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September 25, 2006 | # | Posted by Jordan Frank |
 At the recent Interop New York (see TechWeb story), Andrew McAfee compares Wikipedia to an ant colony, suggesting that the opposite of imposed structure is not chaos. He said: |
When you look at an ant colony, it seems like there is a big brain somewhere... Lots of people don't like having structure imposed on them.
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The "ants" surely do the lion's share of work to build wikipedia. But we should remember that the best practice demonstrated by Wikipedia is not the opposite of imposed structure. Far from it, the simple fact is that there is a big brain behind Wikipedia which very discretely organizes the actions of the ants: |
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- Wikipedia has guidelines |
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- Wikipedia has policies |
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- Wikipedia is not a democracy |
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- Wikipedia is maintained by roughly 1000 volunteer developers, stewards, bureaucrats, and administrators. |
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Nicholas Carr recently wrote about A Fork in Wikipedia's Road, where the 207 member Association of Inclusionist Wikipedians and the 144 member Association of Deletionist Wikipedians are advocating different sides of the wikipedia governance debate. |
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Collectively, there are a set of rules that govern what can be done in this wiki and people who manage the structure through the list of possible categories and who enforce the rules, though sometimes with differing philosophy, but all with common governance. |
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As many companies are fretting with developing blogging policies (see Blogging Policy = Blabbing Policy), Wikipedia provides a good case study which includes top-down policy and structure, wherein the ants may freely work bottom-up towards the group goals. The fact is, ant colonies work effectively because there is a set of explicit or implied marching orders and a discreet division of labor between management (the Queen or Queens), workers, and other roles such as alates. |
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Best practice recommendations (see KM Forum and case studies from Ipsen, a global pharmaceutical company and SITA, a network provider to the airline industry) show that similar top down support and a set of structure and rules for a workspace provide a necessary framework for knowledge workers to adopt technology with willingness and efficiency. |
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 For the ninth consecutive year, KMWorld recognized Traction Software by naming the company to their annual KMWorld 100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management. KMWorld’s list is compiled by KM practitioners, theorists, analysts, vendors, their customers and colleagues. This is the 13th year of the list. "Criteria for inclusion varies, but all companies have things in common. Each has either helped to create a market, redefine one or enhance one, and they all share two things—the velocity of innovation and the agility to serve their customers" says Hugh McKellar, KMWorld Editor-in-Chief.
Greg Lloyd, Traction Software President and co-founder said: "We're honored that KMWorld consistently ranks Traction Software as a company that matters in Knowledge Management. Traction Software employees work closely with customers to build a stronger and more useful TeamPage platform." Lloyd continued, "Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter 2012 TeamPage releases introduced many user interface, performance, and Developer SDK additions and improvements to make it easier for customers to get work done. I thank Traction Software's employees and customers for earning this recognition." See the 2013 KMWorld 100 list. |
| TeamPage 2012 highlights include: |
- Unified search to make lookup of spaces, people, projects and tasks quicker and easier;
- Type-ahead completion for navigation, with optional index based type-ahead suggestions for content search; uniform work in progress autosave and finish later actions to avoid accidental loss of work;
- Invitations to make it simple for members of a space to add new people to a TeamPage space by sending them an email invitation;
- An inline widget to collect and summarize selected tags, dates, and other standard or custom properties from all types of TeamPage content, making it easy to create dynamic tables for task summaries and other uses;
- New calendar event support to manage meetings and other dated activities along with project, task, and milestone dates;
- Drag-and-drop editing of TeamPage calendar events;
- Improved synchronization and notification for TeamPage and external calendar items;
- Improved email digest, print, RSS, and Atom view styling, detail and context cues; improved Active Directory integration and caching;
- Streamlined navigation header, dashboard, calendar and document tab interfaces;
- JMX-based metering of TeamPage server state;
- Improved iPad, iPhone and Android support;
- Performance improvements;
- Twitter style status that can focus on a selected project, milestone or task, as well as birds eye summaries organized by space or person.
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