Okay, I'll admit it — I love playing World of Warcraft. Not that it's an unusual thing to admit — there are 9 million people paying US$15 each month to participate in this multi-player online gaming universe. (Do the math and you'll realise what a money-spinner it is for Blizzard!)

And now, I've got one more reason to play due to Atlassian's support of an Open Source project used by many of those 9 million players.

Norganna, maker of the popular Auctioneer and Gatherer add-ons to World of Warcraft that specialise in the gathering, study and selling of in-game items, recently started using Atlassian JIRA for issue tracking, Atlassian Fisheye for monitoring their source code repositories and Atlassian Crucible for managing code reviews.

Here's some extracts from their announcement to users:

With JIRA we get an issue tracker that is really really powerful, configurable, extensible and usable.

Crucible has source code review capabilities, which means that we can ensure every single line of code that has been committed to our projects has been double checked by someone else on the team. As an end user, this should excite you as well, because not only does this mean less bugs in the end product, but also less chance of a rogue coder placing some malicious code in the addon that could do some nasty things like delete your purples, or mail off all your gold to a random user somewhere.

Fisheye takes all that Trac did superbly, and takes it up another notch again, giving you high level overview of the repository that you never dreamed possible. Branch visualization, Directory filters, Advanced searching, Annotation views, Changelogs, RSS feeds, Activity graphs... It's all very enticing!

These licenses were provided free to Norganna as part of Atlassian's Community License program, where we "give back to the community". This is because Atlassian's products actually take advantage of a lot of open-source code — sometimes up to two thirds of the code base — which lets us deliver quality code faster than doing it all ourselves. Thus, we want to return the favour by helping non-profit open-source and community groups.

Try a quick Google search and you'll get an idea of the types of organisations that use these free licenses (hint: look at their URLs).

There is, of course, an additional benefit to Atlassian for providing these licenses. People who participate in open-source or community projects are usually also involved in very technical jobs — and those jobs often need development and collaboration tools. So, the community licenses are actually a means of advertising Atlassian's products to gain great word-of-mouth. If you've used our products before and enjoyed the experience, you'll use us again!

A recent 37signals blog post put it thus:

The people who buy our products are the people who use our products.

I couldn't agree more.

Which makes me wonder — does this mean I'll be allowed to play World of Warcraft at work, too?

This week, Australia had an inaugural National Ride to Work Day with 30,000 participants across 3,000 workplaces. Atlassian was one of them.

Our Sydney office is well-equipped for cyclists — bikes can frequently be seen parked in our lower level. Staff can bring their bikes into our building's rear entrance and hop into one of the showers.

Bicycle Parking - "Before"

To support Ride to Work Day, Atlassian installed new bicycle parking — our office now looks more like a Bike Shop than a workplace!

2007 Ride to Work Participants and new Bicycle Parking

Eleven Sydney staff members participated in the event, giving a cycle-powered ratio of around 12%, many of whom had their first ride to work. Sherali rode from as far as Manly (15km) and Scott from as close as Pyrmont (2km). We also have regulars such as Justin who rides from Homebush Bay and Conor who pedals from North Ryde (17km).

John, our Chief Financial Officer, found himself a little lost navigating the freeways on the way to work, even calling his wife for assistance when he succumbed to the hills. Showing an amazing measure of determination, he managed to find his way to the Sydney Harbour Bridge and ride to work under his own steam — congratulations!

I personally found that my morning ride from Chatswood was just as fast as public transport, but without the crowded carriages. Buoyed by enthusiasm, I decided that I shall make cycling my default transport method — that was until I attempted the trek homewards, only to find that Sydney has very poor cycleways and practically non-existent signage for cyclists. It was late, getting dark and I had no idea how to get home, so I also had to call my wife for a pickup. I think next time I'll consult a map before attempting the journey!

To round off the event, the office hosted a BBQ to restore depleted energy.

After-Ride BBQ Breakfast

A couple of regular riders couldn't make the event, so we're hoping that we can win an award next year for the workplace with the largest proportion of staff cycling to work. Mmm, maybe we should give priority to hiring cyclists in future?

  I love Wikipedia. Not due to its contents, but due to the way it helps me explain my work. You see, whenever I tell people that I work for a company that makes a wiki, I only get a blank stare in return. But when I explain that it's like Wikipedia, their eyes light up and they instantly understand.
 
However, Wikipedia is not the real world.
 
I've learned this from my time working at Atlassian, where using our enterprise wiki is standard behaviour. We store our corporate knowledge on the wiki, host discussions on the wiki, share our personal joys and frustrations on the wiki. However, Wikipiedia is not the real world. Allow me to explain...
 
