Talk:Wiki Organisation

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Templates & Packages

An organisational wiki relies heavily on establishing convention, and this come in the form of centralised repositories of documentation and templates. Templates are also used to add standard sets of attributes to articles, in effect allowing them to more like objects than text articles. Such templates can also include semantic annotations to further standardise the attributes and make them universally accessible.

Selections

DPL can be used to select articles based on categorisation and templates in use, and SMW can make queries based on specific attributes and relationships. Custom forms should be made for making selections on specific sets of criteria such as date or financial attributes and can also involve filters to reduce the selection down. The forms should be interchangeable without clearing the selection.

Reporting

Once selections are made the results are by default rendered in a similar way to a category page, but different templates can be used through which the selection is rendered such as a sortable spreadsheet table or a tax return form.

Workflow

Each job is an article in the wiki and it is categorised based on its state such as "in progress" or "completed". The idea of wiki workflow is to use categorisation to allow larger jobs to undergo interaction with multiple roles in the correct sequences.

We've been developing organisational systems and related ideas within the MediaWiki software for a few years now and have set up Organic Design as a platform for a team of us to work on these ideas together.

We work on a number of different development projects and use a variety of different software in the process, but our main organisational infrastructure is MediaWiki and ties all the other technology together. Our system has a lot of room for improvement, but over the years we've developed quite a refined idea of what we'd like to see in such a system. Following is a brief outline of our experiences and plans.

Goal: A flexible framework for bottom-up organisation

Info.svg This first point needs a major rewrite, more positive
  • Disillusioned with the top-down hierarchical corporate model (secrecy, copyright, centralisation, corruption), we are looking for new forms of organisation
  • Real-world organisations based on open and evolving business systems and work flows, taking the open source philosophy and methodology into business
  • Democratic organisations that offer full transparency and accountability, with any stakeholder being able to query any decision made or the state of any part of the business
  • Based on evolving templates which are self-contained, that is they include training documentation for all aspects of setting up and running the business.
  • Such organisations could fully focus on delivering the best service to their community while benefiting from the continual development of their business systems by a world wide community of experts
  • Fully "peer-to-peer" organisations which can be highly localised and independent, with access to shared frameworks and global information, allowing for collective intelligence and group decision-making and coordination

Organisational Model

  • Generic framework: A Generic framework or environment that encapsulates information in a structured way.
  • Software unification: Software unification though connectivity of diverse applications.
  • System documentation: If the roles, projects and procedures are fully documented then you can change any aspect of a system, for example move the framework to a different software platform or incorporate a new application into the system.
  • Technology independence: The collaborative nature and completeness of the documentation allows independence from any specialist support or and specific technology
  • Reproducibility: Reproducibility of systems the current work/research conducted without relying on specialists.
    • Allows dynamic expansion of systems
    • Mitigates against any potential disasters

MediaWiki software

  • Why use a wiki?
    • Our goal has been to leverage off highly successful projects such as Wikipedia
    • An audit trail of every collaborators contributions is critical
    • Maintaining history and change control using a difference engine is fundamental for allowing people to quickly see changes in content by others.
    • Organization of content is provided through Special pages
  • How would you use a wiki effectively?
    • MediaWiki allows a dynamic collaborative representation of the system which maintained by the users, all the content is contained in the same unified environment.
    • Documentation should be semantically described
    • Semantic definitions should be controlled using template transclusion so that implementation specifics are centralized within the template definitions.
    • Using forms makes it is not necessary for general users to have implementation knowledge.

Previous work

  • Code reuse rather than rewrite, it is better to wrap and integrate
  • Web 3.0 is here to stay, but the technologies used to achieve its ideas are rapidly changing
  • Functionality required that moves towards technology independence
  • Novice users are not willing to learn template and categorization syntax but are generally happy to pick up basic wikitext syntax.

Successes from our previous project XMLWiki

  • Provide functionality that reduces reliance on IT administration
  • Created functionality for task automation using Robots controlled through scheduling
  • Training, it is important for users of the system to use it and not rely on memory

Lessons learned from our previous project XMLWiki

  • Never fork a project if you can possibly avoid it, otherwise you cannot leverage further development of it and the forked project is in danger of becoming legacy.
  • Separating the XML based properties out of wikitext.
  • Implementation changes are overcome by using wikis own native syntax and template transclusion to add semantic properties to articles
  • Specific implementation such as Semantic MediaWiki annotations or RDF triples should be maintained in the template definitions

Current Work

  • Experience with writing over 40 diverse extensions for MediaWiki through multiple versions of the MediaWiki codebase.
  • Focussing on extensions that reduce administration requirements of the filesystem.
  • Extenions for generation of forms within wiki
  • Workflow using generated forms to structure organised content
  • Security extensions to address security flaws in MediaWiki
  • Automation of adminstrative tasks withing MediaWiki using Robots
  • Wikia, a framework for mapping multiple domains to filesystem paths
  • Automated distributed backups for workstations and servers using SVN

Road Map

Roadmaps often contain deadlines. Have we grown wary of those?

Wiki Organisation code

  • Integration of the API layer for efficient Robots editing and for AJAX form updates
  • Integrate Email/IMAP into our MediaWiki based system.
  • P2P and SQLite extensibility, allowing MediaWiki instances on devices such as the iPod touch.
  • A template wiki providing useful enhanced functionality and documentation (eg packages extension)

Learning Organisation

  • Regarding Peter Senge's definition of a learning organisation; we now have a technical means to implement it which didn't exist at the time of his writing "The 5th Discipline" (1994).
  • Senge's notion of the learning organisation is widely regarded in management circles as leading-edge thought, however we have not seen any organisations fully embrace these concepts.
  • In addition to the other criteria, our ideal organisation will embrace and support the implementation of the five disciplines of shared vision, mental models, systems thinking, microworlds and team learning.
  • We will embed these concepts and values within our template organisations because in addition to the technical criteria we want them to be learning organisations.

University

  • The notion of a self-contained semantically structured learning organisation will appeal to academics
  • An environment of learning, with experts easily accessible
  • A university which doesn't just teach knowledge, it is an open and evolving organisation with learning happening at all levels, with all participants actively contributing
  • We will align ourselves with universities to in an effort to test these ideas in the academic environment

Acknowlegdements

The following people and organisations have provided us with inspiration for moving toward our goal, share our values closely from what we can tell or are even working toward similar goals to the ones we pursue. We wish to acknowledge:

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