Institutional Knowledge

“Like an air conditioned gypsy” and other obscure Who references.

Last week one of our mission critical systems hit a bump in the road and was offline a better part of the day. We have a web application called System Status that is used by the help desk to track the availability of such systems. Having resolved all the issues we left the building only to realize that we needed to update the System Status application to notify the help desk and end-users that the system was back online.

Three of us immediately whipped out our iPhones to access the site and change the status flag. At that moment it hit me, why on earth isn’t this optimized for mobile devices? Having found a practical place to experiment with the iUI framework, I set about creating a parallel mobile interface for System Status. This interface, which uses the iPhone interface metaphors, will allow help desk support staff to check and update the status of our systems while out in the field or away on business.

Here are a couple of screenshots to give you an idea of how the interface would look on an iPhone.

Our friend Stewart Mader is putting out 21 Days of Wiki Adoption videos. Even if you are already going with your wiki project, there will be some episodes worth watching.

Rock on, Stewart.

Not long after the Virginia Tech shootings there was an article on the College Web Editor blog asking if Twitter could be used for emergency communications. I argued that this would be a poor use of Twitter and of campus resources in a situation where resources are critical. I still stand by my reasoning for that particular use of Twitter. That isn’t to say that I don’t think that Twitter can’t be used on campus; I’ve been experimenting a tiny bit this week with something that I think Twitter is actually good at, disseminating casual information to those that decide they want it.

So, my little experiment is to send portal usage stats out via Twitter. The updates are sent every two hours between 8am and 6pm, Monday through Friday. Thank you, cron! There are so many moving parts in this that I’m tempted to fire up OmniGraffle to illustrate it, but I’ll try with just words and see how it goes.

The portal has multiple servers running behind the scenes so that we can deal with lots of traffic. Each of these servers have their own set of user sessions. We can query these servers for their session information, and we do this every 5 minutes and stick the information in a database (thank you perl and mysql). We have another internal system that allows us to graph and browse this data, which is incredibly helpful in looking for usage trends. I wrote a small ruby script that uses the Twitter gem written by John Nunemaker to query the stats database and then post the information to Twitter. Scott was even so kind as to place a Wordpress widget in our theme (top right) to show the information pulled directly from Twitter.

Now, some might call this a frivolous exercise but that would be ignoring the fact that we have to push a lot of information around campus and we need to be looking more at using proper APIs and not just don’t batch dumps of data to be imported by some other system. Our systems need to talk, and more importantly listen to what other systems are saying.

We’ve been running a Confluence Pilot [insert word that rhymes with ‘roject’] for the last couple of months to see if it would be a feasible tool to help departments within Information Resources, and potentially campus at large, collaborate on projects.

The other day, we caught wind that Confluence had been described in a meeting as the “Chicopedia”. Now I’ll be the first to admit that “chicopedia” is catchy, clever, and a great way of explaining to people that Confluence is a wiki by playing off the name Wikipedia. That said, it could potentially lead us into dangerous territory if not given proper context.

The term “wikipedia” can be split into “wiki” and “pedia”. The former being a collaborative editing environment and the later being a body of knowledge. In conjunction, they accurately describe the site Wikipedia, which is an encyclopedia written by multiple authors in a collaborative environment. This is all fine and good.

However, applying that same dissection, the term “chicopedia” should mean “body of knowledge about Chico State”. This is applicable if you’re talking about a web page that talks about Chico State and it’s history but it’s not applicable when used to describe Confluence.

Confluence is not necessarily a “body of knowledge about Chico State” but rather a resource used by Chico State to collaborate within and between departments.

Why worry about this in the first place? To start, this pilot is less than 3 months old and still finding it’s feet. Right now it is important to manage expectations for what Confluence is and what Confluence can do. This enables us to increase the chances Confluence will be a successful and effective resource. We must not think of Confluence as a “magic bullet” solution for problems that Confluence was never meant to solve because we fear we’ll start to view Confluence as a failure.

We’d also like to avoid being too closely compared with Wikipedia and the “why doesn’t it look like this?” or “why doesn’t it work like this?” questions because they are two different products that have two different types of content and wildly different audiences. The similarities between Confluence and Wikipedia are that they both can be edited by multiple people. The similarities end there.

So please, try to avoid using the term “chicopedia”.

Hello Blog Readers,

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted something to Institutional Knowledge as I’ve been buried in Ruby code working on our upcoming Omni Project; but Enough about that.

Pat pointed out an interesting link today on the College Web Editor blog about prospective students using Flickr to take virtual tours of campus. Remembering that I was apart of a Chico State group on Flickr I went and pulled up a map of campus and all of the photos of campus that have been geotagged. You can see the most interesting photos from the pool here and hopefully the group will be able to put together a more comprehensive picture of campus on Flickr in the coming months (especially with the fall colors around the corner).