"It'll be vandalised!"
This is the first thing people say when they conceive of a wiki within the enterprise. However, it simply isn't the case, for several reasons:

• All edits are tracked by name and date — simply turn off anonymous access!
• The content is written by fellow staff members so it's less likely people will want to offend
• Politics, religion and sport are rarely the topic of enterprise wikis, so people aren't driven to vandalism due to emotional reasons

"I don't want people editing whatever they want!"
Our internal wiki at Atlassian can be edited by anyone in the company, with the only exception being the staff HR policy pages. Strangely enough, however, I have noticed that very few people update another person's pages even though they have the ability and social permission to do so. Instead, the practice has arisen to add comments to pages rather than edit.

I'm not sure why this is — perhaps people think that editing is tantamount to trespass. Perhaps it's because opinion is not fact, so they'd rather add their opinion as a comment or suggestion, and let the original author update the page as appropriate. Nonetheless, it suggests that Wikipedia is not the real world.

"A wiki is fine for reference material, but not for communication"
Not so. Communication is alive and well thanks to Confluence's News and Comments capabilities.

News is like posting your own blog — readers can even subscribe via an RSS feed. Within Atlassian, we use News to inform staff about upcoming events, discuss product features and swap interesting stories. Unlike e-mail, the News is kept on the wiki, available for future reference and commenting.

Comments are, indeed, the currency of the Internet. Amazon's product reviews are a perfect example. It's a way people can contribute to existing information. Our public documentation for Confluence is another example. People can not only read the documentation, they can comment on it.

The ability to comment on pages can also be found on Wikipedia, but it is hidden behind Wikipedia's Discussions tab. It's just one big page that people can edit, which makes it hard to follow the flow of conversation. Comments in Confluence, however, show who said what and when, and even includes a picture of the contributor.

"I don't want people wasting their time posting silly information"
Welcome to the world of Knowledge Management. It's only by encouraging staff to post information that knowledge is built and maintained. People aren't your most important asset — their knowledge is! Are you capturing your knowledge, or is it walking out the door each night?

"My staff would never use a wiki!"
You'll never know unless you try. People aren't paid to use Wikipdeia, but they still use it. Maybe you just need ways to encourage wiki adoption.
 
Just remember — Wikipedia is not the real world. But it is close. :)
 
References:

• Your wiki isn't Wikipedia (wikipatterns.com)
• Corporate Wiki Usage? on LiveJournal

Stewart Mader, Atlassian's wiki evangelist, recently presented a series of seminars on 'How do you grow wiki adoption?'.

During the presentation in Sydney, an attendee asked how to use a wiki for Document Management. While the gentleman could appreciate all the benefits that a wiki brings, he couldn't fathom how to move his organisation out of the 'Document dark ages' and into the enlightened age of Web 2.0.

This, indeed, is the focus of the website — a place to share ideas about how to roll-out wikis. These roll-outs often happen by stealth, helping individual teams and business units rather than by corporate edict.

You'll also need a change of mindset — don't think document management, think knowledge management. Document management can only point you towards documents, like a traditional search engine. In contrast, when you've got information on a wiki you can search for information, link to it, reference it, update it, secure it, blog about it and share it.

Fortunately, since Atlassian is a relatively new company (we turned 5 this year), we are fortunate that most of our internal information is stored on our internal Confluence wiki rather than in documents on fileservers. This is very important given that we have a mixed environment of Operating Systems (Mac, Windows, Linux) and that very few people in the company use Microsoft Office. We don't even use much paper since we scan more than we print.

The real benefit, however, is in keeping track of corporate information in a central, searchable location rather than on individual's hard disks. Historical corporate knowledge is instantly available to new staff members rather than being maintained in private e-mail archives. Information is maintained, even when staff leave and erase their hard disk.

So what do you seek — Documents or Knowledge?

Tags: document management, knowledge management

There is a proverb that "The cobbler's children go barefoot", but I'm glad to say that isn't the case in Atlassian. We use Confluence extensively to collaborate internally, both for knowledge management and information sharing.

One such area is our use of internal News Pages to communicate amongst staff. Rather than having 'all hands' e-mail messages filling our in-boxes, the News feature of Confluence is used to discuss everything from product releases to lunchtime sporting events. It's just like everyone having their own blog!

In fact, as part of our staff induction process, new hires create a News article introducing themselves to the company. The article is kept within their personal space on the wiki, but also appears in our internal RSS feed. Since all staff members subscribe to the feed, the whole company will have read the article within 24 hours.

Furthermore, because the article is retained on the wiki, it is instantly available for searching and future reference. This is great for staff who join at a later date, since they can read all about existing staff members. Compare this to using e-mails, where a staff member joining the next day has no access to the archive of knowledge previously distributed.

We also use News to online host discussions, often leading to heated debate on topics such as programming techniques, new feature requests and where to find the best Laksa. It's also used to distribute customer feedback to the entire company so that comments are not lost in e-mail inboxes.

So, have a think for a moment about where you keep your information — is it accessible & read widely, or hidden & hard to find?