After a very long break, since the Wikipedia oriented meeting of last December, around 25 people came to the restart of London Wiki Wednesdays this month, which by all accounts was a very good meeting. We were hosted by Alek Lotoczko at NYK Shipping, on the 17th floor of CityPoint, with great views over the ever changing London City skyline. Beer, wine and pizza were sponsored by WordFrame (so I have to thank myself and George Athannassov for that!). Actually the pain of finding a venue, and getting sponsorship so that the event can stay free, with food and drink provided, is at the heart of the long break. During last year it was relatively straightforward to keep on top of booking a sequence of venues and partner organizations who were prepared to fund us. Coming in to this year, a combination of factors meant the day job(s) and family matters took priority. However, we have restarted, and the meeting decided that we will convene once every two months - the next meeting will be on the first Wednesday of October, and we'll hopefully keep to a regular timetable every other month from then on. I've had a few enquiries from potential sponsors, but at this stage we still need a venue and someone who wants some exposure and link love - please contact me if you are interested or have any suggestions.

You can see this meeting's attendees from the sign up page, and we have kept to the same format as last year. We started with a discussion on Stewart Mader's Wikipatterns - a book and a wiki which details the patterns, techniques and constructs that wiki practitioners have come across repeatedly, and which presents them in a particular format or "pattern language", describing in what context these techniques arise, what problem they solve, and how they solve them. Many of the audience use the resource, or in some cases wish they had found it a lot earlier, as it would have saved them time. There was plenty of discussion about the 1-9-90 rule of participation, and use of things like barn raising. By the way, Stewart Mader, has recently left Atlassian and started his own consultancy, and will actually be in the UK next week. On 3rd September from 7-9PM, he will be in Brighton at the Whuffie Club is for an evening gathering at The Werks. On following day, 4th September at 9:30AM, he’ll be conducting a half-day workshop at the same place on Effective Project Management Using a Wiki. Stewart's a friend, so I'm sad to be missing him, as I'll be in San Francisco next week.

One of the topics that came up during the discussion was the regular tendency for large companies and corporates to want to provide wiki, social media and collaboration solutions using Microsoft SharePoint - a key driver being that the company already has licences for the product bundled with their server software. There is a perception that SharePoint is "free", when actually the approach will require significant development using the Microsoft toolkit. Many practitioners were comparing this to standard, "out of the box" solutions from open source wikis, or products like SocialText, Atlassian, or WordFrame. We decided that this trend, and how to work around it, will be our discussion topic for the next meeting.

Following the discussion, we had our usual 5 minute slots. I talked through one of our WordFrame projects at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales. IT Counts, is the award winning web community which links together their membership and provides practical IT advice for accountants in business and in practice.
Alek Lotoczko talked through his latest deployment of a collection of tools for collaboration in NYK using LDAP and single sign on.
Philip Woodgate added to the discussion on IT Counts, and his use of wiki and blog technology in his own practice, with the kep message being "keep it brain dead simple!".
Andy Roberts surprised us all by highlighting a new feature in WordPress 2.6 which provides version control of post edits, allowing wiki like roll back. It means that you could, conceivably, set up a WordPress blog post to act like a wiki.
Andreas Ridler, who has previously shown us BearingPoint's MIKE 2.0 methodology, showed omCollab. This is a collection of open source collaboration tools for blogging, bookmarking and wiki that they have pulled together as a platform for their clients, and which they are providing on an open source solution under a GPL 2 licence.
Lars Ploughman talked through use of wiki and other tools in different contexts.
Ben Gardner talked through his presentation that he uses internally to position the various tools that they use inside Pfizer, from OneNote, to wikis, to desktop Office, to SharePoint and document management systems. The key message being that there should not be a "one size fits all" solution as information needs to be summary or detail, structured or unstructured - different tools were needed depending on the context.

It struck me that there was common theme throughout all of the sessions highlighting the use of different, "best of breed" tools in the context of the way the information is needed. Everyone I spoke to seemed to be delighted with the meeting and the fact that London Wiki Wednesday is back on track.