allows you to be extremely responsive with details and comprehensive answers to questions without spending much time on them at all. Here are a few of the things that I do to reduce, reuse and recycle my work.

Online Documentation

Don’t underestimate the power of online documentation. These frequently asked questions are a great way to come up with ideas for blog posts or other documentation that you can reuse over and over. I use my personal blog to publish most of my community management posts, and I have a “getting started” page where I’ve collected the posts that provide a good introduction to community management. A wiki is another good option for reusable documentation when you are working as part of a project, team or online community. The community that I manage has a wiki where we collaborate on FAQs, guidelines, technical documentation and many other documents. When I start to see questions coming up in the community on a common topic, it is often a sign that something isn’t well documented.

After your core set of documentation is established, many individual questions can be answered by sending a link or two. Whether you use a blog, wiki, collaboration tool or website, spending a few minutes writing online documentation now can save hours later when you reuse it again and again.

Collections

Once you have a good set of online documentation, you can start organizing it into collections and FAQ documents. I mentioned that I have a “starting point” page on my blog that simply links to collections of documentation, organized by topic. I also do this in the online community with FAQ documents and pages that organize information to make it easier for people to find. In many cases this lets me send people a single link or a couple of links that provide them with a whole collection of information on a particular topic. As I add new content, I go back occasionally to these collections and add additional information or links to some newer documentation on the topic.

Canned Responses

When someone emails you with a question and you take the time to put together a complete, thoughtful answer, you should store it as a canned response ready for the next person who asks a similar question. I often use the canned response functionality in Gmail to do this, and your email client might have something similar available, but if not, you can always store snippets of emails for reuse in a text file or your favorite note-taking application. Now, I’m not saying that you should just blast these out to people as-is. I usually take the time to personalize them and add a little more information that is especially relevant to their situation. Each time I use one of these canned responses, I also take the time to see if it needs to be updated with some new information or additional links and then I save those changes for the next time I need to use it.

Most of my canned responses are actually collections of links to online documentation, so three ideas aren’t separate as much as they build on each other. You could also use the same techniques within a corporate environment with private collaboration tools inside your firewall. Whether the information is public or private, having great online documentation formed into collections and used as canned responses to inquiries is a great way to reduce, recycle and reuse your work.

What are your tips for reusing work?

Photo by Flickr user Nick Bramhall used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

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Flowr’s home screen looks very Twitter-like. But in addition to status updates, users can create several other types of posts, including ideas, questions, events, to-do list items, and polls. Flowr also allows posting of larger documents (complete with links and images) that can be edited, wiki-style, by anyone who the original poster gives access to. One can mention others using the Twitter-style @ syntax, and files and tags can be attached to each type of post.

Each of the above post types can be shown in one main screen, called “My Flow,” or can be viewed by category, so that, for example, all of the to-dos can be viewed together.

Flowr also includes groups, which are rather like a cross between a private BBS and LinkedIn’s Groups. Users can create and join groups related to specific topics. Group discussions can be public or private (invitation-only).

Flowr’s people directory links to user-editable profiles that show contact information. The directory is searchable by such fields as expertise and language skills, which I can see will be very useful in larger organizations. As in Twitter, one can follow the posts of selected users.

Flowr has several tools that allow it to integrate with your workflow, including an iPhone app, a bookmarklet for saving and sharing web content, and a system for posting via email (like Posterous). Updates from Flowr can be shown on the desktop via the Yip extension for Firefox. Interestingly, though, Flowr doesn’t include an instant messaging function.

In addition, Flowr is planning integration with Google Apps, which is scheduled to become available next week. And Flowr has an API so that developers can create custom applications using the app.

The free version of Flowr supports up to 10 users and two groups. Flowr is currently rolling out a premium version with unlimited groups, custom themes and analytics, that will be priced on a per-user basis.

Flowr isn’t Basecamp-style project management, but it may be just the thing for organizations whose members like to interact via social networks.

Have you tried Flowr?

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The organizers approached me to develop a web site to aggregate these posts in real-time before, during and after the event. In the process, I learned how such a site can reinforce the development of community.

I’m sure that you’ve been to events where good ideas are hatched and projects are planned, but often, despite the best of intentions, activity loses steam after the event is over, and nothing much gets done. It’s too early yet to judge the long-term effectiveness of this particular event, but I’m optimistic that it will make more of a difference than many such gatherings.

The electronic component of the event was relatively simple. We created a content-managed web site that would act as the hub for the many places that participants would post their contributions and reflections. We didn’t require participants to use a specific CMS tool (although they were welcome to use ours). Instead, before, during and after the conference, participants were encouraged to use existing technologies with which they were familiar to document their thoughts, and we then created links to their contributions.

Before the Event

The web site went live a couple of weeks before the event began. By that time, event announcements and registration had already been posted to a section on the sponsoring organization’s web site. Participants had been asked to interview another attendee as a “get-to-know-you” exercise. The results were to have been posted, but very few did so — I suspect because the CMS used by the sponsoring organization has a significant learning curve.

