Monday, May 19, 2003

Amy Cortese of the NY Times reports on the use of wikis in business. [via Sam Ruby] Amy Cortese: The creative anarchy of the wiki is the philosophical inverse of conventional corporate groupware software. Groupware's highly structured rules and processes do not always reflect the way people really work. Employees often ignore costly corporate-sanctioned software and revert to informal social networks -- whether simply e-mail or impromptu water-cooler discussions. Note that you have to register to read the article, but registration is free. This caught my eye since I've been spending a lot of time with Ward Cunningham on coding and Open Source issues this year. Back in March, I introduced Brian Ingerson to Ward. That's the same evening we came up with the idea of using the term "agile" to describe programming languages like Python and since then Brian has written his own Wiki in Perl, called Kwiki. [Note that I didn't give Brian enough credit on coming up with the term agile in my earlier post, it was a group achievement.] One of the ideas Ward, Brian, and I discussed recently was doing a Wiki-based presentation tool to simplify building collaborative slides. Brian has already written a first-pass implementation called KwikiSlideShow that is quite elegant. I plan to do one in Python using reST for the structured text. The presentation smarts are JavaScript. What we need are some decent CSS-based templates to make the slides look nice. Let me know if you want to contribute some templates. You can just leave other ideas in the comments. 11:51:59 AM    comment []