rebelutionary / 2.0

RecentChangesCamp: wikis and caricatures but no caftans! / 2006 Feb 05

I've been at RecentChangesCamp (which we sponsored) for the past 2 days discussing wikis, communities and social change in general.

The crowd has been a fascinating mix of wiki techies, wikipedians and social change entrepreneurs. The environment here is quite incredible - there's definitely a buzz around the room with so many excited people chatting about a topic they're obviously so passionate about. The organisers have done a fantastic job of being unconventional in their approach to a meeting, whilst still delivering value. I'm thoroughly impressed by how the entire OpenSpace idea has turned out.

Sessions

The most fascinating sessions I attended were:

• Ward's session on managing large scale wikis (notes) - saw Ward's tools for managing c2 wiki, talked to wikipedians about the mischief problems on large scale wikis and discussed larger wikis within enterprises.
• (bias warning) My session on developing a pattern language for wiki adoption within an organisation (notes) - discussed the 3 patterns we've identified ("Content Magnet", "Intentional Errors", "Wiki Champion") and tried to name a whole host more
• Spam, whitelists and 'wiki cred' (notes) - spam is a huge problem for everyone, but the session focussed more on building trust networks between wikis
• Synchronous editing tools led by the author of SynchroEdit (notes) - tried to use their tool (sadly too alpha to work effectively and only FF 1.5 :() but brought up lots of neat ideas

Confluence awareness & hero worship

It is absolutely awesome how many people are amazed by Confluence from the impromptu demos and I've given throughout the conference. "No way!", "That's cool dude!" and "Neat." are some of my new favourite American phrases.

However the massive "oh-my-god" moment for me came at the end of the first day. Jonathan and I were sitting around and Ward Cunningham just happened to stroll over. He congratulated us, mentioning that he'd heard great things about Confluence and I asked if he would like a demo.

On hour later, I'd demo'ed my heart out, focussing on showing him how Confluence improved on the 'wiki', why we had made various design decisions along the way and how we had tailored wikis for the enterprise. He was suitably impressed - I think he even said "Cool!" a few times. Wow :)

(Apologies for the hero worship - I'm still a little spun out that he thought we were cool)

Any press is good press?

Amazingly, I also managed to get us a plug in the Oregonian (Portland's biggest paper). I didn't actually realise that the guy I was chatting away to was a journalist until the end of the conversation, and then blithely mentioned that he could use anything I'd said.

Thusly I am quoted in the Oregonian's piece In an Open room, ideas flow as follows:

Even wiki enthusiasts weren't sure the unstructured format would work Friday, and some wondered aloud whether it would descend into chaos -- or into some kind of hippie technology fest.

"I really had no idea what to expect. I didn't know whether there would be people with no shoes on and caftans or what," said Mike Cannon-Brookes, chief executive of a Sydney-based company called Atlassian Software Systems, which designs wiki software.

A couple of people did come in sandals, and many wore jeans, but no one was burning incense. And once the meeting broke up into a dozen discussion groups, it suddenly seemed focused and orderly.

Cannon-Brookes noted participants arranged the schedule of discussion topics in chronological order and said it reminded him of the way wiki users jump in to organize the hodgepodge of information posted on the Web sites.

"It looks like it's turning out pretty well," he said.

It's definitely not your normal tech conference, but I really was rather looking forward to seeing someone in a caftan.

Caricatures?

It's been a fun couple of days with a whole host of nice touches throughout the conference, but perhaps the most unique is the caricature artist who donated her time to churn out caricatures of every person at the conference (100+).

Without further ado, here are Jonathan and I as you probably haven't seen us before:

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