In the future, I would recommend creating the event-specific web site much sooner, and using a simpler CMS-, group-blog, social-network or wiki-based system for posting pre-event discussions and comments.

During the Event

The venue at our local university had limited wired connectivity, but it was sufficient for a video stream, an audio stream, and the web updates that I was doing. The video stream worked fine; the audio stream was less successful because the university had blocked the ports we needed. For the same reason, we had to use a MiFi connection to use FTP. Thankfully, this did not affect access to our CMS.

Participants were able to connect using Wi-Fi, which worked well, aside from some issues with entering passwords. I’m guessing that perhaps fifty people were connected at any one time.

The event web site included the following, all of which was updated frequently:

• An attendee list, with links to participants’ web sites and Twitter feeds.
• The event agenda. Since the event was an “un-conference” using the “open space” approach, much of the agenda was developed on the spot by attendees.
• A Twitter statuses JavaScript badge showing posts from the event. These tweets were mostly done by me on behalf of event organizers, but other committee members also tweeted through the conference account.
• A Twitter search widget showing a real-time feed of all posts using the conference hashtag. A full-screen version of this widget was projected in the room where most discussions took place, and it proved very popular.
• A link to a Twapperkeeper archive of the Twitter hashtag feed.
• A Facebook fan box linking to the event’s Facebook page.
• A Flickr badge and links to tagged photos and videos. Flipcharts and graphs were scanned or photographed, then posted to Flickr and to the web site as JPGs and PDFs. We also put up a Picasa link at the request of attendees, but it didn’t get used.
• A Ustream video feed. Video of many sessions was fed live into the site, then archived.
• A link to YouTube search results tagged with the event’s tag.
• An audio feed. Podcasts of many sessions were made available later.
• Links to blogs of those attendees who were writing about the event.
• A wiki for allowing attendees to post notes from event sessions. We chose to use a wiki rather than giving all users access to the CMS, although I think that in future we might go the other way, as some found editing the wiki difficult.
• An RSS feed for tracking changes to all of the above.

After the Event

We had not created a LinkedIn group before the event. However, participants indicated that they wanted to have an electronic venue for continuing the discussion after the conference. We surveyed the room, and discovered that almost everyone was already a LinkedIn user. Since LinkedIn groups and subgroups can be created immediately, we chose to use that service. We could have selected another group conversation service, though, and participants may move to more sophisticated collaborative tools as their discussions continue.

Planning and Setup

If you are ever called upon to provide this sort of support to an event, it can be fun and educational. Here are some tips to make things go smoothly.

• Get involved with the planning committee as soon as possible, and get an event-specific web site posted early.
• Agree on the hashtag for the event, and publicize it.
• Coordinate with the meeting venue to make sure that it has adequate power and bandwidth (both wired and Wi-Fi), and that it does not block ports.
• Plan to bring your own equipment if possible, or make sure that you have everything you’ll need.
• Set up a “tech table” in a convenient location.
• Have a group of volunteers who can cover the full event.
• Give yourself lots of time for setup and breakdown.
• Have a dedicated laptop and projector for displaying the Twitter hashtag feed — participants will love it.
• Consider what you’ll need in the way of cameras, scanners and printers. We had them all, and they were handy to have, but we could probably have done without them.

I found that attendees’ blogging, tweeting, recording and instant posting about the event reinforced what they were thinking and learning. Thus, the effectiveness of the event was increased, along with the potential for new learning and insights to cause change in the wider world.

How do you use social media and the web for events?

Images by Flickr users Choconancy1 and hajush

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e-tipi

“We believe that sharing an espresso in a nice café creates a particular atmosphere that frees minds and promotes promising ideas to expressly appear. This is what we call Espresso Thinking.”

It’s a nice thought, but is that really something that can be captured in a web-based environment? I recently talked about the same kind of collaboration (lack of coffee products notwithstanding) in an article about my beloved sketchbook, so I was eager to find out if I could recreate the experience digitally using e-tipi.

e-tipi incorporates elements of Twitter, Digg, wikis and blogs to create a workspace in which ideas can be born and explored. Each user page is called a tipi, and it contains various ideas submitted by the tipi’s users. All of the ideas center around a central “challenge,” which the main problem or purpose of the tipi. Think of a challenge like a big picture problem that requires a multi-parted and multi-staged solution.

Along with your tipi page, you also get a unique email address that contributors can send their ideas to directly, for quickly adding to the tipi’s repository. You can also follow your tipi on Twitter, the stream for which is automatically updated with information of your choosing. I like both of these tie-ins, because they make e-tipi feel more connected with other networks, making it much more accessible, which is something I like in idea generation tools.

You can also export your data at any time as either XML or HTML, which makes it easy to plug into other tools, including database management software. It’s a nice way to help you organize the raw information you produce using e-tipi’s tools. A messy free-for-all is a good way to generate creative thought, but it may not be the best storage solution for more polished ideas.

Ideas are listed on their own separate page, and you can sort them by activity and date. Each idea listed shows votes for or against, total views, and the number of comments users have posted about each. You also get the idea’s title, its creator, any tags that may have been applied, and the status, if the idea has one. For each idea, an administrator can set the status to tell others how far along the process intis, using labels like “Accepted,” “Started,” etc. You can also filter your ideas list by keyword to narrow your search.

Each idea page looks a little like a Digg article page, complete with the text of the idea in question and comments made by other users underneath. You also get to see potentially related ideas listed at the bottom of the description page.

Other nice features of e-tipi include a tag cloud, and a member display, in which you can view a user’s profile information, and access information like how many ideas they’ve contributed to, including comments and voting, and how many documents they’ve contributed. You can also highlight certain areas in a Spotlight menu for quick access.

Overall, e-tipi is a very rough-cut tool, when measured against others I’ve tried in the past. It’s not exactly easy on the eyes, and at times it can even seem disorganized. Despite that sense of mess, or perhaps because of it, e-tipi does feel like something that could well operate as fertile ground for the generation and refinement of ideas. I like the sense of freedom inherent in the site, and the potential for unstructured, loose collaboration with a wide number of viewers.

Do you use a web app for idea generation and refinement? Which one?

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Over on the OStatic blog

Like many other wiki tools, Luminotes collects a series of linked notes, each with a unique title. To make a new note, you just click on the “+” button (at the top of the toolbar, at left in the screenshot above). You can link notes to each other using the “Link” button on the toolbar, and then there are standard formatting buttons that let you do everything from bolding text to creating bulleted and numbered lists within notes. Wikis are searchable, and you can import and export content to and from them.

There is a complete user guide for Luminotes found here, but I doubt that many users will need the guide. Everything is implemented through a WYSIWYG interface in the application, so that it feels like using Word or any other common word processor. There is no tricky markup language to or wrestle with.

Luminotes also has a blog, which discusses new features and the like. There is a Windows version and a Linux version, but Luminotes doesn’t work with every browser. I couldn’t get it to work in Opera, for example. It supports Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Safari. You can do the download and installation in about two minutes.

You can either work online or offline with Luminotes, and can store it and run it from a USB thumb drive. If you decide to stop using Luminotes but want to keep your content, you can export your notes to a web page or to a CSV file to store in a spreadsheet. This application is very straightforward and could be a good way to manage projects among collaborators, or personal projects.

What note-taking tool do you use?

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Revizr is a new app that combines wiki elements with change tracking features that preserves the integrity of your original document, so you can see exactly what your collaborators have added (or taken away) from your copy. And it does so in an app that’s so easy to use, you’re actually using it the moment you visit its homepage for the first time. In order to manipulate your own documents, and work together with others, you will have to sign up, but if you’re just looking for a taste of what Revizr can do before you enroll, the trial is the site itself.

If you want to dig a little deeper, sign-up is quick, free and easy. Just pick a username, enter a password and an email address, and you’re ready to go. Alternatively, you can sign in using your OpenID credentials (including Yahoo and Gmail email addresses) and skip registration that way. Once logged in, you’ll have access to stored documents and be able to upload new ones. Revizr works with .doc/.docx, .odt, .rtf, HTML and .txt files. You can also cut and paste or compose a brand-new document using Revizr’s built-in word processor, which allows graphics, tables and pretty much anything else you’d expect a word processor to be able to handle.
For each document, you can set an access policy that allows you to specify who can view and make changes to the work in question. There are three options, which include people who already have access (who could be no one besides yourself), people who have the protected link (which you can generate and distribute from the permissions page), or anyone on the Internet. (There could be some creative potential with that option, maybe.) You can also set levels of access for new users, and allow them to see edits done by others, check previous versions, and even control content like an administrator.

What I like best about Revizr’s user control system is that it is incredibly simple, and yet very powerful, if you need it to be. There are only six options total, in two categories, and yet I can’t think of anything I’d add or change.

Users can also opt to “follow” documents, which sounds like (and probably is) a term borrowed from Twitter. All it really means is that if anyone makes changes to documents you’re following, you’ll receive email notifications of what’s been done. By default, you’ll automatically follow changes to any document you upload or create yourself. This is another feature I really appreciate. It’s something that should be a no-brainer, but it’s amazing how often something like this isn’t included. Working with only one other person, the need for it isn’t particularly great, but if you have a larger group, you risk some people missing entire versions without it.
Possibly Revizr’s weakest point is how it handles the actual editing itself. I tested it out by making some changes to my own document as an anonymous user while logged out, and I found the experience frustrating. It’s unclear where the cursor is. There are three icons (one  to insert text, one for commenting, and one for inserting a paragraph) but the choice of which to click isn’t very intuitive. Selecting and removing text works well enough, though, if that’s all you want to do.

Viewing of revisions could also have been better executed, in my opinion. Deleted text is represented as a strikeout, which works, but text additions are displayed in the margin with an arrow indicating where they fit in. It’s clumsy and hard to read, especially when keeping the additions in the main body of the document wouldn’t seem to have been that difficult.

As a free tool, Revizr gets the job done and has some nice backend features. Because of the limitations of the editor and change display, I wouldn’t personally go in for the paid versions, which start at $29 per month and range up to $99.

Have you tried Revizr? Did you find working with the editor frustrating?

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